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

Over the past month or so I have been trying to read Disrupting Class by Clay Christensen.  Very unintentionally I have gone about this task in a very non-linear, web 2.0 kind of way.  As I started reading I came across an interview with Michael Horn on the Seedlings show that gave me some idea where the book was going.  I then noticed that a Disrupting Class Book Talk group had been started on the Seedlings Ning and that someone else was posting reflections.  I’m the sort of person that learns best when I can bounce ideas off of other people so this potential space for an online discussion really motivated me to really read and think about the ideas in this book.  I’m sure this same process would work really well for certain kinds of students.

I haven’t quite finished reading, but these are my take-away ideas so far:

• The reason that technology has not had a significant impact on student learning so far is that it has been implemented within the existing school framework and as such it has managed to improve how schools do what they do (teach to the middle; motivate extrinsically; teach to certain intelligences) but it has not helped the populations of students that traditionally don’t do well at school.  Christensen suggests that in order to for technology to transform education and truly help students individualise their school experience it needs to be introduced in the areas where the present framework doesn’t apply (what he calls the nonconsumers).  It is here that the technology can come into it’s own, the glitches can be worked out and it’s true transformative effects can be showcased.  Once they have proven their worth these technologies will work their way from the fringes into the center of our school systems, thereby disrupting the old paradigm.  They see online/e-learning as the area where disruptive technologies will work their way into our school systems.  This argument made a lot of sense to me and I wondered whether the same approach might work with teachers trying to use technology in their classrooms; if they first used technology to address a part of their classroom practice that they were unhappy with then they might be more willing to take a risk and try something new.
• In the future web 2.0 tools will allow everyone to be a teacher and everyone to be a learner.  They envision a future in which the online tools for creating content are sophisticated enough to allow anyone to create content and share it online.  This content would be modular so that different bits from different places could be fit together to create personalised lessons and courses that meet each student’s individual learning needs.  They see this content as being produced by and for a “user network” that drives the creation of new content and rates existing content.  This is a really powerful vision and I know that I haven’t done it justice.  I really liked the idea that in this context students become teachers of other students.  There was great quote along the lines of: “Teaching
  something is the best way to learn because you have to format material in a
  way consistent with your intelligence type”, that I really agree with.

I’ve been trying to figure out what this modular, user generated online learning environment could look like in the context of the tools available today, these are my ideas so far:

• Blog posts and Podcasts on certain topics could be aggregated into an online course assuming they are tagged in a way that they can be found.
• Mathcasts could be created by students in one class and rated could be used by other students to learn.
• Online flashcards like at Quizlet can be created by one user, improved by others and then shared with the rest of the community.
• Wiki pages on different topics can be created and shared by teams of students.

I have to admit I have found this vision of individualised learning facilitated by web 2.0 tools and user networks very compelling.  The piece that is still missing for me is the motivation and study skills needed for a student to be successful in an online environment.  This was really brought home to me recently when I read these blog posts by Ken Allen and Claire Thompson.

Recently I signed my grade 8 technology class to be a Sounding Board for the Flat Classroom Project Wikis on Uploading, Workflow Software and Wireless Connectivity.  We were assigned the task of reading through these three wikis and providing feedback on: Content (clarity, quantity); Communication (between the students as collaborators) and Wiki Presentation (design, use of graphics, layout).

I have a class of 15 students so I assigned 5 students to each wiki.  I wanted them to assess the wiki individually before they decided on what their group feedback would be, so I used our school`s Google Apps account and it worked really well.

First I shared the assignment with them as a viewable Google Document.  This way I could include the links they would follow to get to all the wiki pages.  Then I had them start a new document of their own with the headings:

List 3 things that are very good about this wiki project.
List 2 suggestions for improving the wiki page.
List 1 piece of new knowledge our group has obtained thanks to this wiki page.

They filled in their individual documents while looking through their assigned wiki page and then shared their answers with the rest of their team using the share feature in Google Docs.

Next they created a new team document with the same headings as their individual one but shared between all members of the team.  They then read through each other`s answers and cut and pasted the ones they thought were the best ones into the shared group document.  I showed them how to use comments and they edited their final document as a team using comments and the chat feature in Google Apps.

For the final piece I put each of their team responses up on the screen at the front of the class and we did the final edits as a class.  I was then able to turn their work into a webpage and put the link on the Sounding Board wikis.

The process was really smooth.  It provided me with both individual and group work I could assess (although this wasn`t for marks) and they managed to produce some really great work in a short period of time.