We have all seen the likes of these documents before, a system-level framework for effective teaching, a document that states the fundamental principles of what is expected of teachers in a particular region. The Canadian Teacher Association paper titled “What did you do in school today? Teaching Effectiveness: A Framework and Rubric” is no different in that regard. It is a multi-year research piece about the effectiveness of teaching.
However, what is particularly arresting about this piece is the plain-speaking language used. Often the weight of unhelpful language and Edu-jargon causes us the poor reader to get lost in sometimes and the true meaning is lost most of the time. So it was refreshing to read such simply stated principles in the document about teacher effectiveness:
Effective teaching practice begins with the thoughtful and intentional design of learning that engages students intellectually and academically.
The work that students are asked to undertake is worthy of their time and attention, is personally relevant, and deeply connected to the world in which they live.
Assessment practices are clearly focused on improving student learning and guiding teaching decisions and actions.
Teachers foster a variety of interdependent relationships in classrooms that promote learning and create a strong culture around learning.
Teachers improve their practice in the company of peers.
For each element they expand on the principle with some clear justification for example in the first principle – Teachers As Designers, the authors refer to crafting opportunities for learning that:
…awakens the human spirit’s desire to know. The result is a deep, personal commitment on the part of learners to explore and investigate ideas, issues, problems or questions for a sustained period of time.
This speaks to my passion for the craft of what we do and emphasises the design skills and dispositions needed to do our work so creatively.
The other principles are just straight forward and make great sense to me – however, there is one stand out phrase for me. Principle number two:
The work that students are asked to undertake is worthy of their time and attention, is personally relevant, and deeply connected to the world in which they live.
That one sentence delivers such a challenge and provocation to what we do that it almost leapt off of the page at me when I read it. If you read further into the rationale for this principle you will quickly find a reference to the design of learning that is authentic to those individuals we are with, even providing a useful rubric as a guide, reference and starting point.
How is the learning we are designing worthy of the time we all put into it? How might we ensure we make every learning moment count with our students and still leave room to take opportunities when they arise?
The worthiness of learning is a measure that may reveal real challenges for some and most certainly will lead to rich conversations for those that care.
Not to be confused with restraint which is much more about self-control, constraint is about finding the edges of the page before you begin, it is about knowing what limits you have in terms of resources. It is about must haves and must nots. And to be honest not something I previously worried too much about, but now I see constraint in lots of work that I do and inevitably seek them out if they are not so explicit.
In many ways the 28 Days of Writing project is built around the concept of healthy constraint, about creating an edge where often there isn’t one. A rule to stick to and enjoy the creative challenge. 28 days of writing with a time constraint on how long you can spend every day.
Twitter was such an interesting medium to write through. The constraint of writing within a specific character limit is just second nature now – I always try not to abbreviate or shorten words unnecessarily too. Back when the education community didn’t know it’s tweet from it’s blog it was a fascinating challenge to share your thoughts with such brevity. In many ways this is the most enduring feature of the Twitter platform and certainly something I still enjoy.
Another time when I observed the impact of constraint in a rather unexpected place was a Year 3 classroom in London. The class were all set to build some versions or prototypes of their new house/dwelling ideas they had been intricately designing on paper. Detailed diagrams and rough drafts overlapped on the tables as the class clamoured to discover what was next for their ideas. LEGO makes a similar introduction when used in most classroom, eyes light up and ideas roll over in the mind. However something unexpected happened once construction of the next prototypes commenced. Constraint.
Boys and girls grabbed LEGO baseboards to build on and suddenly fell into a steady rhythm of stacking bricks around the edges, the cuboid house once again asserted it’s dominance. It was a fascinating thing to reflect upon for Meshendia (the classteacher) and I once all was said and done. The LEGO had in fact imposed its own constraint to the process and those baseboards even more so. What were dreamy, intricate designs on paper soon became cookie-cutter boxes in LEGO.
I think this happens a great deal once we are up to our armpits in the making process, the standard classroom doesn’t quite cater for the resources our ideas truly need. Why would they? After all if we are not given enough signals of the constraints in the early stages of a process when we are encouraging new ideas, those ideas will grow and expand without an edge to them.
I was with a school in Perth last week and the very same thinking task for one group of 3 teachers produced completely different results compared with another. The reason. Simply the size of the paper they chose to work on. One group had a large sheet of flipchart paper and their ideas were more numerous, sprawling and often tangential. The other had an A4 piece of paper, the group’s ideas were fewer, focused, more potent. Same task, just a different piece of paper. For one the edges were tighter, closer and more constrained – for the other much more open and freer. The constraint, or lack of, impacted on the type of thinking the group achieved.
Over the last couple of years I have begun to take a deeper interest in the spaces that we call school and those we don’t but which are still considered spaces for learning.
Much of this focus has to do with our ongoing work at NoTosh with architectural firms and in support of schools seeking support and advice in making the most of new and old physical designs.
So I was drawn to this piece about a new school just outside Stockholm – partly due to the blog title – “Learning environments based on learning.” Here is a short extract in which Ante Runnquist explains some of the spaces or learning environments they have designed for the Vittra Telefonplan.
Campfire situations are characterised by communication flowing from one to many, requiring a space that can accommodate a certain number of people in a group situation, where everybody can focus on the person talking or presenting.
The watering hole is a place where people come and go, and a learning environment where you can gather in groups of different sizes. A watering hole is a place of exchanging communication, flowing back and forth. The watering hole areas are typically placed where you naturally would go, and where you maybe bump into somebody or something.
Show-off situations are situations where one person communicates towards the rest of the world, showing what he or she can do or has done, thus requiring a physical space for display and exhibition.
In the cave, communication flows within oneself, requiring a physical frame that furthers seclusion and contemplation.
Lastly, the laboratories are places where the students can acquire hands-on experiences, working physically and practically with projects in a societal and experimental context. The laboratories inspire students and teachers alike, enlarging the learning experience and inspiring teachers to use different tactile approaches.
In practical terms the learning that is going to take place dictates what space would be best. And Ante Runnquist, a Vittra researcher and the author of the post, supports what we believe at NoTosh about how the pedagogy surely is the forerunner for any school design.
Even though pedagogy has changed greatly over the last 100 years or so, the physical blueprint for schools, dating back to medieval monasteries remain: it is one based on time-space-topic. Behind this lies a basic assumption that the students need to be regulated , if a school doesn’t verify that the students are in the right place at the right time and doing the right things, they simply wouldn’t do it.
During our trip to Sydney in November of 2011 Ewan and I found an old book of school designs from decades ago and were amazed to see how traditional the furniture was in the diagrams. Despite the interesting spaces being crafted and planned, you could still see the regimented learning that would take place from the rows of desks. Some things never change.
In our experience new school design does not automatically mean a school is thinking about learning in new ways – much of our design thinking work helps school do just that and if we are fortunate this precedes any physical planning. In fact it should inform the design.
It is exciting to see that the plans at Vittra Telefonplan have this as a simliar focus.
First, I think we have to rethink pedagogy: what are the dynamics of an education with focus on on 21st century skills? Second, as a consequence: we need to rethink the learning environment. When we do this, things start to happen.
Picture: Detritus of “meaningless language” to describe learning cast aside by students at MLC (Sydney, Australia) by Ewan McIntosh
There has been a great deal written about Khan Academy just recently and the concept of personalised instruction and how this is somehow revolutionary or some sort of game changer. But why is it engaging at all? Where does this type of instruction lead us?
In my opinion the instructional maths videos posted on the Khan Academy are “resources” and the structure surrounding it suggests some sort of recipe for how to best use it. We might call this the “pedagogy” as this term refers to strategies or styles of instruction – and the full-fat version of Khan Academy use has it’s own style, heavily tilted towards personalised instruction and feedback.
Looking at the videos as stand alone resources or items that could be used to support teaching and learning in the classroom – how do you rate them? In my opinion they are not particularly engaging – just a close up version of what you see on a board. In my teaching of maths at primary level I wouldn’t use them directly to support my teaching – I might at a push use them as additional materials for children to access – but I may as well do it myself. So if the videos don’t have anything engaging in them, it must be somewhere else, right?
The Khan Academy is a dressed up YouTube channel and purportedly the statistical tracking and indication of “progress” is what is driving any sense of engagement. So are students engaged in the maths or the pointification? Well if the instructional clips aren’t edge of the seat stuff it must be the notional suggestion of a game that drives clicks and engagement.
My son is just learning to read and he is also learning some spellings, he is 5 years old. He gets about 6 spellings to learn at a time – I have always found spelling strategies and policies that are “learn this word” to be utterly pointless and frustrating. This is similar to learning basic maths too – if George sounds out a word whilst he is reading or trying to write and is using that word in context, he is making a much deeper connection with that concept than if he attempts to learn it on it’s own.
Another off shoot of this list / drill approach is that parents cling on to the score, the outcome, the stats (that are everywhere in the Khan Academy) and as a result begin to build this mentality about what achievement is in school. It is a grade – a score out of 10. No context. We have a cultural fascination with grades and I don’t think Khan Academy does anything but strengthen this fervent point of view.
Seth Godin suggests that it is long overdue to actually create something with these tools – “Knowing about a tool is one thing. Having the guts to use it in a way that brings art to the world is another. Perhaps we need to spend less time learning new tools and more time using them.”
During the last 7 months I have been exploring design thinking as a style of instruction and as a structure to plan curricula that is meaningful and relevant to children. We have had the opportunity to work with a wide range of schools and teachers at all age levels in rethinking their approach to the curriculum. As Ewan puts it:
“it’s not about instruction-giving, the very basis of traditional teaching or “instruction”. It’s about providing structures within which people can operate, structures that use different constraints, not fewer constraints, to achieve more choice and therefore breadth of learning, collaboration and depth of learning.”
This approach has a huge emphasis on the role of the student in their curriculum, they play a vital role in what gets planned and how this plays out in their experience of school. Dan Meyer, a former maths teacher, touches on this approach to curriculum content in his TEDxNYED talk.
What Salman Khan is missing is the connection with the real life around us, that which Dan explores, the context that we need to fully engage in difficult conceptual knowledge. A child using Khan Academy will be able to get a personalised set of exercises, tailored just for them, but not the meaningful choice driven application of those ideas.
Dan Meyer explains that providing students with a real life example of a mathematical challenge levels the playing field for all students as it is more about intuitive problem discovery than spoon feeding text book style. Gever Tulley, the creator of the Tinkering School, explains this succinctly by suggesting that:
“The opportunities for engaged learning are inversely proportional to the knowability of the outcome.”
When we know the outcome of our work, if we have too rigid an outcome in our mind for the topic we are working on, our students are likely to be less engaged. (From the video above you can see Dan restructuring a problem with this in mind.)
To me this refers to the “guess the answer in the teacher’s head” syndrome, which when expanded can (sadly) apply to the whole curriculum topic for weeks an weeks of school. We are all making a musical instrument as that is what we have always done.
I don’t see how Khan Academy can have a place in a creative curriculum model, at least not the model of instruction used, the resources themselves may have some value. But it all seems to be propping up a model that should be vanishing from our schools, not resurfacing.
Resources such as these will just make teachers think that they are taking innovative approaches to their teaching and learning. It will stall the changes that are needed in many schools across the world to make maths and other curriculum subjects more meaningful and engaging – we need more “problem finders“, critical thinkers and indeed children developing the capacity to become “patient problem solvers”. We don’t need games and points to bring rote, de-contextualised, meaningless styles of learning back from the abyss where they should rest – we should be kicking them back over the edge!
Dave Gibbs, a teacher and consultant from the UK summed this up really well: “To me it (Khan Academy) seems like a new way of teaching the old way. Not fit for today’s learners, or indeed teachers.”
Ever wondered what 10,000 young people could do to solve some of the world’s greatest problems? That’s what NoTosh is wanting to find out this month as we help reinvent the world’s most important ICT event, ITU Telecom World 11.
The October 24-27 event is the flagship meeting of the world’s telecoms industries, brought together by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the specialised United Nations agency responsible for information and communication technologies. In the run up to the event, and during it, we’ll be showcasing the ideas of young people, aged 8-18, alongside the debates, panels and corridor discussions of these influential delegates.
I recall how I felt after attending WISE a few years ago, a little numb with all the talk and a firm realisation that the conference was too far removed from the experiences of teachers and students. I am confident that this will be different.
It’s a real chance for your students to make a global impact on problems that matter, wherever they are. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime real world project-based learning opportunity, that ties into most teachers’ curriculum at any given point in the year.
We’re providing some brief points of inspiration to get you started, over the seven key themes, and will then open up a wiki space where teachers can collaborate and add to each other’s resources on the areas. Our first theme, appropriately, is how can we provide an education for all?
By October 24, we hope to have videos, photos, blogs and examples or prototypes of what young people believe might help solve challenges on their own doorstep. We want you to tell us how technology could be harnessed to:
alleviate poverty and hunger
improve education for all
address gender inequality
make sure everyone has access to health care
protect our environment
make disabled people’s lives easier
close the gap between the developed and developing world
To take part, you just have to sign up your interest, and from there you’re able to submit posts to the project.
