Do you sometimes feel that your whole life revolves around school, education, our students, the lesson you are teaching next, the next round of reports, marking? It is often difficult to gain some perspective and remember that there is a world outside school. We also sometimes get very wound up about the fact that “we have no time” to do anything but meet the daily demands of our work, like improve our practice, read about what other teachers are doing in other schools or go to conferences. I was reminded this weekend of an analogy made at a conference a couple of years ago about our reluctance sometimes to keep up with new approaches to teaching and learning. Imagine you went to the dentist, you walk into the surgery, there is an old uncomfortable leather chair that has two settings; upright and flat. Instead of bright shiny, clean instruments the dentist has the sort of equipment that you remember from your childhood. There is no injected anaesthetic or even any mouthwash, there are spitoons on the bench …. I don’t need to go on. Would you be horrified that this dentist had apparently not moved with the times, was not taking advantage of the benefits that technology and advances in his field could offer both him and his patients? Wouldn’t you EXPECT a dentist or a doctor or any other professional with whom you have interaction to be abreast of modern methods, technology, thinking, science? I would.
I found this article, “Virtualy Reality display lets fire crews see in a blaze” in the New Scientist and marvelled at how this technology could help save lives and these sorts of advances are happening and being used in creative, humanitarian ways all over the world and in all sorts of professional spheres. Now I know that teachers are not in the business of saving lives …… but we are in the business of changing lives.
How is it that when you can’t sleep at night , and I struggled last night because I am full of cold and couldn’t breathe, you can write a whole blog post, plan lessons and work out how to fit all the things you need to do in the time you need to do it, but that when you come to do all those things the next day, your mind is a complete blank? I reckon we need some sort of app that records your thoughts in that half-life of “nearly sleep” so that you can access them when you need them.
Anyway, this may or may not be what I thought of last night but here goes!
I read this article the other day about how brainstorming to engender new ideas doesn’t work in a managed situation like a meeting or even a classroom. It makes complete sense. My ideas usually come to me when I am on a long walk, or reading a book, gardening or, like last night when I am in bed. In short, when I am relaxed and am not being put on the spot.
“Google quite famously encourage their staff to set aside their day-to-day work every Friday to explore new ideas, new technologies.” http://newlearnings.posterous.com/google-friday. When we have time to think we tend to come up with ideas that we can then explore and deeper learning takes place.
Sugata Mitra, in his recent TEDtalk talks about how people will learn all by themselves if they are given the opportunity. He says “It’s not about making learning happen, it’s about letting it happen.”
He asks if, “Knowing is obsolete”? If we can search the internet for an answer to a question when we need it, what is the point of filling our students’ heads with “knowledge”? He questions the current educational system – not that it is broken, just that it is out of date. He says that “We take our children, we shut their brains down, and then we say “perform”! We need to shift the balance back from threat to pleasure.” He proposes a “Self Organised Learning Environment” in which we adopt the “Grandmother Method” of asking questions, standing back, giving encouragement and allowing learners to work it out themselves.
I think this idea has huge potential and a lot of merit. However, it is going to take a huge mindshift amongst the teaching profession to enable it. We are used to being the providers or the gatekeepers of knowledge, doling out spoon-sized portions of knowledge on a need to know, just in case basis.
But today, the content is massive. How can we possibly provide everything we think that the learners of today might need tomorrow? We are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information so maybe SOLE is the only way that we, as teachers, will be able to cope. We shift from being providers of knowledge to enablers of learning. We need to provide space, physical and emotional, for our students to explore and learn for themselves and from each other.
I have one question, though. How do we create a mindshift amongst parents and the students themselves? Mitra suggests that “examinations and punishment are seen as threats”. I agree; in many schools they are. But in high performing schools, in high decile areas, where the children come from backgrounds where examination results are given high status, the students often see examination results as the only motivator. I am saddened when I hear students say when I ask them to engage in a task “How many credits is it worth?” and when they find that there are no credits attached to it they become disengaged and don’t take the task seriously.
I have remembered now what I thought of last night!
As part of a team leading Professional Development in my school, whose focus for the next couple of years is “Blended Learning”, we are meeting some resistance. Don’t get me wrong, most of the staff are very engaged, and positive about the adaptations they are making to the way that they teach. But the resistance comes in the form of, “Well, we already get excellent results, our girls are generally well-motivated and if we try something different and we fail (i.e. examination results go down) how will the parents and students react? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Our students, and there are many like them around the school, have an expectation of a good education, an expectation that the teacher is there to teach them (spoonfeed them) and that they will get good results. They don’t actually, really want to have to think! They just want content poured into them so that they regurgitate it when the time is right for the examiners to process and grade. Where has their desire to simply learn and inquire gone? As Sugata Mitra suggests, an outdated education system, as effective and robust as it once was for the purpose for which it was created, shuts down minds in a world where creativity, inventiveness and flexibility are increasingly necessary. In NZ we have a fantastic forward thinking curriculum but, as yet, the examination system has not quite caught up. It is getting there and there are opportunities within it for creativity, self-organised learning and a wider range of assessment types. It is still content heavy though, and it is still being taught by a generation of teachers who are afraid to take risks just in case results suffer. And in the world of league tables, comparison charts and the threat of performance pay why would they?
So back to the idea of SOLE. I think I have tried to use this method for a few years now. I certainly favour a task-based approach which encourages students to find things out for themselves. However, it is only recently that I have adopted it as an approach with all my classes. In the 1990s when I had groups of low ability, highly disengaged students who really couldn’t have cared less about examination results, and were only at school because they had to be, for my own sanity I needed to find a way to motivate them to want to learn. Embedding learning through authentic tasks, like designing and creating a French style garden in the grounds of the school and creating a mural, with a few carrots dangled and a heap of encouragement, those students started to enjoy coming to lessons and learning things. I never really tried it with the “bright” kids – they already seemed engaged and I didn’t need to “survive” those lessons and they passed exams anyway.
Maybe it works with the children in India because they don’t have access to formal education, they want to learn because they cannot? (whereas our students perversely don’t want to learn because they can!) They value the opportunities to learn, they still have the ability to inquire, a system has not pummelled it out of them.
I don’t have any answers but I have lots of questions. I desperately want to engender a desire to learn just to learn, out of interest for a subject in my students and my own children, but I wonder if they just have too much. They take learning for granted, they don’t really need to learn, they just need knowledge! Well that is what they think, anyway, and that is what their parents think and that is what a society built on an outmoded edcuation and results-driven examination system requires of them. Until we achieve that paradigm shift it’s not going to change!
Maybe it’s Edith Piaf singing “Je ne regrette rien”, or maybe it’s the idea of breaking free, but there’s something about this video that resonates in me!
What is real and what is not? The greyness and drearyness of the pixellated world suggests a lack of soul, or perhaps a repression of soul. The clusters of old-fashioned light bulbs, dusty looking books echoes the films and books telling of worlds imploding, technology failing and a return to living pre-technology, surviving in a bubble, But this seems to be a reverse – the real world , nature, life, feeling is outside the bubble apart from a few illicit plants and the hamburger.
Car manufacturers often use the idea of the car being a symbol of escapism; when you climb into your car, you enter another world. “Je ne regrette rien”; a song of moving forward, leaving the past behind, there’s no going back.
But how does all this connect with the idea of technology-mediated education?
A constant cry from teachers I have worked with is that teachers can never be replaced by computers because learning requires passion, needs the face to face element to engage students that technology doesn’t have. One of the questions in the Twitter chat on Sunday morning (Saturday evening for the northern hemisphere folk!) was what did a future teacher look like and there were some interesting answers but most revolved around the idea of a blend of computers and real people.
My experience is that learners are excited by technology and the positive opportunities it offers them but they still want someone they know and trust to explain and explore ideas more fully with them. Humans all need feedback and affirming comments that reassure us that we are on the right track as well as the buzz it gives us when someone says, “Well done” and actually means it. The automated responses on online quizzes just don’t have the same buzz factor.
Now this is the sort of technology that helps to create a more utopian vision of the future. A “simple” tool that can help detect illnesses in the field so that people can be cured or at least treated. As I said before, I think, practical applications for real context solutions. A tool that can help the people who need it and not just those with the money to afford shiny, pretty things!
Finding this article has got me thinking though about the inequality of access to medical care in the world. Well actually I started to think about if everybody was treated and cured then the world would be vastly overpopulated. The natural order of things; birth, life, death would be upset and where would that lead. But that brought me to the thought that not everyone in the world has cheap and ready access to medical care so the natural order would not be evenly spread around the world. And hasn’t that always been the case? Even in wealthy countries there are those who can afford access to health care, education, legal advice and those who can’t.
Going back to the videos “A day made of glass” and the Microsoft advert, I ask myself who the target audience is. Clearly the “haves” and not the “have nots” of this world. A utopian vision of my world would be where the “have nots” have equal access to education, healthcare, housing, clean water. The technologies that can provide those sorts of things are those that can change the social order, determine how society will be in the future.
Sugata Mitra’ “Hole in the Wall” experiments that provide children with the ability to access education have proved revolutionary.
Malala Yousafzai, the young girl shot in the head by the Taliban has a vision for girls in Pakistan to have access to education without fear of being killed.
It is the desire of people, the soul of people that impels them to create the circumstances, to invent the technology that changes society. The technology alone is not the determining factor.
I saw a great video recently that was all about the art of procrastination and I have decided that I could be a world champion if it were a competitive event.
So, in the process of procrastinating, I end up surfing the web and finding all sorts of interesting (and sometimes not so interesting) sites that give me opportunities to get even more sidetracked and even further away from the job I am supposed to be doing. Any way, I found this blog which got me thinking – what sorts of things do I do and could I do at the beginnings of my lessons that will boost my students’ engagement and interest?
I also saw this picture that someone had posted on Facebook – this is a French version but I saw an English version of it a couple of weeks ago – would love to know if there is a Spanish version out there somewhere.
So, where are you? I think I am permanently on the I am going to try to do, but that’s probably because I spend most of my time procrastinating and not actually getting on with stuff!
And what sort of things do I do with my classes at the beginning of lessons? One of my favourite activities is using a piece of artwork and getting the students to come up with a Haiku in the target language. This usually forces them to focus on real meaning and they have to think concisely. Usually nouns and adjectives are the first words they think of and then come the verbs.
Here are a few that one of my French classes did last year for this picture called “Tokyo Girl” by NZ artist Harvey Benge.
Mascara noir, vif
Cheveux rouges, pâle et belle
Yeux bruns, passionnée
Japonais gothique
Fille pâle, cheveux rouges foncés
Maquillage sombre
Visage pâle et intéressant
Fille sombre et vive
Fille triste et gothique
I think it’s time to find a picture for my Spanish classes next week – never tried it in Spanish so will see how it works!
I was invited to “Learnist” yesterday and I couldn’t resist playing with it today. It looks like it could be a great way of curating resources – websites, videos, pictures and documents around a theme to create a Learning Board. I decided to make one to help people learn the Present Tense in Spanish.
At the moment you can only log in through Facebook, which is a bit limiting if you don’t have a FB account. Nor is there a mobile app just yet. However, reading the comments on the home page, it sounds like they are looking into creating other ways to log in and also plan to create an app. Have a look at my board and see what you think. It is very basic but only took me about half an hour to create. I am sure that with more effort I could add more of my own resources and personalise it.
