Tech Ed-dy

I have just finished reading a really fascinating article called How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.  The main gist of the article is that throughout history underdogs have had unbelievable success when they decide to compete on their own terms rather than conventional terms.  In the David vs Goliath battle David

hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine

rather than battling toe to toe with Goliath.  Of course, he also chose to fight with a sling and stones rather than swords.

The article then goes on to describe a breathtaking array of examples where the underdog won for two main reasons (the two parts of the insurgent’s creed): being willing to go against the conventions of society (do what is “socially horrifying) and being willing to work harder than anyone else (which takes courage).  In the end victory in these examples came down to effort.

Effort can trump ability – legs … can overpower arms – because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Threaded throughout the article is a story about a middle school girls basketball team that enjoyed incredible success despite being inexperienced and not very skilled.  Their secret was the full court press.  In short they tried harder than the other team.  When there was a turnover they didn’t run back to their side of the court to defend, they tried to get the ball back.  They didn’t bother covering the person throwing the ball, instead they focused their energies on getting to the ball before the other players.  They played by their own rules and had incredible success as a result.  The article goes on to describe the career of a college coach called Rick Pitino who went on to use the full court press to win championships with teams that didn’t have many all star, potential NBA, style players on them.  It was obviously a very successful strategy, but it was never widely adopted because it took too much work.  Pitino described his workouts this way:

The players are moving almost ninety-eight percent of the practice.  We spend very little time talking.  When we make corrections they are seven second corrections, so our heart rate never rests.  We are always working.

The implications for how I run my classroom seem obvious.  It’s really such a simple observation that effort and motivation are the keystones of effective learning that I wonder why I don’t always see it?  I can get so caught up in either the content or the particular output that I want them to produce that I am not always asking myself what I am doing to keep them motivated.  Sometimes I am guilty of assuming that if I badger them enough they will somehow find it in themselves to be truly interested in what I want them to learn, when deep down I know that the only really useful thing I have to teach my students is a love of learning.

If we don’t treat motivation as intrinsic (or something that can be turned on and off as a result of badgering my a teacher), then we can start to explore the things that really motivate in a classroom.  I can come up with three:

1. Control.  As I understand it, if our students don’t feel in control of their learning their hypothalamus  has been triggered.  They are in some sort of fight or flight mode.  When this happens information gets backlogged in their “primitive brain” and never makes it to their cortex for processing.  So whatever I teach them will never stick.  Conversely if students feel that they are being listened to and have some control of the process then it stands to reason they will be willing to invest more in the process.
2. Choice.  This is linked to control as having choices helps students feel in control.  Cathy Nunley does a brilliant job with this in her Layered Curriculum Model.  I taught Science with this model for a few year and was amazed at how motivated my students were, I couldn’t stop them working!
3. Value.  In order for effort to be valued there needs to be a reward linked to the effort.  Of course we have grades, but often grades are a mystery and if the direct path from effort to reward is not obvious then how can I expect grades to motivate?  Using rubrics and being clear about grading schemes can obviously help here, but even then grades have very little intrinsic value.  They are all about getting something;  for example, if you get good grades you can go to university.  Portfolios and exhibitions are a lot more work than just giving grades but it seems to me that the social aspect of the feedback received in these situations carries a lot more value than grades.

Finally, I wonder how all this will play out as more and more courses go online?  In my experience online courses are wonderful for students who are already motivated and willing to put in the effort.  But if I don’t physically have the student in my classroom, what can I do to motivate them to buy into the “full court press”?

Photo by Sebastia Giralt on Flickr

These are all great videos and slideshows.  I’m sure there are lots of common threads but I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by it all.  So my plan is to park them all here and come back from time to time.

21st Century Pedagogy by Marco Torres

21st century schools with Stephen Heppell

Some great presentation zen style slideshows by Kim Cofino.

The 21st Century Learner

The 21st Century Educator

I recently received an email response from someone kind enough to read my most recent blog posts.  The response was honest and thoughtful and I couldn’t get it out of my head.  I responded by email and was given permission to post my response here.  The quotes are the original email remarks.

I am a little more skeptical though.  Over the past 2000 years, ‘classical education’ (is there such a thing?) has delivered the greatest minds known to us; the scientists, the poets, the musicians, the architects, engineers, linguists and, above all, the philosophers.

I`m not convinced that the Industrial model of education that we have today IS the type of education that has existed over the past 2000 years.  It has been argued that our current system emerged as a way to mass educate students to participate in an industrial society.  Before that education consisted of more of an apprenticeship model.  This learning happened in a social context that gave the content real world relevance.  I`m not an expert on what it was like to be an apprentice but I would guess that it involved a lot of conversation and working through problems with other people you trust and respect.  I think that the power of these new internet tools and Personal Learning Networks is that they can allow us and our students to go out and find mentors andpeople we trust and learn with and from them.  Sort of like a high tech apprenticeship-mentoring model.

Your comment makes me think of Einstein, who we hold up as one of the greatest minds of our time.  He did not do well in our `Classical`schooling system and for most of his professional career worked through his ideas and thoughts in letters to colleagues.  Think what he could have accomplished if he had had a blog

I fear is that we lack the rigour that produced the great Renaissance men; that technology is raising very clever young people, but also ones that lack the discipline, work ethic and insight to change the world we have created.

I share your concern that because project based learning and social learning is more complex and dynamic than more traditional classroom learning there is a danger of students being distracted and not learning about rigour.  But if you start with the premise that PBL and social learning is real learning then I think our challenge is to introduce rigour into the process, not be put off by the fact that it is difficult to do.  I see the MYP design cycle as being a useful way to start doing this.

Maybe there is a balance between these two polar views?

I think this is the key.  In my experience in order for students to really engage in higher level explorations they first need to be taught the content and skills to build on.  There will always be a place for direct instruction, but I don`t think we should just automatically default to this way of teaching.  After reading Disrupting Class this year I have started using an online math program twice a week to give my students more autonomy in how they learn math in my class.  I am still doing some direct instruction for the students that need it and I am doing regular checks for understanding, but I am really impressed with how many of my students are able to figure things out for themselves using the tools I have made available to them.

Image by smiling_da_vinci on Flickr

Right now my brain is obsessed with 21st century professional development and what it looks like.  In my last post I suggested that this needs to start with teachers learning how to leverage the power of certain tools to start building a PLN.

I recently came across a post by Kim Cofino called The Next Generation Conference that I think had some more practical insights into what makes for a really successful pro-d event.  She suggests that in order for a conference to be exciting, engaging and community-building it needs to include the following:

We need to make conferences more practical, not just hands on training with new tools, but a focus on the actual creation of something that bridges new learning with what you already know, and asks you to create something useful.

I agree completely.  I think the trade off is that creating something new and meaningful takes time and often at a conference or training session participants and organisers are focused on filling up the time with as much content as possible.  Often when I am at a conference I feel frustrated when 3 sessions I want to attend all happen at the same time and I can’t get to them all.  I feel like my role as a participant is to be a gatherer of content.  If I was asked to enage in meaningful creation and collaboration at a conference then I think I would get frustrated because I wouldn’t be able to collect as much “stuff”. In order for me to be able to by into a pro-d opportunity that focusses on creation I would need to be prepped to go into the entire process with a different attitude.  So how can that happen?

I would love to see a conference where attendees were grouped the first day, and spent the whole conference reconnecting in various formats with a group leader.

All groups could have an ongoing task that lead you through the conference, asking participants to put their new knowledge to work, building on each plenary and presentation session, and then culminating in the production of something practical and useful during a hands on workshop time.

In order to ensure that there was enough cross-pollination across all conference attendees, the group action projects could be structured in such a way that each group is required to interact with members from the other groups in order to complete their project.

I really like this idea beacause it gives the conference/pro-d attendees a framework for thinking about and using their new knowledge.  It also spreads out the group/creation process over a longer period and intersperses it with plenary sessions and practical sessions that would make me feel like I was getting my money’s worth out of the event.

Students could do … sessions on how to use new tools or on what they’re doing with technology outside of school, or what they’d like to see in school (imagine that?). What about having students as experts on a panel discussion of what schools should be doing with technology? Or how technology has changed the way they receive, create and distribute information?

This one has gotten me thinking.  At my school we have some older students that use technology in incredibly savvy ways (they are linus experts, run their own web servers, jail break their iphones) and they tell us that they don’t see technology being a big part of their schooling because they don’t think we can catch up with them.  It would be great to have them involved in helping train and tutor teachers on how to use new tools.  This would have two potential benefits: 1) Teachers would become more aware of how these tools are an integral part of many of their student’s lives and 2) It would free up time for more big picture discussions around curriculum and pedagogy.

No matter how much you know about a topic, there is always a need for discussion after an engaging session. After each session, a group leader could facilitate an unconference style discussion, with a focus question or Visible Thinking routine to get people processing the information.

It’s amazing to me that this doesn’t happen more often.  In our classrooms we are always talking about Blooms Taxononomy and Constructivism but when it comes to our own learning we often default to the lowest level of Blooms.  Maybe it’s because that’s the way many of us were taught and it’s the mode we are the most comfortable with.

Picture by netopNyrop on Flickr

Will Richardson recently wrote

the real power of the Read/Write is not the ability to publish but the ability to connect.

This really resonated with me and I think provides a key to unlocking really powerful Professional Development opportunities.  I’ll try and explain my thinking below.

I need to start with my own experiences.  After a few years as a lurker, this year I have stared to participate more actively in the social web.  I have started to blog, I have involved my students in a global collaborative project, I have participated in Ning discussions, and I have tried to comment and not just read blog posts.  Recently I am starting to realise the power of Twitter.  I knew about all these tools a year ago, but it wasn’t until I started to use them personally that I began to understand just how powerful networked learning is.  My network is small, but through the process of sharing my thoughts and experiences (both good and bad) I have started to make contacts with like-minded teachers throughout the world.  This fledgling network has not only taught me a lot, but it has also supported me as I struggle with ideas and different ways of teaching.

I have learned a lot from my network and been more inspired than I have ever been in more formal professional development situations.  Not that face-to-face interactions aren’t important, but when the interactions at a face-to-face event are restricted to the faces in the room the potential is restricted.  If instead each of the individuals involved is connected to a Personal Learning Network (PLN) and they all bring that network with them to the face-to-face meetings, the connections and potential increase exponentially.

In my opinion effective 21st century professional development needs to start with the Networked Learning piece.  All participants in the event need to be supported as they learn how to build an effective PLN.  The question is, what would this look like?  Well, in my opinion there would be blogs; there would be commenting on blogs; there would be RSS and aggregators involved so that the power of pulling information can be realised; there would be social bookmarking and folksonomies; and maybe there would be VoIP?  The key would be to set all of this up so that real connections are made and that the platform used is flexible enough that it can beused far into the future.

One obvious platform for supporting networked pro-d is Ning.  I think that a Ning in principle is a great idea in that it combines a lot of the key ingredients in one central platform.  Participants can blog and tag their posts, participate in forums and grab RSS feeds from differet kinds of content.  The danger of creating a new Ning to support a particular event is that the Ningwill never gather enough momentum to sustain itself.  There are a lot of Nings out there gathering dust because they never managed to get all the ingredients right.  Blogging on a Ning is also a little problematic in that then then the Blog is always attached to the Ning and doesn’t necessarily become something individual that represents each particular teacher.  As such the danger is that the blog will only remain active as long as the pro-d does.

So what are some alternative platforms?  I like the Ning platform but I wonder whether there is a need to create a new Ning when there are so many good ones out there already.  If a goal of the pro-d is to help teachers start to create a PLN then wouldn’t it be more effective to start a group within an already established network like the Classroom 2.0 Ning?  I also think that the more you an customise the online space from which you share and network the more likey you are to stick with it.  The Ning blogs are for the most part quite generic.  I think that there would be a greater chance of participants continuing to blog if they atart with a platform like Edublogs or Blogger that allows for much more customisation.

What about the tools?  I am a believer in just in time and inquiry learning, but in my own experience there is also a place for direct instruction to provide a baseon which further explorations can build.  I believe that in order for teachers to start building a PLN they first need to understand the fundamentals of: how a blogging platform works; RSS and how to populate a feed reader with relevant and engaging information; tagging and folksonomies and how these have changed the way information is organised.  I believe that these topics need to be taught directly because they are fundamental to creating and sustaining an effective PLN.

What about lesson plans, teaching and curriculum?  In theory once participants at a pro-d session have started to build their PLNs they will have access to a wide range of lesson plans that iincorporate web 2.0 tools and will be able to read reflections on how those lessons went.  They will be able to read reflections by teachers trying to implement the kind of curriculum that rally leverages the power of technology.  They will be able to look for links between the experiences of other teachers and their own teaching practices. And they will be able to engage in deeper and more meaningful face-to-face interactions because they will be drawing on the experiences of their network.

What about the keynote speaker?  I think that their role is to share inspiring examples and stories that illustrate the power of Networked Learning.  They should also inspire good questions.  participants should emerge from the keynote understanding the importance of life long learning and be excited to start tackling the hard questions with the help of their PLNs.

Am I crazy?  Is this too hard to facilitate?  I don’t know.  But I do know that professional development that does not help teachers leverage the power of the internet by building robust Personal Learning Networks runs the risk of only having a short term impact, not a life long one.

Network Diagram by Sue Waters