You call this 21st Century?

"Let's not just adopt technology into our schools. Let's adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it".

Marc Prensky's call to arms demonstrates how he foresaw (in 2005) that we would struggle to change our teaching to do justice to the astonishing promise of new technology. In the school where I work, we have overcome Prensky's "Big Tech Barrier" - we have gone one-to-one. But this is not the time to pat ourselves on the back: "machines are the easy part" said Doug Johnson in 2004 in the most practical book I have read about technology in schools (free download at the link).

After several years, I have returned to teaching Theory of Knowledge (ToK) because I love to do it and, as Ed Tech Coach, I want to have current experience of the challenges of the classroom. ToK is a central component of the IB Diploma and according to its aims, "encourages students to formulate answers to the question “how do you know?” in a variety of contexts". (Subject Guide). These contexts include the points of view of different cultures. The course is expressed largely in the form of open-ended questions rather than definitive statements about what students should know. For example:

"To what extent are our familiar areas of knowledge embedded in a particular tradition or to what extent might they be bound to a particular culture?"

Very few courses in Western education have ever been formulated entirely in questions. The others which have done so provided a description of the expected pedagogy. ToK teachers are free from even this constraint. What an opportunity to experiment!

So in my introductory unit, having looked at the variety of perspectives we each have, I want the students to consider how cultures affect the ways people see the world. Moving beyond ethnic cultures, I also want to consider those which arise within a society. That's the first element of my lesson.

What I do not want is a lesson in which I provide most of the information, nor do I want an unbounded discussion which would probably engage a few and silence the many (particularly since it is not the default setting for we Physics teachers).

“Engagement and motivation are products of learning about things that matter to kids, things that they see value in" (Will Richardson quoted in Wywrot)

[caption id="attachment_47" align="alignright" width="359"] The deadline looms[/caption]

"Relevance and agency over learning" are the solutions, says Richardson, and "creative assignments". So that's the second and third elements. Next was the timely publication in the Guardian of the documentary Gun Nation. The phrase 'gun culture' came to my mind and I thought I had found the stimulus for my lesson. I realised simultaneously that I could build some activities around the video using TED Ed which is a powerful tool I have been wanting to use with students for some time. Furthermore, in Week 1 of CoETaIL I had looked at the Rubrics for Bloom's Digital Taxonomy on Andrew Churches' Educational Origami wiki. For the creative assignment I have in mind, Andrew's Digital Publishing rubric fits my bill, but it needed a degree of adaptation to become my own Digital Document rubric (with grateful attribution).

If you've been keeping count, that's six elements, to which I'll add one more:

1. Cultural perspectives in the ToK course;


2. Relevance and student agency;


3. Creative assignments;


4. Gun Nation documentary as a stimulus;


5. TED Ed as a medium;


6. Digital rubric;


7. Our One to World learning environment.

Take seven elements and react to form the Is it a culture? activity

We are in the middle of the activity right now, so evaluation would be premature. But to return to the wisdom of Doug Johnson, Never Assume.