"CERTIFYING learning, rather than time, is not an entirely new concept. For decades there have been other ways to earn college credits besides sitting in the classroom. You can “test out” of certain courses through A.P., CLEP or D.S.S.T. exams. At many colleges, you can do an independent study and submit a research paper for course credit. Since the 1970s, Excelsior, Thomas Edison and Empire State have allowed students to earn credits through performance-based assessment, like a simulation with patients in a clinical setting, or by submitting a portfolio with evidence of previous learning, whether through workplace experience, military training or even a hobby.
But not until Western Governors University was founded by a consortium of 19 states in 1997 was an entire degree program structured around assessments of learning. The online institution introduced many ideas that have been copied by new competency programs. They charge fees per term, not per credit, with an “all you can eat” policy — take and retake as many assessments as you can fit into a six-month term."
Thought
that I would start this week’s Food for Thought with something to think about
when we are giving instructions. This idea arose from a moment I observed at
the 3 v 3 Basketball on Saturday when the organizer lined up 9 players for a
sudden death shoot out for 8 prizes…he said the first to miss is out. The first
boy in the queue shot and missed the other 8 got the prizes, was this fair and
what did it teach the others?
This
then reminded me of this homework and its instructions. This was how an
autistic 2nd Grader answered this worksheet. Are the answers right or wrong?
Now that
I have you thinking we can move on to this week’s Food for Thought, which has
been approximately a month in the writing. It is an aspect of student
development that has recently received a
large amount of attention and research and is one that I believe we need to be
cognizant of and think about in our relationships with students. To some extent
it is reflected in the basketball prize example I referred to at the start of
this post. The question is why were 8 runners up being rewarded anyway, and
what does this do for those individuals who are always being told or rewarded for
being smart or good? Does this help them achieve more or better next time? This
concept is very important for our Culture of Achievement that we are working towards.
Developing the right “Mindset” the phrase used by Carol Dweck to encourage
resilience and the ability to learn from our mistakes.
In a recent blog post be Selena Gallagher entitled Learning to
Fail, I that, “The self-esteem movement, which began in the 1980s, was based on
the premise that raising children’s self-esteem would benefit society, and a
culture of praise and reward was established that continues today. In the
United States and Canada, the trophy industry is now worth an estimated $3
billion a year. Much of that comes from junior sports leagues where it is now
common practice for all participants to receive a trophy. In fact, the American
Youth Soccer Organization spends 12% of its yearly budget on trophies.” http://inside.isb.ac.th/challengematters/
In this post she also included these two illustrations which sum
up this situation beautifully. The first by Michael Jordon one of the greatest
basketball players ever.
What the research is saying and what we have to be
careful about is how we use positive praise to enhance achievement, “grit” and
resilience. Hence I would like to share the following links/ articles with you
that talk about this work and will help us adopt the right balanced approach in
our classrooms. So here are 4 readings that you can take a look at that discuss
this topic
"Character
is at least as important as intellect."
Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the
secret of genius is doggedness rather than "god"-given talent, from
the case of young Mozart's upbringing to E. B. White's wisdom on writing to Chuck Close's assertion about art to Tchaikovsky's conviction about composition to Neil Gaiman's advice to aspiring writers. But
it takes a brilliant scholar of the psychology of achievement to empirically
prove these creative intuitions: Math-teacher-turned-psychologist Angela Duckworth,
who began her graduate studies under positive psychology godfather Martin Seligman
at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has done more than anyone for
advancing our understanding of how self-control and grit – the relentless work
ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal – impact success.
So how heartening to hear that Duckworth is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur "genius" grant for
her extraordinary endeavors, the implications of which span from education to
employment to human happiness.
"We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on
this problem. For sure
we need the educators, but in partnership I think we need scientists to study
this from different vantage points, and that actually inspired me to move out
of the classroom as a teacher and into the lab as a research psychologist."
·Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results
”I
had a teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed
up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry
Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group
to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until
our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at
us with a pencil.
Today,
he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty
years' worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey
hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a
concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When
the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra
the size of the New York Philharmonic.”
·Presence not Praise: How to Cultivate a Healthy
Relationship with Achievement
“In The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
(public library), psychoanalyst and University College
London professor Stephen Grosz builds on more than 50,000 hours of
conversation from his quarter-century experience as a practicing psychoanalyst
to explore the machinery of our inner life, with insights that are invariably
profound and often provocative — for instance, a section titled “How praise can
cause a loss of confidence,” in which Grosz writes:
Nowadays, we lavish praise on our
children. Praise, self-confidence and academic performance, it is commonly
believed, rise and fall together. But current research suggests otherwise — over
the past decade, a number of studies on self-esteem have come to the conclusion
that praising a child as ‘clever’ may not help her at school. In fact, it might
cause her to under-perform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting —
why make a new drawing if you have already made ‘the best’? Or a child may
simply repeat the same work — why draw something new, or in a new way, if the
old way always gets applause?”
Last, but certainly not
least, one of the leaders in this movement for adjusting the way and manner in
which we praise students and hence encourage them to be successful and achieve,
Carol Dweck the author of Mindset. This is a short video of Carol Dweck
explaining Mindset. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jDVd-nCEYc
Hope you are feeling refreshed and relaxed after your
vacation. This is a very short food for thought for this week. I have selected
two articles on different topics, the first is short and from my weekly Annie
Murphy Paul blog update about learning styles and the second is an article on
how we maintain focus in our classrooms when we introduce increased amounts of
technology.
Here is the survey that I sent out at the end of last week, if
you have time and are able and the inclination to complete this survey please
follow the link below:
”Whenever I speak to
audiences about the science of learning, as I’ve been doing a lot this fall,
one topic always comes up in the Q&A sessions that follow my talk: learning
styles. Learning styles—the notion that each student has a particular mode by
which he or she learns best, whether it’s visual, auditory or some other
sense—is enormously popular. It’s also been thoroughly debunked.”
The scientific
research on learning styles is “so weak and unconvincing,” concluded a group of
distinguished psychologists in a 2008 review, that it is not
possible “to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general
educational practice.” A 2010 article was even more
blunt: “There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist,” wrote
University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham and co-author
Cedar Riener. While students do have preferences about how they learn, the
evidence shows they absorb information just as well whether or not they
encounter it in their preferred mode.
This doesn’t mean, however, that teachers and parents should present material
to be learned in just one fashion. All
learners benefit when information is put forth in diverse ways that engage a
multitude of the senses. Take, for example, a program that teaches math using
music. At Hoover Elementary School in Northern California, a group of
third-graders learned to connect the numerical representation of fractions with
the value of musical notes, such as half-notes and eighth notes. Fractions are
notoriously difficult for young students to grasp, and a failure to catch on
early can hobble their performance in math into middle and high school.
Clapping, drumming and chanting gave these pupils another avenue through which
to understand the concept.
Called “Academic Music,” the program was designed by San Francisco State
education professor Susan Courey and three colleagues. Courey recently reported on the results
of Academic Music in the journal Educational
Studies in Mathematics. After six weeks of music-based teaching,
students scored 50 percent higher on a fractions test than students in the same
school who attended conventional math classes. Children who started out with
less fraction knowledge responded well to the musical instruction, Courey
writes, “and produced post-test scores similar to their higher achieving
peers.”
The lesson here: The
“learning style” that teachers and parents should focus on is the universal
learning style of the human mind, and two characteristics of it in particular.
First, students benefit from encountering information in multiple forms. They
learn more, for example, from flashcards that incorporate both text and
images—charts, graphs, etc.—than from cards that display text alone.
Second, students’ interest is kept alive by novelty and variety, so regularly
turning away from textbooks and blackboards is key. As long as the new activity
genuinely informs the students about the academic subject at hand, clapping a
math lesson—or sketching in science class, or acting during story time—can help
every student to
learn better.
One more thought about learning styles: instead of dividing learners into
categories such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, a classification I find
much more useful is the one proposed by historian and educator Ken Bain, author
of the bookWhat the Best College Students Do.
In Bain's scheme, there are three types of learners:
• surfacelearners,
who do as little as possible to get by; • strategic learners,
who aim for top grades rather than true understanding; and
• deeplearners, who leave
college with a real, rich education.
Bain then introduces us to a host of real-life deep learners: young and old,
scientific and artistic, famous or still getting there. Although they each have
their own insights, Bain identifies common patterns in their stories. You can
read more about these deep learners (they include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson and comedian Stephen Colbert) on the Brilliant Blog, here. And right now, take
a moment to appraise your own "learning style": is it surface,
strategic, or deep?”
antonio.scardinale via Compfightcc This article about technology in the classroom reiterates
many of the ideas and strategies that can already be seen in classrooms at
ISHCMC. However they are not always consistent across all classrooms and
perhaps as we move forward should be built into our technology policies and
procedures so they remain clear in our thinking about tech and our 1-1
programmes.
For Teachers, Wired Classrooms Pose New Management
Concerns
“In
a growing number of K-12 schools, the use of 1-to-1 computing devices—including
iPads, laptops, and Chromebooks—is becoming a central part of instruction. For
teachers making the digital leap, one of the greatest hurdles can be figuring
out how to manage the tech-infused classroom. How do you keep kids, who
suddenly have the Internet at their fingertips, on task? How do you ensure the
devices are safe and well-maintained? And how do you compete with your most
tech-savvy students?”
Thank you for yesterday it really made me feel up and
energized ahead of a week without students. I hope it had the same uplifting
effect upon you.
I wasn’t sure whether to write a Food for Thought this week
or not, but decided to do so because you should have less school emails and
might have a chance to read it and catch up on previous ones. I was also
feeling so positive about your visions that I thought I could add some more
information for you to read and think about.
So here goes:
Firstly, attached is Helen’s ppt which was linked to Hattie’s
work on Visible Learning. Here is a link
to a similar ppt that I had seen before by Hattie and posted through the NZ
government:
Both are similar in content and do ask good questions about
our mindset as teachers. I believe that this approach links very nicely with
the “Culture of Achievement” that we are creating and naturally with the work we
have done on Walk through templates and ideas of Dylan Wiliam, Sir Ken Robinson,
Daniel Pink and many other authors not mentioned yesterday.
A vision that was also mentioned yesterday that is certainly
worth exploring is that of “Visible
thinking” from Project Zero. Here is a link to their site for you to explore:
The strategies that are suggested here are certainly worth
discussing at department and Grade level. In addition if you are thinking about
potential PD and feel it would be beneficial to undertake this collaboratively as
a Department or Grade level, Project Zero provides some excellent and
affordable ($399 as a group) on line courses that encourage collaboration both for
your team at ISHCMC and as part of a global network of educators:
Finally
there were several presentations and visions about facilities, the school
environment and health. All very important issues and ones that need taking
seriously. Hence this final set of food for thought comes from some readings that I have collected with the intention of
sharing. The first is attached, Teaching for a Better World. This quote starts
this document:
“ One of the tasks of the progressive
educator [...] isto unveil opportunities for hope,
no matter what theobstacles may be.”Paulo
Freire (1994) A Pedagogy of Hope
I like this quote because it provides us with a filter for
our thinking. So often we are pessimistic, passing on our own fears to our
students, about the issues of our world and look at them as a “fait accomplis” rather than problems that can be solved with
creative thinking. I believe it is our role to develop students who recognize
the world’s issues, but are not scared by them, rather seeing them as
challenges that can be solved and hence creating a better world. This approach
would certainly benefit students long term health, as being optimistic is known
to lower stress, release positive hormones and encourage a longer and happier
life.
Finally I wanted to share this very recent article that is
related to the environment but also encouraging others to take action through
our own example and leadership.
Meet the College Professor Who Teaches His
Classes in a Dumpster
Professor
Jeffrey Wilson has taken green living to a whole new level.
Professor Dumpster, a.k.a. Environmental Science Professor, Dr. Jeffrey Wilson (Photo: Courtesy The Dumpster Project)
Professor Dumpster, a.k.a. Environmental
Science Professor, Dr. Jeffrey Wilson (Photo: Courtesy The Dumpster Project)
Just how far are you
willing to go in the name of sustainable living? Recycling, driving less, and reducing your red meat consumption might already be part of your daily
routine. And perhaps you’re just waiting for a three-day weekend to check off
the next item on your green to-do list: Installing a compost bin in your
backyard. But would you ever give up your apartment, sell off your
possessions—and move into a garbage dumpster?
Probably not, but then again we can’t all be
eco-purists like Jeffrey Wilson, a.k.a. “Professor Dumpster.”
An environmental scientist at Huston-Tillotson
University in Austin, Texas, Wilson plans to live in what amounts to an
oversized metal box for the next twelve months, reports FastCoExist.
And
his employer is buying in: Wilson’s bare-bones residence will serve as a
classroom, with the professor and his students converting it into a livable,
eco-viable dwelling. At first, he will survive in just the empty shell, curled up
in a sleeping bag on the metal floor—or “dumpster camping,” as he’s calling it.
“I'm essentially becoming part of the one percent,” he joked. “This dumpster is
33 square feet, which is one percent the size of the new American home in
2011.” Over time, he and the students will add a slew of green improvements to
the trash bin: Energy-efficient light bulbs, nano-insulation, and even an
energy-producing toilet.
Firstly a big thank you for your
constructive comments in helping us build a Walk Through template that will
provide data for us to become better teachers. I believe this has been a very
productive process in establishing indicators for learning in the 21st
century and consequently the organization of and practice in our classrooms. I
will be sharing another draft template with you next week, that we will trial
after the half term break before placing on Mcrel.
Below
are some of the key points that Dylan Wiliam talks about as strategies to
improve student learning that he touched on in the video that I showed in our
meeting and a short 3 minute vdo that looks at the 5 strategies.
I tried to access the Webinar's below and could only access the 3rd one. Each does have a ppt presentation that is downloadable and certainly worth taking a look though. You need to register to do this, but that only takes a minute.
Dylan Wiliam &
The 5 Formative Assessment Strategies to Improve Student Learning
Dylan Wiliam’s new book, Embedded Formative
Assessment, is filled with a number of insights culled from his 35 years of
experience in education. The foundation of the book highlights the importance
of formative assessment as a tool to improve teacher practice and ultimately
improve student learning.
In the book, he provides the 5 strategies that
he has come to believe are core to successful formative assessment practice in
the classroom:
1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding
learning intentions and criteria for success – getting the students to really understand what their
classroom experience will be and how their success will be measured.
2. Engineering effective classroom
discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning – developing effective classroom
instructional strategies that allow for the measurement of success.
3. Providing feedback that moves learning
forward – working with
students to provide them the information they need to better understand
problems and solutions.
4. Activating learners as instructional
resources for one another
– getting students involved with each other in discussions and working groups
can help improve student learning.
These 5 strategies are also part of our Keeping Learning on Track (KLT)
professional development solution that puts these strategies into action with a
formal process for teacher professional development. But before formative
assessment strategies can be effectively implemented, there needs to be an
understanding as to what formative assessment is, and perhaps even more
importantly, what it is not by school leaders and teachers.
Dylan recently gave a webinar that emphasized his understanding
of formative assessment, and gave some practical techniques for implementing
some of his strategies. You can access the
webinar at no cost here. We’d also love to read your thoughts or
experiences implementing formative assessment strategies, so drop a comment
below.
See you at Monday briefing as I need to explain arrangements for Thursday's Celebration of Cultures.
Professor Dumpster, a.k.a. Environmental Science Professor, Dr. Jeffrey Wilson (Photo: Courtesy The Dumpster Project)
