Year: 2011 (page 28 of 28)

@MrWejr and @GCouros have both recently posted about award ceremonies. I felt like I could contribute to the conversation, and I agree with their arguments. I just have a couple of other points to add.

George wrote a post called "Honoring All Students" in which he describes a two possible sets of students; those who receive rewards and those who do not. The students who win awards tend to focus on the awards themselves, rather than the activity they are being rewarded for. In fact, he links to research Daniel Pink has collected showing that rewards (and by extension awards) are detrimental to processes which require critical thinking. It is obvious that students who fall into the other camp will either be indifferent to the awards (or at least externally so) or feel hurt that they haven’t won an award. George also contents that having award ceremonies is for the adults, not the kids.

Chris writes 

June 1, 2010 marked the end of a tradition at our school – a tradition that awarded top students not for their efforts and learning but for their grades and achievements. The staff at Kent School decided to abolish the “awards” part of the year end ceremony.

His post is inciteful and interesting, and rather than quote all of it here, I recommend reading it.

Both of these posts are mentioned in a Vancouver Sun article suggesting that award ceremonies may be losing favour in BC schools. The comments on the article are either praising the ending of the practice at Chris’ school, or lamenting the end of the practice. The argument in the comments is quite interesting, but I find the arguments against awards to be mostly inciteful and well thought out, while many of the opposing comments are one-line sentences making fun of ending awards, like Chris isn’t an intelligent person with reasons behind his actions.

Both Chris’ and George’s well written blog posts come from a student centred perspective of educational philosophy. Rather than focus on the tradition of awards or our personal feelings about being awarded (or not being awarded) they focus on the outcome for the student. They ask the question, "Are awards helpful in promoting learning?" and both find that the answer is No.

There is another argument against awards that doesn’t rely on your perspective. I think it is a much weaker argument than whether we should approach awards from the student’s point of view or not but it is worth mentioning. The argument starts with the question, "How do we choose which students are awarded?"

First, we will assume that if you are handing out awards that you aren’t giving them to every student, because otherwise they wouldn’t be an external recognition of success, they would just be something everyone gets.

So now we aren’t giving the awards to everyone, we have to choose some criterion to select which students get awards. Those criterion will always be subjectively chosen and therefore it is impossible to objectively give awards to students. Awards based on grades will have bias since each teacher will be grading differently. Awards based on the judgement of a panel of teachers have obvious bias since each teacher will be rooting for "their student" (I’ve been involved in selecting awards in teacher committees before).

Awards for students seem like such a powerful message. "We appreciate what you do." It is a good message to send, but sending it once at the end of the year in a public assembly is problematic. It says, "we will reward you for your hard work but only in this special public way." Worse, when the message of recognition becomes a reward, especially a reward given frequently, it turns into an ugly monster where children stop being interested in what they do, and become dependent on the external motivators, or even demotivated by the awards.

Schools should be places where students love learning for the sake of learning, not for external rewards.

This is a new document that I’m typing using only Microsoft speech recognition. The cool thing about dictation is it allows people who may not have the ability to type documents to still be able to write. From start to finish, this document has been created using dictation.

My stepfather has Parkinson’s disease. He has been struggling with the disease for a couple years now and the conditions of the getting steadily worse. His mind is as clear as ever, but his body is struggling and he has constant tremors. He wants to be able to write, he has three different books he would like to finish, but he is concerned that the disease will prevent some from being able to share his ideas.

I suggested Dragon Dictation as an option for him, and he likes the idea of being able to dictate his writing. The cost of Dragon Dictation doesn’t seem too much, but I think he’ll be happy with my discovery that Microsoft speech recognition is actually pretty good. He can get started with his dictation right away.

I was reading an article on the Huffington post tonight that suggested communities should boycott standardized tests. Some of the comments seemed to support the current tests, with the comment “I took tests in school so why shouldn’t these kids?” and other similar arguments. It occurred to me that maybe these people don’t actually KNOW what a modern standardized test looks like? It then occurred to me that, except for parents who are sent home practice material, that many people outside of education don’t know what the tests look like.

Here’s a link to the August 2010 NY Regent’s exam in Integrated Mathematics. Let’s take a look at it so you can see why I’m opposed to standardized tests.

First the front page.

This is too much text. An entire page of instructions for a single exam? It is difficult to follow a couple of simple instructions, but an entire page is a bit ridiculous. If you’ve tried getting adults to follow some simple instructions in an important email you send them, then you’ll understand my point here.

“Print your name and the name of your school above.” I mean seriously, do they think the kids are stupid? The two lines above say quite clearly “Student name” and “School name”. What the hell else could they mean? Treating kids like they are idiots is not the best way to start off an exam. This could be an instruction for the invigidulator to read out to the students to remind them to include their names. Nothing is worse for a teacher than receiving an exam in which a student has put a lot of work, but has forgotten to include their name. However, it is not necessary to print out instructions which are completely clear from the previous two lines.

You can’t see it this small picture, but at the top and bottom of the exam paper, it says “Integrated Algebra” and at the bottom of the paper, it is written upside down. This is clearly not for the student, it is to help the invidulator of the exam keep track of what exam each student has. It’s probably an anti-cheating measure, but it is a distraction and unnecessary. It says in ENORMOUS BOLD TEXT at the top of the page which exam the student has.

In a big giant box there is a notice on the exam. It says “A graphing calculator and a straight-edge (ruler) must be available for you to use while taking this exam.” This is not really a message to the students, who would be powerless to react to this notice if this exam was in front of them, it is really a notice for the schools administering the exams that they are responsible for ensuring that their students have access to the necessary tools. Instructions like this should be sent to the school, not to the students themselves, or at least should be worded in a less aggressive tone. For example, “You may use a graphing calculator or a straight-edge (ruler) for this exam. All other aids are not permited.”

Now let’s look at the questions themselves.

Questions 1, 4, 7, 18, 20, 23, 24, 32, 34, 38, and 39 are all word problems apparently intended to be based on “real-life” examples. Every one them is an example of a classic @ddmeyer “pseudo-context” problem. They attempt to model real life, but do a very poor job of it. No one would ever try to actually solve any of those problems in real life. By including these types of questions on the exam, textbook companies now have to create similar problems for students and teachers (the majority of whom unfortunately rely on the textbook for their classroom practice exercises) have to teach those similar problems. Now you have a case of a standardized exam reinforcing bad pedagogy.

Worse, these questions all have built in cultural references students have to decipher in order to be able to do the questions properly. When I taught in NY state, I showed kids how to draw a line through the parts of the question they didn’t understand and then try to decipher the actual mathematics they were being asked to do. What is the point in having a description of a problem at all if many of the students who will take the exam won’t understand your descriptions?

The other questions on the exam are all computational style questions. None of them has any attempt made to make them a relevant question, they are apparently uninspired by reality at all. Of course now we have the same problem as the other set of questions! Textbook companies will now have to print questions just like these from the exam, and again, teachers will use them. Guess how many students in NY state will get to solve really interesting, well motivated problems using mathematics? Some will, but I bet most won’t. What a shame.

The first 30 questions of the test are all multiple choice with the other 9 questions being broken into two parts somewhat arbitrarily between the easier short-answer questions, and some harder longer-response questions.

Multiple choice questions are awful. Students choose between similar sounding answers, each of which has been chosen either to match a misconception or miscalculation the students can make. Only one of the answers is correct. These questions are multiple choice for one reason only, because it saves NY state money in marking the exams. If you really wanted to find out what students were learning in the schools, you would use a deeper assessment tool.

The exam is translated into 5 languages other than English. This is a great start, students who read and speak those other languages can now have a better chance to take the exam. However, 170 or so languages on the planet is spoken in New York City. What about the other 164 languages? Why aren’t their translated editions of each exam for those languages? Oh right, it would cost too much money. Having a few translations of the test is not sufficient to addressing the inequity of testing students in something other than their mother tongue.

There are many other flaws with this exam. I have a lot of other questions about choices that have been made in its construction. Why 39 questions, for example? Why not 38? Is this so the exam “fits” into a neat time frame? How has the curriculum been chosen? Is this the best set of things students should learn at this age? Does any of this mathematics have relevance in the real world?

Standardized exams like this NY state assessment are destructive. Poorly constructed exams are used to draw inferences about the schools in the state, provide funding for schools based on performance targets, and soon they will be used to decide how much individual teachers will be paid (if the merit pay reform goes through across the US).

You cannot fairly measure a school using a broken metric.

In terms of my career and how I think about education, 2010 was a critical year. Despite having taught in four different countries, and changing from an inner city school in NYC to a posh private school in London, I’d say that this past year’s changes (in my professional life) have been bigger.

The largest change of course is that I’ve started the move out of the classroom, only teaching 2 classes now, down from 6 last year. I’m now working as a learning specialist in information technology (official title) which I see as a learning consultant within our school. It’s now officially my job to help other teachers (and students) use technology efficiently and effectively after years of unofficially doing the same job. I’m also responsible for the technology research at our school which means I spend a lot of time finding technologies for us to use, and looking toward the future of technology in our school. It’s a pretty interesting job, and I’m really glad I have the opportunity to do it.

A transformational shift has also occurred for me in how I view education. I’m seeing the whole process of educating children from a different perspective, both because of my time spent learning on Twitter, and my new role at my school. I’m now doing much more meta-analysis of education and thinking in structures rather than the logistics of education I’ve focused on in the past. This I think is evident in my writing for the year, and the types of interactions and discussions I’m having, both with my colleagues at work, and on Twitter.

I’m more part of the discussion about education. I’ve joined the Cooperative Catalyst, I’m helping set up Vancouver’s first Edcamp, and I have a number of other smaller projects on the go. I’m pretty busy, but generally balancing home life and work life better than 2009.

I completed my Master’s degree in Educational Technology. That was an interesting experience, and one I’m so happy I did. I sort of miss my classes and the interactions I had with my peers, but I am experiencing much of the same kind of learning through Twitter so I have a happy replacement there. However, my best interactions with educators are still the deeper and longer conversations I’ve had through blogs, email, and face to face meetings.

2010 was a good year. I’m looking forward to 2011 and await whatever further transformations that will occur.