Tag: proxy

Closest to the Synapse Wins! – More thoughts on proxies for learning

LearningPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Closest to the Synapse Wins! – More thoughts on proxies for learning

I had the opportunity to work with a primary school leadership team in Sydney today. The team at St Christopher’s in Panania are a partner school of mine and I support in a critical friend type role.

We spent some time today exploring the concepts associated with “proxies for learning” using my recent blog post about it as a starting point.

In short the concept of a proxy is that we focus on a representation of learning – we are not looking at learning itself.

Again the discussion centred on the idea of creating better proxies and what the limits are. We had a range of questions that helped to explore this topic:

  • How might we design better proxies for learning?
  • Can we describe the proxies we have been using in our own practice?
  • If we were observing learning taking place what would we actually be looking at?
  • How might we design a proxy that is closest to the location of learning?
  • What is the evidence of learning?
  • Is this evidence of performance or learning?
  • How might we recognise when learning is taking place?

An interesting challenge to me from the team was that an example I used to explain a proxy was in fact a proxy. I have heard myself say something like “We might only look at learning if we could scan the brain or have a mobile MRI or CT scanner.”

But of course the results of such scans are just proxies for the real thing. Peeling back the skull and directly observing the neuro-chemical process is the truth. Everything else is a proxy.

So when we consider that everything we do is a proxy for learning at a neuro-chemical level, we must shift our energy to the quality of the proxy.

You might also describe it in terms of the fidelity of the proxy – the quality , authenticity and standard of the representation of learning.

My friend Chris also suggested that self reflection and a learner’s self proclamation is the highest standard:

But I am not sure if greater proximity to a synapse is best? There seems to be lots of bias associated with the self-assessment of learning.

David Didau offers a reminder about the complexity of learning and a list of ideas for better proxies:

Obviously, we don’t really know how, when or why learning happens, but we do have some guides about what might make it more or less likely.

So, here I tentatively offer a list of other possible ‘good proxies’ for learning which may help teachers plan and look for opportunities to increase students’ mastery of curriculum content.

Learning may happen when students:

  • concentrate on relevant examples and non-examples
  • retrieve what they have been taught in previous lessons
  • apply concepts to new examples
  • engage in practice drills (which may involve repetition or formulas and procedures)
  • answer questions without cues or prompts

What do you think about this list? What do you consider a high quality, high fidelity or just a good proxy?

This exploration has also led me to wonder more and more about retrieval over time. Sometimes learning might not occur in the timeframe we expect it to and only after a shift in time. More to ponder.

#28daysofwriting

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Are you transfixed by a proxy for learning?

LearningPublished onUpdated on4 Comments on Are you transfixed by a proxy for learning?

This is an exploration of a few emerging ideas from my work today. During a coaching session I was exploring the idea of the “proxy”.

The word proxy means “agency of one who acts instead of another; letter of power of attorney”. In fact a contraction of procuracie (c. 1300) a word meaning administration or management.

A model I have been using with leadership groups over the last year (blog post on the way) is the idea of alignment. One part of this is the alignment between the Actual Learning Experience and Learning.

This might also be called the alignment (or difference) between Performance and Learning. David Didau refers to some work by Nicholas C. Soderstrom and Robert A. Bjork,

  • We can only infer learning from performance
  • Performance during instruction is a poor indicator of learning
  • Reducing performance might actually increase learning.

Soderstrom & Bjork (2013)

Many different sources refer to some other work by Professor Robert and the slide below from his presentation What Makes Great Teaching?

The “Curriculum is covered” is one that resonates as I hear that language a great deal. A poor proxy for learning.

There is a lot more to explore and for me to learn about some of these ideas but I enjoyed this insightful take on proxies from Seth Godin in his post Avoiding the False Proxy Trap:

Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

This helped me get a clear sense of how we might create poor representations or flawed proxies for learning. It also made me think more about assessment and the design of assessment in schools.

Godin concludes by saying:

You’ve already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.

Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.

A good provocation to think through if he, for example, is referring to learning. It would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

#28daysofwriting

Photo by Bianca Isofache on Unsplash