Jane Addams and Student Engagement

I just finished reading an essay on Jane Addams, a pioneer of early 20th Century education, who was one of the first to pay attention to multi-cultural education. While her ideas have been quite influential in that regards, I also found it very interesting the way her ideas of socialized education speak to the general isolation that stems from education. Schools not only function to isolate students from their parental ethnic cultures, but also from the daily experiential cultures that their arents partake in, most notably work culture. Schools tend to provide students with a unique cultural environment that references nothing else in the lives of students except school. Addams charged that this kind of formalism prevented children from conceiving of proper ways to integrate themselves in the adult world. This also provides a unique perspective of many so-called "GenX'ers" from the 1990s who experienced significant personal distress when it came time to enter the "real world" after graduation. In fact,the 1990s saw many developments such as the "permanent student" and record increase in graduate school enrollments, the "Slacker Movement" which encouraged well-educated middle class youths to take up menial service sector jobs such as dishwashers and parking lot attendants. Even the media's fixation on something called "the quarter-life crisis", a noticable increase in the number of students who dramatically change careers a few years after graduation, underscores that even youths who made a career choice often felt it was the wrong one.

All of this points somewhat to the circular nature of contemporary schooling, although the situation has changed somewhat. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the school setting became increasingly self-referential. Students came to school and had few options to engage in activities that were not in some way related to school. The development and increasing proliferation of personal communication devices, along with access to Internet resources has given students more options and means to carry their non-school lives with them into school. Recent student engage surveys, such as those being conducted under the What Did You Do In School Today banner, are clearly demonstrating that students recognize the isolating and divorced nature of their current situation.

The problem is time

As education budgets decline, it remain static in the face of increasing needs, school districts tend to respond by asking teachers to assume more responsibilities, ranging from increased instructional duties (teach more students in more classes) to clerical (tracking attendance, inputting student course selections), to adminsitrative (monitoring earned student credits, writing individualized student performance plans). Advances in technology has made some of this easier; teachers with computers in the classroom can enter attendance or grades directly into central systems with the students right in front of them, other advances, like email an online learning management systems, extend a teacher's responsibilities to students beyond the ringing Tod the tradional end of day bell. Currently teachers, especially new teachers, are under tremendous pressure to contribute to the culture of schools through volunteering to host extra-curricular activities, such as hosting clubs or coaching athletics, all of which occur at the margins of the school day.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for good teachers to balance teaching with other aspects of their lives. Good teachers often became involved in teaching as a way to incorporate and share passions and hobbies in a constructive way. Lengthening commitments to schools leaves less and less time for these other interests. Furthermore, many specialized teachers view themselves as members of multiple communities. A science teacher, for example, might view him or herself as a member of an educational community, as well as the larger science community. Similarly a
music teacher could have membership in the local music scene in addition to the education community. Again, participation in these other communities is made difficult by the increased demands of the school system, which often responds to these criticisms by giving teachers the option of starting a school-based club around these interests, thus involving the teacher ever more with the life of the school and increasing their professional isolation from other communities.

It is clear that teacher retention is an issue for many jurisidictioms and I would contend that a contributing factor is the inability of school systems to allow teachers to maintain healthy lives outside of the school day.

Books in the mail: Teach Like A Champion

Doug Lemov's new book about improving classroom arrived on my desk today and I'm quite interested in reading it. My understanding of the premise is that he has developed a new vocabulary to describe teaching processes that will improve the kind of feedback that teachers receive. I'm not sure if this is what he actually does, but those are my beliefs as to the book's contents, and something I would argue are dreadfully needed in education as it's not enough simply to demand higher scores or lower drop out rates - the idea that there are more effective and less effective techniques seems straightforward, but a good job describing these has yet to be done.

One word of caution now that the book has arrived, I do take a little issue at his subtitle: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college, as if to say the whole purpose of the k-12 system is to move the roughly 1/3 of high school students who attend any form of post-secondary education (at least here in Alberta) to something resembling 1/2 or higher. It also suggests that a k-12 education that terminates in a successful high school graduation is not a success unless the student enrolls in further study.

Are high schools still sites of conflict?

(cross-posted with What Sister Ray Said)

A few friends of mine recently made a passing reference to the period of time starting in the post-grunge years (1994) to some unidentifiable terminal year that has only recently passed, as being a kind of “neo-Sixties.” Their evidence, and none of them made any kind of claim to academic accuracy, was the resurgence of pot use, focused demonstrations against global capitalism (notably the Battle In Seattle and anti-G8 protests), and other protests against the “unjust wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. While this might be superficially true, I’ve always thought that the general rebelliousness and questioning of institutions during the 1960s was much more far-reaching than we tend to remember it today. One of my favourite classes of stories was the surprisingly common one I call “The Day the Hippies Came and Took over My High School.” The number of incidences of “hippies,” whether they be actual bearded longhairs, or members of the SDS, SNCC, Weathermen, sympathetic Black Panther group, or other civil rights/anti-war group, storming the local high school to institute “teach-ins” is pretty high across the eastern US. The same cannot be said for the period 1994-present. Part of this might be the difference that the Internet has played in distributing information, but I wonder how much might also be the case that the K-12 system, and high school in particular, is no longer seen as the part of the general “system of coercion” that it appeared to radicals in the 1960s. Or maybe that idea is now just taken for granted, but attacking it is assumed to be futile. I’m not sure, but this extended 1971 quote from Michel Foucault seems to outline the thinking at the time pretty good:

“…in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society in such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attach them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of supports; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible, the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.”

- from The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature

Thoughts on iBrain and engaging students

Last summer I was part of a reading group that looked at the book iBrain by Gary Small. I was also part of the selection committee that picked the book. We were looking for something that would prompt teachers to think about changes that young people were undergoing both in terms of how they lived their daily lives and the way they thought about particular things. At a Reaching & Teaching presentation earlier that spring, Ian Jukes seemed to endorse the book (he might also have just as likely been name-dropping it, to give the appearance that he had read it).

After distributing the book to our reading group, and explaining our hope to have conversations around it over the summer via Twitter, we left them to their thoughts. Our efforts to have teachers use Twitter ended up not amounting to much. In retrospect, I think that had we prompted via email teachers more over the summer to use Twitter, we might have had better uptake.

When we returned to discuss the book in face to face meetings in the fall teachers quite upset over some of Gary Small's ideas. Part of the problem lay in a misunderstanding that teachers had regarding our purpose. They thought that we had picked the book in order to discuss how best to implement it, not as a discussion prompt. Many teachers reported breezing through the first few chapters, until they got to one of two parts. For some, Small's use of the word "evolutionary" to describe his idea about how children's use of technology causes the rewiring of a child's neural network, caused them to question many of Small's scientific credentials. For them, "evolutionary" refers solely to a process that occurs on a multi-generational scale - "adaptive" might have been a better word choice for what Small had in mind. For other teachers, it was Small's endorsement of a study that seemed to link TV-watching to autism. Once suspicious of Small, they became far more critical about what they were reading.

My thoughts on the experience run as follows:

1. I was surprised that teachers did not begin reading the book critically from page one. It seemed that the very fact that we suggested the book gave it a critical endorsement. Since teachers accepted our informal expertise (insofar as it went towards the book selection) they accepted that the book had a certain intrinsic merit. The conversation we wanted to have was actually about whether the book had that very same merit, whereas the conversation they expected was about how best to implement the merit of the book. I can't help but assume that this same confusion over purpose happens everytime we ask students to read something.

2. Teachers believed the book had merit, then felt betrayed when their own experiences caused them to question certain aspects of it. I think this is a very important part of the reading process, the bringing to bear of personal experience, and part of the question then becomes, how do you prepare students to read books on subjects that they do not necessarily have any experience in.

3. After falling out with Small, teachers were extremely reluctant to endorse any of his ideas, but curiously, did not link Small's idea that use of digital technologies causes a change in the ordering of dendrites, to those of Marcia Tate, of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites fame. If you accept that Tate and Small are both talking about worksheets, ipods, and computers as tools that aid in learning, there is no real difference in their argument. I know a fair number of these teachers are big fans of Tate, so there appears to be a bit of a disconnect there.

Building a Better Teacher

Last week The New York Times ran a piece on education reform. It's a topic that's quite near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued. The article was essentially a pre-release interview with Doug Lemov, the author of a new book entitled Teach Like A Champion. Lemov's basic thrust was that teachers lack the basic vocabulary to describe the act of teaching and this undermines many of their efforts to teach better. My experiences with teachers and teacher improvement certainly validates this idea. True, teachers have no shortage of conceptual frameworks to explain and support the activities that they are having students engage in, they are considerably weaker in using language to describe their day-to-day activities to their peers. This is an important shortcoming to remedy because it prevents teachers from properly identifying what it is that's working in their classrooms as well as offering each other constructive criticism aimed at improving weak practice.

In the last five years or so, I think there has been a tremendous degree of improvement in the language of assessment; teachers have a better capacity to explain what they are assessing, when, how, and why, but assessment and instruction are not the same. I'd like to think that the one follows the other, that from a better understanding of assessment, we will be better able to zero in on what exactly students need to do better in order to understand better.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed to see that much of the article's focus was on techniques for classroom management, rather than instruction. I am intrigued enough to have ordered a copy of Lemov's book, but I find that conversations that focus on classroom management tend to miss the point. When looking at ideas related to classroom reform, I ask myself the following questions:

- who decides what the student will learn on a given day?

- who decides how the student will learn?

- who decides when the student is done learning?

People who answer these questions with "the teacher" are not moving in the same direction as me.

Undecipherable Notes: CES 2010 Higher Education

Higher ed tech pt.2

Will anyone ever go to class again

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?

Followup: m2kidz, anytime, anywhere learning, Arizona state university using google suites throughout campus

Followup: John katzman, 2tor
Eduardo Moura, cengage learning (formerly thomson media)

***key takeaways: more time spent in online environment = more time on task and greater success. UofPhoenix assigns three staff to each cohort in a TA role, because students need feedback and guidance (always, eh?)

***LMS puts emphasis on teacher, social networks on students, and virtual worlds highlight community


How disruptive innovation will change the way college students learn?

Michael Horn, innosight institute, harvars book I read,
Suggests that higher education institutions like harvars centraliZed
Access to knowledge in one place. The rise of state colleges was a decentralizing act, furthered by the development of community colleges.
***the Internet has decentralized things even more, by changing the locus of information access from institutions to my pocket

Peter smith, kaplan higher education
University graduation process is based on training (and weeding) students based on the premise that the jobs they are preparing for are scarce. However, given and environment of
Global mobility, the scarcity of such jobs drops dramatically.

The locus of the higher Ed experience will become the governing architecture of the course, no simply the physical architecture of the campus.

Followup: kaplan higher education looks to translate existing student experiences and learning into portable course accreditation

Christopher dede wants accreditation to be based on compentency not seat time (Carnegie unit)

***key to disruptive succeses is to setup shop on the borders of existing regulations, on areas where the market is non-existent, gather market growth and then chip away at existing regulations as regulators take notice of your activity
***so what are the borders of the k-12 system?

Followup: high tech back pack companies