Tag: The Reflective Educator (page 17 of 43)

This afternoon my wife and I participated in my son’s student-led conference. In this conference, my son led us through a sample of various classroom activities he’s done over the course of the year. He was excited to share what he had done, and both my wife and I were very proud of him.

At one point, he was sharing a math activity he had done during the year. In this activity, the purpose was to add 5 and 7 by regrouping the sum into 10 and 2, using manipulatives. I remember my son saying, "Okay, so I don’t know what 5 and 7 is, so I’m going to count out 10 from 5 plus 7 and see what is left over and then add that to 10." He was obviously remembering instructions he had received on how to do addition using regrouping and counting.

The thing is, my son knows what 5 plus 7 is. I know he does. When we were driving home, I asked him what 5 plus 7 is, and he said, "Oh, I know that. 5 and 5 would be 10, so 5 plus 7 would be two more than that, so 12." In other words, he used a different explanation when talking to me about the problem, than when working in his classroom space. The context mattered.

In the classroom, he probably felt that he should use the method his teacher showed him. With me, he used the method he discovered himself (seriously, I never taught him any of the techniques he uses for addition, I just helped him develop a strong understanding of numbers) because that is what he feels comfortable with when he is around me and my wife.

It reminds me of the story Keith Devlin tells of street market arithmetic done by "uneducated boys of a poor background." When asked to do arithmetic in the context of their daily jobs as street merchants, the boys had sophisticated techniques they developed to reduce the difficulty of the arithmetic they would need to do. When asked to perform these exact same calculations in a different context, as word problems on pencil and paper, the boys failed miserably. The context mattered.

This complicates our understanding of what children know how to do because not only do we need to know what they can do when we are around, we need to understand what they can do in other contexts of their lives.

I read an interesting article recently about over-parenting, where children are made helpless because of too much support from their parents (and teachers). After I read the article, I remember this story from many years ago, shared by a colleague of mine.

"We had a kid whose mom used to dress him all the time, even though he was in sixth grade. She also used to feed him, and as a result, he didn’t know how to use a fork and spoon himself, which was a bit problematic at camp. Fortunately, he figured it out fairly quickly because there was no way we were going to literally spoon-feed him."

"One day, we were playing a relay race where one person would put on a shirt, run to the other side of the field, and pass the shirt to the next member of the team, who would put it on, and then ran back, and so on. When this kid’s turn came up, he ran to the other end of the field and raised his arms up, waiting for his teammate to put on the shirt for him."

This raises an important question for me; in what ways do we as teachers over-coach our students?

I have implemented some changes in my grade 12 math class in an effort to help build independence in my students, and the students at first feel a bit weird about these small changes, but then they adjust to them, and over time, they appear to become more independent.

1. I tell my senior students that they don’t need to ask me for permission to use the bathroom, they should just wait for a sensible time, and tell me where they are going. If I still taught middle school students, I would do this with them as well, and take the rare times when they abused the responsibility as opportunities to teach self-discipline.
    
2. I don’t assign specific problems from the textbook. I don’t even tell students where in the textbook the problems are (most of the time). If our students are unable to self-select challenging problems for themselves, and unable to find those problems in a textbook written for them in mind, then I certainly feel like we have failed them as educators.
    
3. I stopped answering all of their questions. Most of the time, I respond with a question, and try and move them toward being able to resolve all of the simple problems they run into on a daily basis.

(Image credit: Left – Multnomah County Library, Right: Sam Howzit)

If you ask people who attempt to predict the future of education, you will find out quickly that there are two very different, competing perspectives.

One camp believes that the future of education is in moving away from complete standardization of curriculum and focusing on nurturing students to become learners, so that when they need to learn something new, they are capable of doing so independently. They are less concerned with the media that students use to learn, and more concerned about ensuring that students have at least some say in what they learn, and how they learn it. They believe that computers are powerful devices for exploration, and that the full potential of computers in education has not yet been realized.

This first camp believes that learning is something best done within social contexts, while simultaneously believing that cultivating the ability to think independently of others is of critical importance in our life. They believe in students spending some time learning independently through self-exploration, and some time collaborating deeply with others. They believe in teaching kids how to think, not what to think. They believe the role of teachers is primarily to mentor students and to model being a learner with them.

The other camp believes that the future of education is in mechanical learning. They believe that if we can just find the right mixture of content, media, and machine-graded assessment, we can greatly reduce the costs of education, and deliver a personalized education experience to every child. They believe that a teacher’s job is to deliver content and assess the understanding of students, and they believe that these can both be done efficiently and effectively with a computer. They believe that if children just have the perfect explanation, they will learn.

This second camp believes that the future of learning is with children carefully isolated, sitting in cubicles, watching videos, and then answering questions prompted on the screen. They believe that social interaction with other children is at best a supplement to what happens on the computer, and at worst it is a distraction. This camp is usually more concerned with the cost of education than the quality of learning.

Both of my descriptions of these two camps are somewhat reductionist. Obviously there are shades of gray between these two camps. However, if you had to choose between these two visions, which would you choose? More importantly, what are you doing to make it a reality?

I don’t think we are doing a good enough job of preparing high school students for the university experience. We need to do more!

• We should increase class sizes in high school up to 500, so that students get the experience of being in a large lecture hall. We may want to ease students into this experience, so we should gradually increase up to 500 students per class, perhaps at 20 students a year. Working backwards, this would mean we should start with kindergarten class sizes of 260 students.
   
• We should make high schools larger. No more measly 2,000-student high schools. They should have 20,000 to 40,000 students at least!
   
• We should hire mostly teachers who have little formal training in teaching and are mostly interested in pursuing their own research. The lowest level classes in the school should be taught by graduate students with little to no teaching experience.
   
• We should reduce summative assessment in our schools to two exams per semester and use little to no formative assessment. If the students do not understand, they need to study more.
   
• If our students are struggling, we should just keep putting them into remedial courses until they drop out. Why would we offer them any support? They will be on their own in university!
   
• We should charge students ever increasing amounts for tuition and force students to take out gigantic student loans in order to complete high school if they cannot afford to pay.
   
• We should drop all of the ‘soft’ courses from our schools. Students do not need to take home economics, planning 10, or shop class. We should also make physical education optional. After all, our job is to prepare students minds for academia, not prepare them for life.
   
• We need to teach students how to navigate depersonalized bureacracy. Therefore we should make high school as depersonalized and bureacratic as possible.
   
• We should encourage our high school students to drink, so that we can replicate the drinking cultures prevalent on many university campuses.

(Or maybe we should stop backwards designing from university and instead focus on building effective practice, whether or not it "prepares students for university"?)