Learning By Design: A tool to focus conversation

Just as I have previously blogged about the use of common ground as a forum where people can share ideas, pedagogical strategies and designed learning I have also been asked to reflect how the scaffold of Learning by Design helps in this process.
It allows teachers to focus on the design of their students learning. For a lot of teachers it is the outcomes and the content that matter and therefore resort to the same methods and modes of delivery. Students need to know X and will do so by learning from Y. However the process of using learning by design makes teachers reflect and consult with one another about how best to get students to learn. It does this by pushing them to articulate and classify the knowledge process that they are using. I know for a fact that a lot of science teachers implement the concept naming process but rarely venture from this area because to them Science is a lot of facts that need to be memorised. The learning by design process pushes teachers to think beyond their comfortable modes of delivery in order to design a package that delivers across the four learning domains. That asks them to think about how they will push students beyond the textbook and engage with the knowledge.
Using the placemat is a great start when working with staff unfamiliar with the Learning by Design. The act of articulating what is they want students to learn can be interesting as sometimes staff find it difficult to articulate what it actually is that they want students to learn. The four learning areas also ensure that they push the boundaries of how they are going to get students to learn.
The conversation that follows when using the placemat then becomes a professional dialogue about how best practice can be delivered as opposed to “oh, ive got a sheet for that.” This means that the design of several lessons together build knowledge as opposed to being associated with each other by topic. It has proven to be a valuable tool as a curriculum leader and I will continue to use it to develop units of work and beginning teachers understandings of what it is to teach and learn.

Second Life

It was weird.

It was very weird.

I kind of liked it.

The experience of wandering around a virtual world was surreal because you to think very heavily about what it was that you were doing.  Motor movements and gesturing, things we take for granted in our everyday life became frustrating as you were learning how to do it all over.  In saying that it was remarkable that you could be anything that you wanted to be.  Once you got the basics of walking and talking and changing clothes the potential to be anything got to be the focus.  It really is boundless and limited by your own creativity.  It was funny because it reminded me of an office episode where dwights second life avatar is just  the same as his everyday character.  He got that you could be anything that you wanted to be, he just wanted to be himself.

The potential for second life seems boundless.  It was an amazing experience because before having entered the world I had no idea of its existence.  It was like uncovering a parallel universe where people can do anything they want.  In terms of an application for learning i can see it becoming an excellent avenue for what we do in elluminate.  You could easily have tutorials in this environment and set it up so that people could investigate/explore their surroundings.  Breaking up into smaller cooperative groups would be easy and discussion would different because you are talking to someone as opposed to the phone conversation of elluminate.

I really like the idea of building an environment and allowing students to have an immersive experience.  The potential to explore all different worlds is fantastic as you can go to the bottom of the ocean or a different planet and “experience” what a different world would be like and bring that back to the classroom for discussion.

Imagine a world where textbooks are now enviroments and students explore them rather than flip the pages and do the exercises.

CG Learner: A tool to plan with.

The CG learner website has offered what its acronym stands for, a Common Ground with which to work and plan with other professionals.  As a planning tool it allowed a number of teachers to work together online with the same resources and electronic documents.  Planning used to be a hodge podge of different worksheets, matched with different textbook chapters all photocopied and put on teachers’ desks to be delivered over a semester.  It was unwieldy and more about “what do we want kids to do?” as opposed to “what do we want kids to learn?” CG learner gives teachers a chance to edit a common learning element, teach a common learning element, reflect on a common learning element and sharpen a common learning element.  This in turn makes teachers reflect more on what is it we wanted kids to learn.

A reflection that I had having written both English and Mathematics learning elements is that the learning processes vary greatly from subject to subject which may account for the different thinking between teachers of different subjects.  This may seem like a no-brainer but there is a lot more conceptualising by naming and theorising in mathematics and science than there is in English.  English lends itself to critical analysis.  This is where the different subjects will spend a greater amount of time.  However, during the planning with the learning processes, you have to consciously account for the different learning processes so that students are thinking in a variety of ways.  Furthermore it pushes teachers to think outside their traditional ways of instruction.  For instance if you were to diagnose a maths textbook and put each activity into a learning process I would guess that 80% would be “applying appropriately” and 20% would be “conceptualising by naming”.  However if you don’t think beyond those boundaries you would never consider there to be something missing from your classroom.  Furthermore you would never consider that other elements outside the parameters of your subject may influence your students understanding and thinking about what it is they are learning.

This brings us to the important point of collaboratively planned units.  Having this virtual common ground means that teachers learn from each other, share resources and also push each other to try new teaching methods and think to think differently.  It also means that the person you teach with is your critical friend and able to help you adjust and change the teaching to better engage students with the learning.  It took teachers time to learn how to use the website but because it aligns quiet neatly with Microsoft word, it was reasonably intuitive and familiar.  In fact two teachers helped write most of the probability unit without much guidance from me, instead they explored and interacted with the icons and click and drag functionality of the website (that being said one criticism of the site is that it has crashed a few times meaning work that was being written was lost).

Being electronic it was also easy to go back and edit the learning element after teaching rather than re-writing a curriculum manuscript.  This means the document aids the reflection process and is more organic and responsive, which also promotes diversity in the classroom and change in teacher practice.

Maths and Literacy: The sentences of numbers

As a maths and science teacher I have learnt that literacy is more than sentence construction.  It is a complex understanding of how text, image and convention interplay to produce meaning.  In maths students struggle because they actually don’t understand a number sentence.  They are not sure as to what mathematical symbols really mean.  They are fine with process and can say “oh this is the symbol that means I do this” they don’t think of it as “ah this means this”.  That may sound oblique and reading back on it I am sure to confuse some readers but it really is a case of students think that symbols “do” things to numbers.  An example is the = symbol that students think means “do something to”.  This means that the number sentence 2+2=4 doesn’t “equal” 4, the student thinks that the equal sign does something to the 2+2 and transform it into a 4. I have heard students say the number goes through the sausage factory and transform.  This means that they have no concept of equal, which means that math will forever be a mystery.  There is so much language, grammar, syntax and symbols in maths that it is its own language that interplays with our own understanding of numeracy.  Graphs, statistics and charts are all forms of multimodality that aim to inform and interplay with words to tell its readers a story.  The issue for our teachers is to understand what language, grammar, modalities are being expressed so that they may guide students to some semblance of understanding.  Mathematics is a universal language but if the symbols are not known then it is all magic.

Students enjoy manipulatives with maths as it gives a conceptual hook for them to hang their understanding on.  The more that a concept can be made concrete the more students will be able to understand the language that is being used with it.  This modality is important in the maths classroom as simple explanations and work examples can help consolidate the process but do nothing to set the understanding.  In order to understand a concept it needs to be played/toyed with from multiple perspectives and thought of through a variety of lenses.  Multimodality offers different lenses for concepts and ideas to be examined through.  This way students may speak the language of mathematics and have some chance of understanding it.

Identity and the Written word

Writing is an expression of identity.  The issues abound when the reader doesn not understand.  Students get frustrated when their words don’t come or are blunt and don’t describe how they feel.  The other issues come when students feel that all teachers do is pick on the grammar or the spelling and are not listening to the content, especially in creative pieces or poetry.  This then means that students don’t express themselves but will just write what they think the teacher wants to hear.  Our role as educators means that we have to give feedback but more often than not it is on the grammar and spelling mechanics where students may need to be pushed further in terms of ideas.  I think that if we want to improve students writing it is important that we recognise what it is they are trying to say first.

Where do we go now?

Where does the new literacy that technology has afforded us lead us?

The world is changing more rapidly than teachers are able to acknowledge in curriculum. The expectations of print literacy in workplaces and by policy makers still exists. Every time students put writing out into the public sphere it is judged either ‘literate’ or ‘illiterate’. I have a sneaking suspicion that ‘adults’ in the beginning regarded texting as a ‘phase’ or another teenage fad. The abbreviations that teens use not only save them time, but some phones have limited characters per message and it will also save them money depending on the plan they have chosen. Ergo teens are ‘with it’ and frugal! Though I agree with Rita that we need to teach traditional text types so that the students are readily employable. Even in email spelling mistakes makes people look illiterate.We still need the rules of English but need to know where and when certain styles are acceptable.  In the same way as know not to wear board shorts to a wedding we need to teach where and when language styles are appropriate and inappropriate.

Behaviourism

I can certainly understand why the behaviourist approach causes so much concern for people.  They do not want to be reduced to a sum of their behaviours.  However the fact remains that as a people we communicate in behaviours.  We flirt, fight, cower, hide, push, pull, cry, yell, whisper, gyrate, grimace and smile all with our bodies.  These are our behaviours. There are recent shows like The Mentalist and Lie to Me that all examine the minutiae of our every move to reveal our hidden desires or lies (apparently our body can’t lie and there is a great podcast on this subject athttp://health.howstuffworks.com/lying2.htm). We are certainly known by our actions.

If behaviour is the interface by which humans communicate, be it through writing, gestural or verbal then all of these are simply expressions of the thoughts inside.  Kids smear poo on school walls,  kids graffiti the toilets, kids destroy locker room, kids bully, kids don’t eat, kids cut themselves, kids litter.  Kids are capable of an incredible range of behaviours but the motivation behind them is often opaque and unable to be verbalised.  More often than not when asking a student why they behaved in a certain way they can’t express it.  But is changing this behaviour a simple act of enforcing a negative consequence for something antisocial and rewarding socially positive behaviour?  I am not sure. The behaviours that kids display come from a very complex thought paradigm in which decisions and actions are implemented.  Where Skinner is only interested in measuring the behaviour I think students should be encouraged to explore their own thinking paradigm. They should be pushed to reflect on actions and consequences and thus by doing so change the parameters of their thinking paradigm.  I think that Skinner assumes that we are given a set “program” (kind of like a computer) and that this program is how we interpret the world and interact with it.  This program is what I mean when I say “a thinking paradigm”. However I think that we are much more complex than that and that our thinking paradigm is constantly shifting according to our interaction with the world.  I don’t think it is a simple matter of this stimulus will elicit this response (although advertising execs may prove otherwise) but rather a complex interplay between social, cultural, economic, religious and genetic factors that push and pull the way we think, learn and ergo the way we behave.

More Assimilation

Assimilation and the Nation

Our society is based on a process of assimilation.  There are social norms that people need to abide and there are boxes that people need to fit into in order for society to work.

To some degree we need elements of assimilation in order for our society to work. There are rules that need to be followed because things don’t work when they are not followed.  I think that there needs to be some conventions that we abide or the society we wish to celebrate will not be worth celebrating.  Or is it that these conventions reflect the norms of the society we live in and that the paradigm that I am thinking in is limited to only my experiences and understanding.  Perhaps if I was writing this 40 years ago I would be bemoaning the fact that we have “coloureds” in our schools and that “communists” were everywhere.  But the question is I find difficult is that at some point we all need to assimilate a little.  Everything is meeting point of understanding.   Can we have arranged polygamous marriages?  Should doctors condone female circumcision, knowing that if they refuse the family will go somewhere else?  Tribal courts, spitting in the streets, smoking in shopping centres, driving on the other side of the road, mayonnaise on chips, things are different and where is the line that one thing is someone’s cultural heritage and another thing is just unacceptable.

It seems as though the more one part of society says something is wrong the tighter the other party holds onto that idea as a core value or idea that is central to their beliefs.   I understand why assimilation is such an attractive idea.  Everyone the same has a simple ring to it that reduces everyone to the same playing field.  However, if every bird in the forest were to sing the same song what a bland song that would be.

Assimilation and Exclusion

I just had an excellent weekend of fishing.

I went with my father-in-law and his best mate who is a lecturer in Aboriginal Education.  He is white in case you were wondering.

He told me a story about how before white settlement (such a nice term) that neighbouring aboriginal tribes had an incredibly complex system of marriage that was designed to inbreeding and create alliances (similar to European Royalty minus the inbreeding).  However with European intervention and assimilation this system was destroyed and in its wake generations of indigenous have been hamstrung. 

This is not new as there are countless civilizations, societies and cultures that have been absorbed by others.  But is it a case of survival of the fittest?  Does the strongest culture win?  I don’t think so… only because when something is forced something is compacted, when something is pulled something is held tight.  Assimilation doesn’t make a country or a classroom strong it makes all the flowers in the flower bed the same.  What makes us stronger is the variety of the world we live in.  Otherwise we are all in danger of in-breeding.

 

CG Learner

CG Learner

I liked it.

I liked it a lot.

The interface was so much more convenient and user friendly.  I have worked with nearly every phase of the learning element construction.  From the intial word document to the CG online learner and this edition is by far the biggest leap in terms of usability, availability and construction.

A feature that I really liked about the program was the ability to click and drag tables into the document.  This had its own bug though as the program tended to freeze or design inappropriate sized cells in the table.  Another feature that I loved was the ability to create a linear placemat which was awesome for scope and sequence.  As Glenn and Ben and I sat down to work we were able to easily map out where we wanted to go with broad-brush strokes in terms of titles of each learning component.  This meant that we could plan and then write a more detailed account of each learning event.  We also liked the idea of being able to manipulate when each learning event would occur in the learning sequence.  However this highlighted the biggest glitch in the program as most times we tried to do this the program would freeze and we would have to restart.

The ability to paste from other websites and information sources was great as it meant that what previously had to be housed in another folder could be embedded into the learning document.  This wasn’t as easy as it seemed but with practice I think it will be a very useful and important tool as it means that multimedia tools such as music and websites and interactive programs can be a part of the document and the teacher can see how it fits into the learning more easily.

The other great capability that was difficult previously is collaborating with other teachers.  This online version means that there is only one document that is being edited.  I know that this sound simple but in the past we have ended up with three or four documents that each person has edited or changed and there is no consistency or uniformity.  This is great in terms of an online collaboration tool as teachers who are not necessarily in the same school can talk and plan together.  It takes transparency of the classroom to the world and means the sharing of pedagogical strategies are more easily dispersed.

Overall an impressive start to the online version of what used to be a difficult program to use.  It promotes collaboration, multimedia, inclusivity and transparency.  What more could you ask for?