As debate continues over a national curriculum, the ABC has an interesting forum on 21st learning. The forum is  in response to Rupert Murdoch assertions in the Boyer lectures that “Australia has a 21st century economy with a 19th century education system”.

In the first of a series of six lectures, Murdoch argued that: we need to reform our education system … the bottom line is this: it is an absolute scandal that we are spending more and more and getting less and less in return. For those still in school or just entering the workforce, the opportunities a global economy offers are greater than at any time in our history—provided you have the right skills.”

The forum, recorded at the National Curriculum Corporation Conference, examines what a 21st century education might look like.

Guests Professor Barry McGaw (Head of the National Curriculum Board and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute), Valerie Hannon (Director of Strategy for the UK Innovation Unit), Chris Wardlaw (Former Deputy Secretary of Education in Hong Kong) and Michael Stevenson (Vice President of Global Education at Cisco Systems) “discuss the current major reform of curriculum in Australia, skills and knowledge needed in the 21st century, how Hong Kong transformed its education system and the role of technology and innovation.” Download audio file here.

Other Links:

Curriculum Corporation Conference

Cisco paper on 21st century learning

UK innovation unit

Boyer lectures by Rupert Murdoch

Image: ‘Planet of Taris‘
www.flickr.com/photos/40491163@N00/2415962216

From Edutopia

Getting the right people to be teachers

• Finland recruits its teachers from the top 10 per cent of graduates
• Finland has introduced a first-round in its teacher selection process which consists of a multiple-choice examination designed to test literacy, numeracy and problem- solving skills.
• The top-scoring candidates then go through to the second round in the selection procedure which is run by individual universities. Applicants are tested for their communication skills, willingness to learn, academic ability and motivation for teaching.
• Finland limits the number of places on teaching training so that the supply of teachers matches demand.
• Finland, like Australia, frontloads its compensation by paying good starting salaries, but relative to other OECD countries, subsequent increases in salary are small with a difference between the average starting salary and the maximum teacher salary of only 18 percent.
• Teaching is seen as a high status profession in the eyes of the general public in Finland.

Developing teachers into effective instructors

• Finnish teachers work together, plan their lessons jointly, observe each others’ lessons and help each other improve.
• Most faculties of education manage their own training schools: these are fully operational schools where students carry out their initial teaching practice.
• Teachers are given one afternoon each week for joint planning and curriculum development.
• Schools are encouraged to work together and share materials so that best practice spreads quickly throughout the system.

Ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction to each child

• Finland has arguably one of the least prescriptive curricula of all systems. It emphasises the need for teachers to adapt learning to the specific context in which they find themselves, while at the same time setting high expectations for what should ultimately be achieved.
• Finland has largely dispensed with national examinations, conducting only periodic assessments of student performance, the results of which stay confidential.
• Finnish children start preschool at age six and school at age seven and in primary school they study for just four to five hours per day; yet by age 15, Finnish children top the world in the OECD’s assessments of reading, mathematics, science and problem-solving.
• Finland has a highly effective system of interventions to support individual students. Through intervening quickly at the level of individual students, Finland prevents early failure compounding into long-term failure, and thus maintains strong and consistently equitable outcomes for all students.

Source: McKinsey & Company (2007), How the World’s Best-performing School Systems Come Out on Top, http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/resources/pdf/Worlds_School_Systems_Final.pdf

The most interesting angle to come out of this debate was Michael Wesch’s astute comment about digital natives, which tied into other people’s recent debunking of the irritating and false dichotomy of “digital natives versus digital immigrants”.
Here are some of my favourite refutations of the native/immigrant fallacy:
Michael Welsh:
“The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online. They may be learning about this digital information environment despite us, but they are not reaching the levels of understanding that are necessary as this digital information environment becomes increasingly pervasive in all of our lives. All of the classic skills we learned in relation to a print-based information universe are important, and must now be augmented by a critical understanding of the workings of digital information.
Martin Levins:
“The digital native concept is something I’ve struggled with for some time. It seems to hark back to the colonial “noble savage” idea in that, somehow, kids have a deep knowledge of digital stuff and therefore, cargo-cult-like, technology and their affinity with it will allow a better learning experience per se.
It’s simplistic to imply that lots of facebook profiles read trumps 8 books read without asking the purpose of the reading.
It’s equally so to allow only one form of text for students to use to demonstrate understanding, irrespective if it is an essay or a web page or a movie.”

Ewan McIntosh, also addresses this in his post, the tedium of the term digitial immigrants and it’s all to do with age: “we need to make sure social media is used in a relevant fashion in learning. Also, it mustn’t just be something that is in the fiefdom of media studies or English teachers – this is an all round issue, to be learnt and tackled by all.”

Image: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/digitalnatives/ADD-SHIRT.png

Blogged with Flock

I was reminded of this when I was reading Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s post on Creativity is a global crisis, in which she summarises a video, “Teaching HOW TO learn”,  with mind-map creator Tony Buzan:

• World is getting less and less creative on average. Education today is structured so that it destroys creativity and crushes dreams.
• In China, Mexico, Japan and US it is normal for creativity scores to decline throughout a child’s education.
• We teach kids what to learn.. not how to learn. We teach curriculum rather than how to learn.
• Scientific Journal feels that brilliance can be unleashed through nurturing creative thinking in children.
• Intellectual capital is fueled by creativity. There is a new creative age dawning and we must address it. 60% of all jobs and professions within the next 10 years will be based on creative thinking.
• Child are born with intellectual potential- brain is soil with endless seeds. When child is stimulated creatively then brain cells engage and grow. When they are not stimulated cells disengage. Nurturing creativity allows synapse to form more connections. When we routinize, when we linearize, when we dull a child we actually physically disengage their brains.
• It is not one or the other:curriculum or creativity. Creativity is the thread that should be woven in each area of the curriculum.

Sheryl argues that: “Back to basics is returning to way we all learn naturally through wonderment, questions, and explorations – not through memorization and regurgitation of facts.”

This “creativity crisis” is also explored by Ken Robinson in the TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity” [below], who explores how we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. “Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences.”

Another excellent post on this is, “How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci” at Wandering Ink, which details 10 aspects of creative thinking and then goes on to explain how our society quashes them. They include:

1. Intense and insatiable curiosity; constantly learning due to a desire to ask and answer questions

2. Constant testing of knowledge through experience and persistence; accepting of and learning from mistakes

3. Fully noticing and observing things with all senses, but especially sight (seeing things that others miss, seeing the details)

4. An acceptance of ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty out of a realization that life is not black and white (also an art technique using shadow famous for its use in da Vinci’s paintings)

5. Interest in both the arts and sciences and interdisciplinary work that combines them

6. Keeping one’s body in good shape; attending to nutrition, fitness, and general physical well-being

7. Acceptance and appreciation for the interconnectedness of everything in life; interdisciplinary approaches and thinking

8. Energy and desire to focus intensely on one’s work and interests (often the same thing); merging of work and play

9. Confidence, willingness to take risks, and tolerance of failure – Willing to continue on with creative work despite rejection; ability to sell oneself and one’s talents

10. Independence, introversion (from various studies on creative genius) – Willingness to spend lots of time alone working and honing skills; acceptance of possible isolation

Images: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog/2006/10/
http://bedfordcommunityorchestra.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/creativity1.jpg

This is already being pilloried by tabloid “experts” who lament the loss of the Anglocentric canon. Their implied argument, as expressed in the pithily titled, At sea in Junk, but classics ahoy, that meaning is solely located in 17th-19th century British novels ignores the realities of how we receive and create information and knowledge and how we reflect our experiences through language and image in the 21st century world. One such argument in the article above is that “camera angles in the Australian movie Ten Canoes, which is spoken mainly in the indigenous language Ganalbingu, or deconstructing a website on multiculturalism would hardly seem to have much to do with the study of English in high school.” The article, of course, ignores the inclusion of Hamlet, As You Like It, Richard III, John Donne’s poetry and Jane Eyre to name a few.

This course offers students an engaging and meaningful mix of “important” classics and alternative film and fiction from Shakespeare, Blake, Mary Shelley to Blade Runner, Run, Lola, Run and Lost in Translation. When I studied the equivalent course in 1992, it was the sole precinct of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats and Coleridge. While I loved these works, the course was so homogenised and limited in its appeal that in a sizeable co-ed school, not one boy chose to do the course. Students have the right to be able to study more contemporary texts that reflect their own experiences. This is especially so given that the study of English is the one mandatory course and it was heartening to hear that a key determinant in the choice of these new texts was a consideration of what students would find appealing. It is also promising that the course recognises that students need to have the skills to analyse the multi-modal forms that are the predominant sources of their information.

The board states that this “literary feast” “provides a broad mix of Australian content, classic and contemporary literature and film for students of HSC Standard, Advanced and Extension 1 English and English as a Second Language courses.

There is still a strong contingent of classic authors including Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Henry Lawson, but there are also many modern stories such as David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

The new print texts include 11 Australian fiction and non-fiction books, bolstering the existing Australian content.

The new texts include:

• Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story
• Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father
• Contemporary Indigenous Plays, ‘Rainbow’s End’
• Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters
• Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air
• Penguin Banjo Paterson Collected Verse.

New films for study include Rolf De Heer’s Ten Canoes, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Stephen Frears’ The Queen.”

He says: “For over a hundred years our education system has been putting students in small desks in straight rows and trying to force them to remain enthralled for hours on end.”

“If you are one of the teachers who has been trying to enthrall your students constantly and have been frustrated by this experience, today is the day to stop pursuing that goal all the time. Stop trying to enthrall your students and instead strive to engage them. ”

Providing students with choices about what they learn and the ways they express their learning means that they are more likely to become personally invested in what they are learning. This opens up opportunities to make learning empowering and relevant. I can only remember one subject, Society and Culture (often criticised for its lack of academic rigour), where I had the opportunity to do this in school. I researched the “Fall of Communism” and can still remember spending hours researching and thinking about complex issues and making historical and contemporaneous connections. It seems a shame that students often have to wait until postgraduate level until they are given genuine options for self-directed learning. There are a couple of progressive courses in NSW (Australia) that offer this, Year 12 (Senior Year) English and History extension. These courses provide students with the chance to research subjects of their choice but the product they are allowed to create, in history anyway, is still confined to a traditional essay format – strictly no mashups or collaboration allowed.

Fryer discusses the way we can engage students rather than insisting that they memorise content whilst we either bore them to death by writing endless notes on the board or attempt to ‘enthrall” them with tricks a ringmaster would envy. The key is helping students to become experts, rather than demanding that they sit still, stay “on task” and listen for hours on end. Teachers, he says, can encourage “students to collaborate with each other to create authentic knowledge products that reflect their true understanding, perception and mastery of the subject being studied and devise assessment and have students help devise assessments that cannot be faked: A worksheet or study guide will not suffice.”

We can measure our success by:

• the number of questions students ask and strive to answer in their products
• the amount of higher level thinking reflected in the products they make together
• the choices have to learn, express, create and share their ideas

Thanks Wes, I’m going to hang up my leotard for a while…

Photo: Matt Miegel

He rightly says that: “I want my students to realize that learning is not about making your work conform to some standard imposed by the teacher. Learning is about creating your own standards and adjusting them based on your goals. Learning is about setting your own goals and monitoring your own progress. It is about having conversations with yourself and others.”

I thought of Foucault’s comment about criticism, which sum of the type of writing I mean; writing that “would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better … It would not be a sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.”

Graphic from: http://www.youthchg.com/

Constructivism in the 21st century – what is it and am I doing it?

Anyone with an interest in using technology to enhance learning will constantly hear the term “constructivist” bandied about. I thought that I’d attempt to articulate my own understanding of constructivism and reflect on how I (attempt) to apply it in the classroom. In the past year, I have used wikis and blogs with my classes with varying success. I decided to incorporate these tools to help students be co-creators of knowledge and to facilitate team work, critical thinking and multi-modal literacy skills. An interesting aspect I discovered is that it often it is not only teachers who are attached to teacher-centred learning, so are students. Many students would prefer you to be the “sage on the stage”; to stand up the front and tell them “the” answer because this is easier – learning to think for yourself is hard work.

So, what is constructivism?

Constructivism represents a paradigmatic shift from learning based on a teacher-centric, largely passive, instructional approach (known as behaviourism) to student-centred, active, collaborative learning based on “guided and, increasingly, independent investigation of questions and problems for which there is no single answer.”
Constructivism is, in some ways, a reaction to behaviourist epistemology, which is based on the idea that students’ brains are like empty buckets, which teachers fill up with “objective” knowledge (apologies to WB Yeats). According to Elizabeth Murphy, behaviourism is closely tied to objectivism, a belief in the existence of reliable knowledge. As learners, the goal is to gain this knowledge; as educators, to transmit it.

In contrast, a constructivist approach is based on the idea that learners construct their own knowledge on the basis of interaction with their environment. Social constructivists emphasize that knowledge is constructed through collaboration and social interaction. Sometimes called “active” learning, a constructivist approach “provides opportunities for students to talk and listen, read, write, and reflect as they approach course content through problem-solving exercises, informal small groups, simulations, case studies, role playing, and other activities–all of which require students to apply what they are learning.”

What is student-centred learning?

The following contrasts a traditional, teacher-centered, “chalk and talk” approach with a constructivist approach. The constructivist approach shifts much more of the focus and responsibility for learning to the student.

In “Using the Web to Support Inquiry-Based Language Learning”, Bruce and Bishop summarize the key differences between traditional didactic and constructivist approaches; [old on the left, new on the right.]
Students:
* Solve problems vs ask, formulate, find new problems
* Remember the textbook vs Investigate using multiple sources/media
* Follow directions vs create, engage actively in learning
* Work alone vs discuss, analyze, and collaborate; evaluate diverse views
* “Cover” the curriculum vs reflect, evaluate, learn how to learn

So, am I doing this?

English

Download Video: Posted by cinbarnsley at TeacherTube.com.
My Year 10 English class has just completed a “War and Protest” Unit. We explored persuasive language techniques, various purposes of protest texts and analysed the efficacy of verbal and visual techniques. Last year, the assessment for this required students to “Present 3 to 5 minute oral using power point on a protest text of your own choosing. Write a 300 word reflection of one other presentation. Compare it to your own work.”
The thought of sitting through another 25 PowerPoints made me shudder. I also thought that it would be a more authentic task if students had the opportunity to create their own protest text, which addressed: “What is the most pressing problem in the world today? What can we do about it?” Students had the choice of presenting their text as either a podcast or video, which we would view and discuss and then publish on our class blog, hopefully for others to view and comment on.
Their digital protest texts are fantastic and cover a diverse range of topics from poverty, youth suicide, racism, stereotyping, war, nationalism, the use of fossil fuels, the blood diamond trade and genocide.

History

My history class recently created a wiki on the causes of international terrorism. Students worked in small groups and each chose a particular terrorist group to research with the aim of creating our own terrorism “wikipedia”. Students had to develop the parameters of their research by following these guidelines:

In your research Wiki you should:
• develop five to six questions to direct your research
• consult at least five different primary sources of information
• construct report-style notes (with heading, subheadings and paragraphs) in the wiki explaining the key features and issues
• organise your notes and visuals into a logical sequence to answer the questions you have posed, within the word limit allocated (2000 words)
• use visual aids to help illustrate the issues (Visual aids may include: maps, photographs, graphs, video, diagrams, timelines).
• compile a bibliography of the references you have used

Students became the “experts” on their particular group and presented their findings in the wiki as well as to the group in an oral presentation so they could answer questions about their research. We also had an university lecturer, who specialises in terrorism and law come in and discuss the complexitities of categorising terrorist groups. We could have used a textbook with a more neatly defined parameters or I could have delivered lectures on each group and had them recall the information but I wanted students to dive into this vast pool of information, come out with their own interpretation and debate and justify their findings.

The “results” of this approach are difficult to quantify. Students completed reflective tasks following the presentations and their responses, while anecdotal, reveal that their engagement with the material was high. They had a solid understanding of a range of abstract concepts and made insightful connections between the past and present. They believed that using a wiki enhanced their learning and that they could use these skills in different contexts. But will this bear out in exam results? Does this matter? It worried me that some students’ grasp of content – key terms, events and dates – was weaker than I thought it would be. I don’t know how significant this is. Is the process more important than the memorising the content or are they equally important? I’m taking heart from more experienced teachers than I, like David Warlick, who wrote in a recent post that: “I continue to maintain that when we can not clearly predict our children’s future, it becomes much less important what they are learning, and much more important how they are learning it, and what they are doing with it.”

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. W.B. Yeats

Sources: Constructivist Learning Design
http://www.stemnet.nf.ca/~elmurphy/emurphy/cle2b.html
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/approach.htm
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/learning/wiki/wikiworld.htm
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/approach.htm
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/construct.html