Twilight of Education (Kristen Stewart and Differentiated Learning)

People with a lot of uniqueness will struggle to have their needs met by a system designed for the average person.

Kristen Stewart, who played "Bella" of recent Twilight fame, blames her teachers for failing to meet her educational needs when she didn't fit into the education system. Her acting meant that she couldn't make classes regularly and needed personalised "packages" from her teachers to help her keep up her education.

Three things I want to mention about this.

One - This is differentiated learning, i.e. having a unique program of learning that is tailor made to the individual needs of the student.

Two - The workload of high school teachers is impossible if they are expected to provide individual packages for their 125 to 150 students (under a differentiated learning model)

Three - Teaching students how to teach themselves, and weaning them off of their dependence on the (current) education system as early as possible, seems like a good way to differentiate in a meaningful way. Developing learning power according to Guy Claxton, or building Key Competencies according to the New Zealand Curriculum.

For the full news article, visit: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10758053

7 Ways [Video] Games Reward the Brain

I wanted some ideas to apply to my classroom to make it a less stressful and more satisfying place to learn for my students and I.  So, in need of an inspirational kick of energy, I turned to www.TED.com to track down something of interest to revive my brain.  While I wasn’t exactly captured by the blurb for this talk, instead taking a bit of a gamble on the possible productiveness of these 15 minutes, I found myself getting quite excited about how to use these seven ideas in my class.  I think I will experiment with them during the end of this year to see what I can take forward for my teaching practice.

The essence of this talk (by Tom Chatfield) is that we can learn from video games about motivation. He highlights 7 main ways.  Below are the 7 ways and some of my ideas relating to them.  The video is also embedded at the end for your convenience.

1. Experience bars measuring progress
It is highly motivating to players to see their energy or experience bars increasing.  In my class I could have something like this for each student on the front of their book to display their their current level of experience.  I would colour in their level where I think they are at in their understanding of a particular concept and I would colour a different bar to show the amount of time and effort they have put in towards building their level.  Perhaps I could have a series of bars (and effort bars) for a range of skills and abilities including key competencies, tidiness, project progress, and others.

2. Multiple long and short term aims (parallel aims but not too hard and not too easy)
Giving a range of tasks to players helps them engage by allowing them to choose what they feel like doing at a particular time.  Some of the long term goals will likely ensure that players complete even the things they don’t want to do, but if there are multiple ways to accomplish something, then even the perception of being able to choose a personal favourite is motivating.  In my classroom I would offer a range of methods for task completion, and goals could be closely tied with progress bars, e.g. reach the green zone for progress in team-work.  I can also tailor tasks to student ability by having open ended tasks with certain limitations for advanced students to test them.  This is similar to the differentiated learning model.  Short term goals would be crafted to give a sense of accomplishment in each class and also for long term project completion or preparation for exams/assessments.

3. Reward effort (every little bit counts in a video game)
This is self explanatory.  You do something worthwhile and you get a reward.  Rewards can be used to train positive behaviour in the simplest form of learning and can be anything from lollies to verbal praise.  Different rewards will work for different learners but the key is to ensure rewards are not given so long after the positive action that they are not emotionally linked to the action being rewarded.  Especially in today’s world of instant gratification, rewards need to be immediate for good work.  Perhaps over the long term a system can be devised to gradually delay gratification to teach learners how to build a vision for the future.

4. Rapid, frequent, clear feedback (must be able to link consequences to actions very fast)
As mentioned above, but feedback must be meaningful and understandable in order to work towards motivating students and players alike.  In a game you might get eaten by a monster for not using the correct technique or the correct piece of information.  In the classroom you might get the wrong connection to an electrical circuit or use the wrong component and the project fails to work.  As far as the role of the teacher, I need to be constantly giving feedback in the form of advice or support.  If I can design student tasks to be run by the students themselves I will be able to focus on going from student to student to offer suggestions.

5. An element of uncertainty (uncertain rewards 25%) enough to want to find out what happens if...
In the gaming world, your rewards are varied, e.g. opening treasure chests to gain money or weapons.  There must always be some sort of reward, but the reward could be your bread and butter gold for 75% of the time with 25% scoring a special prize.  Once in a blue moon a super special object is in the chest that can give you a super power (or something equivalent).  This keeps things really exciting as you always have a chance of getting something a little bit special, though if everyone is getting the special reward all of the time then it becomes less special and less of a motivator to open chests.  In the classroom the varied rewards could be lollies, extra-special rewards could be cans of fizzy, and super special rewards are ice-cream during lunch for a week.  Maybe that’s not too realistic but teachers can use praise to varying degrees, or a special seat in the class for the best effort, stamps, stickers, hi-fives, and many other rewards for students accomplishing the basics of every lesson.  If we reward the basics then it is easier to get the students to try something a little more than the basic also.

6. Windows of enhanced attention (risk taking potential the most, best time for memory to be used)
The difference between games and the classroom is that students can choose to play games.  All that we can do, when they are effectively forced to be in our class, is make it as comfortable as possible for them to emotionally engage and take risks with their learning. We must create the windows of opportunity where their memory will operate the best in order to retain information, and where they are emotionally safe and willing to push themselves to receive potential rewards for their risk.  Students will not risk if the window is closed and we can’t make them learn by throwing them through without taking the time to open it!

7. Other people/peers/collaboration is the best reward.  
In video games, players team up to help one another and come up with ways to make this help fair on everyone.  Those players who abuse the help of others are shunned.  This points to our natural desire to want to fit in and to be a part of a community to some degree.  We can tap into this as a reward for motivating students in class.  Creating a positive and exciting class culture of collaboration that everyone can feel a valued part of will see engagement levels shoot through the roof.

So there you have it.  Seven ways that we can learn to engage students from observing them with video games.  Businesses and governments would do well to take these ideas into their policy making to make us enjoy and engage with their efforts.  For now, I will look at how I can improve my own experience bar by teaching students how to make their own ones!

Differentiated Learning and Parkour

There are a number of ways that parkour is good for teaching and learning at different levels.  Today I thought I would discuss a number of them to highlight the benefits to individuals.  It is worth bearing in mind that good learners who have a good moral foundation will be productive and positive contributors to society, especially noticeable within their local communities and immediate circle of friends.

Everybody who can move is capable of beginning parkour.  Since a large part of the physical side is improving one’s capacity to move, the goals can be infinitely variable and adjusted for any level.  Someone who can jump up one step will seek to improve by jumping two.  Someone who can jump up 5 steps will seek to jump 6.  If someone can only jump to a particular height, they can work on developing the number of times that they can perform that jump without losing their balance on the landing.

Parkour is a gateway to developing one’s ability to learn.  It happens almost by accident.  A person might get sore muscles from over training and wonder why this is.  They have a direct motivation to explore sport science to find out how to avoid excessive pain, and to train their body in the most efficient way.  There is a culture of learning that is inevitable in an online community (as parkour tends to be) with the sharing of advice and tips for improvement and safety.

Safety and steady, measured progression is an important part of parkour, so participants learn to reflect on their progress to make sure they aren’t getting too far ahead for their body to handle.  Socially, participants encourage risk analysis and balancing the risks taken with their goals for progression and long-term physical health.

Not only is it good for learning and teaching in a direct way, indirectly it is also so much fun to do and confidence is easily developed, making parkour a very easy-to-engage-in activity.  I’ve said to a number of people that parkour (and activities like it) that encourage engagement and make it easy for people to learn self-discipline, should be actively supported by governing bodies, schools, and communities.  In this we would see more people developing in their ability to lead productive and positive lives.  Our society would improve as the population better learn to learn, so that they can learn to live and overcome life’s obstacles and hardships, relishing the challenge!

Differentiated Learning

Differentiated teaching and learning is a buzz concept in education in NZ at the moment.  There is a lot of pressure on teachers to apply methods of teaching that allow differentiated learning among their students.  Today I’m taking a look at the following: What is differentiated learning?  Why do we need it? How do we do it?  What are the challenges to good differentiated learning?

What is differentiated learning?
Every student before us in the learning environment (which extends beyond the walls of the classroom) will have a different range of abilities and interests.  They will also have a different range of needs according to what needs have been met (or not) in the rest of their lives.  Differentiated teaching practice attempts to take into account this range of needs and abilities so that students can begin learning from where they are “at”.  For example, there is no point in teaching year 13 calculus to someone who has not demonstrated skill in year 10 algebra.  Similarly, there is little point in teaching year 9 food and nutrition to a dietary specialist with 20 years of experience in the field.  Some students will need a soft touch because of sensitive issues in their lives and others will need a good “kick up the bum” to get them motivated.  Maybe not literally, but you get the idea.

Why do we need to do it?
The current system is modelled after mass production ideas so that we can get as many students through the system with as little cost as possible.  That often translates into 30+ students sitting silently and copying notes as a means of absorbing information and supposedly learning.  It is clear that this method of “teaching” is not going to meet the needs of students, and could even be said to be forcing students needs into a small box and then saying that that their needs, as defined by the small box, are being met.  Too many of the differentiated characteristics get lost because they don’t fit into the educational box of the 19th and 20th century classroom.

Putting it simply, students are not learning anything of value in such “traditional” learning environments.  If the individual needs of each and every student is taken into account, it stands to reason that they will learn so much more and they will even have their non-curriculum learning needs met to some degree.

How do we do it?
There are a range of methods that people use to differentiate with some of them bordering on being token efforts that don’t really accomplish much.  When we understand the purpose of differentiation properly, we can tell whether a method will be successful or not.  When we don’t understand we are likely to apply our current methods and then find some way of calling them differentiated.  I’ll illustrate two methods and see if these examples work to differentiate or not.

First, is offering a common task to the entire class and expecting students of differing levels of ability to apply themselves according to their ability.  The task needs to have multiple methods of being completed so that it is both accessible for those with little knowledge and patience, but easily developed to a high level for students with more knowledge and excitement to try things out.  The role of the teacher is to observe students and push them when they are choosing too easy an option to complete the task or to gently direct then toward a simpler alternative when it is clear that their knowledge is not up to their lofty, though probably very creative, designs.

The second, students are tested to ascertain their level of ability and are then streamed into classes with students of similar ability.  The teacher will then teach at a particular level and expect that all students can keep up because they teach from the level that those students achieved their results.

Both examples appear to differentiate, but I believe that the first is a very powerful way to do so while the second is bordering on “token differentiation” because it differentiates based purely on a single snapshot in time and does not take into account the day to day factors that may ultimately have a larger impact on student learning.  Even within a streamed classroom there will be such a range of abilities and learning styles that it is not truly differentiated.  It is understandable, but not justifiable, that teachers would gravitate towards the streaming model because it is easier and potentially less stressful.  

What are the challenges to differentiated learning?
Following is a list of some of the challenges to differentiated teaching and learning and a brief description where applicable.  This should give an idea of just how difficult the task will be for teachers and schools to implement this widely:

1. It takes a lot of energy to keep track of individual students progress in a task.
2. There is no simple method of recording progress.  There is no simple percentage of work completed correctly under differentiation.
3. It is immensely difficult to report back to parents how their children are doing.  How can someone trained in a very particular and technical skill (teaching) explain the progress in a way that is meaningful to parents untrained in these skills.  Percentages or levels of results are easy to see but when there is no clear standard, any comments are meaningless.  I would say that most parents will have a good idea of their child’s progress if they regularly talk with them and observe them at home, but this is not necessarily something that translates into something you can communicate to a potential employer.
4. It is almost impossible to design a course when you don’t know the abilities of the students you will have in the year(s) to come.  This means that a lot of planning must be done “on the fly” or rushed during brief moments of non-contact time.
5. Teachers have to be highly capable and experienced in a very wide range of skills, knowledge, and character traits.  They will have to demonstrate that they are good learners.
6. A wide range of resources must be available or readily accessible for student’s to try out their ideas as they come up.  It’s no good getting equipment in a week down the track because the students may have lost interest by then, or moved on to the next thing.
7. Many people who grew up under the industrial, mass production, system will not be able to relate to differentiated learning without a lot of mental effort.  This is a huge barrier, along with the tendency to use those cop-out and token methods.  Informing students, parents, potential employers, and other members of the community about the nature of differentiated learning, and the power of it to improve overall levels of ability, is a huge challenge.  The people who it is meant to serve must believe in it or there will be no support for teachers trying to teach in this way.
8. Methods of differentiated learning will take time to develop.  Teachers need the space to think about this and work out how to incorporate it into their practice.  Teachers don’t currently have the time to do this.
9. Small class sizes are essential to teachers differentiating in their practice, but that would mean classes of about 15 maximum, and this would require twice the amount of teachers than we currently have in secondary schools.

Finally
We can see that differentiated learning will really meet the wide range of needs of our learners.  Unfortunately, there are many challenges to overcome in making it work, and it is quite unfair to expect teachers to change overnight without a lot of support and time to adapt thinking and practice.  I am convinced that it is worth trying to change the system, so I will do my bit according to the abilities and time I have available.  Life is differentiated, so learning must also be differentiated in order to successfully prepare learners for life.