Sliced Bread

As teachers we are mostly a compliant mob. We don’t purposefully set out to be disruptive, we comply with DET mandates, we accept what we are told is “it” and mostly do a superb job on delivering “it”.

REFLECTION ONE: How would you feel if our current “it” was actually the wrong thing for learning?

The “it” you pour your heart and sole into earnestly improving and refining and scoring outstanding results on? The flourishing growth industry of ”it”, the high stakes exams that you and your place are doing well on.

The “it” you are beholden to, the “it” you yourself are a successful product of, the “it” you get your charges great results in year after year for the formula is so refined you are deemed the school doer, the star summative doer? But you are now told “it” is wrong, or broken or simply not right? How would you feel?

By “it” I mean what we have been lead to believe is the measure of educational worth. Education we have had for the past 200 years. Of course here we are a decade into now and we are still striving to perfect our perfect 20th Century models of “it”, which itself was carried over from it’s 19th Century origins.

Fundamentally little has changed, except the rest of the world. 

What we know and do well is not disputed, we comply, very well in most cases for the “it” data assures us we are on track. The wrong track. The soon to be a massive head on stack track in fact.

We enjoy our feel good warm fuzzies, the Group Back Slaps as the agreeable institutional summative assessment data is published annually and trotted out as educational success.

“Oh that school/student/system/cohort is far superior to that one, the data says so”. 

Yes it IS, but only on the broken model we have. 

By all means accept the praise, repeat the formula, gain the ‘rep’ as the little school earner of ticks of goodness, but please don’t dwell on “it”. “It’s” not the right thing and “it” is not learning. In fact “it” is broken so badly the technicians at HQ are having trouble fixing “it”. 

Floundering in fact to find the means to keep 200 year old systems functioning when the rest of the world is whizzing by and leaving them for dead. That’s why the brave daily pioneers are needed, the jump in the deep end doers, to tinker, to experiment, to refine and to inspire. Trusting our leaders are listening, watching, learning and god forbid actually deeply engaging with some of the new ”it” themselves.

In 50 years, lets hope they are not just seen as latter day connectivists ala Siemens or worse latter latter day Deweys, for much of what they both say re learning per se is not revolutionary except maybe the digital applications but even that is evolutionary. Questions raised are the import, not answers offered.

What has effectively changed since Dewey’s day is it is now simply unavoidable for the mainstream to get on board the right education track. We know shift happens, we know billions of “new” learners have joined the global market and we know we must do better to stay competitively relevant.

Hence we have seen the recent misguided scramble of Rudd’s ”digital bucket of cash”, aka revolution, thrown at the “problem” for politicians are still hankering to prop up the antiquated “it” by sprinkling more baubles on top. This alone will not be the catalyst for expected learning change because these tools wont make Keats or Alegebraic logarithms or evolutionary theory any higher quality than current assessment allows.

ICT ubiquity, negligable price, rapid emergence of so called less developed countries and their ready access to level learning opportunities have caused some to realise lately we are being left behind. You then welcome our own random access digital learners who have informally and superficially known nothing else since birth. Many parts of society have engaged and are fast disappearing into the distance. Lets hope its not “slow down, education wants to get off.” It should be “lets do it and lead with learning in schools”.

Boffins will come by the rooms of early adopters and say “lets measure this rigourous innovation of yours properly, lets get us some authentic tools so we can record this, lets assess this fabulous quality learning so we can repeat, refine and share it”. Describe to me what you are doing that works well?

The boffins can then scurry off and show, demonstrate, prove to the laggard governments, still selling last centuries superceded ”it” product, that the bells and whistles latest model has legs and can be held accountable with repeatable measurable rigour. Show them the new ”it” works AND is also right. That’ll fix “it, the older.”

How well do current innovators assess these skills I wonder? What tools do they use?

Maybe they don’t yet for the assessment tools have not yet been invented?

• creativity and innovation
• critical thinking
• problem-solving
• communication
• collaboration
• information fluency
• technological literacy

When asked the serious question about why this new “it” is right, we can’t reply “we have a gut feeling”, ”come in, hear, see, feel the sounds of happy learners”, or worse some tenuous data correlations or other shallow motherhoods. The assessments must be rigourous, repeatable, relevant and right.

Don’t get me wrong. Teachers are 100% entitled to their feel good moments as we fleetingly bask in our classes outstanding data success in NAPLANs or SCs or HSC’s.

It is a fine punctuation mark for Day 1 PD. Inspire the crew to deliver more of the same. Take the data and enjoy “it” for we know nothing else. But that is not learning for life and it is not ultimately the right thing to do.

Discreet syllabi boxes, fill the empty vessal, stamp the product for quality control as it moves seamlessly along the conveyor belt of school at ages 5, 8, 11, 14 and 17 or thereabouts. Compile data, assess, test, compile some more, test again and extract the value added of the sausage. Then do it all again, adding more layers of “it” as “it” has been cheap, convenient and so so easy for politicians and the testing industry to justify their terms via “improvements” in learning (even if standards set are questionably low)

No wonder NSW Principals want to ditch at least one layer of antiquated crud, the School Certificate, now the NSW minimum leaving age has finally been raised to 17 with some flexibilty. They know we are drowning in old ”it”.

Our collective clueless political aparatchiks have parroted polly style ”More of the same, More of the same, More of the Same” for the last 40 years. “It” must be better because if we have more meaningless data and hard evidence of the leaking holes and the shining beacons we can cane those at fault. It’s easy, its cheap but its wrong.

Over the last 40 years expediency has thrown more and more of ”it” at the “problem” (for there must be one if “it” has needed changing?)

The irony is there are now few spots left to apply more “it”, so other solutions (kicking posts?) will be needed. We have reached “it” saturation, the incremantal top of the exponential scale and more are finally asking, Is this right?

Kids are assessed using the wrong tools, of the wrong skills, with the wrong curriculum, that causes the stresses, the anxiety, the desire to conform, to rank, to label, to put in a box and ultimately declare a winner.

Fine and dandy we need high quality outcomes, but lets broaden our base further for multiple relevant skills and literacies to be included on the ‘winners’ list, not just traditional, classic, 19th century subjects with some appeasing VOCed VET of TAFE tinkers tacked on.

Of course quality learning must be assessed, measurable, repeatable, accountable, far better than it currently is. What’s broken, or more correctly yet to be embedded, are the relevant assessment tools to record the look, feel & sound of what learners today actually need and do well.

Dare I utter the term doing us all a disservice, 21st century skills? They are not, they are skills learners have always needed, but now in our digital world they are the disciminators, the essential skills that will lead to effective engagement, productivity and contribution for their 60 plus years post school. Of course they need to be taught explicitly but we don’t yet seem to have the meaningful assessments. Build it and they will come.

Imagine this as an assessment tool. All meetings/decisions/lessons everywhere are captured, all archived, all shared, all open sourced. Just imagine that. Information overload to the max. Not captured to criticise but to collaborate. Embodiments of this exist, many of them in fact. The quality floats, sticks and goes viral. Consumers engage, join the conversation, remix, favouritise, rank, cull, delete, link, embedd, mash up and view. Imagine if that could be done with your unit on Shakespeare?

Could your filters cope? Folksonomy, deep tagging, RSS and I know my PLN will help sort the noise from the conversation. Kids do this too, very well. They get what they want from their social networks for many already have well established PLN’s of their own. That is not innovative or cutting edge to them, that is just the way it is.

They join in the conversations, many, varied, AWAT, 24/7 and seem to cope, superficially at least. Our face to face mentoring role IS therefore becoming more critical, to guide their rudimentary, dangerous or inefficient skills and enhance them so they sustain higher order thinking and deep learning. I wonder how many mentors could?

Along the way we observe, capture, share, record, formatively assess, guide, correct, edit and mentor the group collaborations without concurrently having to teach to a high stakes external data frenzy, pointless exam to jump some hoops and tick some boxes. That is untenable and unsustainable. You can’t have both.

That assessment gig is actually NOT at all hard to imagine. The technical side is there, has been for yonks. That is how the rest of the world has operated in business, in journalism, in music, in social networking, in marketing, in finance, in travel, in food, in faith, in life, but NOT formal learning within 19th century little boxes called schools. 

The former is the world our students inhabit away from school and yet the 13 years of school “it” we dish up is an anathema, anachronistic and wrong.

Who would be more confronted by this brave new open learning? The vessals or the fillers? Neither is my guess. They both have much to gain and little to lose.

Kids live it now, teachers being teachers adapt, but the serious stumbling stymie may well be the administrator’s & leaders whose meetings/decisions/reasoning would also be openly on the table. 

They too would be captured, shared and assessed. Fascinating open democracy ala Obama. We shall see if they walk the walk. See if they are brave enough to bring in the new transparency demanded by this learning. Reminds me of some French Crusties who resisted meaningful change, heads rolled, ended up as a basket case.

Radical? Maybe for some, but the real life long learners2.0 will be the floating cream and the residual curds and whey, relying on “it1.0″, will be on the nose, left on the shelf and so past its use by date it will be discarded as unmerchantable.

We shall see how long “it2.0″ takes to not only be mainstream but to also be the right thing to do.

credit: Robin Hutton

Thinking aloud about Professional development today and was wondering do we ever really get enough?

Why do I ask?

Well our employer, DET NSW, recently increased School Development Days from 3 to 5 days pa, always good to have more time to reflect, think & plan without the daily hustle and bustle.

I was interested to see this nationwide comparison across our 8 education departments, the range of PD offered had never occured to me before.

The range is 4 (Victoria) to 8 days (Tasmania) which is a 100% difference, (please correct my maths if thats wrong)

How vital do you think having 100% more time is? Does it matter? What is/could be achieved if your school PD was increased? at what cost or trade off?

These questions then got me thinking about our new 12 to 14 hours of extra school PD;

• Do you have school autonomy on PD content or are regional & systemic priorities set?
• Is PD conducted at a time of the year when the best outcomes can be achieved?
• How do larger organisations, who cant do ‘together days’ move staff forward?
• What is the style of PD delivery on offer on your days?
• Do you have personal internal choices that interest you?
• How is PD delivered to you?
• Who runs it? locals or visitors?
• Does the keynoter, if you have one, provide a lasting improvement outcome?

I am not favouring one over the other, I am just curious to learn more about PD in your place.

Should flexible/blended learning on days like these be encouraged more? Should staff take charge and ID there own needs? Could they?

I guess far more importantly how satisfied are you with current PD and how could it be improved if needed? 

Hope to hear your views.

credit Ben Hasic & Happy Devil Cartoons

Ok, I’ll admit it, I have more than a passing interest in what the 200,000 compact learning devices (CLDs)our schools will receive in April may look like. Most DET teachers reading this will too.

Australian IT reported yesterday that “the department’s proposed learning device, which can be likened to a ruggedised netbook, is the first of its kind in Australia and one of the more unusual hardware specifications globally“.

Observations from DETs Chief Information Officer Stephen Wilson also caught my eye.

We intend to make the devices available to other schools for other purposes, so watch that space. Any vendor looking at this is going to be looking at a very large market because other states are very interested in what’s going on in NSW“.

More questions than answers are raised and It will be interesting to see;

1. what a “ruggedised $500 CLD” actually looks like, considering it may be a hybrid design blending netbook, laptop and notebook features. We trust the tech boffins, doing the top secret cull this week from 21 tender submissions to 5, will have their hands on it.
2. if the tight tender to implementation timeline can be met efficiently, for all stakeholders, not just political expediency of being seen to ’rush the shiny baubles out’. and
3. will other markets & DETs, global and local, really want them too? We trust our leaders that the CLD’s will be that good, so other’s should flock to order.

Educational innovation is measured by effectiveness of the changes in learning. Measures are in place to rigourously assess the transformative 21st century learning these devices will bring, aren’t they? Well we trust they are.

This simple nuts and bolts phase, despite political chest beating to the contrary, is the easy phase, its only a box of wires, the “21st century toolbox” as Deputy PM Gillard and PM Rudd muttered on DER launch.

What really matters for learners are the 571 state wide school plans to ensure teachers of year 9 to 12 students use the CLD’s as transformative learning devices, far better than the last 20 years of school PC use, that is. We trust these plans are in place and deeply understood before April.

The jury is still out on this last point but we do trust ourselves to deliver the expected learning changes, this time, don’t we?

The governments have provided the tools, again, now it’s up to us, again, or else, again! Dripping with it, yes, again. I’m worried, again. Simplistic motherhood statements and boxes of wires do not a revolution make.

Those who have taught in schools on a full time basis for an extended period of time have seen much of this hype before, in fact since the first PC lobbed into our schools in the mid 1980’s. It’s still NOT new learning, CLD’s are just the latest embodiment. Wireless flexible connectivity and 4 year CLD student ‘ownership’ have more potential, for those facets reflect 21st century more than the device themselves.

I hope CLD’s don’t become more expensive portable pencils, more technology sprinkled on top.

We all want better outcomes for learners, how we best achieve that is far from decided. But I certainly trust this latest DET NSW roll out of CLD’s will help deliver them, whatever it is we end up deciding on and believing to be the 21st century direction we need to have. You can’t choose the best mode of transport when you don’t yet know the destination.