Worksheet > Exam 2

Well, our input to a working group at another school was pretty one-way. We went, we talked about living with computers in the classroom and then we came home. God only knows what they made of it all. Nice contrast between me and my boss, who is more of a gung-ho Web 2.0 educator than I am. I talked mostly about furniture, but in the context of all the other stuff that regularly comes up here.

Back to worksheets and exams. There is a tremendous culture of what I call ‘worksheet’-type questions here, particularly in English class. What was the name of the main character? What happened to him when he was eight? And so on.

Compare that to a typical exam question: “Rewrite the following paragraph to avoid its monotonous and awkward style.” Quite a typical exam question. There is also a part b here: “Explain how your version differs from the original using appropriate terminology.” Now, these are very typical exam questions. Here, they could be used in the year 12 English exam. I find these quite good questions. They demand concrete skills and they enable those pupils who have learned something to demonstrate those skills. They let the examiner differentiate between candidates quite easily without recourse to the dreaded multiple choice or to extremely subjective grading.

Trouble is, many of the pupils being prepared for this exam are being subjected to a strict regimen of short stories and worksheets. It’s no wonder that so many schools do so poorly on this exam – reading tons of short stories and doing worksheets is not a good preparation because the exam demands specific skills and knowledge. Worksheets demand knowledge of specific short stories which can’t be tested on the exam in the absence of a national reading list. This kind of teaching also chases pupils to SparkNotes and the like, and that’s really not building any skills.

Leadership in the digital classroom

I’ll get back to worksheets and exams in a moment. Firstly, leadership in the digital classroom. My boss is visiting a school tomorrow to talk about teachers as leaders in the classroom and I’m going along for the ride. We’re visiting a school that has a focus on ‘the teacher as leader’ and we, I suppose, represent a digital school.

What to share? Well, you have a few hours. What do you suggest I say?

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

• Stand at the back of a room full of teachers. What do you see? Facebook, email, newspapers. Are we expecting behaviour from children and youth that we cannot expect from adults? There was an interesting post a while back on 1:1 Schools pointing out that we often try to get the kids to learn things that most adults don’t know. It’s a very interesting point to make about school, but schools are also often very focused on behaviour and we seem to have the behavioural equivalent here. My pupils are sometimes confused when I berate them for answering the telephone during class. “But the teachers do it!” Humn….


• Leadership in the digital classroom has to rest on three pillars:




1. The technical. The endless proxy war, the American-style filter war, our own experience with LANschool – these things can make one think that there are no technical solutions. Giving computers to pupils and then trying to control them with filters or piggy-back systems can seem like a losing battle. A few pupils spend lots of time figuring out hacks that then spread. What one needs are simple steering or filtering tools that are robust and that form a part of a wider strategy.


2. The cultural. One has to build up a culture in school that regards class time as working time and the computer as a tool for work. You can’t avoid frequent and difficult conversations with pupils. It helps if the whole faculty is on board here.


3. The practical. There will always be a need for ‘eyeballing’. If your pupils are working on screens in class time, you need to be able to see them, and you need to be able to get to them quickly. How are you going to give help and guidance if you can’t get to them and see their work? This is where furniture comes in.


• The standard line is often: clear tasks, short deadlines, imposed collaboration. If pupils are going to work on computers, then they should have something clear and specific that they are expected to produce, an explicit and limited time to do it in and ideally this should not be ‘meaningless’ work, but something that is immediately useful for others. This makes some sense, but I think it underestimates the distractive power of computers. Vast amounts of money are spent on training our students to expect entertainment and that’s what you as a teacher in a digital classroom are up against.

Feedback, anyone?

Worksheet > Exam 1

I was substituting for a colleague a while back and in one of the breaks started talking to some of the pupils. One of them confided to me that he had never read any of the books they had studied in school. “Thank God for Spark Notes” he said.

This reminds me of an essay from the exams I marked last year:

I must admit I am not a very big book-reader, in fact... I don’t think I have ever successfully finished a single book in my entire life. It’s hard to understand, but it’s true. The school projects I have had when we were supposed to review a book, they were all lies. When I reviewed “The Da Vinci Code”, “Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone”, “Atonement” ect. I had just watched the movies and based them upon that. However, I have read the beginning of some books and I have watched a lot of films in my time. (Anonymous pupil)

Moments like these cut to the heart of the matter for me. How is it at all possible for students to replace reading a book with reading a plot summary? They seem to be equating reading a book with knowledge of its plot. Huh? Are we in schools treating ‘reading books’ as synonymous with ‘finding out what happens’?

Yup.

Consider the following questions from one of the textbooks on my desk to the short story ‘Snow’ by Julia Alvarez:

• Where does the family live during their first year in New York?
• What impression do you get of the Sisters of Charity?
• Who was Yolanda’s favorite?
• Where was Yolanda seated in the classroom?
• Why was she put there?

Etc, etc. Typical worksheet stuff, right? Now, what exactly is being trained by setting questions like this?

Nothing. There is no skill or important knowledge base that is being pushed here. Such questions are merely control. They also fill the time, keep the students doing something and thus make us teachers feel useful. But – we can’t hide from the fact that this type of work tends to kill interest in something that is intrinsically interesting. It also teaches pupils to equate ‘reading’ with ‘finding out what happens’. Set questions like this and you chase the pupils to SparkNotes. Consider the questions above – if your goal is to answer them, then it’s actually more effective to read the notes than to read the story.

Think about that for a moment. If you are a teacher who sets worksheet-type questions for your class and you find out that they have answered them by reading the notes, how do you react? Shouldn’t they be praised for finding a more efficient way to get the task done?

So, OK, worksheets are out. What do you ask about literature? There are two questions about literature (or film) that I tend to use in my classes:

• Did you like it? (and why?)
• How does it work?*

These questions are not more easily answered by reading the notes. They correspond roughly to the two mains types of writing about literature and film: criticism/review and academic literary analysis, so they get kids working in real-world genres, not the made-up school-only genres we often get them producing in. Answering such questions well involves important skills.

I’ll post this now and get back soon to part two, which is to consider this line of thinking and ‘worksheet teaching’ in the light of final exams.

* There are, of course, a couple of other interesting questions about film and literature:

• How is this work situated in history? (how can we see it as a product of its time and what effect has it had on the world?)
• What does this work teach us about the world/ society/ life/ ourselves?

…but I rarely get there with teenagers.

Playing games

I used to be a middle school teacher (8-10) and I was known for using games a lot in class. For some reason, the games didn’t accompany me on my switch to senior secondary school (year 12). Maybe I’m afraid that it will be harder to get older kids to play. Maybe I’ve become less playful myself.

Last week, I pulled myself together and played one of my favorites. The Market. Manipulative, lots of fun. Goes like this:

Pupils are told that they are going to play at ‘a market’. They are divided into 3 groups and everyone is given trading cards. There are three types, e.g. red, white and green. The most scarce (I used green) are also the goal of the game. Everyone tries to accumulate green cards. The groups are unequal and the largest group is given primarily the most common ‘base’ type – red. This group should actually be a majority. The next largest group gets more cards per player. They get reds too, and more whites, but still few greens. The smallest group gets a few reds, some whites and also the most green. Ideally, the teacher glosses over the inequality of the groups as much as possible by dealing out quickly and putting emphasis on the rules of play. No attention is given to the fact that the players are not given equal cards. (Put the red cards on top of the pile for each player).

Play occurs in rounds of about 5 minutes. Everyone trades individually. The ideal is to gather ‘sets’ of one red, one white and one green card. At the end of each round, each set ‘generates’ a new green card. During the round, the players trade with each other. At the end of each round, the group that has the highest combined score gets to agree on a new rule for the game. The teacher (the ‘referee’ ) can also come with new rules, usually rules that are only valid for one round. For instance, to stimulate activity in the first round, 3 reds can also ‘generate’ a green. To dampen ‘inflation’, the referee can create tax rules to siphon off green cards. Tax rules can also help level the playing field by being weighted instead of flat, but be warned that this can stimulate solidarity amongst the ‘rich’ group. If play goes on for a while, a rule will be needed for the conversion of green cards into white.

The idea is that the different colour cards represent different types of resources, say red for labour, white for knowledge or human capital and green for material capital. Profit requires combining different types of resources and profit can then itself be re-invested and form the basis of more growth.

The point of the game is what happens. These kinds of things tend to happen:

• Most players increase their holdings.
• The rich group wins.
• Group solidarity forms, especially amongst the ‘poor’, and slowest for the ‘middle class’. In my class last week, pupils quickly got into their roles and began throwing out unfavorable characterizations of the other groups.
• The ‘poor’ or ‘working class’ tend to gravitate towards group play, but this requires internal leadership (or heavy hinting from the teacher).
• Pupils quickly get into the game and get surprisingly emotionally involved. All manner of underhanded tricks appear, cheating, intimidation, brinksmanship, etc.

The game is intended as a quick ‘Marxism light’ – demonstrating the functioning of class in industrial society, but my pupils pointed out that it could be any market system – modern world trade, for example. If people play rationally, then everyone tends to get richer, but while the poor get a bit richer, the rich get much richer, so it’s a good point.

It’s also interesting from a psychological point of view: how quickly groups form and how they relate to competing groups. My pupils last week from the winning group had a typical reaction: they were disappointed when they learned that I knew in advance that they would win. Even when it became clear that they had started with an advantage, they still liked to think that they somehow ‘deserved’ their position.

Endless fuel for classroom discussion here.

Picture credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artemuestra/ / CC BY-SA 2.0'>Reuters / Micheal Caronna

Mistaking access to information for learning

OK – the party line goes something like this:

‘Before’, information was scarce, so it made sense to crowd people into rooms where they all faced the front so that one expert could enlighten them.

‘Now’, information is readily available, so that this structure is obsolete.

The trouble with this analysis is that it starts with a false picture of the past. Most of what has ever been taught in schools has not been information that is particularly hard to come by.

Nothing I teach has ever been a secret. Most of what I teach is fairly simple, conceptually, and very easy to look up.

So, why do they pay me?

Because learning new stuff is difficult.

Skinner’s famous axiom was that (since we can’t see inside people’s heads) the only way to tell if someone has learned something is that they show new behaviour. Unfortunately, getting humans to act in new ways is difficult. Very difficult.

I feel left out of the party. The information revolution is supposed to be transforming schooling. “Pupils now have all the information in the world in their pockets and can find the answer to any question in seconds.” True, but irrelevant. This does not transform school, because school has never been about digging around for scarce information. This does not transform the role of the teacher, because the role of the teacher never has been the sole point of access to important but inaccessible information.

Information has become much easier to access in the last few years, but that ease of access has meant nothing for my teaching because scarcity of information has never been the issue. The difficulty of learning is the issue and sometimes I feel that all the digital revolution has given me are a bunch of shiny new toys that don’t even work half the time and distract my pupils when they do.

(Part 4 in the series Sick of Gurus)

What distraction?

A collegue of mine was speaking to her students about filters and limited student access to the web during class. Some of her students made the arguement that it was less distracting for them to have web access. Without web access during class, the option is games, but games demand too much attention. With the web open, games are abandoned for social networking which the students argued was less distracting. One sends a message and then can return one's attention to class.







I don't make this stuff up. Really. I don't have to.

Technology is its own biggest limitation.

Part three in my ‘sins of the Web 2.0’ series

2. Pretending that all this stuff works all the time.

Monday morning. Mid-term to be written on individual computers. I block internet access to prevent cheating, but need to leave a dictionary and our LMS open. This partial block causes chaos with their internet connections. In this digital age, some of the pupils have no paper dictionary, so they need their connection. I also need the LMS open so that they can submit. Our harassed IT-guy shows up and spends ages looking at the problem.

And I’m lucky. Lots of teachers don’t even have an ‘IT-guy’ they can call. The system manager in their school is some eager teacher who gets a 25% reduction in class load or something, but then isn’t always available when problems arise, because they have to teach the other 75%.

I remember wasting tons of time when I was small as some hapless teacher struggled with the 16 mm film projector. What do my pupils get to see me struggle with?

1. Pupil’s hardware (all 30)
2. Pupil’s OS
3. Pupils software (all of these first 3 having themselves dozens of components)
4. Pupil’s internet connection
5. Base station
6. Local net and server
7. Our line out of the building
8. Problems with external resources.

…and I’m probably forgetting a few things. ‘Doing school’ in this manner means that someone has to spend a lot of time making sure all this works, or we waste hours of class. It’s a new situation, and I’m constantly amazed that in the endless discussions around digital schools, no-one seems to talk about the technical side of things. The truth is, many teachers experience technical problems much of the time and this is possibly the biggest hurdle to effective use of digital technology in the classroom.

I note that Microsoft’s ‘School of the Future’ in Philadelphia has so far been ticked off as a failure. There have been several factors in the troubles that they have had, but I note that frustration with net down-time has been an important issue. If they can’t get it right, is it any wonder that the rest of us get frustrated?

The question I'm forced to ask, though, is can we honestly expect teachers to integrate technology into their instruction when we can't guarantee that they'll have consistent access to the proper tools to do that work?

This is Bill Ferriter at the Tempered Radical, one of the many web-gurus that I still can’t manage to cross off my personal hero list. Saying teachers need to develop “digital resiliency”, he is talking mostly about other kinds of blocks than the plain technical glitches I’m mostly talking about, but Bill still goes where few go here. In conference after conference, on all the hot EduBlogs, in the latest books, where is this discussion? I’ll say it again: technical difficulties are the single greatest hurdle to effective use of digital technology in the classroom. Not lack of pedagogical vision, not unwilling teachers, not lack of funds. It can be hard to get much of this stuff to work because there is so much that has to work properly to get a class online.

Post Script

Will Richardson (another web-guru I can’t quite cross off my personal list. He’s such a nice man.) wrote a post called “I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…)” while I was working on this one and takes an interesting angle. He asks:

How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?

At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?

Wow.

Could we then start to think about...getting back to teaching?