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

What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me

"Despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good." (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014)

This grandiose conclusion was drawn when the authors tested groups of students taking notes either on laptops or longhand. "Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops." (Professor Cindy May, Scientific American).

At least two important questions went unaddressed:

1. Were the subjects in the experiment equally experienced in paper and electronic note-taking? If not, maybe you are actually measuring their aptitude with the medium.


2. What do you mean by 'classrooms'? In the experiments, only podium lecturing was tested (recorded TED talks and verbatim reading of scripts). That's not what the classrooms look like in the schools I know.

What have I learned from 1-to-1?

In nearly all of the lessons I have taught since 2008, the students have used devices for nearly all of the time. Before then, not at all. I changed abruptly because my school did and I was interested to see how far I could take the new model.

You may be an interesting teacher, but you can't compete with the Internet

One sees the truth of this even in staff meetings if teachers have their device lids up. They are not paying proper attention because your brain can't process two information streams at once. In lessons, it's the same. When I talk to my students, I insist they should not be looking at their screens. A strategy which works for me has been to organise my class as an 'inverted horseshoe' with desks around the edge of the room, laptops facing outwards. This means that when I talk to the group, I can ask the students to face me and turn their backs on their screens.

And then I shut up so that they can get on with it. Ergonomically it's an advantage too. When the students are all working, I can stand in the middle of the room and get to anyone quickly. Not every colleague has been convinced, but it works for me.

You are already an expert

I had been teaching Physics for several years before I landed in a 1-to-1 classroom. The internet had become a cornucopia of excellent teaching materials. There were assessments, simulations and videos; there were resources produced by great teachers, inspired students and world-renowned physicists. I started a wiki and embedded, linked and organised all of the assets I had found, but after I had planned my courses there were many I hadn't used even though I knew they would be great for the students. I took a step back from my role as gatekeeper. I flung back the gate. No! I took it off its hinges. In their own time, the students who wanted to know more browsed the wiki and found materials which suited their learning style and because it was online, the site also welcomed up to 5 000 visitors per day.

1-to-1 intimidates many teachers because they assume that students are more comfortable with devices than adults. This may be true, but it's not important. A teacher is an expert explainer; he is knowledgeable about his subject; he knows good teaching ideas when he sees them. A good teacher who doesn't use technology (yet) is still a good teacher. Technology is just another tool he should use to become the best teacher he can be.

Let go

So technology enabled me to improve what I was giving to my students. It also freed me to interact with them in my version of the flipped classroom. Some of the instruction was flipped to the home, but more importantly, it was flipped to the virtual classroom I had made. As the students learned from my curated resources, I could spend time with those who needed support.

To do this, I had to trust in the students' wish to learn. I wasn't standing at the front commanding their constant attention. What they were doing instead is still called note-taking, but it only vaguely resembles the activity which Scientific American said laptops don't do well. Alongside their text, students dragged in images and graphs straight from the wiki. They added photos of my sketches on the whiteboard; links to my curated videos; their own found resources (which we could then add to the wiki).

open up the kitchen and the larder, not just the dining room

The traditional classroom is like a restaurant. The visitors consume what the chef produces because she has the knowledge and expertise. But what if the clientele were allowed to choose ingredients from the shelves and then prepared their own meals under the tutelage of the chef? Of course it's inconceivable; the result might be nourishing, but is unlikely to be sophisticated. This, however, is what we have done to the classroom when we gave the students access to the same resources the teachers have (but not the expertise). The metaphor sounds outrageous, which shows what a radical change education has seen.

Of course, if all we do is try to use devices to replicate the activities which were developed for paper, we will, like Professor May, be disappointed by them.

Never mind the bubbles - a future fable

Graduating Class of 2035! My name is Indira Xi. I was born, like most of you, in 2017.

This was around the time that many of our teachers themselves graduated from school. We have heard their stories of 1-to-1 classrooms; mobile devices; MOOCs and learning journeys. Looking back, it is obvious that our forebears came up with some great ideas for education, but they didn't find a way to scale them up in practice (the average completion rate of MOOCs was 15%, and for the larger enrollments, it was typically much lower). Of course, we now know how to get it up to 100%!

Back in 2017, the big technology companies (their vampiric acronym was FANG) were dabbling with algorithms, serving up content which matched the interests of their users, and they had begun to accumulate information covering many aspects of people's lives (by studying location data, they knew who 90% of all adults were spending the night with). In those years, however, they didn't yet realise what power they had!

By 2022, five years later, everything was different! The FANG engineers had introduced recursively self-improving algorithms which very quickly sharpened the personalisation of everyone's Internet experience (it took milliseconds). When the optimum content was not available, the programs set about manufacturing and distributing stories (so much more efficient than waiting for your friends to recommend the very best videos and articles). They made digitally-generated movies which varied the cast and storyline depending on the preferences of whoever was watching. The FANGS did not survive this revolution as separate entities; they united into one huge engine called Facebubble.

Then, as you know, self-improving algorithms were introduced into education and they immediately unified every MOOC into one enormous course representing the sum of all human knowledge (the type which can be taught online, at least). They used their knowledge of every past interaction to analyse each teaching moment and to perfect a learning path for anyone to learn anything and to enjoy it. They knew their students' needs through a combination of metadata, Facebubble clicks and information from wearables (pupil dilation, skin conductivity and heartrates).

[caption id="attachment_210" align="aligncenter" width="540"] produced with festisite[/caption]

Governments were delighted. They called the new program Epystematic: a system to organise all knowledge and to personalise for each citizen exactly what society needed them to learn. Then by tweaking people's known motivations, they made the process maximally efficient. We didn't even need public exams any more: the Epystematic already knew what we could do. Universities loved that! And once the machines started calling every election result perfectly, there was no point holding votes any more. So they didn't.

Fellow students, this is the learning world we entered.

The classroom was so personalised that no two students were learning the same thing at the same time. We put on our VR goggles and Epystematic knew us better than our own parents, friends or teachers (whose role had been reduced to handing out the equipment). There was no social contact with other children in the class; why would we need anyone else when the output from our headsets was so finely tuned to our own brains? We made no choices. And the more we used Epystematic, the better it did its job. It was personalisation, but it was not personal.

This time was called, as you will remember, The Great Sedation.

So what changed?

[caption id="attachment_209" align="alignleft" width="221"] Back in the day[/caption]

After five years, in 2027, came the punk teachers and their Personal Unfiltered Network of Knowledge. There were some in every school; the punks took on the Epystematic dinosaur. Happily, they had some excellent weapons (which had been around since 2017) to help them in their battle.

Ad Nauseam, the application which simply and silently clicks on every single ad link to make the data they are gathering about us completely useless. The punks taught their students to obfuscate their digital contrail.

Solid, the decentralised web tools, built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which make sure that our personal information is kept in a vault so that web companies must request our permission for access when they need to consult it. The punks showed us how to take back ownership.

Wikitribune, a platform which unites journalists and volunteers to produce news stories which can be easily verified and improved.

A DIY sensibility: Inspired by the historic upheaval in music half a century earlier, the punks rejected the status quo.

The tide turned. The punks had no need of large institutions and began small independent schools which decided for themselves how they would organise their learners, like the one we are graduating from. We recognise learning as a social process; personalisation gives way to personal learning; we all have a role in deciding what and how we learn; we recognise that learning is sometimes a messy and difficult experience. And every day, our punk teachers help us negotiate that process.

[caption id="attachment_213" align="aligncenter" width="635"] produced using ransomizer.com[/caption]

With their heads no longer in the bubble of an algorithmic feed, people started thinking for themselves again and democracy returned.

Fellow students, our journey has only just begun.

Yes, technology may be your friend, but it is only people who can teach and learn!

Beware the poison butterflies

[caption id="attachment_199" align="alignleft" width="215"] The high point of my gaming life[/caption]

Last week, teaching my Middle School students some basic coding (in the land of the blind... etc), I programmed a game, at least I think that's what it is. If you get all the way through this post, you can play when you get to the end.

For their official IB internal assessment, every ToK student must make a presentation according to stringent IB requirements. The descriptor for the top grade requires students to be sophisticated and insightful while using convincing arguments, different perspectives and an analysis with significant outcomes. A tall order.

Furthermore, the basis of the presentation is a real-life situation (RLS) which suggests to the student a knowledge question (KQ). The KQ has particular qualities: open-ended; about knowledge; in ToK vocabulary.

The stakes are high because there will be no second chance and a student's final IB score and therefore her higher education could depend on it.

why all the long faces? Let's at least make it fun!

On a whim last year, I made a set of 40 vocabulary cards for each student containing IB's prescribed 8 Ways of Knowing (green cards); 8 Areas of Knowledge (red) and 24 useful words which I selected (blue). The students have become quite used to consulting these cards during lessons and we have speculated how we could use them to make ...

...A game.

Matt Baier gamified PD at his school by:

'creating a list of skills in which our faculty should be proficient. Our challenge was determining how faculty would demonstrate their knowledge.'

This is my challenge also. Here are some elements of ToK in which students should be proficient.

1. 
   

   Real-life situation

   
   


2. 
   

   Knowledge Question

   
   


3. 
   

   ToK vocabulary

   
   


4. 
   

   Other RLSs

   
   


5. 
   

   Other KQs

   
   


6. 
   

   Arguments

   
   


7. 
   

   Perspectives

   
   


8. 
   

   Analysis

   
   

- But wait, you can't gamify unless it's electronic.

- Excuse me?

- Oh yes, it's well known that only computer games count when we are talking about gamification.

- It's true that the majority of books on this topic such as Gamify your classroom by Matthew Farber devote most of their pages to the digital realm, but the writers do not specify this medium in their discussions about game theory and the importance of play.

 - Oh, OK then.

All games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation (Reality is Broken, McGonigal, p21)

So we will use the vocabulary cards as a tool to help each student to construct an initial plan for her presentation. The goal is to brainstorm a structure for their assessment. The game models I am using are the card-game Patience or the digital sandbox The Sims. I have devised simple rules and a playing surface so that they can construct a network of ideas based around the vocabulary. When this stage is completed, each student will provide suggestions on a small number of the others' plans and then return to their own plan to process the feedback they have received.

It resembles in many ways a normal brainstorm, but I am trying to harness some of the elements which make games so motivating.

Everyone is a participant... A 'need to know' challenges students to solve a problem... embrace a process of testing and iteration... share their work, skill and knowledge. (Quest to Learn School website)

I hope the activity will benefit from a feeling of community in the class as they all begin the daunting quest to deliver a sophisticated and insightful presentation. Whilst every presentation must be unique (though group members will share identical grades in the end), in the preparation stage a collective effort may contribute extra dimensions to everyone's thinking (if they are prepared to see it). The ToK presentation is a non-zero-sum game, which means that no-one gains marks at the expense of anyone else - there is no strategic benefit in being competitive.

In the 1990s, a puzzle video game called Chip's Challenge was bundled with Windows. After many late nights, I completed all 149 levels. Since you can't progress to a subsequent level unless you have finished the previous one, it gave me great respect for the motivating power of mastery. Over the years, when I have considered gamifying my lessons, it is this feature of computer games that I have focused on: a testing, rather than a teaching environment.

There is an important difference between games that teach a learner how to do something and games that test what a learner already knows (The Gamification of Learning and Instruction Fieldbook, Kapp et al, p49)

Interestingly, then, the game element, which I am now implementing, is not a test but a teaching game...

... unlike 'Beware the Poison Butterflies'

 

Dewey want to Seymour Learning? It's not Godin be easy

PART 1

Does this ring a bell?

"The subject-matter of education consists of bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in the past; therefore, the chief business of the school is to transmit them to the new generation"

This is how John Dewey (Experience and Education, p17) characterised the traditional model of schools.

In my experience, the situation has not progressed very far in the eighty years since Dewey was writing. As a teacher in the 'university-preparation' stage of an international secondary schooI, I have spent most of my time in classrooms upholding this model for which:

"the attitude of pupils must, upon the whole, be one of docility, receptivity and obedience". (p18)

The goals are fixed (we make common cause with students, parents and administrators to attain the highest scores in public examinations). We do not ask whether the examining body's criteria benefit the student, we simply train her to jump through the hoops.

Dewey then contrasted tradition with 'certain common principles' of 'new education' which are:

"cultivation of individuality ... learning through experience ... acquisition of [skills] as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal ... making the most of the opportunities of present life ... acquaintance with a changing world." (p19)

That description of an education will appeal to many people who read it, but since we appear to be powerless to change the goal, the means we employ to achieve it also remain largely the same as before.

PART 2

Project-based learning is inspired by Dewey's philosophy of education as a social activity. The differences between Project/Challenge/Problem based learning methods are not really significant; their similarities are the important issue. Each of them helps students to:

learn about Real-world issues

"students are pulled through the curriculum by a Driving Question or authentic problem that creates a need to know the material" (Introduction to Project Based Learning, Buck Institute of Education)

Reflect on how and what they are learning

"Judge it by what the whole system learns, and that includes the teacher." (Interview with Seymour Papert)

choose how they learn

"Emphasise student independence and inquiry" (John Larmer on Edutopia)

Sustain Focus on a topic

"Challenge Based Learning slows down the experience to allow for full participation, ongoing reflection, and self-discovery." (CBL and personalized learning, digitalpromise.org)

PART 3

But it is easy to say what is wrong with an institution; much more difficult is actually to bring about change for the better. Generations of educators have nodded along with John Dewey but, unlike most areas of society in which change has been rapid, very little progress has been made. I think this is because we are prematurely congratulating ourselves on seeing the problem, not realising that it is only the first small step in a journey with no map.

Dewey knew this:

"The general philosophy of the new education may be sound, and yet the difference in abstract principles will not decide the way in which the moral and intellectual preference involved shall be worked out in practice". (p20)

In other words, can we set some new goals? If we don't (and usually, in schools, we try to skip this most difficult step), then the change we say we want will not occur. We have people like Dewey and Papert to help us, but we must listen and let them teach us to think deeply about the reasons for what we are doing.

PART 4

Something has to give. There are only so many hours in a student's career. If you're going to do a new thing, you have to retire an old thing.

"The trend towards portfolio-based, so-called authentic assessment is very good, but it's very limited unless it goes with throwing out the content of what we're testing." (Seymour Papert)

If you've ever seen a conversation between teaching subject-specialists as they try to identify content to throw out, you'll know how hard this will be. Yet it has to happen.

Furthermore, let's not kid ourselves that projects will be easier to implement. On the contrary:

"we're going to have to work very hard to make the stuff that they're going to learn. It's not going to come about just by teaching the old stuff in a more, "constructivist" way." (Papert)

PART 5

So, like our students, we have to read; we have to work hard.

And we have to think and learn.

"Please ask someone, “what is school for?” and don’t stop asking until we can agree on the answer and start taking action" (Seth Godin in Stop Stealing Dreams)

You can read Dewey's answer in Article 2 here.

This is what my family said (and no-one mentioned exams):

• School replaces human nature with more society-friendly characteristics (in his 20s)


• School is there to prepare you for adult life. And I'm not sure it does that for our lot... (50s)


• I think school is there to teach children to read, so that they can go out and choose their reading, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, freely and independently. (50s)


• School gives children their first opportunity to live in a society away from their home surroundings and to build relationships beyond the family. (70s)

What do you think school is for?