Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today - part 2

Just finished a few more chapters in Richard Gerver's book.  Gone are the lazy afternoons when my wife and I would lounge on our front porch and absolutely devour books.  A six month old and a three month old will do that to you.

While the progress has been slow, it certainly has been worth it.

Ch. 6 - "What matters most? The knowledge vs. skills debate."

This debate will likely be eternal.

You have the traditionalists - (and I think of E.D. Hirsch Jr. when I think of this group and his classic Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know) - who argue that there are a basic set of skills that every child must be equipped with.  I also think those who drafted and developed NCLB came right out of this camp as well.

And there is a lot to like about this view of the purpose of education.  As Gerver states: these are "those who view schooling as the acquisition of knowledge, knowledge that fires the thirst and enquiry in young minds that then seeks to explore further knowledge."  When he puts it like that, what's not to like about it?

Plenty.  First, who decides what knowledge should be taught?  Second, this traditional camp gave rise to the archaic form of teaching where the wise teacher stands up in front of the room and dispenses the vital knowledge that the students - who are assumed to be void of this vital knowledge - dutifully copy into their notebooks.  Third, how do you measure the acquisition of this knowledge and how do you know students will need it after school?

In the second camp, you have the progressives.  These are those teachers (and this is where I tend to fall) who believe that while knowledge is nice and important, it is not going to do students much good if they aren't taught the skills that the real world requires.  As Gerver states: the progressives believe "that the role of schools is to prepare children to meet the open-ended problems of their life journeys."  Thus, the progresses start with the child's view and experience first and try to bring it to the skills.  Whereas the traditionalist begin with the sacred knowledge and then deliver it to the students.

Of course, there is plenty wrong with this progressive side too.  First, how can you teach skills students will need in such a fast changing world.  The technical information college freshmen acquire is likely to be outdated by the time they graduate.  So how can you teach them the skills for that?  Second, so what if a student has the skills to problem solve if they lack the grand knowledge of what it means to function well in a democracy?  Third, most of the text books and curriculum materials are not designed to teach skills as well as they are designed to teach knowledge.  Fourth, it is damn hard to teach students skills.  It's messy and treacherous.  And it doesn't even look like learning.  At least the traditionalists have a semblance of order in their classes!

The truth is, though, that to have an effective school system, you must have a strong combination of both knowledge and skills.  I don't think you can have one without the other.

Take this example - a Christian might have the knowledge from the Bible concerning Genesis and how the earth was created.  But do they have the skills to defend that view in the face of the very convincing theory of evolution?  That is one thing I enjoyed so much about Pope John Paul II.  He had those skills.  He didn't just blindly believe.  He could hold opposing view points and had the skill to analyze each and try to synthesize them.  Here is a great read on it.

Another example - take the ludicrous claim by some - namely Jenny McCarthy - that a certain vaccine leads to autism.  This is a blatant lie.  But how many people accepted that knowledge and never had any skill to question or refute it?

It seems to me that we are suffering right now in our culture a total disregard for skills.  We just accept whatever knowledge we wish to and damn the rest.  There's no need to question the ravings of Keith Olbermann or Rush Limbaugh when all we really want is their versions of knowledge to reaffirm our own beliefs.

This is what happens when the liberal arts have been cut and cut and cut.  You have a society that cannot think let alone compromise or show empathy.  Just look at Washington.

Here is an excellent point about why focusing too heavily on knowledge (or knowledge that someone else deems vital for all) is dangerous"

I recently read a book by Caroline Taggart called I Used to Know That. The book is filled with facts and information that we spent our school days trying to learn and remember.  in her introduction the author says that she had forgotten 90 per cent of everything she had included in the book.  It strikes me that, as a hugely successful author, editor, and publisher, she had done okay!

So if students remember so little of the knowledge we pass on to them, why do we still do it?  Where this is where the skills side comes in.  As one of my colleagues says about his approach to Geography, "you might no need to know all the countries in Africa, but you will need to know how to study and memorize to succeed in college."  And certainly there is some truth to that.

But can't we somehow find a better balance of knowledge and skills?

Gerver takes this issue up.  He discusses how some lament that school children are won't know anything about Winston Churchill and the Great War.  I like what Gerver observes: "The point is that simply 'knowing' is not what children should be doing; that is not the acquisition or development of knowledge.  What we want is for children to develop a knowledge and understanding of great leadership and how Churchill exemplified that by leading the Allies.  If what we obsess about are the facts and the ability to memorize then our system will continue to produce Caroline Taggers; people who have forgotten most of what they learnt at school."  Unless you want to be great at Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader or dominate at Trivial Pursuit, then what is the point of acquiring knowledge that you will never use?  I also thought it was funny - since the author is British - that he refers to Churchill leading the Allies.  I always thought it was Roosevelt who led the allies.  That's the importance of perspective (or relevance) in all of this too.

The real way to solve the knowledge vs. skills debate is to craft a curriculum that sees a specific role for knowledge yet knows that ultimately skills are what students will need in the real world.  The curriculum will also allow those skills to supplement and foster a love for knowledge and a thirst to learn more.  It also means that knowledge is way more than simply the memorization of facts.

Here is another example from Gerver: ". . . it is a fact that Anne Boleyn was executed on 19 May 1536 and that is of temporary interest to most.  To have knowledge around this fact would require a person to be able to understand the context and reason for the execution and then to use that information to form an opinion.  This of course takes previous facts, knowledge and understanding.  it also, crucially, requires a level of interest in the facts in the first place and that means that they must have relevance.

(Thanks to that passage I thought of a new writing assignment.  I am going to randomly distribute 'facts' to my college comp students.  I want them to research the context surrounding the fact and the reason for it.  From that I want them to devise an opinion.  Then I want them to write an essay stating why their opinion is relevant and important).

 Facts are good and essential.  But if you can't relate them to your experiences or the world at large, they tend to lose their significance.  Schools should help cement that significance.

Ch. 7 - The world beyond the gate - Creating real contexts for learning

And here is how schools can work to do just what I said a few lines ago about cementing the significance of facts to experience.

The problem traditionally, though, is that we make students leave their experiences at the door.  Instead, we need to take their experiences and attach them to the esoteric (which how students usually view what is being taught in class) knowledge we want the students to learn.

I'm fond of a saying from Congressman George Miller (when he spoke to the National Press Club after "A Democracy At Risk" was released): "Today's students are digital and the systems are analog."  I always like to add to this - "And some of their teachers are vinyl."

We can't afford to be relics.  Why?  Gerver: "Our children come from the high-definition, digital, on-demand generation, yet some of our teaching and curriculum remains 14 inch, mono-sound and black and white."

It does no good for me to wax on and on about the merits of To Kill a Mockingbird for its own sake.  Come on, I have not read King Lear two dozen times for its own sake.  It's great, yes.  But I read it and hold it dear because it speaks truths that resonate inside of me and make me see the world differently.

That is my goal when I teach TKM: to get students to see how it relates to their worlds today.  When you can connect something great with what is relevant and important to the student, you have hit a home run.

Lord knows it doesn't happen every day, but when it does, that's the good stuff that sustains me over my career.

When teaching like that doesn't occur, Gerver believes you get this (and just think of who in your school or business fits this role):

The Staffroom Mafia

  All schools have them, staff who are sure that the children are out to get them, convinced that children don't understand on purpose.  They are most commonly sighted in school staff rooms, often at Friday lunchtime.  Most of the staff have just collapsed for 15 minutes respite, to wolf down a sandwich and muster their thoughts for the weekly "finishing-off session."  The week-long crispbread and decaf coffee good intentions have given way to medicinal chocolate cake and full-octane Nescafe.  One teacher has started to inspire visions of the adult world weekend, then the mafia boss announces themselves . . . the staffroom door flings open, a deep sigh fills the room and the figure at the door eclipses the light.  The rest of the staff look at each other with defiant stares that say, 'Don't you dare ask them what's wrong!' With increasing frustration, the mafia boss bristles over to the tea- and coffee - making facilities and proceeds to make the loudest cup of coffee ever.  The clinking of metal on china ships away like Chinese water torture until eventually one colleague cracks, desperate for the punishment to end.  'What's wrong?' they ask with insincere concern.  Mafia boss spins and like a high-powered rifle explodes, 'Those little bastards will be the end of me!' Hopeful smiles pass across the room.  Mafia boss is too tightly coiled to notice, 'I have spent all week on full stops and capital letters.  We have done exercise after exercise.  Yesterday, the little sods had got it. Today, today, we did some free bloody writing and not one of the little buggers has put a full stop or capital letter anywhere.'
  The staffroom mafia boss epitomizes the problem: we teach in fixed chunks, information, skills and concepts ring-fenced into defined sections.  We, as teachers, are delivering a curriculum filled with sound bites and experiences that man nothing to our children.  The sheer quantity does not allow us the time to mix the recipe, to blend ingredients together in order to make sense of the whole.  This is a bit like telling kids that yeast is important to making bread, but not explaining how to use it in the process.  Maybe, more pointedly, children don't see the need to know about yeast anyway, because they buy their crusty batch loaf from the supermarket, hot and ready to eat.
  To our children, learning is seen as something they do at school.  It is, in a way, role play, make believe, it is a distraction from their real lives.  When they look beyond the gates, they don't see timetables, subjects, paragraphs and full stops; they see a huge, glistening, confusing world.  They do not see how, by engaging in one, you can understand the other.  They feel that they leave real life at the gate.  it is our job to move schools forward so that they are seen by our children as a development of their real lives.

Chapter 8 - The industrial model of schooling - Why our system is out of date

This chapter begins with a most interesting quote from the author : "Our children are organic, they are not machines.  Productivity does not increase because the conveyor belt is made to run faster or because we create tougher production targets."

I think that screams NCLB.  And look at the educational wreckage it has strewn about.

The previous quote echoes so much of what I've read and listened to concerning human creativeness and development.

Steven Johnson talks about the liquid network of ideas.  This refers to how the world's greatest inventions aren't invented by humans who are toiling away in isolation. Instead, one person will develop a hunch and do nothing with it.  Until she meets someone else who exposes them to a new idea that happens to reshape how she thought about her original hunch and soon the pieces fall into place and a new product or service is invented.  This is how Steve Jobs helped develop the first Apple computer.  Not only did he have help (Steve Wozniak), but he also had help when he dropped out of Reed College and began dropping in on the classes that interested him.  One of those was a calligraphy class.  There he realized the beauty of font and type face.  Then ten years later when they were developing the first Mac, he poured all of what he learned in that calligraphy class into the Mac fonts and interface.  And that was one of the features early users of the Mac loved.  And it was one thing that totally set the Mac apart.

Sir Ken Robinson talks about creativity and human development using organic terms.  We grow and mature and adapt.  Just like the most successful environments on earth.  Robinson talks about Death Valley and how - in 1997, I believe - several inches of rain fell on Death Valley.  When that happened, flowers sprouted across the valley.  Death Valley is not dead.  The seeds hunker down and wait for the conditions to be right before erupting in full bloom.  Humans are this way too.  We need to make the school environment more nourishing and engaging so our students can blossom.

James Burke talks about human innovation and history and how it is all interconnected, just like any ecosystem.  Because plants produce oxygen as a result of photosynthesis we have life on earth as we know it.  There are a billion different factors in that, but they are all connected and related in impossibly complex ways.  Human life and history happens just like that.  Thus, Burke gives his famous example of how you can go from Mozart to the helicopter in just a few jumps (Mozart steals the idea for one of his music pieces, "The Marriage of Figaro" from a guy named Pierre Beaumarchais, who is a French playwright.  Beaumarchais is also pals with one Thomas Jefferson and helps launder money that leads to America winning its independence.  Jefferson, a good liberal, is influence by a man named Cesare Beccaria, who is one of the early social reformers who begins questioning why the state puts murderers to death.  He is influenced by two crazy guys: Franz Gall and Spurzheim.  These two invent a very interesting science (which was soon debunked) called Phrenology.  This had an impact on another social reformer by the name of Charles Follen.  He is a radical and soon finds himself hauled up before a judge by the name of ETA Hoffman.  Hoffman in his spare time loves to write horror stories.  This has a major influence on someone named Edgar Allan Poe (no need to a wikipedia link for Poe is there?).  Poe steals the idea for one of his poems, "The Bells" from Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Rachmaninoff is at a party and meets a fellow Russian immigrant by the name of Sikorsky.  Rachmaninoff loans the man a considerable about of money to create his 'flying craft,' which would later become the first functioning helicopter!

Whew.  There you have it.  From Mozart to the helicopter.  And I bet you thought there was no connection between those two things at all.  
Leon Botstein, president of Bard college, talks about how his college requires all undergrads to go through a "Citizens and Science" course in which all of the various elements of science, math, history and discovery and writing are rolled up into one.  This way students are able to take all those different classes and apply them to one unified concept.  When the class is over, students are able to make informed decisions about infectious diseases by having explored such questions as "What is an infectious disease?" "How could it affect me?" "What are the various ways to prevent infectious disease?" "What kind of evidence exists on various vaccines?" "How can I use this evidence to make an informed decision about whether I should be inoculated or not?" The course is incredibly rewarding for students because it combines a variety of subjects around one theme and then allows them to apply what their learn to their own lives and the world around them.
Now, this is how life and history happen. We collide with others and have impacts on them that are unimaginable.  They go out and influence others and on and on and on.  

Burke argues that this is how we should explore our subjects and learn.  He argues that dividing the world into neat categories (math, art, science, reading . . .) is just a scheme to make life easier for teachers.

Gerver echoes this idea: "we learn about life and the challenges of our future in bite-size, categorized chunks."  But that is not how the real world works (or at least how the lives of our students unfold outside of school).

Instead of truncating life into categories, there needs to be some way (and I don't pretend to know the way) of allowing students to learn and grow in a way that is more interesting and compelling to them.  Here are some examples -

A colleague of mine has mentioned that it is a pipe dream of his to have one of his classes create a monument to veterans.  This - it seems to me - would be the perfect way to incorporate several subjects into a real life learning experience.  First, he could have a math teacher illustrate the principals of geometry as the students design the monument and measure and figure out its dimensions.  Likewise, they would need basic math skills to keep track of the funds they would inevitably have to raise.  Second, he could have an English teacher come in and help them run a PR campaign and write brochures for the monument.  Third, he could have a business teacher come in and devise an advertising campaign to inform the public and help raise funds.  Fourth, he could have each student research some aspect of the historical period represented in the monument.   Fifth, they could enlist art students to devise and produce the monument.

That is just off the top of my head.  I'm sure there would be a way to work science in and audio visual classes too.  Then again, maybe it's best not to try and force a subject like science in here if it doesn't apply.  Students need to know too that not everything they are taught is immediately applicable to the real world.

If students were to complete an assignment like that, I would argue with my last breath that they would learn ten times more than if they sat isolated in 45 minute blocks learning esoteric math, English, business, and art 'skills.'

Best of all, the students would be contributing to their community and they'd see the immediate benefits of their work (and maybe even the negative comments, and that is part of the real world too).

How could the skills the students learned from this project be measured?  I think Gerver has the answer: "I'd like to develop a system where every child built a portfolio of kills and competencies, each worth points that could then be measured for performance and used in comparative data."  We already do this in writing.  Why not in the other ares.

Perhaps in a portfolio for the memorial project, a student would put his role in designing the blue prints.  He could also put in the advertising slogan he came up with but which wasn't adopted (it would still have merit though).  He could put in his role in advertising the project, such as meeting with community leaders and speaking to them about the need for this memorial.  He could also include evaluations from various community members on his performance.  He could put in newspaper clippings of the project and any other multi-media projects he developed (such as the youtube video he created chronicling the development of the project or the Facebook Fan page he created to garner support for the memorial.  Or better yet - his portfolio could be a multi-media project itself).

Why aren't we doing more things like that?

Ch. 9 - Are they fit for the future?  Do we really give our children a chance?

This chapter is interesting because for much of it, Gerver asks the reader to imagine themselves as students.  Would you want to endure your class?  How would you endure a day in your high school?  Whose class would you dread?  Whose class would you fall asleep in?  Whose class would you look forward to?  How often would you check your phone during class?  How many times would you glance at the clock?

Now continue this on to when you get home.  Would you want to do your homework right away?  Or would you procrastinate it too? 
When I get home from work, I like some down time to talk to my wife and play with my kids.  I don't sit down right away and start grading papers and lesson planning.  I'm entitled to down time, yet somehow when it comes to homework, we forget what it's like to be a student and expect them to do hours of homework that we ourselves most likely wouldn't do.

Don't lie.  That is a wonderful lesson to conduct.  Just be honest with yourself when you do it.

Next, Gerver takes aim at some of the criticisms that business leaders level at schools.  The main one is this - "Our young people are criticized for their inability to communicate, to generate and sustain discussion.  There is a growing concern in the UK about children's decreased emotional literacy and abilities of self-expression."

Honestly, when are students allowed to communicate in our classes?  Be honest.  Do we drone on in lecture form?  I mean I don't even know how to instigate an effective discussion!  I am getting better, but I am in no way an expert.  Do we constantly steer them back to the esoteric subjects we are lecturing on?  It takes work to take whatever students are talking about (the winner of American Idol, how pointless math is, or the foolishness of someone's Facebook status) and then relate it back to what we are focusing on in class that day.  

The truth is, students get little chance to do any of this in our schools.

Why?  Gerver has the answer - "Schools are designed by adults, run by adults, managed by adults, monitored by adults and modified by adults."  Where is the input from students?

Most teachers and administrators, I would say, shrug this off.  But I think it's vital. 

The best assignments - according to my students - came when I allowed them to have a say and a voice and develop and create.  One student - who developed a blog about the Mayans, Tweeted me and said that working on the blog was fun and it wasn't like school work at all.

Why can't more work be like that?  Gerver argues that "if we change the concept of the learning day (from a truncated approach to a more engaging approach) and if all schools developed learning gateways (activities that would teach all those esoteric (sorry for using that word over and over) skills we want students to learn in engaging ways), it would be impossible to differentiate between homework and school.  It would be bound in the same, interactive, research-based journey of discovery."  Just think about what you love to do (read, quilt, play video games . . .) what is it about those activities that you love?  Why can't we develop lessons that make students love our subjects in a similar fashion?




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