Facts and Myths of traditional learning in schools

It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instructions have not completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry – Albert Einstein

From “Breaking Free from myths about teaching and learning” by Allison Zmuda, we learn about various myths and facts about learning in the traditional classroom, and my synopsis:

Myth: The rules of this classroom and subject area are determined by each teacher:

This is false as the push for meeting provincial (and state) standards increase, the autonomy of the individual teacher decreases.  Collaboration is being used to enforce compliance as well as standardizing the rules of each classroom.  For learning to be meaningful it must stem from personal experiences, current issues from students, as well as address the personal attributes of each student.  This cannot be achieved by blanket policies which affect all.

Fact: What the teacher wants me to say is more important than what I want to say:

This is truly a sad fact about our education system.  It is entirely summed up by a student who said:

It’s easy to take what the teacher says and regurgitate it without even thinking about what was said, and it’s how we’ve been taught to learn.  When I set out to write a paragraph, I actually thought I should ask my teacher to spell out what he wanted me to write… If I tried to challenge my teacher, all it would take is a little bit of him pushing back to make me drop my argument and look like a deer in the headlights, even if I had a decent argument.  Now that I know how passive I’ve been, I’m ready to make some changes in my learning style.

 Students need to have opinions in classes, and the teachers need to be cognisant of these ideas.

Fact: The point of an assignment is to get it done so that it’s off the to-do list:

In our schools, too many students are feeling overwhelmed to get the assigned readings complete, answer the repetitive math questions, study for the Biology exam and still have time to pursue to their own interests outside of school.  One student has even said

Most students just do the assignment because there is not time to really study it.  We don’t really get a chance to go further into the parts of the topic we are studying that aren’t part of the curriculum because we have already moved to a whole new topic.

We, as educators, must be aware that for students to complete all their “homework” they must take shortcuts and thus truly never understand the material at a deeper level.

Myth: I feel proud of myself only if I receive a good grade:

Students are using grades to truly sort themselves among their friends and classmates.  I believe all teachers have heard comments such as:

I got an F on this exam, but that is ok because I am not good at it.

I got a B like I always do, so I am doing fine.

No one is getting an A, so makes sense that I am not getting one either.

Grades and other extrinsic rewards are actually limiting the potential success of students.  Students are actually seeing the grade as an indicator as to how well they are playing the game of school.  As we push for improving learning we must move away from using grades to motivate students.  Students are proud of the product of their education not the mark they receive on how well they have manipulated their education

Myth: Speed is synonymous with intelligence:

Too many times we are pushing students to complete tasks at a speed which is unnatural to their own learning.  We are stripping education of passion and interest and replacing it with efficiency.  This can be seen in math classes when we teach “math tricks” and justify it by “this is the fastest way to get to the answer”.  Other educators validate this idea of rushing to complete the course due to the amount of material that is needed to be covered in a short amount of time.  The pressure to prepare students for standardized exams and complete the overwhelming curriculum is making it quite difficult for teachers to accept alternate views of learning, instruction using discovery methods, and taking time to allow for each student to deeply understand a topic before moving on.

More myths and facts exist, and I encourage all to read the book…WOW!

In the teaching to which I aspire to

I would truly allow each student to be an individual. To allow students to guide, not only their learning, but as well as their assessment. Students will no longer be "passengers on a fast bus down a lone highway" but instead "participants on a field trip to a field of their choosing" .  Top down mandated policies focused on increasing test scores would be replaced with guidelines, created by and with teachers, to allow for deeper learning. Teacher PD will always be encouraged as the work teachers do outside of school is just as important as the work they do inside the school.  

Outcomes will no longer be delivered in the hundreds, where each is extremely specific, but come in few general outcomes. This will allow for teacher autonomy in classes and allow for learning to be focused around the needs, wants, aspirations, and goals of each student instead of the goals of the system.

Technology, with unfilitered access, will be used in classrooms to create engagement around learning instead of being implemented to trick students in completing mundane tasks.  The goals of each class will be around meaningful questions instead of repeptive answers.

Teaching will be around one single absolute goal; lighting fires of interest and curiosity in each student of the school.

Myths related to schools Part 1

Currently reading, "Breaking Free" by Allison Zmuda.

First off reflect on the following quote by Albert Einstein

It is little short of miracle that modern methods of instruction have not completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

Right out of the gates, Allison talks about the school who focuses on efficiency of learning will always fail to educate. 

Food Chemistry - Enhancing Learning

Jeff Lerouge is a fellow colleague at my school, one damn good foods teacher, and another teacher who is challenging the idea of using worksheets to teach material.    His twitter is is here @jlerouge, his blog is found here Jeff's blog.

Before, he used to teach different ideas through worksheets, and here is how he is educating students now:  GOOD JOB!

Jeff start with:

What's the big idea? Why did we do this? Did you learn something today?

We've been learning about the pigments found in vegetables and how other ingredients can affect the color of vegetables. We have also been learning about how those same ingredients can have an impact on the texture of vegetables. To gain a better understanding about what we've been talking about, we decided we needed to experiment with the actual pigments and ingredients. What we've really done is do a science experiment and made some observations that helps us make conclusions.

We started with four different vegetables that represent the four colors of pigments found in fruits and vegetables:

• carrots (orange)
• cauliflower (white)
• broccoli (green)
• red cabbage (red/blue)

We then subjected each vegetable to four "treatments" against a control (boiled in plain water):

• salt
• baking soda (alkali)
• lemon juice (acid)
• sugar

After the experiment we came to some conclusions which supported what we learned in theory. It helped so see, touch, taste and smell - enhanced understanding. Here's what we learned:

• the orange pigments in carrots are very stable and are not greatly affected by acid or alkali
• adding sugar made our vegetables firm
• adding acid made the cauliflower stay white and kept the cabbage purple - good result
• adding acid turned the broccoli and unappealing olive green color - bad result
• baking soda made all of the vegetables mushy - bad result
• baking soda turned the red cabbage an unnatural blue green color - bad result
• baking soda turned the cauliflower an unappealing yellow color

On the same day, we also learned about different kinds of rice not by reading about them, but by cooking 10 different varieties and tasting them all. We cooked a number of whole grain rices, something many students who usually eat minute rice or white rice were not used to, especially the different in texture. Students learned that this difference in texture is from the bran layer being present on the grains.

Student guiding his own learning

Below is an example of how a parent allowed his child to guide the learning.  Good job Mr. Hansen!!

My 3rd grade son is deep into multiplication right now and our discussion about groups of things and multiplication eventually led to factors. And while he was pondering how many numbers can be multiplied together to get 12 or 16, he asked a very good question. He asked me "How come there isn't a division table?" and he went on to say "We could make a division table and sell it!"

I explained to him that division tables do not exist because once you put the numbers down the sides, the majority of the inside is empty because most numbers are not (evenly) divisible by the other numbers. I told him that when we do division mentally we actually use the multiplication facts in reverse, as we did with addition. But I could see in his eyes that my explanation didn't phase him much and he was still dreaming of selling millions of division tables to other 3rd graders. So I said "Let's make a division table!" Big smile.

So I opened a spreadsheet and we started making our table. I said to him "let's just go up to 20 for now and we can expand it later", otherwise we would be there for hours if we went all the way to 144 on both edges. So I numbered the rows and columns from 1 to 20 and then like a game of battleship I started calling off the rows and columns and waiting on him for the quotient, or as is the case in the majority of cells, his response "it doesn't divide".

It took less time than I imagined before he saw the light as to why it is difficult to make a good division table. Maybe it was all the dead ends with him responding "it doesn't divide", but he realized that most of the cells are empty and when you are talking about "whole" division you are actually talking about knowing which combinations of numbers are divisible in the first place which is essentially the multiplication table. But something neat happened. He noticed the diagonal of 1's (you can't really miss that) but then he spotted the 2's, so we studied that for a bit and I started coloring the 1's, then the 2's and then the 3's and so forth so that he could see how they each repeat and form a line. And then I pointed out that there were some numbers with no quotients at all, except for 1 and themselves. I colored those red and pointed out that every now and then those patterns of 2's and 3's and 4's line up in such a fashion that they skip a number entirely, we call those primes. They aren't divisible by any number, except 1 and themselves.

In the end (actually there is no end to this) I told him that what we are doing is turning the multiplication table inside out and if we go in and count all of the filled in cells there will be 144 of them (assuming we did the whole table), one for every entry in the multiplication table. You will find all of the 2's and 3's and 4's and so forth but spread out in a 144x144 table, instead of a 12x12 table.

Our division table is here...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39455389/DivisionTable.pdf

It was a very productive evening to say the least

More on Differentiated Assessment

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a dad teach his son how to ride a bike.  The son had a helmet on, elbow pads, and training wheels on the bike.  As the dad put his son on the bike, he walked behind his son as the son rode the bike in circles in the parking lot.

Just recently, I witnessed the same father and son in the school’s parking lot and this time the training wheels were off.  The dad continued to walk behind the son and the son completed the same circles.  At one point the son fell over and the dad quickly picked him up and put him back on the bike immediately.  After about 10 minutes, where the son did not fall once, the dad stopped walking behind the child and the child started to do more complex paths on his bike.

This is how assessment should be!

It would be ridiculous to mandate that all fathers must spend exactly 10 minutes of time with their child until they stop walking behind them; as each child will require a different amount of time to learn the skill. 

It would be ludicrous to allow a son to write a multiple choice test where, if he scored over 50% (even though he wrote it is ok to play in traffic on a bicycle), the father would let him ride alone as the son “passed the test”, since the son doesn’t understand all the safety issues of riding a bike.

It would be unfortunate if all fathers were required to purchase the same bicycle since not every child is the same height, or has the lower body lengths.

Yet all of these ideas are allowed in schools, why is that?

I wonder what school would look like if instead of holding teachers accountable with mandated common assessment we instead allowed teachers to teach students “how to ride a bike”?

I believe, students would learn the skills at a deeper level before moving on, they could learn at their own pace, and each “test” would be different for each student.

Still not convinced?  Reflect on this picture as it represents the traditional testing model of students.