Freund, Margaret, How Primary Teachers Feel About What They Do

http://tiny.cc/k8qj7

Freund acknowledges that students are social agents too, but seems to both overemphasise and underemphasise the students' conscious ability and will to perform the emotional work of contributing to the classroom environment. In the first case, Freund argues that,

children learn that they should not be too assertive or aggressive, like Susan, a child in Mrs. D's class they will be described as a ‘little madam’, for once a child has been typified as disliked, it is almost impossible to change the typification (King 1984).

However true it may unfortunately be, the fact that labels tend to stick is an unlikely reason for Susan to avoid aggression.  On the other hand, Freund notes an instance in which she argues that students are 'social actors who have a part to play in the way that the social order of the classroom is constructed', and suggests 'being cute' is one of these 'strategies':

Being ‘cute’, is a guaranteed way of getting a response from a teacher and a special response when children use a stereotype of innocence and ‘babyish’ behaviour by acting in ways that appear submissive. Aaron was younger than the rest of his kindergarten class, physically smaller with pudgy, soft baby features, and when he was trying to avoid trouble he would sit passively with his head on the side like a puppy, a picture of innocence and soft baby features .

Aaron's physical appearance here is something he has no control over, and sitting quietly to avoid trouble is more a tautology than a deliberate attempt to get a response from a teacher.

Teaching the Facebook Generation, SMH 27/02/11

An article in the Herald about "Teaching the Facebook Generation" suggests schools are wary about allowing social media to be used during class time. So how are kids supposed to learn about it - and learn with it? Tim Hawkes is still on the Herald's speed dial, and seems to be taking a sensible approach - ''Ineffective policy is to ban use; prohibition has never worked... We want to ensure that each student's electronic footprint is one they are proud of."

Roschelle, J., Pea, R., Hoadley, C., Gordin, D., & Means, B. (2000). Changing how and what children learn in schools with computer-based technologies. Children and computer technology, 10(2), 76-101.

So - the first article I have to read about IT in education is eleven years old. (Perhaps a gentle introduction to the kind of IT I will actually find in education…). It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The study is well aware of its limitations, and is grounded in pedagogical ideals that seem pretty solid in terms of supporting children’s learning, viz
(1) active engagement,
(2) participation in groups,
(3) frequent interaction and feedback, and
(4) connections to real-world contexts
The study then gives examples of how Y2K technology can be used to put these principles into practice. Marco Torres it ain’t. The strength of the article is in identifying the main areas in which IT can be used to support learning, but, with so little idea of what connected technologies will make possible, its suggestions of how to do this are predictably limited.

1. Learning Through Active Engagement
“Students learn best by actively "constructing" knowledge from a combination of experience, interpretation, and structured interactions with peers and teachers”
– for this the study refers to Bransford. Using the “Microcomputer-Based Laboratory,” students can immediately plot graphs from their data. their mate’s graph on the bus the next morning, which jogs a vague memory of that thing they did in Bio the day before. All well and good – in fact, a bit of a jolt to remember a time before Excel – and it increases their learning gain around using graphs by 81%.

2. Learning Through Participation in Groups
Some good justification for this, too -
Social contexts give students the opportunity to successfully carry out more complex skills than they could execute alone. Performing a task with others provides an opportunity not only to imitate what others are doing, but also to discuss the task and make thinking visible. Much learning is about the meaning and correct use of ideas, symbols, and representations. Through informal social conversation and gestures, students and teachers can provide explicit advice, resolve misunderstandings, and ensure mistakes are corrected. In addition, social needs often drive a child's reason for learning. Because a child's social identity is enhanced by participating in a community or by becoming a member of a group, involving students in a social intellectual activity can be a powerful motivator and can lead to better learning than relying on individual desk work.
This seems exactly the kind of thing that web-based learning groups were made for. The study gives the example of Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environment, which apparently encourages metacognition, too. It supports ‘structured collaborative knowledge building by having students communicate their ideas and criticisms--in the form of questions, statements, and diagrams-to a shared database classified by different types of thinking. By classifying the discussion in this way, students become more aware of how to organize their growing knowledge.’

3. Learning Through Frequent Interaction and Feedback
Yup, this sounds familiar too – and predates Visible Learning by almost a decade. The graphs example above comes in again here – timely, specific feedback about what students are learning. The article suggests that boilerplate feedback responses sent via email constitute a good example, too. Pass me a bucket.

4. Learning Through Connections to Real-World Contexts
Bransford, again, on transfer. I think the main difficulty here is going to be how to identify projects that primary school children could hook up with – hopefully we’ll get some pointers there.

Marc Prensky and Stephen Heppell: Storytelling

A series of chats between Stephen Heppell and Marc Prensky (the 'digital native' guy) has been posted on YouTube recently. People tend to ask Stephen some difficult questions about the use of digital technologies in the classroom, and his responses are always thoughtful. In each of these videos the two respond to a question - asked via Twitter or Facebook - things like 'What is the role of the teacher in 21st century learning?' or 'How do we encourage children to be brave, to be wrong and to ask questions?'.  Stephen's and Marc's responses offer much insight, and much that is challenging.

The one I was first drawn to was Marc Prensky - How can we encourage quality storytelling in our children?



There is a lot that is interesting here, and some that I don't agree with.

Private parts

My more perceptive readers will have noticed that there is no picture to the right, and may even have guessed that Alice is not the name I go by In Real Life. Yup, Google has more data about me than any real person, including anyone interested enough to be reading this. Seems I'm not really following Marco Torres' good advice around building up a digital portfolio. But the reasons I haven't are fairly simple. I don't want to identify where I work, simply because I don't want to have to concentrate on being 'on message' all the time.


Lucky I have options...


Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village


...but hopeful I won't need them

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_reuse.png

What is Teaching? Hirst, 1974

I was flicking though a book at the weekend by a professor of education at the University of Cambridge, when I came to a chapter called "What is Teaching?". Towards the end of this essay, Professor Hirst observes,

I am not even sure that successful learning is a criterion for good teaching (p.114).

What a prat I must be - I always thought that learning was the whole point of teaching. So what does Hirst think teaching is - let alone good teaching?  How does he come to the conclusion that it doesn't necessarily involve learning? And is his theory still relevant?

Hirst distinguishes between two understandings of "teaching", as follows -

The most common [meaning of "teaching"] relates to the case in which a person may teach in the fullest sense of that word and yet, in spite of the intention and the appropriateness of the activities involved, the pupils may learn absolutely nothing. ... [The second] involves the implication that not only has there been the intention to bring about learning, but that the pupil has in fact learnt what was intended. (p.106)

I suppose in medicine the equivalent would be the difference between treating the patient and curing the patient - treating is the process, but curing implies success. The second sense is the 'taught' in "Mr Miyagi taught me karate" - which assumes that I now know karate, and Mr Miyagi did whatever it took to instill this in me. Sounds good, but Hirst explicitly discounts the second definition, and concentrates  on the first, which he asserts is the most common meaning. He seems to be concerned about situations where the teacher is ticking all the right boxes - things I suppose like showing rather than telling, allowing opportunities for the learner to discover for themselves - and yet the learning aim of the lesson doesn't seem to stick. Surely the process that the teacher is engaged in is 'teaching', he thinks - what else would it be?

There is an obvious flaw here. If you have taught the student, and the student hasn't learnt, then you haven't actually taught them. There is no difference according to this definition between 'teach' and 'intend to teach' or 'try to teach'. If I go to 'teach' my kindergarten class about Wittgenstein, and they end up asleep or wandering off, an observer might state that I tried to teach philosophy, but I didn't teach. In this case, I didn't take into account the context of the learners - i.e. that they are five years old and have no idea what I'm talking about.

Hirst would ascribe my failure to an exception to his definition: the fact that teaching implies that the learning is possible, and in this case it wasn't. But, in every case in which the teacher 'teaches' and the learner doesn't learn, there must be some reason why. As a teacher I would want to be able to identify this, as the first step towards enabling the student to learn. And the thing is that we know so much more about learning now than we did even in Hirst's heyday. What may have appeared to Hirst as a failure on the part of the student to learn, might now be explained by the fact that that is not how that student can learn.  How People Learn tells us that students' preconceptions need to be discovered, engaged, and if necessary, challenged. They need to develop a deep foundation of factual knowledge that they can organise in a framework for easy retrieval. And a metacognitive approach will help them to take control of their own learning. All of these aspects would need to be taken into account.

I think that Hirst may be reflecting a malaise about teaching and learning current in the 1970s, when classroom walls were being torn down in favour of open learning spaces. The problem was that no-one knew what to do in these spaces, and this led to a search for concrete answers to questions such as Hirst's. But simply going through the motions of teaching is not teaching. Students can all learn, and teaching is doing whatever it takes to make that happen.

Paul H Hirst, "What is Teaching?" in Knowledge and the Curriculum: A Collection of Philosophical Papers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) pp 101 - 115.

Beating the Odds (ABC, September 2010)

Continuing yesterday's news round up - there is a great piece here from the ABC, showing how education can give opportunities to kids in at risk areas - again out here in the west.