I chose the Innovative Learning program in large part because I realized that I needed to grow as an educator in the area of technology in education and teaching 21st century learning skills. I began my teaching career in 1995 when “you’ve got mail” and “surfing the worldwide web” were rather new and exciting phrases. Over the two decades I’ve been teaching, I have managed to maintain basic proficiency in the use of technology, but I’ve never gained a deep passion for incorporating technology into learning. I used technology solely as a tool to replace other tools - computer for paper & pen, online research to replace the library, email to replace notes or phone calls. I even felt a resistance due to concerns about possible detriments of our societal shift of reliance upon technology. I believe that fluent reading with deep comprehension is the most essential foundation of all learning. Acquiring this fluency and comprehension is a complex process requiring memorization, attention span, background knowledge and interaction with the physical world, early verbal language, socialization, many hours actually reading, and critical thinking skills. I’ve seen how increased screen time, online research, immediate availability of facts, information overload, and shortcuts taken by students can be detrimental to many of these processes. On the other hand, I also realized that my ignorance in the area of technology infused teaching and learning is stopping me from exploring its best uses. I hoped to become a more informed educator in the area of the efficacious uses of technology in the classroom. I hoped the Innovative Learning program would help me leverage my use of technology to maximize the benefits of technology while minimizing any possible drawbacks to student learning and critical thinking. At this point in the program, I already feel empowered to explore all the used of technology and innovative learning/teaching. I feel more confident in distinguishing between responsible, effective use of tech tools that are intrinsically part of a learning process and those that are simply overlays to a process and aren’t beneficial in and of themselves. I’ve certainly grown in my comfort level of the use of particular tech tools. Just the fact that I can post a blog (not write it, just post it) in under a couple minutes is a noticeable difference from the beginning of the semester. Before this class, I can count on one hand the amount of times I published to the web. (Don’t laugh!) From dinosaur to… dog(gedness) to… dynamo? One can hope!
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A proposed answer for the task of improving student motivation is the Flipped Classroom model and implementing Challenge Based Learning.
Go ahead, flip your classroom in your head. Imagine asking a student to go learn something on his own. Give him the topic of the desired lesson, give him some video to watch and some reading to do. Tell him to come prepared to class with either some questions or problems (ie math) already answered on the topic, recorded notes, or a written reflection. How many students will do it? Our collective experience as teachers informs us that there will always be students who come to class without having adequately prepared. That isn’t my point, or even a new concern that would arise from a flipped classroom. It’s just a reality to be handled appropriately by a teacher and student as it occurs. In my imagination, as I flip my classroom, I would expect the immediate motivational effect to be minimal, but the long term motivational effect to be significant. Being motivated often requires a student to be able to imagine the future benefits of an action, to be able to visual the outcome, and to be able to connect in advance to a feeling of accomplishment or pride. Why do I do the dishes, clean the kitchen, pack my lunch, and load up my coffee maker before I go to bed, even when I’m tired from a long day and just want to crawl under the covers? Because I have experience with how good it feels in the morning to wake up to a clean kitchen, the smell of coffee, and not having to pack a lunch in a hurry before heading out the door. At night, even if I don’t have any immediate benefits in front of me (why not wait, after all?), I can visualize the feeling the next morning. And I have enough experience to know that the evenings I chose NOT to do the work, I regretted it the next morning. Motivation! After a few weeks or, for some, a few months of either regret or satisfaction, students’ motivation will likely increase. One of the goals of flipping a classroom is to provide class time that allows the students and teacher the time to engage in more productive “application” of the concept or lesson. This could be troubleshooting issues a student encountered while frontloading the lesson. As Ramsey Musallam said, student curiosity and those questions they bring us are our best friends. Go ahead and embrace the mess! Another more engaging way to use class time is working collaboratively with other students on a project, hands-on activities and experiments, or presentations. From the flipped classroom model, presumably, this use of class time is more enjoyable, effective for learning, and therefore, more motivating. Challenge Based Learning (CBL) is a collaborative experience involving students, teachers, community members, and sometimes parents. It is akin to PBL (project based learning or problem based learning, depending on your era). Students, usually in teams, learn about real world issues, create an essential question, frame a challenge in which they propose solutions to these problems, form an action plan, execute it, and publish their results. Some of the reported additional benefits from a 6 school pilot CBL were as follows:
In investigating flipped classrooms, I see ideas that I can use to improve our model of it. Our students primarily use district-adopted textbooks in their work. We also create mini-projects based on curriculum. This is a rather one dimensional way to learn. We could incorporate more teacher created video lessons and digital collaboration that could enrich study from home during the week, either meant to give the opportunity for feedback to the teacher or for students to collaborate with one another. I started following links from April Tucker’’s site and found several YouTube videos from Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams (Edutopia), and Katie Gimbar that I felt had useful tips. CBL might be more challenging to implement for a large, long-term project, but, as was stated in a couple of the guides for CBL, an individual teacher or class can actually accomplish a CBL module in as short as a few weeks. I can most easily imagine working a CBL opportunity into my Social Studies framework. One of the connecting ideas to CBL that especially spoke to me was it’s natural inclusion of what was called Personalized Learning and its four key aspects. These 4 descriptors capture what we often call “voice and choice”, and it is very important to my students. THE SUMMATIVE TAKE-AWAYS
Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation There is a mismatch between what science knows and businesses practice. Experiments shows that rewards as motivation only work when the task is mechanical, simple, and not requiring cognitive skills or creativity. Typical “If-Then”rewards focus thinking to a single-minded frame, whereas solving problems needs expansive, creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Intrinsic motivation may have better results. This kind of motivation works with three principals: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. An example of autonomous work is Google’s 20% time, where employees work on any project they want. Historically this “free play” time produces about 50% of Google’s new products. Another example of autonomy in work is the ROWE workplace - results only work environment. John Seely Brown - The Culture of Learning in a World of Constant Flux In a world in constant flux, learning will need to amplify curiosity so that we can keep up and create. Understanding is socially constructed, so learning is done effectively in group study. This can be done virtually. Dusty and his cohort of aerial surfers demonstrates that perhaps what is needed is a deep questing disposition. Studying the MMOG World of Warcraft shows that this complex game is a joint collective agency. In both these examples, competitors or gamers are willing to fail, fail, fail in order to hone a craft so they can ultimately master a skill and succeed. In both examples, the task is considered fun all the while learning. Play is, in fact, a key aspect of learning and also of creating or changing a culture. Man is a thinker in three ways: homosapien (man as knower), homofaber (man as maker), and homoludens (man as player). When we utilize all three forms of learning and thinking, we are entering into an activity of deep tinkering. All of these qualities combined can create a new culture of learning for the 21st century. Howard Gardner: Five Minds for the Future All thought, generally speaking, has commonalities, but every academic discipline (history, science, math, arts) has its own mental forms, or required ways of thinking. The five minds can be broken into two categories: cognitive and social.
In the world of education creativity is as important as literacy. Creativity requires the ability to risk being wrong. If you aren’t prepared to make a mistake, you won’t ever come up with anything new. We naturally possess creativity as children and seem to be educated out of it. We are taught NOT to make mistakes. Our entire 19th century education system is designed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. In design it is a protracted process of getting to the university level. It values a hierarchy of subject material with math and language at the top and the arts at the bottom. It does not necessarily honor what we now know about intelligence - that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct. This system is not working for the 21st century and will not serve us well for the future. THE COMMENTARY Most of these video presentations were eight to ten years ago. They all emphasize how technology and innovation is driving knowledge and skills to grow exponentially and that what we teach today may be obsolete within years. Given this fact, it is heartening to see that these video presentations themselves are still relevant. I say it is heartening because the thinking around education seems to have evolved to guiding principles that will be able to steer us through the unpredictability of the technology age. NVUSD’s 4C’s goals of 21st century learning: critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration,and a fifth goal often mentioned in our reading on 21st century learning, global citizenship, are mentioned in all of the videos. Gardner’s five minds list is almost a direct reiteration of these goals, although it is probably more accurate to say that Gardner is partly responsible for the existence of the 4 C’s learning goals. John Seely Brown emphasizes collaborative learning and playing, or creativity. Dan Pink and Sir Ken Robinson also emphasize the need to exercise creative thinking in order to address the needs for the future. What I find so fascinating about these “new” goals for education is that none of them is actually particularly new. All of these qualities, either singly or collectively, have existed in humanity for centuries or even millenniums. It is actually because humans have the ability to be creative, think critically, communicate, and collaborate that we are where we are today - in the midst of an age of discovery, invention, and flux. The Renaissance had much of the same characteristics as this period in time and the Industrial Revolution itself was a result of increases in ingenuity in business. Humans have always been inventing, problem solving, and creating in order to help ourselves. It’s almost as if we are seeing the need to re-emphasize these human qualities for this next phase in history because our education system (at least in the U.S.) has devalued them in an educational system that was designed by the universities and the US Labor Department to fit the needs of the Industrial Revolution. There is one learning goal for a 21st education that I feel should be considered. It is hinted at in Gardner’s Respectful and Ethical Minds, in Seely Brown’s notion of a deep questing disposition, and when Sir Robinson bemoans that the arts are at the bottom of the hierarchy of education worldwide. I’ll come at it from the content of Louis R. Mobley’s philosophy for his IBM executive training philosophy that is outlined in the Forbes article “Can Creativity Be Taught?” The fifth principle comes from Mobley’s discovery “that creativity is highly correlated with self-knowledge. It is impossible to overcome biases if we don’t know they are there, and Mobley’s school was designed to be one big mirror.” Acquiring self-knowledge should be a learning goal. By self-knowledge I do not mean naval-gazing, being self-centered, or figuring out what I want in life. I mean something closer to what Gardner mentioned when he spoke of having an abstract view of yourself in connection to your context - your family, your school, your community, your country, your world. To this should be added, I believe, being connected to your historical context as a member of humanity. We should remember that we can’t experiment, innovate, create, nor play our own history as the human race but we certainly shouldn’t ignore it. We would be prudent to study it, understand it, connect to it, communicate it - all so that we can glean the best from human achievement and avoid the colossal mistakes made. If you want to do away with your own biases, study humanity’s worst transgressions to know what we are capable of perpetrating. With Sir Ken, I wish for a return on an emphasis of studying the humanities and arts so that we do not lose understanding of a rich history of philosophy, political science, literature, music, art, and drama. Within these academic disciplines is a whole history of thought, experience, perspective, and expression that can aid us on a quest for self-knowledge and help us form ethical minds. Another 21st century learning model buzz word or catch phrase that I ponder and observe is the call to prepare our students for the “global economy”. If our 19th century educational model failed when the economy for which it was designed began to change (the Industrial Age), does that mean that we are currently making a similar mistake by trying to design an educational system to meet THIS present and predicted economy and it, too, will fail when this economy changes? Is education about creating producers and consumers for an economy? I throw out the consideration that economic ends are certainly pragmatic and necessary, but education should be about creating thinking people who have studied and have at least tried to understand the nature of the universe and the nature of humankind so that they will always be prepared to handle whatever either (the universe or humankind) throws at them. Darling-Hammond, in her closing chapter of The Flat World and Education, lays out five key elements that must be included in a wise, deep, lovely reform of education in the United States. Of the five elements, three of them resonate the most soundly for me in light of my past and present teaching contexts.
Meaningful Learning Goals “Higher achieving countries have much learner standards; teacher fewer topics more deeply each year; focus more on inquiry, reasoning skills, and applications of knowledge, rather than mere coverage; and have a more thoughtful sequence of expectations based on developmental learning progressions within and across domains.” Just this change alone, leaner standards with a mile deep rather than a mile wide approach, would make the culture of any classroom richer and more enjoyable. Feeling a sense of “leisure” to learning, allowing exploration, deep discussion, questioning and student-driven tangents (relevant ones), all of this fosters a community where students and teachers alike WANT to be. I had a principal who used to say that learning cannot take place in the midst of anxiety and frustration, a relaxed, friendly environment must be in existence. The challenge of this form of deep learning calls upon a teacher’s expertise of content area and knowledge of the full spectrum of skills and developmental abilities of her students. In my own experience, when I have had the freedom to engage in this kind of teaching, I needed more time to prepare myself to teach. I needed to reread material, investigate the best pedagogy to design lessons designed to bring the students into the learning, I had to consider my audience and their current skills and backgrounds so I could build on what they already knew and could do, I needed time to collect realia and stage learning centers in my room. When I did this well and thoroughly the results were nothing short of amazing. Students were observably enthusiastic, engaged, and their performance tasks reflected their increased learning. Too, I myself would walk away feeling satisfied and fulfilled as a teacher and more likely to succeed on the next learning unit design. Strong Professional Standards and Supports Designing this type of deep study underscores the need for teachers to be fully trained and supported. Not only does a teacher need a full command of subject content and pedagogy, as mentioned above, a teacher needs time to think deeply and plan masterfully. It calls to mind Darling-Hammond’s comparison between U.S. teachers and teachers in more successful countries. U.S. teachers spend more time actively teaching and little time in planning and collaboration whereas the teachers in the most successful countries spend less time actively teaching and more time in lesson, curriculum, and professional planning and learning. My experience from teaching in a private school highlights this use of time. On some days I was with students all day without a single break - including monitoring recess and lunch time. I was lucky to get 2 or three prep periods of about 30 minutes to 45 minutes each for the entire week. For most of these, I relied upon parent volunteers to teach P.E., Art, Music, or Gardening. If they didn’t show up, well, I was just out of luck. The flip side was that I was allowed the freedom to set my own pacing and design my own learning units in most subjects. Very exciting and very time consuming. But the allure of crafting deep learning like that… well, to be continued while I segue into the third key element of education reform that struck a chord with me. Schools organized for student and teacher learning So there I was with little prep-time (and incidentally, no formal training as a teacher as I acquired my teaching credential eight years into my career)... but it was a school setting structured for personalization. It was the essence of what Darling-Hammond called a communitarian school - smaller class size, looping the teachers to stay with kids, teams of teachers who collaborate and share students, and involving students’ parents. It had most of the structures for personalization: a close advisory system for the students; reduced pupil loads for teachers; intellectually challenging and relevant instruction; flexible supports in the form of individualized tutoring and high teacher accessibility; multiple instructional strategies; community service; performance-based assessments; and weekly whole-staff collaboration time which was highly student-focused. In this environment, you not only come to know your students personally, but you also come to love them, truly, and want the very best for them. As a teacher, you will dig deeper for them, almost as if they were your own children. Near to what John Dewey describes, you are like the best and wise parent, wanting something lovely and deep for your children. And so you work harder and perhaps (even if you have little provided for you in the way of ongoing teacher supports, such as training in meaningful pedagogy and adequate prep time) longer. That allure of loving WHAT you teach, HOW you are given permission to teach, and WHO you teach will offset many other less desirable considerations - like staying several hours after school every day to get it done, not having an intelligent, reciprocal accountability system, or a lack of resources. http://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/student-assessment-with-tech
If you want to move a mountain, study those who succeeded - and those who failed. The stories of the struggles of New Jersey and Massachusetts to maintain consistent educational gains, the histories of successful education reform in Connecticut and North Carolina, and the tale of California’s dismal failure to close its opportunity gap demonstrate that money, well spent, does matter. In Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, where significant successful education reform was enacted over the last 3 decades, part of the strategy was to fund centrally and equally all schools, regardless of their socio-economic influences. The success of Finland, Korea, Singapore, and the states of Connecticut and North Carolina is largely attributed to several other shared strategies.
What strikes me as most relevant to my own teaching practice is how impactful a well-trained, thoughtful teaching force can be on the overall success of a state’s or a country’s education reform. Most of the above mentioned monumental changes are not within the purview of my daily classroom life. What I can control daily in my sphere is who I am to my students and what I do with them. Which brings us back to Confucius. In Korea, teachers rank among “the most trusted members of society.(Loc 4089)” “Don’t even step on the shadow of a teacher,” states a Korean proverb, reflective of the deep respect for knowledge and teaching that is part of its Confucian heritage.(Loc 3953)” It’s a little daunting to think that little ’ole me has such a large role to play - it is a truly AWEsome responsibility, much like the mountain in the photo. If I want to move that mountain, I’ll start by picking up one stone at a time. And I’ll study those who succeeded in moving a mountain.
I feel these are the key elements I must include in my classroom to prepare my students for the future. In The Flat World and Education author Darling-Hammond directs our attention to the unsettling statistics that show that the Math, Science, and Literacy scores of U.S. students place us below the top 20 performing industrialized nations. She points out that U.S. education changes and reforms lack a consistent approach in the past decades, compared to countries such as Finland, South Korea, Singapore, China and Japan whose education initiatives rebuilt their systems to address the needs of the 21st century learner. In the United States, our educational policies and reforms have consisted of programs that are not bottom-up reconstruction. “... U-turns in education policy and practice are not unusual in U.S. education. Local, state, and sometimes, federal policies frequently force schools to change course based on political considerations rather than strong research about effective practice.” Further, Darling-Hammond shows how teachers in the United States receive less training and ongoing instructional and job support than their peers in many countries, notably Singapore, where “teachers, meanwhile, engage in action research, sponsored by the government, to continually improve their teaching.” A couple months ago I heard a conversation between a district academic specialist for Science assigned to a school and that school’s middle school Science teacher, whose weekly courses span three grade levels of Science. The academic specialist was checking in to see how using the newest Science standards was progressing. As I was reading Darling-Hammond’s argument that we have a problem in U.S. education, especially in math and science, I was reminded of this conversation. The Science teacher did not have the newest standards (except perhaps online) and it seemed had not been clearly given any instructions about when and how to begin using them. She had been offered no new training. The specialist didn’t have a copy for her and showed her a website to access. It seemed the district couldn’t provide any materials; in fact, no textbooks or support material had been identified to match the new standards. From what I could understand, the content wasn’t actually significantly different, just ordered differently among the grade levels and given a new perspective that would speak to 21st century skills. The Science teacher, wanting to get on board with the new standards, asked how she should begin. She was given a few websites where she could look up curriculum, materials, information, lesson plans, and a school in Oakland that had spent some energy developing lessons to match the content standards for various grades. Now I’ve only ever taught elementary science classes, but I know that even at that level, an effective, engaging Science unit for one grade level takes hours and hours of serious thought to design and develop; not to mention the time and money to collect materials for experimentation. My heart went out to both the specialist and this teacher because it seemed to me that they were essentially being asked to create multiple grade levels of Science curriculum and instruction by cobbling together their resources. How would either of them ever have the time to do this mammoth task justice? Thankfully, this particular Science teacher had years of experience to draw upon. Imagine a first year teacher attempting to identify grade-appropriate material that would be effective and designing learning moments that would engage, inspire, and be accessible to all students. Fast forward to a conversation with a friend a week ago. Her third grader has yet to do Science once this year. It’s no wonder, then, that ”our students rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in math and science achievement” (Darling-Hammond). I’ve had the opportunity to experience the world of education in five different states, either as a student or as a teacher; I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to try my hand at elementary, middle,and high school teaching; and I’ve been a student and a teacher in both the private sector and the public school system. This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered what causes the difficulties of education in the United States. I found Darling-Hammonds comparison between U.S. education policy and that of a few other notable countries in the past 4 or 5 decades to be especially insightful. Just in my own teaching career I’ve seen national or state standards change 3 times, federal education policy make major directional changes to programs and funding, mandated state teacher preparation and professional standards and certificates change every couple years, and of course, our textbooks and materials are on a constant 3 or 4 year rotation. A friend of mine who has worked in Sacramento for 20 years in such positions as legislative aid, chief of staff for an assemblyman and a senator, and now as a lobbyist told me that textbook conglomerates maintain lobbyists active in pushing new education legislation and reform. Publishing is big money! I imagine the boardroom of Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt-Brace-McGraw-Hill-Pearson-Holt in early November. A voice is heard to exclaim, “Okay people! New President means new education policies! That means we’re gonna be busy! Get ready to publish some new textbooks! Let’s go, people!” Certainly every new president I’ve watched has seemed to want to put his own stamp on education. Although our new president hasn’t yet turned his attention to major educational overhauls, it’s most likely coming soon. I certainly wait with curiosity. And, well, this is just me… hope springs eternal...maybe, just maybe, this time we can get it right? Greetings, Cohort 12!
I've done the reading and watched the videos, but I have to admit I'm stumped in formulating a driving question. Partly, I feel challenged by my teaching context. Let me give you some background and perhaps someone has a suggestion. I teach at Independent Studies, which is a non-traditional setting. As the name implies, students predominantly do their studies at home. I teach in the K-8 setting. Conceivably, I could have students in any or all of these grades. Enrollment is voluntary; students are not here due to suspension/expulsion. Typically our enrollment is light in the lower grades and increases in middle school. For example, I have no K, 1 or 4th grade students. I have one 2nd grade student, two 3rd grade students, 1 fifth grade student, four 6th grade students, seven 7th grade students, and seventeen 8th grade students. The elementary students come to our classroom 3 times a week for an hour each session. The middle school students come twice a week: once for their core period (2 or 3 hours) and once for a math lab (1 hour). Other than that, they work at home. There is very little instruction time. During their core session, they basically get 1/2 hour to 45 minutes per subject. In that time we have to go over the work they've done the previous week and frontload the next week's work. I's a blur of time! Basically, as far as academics are concerned, we're akin to curriculum mappers or homeschool proctors. Much of the importance of what we do is in the social and emotional realm. We provide a very safe environment with a small student-teacher ratio. We typically see our students in groups of 4 to 6 students at time. Many of our students come to us after having faced difficult or even traumatic situations in their lives or at their previous schools. A few have been in and out of the hospital, many have anxiety/depression, some have been victims of bullying, several are on the spectrum, and about 40% of my students have IEPs or 504s. Some of the problems I see or ponderings I have, put in the form of a question, might be...
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