next-ed

A few unpredictable things have happened to me in my interactions with kids lately, and all of them point in one direction: my students are conservative and risk-averse. Sure, what they do on the weekends may be an entirely different kettle of cetaceans, but as learners and social beings they seem, well, prudish.

First, we ask students about their politics, they say they have none, but ask them to take a stand on political issues, and they begin to lean further and further to the right.
Second, we asked the students what changes they’d like to see in the school rules. They want stricter, clearer rules with punishments that modify behaviour!
Third, I offered all of our new college leaders access to social media tools to manage their profiles in the college, create networks and spread good news about their work. What do you think happened?
Nothing.
Awkward silence.
Then came the type of skepticism you’d expect from end-of-career teachers, retired on active duty. The students said “Whoa, that’s a bit too risky in the school environment!” One student said “That couldn’t work”, another just asked “What for?”
So the real question is, in the face of the social media megalopolis – what is it the students don’t get?
I think the answer is, nobody is teaching these kids how to use powerful tools.
If I asked all of the MySpace, Facebook and Twitter users in my school “How could these tools improve your learning?” they would not know where to start.
Hey, it’s St Mary’s… maybe we should just start another club!

Well that is what some teachers at St Mary Star of the Sea College are given every year.

They will head in to the new year with the resources to study, measure, design and implement a plan to improve student engagement and learning outcomes.  Using the principles which underpin the NSW Quality Teacher Framework, these leaders and their teams will create a cycle of action learning as courageous and innovative as their imaginations will allow.

Most importantly, they will listen to what students have to tell them about their learning.

What would your students say if you asked them, say, at the end of a lesson:

• what point in the lesson was the most exciting?
• what did you learn today that was valuable?
• how would I know you succeeded in this topic?
• what would you tell next year’s students about this lesson?

Practitioner enquiry – an ethical approach to student learning.

What should we be asking?

In a recent article in Teacher magazine, Joanne Pace reflects on the learning taking place in her junior environmental science class.  What she discovers is that the students are not engaged in anything deeper than the strict instructions and single learning path she has been offering them.  Things must and do change when she asks “What should we do to make our school more environmentally friendly”? Suddenly, an open ended conversation leads to new learning.

It takes some courage, but Pace begins to plan for her students’ learning based on their emerging understanding.

People who know me know I am passionate about learning how student voice can be used to improve practice.  This ethical practitioner enquiry model holds great power for shaping the learning environment.  How could it work in your classroom?

Mark Pesce has offered us a deeply thoughtful and sometimes disturbing look at how the Internet is evolving to meet the needs and expectations of the mob, at the expense of the hierarchy.  As he says: “The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.”  By asserting that the mobis larger, smarter and stronger than any institution, Pesece describes a net that is organic and which actively works against censorship, control and order. Cool, but…

where does that leave schools (as we understand them).  Can you name a more highly centralised, controlled and censored environment on the planet (short of prison)?  While knowledge and content is being happily democratised in the online world, and while young people create, distribute and consume media of all sorts without so much as a thought about who controls it, schools continue to package knowledge into pre-prepared, bite sized and tasteless peices of knowledge-lite.

Our struggle therefore, is two-fold:

1. We must use the net to our own advatage by providing opportunities to create, publish, solve and share in real and meaningful ways; even if this means confronting the chaos.
2. We must ensure that the world of the school does not recede from the world view of our netizen students.

As Pesce says:

“We live in increasingly interesting times.  Half of humanity has suddenly dropped in – uninvited and unannounced – crashing our private party, eager to participate in an exploration of the possibilities of human communication.  Whatever they want, they’re going to get.  That’s the way things work now… Things are going to change.”

I had the great pleasure of attending the second annual Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools conference, held at Taronga Zoo on the banks of Sydney Harbour last Friday.  The Coalition is a cooperative association of member schools and institutions from across New South Wales and across sectors of education.  At times it was difficult to concentrate as Cotton Top Tamarin monkeys played on the other side of the glass wall.

The small conference was energetic and the atmosphere was very open and trusting.  People from divergent fields, inlcuding zoo educators and museum curators shared their experiences with primary and secondary schools of vastly different cultures.  Two prevailing themes emerged from our discussions: 

1. That the ubiquity of technology takes it beyond being ‘just another tool’.  Its pervasiveness in the lives of our students, and its seamless integration into social organisation and cultural expression elevates technology to a status which has more in common with a cultural paradigm rather than merely a learning tool.  The implications of this are profound, starting with our moral and ethical obligation, as teachers, to study and understand how learning and knowing can be enhanced and mediated in a culturally powerful way.
2. One of the most authentic and effective ways of keeping learning fresh is to engage in action research as a practitioner.  By asking rich questions and endeavouring to answer them by listening to the voices of those we teach, we can come a long way down the path towards that elusive destination: best practice.

I want to leave you with a a short (4min) video summarising some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime

I am a teacher of Religious Education and one of the most engaging topics for Year 10 students is Working for Social Justice.  Quite soon into the topic it became apparent that these 15 year old girls living in Wollongong, Australia receive a highly filtered view of the world and the issues being faced by people in it.  Their consumption of media is extremely prejudicial with a bias towards commercial news of very low intellectual value and news which is actually thinly veiled advertising and cross promotion. 

When we began discussing topics like Dafour or Burma, there was a pervading level of ignorance from even the most talented of students. 

How, in this digitally connected world, can my students remain untouched by news that touches the very root of what it means to be a human in community?  I found it porfessionally and personally distressing, cosnidering my belief that it is to students like these that we must look to help solve the inequities and imbalances in the world.

Pageflakes is a web based  RSS and XML aggregator.  It is highly customisable and adds elements of social networking to the idea of news aggregation.  I thought “If my students won’t seek out the news, then I will pushthe news to them!”.  They all signed up for a Pageflakes account and grabbed hold of a Pagecast I had prepared called “My Conscience”. This page drew together news feeds from Amnesty Internaltional, The United Nations, blogs from intellectuals and activists in Africa, news headlines, Flickr images for poverty etc.  The students then worked with this as a starting point and customised the page to suit themselves.  This then became their homepage for the browser.  If they were proud of a page they had created, they would pagecast it and email me an invitation to come and look.

I am hoping that the next time I ask “What do you think about the junta’s crackdown in Burma?” I will not be met with 28 blank expressions.

pl.bebo

My daughter and I just had a look through her Bebo site (social networking). We checked that there was no identifying information on there (there was!) and who was hanging around.

This is not a fear post about the dangers of 50 year old men pretending to be 12 year old girls. She told me how people seem so much more polite online than at school. This was surprising. People who usually don’t have much to say face to face are happy to engage in conversation through Bebo or MSN.

I’d love a crystal ball to see how social networking will be leveraged into learning in the future. It is not a matter of if, but how. Shouldn’t we be thinking in terms of possibilities and potentials, instead of only risks and dangers?

 Yesterday, Jacob and I watched his older sister compete in the NSW finals of Tournament of Minds – a great challenge based competition for teams of students across age groups.  According to their website ” Tournament of Minds is an opportunity for students with a passion for learning and problem solving to demonstrate their skills and talents in an exciting, vibrant, and public way.”  The passion of the young people solving these problems is palpable, and engagment with learning is through the roof!

Makes you wonder if problem based learning would solve many of the engagement problems teachers report having in their classrooms.  Boys, in particular, love the idea that their work will produce something real.  Many schools around the world have embraced Problem Based Learning (PBL) as their entire curriculum including New Tech High School in California, Eltham College in Victoria and Canningvale in WA.  In these schools, the problem IS the curriculum.

With such powerful technological tools at our disposal, it seems a waste not to employ these students and their computers, phone and iPods in collaborative activities that confront real world problems and create real quality products and solutions.

That’s what the Tournament of Minds teams do every year.  Congratulations, Rebecca.