Educating the Dragon

Have just finished watching Clarence Fischer classroom 2.0 presentation.  

It’s morning tea time here at my school so I’m typing as fast as I can. 

He made some great points about the ‘new classroom’ that fitted into my ideas and extended my thinking about pedagogy. 

How classroom pedagogy works, currently, is a little like that old addige about personalities being the sum of my yesterdays. Classroom Pedagogy is an evolution of ideas and strategies which appears to go in cycles if any ‘older’ teachers in my school are to be believed. 

The problem with Classroom 2.0 is that it does not fit into the cycle process it is a whole mind shift that is required. It is not something that is a fad and we will come around to it again in another few years after with finished with Intergrated learning style (or thematic study, as they used to call it)  

Clarence stated  Pedagogy- our ability and enthusiasm for this shift will go hand in hand with the support and encouragement we get ‘from the top’ (the senior management in the school- rather than the ‘the Ministry) How long can a teacher sustain their motivation if ‘the change’ is not really a change but an add on to the current, already overloaded, system. For a sustainable pedagogical shift their needs to be an attitude change. I was talking with friends not so long ago about this very issue and the importance of matching ‘Web2.0-teachers’ with ‘Web2.0-management’ – what a powerful potential for change! 

Clarence talked about this attitude change and I fully agree with his observations. We are very fortunate in
New Zealand right now. Our Minister of Education seems to have something of a Web2.0 understanding of the education community. The current Ministry Document also nod towards this shifting in education. However, I feel there is something of a time-lag between these publications, the minister’s speeches and what it looks like in the schools across
New Zealand. Should this be a grassroots movement or a directive from the top? Some combination of both is what is required, that what an attitudinal change is all about. 

The Tools, or rather access to the tools is vital, there are many more Web2.0 tools available than the few Clarence mentioned. All of them have value in the social-networking realm and many of them show great promise for the educational setting. Education and Learning are all about the relationship and the collaboration in learning that allows our students to become the ‘life-long learners’ they need to be. 

The change that is required should begin with us. If you are reading this, or have heard Clarence’s presentation then you are well on the way to making this change. We all have responsibily in our schools to ‘infect’ our staff with the desire for this radical change. 

I loved the ‘studio’ style of classroom and what I could see in the classroom with its layout and environment encouraged me to look again at my classroom, through fresh 2.0-glasses. 

What we can learners together. Let’s work like it.

Today we were looking at the Gifted and Talented register. Angi delivered a paper she’d written for Uni back last year. The presentation can be found on slideshare, unfortunately I’m having a few issues with embedding in my blog so you’re left with a screen capture and the link to the slideshow, Sorry.

I’ve managed to grasp some key aspects. 
 

 Our school definition reads: 

Gifted and talented students are those who have potential (gifted) or are Performing (talented) well above average in any of the following domains: general intellectual or social, specific academic, cultural traditions, values or ethics creative or productive thinking, leadership visual or performing arts, and psychomotor ability. 

There is huge provision for ‘special needs’ kids with SEA, JOST, ‘Seeds for success’, hearing and vision screening, NUMPA, ESOL assessment and Ministry cohorts English Language Assessment.So why not identify those with special abilities? Those with ‘special abilities’ need appropriate learning experiences, lest we are in danger of switching them off and ‘giving’ them behaviour issues, or worse, they’ll be labelled the class know-all. They need the challenge, but what does that  look like in our classes? 

A little bit of theory: 

Conservative definitions of giftedness are the traditionally recognised ones. They tend to focus on one area – usually academic intelligence – and base their identification on high IQ scores.  Some of the supporters of these conservative definitions were the early theorists, Alfred Binet and Théophile Simon devised the Binet-Simon Scale, which measured the mental age as opposed to the chronological age.

Liberal definitions are much broader in their base and therefore a lot more inclusive. They allow for a much higher percentage of students to be labelled as gifted or having special abilities.Among others, there are three key people who have contributed to current thinking on liberal definitions of giftedness: Renzulli, Gardner and Gagné.  Joseph Renzulli(1978) is one person who led the way in the area of using a multicategorical approach to giftedness.  He included three key components to his model of giftedness: 

•         Above average ability (as opposed to high IQ)

•         Task commitment

•         Creativity 

Often a trait of ‘gifted’ children is their isolation within there peer group. Often they are ‘loners’ and require What impact does economical background play on the gifted and talented?

What about Maori andPacific Island children?  Within their culture ‘gifted and talented’ looks very different to our white-middle class background. 

‘Dyssynchrony’ is a term coined by Gibello (1976) when intellectual skills develop a lot quicker than affective and motor development.  In other words, there is internal and external unevenness in development with corresponding consequences. Following are some examples of  kinds of dyssynchrony evident in gifted children.

Intellectual-Psychomotor DyssynchronyAs the name suggests, this is when the intellectual development surpasses the physical/motor development, causing an imbalance between the two. An example of this is a child who reads fluently before starting school but has problems with handwriting, or has difficulty co-ordinating their writing with the speed that their brain is thinking. This is more common with boys than girls.  

Language-Reasoning DyssynchronySometimes what can happen with gifted children is that their powers of reasoning are in advance of their language ability. Their thinking abilities exceed their knowledge. They may be able to understand something without being able to explain it.

Intellectual-Affective dyssynchronyIntelligence may mask emotional immaturity at times. ‘Too much information’ can in turn cause anxiety and fears when the child is unable to process that information appropriately. 

Some cool examples: 

•         Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read.

•         Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school.

•         When Thomas Edison was a boy, his teachers told him he was too stupid to learn anything.

•         A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he had ‘no good ideas’.

.•         Abraham Lincoln entered the Black Hawk War as a captain and came out as a private.

•         Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade.Back to my school. 

The gifted and talented register is split into these key areas:

• Motivation
• Problem-solving
• Interests
• Reasoning
• Communication Skills
• Intensity
• Memory
• Insight
• Cultural
• Inquiry/Curiosity
• Humour
• Sporting
• Imagination/Creativity
• And Sensitivity

What I would love to here about is what does your school do to provide for the needs of the gifted and talented? 

If you know of any Web2.0 tools that could be used to address some of these areas please let me know. 

Also please feel free to comment about the whole nature of ‘gifted and talented’, I am just learning about it and would really appreciate a broader perspective on this subject.

It has been interesting to share Greg’s post and Chrissy’s posts 1 and post 2 about pedagogy.

 I am of the opinion that it is vital for us as practioners to know the answer to the WHY? question. There are many teachers of various generations that I know or know of who struggle with the WHY? question. I have had to take a stand on this issue recently when a colleague of mine answered me by saying:

“I really don’t think we should concern ourselves with the background to why we have identified these traits as being gifted and talented, we should just concern ourselves with classroom practise.”

I totally agree with her about focusing on our classroom practise but we still need to understand the purpose behind what we do, simply replying to the question “Why do you run your reading programme like that?” or “How did you determine these as valuable traits to worthy of additional time and resources?” with the words “Because Marg told me to” really isn’t going to cut, especially in an ERO year!

 My main focus has to be on the classroom teacher, me specifically. What values and beliefs to I hold to as I develop my classroom practise.

In 1997 Julia Atkin wrote an article entitled “Enhancing Learning with Inforamtion & Communication Technology: Promises, pitfalls & practicalities” 

She uses the term ‘Learning Technologist’ as one possible alternative to ‘teacher’ - Learning technology she states is the applied science of learning.  I do prefer this term to facilitator, coach and teacher, the reason being that the Learning is placed at the heart of the role:

This is a comment Bronwyn  made on my blog post “Ewan message rocks” - I’m publishing it not because I totally agree with what she said but because it is an important conversation that I believe we should have and I didn’t want it to get lost in my ‘comments from last week’ - never to be viewed again.

“Sorry but I’m with Paul. There’s real confusion between  entertainment and education here. I certainly found Ewan’s presentation entertaining and - thank God - he actually had some understanding of the realities of the classroom which is more than you can say for most IT presenters/consultants who are miles away from large classes, excessive workloads/ indifferent resourcing, tired and and sometime drugged teenagers… I was really taken by the clip of the undersea French discussion made by the kids but it’s not hugely different from the past when kids did the same thing with tape recorders or by acting in a play. The important thing is that they were demonstrating that they could use a foreign language. That’s the real learning - not the mode of presentation. I’ve been to loads of ICT conferences this year and once you cut through the hype what you see are good teachers using ICT as a tool to support learning BUT we are constantly urged to admire the product rather than asking the tough questions like when they had all that fun did they learn anything? What? How do we know? Was it what we meant them to learn? Can they transfer that learning to other contexts? Too often we are asked to assume that because the kids appear to be having fun they are learning. This does not necessarily follow.
If you read the cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker (How the Brain Works; The Blank Slate) you’ll note that he argues that much human learning is intrinsic because we have evolved innate brain strucutres that make some things easy for us eg language, basic number, some psychology, physics as related to movement … BUT beyond that we don’t have innate abilities so we have to press into service other brain structures and that’s hard - things like reading and algebra require effort.

We have proven this to some extent in New Zealand because we damaged a cohort of youngsters with the assumption that all kids would “catch” reading if they surrounded with enough written language. NO! It worked with middle class kids who were getting constant “teaching” from their parents but a generation of working class kids who didn’t come from language-rich homes missed out. The Literacy Project is about teaching reading much more deliberately. Similarly, when we get all excited about the digital age when students will choose their projects of work we should remember that one of the big problems NCEA has thrown up is that given a free choice, teenagers are inclined to do as little as possible (80 credits and that’s it!). Sure there are some students who will find something that interests them and work single-mindedly on that but it would be a triumph of hope over experience to design an education system for Einstein.
The worst thing about this is that most kids will never know what they are really capable of because learning pedagogies are being replaced with a new vision that has the teachers as entertainers and the kids’ best friends not as a grown-up who is responsible for ensuring kids learn and who may not be an expert on Youtube but actually know a hellava lot more about life and learning than a 14 year old does. The uncomfortable thing is that teachers are jettisoning this, not because it’s better for kids’ learning (there’s no evidence whatsoever of that - it’s a classic example of the Goebbels technique )but because they want to be liked and valued and the people who produce and sell ICT hardware and software and the consultants who support the industry are telling them this is how they can become revered public figures. Who wouldn’t want that? We’re selling kids short if we continue to promise them that they will never have to struggle and sweat to get up the mountain because we are going to helicopter them to the top. The view is just as good so that’s all that matters, doesn’t it?”

In my presentation on SkypeTalkandWrite I spent very little time talking about the background to its use in the classroom. 

Skypetalkandwrite is a synchronous conferencing tool. In this book David Jonassen talks about ‘How..synchronous conferencing can be used as a mindtool.’ 

These tools are not new, back in the day there were MOOs,  MUSEs, MUSHs, MUDs some or all of these are still in use in various forms.  

Neither is skypetalkandwrite unique Microsoft Netmeeting,  CUseeME are two other examples on synchronous conferencing being used today and I’m sure there are others. 

What I’d like to focus on here is the value of the real-time communication which enables learners to become discursive members of a wider community.  As with any level of real time conversation it is important to ensure it stays on track. There is a fine line here to consider, with synchronous conferences being in nature social it is important to establish, and maintain, the purpose of the discourse to avoid the quality of conversation spiralling downwards.One of the key ways to do this is offer purposeful conversation, students require a project to engage with, an issue to debate or a problem to resolve. It is often helpful for students to share a workspace on line, it is good for then to see a product of their labours. This is where the ‘object’- the shared whiteboard provided by the TalkandWrite software comes in, it focuses the students attention on the project at had. Without a shared ‘object’ conversation can deteriorate very quickly (just like a real classroom)  

The single most powerful aspect of a synchronous conference is the immediacy. ‘Live interactions produce more motivation to contribute’ 

There are other applications out there, Web 2.0 is full of synchronous and asynchronous tools. I guess it’s what drives the social networking, the picking and choosing of applications to meet your communication needs. As I type this I was engaged in a conversation with Amanda about this very subject and I started out hoping to support my presentation with some theory but never mind. This is how I conversation went: 

Dragon09 says: Am writing a post about synchronous conferences…. any thoughts? 

Amanda says: i.e. k12 online chats?

Dragon09 says: yeah true…Skype too

Amanda says: or what Ewan talks about in his blog about being able to respond while he gives his keynote?

Dragon09 says: Sort of, but I think that is technically asynchronous cos you don’t need to be on at the same time like we are now

Amanda says: ah yes you would be right in that

Dragon09 says: Twitters an interesting one, its kinda both.. if you think about our ERO twitters yesterday, hours apart, but if you catch people on at the same time it can be…synchronous

Amanda says: definitely

Amanda says: I think that they synchronous element is important in a conference I went to Ulearn last year but didn’t have the contact other than the people i went to school with and some people i met. But after I met you and begun to have more contact with people within the conference via twitters it changed the dimension of the conference. It changed from being me thoughts between the speaker and myself to the possibility of having other peoples opinions i.e. the Helen Baxter presentation and the twitters and examples that were given in rebuttal or agreement with her presentation It meant that I was questioning and thinking during the keynote to a higher dimension than if I was just sitting there listening to HER. Make sense?