Educating the Dragon

Sir Ken hits the mark again. He’s speaking on creativity/ education/ and the general systematic sleep-walking toward the future.

I will be listening again to the talk and reflecting on it further at some later date, I just wanted to share with you the audio recording of the presentation.

Ewan asks the following question of NZbloggers about our national curriculum:

It got me thinking about where our ‘flexible curriculum’ is up to. If my school is anything to go by it means that we have permission to return to ‘thematic study’ where “we are all best suited…aren’t we?”

NO!!!! The flexible nature of our curriculum, I think, is a development towards the foci shifting from ‘knowledge facts about’ to ‘developing skills for..’

It is the intension that New Zealanders become ‘life-long’ learners, capable if not willing to be adaptible to the opportunities presented by the challenge of the changing workplace.

This means that teachers need to demonstrate this in their approach to teaching, modelling it for their students, it is a long, long journey we are on but the flexible curriculum opens us up to new possibilities in the design and creation of our school curriculums. 

Most schools, I’d assume, are nervous of this new freedom…. It appears to be a little less ordered, a little more chaotic, a little less stuctured for the ’teaching masses’….  ”after all we have behavioural issues here, I kids wouldn’t cope!”  

Not sure this helpful to Ewan…. but it’s something to think about all the same.

but know I Googled it and came up with stuff on languages…. so maybe I’m talking rubbish!

Whatever ‘Flexible Curriculum’ is it appears we could just make it up

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?”

I over heard a conversation while waiting in for lunch by a guy called Paul, he was saying that Ewan’s presentation didn’t hold anything for him. That what was said had little substance. You’re entitled to your opinion but I think you’re wrong. 

Here’s why… 

Ewan made me think about who I am? Simon, Dragon09, teacher, father, husband, friend, son, brother??? (in no particular order, obviously) I am all of these things but not at once. I strip away teacher at the end of the school day. I leave ‘friend’ in the cupboard when I’m working, I’m ‘brother’ and ‘son’ to not so many people. I’m Simon when I blog and comment I’m Dragon09 on Skype, flickr, teachertube, twitter. 

Students are no different.  

Ewan talked about  

Secret places- mobile phones, SMS, IMGroup spaces- Bebo, facebook, taggedPublic spaces- Live Journal, blogger, flickr, photobucketPerformance spaces- Second Life, World of WarcraftParticipation spaces- marches, events, conferencesWatching spaces- TV, theatre, gigs 

He posed the question: Does your classroom have these?  

Secret places- passing notes (except when they get busted), probably exercise booksGroup spaces- Group work in this lesson to brainstorm……Public spaces- “Great, my work is on the wall” Performance spaces- End of year Musical, if you’re lucky, “….and you can be in the chorus, at the back”Participation spaces- PE? Playtime?Watching spaces- watching DVD at the end of term?  

There point he made was the audience size….. You write a story in your exercise book, the teacher marks it (one person sees it)You publish that piece for a class display (30 people see it) You publish it on the next ( potential audience is a billion) 

With emerging technologies comes emerging practises. 1.    Audience2.    Creativity3.    Differentaition4.    Autentic goals5.    Its not about the tech its about the teach 

These were his headings but the idea of emerging practises is something that has been playing on my mind and something I was hoping to explore while I was here.  

The changing pedagogy, really, truly, what does that look like. Ian Jukes talks about it, David Warlick does, Ewan eluded to it. But what does that look like in my classroom? 

Over the past 18months I’ve been playing around with this idea while encorporating ‘new technology’ in my classroom practise. There are several obsticles to this: 

Staff, senior management have been around for sometime. They know ‘their type of kinds’ and have a system in the school that ‘suits those kids…and has done now for 23 years, thank you very much. Why would you want to mess around with a system that is working”. It only appears to be working because on the whole the kids shut up, sit up and listen. “The results show they’re making progress”, but then could they be doing even better? 

There is a fear of failure. If you want to try having the kids in working on international collaborative projects and it all goes to custard well you’ve failed and you’re a miserable specimen of a teacher. NO you’re not, you reflect, you feedback you assess your practise and give it another go. But the reality is that there is a culture in education that status quo is better than experimentation. – If that were the case we’d be driving around in cars with wheels made out of slices of log! 

There is a lack of research into ‘best practise with technology’ so folk are unwilling to experiment without professional development ‘textbook’. But then the ‘textbook’ comes last of all after established research, which comes after experimental teaching. ICT is no longer taught as a discreet subject it is supposed to be ‘infused’ in all areas of the curriculum. Therefore it does not fit into the technology curriculum in quite the same way as woodwork, home economics and ‘soft materials’.  

Emerging technologies needs emerging practises and emerging practises needs darn brave teachers to step up.