This is a presentation I created for a staff meeting tomorrow.
Author: David Wees (page 57 of 97)
If we want to discuss whether or not our k to 12 education system is successful, we must first examine its possible purposes.
Suppose the purpose of our education system is to produce kids who are ready for college. Given that only 61.9% of students (in Canada) even attend college, and that not all of those people complete college, then our system is failing at least 40% of its youth by this measure of its success.
What if instead the purpose of our education system is to produce kids who participate actively in democracy? At the very least, voting in an election should demonstrate an active participation in democracy. Given that in the year 2000 only 22.4% of youth aged 18 to 20 voted, and that this number has been decreasing steadily since the 1970s, it should be obvious that in this possible purpose of education, we are failing dismally.
Another possible purpose of our education system could be to produce students who are literate and numerate. According to government statistics, 46% of Canadians are not literate enough and 55% of Canadians lack sufficient numeracy to be successful in society. Clearly we are failing many people in this respect.
Perhaps our education system is designed to produce people who are critical thinkers, or alternatively, life-long learners. Without literacy and numeracy skills (see previous paragraph), one could easily argue that it is extremely difficult to be a critical thinker, or a life-long learner, so we are likely failing many people with these other two possible purposes of education as well.
Other possible purposes for our education system could be to indoctrinate our youth with our societal values, create compliant citizens for a factory model of work, or to act as child-care for families where both parents work. Finding statistics to verify that the first two of these purposes are being met is difficult, given that it is rare that anyone admits that they could even be purposes of education. As for the successfulness of our system in acting as child-care, it seems that it is an awfully expensive way to provide child-care, but it is true that our education system does provide many hours of supervision each day.
Personally, I don’t think that the last three purposes of education, which might be the only ones in which we are being successful, are sufficient purposes of education. We must do more than merely train our youth to be compliant, teach them how to be nice people, and provide child-care for parents.
I’m a strong supporter of our current system, and I wouldn’t recommend that we tear it down. However, I don’t think we can pretend that it is working as it should, under any definition of success. Something needs to change.
(Image credit: Question_Everything)
After reading this Global and Mail article shared by Chris Wejr, I realized I had a serious objection to the phrase "learning loss that happens over the summer months" as suggested in the article.
The problem is that kids learn lots of things during the summer, they just aren’t generally learning academic skills during those summer months, except for those unfortunate souls enrolled in summer school.
I remember learning how to swim, how to ride a bicycle, how to complete the computer game Might and Magic II, how to organize times to meet up with my friends and many other fun things. I was a reader, so I also spent much of my summer reading. However, I challenge the notion that kids are learning nothing during the summer; they just aren’t learning the skills schools consider valuable.
If we find that there are kids who are not able to engage in these kinds of unstructured learning activities, we should make these types of summer-time activities more accessible, not take away the summer.
Reprinted with permission from my school’s magazine, the Imprint.
I watched an interesting, but disturbing, video about a recent phenomena in the online world. You can watch the same video here.
In the video, Eli Pariser makes the point that the recent trend of search engines, like Google (and Facebook) to present information for us based on our past searches and who our friends are, is resulting in our society being divided into “Internet search bubbles.” For example, let’s suppose I do a search on “Canadian education” from inside Canada, and outside Canada. Even an innocuous search like this leads to different results.
In Canada:
In the United States:
Apparently Google thinks that US citizens who search for Canadian education want to study here, and Canadian citizens want to do research.
What the video points out is that for more politically charged searches, the search results themselves can be radically different, rather than just a bit different, as these two screen-shots show. Two people searching for the same information will be shown very different perspectives. The situation is even worse if you use Facebook to find out about the news, as only news that your friends think is important and which you click on more often will be shown to you.
In the video, Eli describes how he had a good mixture of liberal and conservative friends in his Facebook stream, but he noticed that as he tended to click more on the links in stories of his liberal friends that over time his conservative friends began to disappear from his stream. In other words, Facebook figured out that Eli was a liberal, and decided for him what information would be relevant to him.
What is going on is that Google, Facebook, and other search engines are using a friend recommendation and personal history system to decide what your perspective is, and to deliver you the content that they feel is more relevant to your perspective. This is the same recommendation engine that is part of Netflix. As a result, you are less likely to become exposed to ideas from outside of your friend and family groups. You are now less likely to learn that there are perspectives on the world other than your own.
This speaks to the need to discuss media literacy, as someone who does not know the perspectives of others is less equipped to deal with the challenges of the world. Imagine if you grew up not knowing that there were multiple perspectives on any issue: How would that change your worldview?
While we have always had our worldviews limited by who our friends are, we currently have easy access to resources like newspapers and television to help us find out about alternative perspectives. As television stations and newspapers fail, our students will be facing a world where their primary source of information is filtered. Already more people get their news online than through traditional media, so the failure of television and newspapers is imminent.
The leaders in information literacy at Stratford Hall are aware of this issue, and will introduce students to this issue as we develop their information literacy skills. It is critical that our students know that they are being subtly given a distorted view of the world through their web browsers, and that they must seek out other sources of information.
I’m conducting a poll to find out what night would be the best for a regular #BCed chat. Vote below (and see the results). This chat would be open to all interested in chatting about education in British Columbia. I think it would be held about every two weeks at this stage. @MrWejr has volunteered to co-moderate the chat with me. If you are interested in helping moderate the chat, please contact me.
I’ve created a separate wiki to keep track of the chat archives instead of my blog. We will also post suggestions for future topics, and useful information for getting started with Twitter.
We had a fast and furious discussion on #BCed about personalized education tonight with our education minister, George Abbott ( @georgeabbott4bc on Twitter). I don’t have time for any analysis right now, but here’s the archive for the chat:
Download archive in Excel 2010 format
Download archive in Excel 2003 format
Update: Read online here
(Image credit: XKCD)
In many ways this comic from XKCD describes to me the dichotomy between the neo-Liberal 21st century personalized learning model, and the constructivist learning model.
The Magic Bus uses an constructivist approach to learning. In each episode, Ms. Frizzle leads the students through investigations of different scientific ideas through magical field trips. The students lead the process, and Ms. Frizzle uses her questions to draw out their thinking, and to help students decide on the direction of the bus. Often she leads the students through the scientific principles, but she lets them come to their own understanding of the science, while helping to correct their misconceptions.
In the neo-Liberal model, students absorb content through online courses, and the personalization comes in through what pace they are learning the material, and what resources they need to be indoctrinated. One of the primary purposes of technology in this mindset seems to be to reduce the role of the teacher in leading the child through learning, both for a cost-savings effect, but also to reduce the natural tendencies of teachers to indoctrinate children with their own moral values.
Personally, I’d hate to see the Magic School bus model of learning derailed to meet a corporate need for compliant citizens. Videos used to help explain concepts, or as part of a pedagogical approach of individual teachers is okay with me, but as a vehicle for dehumanizing education is entirely inappropriate. If we are going to use technology in our schools, I think it behoves us to recognize both of these arguments for what they are, a fundamentally different approach to education.
(Image credit: auntiep)
Last year at ISTE, I saw a lot of waste, and I feel like we should be able to run a greener conference this year. Here are some recommendations.
First, take advantage of the watering stations. If you are planning on attending ISTE, bring a water bottle (or two). Make sure to fill up your water bottle rather than using the disposable paper cups, or even worse, plastic water bottles. You need to be hydrated, but you don’t need to be producing extra waste. In fact, you could bring your own utensils and a plate as well, and rinse these off in the bathrooms so that you don’t have to throw away paper or plastic plates.
Next, participants, please avoid vendor hand-outs. You aren’t going to look at them. Use your electronic device, and take pictures, or take notes instead. Take the time to get the contact information on the vendors whose products you are really interested in exploring further, and say no thanks to their brochures. Vendors, please learn about QR codes. Provide short urls to resources which are deep-linked if you must, but don’t be fooled into thinking that your little pieces of paper are useful; they aren’t.
ISTE organizers don’t give every participant a copy of the program guide to look at. Post maps at strategic places within the venue itself, and your already out-of-date schedule, is up already in electronic form on the ISTE conference website. This is a technology conference, use the technology effectively! Demonstrate best practices. There were hundreds of laptops with internet connections set up all over the place; these could have been better utilized. Again, nearly every participant will have a portable electronic device with them. Instead of your newspaper, use a blog on the website with an RSS feed.
Everyone at the conference should put their devices to sleep when not in use. The power output at ISTE will be enormous, and given that in the United States some of this power comes from coal, it behoves those of us involved to be aware of our power use. The ISTE laptops, while useful, should go to sleep, with instructions beside each one available so that people know they can wake them up from hibernation mode and use them. The LCD projectors that nearly every vendor feels like they need to use are expensive in terms of power use. Vendors, your products aren’t more likely to sell because you have a flashy presentation, they will sell if they are useful.
What are some other things we can do to run a greener conference?
Here are the results from a simple poll I posted through Twitter.
A flaw with this poll is that I’ve not defined community, so respondents were free to decide if this meant their local school community, or the community in which their school is located.
The results speak for themselves though. A profession which dedicates itself to long hours and relatively low pay (when compared to other professions where a Masters degree is nearly mandatory) should receive more respect than this.
The good news? Many teachers do feel respected in their community, myself included.
One of my grade 11 students wants to be a mathematics teacher. She has asked me a for a list of books she should read. Here is a list of books I would recommend, along with some recommendations from members of my Twitter network.
- Why Children Fail by John Holt
- A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart
- Mathematics Miseducation by Derek Stolp
- The Element by Sir Ken Robinson
- Teaching Children to Care by Ruth Charney ( suggested by @lookforsun )
- Mosaic of Thought by Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman ( suggested by @lookforsun )
- Comprehending Math by Arthur Hyde ( suggested by @lookforsun )
- The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon ( suggested by @getcarter66 )
- Mindset by Carol Dweck
- What does it mean to be well educated? by Alfie Kohn ( suggested by @symphily )
- The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn
- Punished by Rewardsby Alfie Kohn
- The Six-Lesson School Teacher by John Taylor Gatto
- A Different Kind of Teacher by John Taylor Gatto ( suggested by @symphily )
- The New Teacher Book by Stephanie Walters ( suggested by @symphily )
- The Three Questions by Jon Muth ( suggested by @brophycat )
- Teaching Tools by Fred Jones ( suggested by @graemecampbell )
- Words Worth Teaching – Dr. Andrew Biemiller, OISE. ( suggested by @pattimarathon )
What else would you add to this list?