Valedictory speech

I was reading a post on the Startl blog site. It contains a valedictory speech from a student named Erica Goldson. In it, she takes some pretty good shots at how schools drum the creativity out of students. She claims that she excelled at school, yet learned very little. She wonders if the students who doodled in class went on to be famous artists, leaving her as an "obedient, non-creative learner" (my words). Excelling for the sake of excelling instead of learning as she writes.
It reminds me a lot of my first year educational philosophy class. We were asked to read papers on the purpose of schools. One paper in particular stated that the purpose of school is to socialize a work force that would work according to an acceptable social structure. I have posted a blog post with a video describing a similar view.

Erica's speech has made me think of my quest to empower creative, self-directed, critical thinkers in my classroom. Is it possible for students to be all of the above without at first developing "educational obedience" and great work habits, reaching superior standards of effort and performance on lower level foundational skills? How much work can be done on collaboration, creativity and critical thinking if the knowledge base and habits of mind are not hammered in first?

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of "The Tipping Point ", talks about the 10000 hour rule. This rule is one that states to reach excellence at any task, you must spend three times a week for a decade honing your skills. Gladwell seems to be supporting the need for schools to be places where much of the time is spent on foundational skills and knowledge.

The other day I was talking to a grade two teacher about how she could use technology to teach higher order thinking. Her first comment was that her class needed to learn how to write a sentence and could use a computer to do that, in the process learning how to save files and to type. Although this hardly seems to justify a tool as powerful as a computer, this seems hard to argue with, in part because I know so little about teaching grade twos.

Of course this story doesn't negate the necessity of teaching higher order thinking, creativity and collaboration to grade twos. It simply reminds me how difficult it is to practice these skills if the student knowledge and skill base is low.

Many, many years ago I went to an inservice put on by a teacher who was visiting from China. At the end of the day, I approached him and asked him if he thought that the North American educational system taught creativity differently than in China. He responded by telling me about how children were taught art in China. They were required to practice writing their characters for literally hours per day, for years. Brush strokes and subtle differences in texture needed years to perfect. His point was much the same as Gladwell's, that great artists spend time on the tedious before they accomplish the glorious.

I wonder sometimes if I get this backwards.

How to Boil a Frog

If you haven't checked out the movie "How to Boil a Frog", have a look. It is very funny and addresses climate change from a unique perspective. More important than that, the founder uses the power of the internet, specifically Youtube, as a social action tool. He calls for people who don't like what they see to video it and send it to him. A very good example of 21st century social action, crowdsourcing, collaboration and creativity.


I believe that we need to teach our students 21st century vocabulary even though they are immersed in social media. They need to be taught how to be creative, collaborative, socially active, critical thinkers and crowdsourcers in a positive and productive way.


How are you teaching these skills in your school?

Give it time, donkey?

I was talking to a colleague of mine who had just read an article in the Globe and Mail about technology and schools. The writer's point was that schools will become 21st century schools in time, no matter what we do to speed it along. Too many people are living with the tools of the 21st century for schools to stay in the dark ages for much longer. Given enough time, schools will adjust accordingly.

This reminds me of a conversation I have had with a friend of mine. I have not seen this friend for a long time and have not asked his permission to use his name, so he will remain nameless. He was a guest presenter at one of my school camps. He was the "traditional knowledge keeper". He was there as an amazingly gifted First Nations teacher. His expertise was based on years of interviewing First Nations elders. I loved his cultural backgound and perspective. He taught us all a lot. We got into a conversation about healing the relationship between First Nations people and non-First Nations people. He told me that he thought that since the wounds in the relationship took two hundred years to acrue, time was the main thing needed for true healing.

Healing for First Nations people will happen. Changing our schools for 21st century learners may well happen if we do nothing but wait for it to evolve. Positive change is coming, perhaps I can hurry it along.

Joe Bower on 21st century education

Joe Bower ususally posts about the evils of grading and testing (I agree with him). He has written a post recently that is about 21st century education. I am convinced that many teachers don't have clue what we are talking about when we say 21st century education. Joe Bower does a great job of reminding us of something I say all the time, "Great teaching is great teaching, always has been always will be!"

He says it in a more eloquent way. The great minds of learning and psychology have framed progressive education years ago. Collecting knowledge and thinking have not been the same thing forever and men like Piaget have described this to us long ago. Arguably, the main difference in 21st century education is that technology alows us to not spend so much time accumulating lower order knowledge and to persue higher order thinking. (creativity, collaboration, critical thinking)

Joe writes:

If we really care about getting school reform right in the 21st Century, then we have to go back to two men from the previous century who have framed how we think of truly progressive education - John Dewey and Jean Piaget.Dewey's message focused on democracy as a way of life, not just a form of government, and that "thinking is something that emerges from our shared experiences and activities."

Piaget taught us that "even very young children play an active role in making sense of things, 'constructing' reality rather than just acquiring knowledge.If we take the work of Dewey and Piaget seriously, we have to acknowledge that the best kind of education we can provide our children has nothing to do with the date on the calendar and more to do with understanding how children learn.In the end, I have one question about the 21st Century: will the politicians and policy makers figure out what Dewey and Piaget figured out in the 20th Century, and will they listen to the modern day education experts such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao and Constance Kami."

When you try to convince your staff of the need to be a 21st century school, you can frame it with reference to what Piaget and Dewey have taught us years ago?

Webcasts for Teachers

Curriculum Services Canada has a website that posts webcasts for teachers. This is another great example of the variety of learning resources for teachers on-line. Why not consider making this part of your RSS/google reader feeds. Examples of the available webcasts are:

Engaging boys

Teacher Learning- Critical Pathways

Critical Literacy

School Effectiveness Framework

All Children Can Achieve

Diana Rhoten: "We are not waiting on superman, we are empowering superheroes"

I have been reading about the movie "Waiting for Superman" which is about schools in the U.S. Although I have not seen it, Diana Rhoten writes about it in one of the most thoughtful posts I've read in a while. I would really urge you to check out her entire post, I have added her blog to my feeds and look forward to more.

According to Rhoten, the main message of the movie is that the education system in the U.S. is failing kids and their families left and right. Furthermore, the movie claims that the adults in the system – particularly, the teachers unions – are responsible for letting the public-school system devolve to the state of crisis it’s in today.

According to Rhoten, all of the recommendations the movie makes for fixing schools have been tried before and they haven't worked.

She says, "I believe we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning." Her plan to re-think involves three assumptions (see her blog for full text).

Assumption 1:

"The future of education is about learning not schooling. If we continue to limit our thinking about education to 28 students,1 teacher,1500 square feet between the hours of 8 to 3, we are condemning today’s fourth graders to exactly the same educational experience that I got in 1976, that my father got in 1946, and that his father got in 1916.

And, as long as we constrain ourselves to thinking about education in terms of these traditional parameters of schooling and not frame the conversation about learning as something that happens anywhere, anytime, by default we limit our ability to imagine alternatives that could actually get us out of the crisis we’re in today."

Many others have said that the same thing.

Assumption 2:

"Technology is not an end in itself but a means to an end, and that end is better learning....

.... to date most of technology applications in the education sector have been about increasing the efficiency of institutional schooling rather than improving the efficacy of individual learning. But, what if we designed new technologies for the learner rather than the school administrator?"

I believe that we are talking about a change in the culture of schools. My own experiences prove that even realizing culture changes within my own classroom are not easy.

Assumption 3:

..."We don’t believe in simply throwing technology over the fence and seeing what happens....

...Our vision of technologically enabled learning is not one of the lone child sitting at her desktop (or laptop) passively consuming PDFs or browsing Web pages. We believe the potential of technology for learning is much greater. We believe its power resides in its ability to deliver active and interactive experiences where a learner participates in the very construction of knowledge by crafting and curating, mixing and re-mixing information with digital tools, a process which can be and should be greatly augmented by online and offline social interactions between friends, in a community of peers, or an extended network of people (both professional and amateur) who share her interests."

She gives her three aspirations.

Aspiration 1:

"We want to be disruptive in our work. Our goal is to “shock the system” by bringing to light concrete, real life, radical examples of what the future of learning could really look like. Both in terms of the technological tools and the social contexts. If we are doing business as usual, we will have failed. "

Aspiration 2:

"We see our work as taking place on the edges....Better to demonstrate what could be than to wait for what might be."

Innovation often means initial failures.

Aspiration 3:

"We want to work with thinkers and doers, makers and movers beyond the “usual suspects.”Our success depends on our ability to recruit talented folks who haven’t necessarily considered themselves stakeholders in the system before and to engaging their expertise, their insights, and their resources to solve this problem."

She goes on to say that people working in the system are needed and important as well. In my opinion, it's about time we listened to and empowered the innovators or our public schools will be the subject of the next high profile movie.

Don't Forget Who We Are Teaching!

This video from Learn Alberta reminds me to see the students as young adults with the potential to do practically anything with their lives, in spite of my teaching. I always try to keep in mind that they will all be adults one day and will have an opinion as to whether or not I did my job well.