Bicycle Radio NZ - Government and Education

Today's episode covers:

• A poetic consideration of the frosty morning
• The role of government in education - with reference to the 2012 Budget stuff ups
• Industrial models of education and how they don't work today
• My ideal educational vision for NZ schools

Bicycle Radio NZ - Wednesday, May 30th 2012 (episode 07) (right click to save)

Links from the show: 

My education focused blogging: igage.wordpress.com

A fantastic "rant" about class sizes illustrating the problems superbly!

I forgot a bunch of what I spoke about but I'll add links in the comments if I remember anything worth adding.

Bicycle Radio NZ - Education and Assessment

Today's episode (on a chilly and foggy morning).  I talk about the purpose of education, the government's role in education development, and the purpose of assessment.  Enjoy!

Bicycle Radio NZ - Monday, May 21st 2012 (episode 01) (right click to save)

Some of these themes are discussed on my education focused site: igage.wordpress.com

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!

Changing Education Paradigms

Think about this:

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.

“Old” Age and Physical Training

Today I’ve been pondering why older people (60+) training seems less common than younger age groups.  There are a lot of possible reasons that I’ve heard, but what it seems to come down to is a lack of time, determination, and education about how the body responds to exercise.  I’ll list a few common reasons that older folk tend not to train, and I will then proceed to “teach my grandmother to suck eggs” and show that almost none of these reasons can be used to justify a lack of physical training.

Some reasons why older people do not train (either much, or at all)

1. It is too hard on their bodies - it hurts to train and it takes a long time to recover.
2. My joints cannot handle the training load like they used to.
3. I’m afraid that I will hurt myself now that I am old.
4. I’m too busy.
5. I’ve never really exercised in my life, so why start now when I’m already old?
6. I wouldn’t know where to start.

I’m almost certain you will have heard several of these from friends or relatives.  I’ve even heard a number of them from people in their early thirties!

What we now have to consider is the few older athletes that continue exercising regularly, and who maintain good physical health, well into “old age”.  Are they genetic freaks who can do this without trying?  Or is there something that they do which anyone can tap into?  If we believe 64 year old Sylvester Stallone, it takes “scientific ways with new equipment” to keep in shape, and you have to constantly battle pain and a loss of flexibility associated with age.

Let’s look at some responses to these reasons:
Is it really too hard on older bodies to train?  The obvious answer is: NO!  Like anything, you must train within your ability.  There is no point in trying to run a marathon or lift 200kg if you haven’t trained for it.  After the kids leave home, a lot of older people find that they are left with a life of routines that were adapted around their kids and almost none of their time went to maintaining exercise routines or developing physical fitness.  The biggest hurdle to overcome is finding out what you are capable of, and accepting that it will be much lower because of years of inactivity.  It can be a real hit to the pride to have to start small and slow, and the longer you delay the lower you will have to start.  The good news is that as long as you can heal from wounds and put on weight, you are pretty much physically capable of developing your muscles and improving your joint health and flexibility.  Recovery time may be long, but as long as you can recover you are still in the game.

It may be true that your joints are weak, but this is normal for anyone of any age if they have not worked out or eaten the right nutrients to maintain good joint health.  Of course, some people will have diseases such as arthritis, but for goodness sake get it diagnosed by a doctor instead of carrying on using it as an excuse not to exercise.  Once you know what your ailments are and the limitations they cause, you can then design your exercise routine to get around them.  If your hands are too sore to hold weights then you can use your lower body more.  Creative thinking of determined minds should be able to come up with a solution.

Fear, a busy life, bad habits, etc. are all things that need to be overcome by everyone at any level of physical ability.  These should never be insurmountable obstacles.  Too many reasons come down to a lack of self discipline and mental toughness, both of which can be developed at any age.  Even an old dog can learn tricks with enough determination and the right resources.

Which brings me to the last objection: education.  If you don’t know enough to start training then just ask someone.  Eventually you will come across a person who can direct you to videos, books, and people that can guide you.  I don’t know a more comprehensive source of information than www.stadion.com where the main man, Tom Kurz (over 50) often demonstrates the principles that his books contain.  You can see an example of Tom at age 50 demonstrating how to maintain his splits, clearly showing that most people have a very wrong notion about what older bodies are capable of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGjEeChs4tk

I have seen a video on YouTube of a 60+ year old woman performing parkour movements.  I worked with an amazing gentleman who ran a marathon on his first day of retirement.  I’ve seen ancient martial arts gurus holding their own against young whipper-snappers.

“Old” age is no excuse, just another obstacle to overcome.

What’s the Point of School (Part Three) - Stress and Escapism

Guy Claxton highlights the problem of stress and escapism in our students.  In a nutshell, the pressure to achieve academically, without being given the support and resources to actually reach those expectations, is causing a great deal of stress in our students.  They turn instead to other sources to bring about the feeling of success and happiness that they crave.

Some negative sources of these substitutes could be: excessive television, excessive internet, drugs and alcohol, bad relationships and sex, bullying, other antisocial behaviour.  Some positive sources of these substitutes could be sporting pursuits, subjects at school that are perceived as less academic because of their creative aspects, good relationships, joining campaign groups.

The young people who have some guidance tend towards the positive substitutes and those with little guidance tend towards the negative.

What is really needed is a total overhaul of the education and assessment system.  Instead of refurbishing something that has rotten foundations, we need to start from scratch, breaking down the old system piece by piece so that we can see the details of the full picture of destruction that we’ve carefully avoided looking at for so long.

In an ideal learning situation, the person in the teaching role identifies where the person in the learning role is in their understanding.  The teacher will then begin to build from there, gently pushing the learner to challenge them self by encouraging them to step just outside their comfort zone.  With the support to overcome challenges like this, gradually increasing in intensity over months and years, the learner will develop confidence in their ability to deal with difficult situations.  With support from someone who is good at teaching them self, the learner will develop a tool box of strategies for promoting their own learning and overcoming of challenges by them self.  This sort of learning is not limited to the academic field, but also to the learning of technical skills (in a sporting context for instance).

The limits to such learning is only time.  For some people, they may take a lot longer to learn the same lessons as the average person, but this does not matter because such a style of learning leads to greatly accelerated learning if it is persistently practiced over many years.  You can see where the current system, which forces learning of individuals into a time frame that will at best suit 50 percent of students, is not going to be workable for too many people.  To it’s credit, the NZ education system has a standards based system in which students are not meant to sit an assessment until they have reached the required standard to pass.  Teachers are meant to know when their students are ready to sit the assessment and allow them to sit internal assessments, or enter into external exams at the end of the year, with the knowledge that they will definitely pass.  In practise, teachers are still under pressure to teach a set body of knowledge in a set period of time, and they are somehow expected to focus on key learning competencies while meeting the learning needs of 25 to 30 students with unique learning needs.  Along with the requirements for University entrance guiding things, and the many other pressures of life and education, it is impossible to expect teachers to be able to do this.  The same system which puts pressure on students, but fails to give them the resources to succeed, also puts pressure on teachers with similar limitations.

This has turned into a longer post than I would like, so I’ll finish there for now.  The key thing to remember, when you find yourself in a learning or teaching situation, is that you can’t rush good learning and you can’t expect people to learn rocket science if they haven’t mastered the basics.

What’s The Point Of School (Part Two)

From the preface:
“[quoting Winston Churchill] “The only time my education was interrupted was while I was at school.”

The purpose of education is to prepare young people for the future.  Schools should be helping young people to develop the capacities they will need to thrive.  What they need, and want, is the confidence to talk to strangers, to try things out, to handle tricky situations, to stand up for themselves, to ask for help, to think new thoughts.”

My thoughts
I’m not sure if Winston Churchill was making a deliberate commentary on the education system when he said this, but sadly it seems accurate.  Instead of being educated according to the noble purpose presented above, students learn to stop asking questions that will develop themselves as people.  Their focus is instead upon passing assessments and meeting requirements for literacy standards that have little bearing upon the real world due to their formulaic and predictable nature.  The real world is not so neat and tidy and real people need to be able to cope with the unexpected.

I would frame the situation as such:
We should be aiming for personal development and character building, developing an understanding of the base principles of learning, rather than focusing on such narrow measures of academic ability as exam results.

I have three concepts upon which I would build my ideal education system.  Creativity, discipline, and altruism.  I have written about these things on my parkour blog in the context of parkour.

What's The Point Of School, by Guy Claxton

From the back cover: "With their emphasis on regurgitated knowledge and stressful exams, today's schools are actually doing more harm than good... ...Guy Claxton proves that education's first priority should be to create enthusiastic learners who can thrive in our complicated and dynamic world..."

I was drawn to this book by the title, as I am not one to blindly follow the system.  I like to question the status-quo, especially when systems appear to be failing at accomplishing the purpose they were designed for.  Also, it is sometimes useful to look at the reason for a thing's existence in order to understand its structure.

The education system is meant to be a learning tool for young (and not so young) people to go into and then come out the other side with some more skills and ability to live their lives.  The government wants productive and happy members of society and the education system is one tool they use to accomplish this end.

Guy Claxton argues that the system is no longer serving these purposes because, amongst other things, it has become more about preparing students to pass exams so that statistics can look better for schools and the government.  In the process, almost every sound principle of natural learning that we take into the system is compromised in order to get us to fit into the artificial learning process.  It reminds me of the Pharisees who had a very detailed system of law, rules, and regulations for worship and did it very well, while at the same time they were missing the point of worship entirely.

Even thought he argues that exams have no real bearing on whether someone will have a happy and successful life, Claxton shows that the educational system is pretty bad at it's own game.  Students cannot pass exams that they have been inadequately prepared for, yet we push out students to achieve extreme goals without giving them the resources to meet those goals.  A result of this is a generation of young people who do not enjoy learning and who seek every alternative they can find that will give them the feelings of success they crave.

There is so much more to say on this, but I'll save it for another time as I'm putting together a few quotes and comments arising from my reading of this book so far.  I'll post snippets as they develop.