The first thing that strikes me when I visit a new school is that the classrooms don’t look a whole lot different from my dad’s one-room school house in 1940s Saskatchewan. (In fact, my dad’s classroom, above, generally looks more vital and lived in.) Not much has changed except the colour of the chalkboard in 200 years.

I was thinking out loud on Twitter and said to  @russgoerend that I’m playing with the idea of having kids do homework at school and schoolwork at home.

At Island Pacific School, we consider three kinds of school work: the basic grammar of a subject, applications of that grammar, and extensions of those applications. For example, some of the grammar of math are the trig rules for solving triangles; an application of those might be measuring the height the school flagpole and an extension of that might be using that to calculate the  and the extension might be using that application to measure the height of old growth firs for a Google maps geo-tagging inventory of local flora on Bowen Island, our school’s home.

Typically, we’ve sent kids home to work on “grammar” exercises with “Read the next two chapters for next week” or “Answer math practice questions 1 – 10 for Thursday” and we’ve saved the fun project-based learning to do in class. The problem is that the kids can go home and do all or some of the work wrong–they can misread the chapters, solve the triangles incorrectly. And they’ll get no feedback from teachers for perhaps days. Yet we know that the sooner students get feedback, the better the learning. We also know, it’s harder to undo learned mistakes than to teach it right the first time.

So, I’ve been running some informal experiments. I read much more to the class–as much as half a novel, maybe–so I can be sure all my students have a good understanding of the texts. I work through drills and practice questions in class so I know they understand the grammar of the subjects I teach. Sometimes I’ll do some applications in class. But I send the kids home to do extension activities and then ask them to come back and report to the class on their work.

Various social media–we use wikis, blogs, IM and email–allow me to keep contact with the kids when they’re doing this extension work outside of school hours. It’s not uncommon for me to get a IM call in the evening from a student with a couple questions about his or her project.

The experiments have been informal, as I said, but I’m getting some indications that the idea works. I have enough anyway to press on further. The students see homework as something rather interesting; the students’ blogs, for example, have grown from a couple dozen words a post to several hundred, and I think I see a growing confidence and willingness to take intellectual risks in the students. The result: better quality applications and extensions.

More to come.

Unlike Macmillan, which wants to let instructors to edit their textbooks, I want my students to be able to add and edit content. I see myself seeding a custom e-textbook with content that the students add to and edit through the year as they individually need–not custom courseware, but custom student-ware. The dual axis navigation would let them build subject area content along one axis and interdisciplinary connections along the second. This sort of Web 2.0, or read-write web artifact would be change a game changer.

Travis Allison at the OurKids blog asked me for my first impressions of the iPad. Here’s the interview.

But in short, I think it’s the ideal tool for the classroom working in the cloud (and everyone should be.) At Island Pacific School, where I work, I’ve divided web tools into five categories: research, production, publication, discussion and time and task management. I also try to use Alan November’s six jobs for students as much as possible, although as we’re not yet 1:1, this is a comes off more haphazardly than I’d like. The iPad would let me and my students handle most of these better than an iPhone/Touch (which, though a fabulous tool, is too small to share in a classroom) and at half the cost of a laptop.

"Dialogue"

source

Actually, I’m being polemical and that’s not entirely true. I like the way a vigorous community of platform developers and users is beetling away at new, clever and challenging ways to teach. But we don’t need no more innovation, not above the level we already have, anyway. First of all, we’re getting carried away by the word. We borrowed it from business, which was a mistake because education is not a business, even if schools might need to keep the bottom line in mind. A modern business in a capitalist market economy grows through innovation, that is through product development. But an education is not a product in the sense that cars are or that TV shows are products and education is not about being competitive, except in the narrowest sense. Innovation relies on obsolescence, and while there may be certain educational practices practice that need to go by the way, there are many that need to stay, too. Innovation is necessary, but not sufficient for securing education’s future. (And, I’ll argue that so far, little fundamentally new is being created. As a small example, most prezi presentations I see, for all their spinning, are still run A-to-B-to-C linearly like old PowerPoints. And the teacher who creates a Ning but doesn’t open it to the public has only recreated the brick-and-mortar classroom. Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited by the potential emerging technologies offer education, I just don’t think we’ve tipped yet. As Clay Shirky says, things are breaking down faster than we can think of ways to replace them.) Secondly, innovation tends to focus on technology, and as I’ve said many times before, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological (actually I’m paraphrasing Heidegger).

Innovation is only half of what we need to get schools moving forward. Emerging web technologies, especially social media, subvert authorities; that is they resist top-down development and give the most payback when they are in the hands of the many, in this case teachers. But for this to happen, schools need to create a climate where experimentation and development by teachers is encouraged. It is the administrator’s job to make that possible. (We can talk another time about what administration looks like in the next iteration of “the school”, whatever that might look like.) To do that job, administrators need certain assurances that that innovation is done safely, accountably and, most of all, with purpose.

And here’s where things become polarized: administrators need control and teachers need freedom. I’m generalizing now, but these two camps are usually presented in opposition to each other. We’re making a mistake if we think one has to give way to the other. And we’re making another mistake if we think the one doesn’t want the other. I will be one of the first to say that control frequently become over-control and stifles real innovation; and even if we–both teachers and administrators–want to let go a little, we may find it hard because structurally, schools are set up as systems of control. Altering control even a little may mean altering the very structure of a school. But just as innovation isn’t inherently good, control isn’t inherently bad. We need a modicum of control–enough at least to hold off chaos and actually get some work done. So, ironically, without some control, there’d be no place in which to innovate. Wordsworth knew this:

We need not more innovation but, rather urgently, to open a substantial dialogue between administrators and teachers–or between control and innovation, if that is a better, less prejudicial way to characterize the players. We need a conversation that recognizes mutual need.

As it turned out, it took a great deal of work to change that view of writing; so much that I changed my entire term’s plans and objectives to develop the practice of thinking first, writing later.

My students and I have come to see a blog as a place to think out loud. It’s a discussion tool. I rarely specify length for a blog post, preferring to let the students write until they feel they’ve expressed themselves clearly. Their first post were short, to be sure, but I suspect they were checking each other’s commitment to blogging. I know of at least one student who had tossed off a blog post went back and then went back and revised her thoughts once she saw what the rest of the class had written. “Wow, my classmates really think philosophically,” she said. I don’t get the sense she had been embarrassed. Rather, it was the fact that everyone else was publicly working hard  that allowed her to work hard as well. But since those early days, I’ve sen the average post length steadily increase.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my Grade 9s, comment on our study of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Sophie’s World, and Surrealist art. She’s responding to a comment by Flannery O’Connor:

The American writer, Flannery O’Connor” said that distortion is often a way of leading people to see the truth. What do you think she means by that? What truths do the Surrealists want us to see? What truths does Carrol want us to see?

I think that this is all connected to what we define and see as “reality”. Surrealists, Lewis Caroll, philosophers too, have the goal of showing us “many realities”. Or more so, showing us that reality is relative, subjective, and that it’s only a reality for us because it’s so deeply rooted in our everyday life, in what we do and see every day, leading us to being “nestled comfortably in the rabbit’s fur”; it’s comfortable, yes, but reality will never change, never differ for you, unless you climb to the tips of the rabbit’s fine hairs, or as Flannery O’Connor puts it, distort your reality. Surrealism, to me, basically means opening up to – not exactly a “new reality” – but to the fact that there is no such thing as “reality”; just many different ones. The distortion of reality, in the same way that many surrealist paintings make people uncomfortable, and sometimes even scared, is, I feel, another way of pushing past your “reality”. Here’s an example that I feel greatly reflects on what Flannery O’Connor said. Maybe you’ve been living underground for all of your life. It’s comfortable, you’ve created a “nice little home” for yourself, but you’ve never seen or experienced the reality of the outside world. And so one day you climb out of your small home in the ground, the one you’ve so conveniently and safely created for yourself, and enter the outside world. It’s chaotic, hectic, nothing like the warm, comfortable home you’ve always lived in. It makes you scared, uncomfortable; and this is when you either decide to return back to your home or explore this new outside world. And what I think Flannery O’Connor is saying is that the truth, or reality, can be uncomfortable, can scare you at first, but once you push past that discomfort, that feeling that “this is nothing like the real world”, or “my reality”, it can be amazing, it can be a completely different reality than you’ve experienced. Because distortion, or discomfort, or fear, is what motivates you to push past all of those things, and see what Flannery O’Connor says is “the truth”. Whatever that may be. This is why I feel that when in, say, a museum, when someone asks what your favourite painting is, you’ll most always point to a pretty watercolour painting of some nice scenery, or a peaceful sunset, etc. It’s pretty, it’s safe, it’s in your comfort zone. But it’s those other paintings, those strange, bizarre ones, that really make you think, make you wonder. I don’t think surrealists want us to see a truth, but more the fact that there can be many. Many truths, many realities, however “surreal” they may be. It’s just always getting past that initial discomfort, that early uneasiness, that’s difficult. And I think that this is what all these people – Caroll, Surrealists, philosophers – want us to try to see, to try to understand.

Sorry everyone–ran into issues converting the Jing swf format to a Youtube friendly format. so here’s the link to the screencast.

Link to Alan November’s 6 jobs for students.

The only reason letter grades or percentages or any other scale for that matter exist, so far as I can tell, is to act as a sort of handy shorthand for passing around information on enormous numbers of students. Let’s save a critique of Western education for another time (in the meantime you might want to read Hilda Neatby’s So Little For the Mind) so I can say without getting sidetracked that it is essentially an industrial or commercial enterprise; that is it is designed to move large numbers of inputs through the box. We all have to admit that it’s done rather well at this–just compare literacy rates from 150 years ago to tday. But one of the tings it had to do to make this success possible was to create a simple way of passing information about all these students from one teacher to the next, and from one school to the next as students matriculate through the system–hence grades.

As a teacher and administrator, I for one have never found grades, whether letters, percentages or any other scale, to be very useful information. Sure, I can assume some correlation between the grade and the student’s understanding of our Ministry’s prescribed learning outcomes. But what does an “A” or “B” mean when a student comes from another jurisdiction? Or, for that matter, what do they mean coming from different schools or different teachers who will all teach differently, apply standards differently and assess differently? An “A” doesn’t tell me anything specific about a student’s strengths and weakness.

One response here has been to adopt national standardized tests, even though these, as we know, are frought with problems. The standardized test was the only possible solution in a system that had to matriculate large numbers of students from an increasingly mobile population and do so in a world where communication was slow and restrictive–the pipeline was narrow, let’s say. When I was going to grade school, information went by mail or telephone.

But social media and networking dramatically change the situation. The internet pipeline is enormous and getting fatter by the day. Not only is it possible to get in touch with large numbers of people all over the world directly, it’s increasingly easy to check their reputations. Anyone who has asked for information on a product on Twitter understand what I mean here.

So, it seems to me that we ought to be able to leverage this in education. I imagine a world where teachers earn a digital reputation for doing their jobs well and so when they say a student is ready to move on in math, for example, we can trust them. If I have specific questions, I should be able to contact the teacher directly. I should also be able to bring the student into the conversation.

This makes for another fundamental shift. Over the last century or two of modern Western education’s life, we’ve tried to make assessment objective in the belief that this was better. (See C.S. Lewis’ lovely little Meditations in a Toolshed ) But, speaking as a parent of two kids who’ve now put K12 behind them and are now in university, I never wanted objective reporting; I want intensely subjective reporting from someone I trust and whose opinion I value highly. Social media & networking might just makes this possible on a large scale.