Author: David Wees (page 69 of 98)

I read an article on the Principal’s blog by Mel Riddile talking about the changes the AP is implementing and how these changes will make it more like the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. He asks a teacher who has been fortunate enough to teach both programs for a long time. Her response kind of irked me because she focused almost entirely on what I consider to be the logistical set-up of the IB as compared to the AP, rather than the major philosophical differences, which at least Mel touched upon.

She said:

"The IB requires laboratory work but the instructor can choose which labs will be performed and they must be at least partially developed by the student."

I left a comment on his blog that the IB was about so much more than just a few labs.

There is more of a philosophical difference between the IB and AP as well which Sherry seems to miss. The IB is not about the courses or the content, it is primarily about their mission statement.

"The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right." (from their website: http://ibo.org/mission/)

The IB is about developing a whole student. You can’t just take an individual course and consider yourself an IB student, it doesn’t work like that. Teachers have to frame the curriculum from the perspective of the 10 learner profile traits of the IB (see http://www.ibo.org/programmes/profile/ and watch the video).

Students also do a self-directed course as part of the IB where they all write an academic essay of about 4000 words on almost any topic they choose. They have to show a commitment to learning outside of school in the form of the CAS program.

The IB program is about so much more than just some instructor choice in what labs students do.

Almost all of Sherry’s explanation of the differences between the AP and the IB is about the ways courses are structured and what information was given to instructors in order to prepare them for teaching the course. Only one sentence in mind spoke out to the really big difference between the two programs.

"Obviously, the benefits to the students working in this kind of laboratory situation where problem solving was critical transformed lab days for me and my students."

So the IB is about critical thinking but also about a host other important skills. It is a complete program, not a small part of a larger high school curriculum. A much wider range of students will be successful in the IB program than a full complement of AP courses. The IB is not just the AP dressed in different clothing or wearing a different skin.

So a student of mine just mentioned me in this tweet.

So the background to this story is that this is a student of mine, and that I taught her IB Mathematical Studies and Calculus in school a couple of years ago. The calculus class was taught using much lecture (unfortunately) but had this huge project we worked on about trying to figure out if a mission to Mars would be possible, using some calculus to help answer the question. One of the tools that I taught them how to use as part of this project was Google Docs.

Apparently she is working in a children’s television and thought that they might find using Google Docs useful for writing scripts.

So she’s actually using something she learned in my class and applying it to her work. Very cool. Notice though that it’s not the calculus that she’s applying, or the ability to sit in a lecture and listen quietly. Nope. It’s one of the technology skills that I taught her that she is finding useful.

So I decided to ask her if she had used any of the mathematics I taught her. I actually had this student for two courses and one of those courses was an applied mathematics course so you’d think that there might be some chance she’d used some of it. Here’s her response.

This is just more anecdotal evidence for me that the most important things we teach in our classes don’t lie between the pages of the textbooks we use. It’s the skills, not the content.

A problem with education is that we have too many "best practices" and not enough innovation. Once you establish a procedure as a best practice there’s no room for argument about whether or not it works. We should call it a "current practice" instead. Now we have the freedom to explore this practice and confirm whether or not it is actually working, and find new innovations in education.

We need to encourage more innovation in education and explore a wider range of what is possible. People need to be rewarded for their innovation by being given the responsibility to implement it, provided that they can show solid evidence that it works for other educators too. We need more peer review of what we do as educators.

Imagine a teacher has an idea for improvement in their teaching. They try it in their classroom, bounce the idea off of a friend and collect evidence that it works. They convince a colleague to do the same, and show that whatever it they are doing differently works for both teachers. They submit their idea to a peer review panel, which then would make recommendations on what ideas have wider merit. The teacher who had the original idea would then be given the responsibility and the authority to try out their idea with a wider group of students or teachers. Teachers would be rewarded for innovation with the responsibility to see their idea through, and spreading it to other schools where it could also work.

We would end up with a lot of benefits from this system. First, the amount of collaboration between educators would increase. Next, school improvement ideas would spread out of the school in which they are initially implemented. There would be encouragement to share one’s ideas rather than jealously guard them. Furthermore, educators would be encouraged to innovate. It would lead to improvements in education by greatly increasing the pool of talent to produce possible innovations. So many educators come up with awesome ideas that never make it past the door of their classroom.

Let’s turn our system which just uses "best practices" as determined into researchers into one which includes innovations from educators in the field.

Let’s suppose the picture below represents the possible states schools can be in, with the peaks being "good" places to be and the valleys being bad places to be. We don’t really know yet what variables we are even representing with this picture, in fact it is likely that the picture itself would be better represented in 20 or 30 dimensions, as there a huge number of factors which affect how successful schools are.

(For those of you who are interested, the equation of this curve is z(x, y) = sin(3x) + cos(2y) + 1.5sin(x) – 3sin(0.5y) and it was created using GraphCalc)

The first thing which is clear from this picture is that there are a lot of ways to be a good school. No one formula works, no single arrangement of the variables corresponds to the best solution. Similarly there are a unfortunately lot of ways to be a bad school. 

The next thing I notice about this picture is that it’s not easy to be at the top of one of these peaks. Make a small nudge in policy, lose a key teacher or administrator at your school, and you can quickly move from a peak to a valley, and your students suffer. The valleys are hard to move out of because of the inertia of a bad school and the energy required to overcome that inertia. Educators can literally feel like Sisyphus, pushing their school out of a valley only to see it collapse back down again with a change in district support, funding, or policy.

Worse, this picture changes over time and the peaks and valleys don’t remain in the same places as external pressures push on schools. Outside pressures from society can have huge influences on school. Think about what schools would look like if the Internet had never been invented. Would they need to change that much? What about if the civil rights movement hadn’t happened?

It is also equally possible that two people from different schools could be standing on different peaks and not recognize that each person works in a wholely different but equally successful school. Or that two people could be in different valleys, and what works to improve one school is completely unsuccessful at another school.

The key message here is that there is no one single formula to improve a school. All standardizing curriculum and increasing accountability in schools will do is shift schools in the same direction on this graph. This will work for some schools, and fair at others, and can potentially push successful schools out of a peak.

I got owned by one of my students today in math class which doesn’t happen terribly often to me. Here’s the situation, see if you can tell whose solution is really a better way to approach this problem.

My student, instead of approaching this problem from my algebraic method using the distance formula drew some triangles and using the Pythagorean theorem to solve the problem. Her solution was much easier to understand and easier to work out. No one even completed the problem the way I was suggesting to do it. So I got owned.

You can’t discover these kinds of interesting solutions to problems if you require rigid step-by-step solutions. I got some professional development today and some advice from my 16 year student. She said, "Triangles are your friends." I gotta say, I agree with her.

Sandy Hirtz of CEET BC asked this question over at the CEET BC Ning.

"British Columbia Liberal leadership hopeful Kevin Falcon says public school teachers should be paid according to their teaching skills, not their length of service or level of professional training. He thinks a merit-based pay system should be implemented. What do you think?"

Here is my response.

When we think of merit pay, it is an attempt to turn the skills teachers have into a commodity. This works for some other professions because it is easier to attach financial value to what people do.

If you work in a profession where your work has a measurable financial impact, you can determine which of your employees has had the greatest financial impact by looking at various factors, including total sales in a marketing or sales profession, number of cases won and settled in law, etc… So it makes more sense to reward your employees for the good work they’ve put in. If you follow the research Daniel Pink has collected though, you’ll find those rewards don’t help the people in those professions work better, in some cases it actually hinders their profession.

Whether or not merit pay will improve teacher [performance] is a moot question however since there are no obvious financial gains from a teacher who performs well, or at least no gains that one can see in any useful time frame. If we buy the argument that people who are better educated make more money, and that a good teacher leads to better educated students, then over a time-frame of a generation, you could expect to see results if all of your teachers were suddenly better or worse at what they do.

In the context of schools though, this just doesn’t make sense. (Edit =>) We can’t wait a generation to see results and determine if teachers have actually been effective. So instead we are going to use ineffective measures which are not in fact related to the economic impact of good teaching, but are in fact a measure of the "turn them into factory workers" mindset of the 1860s.

However, I don’t actually think that the goal of merit pay is to pay good teachers more, or to bring an business model to education, I think it is actually intended to be used to pay teachers (overall) less. Essentially, the state controls the test, and the measures of how well teachers are doing, which means that what teachers are paid is not up to collective bargaining, but instead up to a bunch of factors controlled largely by the education ministry. I’d never want to cede that much control to an organization which has brought us such beauties as standardized testing, and BCESIS.