Freelearning

What is Teaching?

This comment by David Warlick on Jamie's blog points to a reason for why teachers resist Professional Development (PD).

This need for re-imaging could be the basis for great interview questions of school stakeholders, including the teachers, using an Appreciative Inquiry protocol. 

clipped from davidwarlick.com I think that we need to figure out a way to re-image teaching, for the community.  We need to project it as a dynamic profession that is more than just teaching the same old thing.  It’s about crafting learning experiences for students that introduce them to the world that they will inherit.

clipped from davidwarlick.com I think that we need to figure out a way to re-image teaching, for the community.  We need to project it as a dynamic profession that is more than just teaching the same old thing.  It’s about crafting learning experiences for students that introduce them to the world that they will inherit.

Learning by Doing: House Painting

A large crew of painters is tackling the house next to me.  They call back and forth to each other or talk with the man on the next ladder.  Spanish and English.  Now quiet.  Now loud.  Everyone seems happy.  No grumbling, no cursing.  Radio at moderate volume. 

The crew manager talks with a young man on a ladder.  "I want you to paint only three boards at a time.  See you've missed some over here.  Others may paint that way but we don't."  The younger man climbs down.  With only an 8 feet gap between the houses, I hear the manager say quietly, "I don't want you to get discouraged."  And the younger guy says, "Yeah, I know.  I'm okay."

Here is a workman being taught how to paint by someone who is patient, clear, and concerned that the student not be disheartened.  I hope the young people at the Met schools get equally skillful mentoring on their internships in the community. 

When someone chooses a mentor, patience, clarity, and encouragement are all important.

Sarah Puglisi describes the mentoring she received that got her blogging and using technology in the classroom.

When you decide to go learn something who you encounter and how they treat you means a lot. If they treat you in a value additive way, you are compelled almost into your better self. And so I have been.. And as I made friends on-line this would happen in the last year a few more times as I talked to people in many walks of life willing to listen to me about education. This literally amazed me.

Bloggers have been very generous with me, too.  If I'm willing to ask, they are willing to answer my questions and help me along with comments and encouragement.

Is This Your Kind of High School?

Ewan McIntosh reports on a recent visit to the Met schools in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.  These are high schools initially funded by the Gates Foundation and now based on public funding.  He says:

The schooling here is based on four 21st Century education principles:

• Knowledge
• Application of knowledge and critical thinking
• Experiential learning: learning by doing
• Storytelling and presentation skills

In the MET, every teacher is a generalist, helping to scaffold learning alongside others: students, parents, local business. There's an emphasis on the practical hands-on connection to learning, something they have honed over the past 6-6 years.

Ewan tells how the students select their own learning topic that they will focus on each semester.  They work in groups with a faculty guide and stay with that person all four years.  It takes time for them to select a topic -- they have to be deeply interested in it.  They then find a relevant internship in the community.  At the end of the quarter, they give an exhibition on their project.  Their depth of study in one area is complemented by listening to the reports of all their group members on the topics they've chosen.  Read Ewan's detailed description of what he saw and asked. 

Big Picture has a video of one girl's "exhibition" i.e., end of quarter presentation and a discussion by students and faculty of what should be in anyone's exhibition.  Big Picture Schools is a non-profit organization created to develop schools based on the Met idea across the USA.  In this video they are using teleconferencing to help the new schools to understand exhibitions.

Dennis Littky is the driving force behind these schools.  He, with the help of Samantha Grabelle, has written about his experience in The Big Picture: Education is Everyone's Business.  The schools are based on the idea that the young people belong to the community.  They involve local employers in providing internships and parents in observing, assessing, and supporting the student's learning.

I attended inner city public schools in Detroit (Highland Park) as a young person.  School was traditional.  I found room to pursue an interest of mine by earning a Girl Scout badge on building design that was taught by an architect.  Though we were not in a work setting, he did teach us basic skills.  I can still draw basic floor plans of houses when I want to.  Looking back, I would greatly have benefited from seeing what architects do.  Immersion in that environment might have resulted in a different career choice.

My college roommate is an adult who found an internship outside of formal schooling.  She was Associate Dean of Admissions for the Business School at Columbia U. in New York City.  She became  interested in working on the stock market so she arranged to take on an internship-like position for 6 weeks.  At the end of that time, the Wall Street firm offered her a job.  She made arrangements and transitioned into stock analysis first in telephone companies, etc. and later in developing markets. 

How can we, as adults outside formal education, find ways to apply methods like those used at the Met to flourish as adults?  Can we select topics that really interest us and then find ways to pursue learning in those areas?  Can we find or create internships or similar active learning experiences so we gain skills and familiarity with the new field?  What other ways do adults have of doing hands on learning?

I'd love to know what your experience has been with learning about totally new fields.

Crazy Quilt Mind

When I'm too shy to post or too unfocused, I read some more.  I have almost 700 bookmarks on del.icio.us (in 5 weeks) and many notes in my Google notebook -- on items of interest and possible posts.

The result is that my ideas get more and more complex or is the word complicated?  I see relationships between things -- like global economics, self-directed learning, nature, and forces for innovation.   I find examples of model schools, insights into technology and the future, stories of children on a camping trip in Pakistan protecting baby sea turtles from predatory birds, and an account of a mayor demolishing an elementary school's garden to allow developers to put up affordable housing.

How do I talk about the relationships I see in just a few paragraphs.  I need to present some background and examples before I can launch into relationships between ideas.  If I waited until I could express everything clearly and succinctly, I might not get around to writing. 

A crazy quilt is made by adding one piece at a time and looking at what you've created to decide what to do next.  Edging stitches and embroidery are often used later to pull a quilt together.  Perhaps I need to build my blog one piece at a time and do more integrating after I see what designs emerge.

 

Why Are My Posts So Formal?

My posts on the topic of freelearning are very formal so far.  When I speak with people I usually tell stories. I have a large vocabulary but I adapt to the language of people with whom I'm communicating.  I infer that, in contrast to daily conversation, blogging has tapped into memories of school.

I want to "play with the big guys" and gals .   I think I've inadvertently adopted a dry, academic mode of writing in order to do that.  I'm more caught up in trying to find my sources than I am in sharing my thoughts, feelings, and insights.  I don't believe people learn from ideas and yet that's what I'm sharing.  I'm not creating a blog for me but trying to meet someone else's standards -- and I don't even know whose.  While Iii'm writing about freeing up learning.

The first time I took an online course and I clicked through on a hyperlink that the facilitator had embedded, I felt like I had found freedom.  I was excited to be able to explore far and wide with as much depth and breadth as I chose.  I didn't have to wait for others to be ready to move ahead.  In first grade it was group reading when I wasn't allowed to turn the page until the person reading outloud finished.  In graduate school it was taking the required developmental psychology course after I had taught the subject at the college level -- "because the other students don't know the material."

Now I've started a blog and I'm free to write what I want when I want and I find I'm confining myself using preconceptions I internalized when I was in school.  I've heard that we teach what we need to learn -- and it's obvious when I see someone else doing it.

Many introductions to blogging talk about finding one's voice as part of the task.  I thought I would have to write for a while to find what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.  I didn't expect to discover that I had penned myself in (pun intended) from the start. 

SLA Documentary: From School to Family

A snapshot of our first year, made by Class of 2010 classmate, Arielle Reese

Deciders Lack Experience with Poverty

In my last post I wrote about lack of experience with the inner city on the part of Dan who taught in the Bronx and the Acting Assistant from the Department of Education. 

Syracuse has brought in the Bridges Out of Poverty  program to help persons without experience of poverty to understand the differences in values and perspectives of those in poverty, the middle class, and the upper class.  Class differences are often a forbidden subject in American culture.   This program has, however, received wide support.  Over 2,000 people have sought out training in the 18 months since the offerings became available.  I wonder what would happen to NCLB if Congress were given this information by trainers who talked about their experiences with poverty.
 
The program description includes an interview with the director, Ms. Douglas:

The idea behind Bridges is to learn and understand the differences in economic class and to avoid making judgments about the choices people make, organizers said.

It’s not always about access to resources or programs, Douglas said. It’s also about relationships, she said.    

"For folks living in poverty, relationship is central and it becomes the base for the way we make decisions living in generational poverty," Douglas said.

Chris Lehmann is principal of an urban charter high school in Philadelphia.  Some of the work of the students was based on self-selected projects.  One of the students chose to do a video that captures a sense of the first year of the school.  The consensus of the students and teachers is that they have become a family.  Since relationships are highly prized among most people who live in poverty, this school has created an atmosphere that meets some of the special needs of impoverished students.  See the following post for the video.

 

Does NCLB = Free Education in U.S.?

On August 23, radio host Diane Rehm aired a program on the controversial No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.  I'm writing about this show because stories it contains have motivated me to become active in opposing NCLB.

On the panel is Jonathan Kozol, a longtime educator, who talks  about “Francesca”, a first year teacher in the inner city in Boston.  He describes her in his new book, Letters to a Young Teacher.   Also, Dan Brown, a former first year teacher in the Bronx, NYC, author of The Great Expectations School, talks about learning to be authoritative and the joys of really connecting with students.  Diane also interviews Doug Mesecar, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. 

 

In the US, this national legislation attempts to insure that all children get a free, quality education.  It mandates that each State give tests to children to prove they are meeting standards in reading and mathematics.  Schools that do not achieve the stated level are threatened with closing and parents are to be offered alternate schools for their children to attend.  Does this program, in fact, guarantee a free education?

As is always the case, there have been consequences that were not intended.

•   Physical activities have been reduced in many schools.  Kozol states that no child in Chicago now has recess.  Increased time has been allocated to reading math.

• Teachers are less able to determine how they will teach and what material is important for them to teach.  In Harlem, teachers are given instructions which define their teaching activities in 20-30 minute blocks for the entire day.

• Teachers are pressured to teach to the test.  Most of the callers to Diane's Show were teachers who described principals and superintendents who insisted they teach what would be on the test to the exclusion of creativity on the part of the teachers. 

• Kozol describes new teacher “Francesca,” insisting that she teach classical music and poetry and not focus only on math and reading. Her students passed the test.

• Mesecar derides school administrators who insist that teachers teach to the test and eliminate other activities.  He asserts that there is nothing in NCLB that requires any of these responses.  He feels sorry for students and teachers in these districts.

• Dropout rates among first year teachers are very high.  Many enthusiastic young people are leaving the classroom.

• Funding for education has not increased and the inequity in resources between urban, rural and suburban schools remains.

Outcomes of this policy are controversial.  Mesecar presents the Education Department's view that test scores are improving.  Kozol directly contradicts this conclusion. 

Many people question the meaning of standardized test results as a measure of learning. Kozol insists that NCLB terrorizes children.  Less extreme is the view that higher order thinking cannot be measured by such tests. Others want measures of progress, not arbitrary standards.

Brown tells of a student in his 4^th grade who reconnected with his peers, learned to read and began writing poetry after two years of isolating himself.  This student failed the test.  Brown insists failure is not a reasonable conclusion about how much he learned.

Refugee children who have just started school in this country are given one year to catch up.  After that they are given the same tests and held to the same standards.  Thus, a child who has spent 4 years in a refugee camp, who does not know how to read in any language, and who does not speak English is tested at grade level after one year.  Even with dedicated ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teachers, this task is impossible and schools that are succeeding are penalized (conversation with local school principal). 

The claim that higher test scores indicate students are doing better is based on the assumption that students who are less able do not drop out of school. Despite the fact that NCLB provides some definitions for how to calculate that rate, states are not consistent in their reporting. Misleading numbers have been common.  Many states do not keep track of students so they cannot report on whether individual students attend another school or dropout.

 

Since I am a proponent of freelearning, you might have guessed before I began that I would not like NCLB.  I find it limited on many dimensions.  In addition to objecting to the pressures it puts on teachers and students away from creativity and inquiry, it does not take into account the class structure in this country.  I'll take up the effects of poverty on children and the inequitable funding of education in a later post. Our current system does not guarantee each child a free, public education.

Are there other consequences of NCLB that you would add to this list, positive or negative?