teaching

The disturbing thought of the unknown, or, what is learning? teaching? education?

As part of a self-study accreditation process, our school has invited staff to consider the question of what learning is -- for three hours on a Saturday morning.  Reps from each grade/area should be in attendance -- and each person is asked to bring along a book, article, or reference.  I know what mine will be.

Engaging Minds: changing teaching in complex times -- 2nd ed, 2008 -- by Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler.

Here are some bits.... taken from my notes.....
Learning is about becoming attentive to things you never noticed before -- becoming conscious -- becoming aware.

Teachers play a pivotal role in orientating attentions in ways that prompt transformations in personal perception and consciousness -- helping people to notice what they haven't noticed.

Education is not about compelling others to see the world in the ways we see it, but in terms of expanding the space of the possible.

The notion of shared labor -- social learning -- highlighting how complex knowing is distributed across a web of individuals.

The learner is the collective.  Knowledge cannot exist independent of the knower -- it is a potential to action both embodied and situated.  Bodies know, and that's what makes them part of grander knowing bodies.  Knowledge, then is about relationship.

The metaphor of the teacher as "the consciousness of the collective" -- expanding the space of the possible and "creating conditions for the emergence of the as-yet unimagined".

Prompting change or learning is a matter of disequilibrium.... with the teacher in the middle, mediating, mentoring -- giving voice and advocating... opening up spaces for collective action, not defining the action.


Teaching is not about what the teacher does, it's about what happens to the learner. 

Learning is complex, full of recursive elaboration... iterative processes and nested systems.

"A complexified conception of curriculum would suggest an image more like a phase space or a fractal tree, in which each event opens up new possibilities for action, which in turn open still other divergent possibilities.  There is no particular direction -- except, perhaps, toward the expansion of the space of the possible."

A teacher is constantly perturbed and being perturbed.

Teaching is an event that prompts a complex system to respond differently.

The lesson plan is a thought experiment.

I'm fascinated with the idea of the unknown unknowns*.  E.g., see my blog post on Roger Schank.  His definition of learning bears repeating:

"Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one's explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking that is the crux of intelligence."

Piaget said intelligence is what is called on when an agent doesn't know what to do, i.e., discerning what really matters in a situation.

Karl Hostetler, a professor interested in both philosophy and education -- (download a PDF of his article << What is "Good" Education Research?>> (2005)),  quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1989) :

"Knowledge always means, precisely, considering opposites.  Its superiority over preconceived opinion consists in the fact that is able to conceive of possibilities as possibilities.... [So] only a person who has questions can have knowledge. [However] there is no such thing as a method of learning to ask questions, of learning to see what is questionable.  On the contrary, the example of Socrates teaches that the important thing is the knowledge that one does not know."

This potential knowledge is what we as teachers must value -- in ourselves as much as in our students.

Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, did a 5-part series of articles on knowing and unknowing in the NYT earlier this year -- "The Anosognosic's Dilemma:  Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is" (Part I) -- in which he interviews David Dunning, a professor who is known for his elaboration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is when our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

Dunning:
"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects.  The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered.  The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there.  People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.  This is one of the reasons I often urge my student advisees to find out who the smart professors are, and to get themselves in front of those professors so they can see what smart looks like."

When I read that, I realized why I love TED Talks so much -- it gives me easy access to seeing what smart looks like.  It also gives another angle on the role of the teacher.  People like to say 21st century learning demands teachers shift from "the sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side".  I think there are times to be the "sage on the stage" -- to exhibit "unnatural acts" of thinking (a la Sam Wineburg -- more re him in a future blog post) -- though overall, I prefer the concept of the teacher as "the meddler in the middle" (Erica McWilliams, 2005).

In an interview Benjamin Barber reflects on the positive aspect of disturbing thoughts:

London: It occurs to me that you are not at all afraid of controversy — not in your statements here and not in your books certainly. You say somewhere in An Aristocracy of Everyone that "with good teaching, as with good art, someone is always offended." Is that really true?

Barber: I think so. I think that if you don't offend someone, you haven't even woken them up, let alone gotten their mental energies going. One thing that does bother me about so-called political correctness — I don't like the term PC — it's really an unfair word, it's kind of a slur in the way that it's used. But the true part of it is that there are some people who seem unwilling to be offended and provocative speech, free speech, and most importantly educational speech — speech that makes people think — has to be to some degree offensive. That's how you get people woken up, that's how you get people caring, that's how you get them reacting.

Another vision of the teacher as a constructive mediator is the grandmother -- in Sugata Mitra's sense -- in his SOLEs (Self-Organized Learning Environments).  The person who stands behind you every now and then-- who is there to support you in your own learning.

Isn't that the role of our own PLN (personal learning networks) -- for us as teacher-learners?  We just need to make sure we are allowing ourselves to be disturbed.  That is the danger for adults... that we move into spaces (mental and physical) which do not regularly perturb us.

* Yes, "unknown unknowns" brings Donald Rumsfeld to mind -- and my favorite packaging of him is in the 2003 Slate article on "The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld":
The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

It's Storytelling, Stupid!


Clay doesn't stop. Luckily the blog entry he just wrote -- “You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning -- fits in perfectly with where I want to continue from my last post (which was spurred by a previous post of his: Barbarians with Laptops).

It's about the importance of narrative in the teaching/learning process.

Okay, You Suck at Photoshop isn't "a grand narrative" (one of the three essential elements of teaching according to Michael Wesch (see my previous post)). But the format could be used to help convey one, incorporating "disciplinary knowledge" into a funny story with a good hook. And Clay showed us an example of a teacher, Lynn Hunt of UCLA -- a "sage on the stage" -- presenting a compelling introduction to the Enlightenment -- by telling us a good story. It's "chalk and talk" but effective. (See his blog post: New Tech Teaching Habits.)

The power of storytelling is often lost in the ongoing debates over:
  • teacher-centered vs. student-centered learning
  • content vs. process focus
  • traditional vs. progressive
  • "sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side"
  • disciplinary knowledge vs. 21st century skills
Two theorists who consider storytelling at the constant heart of intelligence and teaching and learning are Roger Schank and Kieran Egan. Both have been around for a long time and are still producing work, e.g., see:
-- and both deserve wider audiences, if only as interesting voices from the margins to test your own ideas against.

Roger Schank

The best historical introduction to Roger Schank is probably via the Edge.org website. You might read his article "Information is Surprises" (1995). Especially note the comments by other people at the end -- re him, not that article. I particularly like this one:
W. Daniel Hillis: The Roger Schank I knew was a thorn in everybody's side — constructively so. The interesting thing about Roger Schank, something he shares with Minsky, is the fact that he's produced an incredible string of students. Anybody who's produced such a great string of students has to be a constructive pain in the ass. He's always taken an adversarial stance in his theories. He doesn't just say, "Here's my theory." He says, "Here's why I'm right and everybody else is an idiot." He's often right.
Okay, now that you're primed for someone quite opinionated (I like that phrase: "a constructive pain the ass"...), go watch this Jan 2009 video, filmed in Barcelona where he is helping to open a new Institute for the Learning Sciences (as part of their Business Engineering program*) -- based on a Story-Centered Curriculum. He goes through everything wrong with existing schools and describes his ideal school:




In summary: "Every curriculum should tell a story... and the story should be one that tells what the life of the future practitioner is like (and it should involve lots of practice)." As he says, teaching doesn't mean talking -- people aren't good at listening -- we listen to be entertained, not to learn. Learning happens as a result of being hooked by good stories -- and by practicing goal-based scenarios that are fun or obviously useful.

Here are my notes on Roger Schank's 1999 book, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, a thought-provoking read for teacher-librarians as it's about stories, learning, and information retrieval (out of the brain, not the internet) --and so relates to fiction, non-fiction, and tagging/cataloging. (Google Books makes a lot of the book available online, as well as the foreword by the literary critic Gary Saul Morson.)
Teaching is the right story at the right time.

Good stories with lots of information allow listeners to derive their own conclusions.

We do not remember a whole story, but only the gist, indexed in different ways.

Listening is hard -- stories usually just trigger stories back and forth -- how does new learning occur?

Creativity is the adaptation of old stories to new purposes -- it arises not from the void, but from the drawer. And the drawer is only full by virtue of intelligent indexing over time -- the collecting of lots of stories in the brain. Understanding is the process of index extraction -- figuring out what story to tell.

Find an anomaly -- ask a question -- get a story. Anomalies are when we don't know the answer. When we have no story to tell, we look for one -- by asking ourselves questions.

Curiosity is about recognizing anomalies and having the ability to take pleasure in exploring them, which leads us to the value of the search process itself and to prefer answers that lead to ever more questions.
Or as Schank says on page 231: "Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one's explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking that is the crux of intelligence."

Re the failure to listen to failure, see this recent Wired article - Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. The importance of having a broad input of stories -- and a broad audience -- is highlighted:
When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
[bold added]
This is similar to something a former PhD student said about what he learned from Schank (quoted by Schank in his four-chapter preview of his upcoming book:
You taught me that often our theories get so complex that it takes a specialist with years of training to understand them. When we get our theories this distant from everyday life and everyday people, it is awkward explaining what we do when in conversation with our family, friends, the press, and even upper level executives, etc. You taught me to test to see if what you are doing matters and is of interest to the everyday person seeking distraction and some entertainment, but not entirely brain dead, with some curiosity left about life and what others think.
In other words, can you make an interesting story out of it?

Kieran Egan

Kieran Egan argues that students have access to plenty of information - the problem is getting it into them and getting it to mean anything to them. Knowledge exists only in people, in living tissue in our bodies; what exists in libraries and computers are only codes or externally stored symbolic material.

This is where powerful stories and metaphors come in -- as tools to engage students' imagination and emotions in learning about the world.

Egan insists that students' imaginations can only work with what they know, so a great deal of content knowledge is required. He's an advocate of students becoming experts, e.g., by studying one topic throughout their whole school career (in addition to the usual curriculum). (See his new Learning in Depth project.)

Storytelling fits into Egan's larger framework of cognitive tools and theory of Imaginative Education. These cognitive tools are the things that enable our brains to do cultural work -- and he likens to operating systems or programs in the brain, forms of which are running at all times in varying degrees at all ages: the Somatic (the body & its senses), the Mythic (oral language), the Romantic (reading and writing), the Philosophic (the meta-narrative of systems in the world), and the Ironic (multiple perspectives in the mind at one time).

For more details on Egan's framework, see The Educated Mind: how cognitive tools shape our understanding (1997); for a more practical guide to his storytelling ideas for younger students, see his Teaching as Storytelling: an alternative approach to teaching and curriculum in the elementary school (1986).

Egan defines education as "the process in which we maximize the tool kit we individually take from the external storehouse of culture." For me, libraries (whether physical or virtual) are primary portals to that cultural storehouse. (As they say, knowledge is free at the library -- bring your own container.) And librarians are there with embodied knowledge to help people find the right story at the right time.

More on Storytelling and Metaphors
These next ones are NOT specifically re education and you probably know most of them, but they're some of my favorite examples of storytelling and metaphors.


* re business schools, there's a debate in the NYTimes re the appropriate metaphor for how universities (especially business schools) treat students - as customers? as products? For a really unusual business school - one that is living 21st century skills, check out KaosPilot.

And for an example of graduate schools looking for applicants with creative storytelling capabilities -- or at least competency in metaphors, see this NYTimes slideshow of images meant to prompt applicants' admission essays: What Do You See?

Teachers, Meaningful Connections, & Mindful Information Consumption


Clay Burell has been on a writing binge over the holiday -- and there have been long conversations in the comments of several posts, which, as Clay put it, have been the equivalent of college-level credit in terms of professional development. NB: Some of my contributions are re-formatted and expanded below.

First of all, see the original Beyond School blog posts (among others):
Clay expressed his fear that we are producing barbarians with laptops and challenged people to to provide good examples of learning that effectively enhanced content and the development of important skills -- and many did. (Check out the responses of Roberto Greco, Monika Hardy, Neil Stephenson, Hellen Harding, et al.)

I cited Michael Wesch's philosophy of teaching outlined in a video in 2008 as my guiding light.



In summary, to create students who make meaningful connections we need to
  • find a grand narrative and provide context and relevance (i.e., semantic meaning);
  • create a learning environment that values and leverages learners themselves (i.e., personal meaning); and
  • do both in a way that realizes and leverages the existing media environment
Technology isn’t an end in itself -- it’s about leverage in the service of meaningful connections. So if it doesn't enhance the learning in the classroom and it's not authentic participation in the existing media environment (read: busywork), you shouldn't feel obliged to use it.

Cliff Stoll is someone who comes down squarely against computers in the classroom. See his 1999 book, High-Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian -- as well as his Feb. 2006 TED talk (which provides an excellent preview of how he would perform as a teacher in a classroom).



(And if you want an example of what it means to be a ruthless and natural inquirer, read his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg: tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage .)

Here he is talking about computers in classrooms -- from an interview in 2000:

Stoll: The one thing that computers do extraordinarily well is bring information to kids. Computers give kids access to vast amounts of information.

EW: Don't computers have a place in the classroom, then, if merely as a source of information?

Stoll: Is a lack of information a problem in schools? I've never once had a teacher say to me "I don't have enough information." Teachers say they don't have enough time. The problem in classrooms is not a lack of information. It's too much information. ......

Stoll: ... The problem is that the use of computers subtracts from the student-to-teacher contact hours. It directs attention away from the student-teacher relationship and directs it toward the student-computer relationship. It teaches students to focus on getting information rather than on exploring and creating. Which is more interactive -- a student and a teacher or a student and a computer? ...

Re the love inherent in classroom teaching and the importance of time with a teacher (technology aside), I can't help but re-recommend a commencement address by Margaret Edson, teacher and playwright. There's a link in this blog post (skip the first 3 min of her talk and get to the heart of it).


Umberto Eco in this interview also brings up the problem of too much information, but sees the teacher (in the role of master to apprentices) as instrumental in dealing with it.
Eco: ... These [Google] lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance. There, the masters may not necessarily have been able to explain to their students why a painting was good in theoretical terms, but they did so in more practical ways. Look, this is what your finger can look like, and this is what it has to look like. Look, this is a good mixing of colors. The same approach should be used in school when dealing with the Internet. The teacher should say: "Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information." If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others' mistakes.
Last year Clay Shirky pointed out It's Not Information Overload, It's Filter Failure.

In that light, Umberto Eco is proposing teachers as human filters** for disciplinary knowledge and practices, teaching students to discriminate.

Frank Schirrmacher recognizes this same need to question what we're consuming in the way of information.

He talks about humans as ''informavores" in this video/transcript: Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE— A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher.


I think it's very interesting, the concept — again, Daniel Dennett and others said it — the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information. So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn't do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you. ....
As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.
It's the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news.
Having introduced the metaphor of information as food, I can't help but end with a link to one of the essays David Brooks gave a 2009 Sidney (best essay) award to:

Is Food the New Sex? - Mary Eberhardt - Hoover Institution - Policy Review
Try reading it, substituting the word "information" for "food" or "sex"....
These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?
This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.
In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.
[bold added]

Here we are, for the first time in history with all the information we want. It's the "Informavore's Dilemma" ***. Now we just need to develop the discipline for mindful information consumption.


** Social bookmarking is a form of discriminating filtering and Roberto Greco, with over 17,500 bookmarks on Delicious is one of my richest human filters for reading material. As a librarian, I'm impressed with both his descriptions and his tags.

*** I thought I was being clever vis-a-vis Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma", but Google tells me findability.org used it first...

p.s. Wherever I've used the word "teacher", I obviously include "librarians".

Image of Umberto Eco via giveawayboy on Flickr / Image of bento box via Cowism / Image of Google log via the Telegraph UK

Pulling it all together online -- LibGuides? Netvibes? Pageflakes?

Research resources -- shared and organized in easily configured widgets/modules on tabbed pages -- that's what libraries using Web 2.0 tools like LibGuides, Netvibes, and Pageflakes can offer their customers. It's one of the quickest ways to create a library portal or home page.

LibGuides is not free, but it looks like it could be worth buying.

Check out the LibGuides Community page where you can browse for academic, public, and school libraries and see how they have used the product.

For example, see the library guides created by:
Buffy (alias The Unquiet Librarian) recently blogged about how much she loves LibGuides and she's someone who has been exploring the best means of providing students with research guides and pathfinders for some time now -- see her wiki: Research Pathfinders 2.0: Information Streams for Students.


Netvibes is the next best option -- and it's free. This is what I've been playing with for the past few weeks, inspired by these librarians:

The beauty of Netvibes is that anything I see on any of their pages, I can easily copy to my own by simply clicking "Share" on a particular widget. And everyone has both a private page and a public page, so you can play around with customizing widgets on your private page and then move them to the public sphere.

For example, I just copied over links to kids' magazines from Fiona, links on books and reading from Leanne, more book and reading links from Yvonne, links to audio book sites from Dianne, and dictionary websites from Kathy.

I like how Kathy has made a separate page for the PYP units of inquiry -- and I'll be doing that as well, but for now here's my initial effort:


Pageflakes is a similar tool that I have experimented with before, but then I recently read a blog posting which suggested Pageflakes might die (from lack of funding). So I immediately began exploring Netvibes and was thrilled to find so many good library examples out there to copy. But then just the other day there was an ominous blog posting about Netvibes! Well, I'm not giving up on Netvibes yet. But as a form of insurance I've also just requested a proper LibGuides demo (and formal quote). By the way, this is the official comment on costs:

The cost of an annual license depends on the size of your institution and the number of libraries involved. We try to customize the pricing for every client, to meet their specific needs (as well to fit within their budgets!). The annual license fee ranges from $899 to $2,999 ($549 for K-12 libraries). Most libraries would fall under the lower license range. Contact us with the info about your institution (FTE or # of card holders) and we'll give you an exact quote. Chances are, you'll be pleasantly surprised - LibGuides is a great deal, any way you look at it!
I haven't mentioned iGoogle personalized pages, though they're quite similar. You can also share widgets and tabs with other people, but they're designed more for personal homepages -- where someone is logged into their Google account. So if your students all have iGoogle pages, then you could publicize library-specific widgets for them to add to their homepages. And if you want to explore other options, see this list of "start page" tools via Delicious.

Speaking of library websites, there are two I've admired recently for their clean "Mac" look and layout, though only Leanne's was made on a Mac. The other was created using a free tool called Weebly.



p.s. Check out the screencasts/tutorials The Big House Library has made using Jing (a free screen capture/screencast tool) showing how to use their library catalog (Follett's Destiny). I plan to do the same (someday).


Improving the inquiry process

Photos from Flickr: istlibrary
Learning from peers is powerful -- in the classroom and in life. I often get my share early on a Saturday morning, thanks to Skype and Beth Gourley, my friend and fellow teacher-librarian. When our video cameras come into focus, the difference in our locations is obvious. Beth, up in Tianjin, China, at this time of year is wearing a thick bathrobe and huddled under a duvet, while I, down in Singapore, lounge in sleeveless nightwear, cooled by a ceiling fan.

This week's treasures from Beth included an article she wrote last year for KnowledgeQuest called "Inquiry -- The Road Less Travelled" (Vol. 37, No. 1, Sept/Oct 2008) and some related photos. Unfortunately, the article is not yet available online, but should be eventually (and you could always write Beth and ask her to send you a copy.... )

In the article she describes the International School of Tianjin (an IBO school) and how the teaching team there has worked on improving inquiry in the classrooms and library, starting with a group exploration of inquiry and information literacy models.

The result was a model adapted from three major sources: the spiral of making personal meaning and understanding from Barbara Stripling (2003), guiding questions from Jennifer Branch and Dianne Oberg (2005), and language from Kath Murdoch (2005). The secondary school version is shown above, and they have a similar one with simplified questions for the elementary school.

I especially love how teachers use the model as a framework for documenting the units of inquiry. Here is an example from one of their Kindergarten classes (click to enlarge):


When Kath Murdoch came and worked with their teachers last year, they did a reflective exercise on their implementation of inquiry. Here is a partial summary of the remarks collected (also taken from the article):

They go on to create the list (below left).

Nothing radical there -- everyone struggling to improve their inquiry will recognize the items as common goals. Still it's good to be reminded of them.

Beth is also working on a wiki called Research Story, based on their inquiry model (which I trust she won't mind me sharing). Like all wikis, it's a work in progress. But I know it's made me want to go back and re-organize my own grade-level wikis around an inquiry model.





NB: The inquiry cycle image at the top was developed at the International School of Tianjin (IST) in 2007.
Sources for the image compilation-- as taken from the IST Flickr page:
Stripling, Barbara K. 2003. “Inquiry-Based Learning.” In Curriculum Connections through the Library, ed. Barbara K. Stripling and Sandra Hughes-Hassell, 3-39. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited. Murdoch, Kath. 1998. Classroom Connections: Strategies for Integrated Learning. Ar-madale, Vic: Eleanor Curtain Pub.Branch, Jennifer, and Dianne Oberg. 2005 “Focus on Inquiry.” IASL. (accessed 6 May 2007).

Looking back at (the technology behind) our conference

Our conference -- Hands on Literacy -- came off beautifully just over a month ago, with over 260 people attending, but it burned us committee members out so much that we have spent the rest of this term recovering.

In our de-brief we made many notes of things to improve on next time, the most important being: "start planning much earlier" -- like 18 months ahead of time. We really only started working on it in mid-August and it was held mid-November, so it was a miracle it all came off at all.

The use of technology to plan and present the conference was another area for improvement. Wiki and SurveyMonkey worked great for us, but not enough presenters took up the challenge to make their pages their own. Also need to go with online payment/registration, e.g., using something like EventBrite, next time. And in retrospect should have set up Google Group for the committee, rather than relying on just a Google Email account. Getting all committee members up to speed with chosen web 2.0 tools before crunch time is something else.

Several presenters have updated their wiki pages since the conference, including:
But wish more did.

21st Century Focus at Conferences... near and far...

Hands On: Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom and Library is the one-day conference our Singapore international school librarian network is putting on Saturday, 15 November 2008 at the Australian International School Singapore. It's modeled on the Teach IT conference of the IT educator network, which was offered in November 2005 and 2007. Note that anyone is welcome to attend, whether you work in Singapore or not.

We're still at the Call for Workshops stage (until Sep. 30th). Topics can cover all forms of literacy, whether visual, digital, information, critical, mathematical, historical, scientific, political, media, cultural, spatial, social, ethical, or the traditional textual. We especially welcome workshops with a "hands-on" component or practical application of theory.

Wish I could have attended the Learning 2.0 conference up in Shanghai this week, but with a new campus we were in lock-down mode for the month of September. Others, from our old campus, did get to go, e.g., Ben Morgan gave a workshop on Creating a 21st Century Learning Environment in Your School: From Strategic Vision to Reality (his slide presentation and handouts are available for download from that link page). As IT director, his take is the big picture and I appreciate we've come a long way, however, I still chafe at StudyWiz and its inability to let people roam around and see what other teachers are doing. It's structure is basically silos, or, what happens in your classroom stays in your classroom. It may suit secondary, but not primary. Though we at the East Campus are trying to find ways to be as open as possible, using the StudyWiz junior interface.

Roaming around the Learning 2.0 conference ning, "21st Century" jumps out as a major buzzword. Note these workshop sessions:
Kim gave a workshop at the Teach-IT conference last November here in Singapore and her school, ISB (International School of Bangkok), is pursuing 21st century goals with a passion. See, for example, their ongoing professional development wiki, 21st Century Literacy, complete with minutes of meetings, teams, projects, resources, etc.

Michael Wesch, Media Literacy, and Classroom Portals

Michael Wesch is a professor of digital ethnography who has learned both from his students and with his students. His videos -- A Vision of Students Today, The Machine is Us/ing Us, and Information R/evolution -- are well known.

Over the summer he did two major presentations, with overlapping content, summarizing his work with students and providing a good overview of the cultural history of YouTube and the role of digital media in learning. He rebuts the digital native/immigrant distinction, saying we're all natives now in this rapidly changing digital environment. He also confirms that while students have been exposed to a lot of media, it does not follow that they are media literate.

One was "An anthropological introduction to YouTube" given at the Library of Congress, June 23, 2008.

The other, "A Portal to Media Literacy" or "Michael Wesch on the Future of Education", was presented at the University of Manitoba on June 17, 2008. This is the one I recommend for teachers, as it was aimed at educators. Wesch has only been teaching for four years and the story of his own learning path is fascinating. (NB: it runs for about an hour, so get a glass of wine or a cappuccino in hand before you start.)

Wesch keeps asking, how can we create students who create meaningful connections? How do we create significance?

He offers this wonderful quote from Barbara Harrell Carson (1996, Thirty Years of Stories):
Students learn what they care about from people they care about and who, they know, care about them.
He discusses first finding a grand narrative to provide context and relevance (i.e., semantic meaning, or a big picture), then creating a learning environment that values and leverages the learners themselves (i.e., personal meaning) -- doing both in a way that realizes and leverages the existing media environment. He asks, how do we move students from being knowledgeable to being knowledge-able?

Wesch uses Netvibes to provide a platform for student participation: Mediated Cultures: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

On a much smaller scale, for much younger students, Keri-Lee and I are playing around with Pageflakes to create a portal for our primary school students. My plan is to make a separate Library tab on the page.

The actual, not the virtual - or the love (ideally) inherent in classroom teaching

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.
Listening to Margaret Edson talk about her love of classroom teaching, it's not hard to understand her success as a playwright ("Wit" won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 2001 by Mike Nichols, a movie the critic Roger Ebert recently mentioned as one that hurt too much to watch now that he's had cancer himself).

Don't just read her speech -- watch her perform it. Her delivery is dramatic, poetic, and funny. (I've already suggested her as a speaker for a TED conference.)

Her emphasis on the importance of the face-to-face interaction between teachers and students reminds me of one of my favorite poems -- "Did I Miss Anything" by Tom Wayland -- subtitled, "Question frequently asked by students after missing a class".

Edson spoke at Commencement Day at Smith College this past May -- her alma mater, and mine, which is how I came across her speech -- in one of those usually boring email bulletins. Such graduation addresses aren't always so memorable, though two others I've bookmarked are: JK Rowling on "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination" at Harvard this year, and the comic writer David Sedaris at Princeton back in 2006.

Rowling's comments on the benefits of failure -- real failure -- makes me think of the need to welcome and recognize risk in our lives (read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb).

Similarly, her comments on imagination -- that "what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality" -- reinforce Edson's message that it's the journey, not the arrival, that counts in life. Edson claims she wrote her Smith college application essay on the theme, via Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Montaigne. I've always preferred Cavafy's expression of it in the poem "Ithaka".

Edson is passionate about her job as a kindergarten teacher and considers giving children the power to read as the best way she can change the world.
"Reading and writing is power--the thing that gives you the most power in your whole life. I like being part of students acquiring that power. I like handing that power over."

Sharing the wealth of information

Our TeachIT workshop today on Social Software in School and Life is not so much HOW to use these Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, online catalogs, photo sharing, etc.), but what you might do with them. The power of the social comes from seeing how others make use of tools. So we're hoping our chart will get filled in with examples from our participants.

What is the best way to share information?

SHARING LISTS OF BOOKS: Example 1: PYP Resources

PYP teacher-librarians are always being asked to provide a book that exemplifies the IB Learner Profile. And paper lists of relevant books are always being passed around. My solution to this was LibraryThing, an online cataloguing program.

My catalog -- UWC_PYP (see description) started out as a means of consolidating lists of books that relate to the IB Learner Profile (examples of how we can be Inquirers, Thinkers, Communicators, Risk-takers, Knowledgeable, Principled, Caring, Open-minded, Balanced, and Reflective), however, it's now all-purpose.

For example, my children's literature discussion group recently focused on books featuring contemporary cultures. So I took the various recommendations and information collected them under the tag "contemporary cultures" in my UWC_PYP catalog. Voila! -- an instant "contemporary cultures" reading list.

As the school librarian, I also have been frustrated with finding out (and keeping track) of the sets of novels available (but not easily accessible) in all the grade levels' reading cupboards. I run an after-school book club so always need new sets of novels. Once I got the teachers to give me their paper lists, I quickly entered them in a LibraryThing catalog: UWC_novelsets. Note how the tags tell me where the books are and how many are available (where '?' indicates I'm still not sure!).

Building A Reading Community

Had the chance to hear Helen Reynolds, Teacher-Librarian of the Year 2007 in Australia, speak at the Australian school here in Singapore the other day. Though on the The Southport School library webpage her job title is listed as Senior Librarian, she says she was hired ten years ago as Director of Information Services. Instead, Director of Literacy might be appropriate.

Her talk was titled: Maintaining Momentum: Keeping boys reading in the middle school years, and she gave us an overview of her philosophy and practices behind the creation of an active reading community in a day/boarding boys' school with an enrolment of approximately 1400 preschool to year 12.

She swears by Stephen Krashen's The Power of Reading, Aidan Chambers's The Reading Environment, Young Australians Reading, and Knowing Readers by Susan LaMarca and Pam MacIntyre.

The key is getting the whole community involved -- a giant partnership -- which means not just the library and the English department, but all staff (even the cleaners) and the parents. The goal is an environment which legitimizes wide and comprehensive reading.

Some elements of her successful program:
  • * All students keep Reading Records -- lists of the books they've read in and out of school -- that follow them throughout their time at the school (so any teacher can see any student's reading history);
  • * Book reports are 40-second oral events, done at the end of term -- no long boring writing about what you've read;
  • * Book chat time -- lots of it -- in classrooms, in the library, in the hallways;
  • * Author visits -- as many as possible;
  • * Regular silent reading times throughout the school, e.g., every English class starts with 10 minutes of silent reading, and Grades 8-10 English classes come to the library every fortnight for a session of book talk and reading;
  • * Monthly book club (and newsletter), where students get the pick of new library books to read and review; she also takes club members out to literary festivals and any events related to books;
  • * Ongoing collection of data -- such as surveys to find out what the kids are reading and how they think reading helps them; this data is shared with teachers, admin, and parents;
  • * Tons of book displays, e.g., the first display of the year is of books which the students voted as their favorites the year before;
  • * 7-week parent program at the beginning of each year -- in which she teaches parents the same information literacy skills the kids learn;
  • * Big book collection, catering for all reading levels and a wide variety of interests; she said she buys for everyone (including parents); I like her attitude that she's about choice, not censorship -- she says it's not her job to censor what a child reads -- parents can do that by submitting a form;
  • * Supporting teachers as readers and getting them to advertise their reading to students, e.g., before every holiday break, she takes a stack of books into the staff room and passes them out, and teachers in all subject areas are encouraged to produce bookmarks of their recent reads and have them available in their classrooms for students to take;
  • * Reader's Cup (an annual competition in Australia) -- she always get a team to enter;
  • * Writing competitions -- she encourages students to enter any online writing competition and says some students have won money from them.
Three websites she recommends:
Given my current situation, I was particularly pleased to hear her say, of course, she lets parents borrow. And her response to my query about borrowing limits was, unlimited! (She did admit there are borrowing limits printed in some library policy document, but they are not enforced.) Letters about overdue books are sent to parents after two months and any financial reckoning about lost books is only done at the end of term. So reasonable...

I also noted her comment that circular tables in the library encourage social booktalking. Made me decide I must get to IKEA to replace a few of my dreary institutional rectangles with round colorful ones.

Local to global? Or global to local?

You hear it over and over again. Learning must be relevant to kids' lives. I completely agree. But sometimes I feel too little credit is given to the power of how we -- as teachers -- can make something non-local relevant to kids.

At a workshop I recently attended my table was supposed to be coming up with sample research paper assignment questions which would force kids to go beyond the basic instruction to "Write about a disease." We proposed a series of increasing challenging questions, from "what is disease? what diseases do I know?" to "what are the most deadly diseases in the world for which we don't have a cure?" to "if I had to write Bill Gates and convince him to give money [or raise money myself] for research into one deadly disease, what would it be and why?". The workshop leader was gently trying to get us to come up with questions more based in the kids' everyday reality, e.g., what diseases are in my community and what I can do about it?

But what if malaria isn't rampant in our community? Does that mean we shouldn't encourage kids to learn about it?

As Rischard said at some point in his talk, we must get people into the mindset of the question,
How can I be first a global citizen, second a national citizen, and third a local citizen?

Which makes me think of Kieran Egan, one of my favorite educational theorists. In an article back in 2003 in the Phi Delta Kappan, he asked if we should, "Start with What the Student Knows or with What the Student Can Imagine?"

While starting with what the child knows works with some subjects, e.g., material ones, it shouldn't be a rigid rule. He bemoans the limitation of the social studies curriculum which annually expands from the family to the community to the state to the country to the world. It can take forever to get to that world perspective. Perhaps that's where we should be starting...


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Networking about pressing global issues

Continuing on re Rischard and his book High Noon.... (see previous posting)

The 20 most pressing problems, according to Rischard:

Sharing our planet: Issues involving the global commons
1. Global warming
2. Biodiversity and ecosystem losses
3. Fisheries depletion
4. Deforestation
5. Water deficits
6. Maritime safety and pollution
Sharing our humanity: Issues requiring a global commitment
7. Massive step-up in the fight against poverty
8. Peacekeeping, conflict prevention, combating terrorism
9. Education for all
10. Global infectious diseases
11. Digital Divide
12. Natural disaster prevention and mitigation
Sharing our rulebook: Issues needing a global regulatory approach
13. Reinventing taxation for the 21st century
14. Biotechnology rules
15. Global financial architecture
16. Illegal drugs
17. Trade, investment, and competition rules
18. Intellectual property rights
19. E-commerce rules
20. International labor and migration rules
[both images, above right, taken from www.nais.org]


Rischard stresses that these problems require long-term thinking and commitment, something democracies cannot easily deliver (due to electoral pressures). Nation-states, territorial by definition, are also inadequate, given the inherently global nature of the problems. He proposes the establishment of Global Issues Networks, consisting of experts from various countries appointed by world leaders. These experts will work to extract rough consensus for norms and standards for all countries to adhere to in the interest of the whole world.

Rischard said you'd have to tell these experts that they were working for humanity with an eye to each of them winning a Nobel prize for their work. (I love that idea of appealing to their pride!)

The other thing we'd have to do, he said, is to work towards developing the mindset of global citizenship -- which is where education steps in.

There are several educational projects, based on Rischard's book and his advocacy, now in place, with more likely.

In the US, the NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) has a program called Challenge 20/20, which pairs schools in the US with a school elsewhere in the world to work on creative global problem solving.

In Europe there are GIN (Global Issues Network) groups starting up in international schools. Clayton Lewis, head of the International School of Luxembourg, has been working with Rischard and a GIN conference is planned for next year.

Here in Asia WAB (Western Academy of Beijing) has a program in place called GIG (Global Issues Group) and they are planning to host a (student?) conference in March 2008.

Rischard said he is also meeting with the IBO to discuss how his framework could be spread throughout their school network.

It's all exciting stuff. Our school already has a well-developed Global Concerns program, but I can see the benefit of becoming part of the Global Issues Network.


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Questioning projects and assessments

The importance of generating good, meaty, essential questions, especially for student projects, is something everyone agrees on. However, those of us in a school with an explicit inquiry-based learning framework in place often feel ahead of the game.

For example, at Doug Johnson's EARCOS 2007 pre-conference workshop for teacher/librarians on Designing Projects Students (and Teachers) Love, those of us at PYP schools felt his 4-level Research Question Rubric -- where Level 1 asks for simple recall, Level 2 asks a specific question, Level 3 asks for personal response, and Level 4 includes a call for action -- simply reflected different stages in the inquiry process.

Using Kath Murdoch's inquiry cycle model, a Level 1 question is equivalent to Tuning In, a Level 2 question might be Finding Out or Sorting Out, a Level 3 question reflects Going Further or Making Conclusions, and a Level 4 question falls under Taking Action followed by Sharing/Reflection. So, while he was trying to get us to generate a Level 4 question to assign to students, we all felt the rubric was just a spiral students would move along themselves in any one project or unit of inquiry.

When the question of appropriate assessment (or assignments) came up at the IBAP conference, Prof. Stephen Heppell had a few great substitutions he threw out to us (likes scraps to hungry animals) -- especially after the IB Diploma students participating in the forum complained about two years of effort being assessed in a 2-hour handwritten exam worth 80% of their grade.
  • ~ instead of an 80% exam, why not require a 3-nation collaborative task for students?
  • ~ instead of assigning a 1,500 word essay, why not require either a) scripting and posting a 3-minute podcast, or b) managing an online discussion for a week, or c) annotating 10 website links?
  • ~ instead of bemoaning the availability of "free online essays" for students to pinch, why not assign the task of choosing 4 "free online essays" and critiquing them, and then improving on one of them?
I mentioned this to my daughter and a friend, both of whom are about to take the IGCSE/GCSE exams, and they leapt onto the last idea, saying how useful it would be for them to critique other people's essays -- to internalize the examiners' rubric and understand more fully what it is they are being asked to perform.

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Abolish school!

I just love to read calls to abolish schools. If only we had to courage to do it.

Robert Epstein, author of the recently published The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, openly argues for it in his article "Let's Abolish High School" in Education Week. Just as Alvin Toffler explained why we need to shut down the public education system in the Feb. 2007 issue of Edutopia.

It's what Prof. Stephen Heppell was suggesting at the IBAP conference: instead of schools, what if we could measure what people know and offer a free, global model of recognition of accomplishment? A kind of YouTube for learning outcomes, as he said.

During his talk, Heppell showed us several examples of work by "researchers" (as students are called, to distance them from traditional school language) participating his notschool.net project. These kids, excluded from traditional schools for some reason, are given a brand-new Macintosh computer, a broadband internet connection, and mentors -- and the learning begins. The program has exceeded all expectations. (See this report on the Apple Learning website.)

Heppell was also instrumental in the establishment of Ultraversity -- a degree course now offered at a UK university, where people can work full-time and study full-time -- by learning about the work they're already doing. (See this 2003 Guardian (UK) article on Ultraversity.)

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Global visions of the world

How can we convey global visions of the world?

A fantastic visual tool I've started using with my primary students is worldmapper: the world as you've never seen it before - a joint project of the Univ of Sheffield (UK) and the Univ of Michigan (US).

Statistics about the world are presented on a world map where each country or area swells or shrinks in proportion to the data being represented. A picture is worth a thousand words -- start with the basic land area, then move on to population, then look at the estimates of the distribution of the world's wealth in the year 1 (yes, 2000 years ago) and in the year 2015. There are 366 maps so far, covering pollution, disease, resources, violence, education, etc. It's a site to watch.

Then there's the Breathing Earth website which shows you births, deaths, and carbon dioxide emissions in real time around the globe.

On a more artistic note, see Jonathan Harris's Universe project which "reveals our modern mythology" using input from the news portal Daylife.