My Thanks To …

My thanks to Cheryl Barnard for donating copies of her book “Beyond Survival, Thriving in Your First Years of Teaching” to the recent Reform Symposium 2011, one of which I was lucky enough to win.

A Review

The book is aimed, as the title suggests, at new teachers, and I recommend it to teachers who are about to go into their first school.

It is written in a conversational style, and Cheryl shares her own disasters and triumphs with her readers, providing a road map of the sorts of emotions that new teachers might expect to encounter, and suggests ways in which readers might handle those emotions.

The book is well-organised into nine chapters, providing good coverage of the issues. Each chapter is further broken down into four parts:

1. A description of a situation or related situations in which she has found herself, followed by her responses to them;
2. A list of questions which the reader is invited to consider and answer, with space thoughtfully provided below each question where readers can make their own notes;
3. Some practical tips that readers might like to try in the classroom;
4. Additional sources of information.

Cheryl’s warm personality shines through every page.

Publication Details

Publisher: Deep Roots Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-4538-4097-9 (paperback)
Date: 2010

An Apology to Sue

This post, and its link to a Google Docs page, all started with my gently teasing Sue about her being prone to accidents: perhaps we should run a sweepstake on it. She then went public on it, much to my astonishment, and I found myself in a position of having to prepare a sweepstake, and what is more to make it public.

A Situation Rich With Possibilities

As I write this post, there is a riot of questions all vying for my attention. Here are a few of them:

• How can I make it fun for everybody?
• How can I stop the Google document being wrecked?
• Will it even work?

Well, there is nothing for it but to dive in and try it.

Sue’s Recent Mishaps (The Ones She’s Admitting To)

People entering the sweepstake will of course want to “study form” before “placing their bets”, so I include here two images, supplied by Sue, of her two most recent “incidents”:

You can read Sue’s stories about these mishaps at http://suewaters.com/2010/07/15/the-story-behind-that-twitteraholic-post/ along with a collection of pictures at http://yfrog.com/hsmlhzhj. (And “… my story remains that the concrete pillar was driving on the wrong side of the road!” sounds very unlikely to me, Sue!)

Placing Your Bets

You can enter the sweepstake by going to https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AVoNw1Jk7Ya9ZGM0djQybjlfMDJoNW0yNGZ6&hl=en&authkey=CNiOtqEN. You will need a Google identity before you can change it, though.

It all meant to be a bit of harmless fun: read the “Rules” at the top of the document 🙂 .

Spread the word about this!

Just Mucking Around

Thanks to all those that attended the Edublogs/Elluminate serendipity session on 4-March, and all the talk about Vokis. For what it is worth, here is my first offering:

Click on the “Play” button at the bottom of the Voki.     “My creator gave me this idiot voice, and I can’t swim.”

That’s all, folks!

The Confessions of a Bibiophile

This post was partly inspired by Dan Brown’s “An Open Letter to Educators“. After some days of mulling, my grey cell finally asked itself “When was the last time you recommended a text book to your students?”. The answer is “never”.

So how do I provide texts to students, and am I using appropriate technologies? The answers are “in a variety of fashions” and “possibly”.

The Limit

While the following scenario is unlikely to happen, it is nevertheless a goal that I have in the back of my mind when preparing learning resources.

In the limit case, the only resource that I would give to my students would be a single tweet containing just one link. That link would point to an index of online resources from which the learners could pick and choose to best suit their own goals and learning styles.

Of course the limit case could only apply in special circumstances, including the requirement that all the learners felt fully at ease using Twitter.

A Dose of Reality

When I am presenting a one or two day course, I typically use a handout that ranges anywhere from 50 to 250 pages long, depending on the nature of the subject. I prefer to write the handout myself.

For other types of course, I might or might not use a 4 to 10 page handout each session, relying on electronic presentation for the balance. The nature of the electronic presentation is as varied as the course content and the learners’ own learning styles.

Does the Book Have a Future?

I believe that books have a future. I expect they become a smaller part of each student’s learning. In many subjects, it is conceivable that they will vanish altogether. In other subjects, such as the arts, and in particular the performing arts, I see them being with us for a long time.

A Good Read

Anybody who has ever downloaded a book from Project Gutenberg and compared it with reading the same book in a hard-cover format will know the immense difference between the two experiences. Bibliophiles will continue to vote with their wallets.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Bill Genereux (Twitter: @billgx, web site: http://billgx.edublogs.org/) for prompting me to write this post.

The Prompt

Bill tweeted “Just watched it again. @mwesch’s Machine is Us/ing Us. I see something new each time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE” which led to a wide-ranging discussion that we both agree has lots of avenues left to explore. This post is what I see as I look down those avenues.

The Half-Baked Ideas

Bio-Interfacing

What emerged towards the end of the time that we had available together was the idea of bio-interfacing the web (in whatever future form it might takes) and connecting directly into the human nervous system. From an ethical viewpoint, I am neutral on that issue. But there is then the question of “Would I want to?”. The answer is “Probably not.”. While I would be delighted to have a cochlear or retinal implant to solve some issue with my ever aging carcase, I would be unlikely to want to have my sensory inputs directly connected in such a fashion to any external equipment on a permanent basis.

I may be out of step with other people on this feeling. As Bill says: “a while back, I tweeted about having an implant to be directly connected to the ‘net. I was amazed at how many said yes.”

Teaching the Machine

If we admit of a world where most people are bio-connected as above, then the phrase “teaching the machine” makes sense, because we will have at least partly transformed ourselves into the Borg, and since we are all teachable as human beings, and we are all part of the same machine, we can indeed “teach the machine”.

Bill also tweeted “When we program a computer, don’t we do a rudimentary form of teaching it what we want it to do?” which I found to be a great disrupter of my thinking processes, always a welcome moment as it gives me a chance to learn. My answer to that question was at the time and still is “no”, and now I have to justify my response.

While I have yet to fully think through this concept (hence calling this post “half-baked”) the question resolves to “Can you use a reward-based scenario to reinforce a particular behavior?”. If the answer is “yes”, then you have something that is teachable, otherwise you don’t. This has a number of consequences.

If something is “teachable” (as per the above) then that implies consciousness. Moreover, it implies purpose, the purpose in this case being the seeking of reward. I have yet to see a machine that has, rather than merely simulates, purpose. This leads to points to two great thinkers in this area: Alan Turing, and Isaac Asimov.

THE TURING TEST
In essence, the Turing Test is a measure of how much a machine can make a human believe that it is also human. I have yet to see anything that even gets away from first base, let alone getting anywhere near that benchmark.

ASIMOV’S ROBOT SERIES
Isaac Asimov poses a far more interesting question in his robot series. While the possibility of robots with consciousness must be admitted, when can we say that a robot has consciousness? I do not know the answer to that question. What is worse, I do not even know what questions I would need to ask if I was presented with such a creature, and asked to assess whether or not it was truly conscious rather than just simulating consciousness: I lack the experiences which might allow me to formulate the appropriate questions.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Christopher Dawson (Twitter: @mrdatahs) for highlighting an issue with the way some students are being mis-taught.

Background

It is one of the responsibilities of a decent society is to equip its members to function effectively in their future lives. Teachers are one group of people that shoulder that responsibility.

Society changes at different rates at different times. In a society that changes slowly, most of the skills that were learned in childhood are applicable for the whole of a person’s life, and the need to learn new things is relatively uncommon. The Information Revolution has changed all that. Teachers now have an additional learning outcome for their charges: the ability to function effectively in the context of an information society.

Discussion

Ready access to information is a given for today’s students. Teachers need to harness that to continue discharging their responsibilities to the learners. Prohibiting students from using rich sources of information is an abrogation of that responsibility. Such teachers complain that the students simply copy and paste from the information sources into their responses to assignments.

The learning opportunities that are missed by this approach are mind-boggling.

One of the great challenges to today’s netizens is how to judge the quality of the information that they find on the Internet. From my own little hole in the ground, it seems that the great majority of people accept everything that they find on the Internet as accurate. While some organisations such as Wikipedia go to great efforts to ensure the accuracy of what is on their web site, others are less careful. There is also a great amount of information posted in blogs and newsgroups. Anybody who accepts all such information uncritically is living dangerously: I have seen factual inaccuracies in Wikipedia, and potentially fatal medical advice posted elsewhere.

Teachers who fail to take advantage of the learning opportunities presented by this are failing to discharge their responsibility. The complaint about copying and pasting is unsustainable. At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, give the students a choice: either research the given topic without reference to information sources that you know can be used for copy and paste, or use those sources, and give a critical appraisal of at least two of those sources. Any teachers who cannot handle this should question whether or not they are still fit for service.

I know of teachers who build such critical appraisal activities into their assignments.

Nor is this lack of focus on teaching critical appraisal skills limited to just teachers. I have yet to see a curriculum document which includes the skill of being able to judge the accuracy of information in this context. This is an equally strong condemnation of the organisations that write and maintain those documents.

Educators who read this post might want to ask the curriculum organisations in their area what those organisations are doing to address this ridiculous shortfall.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Michael Josefovicz (twitter: @ToughLoveforX) without whom this post would not have been written.

Background

Michael tweeted “#ecosys When you have a little time, I’m curious to any thoughts about http://ilnk.me/4ba9” the link pointing to this BBC article “Danish pupils use web in exams“, which raised a question about cheating and the Internet. My grey cell then became very excited about the question “Okay, what exactly is cheating?”.

The Assessment of Understanding

By “understanding” I refer to everything from the ability to recognise something through to the ability create something by transforming other things. Educators assess learners’ levels of understanding by devising various assessments.

This then raises the question of “How important is memory in the assessee?”. I guess that all educators would answer this with “It is crucial.” to which the subsidiary question is “What is important that is remembered by the assessee?”. I will address this last question by way of analogy.

I expect the next paragraph to provoke an angry reaction from some readers.

I maintain that expecting assessees to be able to fill in random parts or the whole of the periodic table is at best a waste of time and is potentially misleading as an assessment tool. The ability to perform this task relies solely on blind memory without any need whatsoever for understanding the information codified by the periodic table. A well-trained parrot would suffice. The assessment gives no information about the assessee’s ability create chemical reactions of a given nature by choosing reagents based on the chemical properties of the elements in those reagents. Phrases such as noble gases, halides and alkali metals come to mind in that context. While anybody who works regularly with a group of elements will become very familiar with the properties of those elements, and one thinks here of scientists working on novel semi-conductor devices, the requirement to assess anybody’s ability to recall the whole of the periodic table prior to going into the workplace is quite pointless.

Prior to search engines becoming a commonplace, it could be argued that having ready access to a fund of knowledge stored inside one’s own head was an essential for being able to do a job. To look something up in a reference text could take anything from a few minutes to several days depending on whether the text was available in the library in the next room, or needed to be obtained through inter-library loan. People now have access to levels of knowledge that was inconceivable 20 years ago. Rather than having to carry thousands of facts around in one’s head, what is needed today is an understanding of the context in which the question is being asked and being able to place the answers within that context. If, as I had cause to recently, I wanted to find out about the safety of an ant-killer powder that was beyond its use-by date, I needed to understand what it degraded to, the rate of degradation, and the toxicity of the result. While a practicing toxicologist could probably have given me the answer within a matter of seconds, I knew enough about the context to ask the appropriate questions and act of the answers that I found, all this in a matter of minutes.

So when we see somebody “cheating” in an exam, what are they doing? They are taking information from another source, in this case a fellow assessee. Is it legitimate to do so? Probably not, but … accessing the Internet with the correct question and being able to use the resulting answers when responding to an exam question requires an understanding of the context. In other words: “How well is the assessee able to remember the context (and everything that goes into making a context) rather than being able to merely regurgitate facts?”.

This then has significant impact on what and how we teach, and (which may be even more of a challenge) how we devise assessments to establish the assessee’s understanding of the context.

The Future

Given that Internet research is now a part of future generations’ lives, I think it is incumbent on today’s awarding bodies to take this into account when defining “conditions of assessment” (or “examination conditions” if you prefer).

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Michael Josefovicz (twitter: @ToughLoveforX) and Chris Jones (twitter: @sourcePOV), without whom this post would not have been written.

Background

Chris runs regular tweet-ups using the #ecosys hashtag, and Michael wanted to know more about one of my tweets in a recent tweet-up.

Michael’s original tweet was “@fmindlin #ecosys From what I’ve read Peer learning is a change that has demonstrable effect across many contexts. 2¢ a basic principle.” to which I replied “@ToughLoveforX (@fmindlin) #ecosys Students teaching=peer learning? I was peer teaching in what was to be my specialist subject back in 1970“. Michael wanted to know more, in particular if peer learning could work well. I asserted “@ToughLoveforX (@fmindlin) It *can* work well PROVIDED THAT the teacher monitors closely and advises *gently* #ecosys“. This post expands on that idea.

Reportage

My first experience as a student-teacher (or providing peer-learning, choose whichever phrase you prefer) was in 1970 in a then new subject (“Computer Programming”) at a moderately progressive school. About half-way through the course, I had outstripped my teacher (he was in his early 20s, and the subject was as new to him as it was to the rest of us) and I was on my own. Part of the learning process was helping learners understand what had gone wrong with their own efforts. With the teacher’s assent, I was sorting out just as many of my peers’ issues as he was.

Crucially, I had already developed my own understanding of the subject, which is a point that often seems to be missed in the “pyramid” model of teaching and learning.

Skip forward to 1999, when I was teaching computer networking to diploma level students. There was one student who knew his stuff, but who was slightly awkward socially. Now for a disruptive idea: get him to teach part of a lesson. Despite his own fears, he was extremely keen on the idea. We negotiated and agreed content, duration (about 20 minutes) and delivery mode. His delivery was almost flawless (amazing for somebody with no previous teaching experience) and he made only one factual error. His self-confidence was much improved by the experience.

There was then the issue of how to correct the factual error. The words I chose were something along the lines of “Thanks for all that. You did a wonderful job. There was only one thing that was not quite right, and it was …”. And let’s face it, what teacher does not make mistakes in the classroom?

Now to more recent experiences. I have been working with young people in a basic literacy and numeracy context. My own teaching style includes setting up an exercise, and then letting the learners get on with it, while maintaining a low as profile as I can manage. I monitor what support learners are giving each other (along with a myriad other things that I am observing). Except when a learner makes a factual error to another learner, I say nothing in that context, only intervening in the same manner that I did in 1999.

Can that level of observing be demanding? Yes, of course it is. Can it be rewarding? Yes, extremely so.

Does Peer Learning Have a Future?

Peer learning may be an under-reported classroom activity. For my money, it certainly has a future, and perhaps we should be putting a bit more emphasis on this in teacher training.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Maggie Leber (twitter: MaggieL) for prompting this post, and to Michael Fawcett (twitter: teachernz) and Michael Jozefowicz (twitter: ToughLoveforX) for previously providing me with a lot of background that has gone into this post.

Background

Regular readers will already know that I teach students with levels ranging from diploma level to the intellectually challenged. (Readers who find the last two words of the previous sentence to be offensive are invited to replace them with a non-offensive equivalent.) A recent exchange of tweets with Maggie Leber prompted me to ponder the different ways in which my students use language.

I should add that in the two cases detailed below, both students were native English speakers, and that their names have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Language Usage

Let me introduce “Betty”. She has only borderline intellectual disability (you wouldn’t know it if you met her in the street), and suffered much abuse at the hands of her stepfather when she was a child. One day in class she said to me “I want a word with you!”. Needless to say, my heart skipped a beat, but I kept an appearance of calmness. We left the classroom, and sat down together on a wall outside, at which point she poured her heart out to me. What then became immediately apparent was that she was using English in the best way that she knew how to communicate something to me that was very important to her.

Now for “Christine”. Christine was doing a Diploma level course in network engineering. One day, she took me quietly aside from the class and confided to me that she was entering a bout of mental illness (which she knew she would be able to manage) but she was worried about how it might impact on her academic progress. We agreed a course of action, and she went on to pass the course.

If anybody from the diploma course had said the same thing as Betty, it would have had a completely different meaning from the one Betty intended.

Conclusion

I had been aware of, but had not put into words, that different people use the same words to mean sometimes completely different things, and that context can be crucial in eliminating the ambiguity. It has been Maggie’s promptings that have allowed me to externalise that understanding. (As an aside, I have not found this to be made explicit in the teacher training courses or the CELTA course which I have attended.)

By way of a da capo, I would like to thank Maggie for helping to move from unconscious-competent to conscious competent in that area. This will allow me to be a more effective teacher in future.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Michael Josefowicz (twitter: ToughLoveforX) for prompting this post.

Background

Michael posted a piece titled “#ebdish Notice. Focus. Mull. Engage. Learning and Teaching” at http://sellingprint.blogspot.com/2010/08/ebdish-notice-focus-mull-engage.html. It looks at the classroom “learning cycle”. Michael invited me to have a look at it, and if I was so minded to respond to it. This post is my response.

My Own Educational Baggage

My own work as a teacher includes teaching horse riding and information technology, with students from age 6 up to retirees whose minds ranged from being intellectually disabled to far brighter than my own.

The Classroom Learning Cycle

Whenever I walk into a classroom (either physical or virtual) I always know what it is that I would like the students to have understood by the end of the lesson. I also have an outline plan of how I intend to deliver that learning.

Sometimes, the lessons go exactly to plan, but this is unusual. The main reason behind this is that students bring their own life experiences, and their own feelings with them into the classroom. I need to be aware of, and responsive to, such things as female horse riders suffering menorrhagia and Muslim students towards the end of Ramadan: both of these effect the students’ performance. Students can also cause serendipitous moments, which can make the learning go in a completely different direction. Under these circumstances, I abandon my lesson plan, and I do so with complete confidence knowing that I can deliver whatever learning is appropriate and engaging to the students at that moment.

My own classroom cycle is “plan, deliver, observe”, always with a view to what the students need to know by the end of the course.

“Planning” is what goes on inside my head.

“Delivering” could be making statements, asking questions, giving a practical demonstration, using a piece of technology, and such like activities.

“Observing” means observing the totality of the students’ responses, both at the individual level, and as a body. It includes not just listening to what they say and how they say it, but also observing their body language. This feeds straight back into my planning.

Depending on the tempo of the class, this cycle happens anything between a few times and up to 30 times every minute, the higher figure applying when the class is doing a practical when I spend most of my time just observing and planning (“Do I need to talk to that student, or should I let him struggle?”).

A Final Thought

As I was planning this post, there was at the back of my mind the issue of “lock-step teaching” where every child is taught the same thing at the same point in the school year across an entire legislature. My own reaction to this is “What a disastrous way to run an education system!”: it is treating children as automata, and you might as well replace teachers with robots.