Curriculum

Occupy Education: The Revolution Starts Now

October 7, 2011 By Josie Holford 5 Comments

As always, lots of good stuff in the latest edition of Independent School, the quarterly magazine from NAIS.

And those who hold rather outdated notions of independent schools as universal staunch defenders of tradition and the home of the status quo might be surprised by the theme: Evolution or Revolution: the Pace of Change in Schools.

Evolution or revolution? – both suggest that things are on the move, change is afoot and the status quo is to be questioned, challenged or perhaps overturned.

In the end, it seems, education and schools are not immune from the whirlwind – fueled by technology - that has upended virtually every other industry. (Think music, medicine, publishing, news media, communications, manufacturing and etc.) That glacial pace is picking up.

The magazine includes this call to arms by Elizabeth Coleman, the president of Bennington College and an NAIS trustee: The Revolution Starts Now.

Coleman wrote this before the #OccupyWallStreet movement took root in downtown Manhattan – indeed she delivered a version of this at the NAIS annual conference last spring - but it resonates with the sources of that discontent and remains important and timely.

Elizabeth Coleman is not one to mince words. She begins with inescapable brutal facts that:

During the past decade, we have witnessed escalating crises in the most vital areas of our public life, including: a relentless acceleration in our awesome failure to effectively educate vast numbers of our young; a no-less-relentless increase in the spectacular inequities in the distribution of wealth; an extraordinary timidity, to put it politely, in our approach to providing health care; a growing incapacity to discuss, much less confront, the potential of global warming to upend human civilization itself; an assault on the principles that define us as a people (the rule of law, the separation of powers, the relationship between church and state); a disconcerting predilection for the uses of force despite overwhelming evidence of its limitations; and a squandering of our material and ethical resources in less than a decade that defies credulity.

And at a time when clarity of thought, respect for evidence, and appreciation for complexity is especially critical, the sensationalism of the media — the other major educational institution in our society — continues undiminished. The distance we have traveled is best measured by reminding ourselves that the Federalist Papers were published in three New York newspapers and then, in response to popular demand, published in newspapers throughout the colonies. There is no more damning evidence of the failure of education in this country than the quality of what the public craves or tolerates in its media.

While Coleman sees a crisis, the academic establishment, she says, moves on as if oblivious to the tumult and chaos; education is increasingly defined in economic and vocational terms while the health of the democracy is left to languish. Education, she laments is seen not as an intrinsic value but as a handmaiden to political, economic and religious interests and remains “… a blank slate on which virtually anything can be written.”

Coleman sees the purpose of education as being not to perpetuate the status quo but to challenge and change it for the better.

Our neglect of the distinctive power and responsibility of education is especially perilous in a democracy.

She connects this thinking with the nation’s founding philosophers:

From the beginning of this great American experiment in self-governance, education was universally understood to be critical in determining its fate. Thomas Jefferson put it most succinctly: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be….

Questions such as “What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making?” move off the table as beyond our ken. Incredibly, neutrality about such concerns is seen as a condition of academic integrity.

Coleman’s argument proceeds from there and includes the necessity – as she sees it – to take a stand on the vital issue on which democracy is founded.

Education, she says, is more than crudely vocational however lofty or urgent it is made to sound. She quotes President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union message of 1994 “We measure every school by one high standard: Are children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy.”

And she asks:

That’s it? That’s the whole story?

One might reasonably consider economic well-being to be one of the desirable outcomes of a successful education, but that is a very different matter from its becoming the sole objective of such an education — the standard by which everything is to be measured.

She has much more to say on the subject and offers some ways forward and out of our current dilemma with an education focus on the compelling needs, human purpose and what it takes to educate for sustained democracy and democratic values.

And her conclusion presents the stark alternative: the status quo or revolution:

Finally, the world is right in its ongoing passionate commitment to the power of education, despite everything. Imagine what could happen if we do it right. Imagine what will happen if we do not. The stakes could not be higher. We are unlikely to have a viable democracy made up of experts, politicians, zealots, and spectators.

For Elizabeth Coleman education - aka the liberal arts and sciences - should focus on broad subjects relevant to our immediate problems. And they are: Equity, the environment, health care, education, governance, and the uses of force. She believes that the task of education – specifically colleges - should be to re-engage communities around these pivotal issues and that our survival depends upon that refocus.

For some of the specifics of what she has in mind read the full essay: The Revolution Starts Now.

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Change, Curriculum, Education

Snow Days and Disruption: An open letter to families

February 2, 2011 By Josie Holford 14 Comments

Dear PDS Families:

A few lines (with minor edits) from division in-boxes and my twitter feed:

Student:

I just wanted to say how I’ve never been so productive or so academically aware on a Snow day. I’ve been working all day today and yesterday making up work for the D day and other classes. I feel home schooled. I miss school.

Faculty:

Just finishing up using Edmodo for the first time, I have over three hundred replies in less than an hour in a review session about America in WWI. Very awesome

I had 100% participation (6th grade) yesterday

I did create a giant loophole when I posted my assignments by calling them homework…due Thursday and Friday. I have only been contacted by 25% of students. I think Edmodo is probably more effective than posting on my PDS site or emailing, but I’ll assess it tomorrow.

Another snow day tomorrow so online class on Edmodo and Google Docs. Keeps us connected and learning. Classrooms have no walls.

Parent:

I just wanted to say that the math homework today was excellent. It was challenging and the electronic format was genius! I hope to see more of them, even on non-snow days.

Thank you for the innovative approach – it is great to see that we are able to use technology in this way

As we make our way through what has already been a most trying winter I want to express my appreciation for the understanding and patience of families and faculty.

One snow day can be a delight but this many become a test and a trial. Above are just a few of the comments coming in about how we are coping with the days of snow and ice. I am sure there will be more and possibly some less positive.

I want to assure families that we are doing, and will do, whatever we can to maintain momentum and ensure continuity in spite of the disruptions.

This is somewhat easier to achieve in the older grades where students have greater independence and they and their teachers can use technology to keep connected and the work flow going. It’s harder with the younger children although their teachers have been talking with them about how to stay engaged and always learning. I am so appreciative of the faculty willingness to explore new ways to keep in touch with students and their work.

For the older students at PDS these snow days have been disruptive but manageable.

It may not be the same – but students can continue to read and write essays, responses, poems and position papers. They can work through mathematical examples, tackle complex problems, listen to French, speak in Spanish and conduct research.

They can create, communicate and contribute their ideas; collaborate and submit their work; contact each other and their teacher; and receive feedback via Skype, ooVoo, Edmodo, Facebook, Google docs etc. plus wikis, blogs, chats, text, phone and email.

They can learn their lines, practice their music and maintain fitness. They can catch-up, forge ahead or carve out new directions.

But they can’t rehearse on the stage, perform in the band, sing in the chorus or play on the team. And – while they can use technology to create a virtual classroom – they can’t sit as a group in the same room, eat lunch together or attend an assembly. It’s not the same.

Activities where it is essential that students need to be together in real time – play and concert rehearsals, chorus, and basketball for example – have been the hardest hit. And rescheduling is a challenge.

I know that time lost to weather emergencies raises other concerns for families. Sometimes school is closed but work is not. What to do? We understand the strain and stress on parents who must scramble to find basic child care.

And the academic time lost. Will my child now be at a disadvantage because the class won’t complete the material for that class or complete the course with adequate preparation for the next level? Can the time be made up?

Be assured that we will work to ensure that children are not at any disadvantage because of time lost and that they are indeed moving forward with what they need to do.

In that most annoying but true of axioms – every crisis is an opportunity. And these days of disruption are a chance to discover news ways to get things done and new sources of resilience and support.

I hope all of you are safe, warm, powered and productive. And I hope to see all of the students very soon!

- Josie

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Change, Curriculum, Education, High School, Middle School, PDS People, School 2.0

Break out of the Box

October 24, 2010 By Josie Holford 11 Comments

Prior to the industrialization of education, the education model was centered around a single-room school house consisting of one teacher with many students throughout many grades. The teacher was a facilitator of an instructional design that had students teaching each other. The younger students benefited from the knowledge of the older students and the older students benefited by reinforcing what they had learned, encouraging their mastery of a subject.

That’s the opener for a good article by Farb Nivi in Education in a Social World in e-School News. It provides a strong contrast to Amanda Ripley’s article in Slate Brilliance in a Box that gets it all wrong.

As the industrial revolution uprooted rural communities it likewise established a school system in the image of the factory. The rural communal schoolhouse was replaced by an assembly line model that moved children through the system in batches based on age, with teachers – wise or otherwise – bolting-on the information as the students moved on the conveyor belt of grade levels.

This one-size-fits-all mass production establishes school as a society segregated by age: Children at the same chronological age, at the same stage of readiness and development, and with the same interests and needs are put on the assembly line and processed through to graduation.

This is the model that so much of education reform is so desperately trying to improve with better delivery systems (aka teacher improvement), better assembly line techniques (curriculum change and the teacher-proof curriculum), improved quality control (standardized tests) and higher standards (more shoddy rejects and a higher dropout rate).

From one perspective it is a a highly individualized system: students are isolated learners and the teacher’s role is to manage the individual learning of the whole class. The good classroom is a silent and still place with children on task working alone under the surveillance of the cheating police.

The article makes a simple proposal:

Go back to the principle that worked so well in the single school house model: social learning.

There are a few problems on the issue of that one room schoolhouse model that I will write about separately, but let’s stay with the central notion of learning in a social shared space and the implications for learning and design. Farb Nivi looks to students for his answers:

Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit group, conducted a 2010 survey of more than 250,000 students and asked them to speak about their vision for 21st century learning. Three essential elements emerged:

Social-based learning – students want to make use of emerging communications and collaboration tools to create and personalize networks of experts to inform their education process.

This makes sense from the constructivist learning perspective that maintains all learning is social and interactive.

Un-tethered learning – students envision technology-enabled learning experiences that transcend the classroom walls and are not limited by resource constraints, traditional funding streams, geography, community assets, or even teacher knowledge or skills.

This makes sense in a world where we are swamped with information. Learners must become intelligent navigators, grazers and deep-sea divers.

Digitally-rich learning – students see the use of digital tools, content, and resources as a key to driving learning productivity, not just about engaging students in learning.

This make sense because it means using the best available tools to advance the cause of using, seeking and creating knowledge.

The Slate article was also on the topic of learning and design but manages to get it all wrong. Brilliance in a Box is an unfortunate title that suggests good education can be manufactured and taken off the shelf as a prefabricated item. Look at the model of excellence proposed and the assumptions about learning. In the comments there’s a wonderful and impassioned response from Prakash Nair that is worth quoting at length:

This is a horrible article and full of old stereotypes about education. It is based on a complete misunderstanding of what it means to be “educated” in the 21st Century. It repeats the Bush (and now Obama doctrine) that hammering kids into submission and then “measuring” how educated they are via test scores is the answer to a failed education system. Pathetic that in this day and age we are still stuck squarely in the 1950′s and … buy into this MYTH about what education is. … Before you jump on Amanda’s bandwagon, PLEASE, PLEASE watch the video … Sir Ken Robinson’s take on education in the 21st Century at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U). … it is time to look around and see that it is actually impossible to have “brilliance in a box” unless you assume that Peer Tutoring, Multiage Groupings, Independent Study, Hands-on Project Based Learning, Learning from Nature, Performance-Based Learning, Seminar Style Learning, Play Based Learning, Distance Learning, Internet Research, Service Learning, Inter-disciplinary Learning, and Art and Design-Based Learning are all marginal and secondary to the “real” learning that happens only in a classroom with the teacher firmly in command. Oh! and the “box” also keeps teachers trapped instead of allowing them to collaborate with their peers as the rest of the world does. So what to do? Please see how brilliance can best be achieved when you do exactly the OPPOSITE of what this article recommends — break out of the box!! Want real world examples of this? Visit the projects we have been working on for the past 10 years at: http://fieldingnair.com. And anyone really interested in pursuing this and having an honest discussion about what is wrong with our education system and how to fix it should read Alfie Kohn‘s masterpiece: The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher” Standards.

Agreed.

Cross-posted at Connected Principals

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Change, Construction, Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Data, Design, Education, Future, Learning, Progressive Education

Stand back, Hats on: Kindergarten at work

September 2, 2010 By Josie Holford 13 Comments

Every year there are new hats on the shelf in the kindergarten. Every year there are so many opportunities for kindergartners to try on new roles and responsibilities.

Kindergarten is known as the age of industry for a reason: Make a suggestion and these children are ready to take it on and try it on.

Whether it’s the post office, the doctor’s office or the local farm., these children are ready to run the world with efficiency and complete dedication.

And just why does this matter? Well – it’s fun for them of course. And fun and learning should go hand in hand.

But it is actually way more than that. In taking on these make-believe roles these children are stepping up into a cognitive zone well beyond their present capability. When they “play” at being the manager of the post office they assume roles of responsibility beyond their ability. They try it on for size in make believe and that experience leads them forward into a new cognitive zone of capability. They are literally learning above age and grade level.

There’s some very good educational theory behind all of this.(Stay tuned.)

And the good news is: this kind of learning doesn’t have to stop at kindergarten.

Throughout our lives we can advance our learning, and that of our students, by creating the spaces where everyone can step up and stand tall and be the person who knows what to do and who understands at the next level.

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Filed Under: Creativity, Curriculum, Education, Learning, Lower School

The Shift in New Brunswick

August 16, 2010 By Josie Holford 8 Comments

This video was produced by the New Brunswick, Canada, Department of Education. It reflects their thinking about our rapidly changing world, the future of education and the needs of their students.

At PDS we are always thinking about our students and how to serve them best. As you watch the film – what are your thoughts about education, our children, their future and what matters most?

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Change, Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Education, Future, Learning, Literacies, Mission Vision Values, One World, Progressive Education, School 2.0, Strategic thinking, Technology

More Educator Luddites Please

July 29, 2010 By Josie Holford 37 Comments

Part two of: The Age of Bricolage: School in the Change Blender:

Technology is always disruptive: Think of the introduction of the printing press, or the combine harvester, or the typewriter. Think of the mechanical looms and the factory system of the industrial revolution that destroyed a way of life for cottage industry weavers. Some of them took to frame breaking and gave us the unfairly derisive term of “luddite” for those who resist technological change.

In the early decades of 19^th century England, years of war, economic hardship, crop failures and political repression incubated a spirit of rebellion that made the government nervous. Rather by chance, I discovered this year that I am a descendant of a luddite – an infamous rebel and the last person in England to be sentenced to be beheaded. In 1817, beguiled by a government spy, Isaac Ludlam – a Methodist minister past middle age - led a group of men armed with pikes, scythes and muskets on a march to unseat the government. They were stopped by the military and Ludlam was captured and convicted of treason. His sentence, and that of two of his companions, was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The Prince Regent commuted the sentence to beheading. The trial and execution in Derby gaol was so vividly described by the poet Shelley that readers imagined he had been present.

Knowing that story has given me a new appreciation of luddites and I think it is time for a little revisionist history. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I think we need a new caste of educator luddites to help guide schools forward.

The luddites of the industrial revolution were craftsmen and artisans fighting against forces that would reshape their industry and impoverish them. They were not mindless louts but desperate men concerned for a future that they saw threatened by the mechanized factory system. They were resisting the destruction of their way of life, their livelihood and the deskilling of their labor

In Releasing the imagination Maxine Greene wrote of the notion of teaching “social imagination,” which she defined as “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, and in our schools” (p. 5).

I think we need to cultivate that process of social imagination, reclaim the label luddite from the pejorative and establish a whole new ethos of luddism in our schools.

The educator luddites I have in mind are people who have always understood school to be more than test prep and who see themselves as far more than the agents of a standardized testing industry. I see them leading the way to create inquiry driven schools where students and teachers are not too busy to think. Schools where the technology serves the learning rather than drives the teaching and where the demand for original work is a collaborate effort to solve compelling problems to which no one present knows the answer. In such a school, the curriculum is not driven by the textbook, the flow of information is not unidirectional, learning is networked and students and teachers work together across the boundaries of age and experience as active seekers, users and creators of knowledge. In this rosy picture, individual schools form a kind of globally aware and networked cottage industry of creative learning.

In order to start that journey we need a collective effort to figure out how to negotiate the changing world and make sense of it. Here, in a small collection of nutshells, are some observations about the context for the work:

The web is changing (us). For the most part we are oblivious to the bigger picture as we take each new gadget, or shift, or industry upheaval for granted. For the cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, the machine is us and the machine is using us. In his prescient and chilling short story written in 1906 “The Machine Stops”, E. M, Forster imagined a world dependent on an all-powerful, all-knowing machine where humans became shrunken, feeble underground creatures alienated from nature and the natural landscape. In Forster’s story, the machine falters and fails. In our world, it does not look as if the machine is going to stop anytime soon. And that, according to Professor Wesch, means we are going to need to rethink a few things, including: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family and ourselves.
In the networked world of ubiquitous and mobile access, boundaries are fluid and hierarchies broken. The ownership of knowledge is changed and the flow multidirectional. Students come to school wired and ready to join the knowledge stream. Learning needs to be organized around these networks and not contained in the traditional one way flow of teacher to student.
We have to think off the world of the web and interactive technology as a new ecosystem – one in which any person, in any place, at any time can participate, contribute, communicate, produce, share, curate and organize. It’s an ecosystem that has the potential to make prosumers of us all. That is, producers and not just consumers of information and media content. Anyone with a connection can generate content and the tools of social media mean it can be Stumbled, tagged in Delicious, uploaded to YouTube, sampled in Moviemaker, voted on at Digg, pushed in an RSS feed, shared on Facebook and Tweeted to the world. And then someone can create an interactive commentary, put it to music and turn it upside down, again. This interactivity blurs boundaries. As the New Yorker cartoon put it: “On the net, no one knows you are a dog”. Expertise and value may be perceived without the limiting filters of age, status, nationality or appearance.
We have both an explosion of creativity and an incessant need for problem solving and ethical thinking. Information, misinformation and disinformation are fast moving and in fluid abundance. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity Postman and Weingarten wrote of the need to develop “crap detectors” to filter the disinformation, propaganda and hype. To some www means a world wild web of mayhem, mischief and malice. But with a sense of purpose, and the skills of filtering and information navigation, it also holds great promise and potential.
Reading and writing are becoming less of a solitary and silent activity characteristic of the print era and more of a social activity. E-reading enables readers to interact with each other as well as the text and digital text is always on the move.
We are headed toward ubiquitous access and ever more speed. As quotidian objects such as umbrellas and shopping carts become digitized we are being linked with products just as we are linked with each other. Building community and creating relationships are what people, and social media, do well.

This then is the sea in which schools can swim, or – if they allow themselves to become irrelevant – sink. Professor Wesch had his list and here is my list of some of the things that schools may need to begin to rethink:

Classroom and school design; the school day and the schedule; segregation of learners by age and rather than by interest, passion and commitment; the segregation of knowledge into subjects; grading and assessment; social relationships, adult learning, the role of teacher, peer-to-peer learning and the isolation of the learner; textbooks, curriculum development and the sources of information; the nature of literacy; the nature of learning, creativity and the place of technology; citizenship and community; teamwork, collaboration, plagiarism and cheating; digital footprints, transparency and privacy; partnership with parents other adult learners; learning in the world and learning in school; what counts and what gets counted and how and by whom; and the dress code. (I added the last item because sometimes it’s useful to have a topic that gets everyone thoroughly engaged and busily distracted from important work.)

Above all it means a definition of education as going beyond the acquisition of knowledge. Critical thinking and digital literacy are essential but they don’t go far enough. We need to educate children for active and ethical participation. They need to be contributors and creators of knowledge and that means engaging in solving real problems from the very start.

Change is always hard. Socrates feared the effects of literacy on memory. He argued against it as harmful to young minds, short circuiting the arduous intellectual work of examining life. The scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein, who has written extensively on the effect on the world of the Gutenberg and the print revolution, has said it may be too soon to assess the full impact of that centuries old shift. If it’s too soon to gauge the effect of printing then we can only dimly imagine the effects of social media and the digital age.

Media has transformed our society before, but never at this dizzying rate. The unforeseen and unintended consequences of this revolution that sweeps all before it loom for many as dark clouds threatening the very roots of civilization. And here we are – smack in the epicenter. Unless we want to take ourselves right off the grid we had better start trying to make sense of it.

Educator luddites will be those who can learn with others, in and out of school, against the grain of narrowing definitions and toward what it means to be an educated citizen in a networked world.

I think it is our collective task to engage in the work of social imagination and envision our schools as we want, and need, them to be.

For schools it means some hard work and we are going to need all the help we can get.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth, L. (1979) The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe (2 vols. ed.). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Postman, Neil, and Weingartner, Charles (1969), Teaching as a Subversive Activity, New York, NY: Dell

Greene, Maxine (1995). Releasing the imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Change, Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Education, Future, Leadership, Many minds, Mission Vision Values, Professional Development, Progressive Education, School 2.0, Strategic thinking, Technology

Baby, bathwater, freshwater

May 24, 2010 By Josie Holford 7 Comments

Joe Bower teaches in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. And he is on a personal mission.

His blog For the Love of Learning takes on the traditional model of education and challenges its assumptions and practices.

His latest post is a passionate call for action for educators everywhere. It opens with Ken Robinson’s latest TEDTalk (see below). It’s a follow up to his 2006 call for creativity and personalized education.

Robinson makes the case that we don’t need reform in education we need a revolution. That’s the launch for Joe’s urgent appeal for radical change. Is Joe paying attention to what matters most?

Does he have it right? Take a look and see what you think.

And if he is right, what must we hold on to and not change? What do we need to stop doing or radically change? And what must we begin to do?

What is the baby? What is the bathwater? What is the needed fresh water?

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Digital literacy across the curriculum

April 25, 2010 By Josie Holford 6 Comments

It’s not about the tools and the testing, it’s about the learning and the thinking.

Digital literacy is an important entitlement for all young people in an increasingly digital culture.

Every school should have an organized policy for language across the curriculum…

Two documents, two eras. The first from FutureLab (UK) – a wonderful introduction to, and handbook for, digital technology and learning.

The second from the influential UK government report – “A language for life” – the Bullock Report HMSO 1975.

I was a teacher in London when the Bullock Report was published – an orange-mustard colored compendium of review, research and government recommendations for schools. Word came down from on high that we were to develop a school-wide language policy.

Bullock gave the official push that launched the “language across the curriculum” (LAC) movement in the English speaking world. In retrospect, it and the work it engendered are beacons of enlightenment.

It was, and is still, a movement with intellectual roots in a wide range of disciplines – psychology, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy.

These disciplines lent perspectives on learning as a set of complex and personal interactions by means of which the individual makes sense of the world.

But teachers were the real heart and origins of LAC. Secondary English teachers were the prime movers but soon teachers from all disciplines were involved.

They grappled with the issues of language, thought and learning and the implications for teaching, language assessment and school.

James Britton’s Language and Learning was the influential founding text. It was followed by the groundbreaking research of Britton and his colleagues at the London University Institute of Education: The Development of Writing Abilities 11-18 (1975) and a focus on the role of talk in constructing understanding and making meaning.

With that intellectual framework and research in hand, teachers of all subjects saw the connections between language, thinking and learning. If talk and writing were heuristic – meaning that children used them to uncover meaning and make knowledge their own – then the implications were enormous.

Children’s language – writing and talk – was not something to be policed and corrected, taught and tested, but an all-powerful intellectual tool for thinking and learning.

This was about language as a means of thinking. It placed learning at the center, not the teaching of discrete skills and functions of writing. Correct use and mastery of certain language forms are not the goal; learning is the goal and language is the tool.

When the emphasis shifted to “writing the curriculum” – rather than the broader context of learning and thinking – the movement shrank in scope. And writing across the curriculum sometimes became grammar and spelling across the curriculum.

Talk and writing in math and science became opportunities for assigning word problems and essay tests rather than a means to understanding concepts. And everyone got back into the act of being judge, jury and executioner of children s language.

LAC is essentially a set of principles focused on how children think and learn. It is not a set of teaching practices that lead to easily measurable language outcomes.

With the theoretical understanding in place it is left to actual practitioners i.e. teachers to create the environment within which learning and thinking can flourish.

So this is the personal context within which I read Digital Teaching across the Curriculum.

It doesn’t have Bullock’s heft and stamp of officialdom (My copy cost £5 from the HMSO – it’s now available free online) It is not a government document and arrived free, weightless and digital.

It is however, a wonderfully helpful introduction to the world of digital media and education.

It begins with the cultural context and the why. And while it focuses on the learning not the tools it contains many useful starting points for professional discussion, training and development. There’s a really helpful digital literacy planning tool.

It is not prescriptive and does not pre-empt the role of the teacher in determining how to harness the technology in the service of what actually matters – learning.

It is teachers that are expert in their own school context, in the needs of their students and in the pedagogical techniques required to support learning.

This is a complicated area for schools and professional development. Many teachers feel fearful or inadequate in the face of rapidly shifting technology. But learners need their teachers. And they need their teachers to be learners.

The handbook does not shy from this issue and nor does it scold or become prescriptive. In fact, it includes important thinking on just why – for all their apparent confidence – the digital generation needs its teachers.

Rather – it begins with the context and makes suggestions for ways forward.

It starts – like the thinkers who gave us LAC – with the why, not the how and the what.

But read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Let’s start with the why. (Nicely captured in the graphic below.) And let the rest follow from that.

Digital literacy is an important entitlement for all young people in an increasingly digital culture. It furnishes children and young people with the skills, knowledge and understanding that will help them to take a full and active part in social, cultural, economic, civic and intellectual life now and in the future.

from the introduction

Education systems need to help young people to understand and benefit from their engagement with digital technology and digital cultures. Fostering digital literacy in the classroom provides one way in which to make subject learning relevant to a society in which growing technology use is changing the way that both adults and children represent and communicate information and meaning and participate in cultural life.

Developing digital literacy in subjects of the curriculum is not about being fashionable or simply about trying to engage students in learning. It is about addressing the changing nature of subject knowledge and acknowledging that young people will need different kinds of skills, knowledge and understanding in order to develop their expertise in subjects. Developing digital literacy in subject teaching supports young people to be effective, competent, critical students of that subject in the digital age.

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Books, Change, Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Education, Future, Learning, Literacies, Lower School, Middle School, Professional Development, Progressive Education, School 2.0, Technology

Math Curriculum Makeover: Be less helpful

April 19, 2010 By Josie Holford Leave a Comment

Math makes sense of the world: Here’s math teacher Dan Meyer speaking at the TEDxNYED conference in March.

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Filed Under: Assessment, Change, Critical thinking, Curriculum, High School, Mathematics, Professional Development

“The death of education as we know it may be the birth of learning as we need it”

March 14, 2010 By Josie Holford 4 Comments

I’m more than a bit late with my NAIS annual conference round up but then …excuses, excuses…what with returning to Poughkeepsie with a rotten cold, the remaining effects of a mega storm that closed school for three days (ably dealt with by Steve Mallet and the division heads) and then all the catching up…. So – a few random and incomplete notes and reflections.

First – a frustration. When you start to take free wifi for granted it’s annoying to be confined to a hotel lobby for a connection and beyond the lobby feels like being nickle and gouged for internet access. And then find yourself only intermittently able to be on line during the conference itself and always in danger of battery outage. Why is that?

Now to the conference – bottom line: Great. Congratulations and thanks to all concerned and for Pat Bassett’s leadership, his avatar Captain Independent notwithstanding. Actually that was entertaining. (I leave aside the Wonder Woman misstep and I hope she got paid well to wear the costume. She assured me it was fun.)

But the key issue was the theme and content which flowed well from last year and allowed for a little celebration at having weathered all the storm metaphors.

And the theme was clearly transformation, adaptation, renewal, evolution. Call it what you will – the game of change is clearly afoot and this conference was charged with ideas, examples and tactics.

Disruptive Change is here now and it’s more than time to pay attention. Disruption is the new normal and the challenge for educators is to keep figuring out what that means when it comes to educating children for the world they will inherit. It was amusing then, to hear one of the high powered panelists with Pat Bassett in “The Power of Transformation: Disrupting your Institution to make it Relevant” trot out a canned and cloth-eared reference to Toyota.

It was in that workshop that Pat came out with the zinger that became “The tweet heard around the world” – apparently the most tweeted line from the conference. I heard it as: “The death of education as we know it may be the birth of learning as we need it”.

As Bruce Hammond pointed out, it’s interesting to note that five of the articles in the spring edition of Independent School Magazine are written by members of the Independent Curriculum Group. (ICG, Bruce is the executive director). PDS is now a member and that means a seat on the board. As a school that has always structured time for high school interdisciplinary courses, and has never taught to the test (even as our students have taken them), it is good to be in such great and growing company.

Those articles go a long way to correct misperceptions of independent schools as uniformly bastions of tradition and conservatism. Indeed, so many schools across the country are doing innovative work and taking up the challenge of what it means to be a school for 2010 and the future. There are times when it feels like everyone is now catching on to what PDS has always championed. Just because we can sometimes sit back and say – “done that”, “do that” at PDS – does not mean we cannot learn and grow. Indeed, we must.

So, what did I choose to attend and what did I learn? Shut out of the session I wanted on Wednesday (“Leading toward a sustainable future”) I wandered the halls and dropped in on “Be like Google” led by Presbyterian Day School in Memphis. (Known as PDS – how annoying is that?) Lots of interesting ideas on display as the presenters told the story of how they used and applied Google’s Nine Principles of Innovation at their school.

Later that day, it was good to catch up with some of the New Heads Institute ’06 cohort and trade stories.

Mimi Ito is a Stanford based international expert on how people use mobile technologies and new digital media in their everyday lives. In her presentation she asked some very pertinent questions about our assumptions. “Why do we assume kids only learn in school?” And “Why do we assume that children online are not learning?”

Children growing up in a radically different media environment that keeps them connected 24hours a day present new challenges for educators who must grapple with the divide between home and school and seek proactive ways to bridge the gap.

With examples of new behaviors and opportunities for passionate and interest-centered learning she urged us to look at new media environments as a place of promise and potential. The complex narratives of Pokémon for example – and how children flock to participate with contagious media that is playful and interactive.

In this highly personalized and informal play, skills and literacy are a by-product not the focus of the engagement.

She had some good examples of community standards and how they are learned, developed and maintained in online environments.

Next up: Tina Seelig and Innovation as an Extreme Sport.

Meanwhile the conversation and community continue online at: NAIS Annual Conference

I had forgotten how many people seem to live on the streets of San Francisco. This man was reading in the drizzle by the light of a street advertisement.

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Assessment, Books, Change, Choice, College, Curriculum, Education, Future, High School, Learning, Technology

Science and technology heroes

February 7, 2010 By Josie Holford Leave a Comment

It was Dean Kamen - the inventor of the Segway and a version of the artificial heart – who established F.I.R.S.T.* His vision was:

“To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes.”

Last year we introduced lego robotics to 5th and 6th grade science. This year we started an after school lego robotics team. And yesterday we hosted a qualifying tournament for the second annual Hudson Valley F.I.R.S.T.* lego league. Many thanks to John Houston for bringing this event to PDS and working so tirelessly with the teams.

The theme for the 2009-2010 season is “Smart Move” and teams investigated many aspects of transportation systems including missions related to transportation safety, collecting objects, manipulating them, and transporting them to different locations.

Gracious professionalism and fun – the words are from the Hudson Valley F.I.R.S.T. lego league creed that also espouses teamwork, learning with mentors, friendly competition, discovery and sharing. They were all on display at PDS yesterday as the teams took over Gilkeson with their robots, models, umpires and team spirit. And thanks to parent volunteers led by Mimica Hyman, we welcomed them not just with open arms but with a cornucopia of baked goods, pizza and customized table decorations. Quite amazing.

Tournament director George Swain writes:

What a day it was! Twelve Hudson Valley teams from as nearby as Wappingers Falls, Millbrook and Rhinebeck and as far afield as Ballston Spa and Albany came to PDS. PDS brought three junior teams and one senior team to participate. Senior teams competed in four areas: robot design, teamwork, research and robot performance.

Our senior team won FIRST PRIZE in the research competition.

Congratulations to all PDS students who participated and volunteered their time. Special thanks to coaches Bryan Del Bene and John Houston and to volunteers Emma Sears, Laura Graceffa, Steve Mallet, David Held, Aaron Lieberman, Debby McLean, as well as Mimica Hyman, Mark Schlessman, Beth Brofman, Alaster McLean and the many other parents who made this event such a success.

The gym, the Chapman Room and Gilkeson classrooms were transformed as teams demonstrated their expertise in the four categories: robot performance, robot design, research presentation and teamwork. We were delighted to welcome all the teams, their coaches and supporters and also to welcome Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, Founder and Director, of the League and Distinguished Engineer at IBM Corp, Poughkeepsie, NY.

More photographs on the PDS Facebook page. Check it out, become a fan.

* F.I.R.S.T. = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Education, Lower School, Middle School, PDS Events, PDS People, Play, Science, Teamwork, Technology, The Hudson Valley

“What ails thee Jock?”

February 7, 2010 By Josie Holford 4 Comments

By now you have probably been sent a link to, or have even read, Playing to Learn – Susan Engel’s oped in the NYTimes last week. In addition to the fluttering in my twittersphere, I received notice from a teacher, an alumna, and an administrator at PDS as well as the head of a neighboring school. And no surprise: Engel outlines a research-based curriculum recipe for success that you can find in many good schools and certainly at PDS.

And if you haven’t read it, now is a good time. It’s short, to the point and important.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is set to pour money into a renewed focus on school success, failure and assessment in the well-intentioned but misdirected “race to the top”. It’s an unfortunate metaphor. A race means winners and losers when what we really need is for all children to be educated and to succeed. We need a “team effort to the top” to make a collective climb to higher levels of literacy and numeracy not a sharper elbows scramble for scarce rations.

This No Child Left Untested policy suggests that test scores are the desired and final outcome of education. It will ensure that teachers increasingly teach to the tests, and that assessment and measuring become the focus of the curriculum and time in school. The truth is that improving test scores can never take the place of actually educating children.

Also last week New York Magazine had a cover story The Myth of the Gifted Child that excoriates the notion that four year olds can be tested effectively for giftedness, intellectual ability and potential. This is a magazine that relishes the opportunity to tweak the obsessions of the elite and its The Junior Meritocracy did just that asking: “Should a child’s fate be sealed by an exam he takes at the age of 4? Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless, at best.”

Reading about the testers’ interactions with small children I wondered what they would have made of Thomas Babington Macauley, the eminent and erudite 19th century scholar, writer, barrister and politician. The story is probably apocryphal but here is one version:

Legends surround the first words of Macauley…. He famously did not utter a word until around age 4 when he turned to a wailing baby and asked, “What ails thee Jock?”

In another version the four year old Macauley soon speaks again, and in characteristic style:

While he was dining one day with his father and mother at the house of a neighbor the servant upset a cup of coffee on his legs. On his hostess’s inquiry as to whether he was hurt, the young Thomas immediately replied: “Madam, the agony is somewhat abated.”

The British humorist Frank Muir is said to have commented, rather uncharitably, “I think the temptation to spill coffee on such a child must have been quite strong.”

Annoying brat, child prodigy, neither or both, I don’t think Macauley would have impressed the testing psychologists.

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Assessment, Change, Curriculum, Educational Insanity, Kindergarten, Learning, Literacies, Lower School, Progressive Education

State of play

December 1, 2009 By thecompasspoint 3 Comments

So the debate on the purpose of play in early childhood simmers on. It popped up on my Facebook page yesterday with this from the ASCD: Play is problem solving

That then led me to the The Playtime’s the Thing from the Washington Post.

The pressure is on to raise achievement scores and this puts the squeeze on time for play.

“If we are to prevent the achievement gap and develop a cradle-to-career educational pipeline, early learning programs are going to have to be better integrated with the K-12 system,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday at a convention of the nation’s largest early childhood organization, the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

With school districts targeting student achievement the focus has been on literacy – especially reading and math skills for children at ever-younger ages. No Child Left Behind requires schools to ensure that all children are proficient in math, reading and writing by 2014. What could be wrong with that? Well – quite a lot as it happens. With a society that actually needs a wide range of aptitudes and abilities – with the route to actual success in school being more than the narrow gateway of test scores – we are in danger of leaving many children behind.

Furthermore – it appears that while certain measures of proficiency show up in test results the far reaching effects of lack of play do not. According to the article lost playtime shows up in life. And with devastating, costly consequences – delinquency, school failure, emotional disturbance and delayed social development.

It’s with dismay, then, that I read the statistic of the amount of play allowed quote story:

“… in kindergarten, children are playing for fewer than 30 minutes a day, according to a study of full-day kindergartens in New York City and Los Angeles published in the spring by the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group based in College Park. They spend four to six times more time on literacy, math and test-taking than they do on play.

What it signals to me is a false dichotomy of play and work. Perhaps adults can distinguish between the two – although meaningful work often has a playful aspect. But for small children the two are one and the same.

If play is the work of the child then why are we keeping these children from their essential work for a short-term bump in test scores? And at what price? Evidence seems to suggest that this educational dead end short circuits the very activity – the industry and intellectual activity of active play – that children need to grow academically and socially.

I’m with Friedrich Froebel on this one:

Play is the highest level of child development…It gives…joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world…The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Assessment, Creativity, Curriculum, Data, Education, Educational Insanity, Kindergarten, Learning, Literacies, Lower School, Many minds, Mission Vision Values, Progressive Education, Research

That was then: Are we "betraying most of our children"?

November 15, 2009 By thecompasspoint 1 Comment

From: We are the people movie people

This landmark independent documentary … explores the education system … and asks whether the current system provides young people with the opportunity to develop their talents. High-profile figures sharing their personal experiences and views include Sir Richard Branson, Germaine Greer, Henry Winkler, Bill Bryson, Sir Ken Robinson and a wide range of education experts from around the world.

This thought-provoking film offers unique insight across generations and nations, and reveals a very inconvenient truth about education. The world is changing rapidly – but our education system is not keeping pace.

And just look at all that great footage of industrial Britain and the classrooms I remember!

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Change, Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Education, Film, Future, Going Green, High School, Learning, Mission Vision Values, Nature, Professional Development, Technology, Uncategorized

The new literacy ladder. What rung are you on?

November 14, 2009 By thecompasspoint 6 Comments

The world is moving at a tremendous rate. Going no one knows where. We must prepare our children, not for the world of the past. Not for our world. But for their world. The world of the future. – John Dewey

PDS graduates students who…

possess a rich academic knowledge base and know how to think as creative, flexible, independent, resourceful learners for life
are intellectually curious, active seekers, users and creators of knowledge – from our mission

Fullscreen capture 11142009 15021 PM Take a look at this The Social Technographics ladder. It’s from Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernofff .

At the top of the ladder are the Creators. At the bottom rung are the Inactives who do not engage at any level either by choice or lack of opportunity. Seems to me that we want all our students to climb on that ladder and ascend to the top rung of this groundswell that the authors define as:

A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

Think of the world of the web and interactive technology as a new ecosystem – one in which any person, in any place, at any time can participate, contribute, communicate, produce, and share. It’s an ecosystem that has the potential to make prosumers of us all. That is producers and not just consumers of information and media content.

That top rung is small in the wider world (you can see the stats by rung and country at the link) but in schools with students beyond the early elementary years it should be 100%. In school – at PDS at least – getting engaged, being creative and collaborating is not an optional activity. And technological innovation makes it possible to engage with a global reach. And if we believe in the importance of innovation and creativity, making a positive contribution and changing the world – there is the purpose. It brings a whole new meaning to the eduspeak catch phrases of problem-solving and ethical and creative thinking. It makes our mission possible in effective, dynamic and inclusive ways.

Good schools have always developed prosumers: Students read novels, poetry and essays; solved puzzles and problems; consumed charts and graphs, and watched videos and film. But they also wrote, posed and created them. Now they can produce them, share them and test their quality with a wider audience. (Authentic assessment.) It’s one big intellectual sandbox and showcase where everything can be interactive and collaborative. The lines between producer and consumer have blurred. So have the lines between learner and teacher. Both can learn and both can teach. That has always been possible. Now it is closer to essential. Given the pace of change students and learners are in the sandbox together. (Teacher as coach, guide at the side not sage on the stage.)

Once we grasp the concept of the groundswell and see its potential for learning the more we will enter this new ecosystem and learn and teach the skills of navigation. It a whole new set of literacy skills to be understood and brought into the classroom. And by incorporating these tools and this potential we are preparing students to function constructively in the world where this groundswell is becoming a tide.

What does the ladder look like?

Top Rung: Creators
This is the group who regularly – at least once a month – publish a blog, put an article online, maintain a website, contribute to a wiki, or upload music or videos. They engage, create and contribute online. In the United States it’s about 25% of people. We have top rung students. They all should be top rung. Our job is to move them up the ladder with what we teach, how we teach and what we expect. We need to systematically seek the next level with what we require of students.

Second Rung: Critics
These are the reactors who comment on and critique the work of others. In writing classes it’s a common best practice for students to comment on and respond to the work of classmates. This takes that good practice to a wider world. Our students are growing up in a world where this kind of interactivity is usual practice. How do we prepare them for it in the academic arena and beyond the world of social networking? Everyone’s a critic these days and the online ecosphere is full of commentary. How are we helping students engage in this world by commenting on and contributing to the work of others??

Third Rung: Collectors
These are people who collect bookmarks, RSS feeds, vote for sites on Reddit and Digg, who StumbleUpon, use Diigo or Delicious and amass all manner of digital media from their travels online.

So, what are the best ways to do that effectively? How do we teach how to find, evaluate, filter and store our collected material, bookmarks, feeds and links. Where do we teach that literacy?

Fourth Rung: Joiners
These are the people who have profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc. It was students who gave these sites their initial boost but they are becoming ubiquitous among all age groups of computer users. Teachers are apparently among the most rapidly increasing user group together with the middle aged and elderly. But what are the skills students need to maintain effective sites and use them to promote themselves in a professional or scholarly way? How do they protect their on-line identity and leave the digital trail that accurately represents them?

Fifth Rung: Spectators
Consumers. This is the largest segment because it includes everyone in all the rungs above. And given just how much is available participation in this rung is all about the choices we make online. Where do we go for what and how and why? To “develop educated citizens” we need selective spectatorship.

The bottom rung: Inactives
Out of the loop and off the grid. These are the people who have no access to the technology or the web or who choose not to participate. This is not an option at PDS. Although it does provide an opportunity to help others start climbing the ladder.

Do we have a choice?

Getting on the ladder and starting the climb is a literacy and survival issue for the 21st century.

Non participation is not optional for educators who want to educate children for their futures I began with quotations from John Dewey and our mission. I did that because I believe that this work is consonant with a progressive approach to education. I believe that the tools of the online world bring exciting new possibilities for finally making the ideals of progressive education a reality. The question for me is not why? But how? In what ways? With whom? And to which mission-consistent ends? Teaching these skills and engaging in the ecosystem is an outgrowth of our mission and is what our students need and deserve.

How do we get started?

We already have. Take a look at what is required of students at every level and every subject and you will see students using technology (remember – a crayon is technology) to engage in the information and social ecosystem. It may look different at various grade levels and subject areas but students are already on the ladder in school and at home. And there are so many examples throughout the school. And it starts with what good teaching at PDS has always looked like – active, engaged students and teachers learning by doing.

“Each step on the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous steps. To join the group on a step, a consumer need only participate in one of the listed activities at least monthly.”

Each rung of the ladder represents a literacy challenge for us and our students. We need to climb the ladder and we need to help our students climb the ladder. And what an opportunity for community learning! I used to teach English. We have middle school students at PDS who have published more short stories than I have in all my years of teaching writing (none).

Our job is to help students build the skills they will need to understand and thrive in the ecosystem in which they must swim.

Here are the presentation slides of the ladder:

Social Technographics Explained

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