Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Pedagogy

  • Stop talking about classrooms that don’t work

    This morning I read a thoughtful post about what ADD may or may not be. Despite the timeliness and depth of thought present in the article, I was stricken by one paragraph about the perils of classrooms on our children. How our young children today, so rife with creative potential, are doomed to a future of diagnosis and boredom because they will be subjected to school.

    I was not only stricken but insulted.

    Does all of the work that I and many of my colleagues have done over the past years have no bearing on the future of education? Do all of those teachers out there in schools all over the world who care about their children not count?

    I feel we need to get beyond the system is broken kind of thinking and focus on what is working. We see what we look for and if we keep focusing on a broken system we will only succeed in creating more broken system.

    Instead of creating a doomsday effect by telling ominous stories of the proliferation of ‘traditional’ classrooms that stifle creativity and connectivity, I prefer to point towards learning that does the opposite, learning that works and educators who ‘get it’.

    George Couros
    Michael Doyle
    Lori Centerbar
    Kevin Hodgson
    Glenn Moses
    Linda Clinton
    Elona Hartjes
    Darren Kuropatwa
    Kelly Hines
    Karen S.
    Dea Conrad-Curry
    Zac Chase
    Angela Maiers
    Chris Lehmann
    Jose Vilson
    MRW
    Damian Bariexca
    J. M. Holland

    .
    .
    .

    You get the point. There are good educators who foster good learning in good classrooms in good schools. I keep this in mind as I work towards hope for the future within (and without) the walls of my own school.

  • How to get them to speak the language they are learning?

    (cross-posted at Enseigner, c’est agir – en français)

    How do you get your students to speak French (or whatever the 2nd language is that they are learning) in class?

    I am not interested in offering rewards. I don’t want to raise a group of trained seals who will do anything for a candy.


    click image to view source

    I think the answer lies somewhere in here:

    If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    in creating learning situations where they must speak the 2nd language in order to participate and where they will want to participate…

    Have you been able to do this? Tell me your story!

  • Changing how we evaluate…utopic?

    I was asked to think about this statement and how it can be considered an assumption:

    The notion of systemic change in how we evaluate is utopic since it goes against parent expectations and societal values.

    If this were true then women would never have gotten the vote and black people would still be riding the back of the bus and children would still be working in coal mines.

    Any kind of systemic change is challenging but certainly not utopic or impossible! If that were the case then nothing would ever change. For this statement to be qualified as true then I must assume the following:

    • Parent expectations and the values of society are homogenous and fixed.
    • The whole system of education is formed by these two elements alone.
    • What educators have to say has no affect on any other element of the education system (esp. parents and society)

    One at a time now.
    Parent expectations and the values of society are homogenous and fixed
    In my experience working with parents I know that their expectations are not fixed in favour of the stagnancy of how we evaluate students. Parents of students who have test anxiety, for example, would love to see formal, high-stakes summative evaluations bite the dust. And societal values? Which society are we talking about? Is there an assumption here that all societies have the same values when it comes to education and evaluation? I’ve worked in a few different social arenas myself and each one held different values. Even within the same school community I’ve experienced some parents who were in favour of rigorous testing while others were in favour of less rigorous practice. Oh and wait, don’t my values as a teacher fall into the realm of societal values? Am I not part of society?

    The whole system of education is formed by these two elements alone.
    As soon as we talk ‘systemic change’ we can not base our ideas on only 2 elements of a system. Theories about how systems work tell us that a system is made up of many parts and that none of the parts can be looked at in isolation in order to gain a complete understanding of how the system works. This is because each of the parts affects each of the other parts. Think of your own body. Do you think we could get a good understanding of why you have that headache by only looking at your head? A friend of mine’s headaches ended up being as a result of high blood pressure. If his doctors had only examined his head he may never have found out why they were happening.

    By its very definition, a system is an arrangement (pattern, design) of parts which interact with each other within the system’s boundaries (form, structure, organization) to function as a whole. The saying, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” reflects the notion that it is not enough to focus our evaluative gaze on single goals, objectives, actors, processes, activities, and the like, without attempting to understand the larger system in which the initiative lives. From Evaluating Systems Change by Hallie Preskill

    What educators have to say has no affect on any other element of the education system (esp. parents and society)
    This assumes that as teachers/administrators/consultants we have no power within our own workplace, that our beliefs and practices do not count. When looked at within the concept of systems thinking, as briefly explained above, we see this is nonsense. While we may sometimes feel this to be true, we know that if we need to change something we can. Look at how a group of Catholic educators changed public policy on the teaching of ethics and religion in Quebec, look at the number of hits that come up when I google teachers as change agents.

    What do you think? Is it erroneous to think that we can change evaluative systems in education?
    What would you like to see change in how we evaluate in schools?

  • What do you think when you think évaluation?

    Here are my explanations. Translated into English below.

    Continuel – l’évaluation est un aspect de mon enseignement que je suis toujours en train de faire.

    Conversations – l’évaluation pour moi est comme une conversation entre moi et l’élève, ainsi que leurs parents. C’est une conversation qui permet l’amélioration continuel.

    Rubriques – On parle beaucoup de rubriques en évaluation. Je ne suis pas très pour les rubriques. Je trouve qu’ils limitent l’imagination de l’élève. En même temps je crois que c’est important que les attentes soient claires, alors c’est une idée dont que je pense souvent.

    Bulletins – Souvent les évaluations sont liées aux bulletins et il y a beaucoup d’enseignant(e)s qui les font seulement pour les bulletins.

    Auto-évaluation – C’est important que je m’évalue comme enseignante tout le temps. Les évaluations pour moi sont un genre d’auto-évaluation, car ils permettent une réflexion sur comment j’ai enseigné le sujet qui est en évaluation et comment je pourrais le modifier pour améliorer les situations d’apprentissages.

    ——-

    Ongoing – evaluation is a part of my teaching that I do all the time.

    Conversations – I see evaluation as a conversation between me and my students, as well as their parents. It’s a conversation that allows for continual improvement.

    Rubrics – I don’t really like rubrics because I think they limit the imagination of a student. At the same time I believe in the importance of clear expectations, so this is something I think about often.

    Report cards – many teachers only evaluate when it is time to write report cards.

    Self-evaluation – It’s important for me continually evaluate myself as a teacher. When I evaluate student work it is a way to reflect on how I taught the subject being evaluated and how I can improve learning situations in the future.

  • Another big question re: learning styles

    This question is an add-on to my last post: I no longer believe in learning styles. You? It might be a good idea to read that to put this in some kind of context :)

    ———

    If we cater to individual preference in terms of how to receive input

    aka match our teaching style to students’ preferred learning styles

    how can we possibly properly develop the multiple intelligences that, according to Gardner, we all posses?

    If all we have is a hammer all we will see are nails. What happens when we come across a screw?

    If Johnny, the supposed visual learner, receives only visual input most of the time (as part of his formal learning, since his teacher will be matching how she teaches to his preference…), he will only be able to deal with what can be dealt with visually to any degree of depth.

    Sounds pretty uni-dimensional to me.

    ESPECIALLY when we know that for knowledge to enter long term memory it is most successful when dually encoded – visually and verbally! The more diverse the input we have, the better the learning.