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

  • Blooms Digital Taxonomy: My Thoughts

    [cross-posted at 09/10 ~ Thinking Forward]

    Concept map for Bloom’s digital taxonomy. Developed by Andrew Churches of Kristin School in Albany Auckland, New Zealand. Click image for source.

    Hmmm… not too sure I like the title. I’d just call it revised again, or updated, or something along those lines. It is a taxonomy that is updated to reflect current reality. It incorporates all modes of learning, not only the digital. Right?

    Actually, on 2nd look I see that it emphasizes the digital in the descriptors as well as the information document this accompanies. Why the division of digital from all other learning? I’ve written about the problem(s) of separating the digital from other literacies before:

    em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble or Hesitancy and “digital literacy”

    And that writing still rings true to me.

    As teachers we do need to teach students how to know, understand, and do. We need to teach them how to organize the increasingly messy amount of information around them, how to think critically, how to collaborate, and how to create based on all of those skills.

    I plan on teaching these skills regardless of the tools they use to get there. Mind maps can be made with Dabbleboard, with masking tape and paint, or with a pen on the back of an old envelope. Heck, they can be made with a finger in the dirt. But the concept of organizing thought, either individually or collectively – stands way above the decision process over which tool to do it with. In fact, I have seen groups get so bogged down in the tools (tools that aren’t available but they wish they were, tools that don’t work, tools they don’t know properly, tools from home that aren’t compatible with school tools, etc…) that they lose their purpose altogether.

    We can also model these skills. Students know I have a blog where I write about my teaching in order to improve it. They know I use different digital organizing tools. They know I collaborate with educators all over the world. They also see me calling other teachers into the classroom for advice/feedback/opinion/whatever. They see me talking with their parents so we can collectively reach our goals. They see me taking days off for professional development, so I can go meet with other teachers to improve our practice.

    While I appreciate the addition of new verbs and conditions for learning in Andrew Churches’ taxonomy,  I still think the title and information document puts the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. As long as we keep our emphasis on the learning outcomes, the tools we use to get there can be varied.

    They do not need to be digital.



  • Alternative Schools

    Waiting to see what the new year brings us, like at a starting line, so many factors contribute to success - including being prepared to run the race.
    Waiting to see what the new year brings us, like at a starting line, so many factors contribute to success – including being prepared to run the race.

    I work in an alternative school. Actually, it’s an alternative program within a large school. We have a closed off area of the building with a separate entrance and run by a slightly different schedule – we don’t hear the bells and are just fine with that!

    I am completing my first year here and am excited about continuing next year. What makes this program so exciting for me after 13 years of teaching? I believe it has to do with a few things, the biggest being the heightened sense of entanglement with my students’ learning.

    There are an increasing amount of alternative programs across North America. Each one is different. They have to be because one of the purposes of an alternative program is that it is tailored to the needs of the learners within it. Though each school is different, studies show that they have basic elements in common (Boss, 1998; Johnston, Cooch & Pollard 2004; Quinn & Poirier, 2006) :

    1. A focus on changing the educational approach, not the student.
    2. A belief that all students can learn with high expectations for learning.
    3. Teachers and administrators are caring leaders.
    4. “Low adult-student ratios in the classroom are considered integral to successful outcomes” (Quinn & Poirier, 2006)
    5. Ongoing PD for teachers in the areas of alternative learning environments and factors, as well as communication with students and families
    6. Relationships at all levels are key – they are positive, trusting, and caring
    7. Students are able to create a solid connection with an adult who believes in their success.

    In our program, our class sizes are small. This year our 3 classes ranged from 13 to 18 students. We interview students who are recommended to the program and each and every one talks about the distractions of a large classroom, the need to connect with teachers who explicitly care about their success, the need to learn outside of the box.

    Things will change a bit next year. We will have a new head teacher who has never taught in an alternative environment before. We are meeting today to talk about our vision for the program. I’m writing this post to remind me of key factors, what needs to be in order to do the right thing by these kids. They only deserve that – to be done right by.

    Boss, S. (1998). Learning from the margins: The lessons of alternative schools.

    Johnston, C., Cooch, G., & Pollard, C. (2004). A Rural Alternative School and Its Effectiveness for Preventing Dropouts The Rural Educator 25 (3), 25-29.

    Quinn, M. M., & Poirier, J. M. (2006). Study of effective alternative education programs: Final grant report. Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research.

  • Challenging Conventional Wisdom, Indeed.

    There is a great conversation going on over at the CASTLE book club blog (orange group) about the  teaching of facts and skills. I plan on posting this post over there but my login and password are stored on my home computer, I’m correcting procrastinating correcting English papers at work. For now, I will post it here and then cross post it there when I get home waaaaay later tonight.

    We are reading Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham.

    In A Challenge to Conventional Wisdom? posted by Michael Curtin, he questions Willingham’s first two chapters, one focusing on the primary need for teaching facts, and the other on the primacy of essential questions and individualization of the learning process. Michael asks,

    …how does he reconcile this insistence on memorization of facts – after all, that’s what it boils down to – with his insistence that students’ curiosity is such an important part of learning.  How is a teacher to implement the suggestions from both chapters one and two: they seem contradictory to me.

    The conversation that came out of this question is leading me to what, so far, is bothering me in this book. I’ve only read the first two chapters at this point and I don’t know how this will be reconciled later on, if at all.

    If I agree with Willingham that “…factual knowledge makes cognitive processes work better…” (p.36) and that we need to increase our students’ background knowledge then I need to make the next step and decide what kind of background knowledge they need to work with when learning a particular concept or idea.

    Art Titzel, in a comment to Michael’s post, writes,

    As far as teaching new topics I believe there needs to be some pre-loading of factual information before we can expect students to critically think. This pre-loading of information should be meaningful to students and in context with the learning, not just rote memorization.

    It is in choosing what information to pre-load where things get sticky. Willingham makes this statement about what facts learners need to know. It makes me cringe.

    For reading, students must know whatever information writers assume they know and hence leave out. The necessary knowledge will very depending on what students read, but most observers would agree that a reasonable minimum target would be to read a daily newspaper and to read books written for the intelligent layman on serious topics such as science and politics. Using that criterion, we may still be distressed that much of what writers assume their readers know seems to be touchstones of the culture of dead white males. From the cognitive scientist’s point of view, the only choice in that case is to try to persuade writers and editors at the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and so on to assume different knowledge on the part of their readers. I don’t think anyone would claim that change would be easy to bring about. It really amounts to a change in culture. Unless and until that happens, I advocate teaching that material to our students. The simple fact is that without that knowledge, they cannot read the breadth of material that their more knowedgable schoolmates can, nor with the depth of comprehension. (p.36)

    Tell me, HOW are we going to change culture if not by starting with our students?

    With that one paragraph, Willingham is supporting:

    • the persistence of outdated, patriarchal knowledge as most important
    • the persistence of science and politics as the upper echelon of knowledge
    • the division of class based on patriarchal ideas such as the primacy of scientific knowledge

    I think he is also suggesting that the majority of writers write from this perspective.

    He prefaces the paragraph by saying this has nothing to do with value judgments or politics, but merely with what is cognitively best for students. I think I need this explained to me again so I can understand how that is so. Is he really claiming that cognitive science is not influenced by culture?

    What do you think about this?

  • Lessons from fake blogs

    I want to reassure those of you who read this blog that it is all real. Moreover, I am a real person – Tracy, a dog owning, just bought a house, reflective, love my job as a teacher, can’t wait to get to the country, goofy grin and all, real person.

    me

    Just thought I’d reassure you about that since we can never be too sure about who or what we are reading. Heck, you can friend me on facebook if you need more proof. Oh. Wait. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything either…

    Montreal launched a new self-serve bicycle service (for a fee) on May the 12th – BIXI. It’s said (by the mayor) to be unique in the world and everyone is very excited about BIXI. Including three authors of a grassroots biking blog called A Vélo Citoyens (To your bikes, citizens) who loved the idea so much they wrote about it everyday, they spread the word to all their friends on facebook. They filmed video of the soon to be released BIXI bikes. These were citizens with a cause!

    However they weren’t citizens at all. They were characters in a marketing scheme. They don’t exist. Bet all those new facebook friends feel kinda used.

    I searched for the blog this morning but it seems to have been replaced with one that is obviously a marketing tool. What I did find was at least one blog (Cycle Fun Montreal) with an author who felt angered enough to complain about the legalities of using the blogging community as a marketing tool in such a fallacious manner – ok, what’s with the fancy words so early in the morning? – who felt we were lied to and from within a normally trusting community to boot!

    (The original newspaper article that exposed the marketing campaign was BIXI, Blog, et Bullshit by Patrick Lagacé of La Presse, but you can read an English translation in the comments if you click on the Cycle Fun Montreal link above)

    So. Why am I writing about this? The point here is that everyone (I’m assuming) who read that blog thought it was the real deal. They thought the authors were real people. Enough so to befriend them on facebook (one of the authors had over 800 of them, according to an interview on CBC). Luckily they ended up only being duped by an advertising firm and the City of Montreal (I’ll leave that can of worms closed …). People say that they only friend people (facebook verb) they know, so what constitutes knowing people?

    I teach my students about their online presence. My students are about to leave high school (or so we hope ;) ) . They are entering CEGEP or the job market and need to rethink things like that cutiehotty hotmail address and those partying pics they have on facebook. They also need to take care of who they talk to and who has access to their info online. We all do, but they in particular – teenagers are targets, they don’t have as much life experience and the world knows it.

    Yesterday MissTeacha asked me what my classroom looks like, in particular economics. Here is an idea of how I am going to teach about advertising when they return from their 2-week stages (woohoo – they get 2 weeks of work study, which they love, and we get 2 weeks to gain strength before the last few weeks of school, which we need) next Wednesday. It’d be great if that blog were still up, but since it’s not I may recreate one like it to present to them, or I may just share the story of BIXI, show some videos (BIXI marketing videos and those that are but maybe don’t look like marketing videos). We’d have a conversation, either full-class or in smaller groups, about advertising – it’s purpose, deceptive qualities, how it plays with our emotions – I’d then have them explore this post at Fagstein’s blog “Why do Marketing Companies Hate Themselves?” along with it’s accompanying links with various reactions to the BIXI marketing campaign. Then we might debate – good, solid campaign vs. dirty, rotten scheme or is it better to market by any means necessary or to be truthful at all times, something like that. Eventually down the road (though our school year is almost over so we don’t have much time…) I’d love for them to create their own sneaky marketing campaigns.

    The idea is, they search for their own meaning. I don’t need to ‘teach’ them anything much beyond how to locate information and different strategies for organizing and thinking about the information they find. They are engaged – talking, researching, talking some more, acting (debating is like acting), creating… you get my drift. If they are engaged in doing they are learning.

    So it’d look something like that.

  • How do we not give zeros? Voicethread response.

    Preamble...

    I finally had a chance to check out my incoming links and discovered Miss Teacha’s post on how she creates a podcast. At the same time I am reviewing some voicethreads made by students (actually, trying to. Forgot the reminder about making the threads public so I’m kind of locked out of them for the moment! There goes my Sunday morning grading plan because I am sure NONE of my students are up at 8 am on a Sunday morning to make the changes needed for me to view them!) and it made me think that voicethread could be a neat alternative to podcasting.

    This morning I learned that you could use your webcam to make a comment on a voicethread! Ms. McMullen-Dent’s class created a voicethread about Self-Control and it was the first time I saw some movie comments (have I been under a rock? or is this new?).

    There are 60 some odd comments, mine is waaaaaaaaaaay at the end.

    Getting to the point…

    It got me to thinking that I could record a voicethread instead of a podcast for my blog and that commentary could come in many forms. Either as traditional blog comments or typed, audio, or webcam comments directly on the voicethread.

    So. Let’s try it out. That very same Miss Teacha left a comment a little while ago on an older post of mine Why I Don’t Do Zeros. She asks difficult questions. Let’s try to address them together, shall we?

    _____

    I warned you I’d be tagging you…Please invite others you think could add to the conversation.

    Michael
    Hugh
    Joel
    Dr. Jan
    Pat
    Linda
    Jose
    Douglas
    Marcy
    Elona
    Diane
    Angela Stockman
    Angela Maiers
    Liz
    Chris
    Scott
    Roberto

    Dr. Douglas Reeves on Toxic Grading Practices. Getting Things Done.

    Voicethread image: Report Card by Divine Harvester on Flickr