Professional blog

Okay so after attending the ASCD conference this year I have a number of recommendations that I have for holding future conferences.  I don't know if anyone will listen to these ideas, but there must be a better way to run these sessions.  Near the end of the conference, I got the chance to meet Cate Brubaker and Shane Krukowski who are very interesting people and seem like they are excellent educators.

Personally I believe schools are in need of deeper reforms than simply changing the pedagogy a bit can resolve.  Here are some suggestions I've been exposed to over the past few weeks, which could be considered radical, but might really improve schools.  I'd like to provide references for where I learned about this information, but to be honest I'm not really sure who exactly suggested what, I've been processing a lot of information recently.

This is essentially a summary of Ben Grey's and Jeff Arnett's session on podcasting from ASCD 2010.  Pretty useful session, I liked the summary of why students should be podcasting.

Gary Stager has presented some ideas in his presentation on 1 to 1 computing devices.  Rather than focusing explicitly on the uses of the devices, he focuses on the big picture that computers are imagination devices, and should be used as such.  The focus of his presentation was on how the creative use of computational devices by the students can lead to powerful learning experiences.

Here are his top 10 uses of a computer:

This morning I was not able to attend a session on using iPod touches in the classroom because it was cancelled, and then I missed an opportunity to learn more about Smartboards because the session was full.  I was upset but sat down and looked through the program and tried to find an alternative.  Finally I settled on a session about learning about how adults learn differently than children.

How do we teach our students to be compassionate? I'm thinking about this idea this morning because of something that happened to me that I want to share.

A typical classroom might look something like this.  The problem with this arrangement that I see is that almost no one actually works under this arrangement.  Why not?  It's distracting! this is similar to the layout in a lot of teacher staff rooms, and it is my experience that very little work happens in the staff room when it is full.  There are too many people around and too many things to see and do.

There is lots of research which shows that human beings are complex.  In fact, although we can be modeled as groups of people mathematically in many circumstances, individual humans are too complex for mathematical analysis to much use in exactly predicting our behaviour.  However humans do follow patterns of behaviour, and we can predict what a possible range of behaviours are we expect to see.  Obviously this is why our social structures work because this predictive ability is easy enough that one can do it without the aid of a computer.

Here's my observation.  What we have students do during school does not at all resemble what they will do when they finish university.  In fact there is literally no relationship at all, and our students can see that and of course, they rebel.  I've talked about an alternate school structure before, this post is really an extension of that post.

So I was struck by an interesting analogy today after reading part of a post about flipping curriculum.  The problem with current education, the post claims, is that we are focusing on cramming content into courses, rather than working fundamentally on critical thinking skills.  I thought, Yes, I totally agree, and then it came into focus, the reason WHY I agree.

Here's the argument that ran through my head.