Food for Thought: World EduLead Conference

Dear all,

Hope you are all having a good Easter weekend. This not an April fool's day Food For Thought although there have been some great ones over the years. I think there are still people who believe this one from Google.

Last week I spent four days at the World Edu Learn conference listening to some of the leading Educational Thought Leaders in the world. The common theme from all speakers was that it is time for a revolution in education and that there is plenty of evidence that shows this needs to take place sooner rather than later.

This year rather than writing lots of notes about each speaker I have decided to write a sentence or two about what each of them spoke about at the conference and provided links to their work if you think you might like to learn more about them and their thinking.

Will Richardson: His big question revolved around this quote, “ Are we trying to do the wrong thing right in schools?” What is the cost of this? Finally, the ultimate and most worrying thought that originates from Russell Ackoff in his book Turning Learning Right Side Up, “ the righter you are at doing the wronger thing, the wronger you will become.” Does this thinking apply to exams, traditional grading systems and tracking through value added? The answer from the conference was a categorical, yes.

Ron Clark: Shared his story online about how he realized education was failing so many students. He wrote a successful book and used the royalties to build his own school, the Ron Clark Academy which is visited by 1,000’s of educators every year, to provide a platform for low income families to have their children educated in a way that will create opportunities for them to go to university and get good jobs.

Sylvia Martinez: She talked inspiringly about the maker movement and the need for a global community of people learning to solve problems with modern tools and technology. Her master class was attended by Libby and she has returned enthused by the things she learned. Sylvia certainly walks the talk and believes that educators can adopt the powerful technology that exists today and “can do” maker ethos to revitalize learner-centered teaching and learning in ALL subject areas. Here Sylvia talks about her book invent to Learn.

Dr Peter Gamwell: This session was very interesting because it reinforced the importance of allowing student inquiry to flourish in our classrooms. He talked about a Wonder wall in  a classroom and that encourages deeper learning through students following their interests.  Here is a 13 min video of Peter Gamwell talking about the concept of Wonder Walls at another conference exactly as he did in his 45 minutes at EduLead

Ian Gilbert: Ian’s work was around thinking. It was very similar to the work of Philosophy for Children that we have been working on this year. He believes that all classes should start with a mental limbering up exercise. Here is a link to a pdf that has  some questions and guidance that you might find interesting for incorporating Thunks into your classes.

Howard Gardner: This is a name that I’m sure you are all familiar with because of his work on Multiple Intelligences. In this video link speech he did not talk much about this work but his latest research on creativity, the big C as he calls it, and how it will be essential for the future. He stressed that creativity needs defining and that “ if we want to think outside the box, we need to understand the box first.” His interesting conclusion was that his research has shown that it is rare to find innovation/ creativity and entrepreneurship in the same person. In general creative people aren’t motivated by money and this is why many great ideas that become startup companies very often fail. He said that it generally needs a partnership/ teamwork to make a good idea flourish as a business.

Dr Douglas Reeves: His key question was why do schools make progress from good to great and then stop improving. A very good question for us at ISHCMC to ponder. His work is deeply enshrined in academic studies of schools from all over the world.   Much of the thinking that he shared in both his plenary speech and his masterclass is essential for the development of our Studio 5 and 6. Hoa attended his session and walked out deep in thought and brain challenged. His work will help us overcome pushback as we create institutional and organizational change through our thinking.

Dr Debbie Silver: The most animated and humorous speaker was left to the last. Debbie gave a hugely entertaining speech and workshop about how we can engage all our students in our classrooms. She shared her own teaching experiences and it was clear that she walked the talk in ensuring that all students should be given the chance of being successful. Much of what Debbie talked about was based around her book, Drumming to the Beat of Different Marchers-Finding the Rhythm for Differentiating Learning. He speech was humorous and very similar to this extract on youtube.

My biggest take a ways from the four days were that education is very complex, ISHCMC is definitely aligned with the thinking of educational thought leaders and researchers and that we need to read more deeply writers like Dewey, Montessori, Costa, Freire, Csikszentmihalyi and Piaget to search for a deeper understanding of learning that will help us navigate the years of change that lay ahead.

Have a lovely Easter Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

Food for Thought: our Wandering Minds

Dear all,

Thanks to everyone involved in the Grade 4 Mini X, MRISA Arts and STEAM Festival, and all the other school activities this last week and this weekend. I know it is a very busy time and thank you all for making it a good one for our students and their learning.

This week’s Food for Thought provides further evidence from neuroscience that our desire to empower our students by giving them the skills to control their lives is spot on, and very important. As you know one set of these skills is what we do through mindfulness. This Ted talk by the neuroscientist Amishi Jha, How to tame the wandering Mind, has much relevance to us in education. The research focuses on the importance of attention in framing our minds perceptions. The results clearly indicate that when a person is bored, this can be through repetitious activity as well as other things, our minds start to wander. It is also clear that attention is reduced by stress. We have known for years about our students attention span varies between 8 and 20 minutes, although a much debated recent articles implies that today due to social media and modern media and lifestyle trends it may be shorter than a goldfish’s at 8 secs.  Whatever the exact figure is we should be thinking about it when we plan our lessons and how we pace lessons and phase lessons to ensure that students remain engaged with their learning. There are obvious implications for preparing students for examinations. The talk concludes with research findings about the impact of deliberate mindfulness activities in increasing attention and assisting students and ourselves in taking control of our minds.  Doing a quick internet search on strategies to maintain attention it was interesting to see that the majority had mindfulness at or near the top of their list. This article on paying attention is just one example.

This type of research supports our mindfulness programme by providing scientific evidence of its importance in providing students with the skills that they will need to control their lives in the future. It is clear that mindfulness should be a daily exercise and even beyond that a technique that is used during class to help students control their wandering minds.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

PS Just received my weekly post from Barking up the Wrong Tree and it is about 
How To Increase Your Attention Span: 5 Secrets From Neuroscience. Guess what meditation is there in the list.

Food for Thought: Personalized Learning 3

Just returned from a wonderful few days chaperoning the U14 football teams in Hanoi so apologies for the late edition of Food for Thought on Personalized learning. This week I have decided to share a short article for you from Edutopia about how personalized learning can go further than being trapped within our traditional curriculum structures. This where we need to be going as we attempt to also break down some of the systems that restrict the move from teacher controlled learning to real student agency. In order to maximize the use of this article you do need to follow the links because they provide valuable additional Food for thought.

Personalized PBL: Student-Designed Learning

By Andrew Miller

June 27, 2014

" I wrote a blog about one of the pitfalls of personalization for the ASCD Whole Child Blog. Specifically, that pitfall is the lack of engagement. With all the focus on personalization through time, pacing, and place, it can be easy to forget about the importance of engagement. No matter where students learn, when they learn, and the timing of the learning, engagement drives them to learn. When we factor all the pieces of personalization together, we can truly meet students where they are and set them on a path of learning that truly meets their needs and desires. Project-based learning can be an effective engagement framework to engage students in personalized learning.

Moving Past "Course-Based" PBL

Due to the antiquated restraints of the education system, most educators are forced to implement PBL in a "course-based" manner. This means that the project occurs within the traditional discipline structures, where there may be integration, but learning is framed within grades and competencies. In addition, start and stop times, driven by the Carnegie unit, force teachers to start and stop a project for all of their students around the same time. What if PBL wasn't held to antiquated rules of time, space, and discipline constructs? In that ideal situation, students could be engaged in personalized projects.

Student-Designed Projects

Students at Phoenix High School have been engaged in a model similar to the one I've described. In it, students design their own driving questions and select the 21st century skills they want to work on, as well as the content learning objectives. They select and design their own products to show their learning in a true commitment to performance assessment. They decide on due dates, benchmarks, and the authentic audience of the work. There is also a heavy push toward community impact and work outside the four walls of the classroom.

My PBL colleague, Erin Sanchez, (formally Erin Thomas), created an amazing graphic of this continuum that shows the power of PBL truly aligned to the learner. As teaching colleagues, we did our best to implement personalized projects for students, and we experienced many of the same challenges faced by teachers who attempt to do this. However, we also saw the payoff: engagement! When students are truly in the driver's seat of their learning, the impact of their work and the learning associated with it can be powerful!

Role of the Teacher

When teachers move toward personalized PBL, their role continues to shift, just as it does when teachers move traditional instruction to "course-based" PBL. While still involved in the design process, they also serve as advisors. Teachers frequently use question techniques to help students focus and crystalize their projects and project plans. They coach students in creating effective driving questions and student products. They're still involved in frequent formative assessments, but instead of planning all instructional activity for the students, they help students plan it themselves. In addition, teachers help students select standards and learning targets that will align with the project and products. Teachers at Phoenix High School, for example, help ensure that all standards are targeted for a year, but do not limit the standards that students may want to hit in a project. Here the teachers create and facilitate the infrastructure for the learning rather than designing the PBL projects themselves.

Not every teacher may be ready to jump into this type of personalization. To make it work, they'll be required to adopt a different teaching role. They'll need strong management skills and a commitment to disruptive innovation. In addition, the current constructs of the education system may hold us back. What if we could make this dream of personalized PBL a reality? I say that we work toward it, creating a push on the system that demands change in the education of our students."

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/personalized-pbl-student-designed-learning-andrew-miller

Have a good evening,

Yours,

Food for Thought: Thinking about Personalized Learning in Practice

Dear all,

At the Cognita Leadership Conference, Simon Camby, the Cognita Director for Global Education spoke about Personalized Learning, as it has an important place in the Cognita Way, for those who missed information on the Cognita Way from a previous post, here it is for you. It was clear from his keynote that we are ahead of most schools in our interpretation of Personalized Learning and making it happen. Last week this article on school disruption was share with me and hence I wanted to share with you as Food for Thought. Immediately I thought of the quote attributed to Gandhi “be the change you want to see in the world.” I say attributed because whilst browsing, I discovered that there are researchers who say that Gandhi never actually said these words, although he would probably agree with them. The power of these words, that certainly align with Gandhi's philosophies, are that they encourage us to stop judging others because they replace complaining with a call for self-reflection and the need to action and take control ourselves. What it appears he actually said was much deeper and is this quote:


https://www.google.com.vn/search?safe=strict&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=IKOkWqrBOobsvgSLqrqwBQ&q=gahnadi+quote+but+we+mirros+the+world&oq=gahnadi+quote+but+we+mirros+the+world&gs_l=psy-ab.3...362868.368487.0.369087.23.23.0.0.0.0.173.1967.20j3.23.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.1.79...0i13k1j0i8i13i30k1.0.jMv_wplSQ54#imgrc=7rfUf0vxwhiyIM:

I suppose it doesn't matter who said these words as they are very useful for encouraging individual action. So returning to the article you will find that it provides support for the direction that we are moving as school again demonstrating its power for student agency and learning.

"It may not seem like “school” in the classic sense—but then, that is the point. NuVu is an off-the-grid, independent “micro-school,” whose 60 students are stretching the boundaries of what constitutes education in America. Such boutique programs offer highly personalized environments on a tiny scale, in a tech-enabled reinvention of the one-room schoolhouse that eschews lockstep schedules and standard curricula for student-led learning. They represent a handful of private schools in the country today, but their rapid growth and embrace of sought-after “deeper learning” goals raise important questions about how to scale and democratize the approach."

In the last section the debate arises about if this form of education can be expanded beyond micro-schools and this is where we come in with Studio 5 moving to Grade 6 and 4. We know it can be done because there are several models in countries like new Zealand and Australia, it is the will to change that matters. I enjoyed the final sentences,

"Wildflower’s Kramer is sympathetic but believes that the benefits outweigh the liabilities. “If you think about what modern neuroscience research tells us, the basic principle of learning theory is that kids learn more when they get to follow their interests,” he said. “What we need are human-scaled, autonomous school environments. Micro-schools are not a magic solution, but they do work on important topics that we haven’t figured out at scale anywhere else.”

Lots to think about in this article,

Have a good Sunday,

Adrian

Food for Thought: Personalized Learning

Dear all,

Hope you all enjoyed the International Festival on Saturday afternoon. It was a great afternoon, I felt the best in my 5 years because it was more relaxed with a street party atmosphere. It is afternoon’s like this that differentiate true international school communities from want to be international schools.

This week’s food for Thought is going to be in two parts so that it is manageable for everyone. Part 1 starts with an amusing 10 minute Sir Ken extract that is shared to provoke you to think about personalized learning in an indirect context. His talk touches on unexplored talent, the miracle of being born and ends by saying, “nothing is so important as an idea whose time has come,” which I believe is why we need to be focusing our ISHCMC future on Personalized learning. Sir Ken then says, “nothing is so influential as a life well lived,”  and for us that lays down the challenge has to how we create the foundation for that life through the education and experience we give each and every one of our students. Again this has to be by seeing each ISHCMC students as an individual and personalizing their experience. 

Understanding Personalized learning is very important for all of us because as ISHCMC moves forward it needs to become more and more embedded in our classrooms, if we are to truly assist students be the best learners they can be. Five to ten years ago we were talking about differentiated teaching strategies, then it was individualized learning, both of which are controlled by the teacher. Today we are talking more and more about personalized learning where teachers pass control to the students. The new PYP model stresses Student Agency. Other system refer to this as Personalized Learning or Student centered learning. This short video introduces you to the transformation that is needed. It stress four key principles that need to be present for this transformation of education: Personalized Learning, Competency Based Learning, Learning Happens Any Place and Any Where and finally Students Take Ownership. 

One of the key areas that becomes very obvious when one reads about personalized learning is the use of data to both identify and then track student development of skills and the impact of these upon their learning. This is a fundamental part of personalized learning and one that we will have to work very hard to develop at ISHCMC. This short promotional video highlights how algorithms and systematic planning can make personalized learning come true in schools. 

Next week we will go deeper into this topic.

Have a good afternoon,

Yours

Adrian

Additional News Article that you might like to scan.

Here is article about the importance of philosophical thinking routines for our changing world. Again it supports our move to introduce Philosophy for Children across all Grades in ISHCMC. Again we are aligned with progressive thinking about education.

https://psmag.com/education/ireland-pushes-philosophy

Food for Thought 11 Questions to Prof. Hattie from teachers

Dear all, Here is a good continuation from last week’s Food for Thought as provided by Suzanne who shared this link to the work of Hattie. You may prefer to view on the Food for Thought Blog where all the links to the videos are with the questions are complete. https://ishcmchungry2learn.blogspot.com/  Last week’s Food for Thought provoked several lines of thinking about pedagogy and in particular inquiry and flipped instruction. I thought that this weeks would be useful for you to flick through the 11 teacher questions and see if any are of interest to you. Hattie’s answer are short and only a couple of minutes in length each time. Just in case you need a refresher or aren’t clear about Hattie and Effect size here is a short post on the topic.“The research of John Hattie created great interest in 2009 when he published Visible Learning. In the book, he compares the statistical measure of “effect size” to the impact of a variety of influences on students’ achievement such as class size, holidays, feedback, and learning strategies.
Hattie’s study was designed as a “meta-meta-study” that collects, compares, and analyzes the findings of nearly 50,000 previous studies in education and brings the data together in a way that is seemingly comprehensible. In 2012, Hattie published a follow-up, Visible Learning For Teachers, which concentrated on the underlying story behind the data and provided many concrete and hands-on examples in the classroom. (In many countries, Hattie’s findings have become an important part of a teacher’s professional development and guides districts in their prioritization of many initiatives.)”https://www.illuminateed.com/blog/2017/06/effect-size-educational-research-use/

11 Questions to Professor John Hattie, asked by teachers and school leaders

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Are you a teacher and surprised by some of the evidence found in the Visible Learning research? Wouldn’t it be great to discuss your questions directly with Professor Hattie? In 2016, Corwin, a partner of John Hattie’s professional development program Visible Learning Plus, has organized an online Q&A.  (Corwin has also published Visible Learning for Literacy, the latest addition to John Hattie’s VL series). Here are the questions that teachers and school leaders submitted to Professor John Hattie. We provide an excerpt of each answer as a quick take-away. But you should definitely take the time to listen to the full answers. And read the the books.

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1. Why does inquiry-based learning only have an effect size of 0.31 when it is an approach to learning that seems to engage students and teachers so readily in the process of learning?

—Question submitted by a school improvement resource team leader from Canada

Professor John Hattie: “It turns out that if you are learning surface-level information, the content, as contrasted with deep learning which is the relationships between the content, then problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning is pretty useless. But if you don’t teach the surface and the content, you’ve got nothing to inquire about. […] The reason it comes out very low on the chart is because most teachers introduce it far too early.”

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2. Why are we striving for an “assessment-capable learner” and not a “self-regulated learner”?

—Question submitted by a Principal from Southern California

Professor John Hattie: “If we teach the students how to evaluate their own learning, that’s what the key of formative assessment is. And of course, if you’re going to teach the students that, the teachers have to know it to teach the students that. So you get this double virtuous circle without all that language that goes with formative vs. summative.”

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3. What are the three most important things I can do in my classes to improve learning?

—Question submitted by a Teacher leader from Texas

Professor John Hattie: “Know thy impact!” Having an understanding…

• what impact means,
• about the magnitude, how big the impact you want,
• about the equity question, whether all kids get that impact.”

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4. What methods have been successfully used to effect a paradigm shift at the campus and district level?

—Question submitted by a Curriculum instructional specialist from Texas

Professor John Hattie: “It’s about how we think about what we do. Do we have a mind frame that we actually can collectively make a difference to these kids?”

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5. Is there a correlation between calculating effect size and percentile rating? If so, how do you compare scores and effect size?

—Question by Ainsley Rose, Corwin Author and Certified Visible Learning PlusTrainer

Professor John Hattie: “Yes, there is a way to do it. Unfortunately, you have to use something that is not easy and not obvious. But I’d express a lot of caution. Percentiles have some major problems. The whole point of percentiles is to compare students to other students. And yes, there is a place for that, I suppose, but what I’m much more interested in with the effect size notion is the learning for each individual student, and when you look at the averages of the effect size, you’ve in sense got a comparison.”

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6. What is the effect size for the cultural competence of the teacher?

—Question submitted by an education consultant from Seattle, WA

Professor John Hattie: “Teachers, they do understand what kids bring to the classroom. Certainly the effect size of that is extremely high. [… ] It’s how the kids think: Are these kids prepared to take challenges? Are they prepared to be risk takers? Do they study learning because they want to perform well in front of their peers. Or do they do it because they want to reinvest in learning and really want to master what they do. These are critical dimensions to make connections with these kids, to help them on this learning journey.”

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7. How can we prioritize which influences to focus on during the school year?

—Question submitted by a Principal from Michigan

Professor John Hattie: “Having a collective understanding of the actual problems we need to work on is critical. But at all times, we need to be very careful not to make changes to things that are really working. So that’s where the prioritization starts. Then, what I’d love schools and districts to do is to map that with what are the high-probability effects from the research side of things […] and from that then we do our interventions.”

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8. How does communicating the learning target impact student learning?

—Question submitted by an Instructional coach from Arizona

Professor John Hattie:  “You need learning intentions and success criteria. It’s those two things that go together. It is giving the kids a sense of what is the purpose of what we are learning here today. […] Like think of kids playing video games. They know what it means to be successful: Get to the next level. And they’re prepared to invest an incredible number of hours to get to that next level. And they get very many cues and understandings of what that next level is.”

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9. Why does ability grouping or tracking have a negative effect size?

—Question submitted by a Supervisor of math and science from New Jersey

Professor John Hattie:  “It has a very close to zero effect size. And in many ways that means it doesn’t matter whether you track or you don’t track. […] But the biggest problem with tracking – by a million miles – is the equity issue. For instance if you look at this country here. There is a higher probability for African Americans and Hispanics being in the lower track groups. How can you possibly defend that apartheid in that schools?!”

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10. What RTI models did you investigate? What critical attributes were included in the models that you looked at?

—Question submitted by an Assessment coordinator from Iowa

Professor John Hattie: “I’m not weighted to one particular way of implementing the RTI model. What I like about the RTI model again it comes back to how we think. The RTI is always looking at the Response – To – Intervention. And then making adaptations and changes in light of that. And that’s exactly what the Visible Learning notions are.”

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11. How does recess, art and music impact student achievement?

–Question submitted by a Principal from Michigan

Professor John Hattie: “Many years ago when I was a real teacher I was a music teacher. And so this question is very passionate to me. The answer is it’s very very small but I wished it was zero. Because understanding music is worthwhile in itself. Why do we have to justify a subject just because it relates to a narrow excellence of teaching maths, literacy and numeracy? […] Recess, art and music are worthwhile things! Kids need to have multiple ways of learning. I think the most important outcome of our schooling is kids who want to reinvest in learning. Not reinvest in a narrow excellence. There are multiple ways to be excellent in schools.”

Video source: www.corwin.com/visiblelearning

Food for Thought different style of sharing

This article is from Stanford Education Department and is about students doing hands on activities before reading and videos on a topic. It challenges the idea of the flipped classroom and encourages more inquiry.

"We are showing that exploration, inquiry and problem solving are not just 'nice to have' things in classrooms," said Blikstein. "They are powerful learning mechanisms that increase performance by every measure we have."  Pea explained that these results indicate the value for learning of first engaging one's prior knowledge and intuitions in investigating problems in a learning domain – before being presented with abstracted knowledge. Having first explored how one believes a system works creates a knowledge-building relevance to the text or video that is then presented, he said.”

What I like about this article is that it challenges Hattie’s mega data research which implies a low learning effect for inquiry if the students haven’t been given direct instruction ahead of the inquiry activity.