Catalysts for understanding

If you watched the video, you now know that the Earth spins because it formed from rotating dust and nothing has stopped it so it just keeps on going. It's got nothing to do with forces, centrifugal or otherwise, nor does gravity make the Earth spin. Many former students of Physics can spout Newton's First Law of Motion, but Derek Muller's videos go beyond mere repetition of knowledge and, by first focusing on misconceptions, achieve greater understanding.

"The idea of understanding is surely distinct from the idea of knowing something." Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design 2nd edition (p36)

More than just a manager

In 2018, all of the teachers in our school will be using a new learning management system (LMS). My ed-tech coach colleague and I have a full year in which to help our Upper School faculty, alongside their existing workloads, to become comfortable with the system. As a first step, we have envisaged a pilot of volunteers which will begin in August 2017. My hope for this LMS, with its myriad capabilities, is that it will not simply manage the learning, but that it will be a catalyst for change. More than simply acquiring new routines, we will explore the potential of the LMS for improving our students' learning.

We call it One to World

For nearly one year now, all of our students have brought a laptop to school every day. The learning curve has been steep, since most teachers and students had never worked in a 1 to 1 environment before. But the education has not changed very much, if at all. This is not to say that the computers are unused, rather that there isn't a strong culture of innovation. Don't get me wrong: no-one is suffering. As ever, Good Teachers + Good Students = Learning. Having gone down the road of computer-enabled learning, however, I think we should be better exploring technology's possibilities.

What should our teachers be able to do?

"The challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow." (p14)

The teachers will learn how to use the LMS and will know what the school wants them to do with it. Is that all? Surely there must also be understanding of how the system can support learning.

"To understand is to have done it in the right way, often reflected in being able to explain why a particular skill, approach, or body of knowledge is or is not appropriate in a particular situation" (p39).

Our teachers are not short on professional knowledge nor understanding; but many aren't familiar enough with how educational technology could help their students learn better. Our goal will therefore be to relate the mechanical processes of the new LMS to powerful educational concepts; in particular, concepts which can be enhanced by computers in the classroom.

And what might these concepts be?

[caption id="attachment_69" align="alignleft" width="300"] Image: Craig Badura[/caption]

George Couros has provided an excellent schema for how today's classroom could look. Crucially, although few of the ideas have a direct line to technology, they all can be enhanced by it.

When the Physics class used a wiki to comment constructively on each other's Energy projects; when my IB ToK students could submit any 'creative digital document' to demonstrate their understanding of Cultures; when Grade 6 students could see their Online Habits survey responses accumulate in real-time; on all of these occasions, I revelled in examples of Couros' ideas made concrete by technology.

A greater success, however, would be if they can use that knowledge gained in one situation and apply it to others.

"Understanding is about transfer... we can create new knowledge and arrive at further understandings if we have learned with understanding some key ideas and strategies" (p40)

How will we know what the teachers have learned?

What will be the evidence of learning? I'm not sure I know yet. The LMS has been purchased, but I haven't got my hands dirty with it so far. This one has a great reputation in schools. I do know that I want to use Couros' 'Today's Classroom' as part of the teachers' learning experience. There will be evidence of their Voice as they Reflect on the outcomes of their Self Assessment. I hope there will be evidence they have Thought Critically about the Problems they might solve and evidence they Chose to Innovate and to Connect with other learners.

What will be their learning experiences?

In UBD, this is the third and final stage of deciding, and since my knowledge of the evidence is incomplete due to inexperience with this LMS, I shall be developing the activities, with my coach colleague, at the start of the next school year.

On my CoETaIL projects page, I have embedded the UBD template. Being live, it will reflect the project at whichever time you read it. As I write, only the Desired Results are known, including:

Understand how new ideas (eg Couros’ ‘today’s classroom’) can be supported by the new LMS

More than knowledge, understanding will be my main criterion of success. The teaching will aim at understanding and I shall seek ways to gather evidence of:

"conceptions: that is, meanings that are general ... Without this conceptualizing, nothing is gained that can be carried over to the better understanding of new experiences" John Dewey, How we Think, 1933, p153

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.



 

 

Taxonomy Domine

When I went for breakfast at the ISTE conference one day last June, I picked up more than just muffins and coffee. ISTE's best-kept secret was finally out: the 2016 Standards for Students in handy poster format. I tweeted them out.

— Steve Weatherell (@steveweatherell) June 27, 2016

So was it worth the wait? After 9 years, ISTE has given the Standards a big shake-up. Firstly, the bar has been set higher, and no longer do we merely "use technology to learn". No, we are promoting "Transformative learning with technology".



And it's true! The new Standards are very far-reaching, including whole new skills and abilities which we expect good teaching to bring to our students. For example, there is a new category: Computational Thinking. Of course, it could all just be wishful thinking. Just saying something is transformative, does not make it so. But as I plot my path through CoETaIL Course 1, I feel that the new Standards (a taxonomy, if you will) are very timely.

[caption id="attachment_26" align="alignleft" width="213"] Bloom's Taxonomy updated 1990[/caption]

 

This week I became re-acquainted, once again, with the work of Dr Benjamin Bloom who pops up whenever I am studying education.

The most interesting aspect of the 1990 revision of Bloom's taxonomy is how Synthesis is promoted and re-branded. It becomes Creating. Whereas 'synthesis' suggests a use of raw materials to make a new product, 'creation' implies an extra ingredient - something which wasn't there before. Perhaps the difference is only semantic, but the decision to put Creating at the top of the ladder is significant.

Few people in 1990 could have foreseen how, within a couple of decades, it would be commonplace to be able to create artifacts: films; sound recordings; multimedia objects using one and the same portable machine. But Bloom's revised taxonomy anticipated the changes in education which ubiquitous digital technology makes possible.

 

[caption id="attachment_28" align="alignright" width="160"] 3 steps to heaven[/caption]

I read about another hierarchical taxonomy in Living and Learning with New Media. According to this analysis, kids, on their own and without the help of adults, hang out with technology, then mess around and finally geek out. It's a hopeful vision, but the reality about the geek stage which is "intense, autonomous, and interest-driven" (p. 28), is that:

"these kinds of youths are a small minority among those we encountered" (p. 28)

That is not a startling revelation to many of us who work with 21st century youth. Although some of my students are much more skillful and dexterous than me in their daily use of their devices, in other ways they are limited in what they do. They have acquired certain habits such as efficiently consuming and generating social media, but they do not necessarily learn new skills unless they offer immediate rewards (why would they?). This innate conservatism is invisible to many of my colleagues who regard their students as masters of the new devices, but it is important for the teachers to realise that it is so.

For otherwise, what would we need teachers for? Thankfully, search engines have taken over some of the bottom-rung Bloom skills. And there are web-services which allow anyone to cobble together a basic explanatory video. This leaves us with our hands a little freer to give the students new challenges.

[caption id="attachment_29" align="alignleft" width="174"] Image credit: ladder[/caption]

Sure, student, you can bash out a quick presentation, but:

• Do you know how to find and evaluate the most reliable sources?


• Can you use visual information to engage your audience rather than riddle them with bullets?


• Will you present it in a way that your audience understands the ethical or social implications?

Google won't do that for you, but your teacher can.

Last week, in my Theory of Knowledge class, I had a clear idea of what I wanted the students to understand at the end of the lesson and I designed an activity to achieve it. I don't think I did a good job. In attempting to dictate the students' learning, I did not trust in their ability to construct it. We used the devices but as consumers when we could have been creating.

So next time we will climb the ladder.