Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Assessment’ Category

PISAful Thinking – Giving Context to the 2023 Numbers

Posted in Assessment, tagged , , , , on December 12, 2023| 3 Comments »

If you have a narrative you want to tell about education, locally or globally, PISA results can probably help confirm it. And for the most part, we do like bad news, so if you like to describe what is happening in education as “concerning” or “worrisome” or gravitate to ideas like “declining” or “falling” there was probably something for you in the latest wave of PISA results. Of course, if you want to see Canada, and more specifically British Columbia, as one of the world’s highest performing jurisdictions this evidence is also present.

PISA 2022 – Canada Fact Sheet (shows Canada in global context)

Canadian Results (showing results for each province)

First, let’s talk about what PISA results are.  For those in education, they are a bit like the Education Olympics.  They are a tool for comparing jurisdictions around the world.  PISA is the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, that measure 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills.  If you remember 10-15 years ago when everyone was going to Finland to learn what they were doing in education, this attention started from very strong PISA results.  

And, like the Olympics, they are controversial.  Criticisms include concerns about the narrow focus on certain skills, potential cultural biases, and the complex nature of education systems, which may not be fully captured by standardized assessments.   My doctoral advisor,  Yong Zaho is one the loudest critics. He wrote,  “PISA is a masterful magician. It has successfully created an illusion of education quality and marketed it to the world.”

It does seem as though PISA results have got less attention this year than in previous waves – maybe that is a statement on fewer journalists covering education, or other global events dominating the news, or maybe the criticisms have some shying away from covering the results.

I have written here several times around the results.

In 2009 – Our World Cup (on reflection, I was much more excited about them than I am today)

In 2013 –  Some PISA Thinking (which looked at BC’s results of that time)

In 2016 –It is OK to be Happy About PISA (some celebrating our strong achievements)

I do think they have value – because at a time when it is important to have conversations around learning topics like numeracy and literacy there is little media attention around them.  PISA brings these discussions to the provincial, national and even global levels.  And while most are looking to tell a story about how we are just not as good as we used to be – so it must be the kids or the teachers, beyond this simplistic silliness there are good conversations worth having.  And beyond the front page “Who is winning” comparisons, the survey breaks out data on topics that many are curious about, like the various impacts of COVID on learning, and the impact that home language  or gender can have on results in jurisdictions.   Some of the conversations that PISA can open up include:

  • The need for quality discussions around the use of data – at schools, in the community and with politicians
  • Areas of strength and weaknesses in schools and districts.  When PISA says X about science in your country, what do we know about science at our school or district – do PISA results surprise us?  Do they confirm what we know?
  • What do PISA and our local information tell us about equity?  As you get into PISA there is a lot of information like the gap between the highest and lowest performing students – the smaller the gap, likely the more equitable, at least on this measure.
  • Education as a global topic.  The assessing of students around the world is a reminder that our students are part of a global community – they will be competing in the workplace not just with those in their school or neigbourhood but much further afield.
  • A discussion about what matters.  So, PISA says something about reading, math and science – what else do we value in our system and what other evidence can we use to better understand how we are doing?
  • What can we learn from others?  Are there particular jurisdictions having success that stand out? (I would like to know what Utah is doing with math instruction as they outperform Finland in PISA). Like the Finland impact of the early part of the century, there may be something we can learn.  Even within Canada, this can be useful.  We need to see places like Alberta and Quebec as our partners not our competitors in BC.

As with any test results, PISA results are quickly politicized – so everyone spins the results. Often current governments will say the results prove everything is going well, those looking to be the next government will use the same data to say the opposite. 

It was in my last post I wrote about the power of networking in British Columbia and how education is not just a competition.  I see that PISA does open some of the wrong conversations around this battle between jurisdictions, but I do also think that any attention can be good attention – so let’s take this energy and focus and have real conversations about equity and excellence with numeracy, reading and science – not just for a single jurisdiction but for all learners everywhere.  

Read Full Post »

Desperate for Rituals

Posted in Assessment, Change, tagged on April 20, 2022| 1 Comment »

There is an interesting contrast happening right now in schools.  In some ways, they look very different than they did in 2019, and this shift is being met positively, and in other ways there is a desperate push to return to rituals that we used to have, that have been on hold for more than two years.

The simple view I take of this is that with so much different in our world, there are some rituals that people are looking towards to be simply as they remembered them in the past, a reassurance that the world has not lost all its good parts.

I am seeing that, for example, with graduation events.  There is more interest than I can ever remember.  And particularly from parents who want to be sure that this year’s students have experiences just like students used to have.

And at the same time, there are new structures and experiences, completely different from pre-pandemic.  I can’t go to an elementary school now without seeing some outdoor learning experience going on – no matter the weather!   And I can’t go to a high school without some new way that time is being organized to give students greater control over their learning. And throughout the system, it is clear everyone has a new set of digital skills that they are using.

So, we have these seemingly contrary narratives at play.  The world has been turned upside down, and we are desperate for the rituals of schools – the ones that are like those of our parents and grandparents to return – as a reminder that everything will be ok.  And we have lived through the last two years and learned we will forever want to do some things differently, the pandemic has exposed issues of equity, made us question what we value in schools, and given us brand new skills and outlooks that are making schools so different from a couple years ago.

The trick of leadership over these next few months  is to not see these different views as actually in opposition.  We can, and should, live with a foot in both worlds.  In one world, we have rituals we all remember and reassure the community of the stability of school, and in the other world, we are shifting for the changes we have seen and continue to see in our world, ensuring our schools remain centres of relevance.

The importance of the next few months in our schools cannot be overstated.  A narrative will emerge – one based on going back to good times of the past, or one that says we know better and we are going forward to a new way.  Or maybe a third narrative, which might disappoint some in both camps, that holds onto some of the practices and customs of pre 2020 schools, but still creates space for the new ideas of the last two years to flourish.

As I often say here, it is an exciting time in education.

Read Full Post »

The Pandemic as an Accelerator of Shifts in Schools

Posted in Assessment, Change, tagged , , , , , on November 19, 2021| 2 Comments »

Why has it been different this time?

This is a question I think a lot about when I walk through our high schools, see the structures they are experimenting with and talk with students and staff. It feels different.

Now into my second quarter century in the business the idea of making shifts in high schools is not new. Hearing grumblings about the traditional bell schedule, the perceived lack of student engagement, concerns over relevance of courses and leaning experiences, and someone saying something like, “they need to be more like elementary schools” are all views that I have heard every single year of my career.  And with complete earnest efforts each year I saw schools doing everything they could to find ways to think about time differently, reorganize class structures (e.g. for many Socials 8 and English 8 became Humanities 8) and an amazing array of strategies to build connections with students.

Of course, I can see how it would feel a bit like Groundhog Day.  In their totality the shifts were really tinkering at the edges.  And in truth, there was no urgency – for most students the system was working fine, and its resemblance to the system of their parents was reassuring to the community.  And while much attention was given to those really pushing the model of schooling like High Tech High or Big Picture Schools, the model of schooling for most has seen little change.  That is not to say there has not been change – I have argued here before that today’s school experience for students is very different than for those even 20 years ago, but it is not different in fundamental ways.

So, why do things feel different this time?

COVID has upended everything in our world and while new challenges are exhausting, they also create curiosity and urgency like no other times.  But I don’t think it is just COVID itself that has pushed us, but it has accelerated and exposed other elements.  It is not as much as they are new trends, they are just more obvious and really moving quickly.  Here are some other things I think are going on:

Equity – You cannot attend a conference or read an education publication without some discussion around equity.  Now it is a broad term and is inclusive of everything from Truth and Reconciliation to poverty and food security to students with specific identified needs.  A mindset around equity is having all of us question our practices in ways unlike times before.  It has both the curiosity and urgency elements.  When we talk about equity we immediately need to look at our teaching and assessment practices.  

Time – We have been trying to rethink the use of time in schools forever.  In high schools we had 2 classes at a time, we had 4 classes at a time, we had 8 classes at a time, we had 3 before lunch and 2 after lunch, we had moved the pieces around to many different combinations.  A lesson from COVID was time was more flexible than we thought it was.  In our region almost every high school is using some version of flexible time where students make choices over their learning.  For us, it is X-blocks in our high schools every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon where students can make choices over where they need to go.  We have long known not all students need the same time in each course, but we have used solutions like tutors and extra homework to deal with it – now we have thought differently.  Of course, these efforts were moving slowly before COVID, but COVID has absolutely accelerated the shifts.

Modern Skills – I am not really sure what to call this – it is all about making and creating.  While already trending before the pandemic we are seeing a massive interest in robotics – which was once limited to high schools, now having interest in specialized programs from the primary grades.   A similar trend is entrepreneurship.  What started as courses limited to students in grade 11 or 12 is now seeing great attention across the grades.  When students and parents talk about it, they talk about real-world skills and being competitive for the world.   No doubt the impact of emerging technology and everyone seemingly having a “side hustle” has been impacting schools for a while, but again COVID has really ramped it up.  

Post-Secondary – There is some really interesting data coming out of the United States.  A recent story indicates that US college enrolment is on pace for the largest 2 year drop in US History (interesting to see the only schools which are seeing increased registration are the most elite schools).  I have one of those friends who sends me every story he sees about the struggles of the post-secondary sector.  He is saying “I told you so” a lot these days.  Colleges have for a very long time just expected the students would come.  But maybe the pandemic has shifted some thinking – maybe students don’t need to build up the huge debt from the ever increasing post-secondary school costs, or maybe there are other ways to get credentialing and maybe large employers like Amazon and Google might bypass universities and hire and train students directly themselves.  All of this which is potentially fundamentally shifting post-secondary will absolutely impact the work in K-12.  Exactly what this means is hard to know yet, but again this is a larger trend that is pushing us.  If post-secondary is shifting, so must high schools that help prepare students for life after grade 12.

Now, the global shifts and increased commitments to equity were present before COVID but COVID exposed how much we haven’t done and still need to do.  There have been a new list of skills for the new world emerging for a while.  Time has always been a topic of discussion in high schools but a global pandemic really opened the door to doing things differently in how we organize.  And there have been questions for a while about post-secondary schooling but COVID sped up changes taking place.

All of this churn in our world is creating curiosity – from staff and community about how we can do things differently and better going forward and it is happening with an urgency unlike at anytime in my career.  

I am convinced this ain’t Groundhog Day – high schools are changing in real ways right in front of us.  

Read Full Post »

Plus, Minus and Equal

Posted in Assessment, Change, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Do you want your child to be the strongest student in their class? Or maybe, one of the weakest so they learn more? Or how about if they were all at the same level so they learn together?

In fact, we often want all 3 of these situations.

This will be the first time in my writing that I reference the work of a mixed martial arts athlete, but I think Frank Shamrock is onto something with his “+,-,=” system.  In short, Shamrock’s theory is that in order to be the best you need to work with someone who is better than you, someone who is equal to you, and someone who is not as strong and you can teach.

I love the simplicity.

Now, I can see how this would be useful for an MMA fighter, but it has really struck me how this is really what we want for our kids as they develop –  whether that is in school, sports, arts or other areas.  When our students are in a class with those at a higher level, they see what is possible which pushes them to challenge themselves.  And we often try to set up peer tutoring situations for our students where they get to teach others, as this helps to further enhance the learning.  And those at the same level leads to great cooperative opportunities and shared learning experiences.

Of course as you batch students together in classes this is hard to create in every situation.  I think what matters is that as often as possible we are looking to create all three situations.  It is OK to be the best player on a sports team, but if you are always that player you miss out on the other two situations which are important for growth.  And if you are regularly the weakest player on a strong team, you never get to experience the opportunities that come with teaching others and being truly part of a group that is always challenging each other.

While education can get caught up in letter grades and awards, its core business is about always getting better.  We should strive to continually put our students in situations where they are perpetual learners – sometimes being taught, sometimes teaching and sometimes collectively working together.

 

Read Full Post »

BC Education – New Curriculum Inside Comfortable Boxes

Posted in Assessment, Change, tagged , , on September 20, 2021| 4 Comments »

Seth Godin wrote a provocative post about reimagining the curriculum last week.  It is not often that parents forward me blog posts, but 4 different parents from our district have sent me the post, each adding a comment like, “This is what we need for our kids.”   And I wanted to respond back, “We are doing it!”

First, here is the premise of Seth’s post:

We’ve spent 130 years indoctrinating kids with the same structure. Now, as some of us enter a post-lockdown world, I’d like to propose a useful (though some might say radical) way to reimagine the curriculum.

It’s been a century of biology, chemistry, arithmetic, social studies and the rest. So long that the foundational building blocks are seen as a given, unquestioned and unimproved. The very structure of the curriculum actually prevents school from working as it should.

Godin has a new list of courses he proposes including:  statistics, games, communication, history and propaganda, citizenship, real skills, the scientific method, programming, art, decision making and meta-cognition.  It is a great list.  And like Godin argues, I am sure this resonates for the skills we want for our children as we prepare them for the world we live in for both work and citizenship.

British Columbia refreshed its curriculum over the last decade and it has received a lot of global attention, and I would argue it is doing much of what Godin proposes – detailed lists of facts have been replaced by big ideas and curricular competencies, core competencies including thinking, communication and personal and social are put at the centre of all curriculum and Indigenous perspectives have also been embedded throughout the curriculum.  

Having been part of discussions that date back over a decade around modernizing BC’s curriculum, there were ideas like those Godin suggests, of swapping out “old” courses for “new” courses.  In the end the shells of the traditional system were maintained in BC, the subject areas are largely the same now for students as they were for their parents, other comforts including labeling courses by grade (e.g. you take French 9 and then you take French 10 – largely in groups of students the same age) were maintained and the basic structure of high school courses all being just over 100 hours was also kept.  Now, within these courses the massive changes I described above took place – and the experience has been modernized.

The beauty of Godin’s model is it radical.  It does not allow you to keep doing what you have been doing before.  The old courses are gone and replaced by new ones. Of course its great strength is its great weakness.  Very few students, teachers or parents I encounter are looking for radical shifts in education.  While we are interested in High Tech High and other schools that seem to be living Godin’s vision, these schools seem to exist as alternatives not the mainstream. While the education community appreciates the notion of change, they want change within the context of a system that is comfortable for them. 

It is not that we are broadly anti-change, but we are more incremental than radical.  I think most people agree with Godin:

We’re living in the age of an always-connected universal encyclopedia and instantly updated fact and teaching machine called the Net. This means that it’s more important to want to know the answer and to know how to look it up than it is to have memorized it when we were seven. Given the choice between wasting time and learning, too many people have been brainwashed into thinking that learning is somehow onerous or taxing.

So, here in British Columbia we have tried to do this by dramatically transforming the curriculum (the what and how of learning), yet not really changing the comfortable boxes we are used to.  For us, the strength of this is that we are able to make major changes while not radically disrupting the system.  And the downside, you can keep doing what you have always been doing – Social Studies 9 is still Social Studies 9 filled for 100 hours a year by a group of 14 year-olds – this shift relies on the commitment of everyone to the higher ideals of the change.

Since the turn of the century the calls for an overhaul and transformation have grown louder.  We have heard them come out of the globalization conversation and we have now heard them as a product of the pandemic.  I want to believe we can have the shifts that Godin and others write about within our current structure.  The realist in me says that this is actually the only way.  I like how David Albury recently described this work, “One of the tricks of transformation is to combine urgency and passion with courageous patience.”  We need the big thinkers like Godin to push us, and then we need to make these shifts within our reality.  We need to hold onto the comforts of the system we all have known while continuing to modernize the experience within it.  

Read Full Post »

School on a Dial

Posted in Assessment, Change, Personalized Learning, tagged , , on June 3, 2020| 7 Comments »

I want to pick up on the idea of school on a dial that I introduced in my last blog post – The End of Snow Days?

School for a long time has been something you turn on or off.  School is turned off on the weekends, during Christmas, Spring Break and the summer.  And it is turned on from 9-3 Monday to Friday from September to June.  It is a switch.  The day after Labour Day we turn the switch on and across British Columbia hundreds of thousands of students arrive in buildings joined by tens of thousands of teachers and other staff.

Unlike most jurisdictions in the world, British Columbia did not turn off the switch for in-person schooling when the pandemic hit in the middle of March.  We changed this switch to a dial and introduced five different settings on this dial.  Here is one recent image describing the five stages:

Since spring break, and up until this week we had been in Stage 4.  There were a limited number of students attending school – these were largely the children of Essential Service Workers and vulnerable and special needs students.  The vast majority of students were learning remotely.  This week, we moved to Stage 3 and saw thousands of student returning to schools part-time and on a voluntary basis.

Of course, with it already being June, many are turning their attention to September.  We all would hope to be at Stage 1 – and stay in Stage 1 – but we also need to plan for other eventualities.   So, back to this notion of school as a dial and not a switch.  If we think of it as a dial, if there is a second-wave of Covid-19, we can dial-down the in-person instruction, and if BC continues to plank the curve, we can dial-up the in-person instruction.  The challenge for a school system is how do you design learning and schooling that lets you move between the various stages on a dial and not get caught thinking of it as a switch (models are for another post).

This also raises a larger question about the future of education and the idea of in-person instruction being on a dial. Right now, the dial is being controlled by the virus.  The virus threat is lower in BC, so the dial for in-person instruction goes up.  And this will be the pattern in the short term.

But I have heard from both staff and students that they have found more success with partial remote learning than they were finding in the traditional classroom, particularly at high school.  So post-virus, how might we let students control their own dial? Or staff?  How could we design structures that allowed some students and staff to attend in-person everyday, some only a few days a week, and maybe others vary rarely?  It makes my head hurt – but it is a conversation worth having. 

I think of Alan November’s question that has long inspired me when he speaks of the classroom, “Who owns the learning?”, the teacher or the student,  in the post virus world, I think as we look at structures, we may want to ask, “Who owns the dial?”

More to come . . .

Read Full Post »

I Am Them

Posted in Assessment, tagged , , on April 25, 2019| 11 Comments »

For the first time since finishing my Masters Degree in 1999 I am back in the student world. In January I began a doctorate program with eighteen colleagues from my district and around the province. It is so interesting going into the modern student world I have been seeing as a teacher and administrator over the last two decades. There are probably a lot of future blog posts in the work and the reflection of my experiences.

For now, I want to talk about my first two major assignments and my feedback on my feedback.   These are both fairly large written assignments – done in a group of three (I really like the ability to collaborate – a post for another time).  We submitted the first one, and a few days later one of my partners texted the others of us in the group to let us know our paper was marked.  I think the text was something like, “Paper is back .  A-“.  Well, that was a bit disappointing, like an A- is an OK letter grade and we all have some paper-writing rust, all just getting back into writing after a long time on the other side of assignments with our students.  My partners then said that there was a lot of feedback on the paper.  I think to their somewhat surprise and disappointment I said something like “We got an A-. Time to move on.  I am not going to read the feedback.”  And perhaps to partially prove a point, I haven’t read any of the feedback on the paper.  I heard it was very good.  The professor raised a number of issues and questions for our consideration.  And I know he may be reading this blog, and I know I am supposed to be a mature learner, but I didn’t read the feedback – I had my grade, A-.  And that was OK, and I was moving on to the next assignment.

Push ahead to our second assignment. Same professor.  We got it back today.  There was no letter grade on it.  He gave some kind comments that we were well on our way and he offered a lot of feedback, questions, suggestions, and provocations throughout the paper.  I have read the comments three times already and re-read the paper at least as many times.  I am sure I will spend several hours seeing how I can incorporate the thoughts into an improved paper.  I see some ways it definitely can be better.  My mind is just so different without the letter grade on the assignment.  I know at some point there will be a letter grade on the assignment and as our professor says, “deadlines are your friends.”  And in that way, I guess marks are as well.  They do signal conclusion.

Now, for all inside education this little experience I have had will not come as a surprise.  For the last twenty years (and longer) we have been talking of the power of feedback and the challenges associated with grades on papers.  This links to the movement away from grades at younger ages.  It is interesting to experience it myself.   Feedback is an invitation to a conversation and to improvement and grades (even if accompanied by the same level and quality of feedback) is an end point.

Thinking of our students, and what they have told me about feedback and grades, as I said in the title, I am them.

Read Full Post »

Reflecting on Competition

Posted in Assessment, tagged , , , on February 3, 2019| 14 Comments »

I am pretty competitive. It is a short list of things I won’t try to turn into some sort of contest.  I don’t just like to run, I like to race. And while I like getting steps with my FitBit, I also really like seeing how I am doing against my friends who have the same device. I could easily go on, the list is long.  And while I like winning, I really like the act of competing.  I find it motivating.

Since I think competition is so great in so many areas, why am I so lukewarm on letter grades – particularly with our younger learners.  And why have I written multiple posts criticizing the Fraser Institute and their use of school assessment data to rank schools?  If my FitBit rankings encourage me to walk more, shouldn’t the Fraser Institute rankings encourage our students to perform better?

A recent conversation with Dean Shareski helped me bring some of this into focus.  As I look at the competitions I like, they are all ones that I have voluntarily joined to participate.  I think a key piece for me is this explicit commitment to participate.

All my favourite competitions are ones where those of us involved joined, not ones we were forced into.  I am good with competitive team sports, with their scoring and winning as the participants knew what they signed up for.  And for those who don’t want to compete, they don’t sign up.  The way my brain is wired, I think everyone must want to compete about just about everything, but I do know this isn’t true.  I was struck by a recent post by my colleague Maureen Lee who wrote that she found her FitBit was actually hurting her fitness so she has taken it off.  I think it is crucial to recognize that competition is a motivator for some people in some instances but this is far from universal.  And I realize it is not always healthy for motivation to be so extrinsic- I am the person who now doesn’t want to get off the couch when my FitBit is charging, thinking of any steps as wasted steps.

It is this volunteering piece that leads to some of my struggles with the Fraser Institute and our ranking and sorting in schools.  The Fraser Institute has a narrow slice of criteria (a few province-wide assessments) and applies blanket rankings to all schools in the province on these results.  The schools don’t sign up to participate.  It is not that inner-city schools are saying, “this year let’s compete in our writing tests with some of the elite private schools in the province”.  It takes no acknowledgement that different schools may have a different focus or goals, and are all starting from very different places.

Similarly, students working through learning their math or language arts are not asking to be put on a common scale with their age-similar peers and have their results posted in the class (I know this happens very rarely now) or stamped with a grade that says little about what they need to improve but says a lot about how they currently stack-up with others around them.  This is particularly true at younger ages.  I wonder how a 10 year-old bringing home a report card with C’s thinks – when did I sign up for this?  We know better.

It is not easy to reconcile how we can both embrace and champion competition and also question its necessity.   Perhaps we need to ask the hard question –  why exactly are we competing in something that really is a personal journey?   At least for now I am going to see how this new criteria fits – I am all for competition that I signed up for.   And to all you FitBitt-ers on my Friends list – I am coming for you!

Read Full Post »

In Defense of Knowing Things

Posted in Assessment, tagged , , on June 18, 2018| 12 Comments »

Here is a quick quiz, put these in order from most to least important for students to be focused on in school:

  • collaboration
  • critical thinking
  • creativity
  • problem solving
  • knowledge
  • communication
  • flexibility
  • leadership

This is a quiz I was given recently in a room full of Superintendents.  We started with our #1 answer.  I selected creativity.  It was a popular choice, but so was critical thinking and problem solving.  We were then asked to give our last place answer.  As we went around the room, everyone was saying knowledge, until it came to me.  I said flexibility.  I had knowledge in 4th of the 8.  Basically everyone else had it in 8th.

Two thoughts.  One – this is a terrible quiz.  You cannot take any of these items in isolation, their power is how they work and connect together. Two – knowledge is unfairly getting a bad name.

The quiz bugged me.

I appreciate the sentiment that goes into activities like this.  The goal is for everyone to say “knowledge” is the least important and to think about if this is true, is it reflective of the systems they are leading.

There is a version of this 21st century learning talk I have given before. It goes something like this , “Particularly with changes in technology, we all have access to facts at our finger tips, so school becomes less about the transmitting of facts, and more about the making sense of them.”  This has been some of the exciting shifts in schooling over the last couple decades.  We no longer need to spend classes recording notes in our binders off the overhead, instead we can engage in activities that allow us to work with the facts that we all have access to and go deeper with notions of collaboration, creativity, problem solving and the others attributes that are on the list above.  The growth and value given to core competencies in British Columbia is part of this positive trend.

That said, knowing stuff is still important.  And while Jeopardy-style knowledge may be less important now and schools should rightly spend less time on memorizing dates and reciting poems from memory than when I was a high school student, you cannot do all the other things on the list without knowledge.  The amazing growth in inquiry-based learning has been a phenomenal development in schools – but inquiry is nothing without knowledge.

I have become particularly attune to this lately, with the craziness over fake news, and the like, which is mostly coming from the United States, but also in pockets here in Canada and other places around the world.  I still think it is important to know stuff.  When my kids read the paper or watch the news, I want them to have the knowledge of what has happened in the past, so they can be critical of what is happening today.

I am definitely not advocating we go back to our system of events 20 years ago.  The progress of schooling has been great.  I am wanting to be sure as we rightly shine a light on the range of talents we want for our children we don’t diminish the value of knowledge.  Knowing stuff is still cool.

Read Full Post »

The Speaker Who Made Me Think Differently

Posted in Assessment, Change, Technology, tagged , , on February 27, 2018| 4 Comments »

For me it was Alan November.

When I look at which speaker I saw who finally got through to me and made me think differently about teaching and learning, it would be Alan November. It was 2004, and the web 2.0 world was coming alive.

I have seen hundreds of speakers who suggested I needed to think differently but for some reason on that fall day at the Terry Fox Theatre in Port Coquitlam, Alan November got me thinking in new ways and I never looked back.

I have written on some similar shifts I have made – like My Aha Moment when I took what I heard from Alan November and brought it into my practice and My Own Watershed Moments when I reflected on influential conferences, people and presentations on my thinking.

The short version of what I remember from the November talk of 14 years ago, is that we need to have students own their own learning (He would ask, “Who owns the learning?”), and some of the new technology tools can help do this in ways we had only dreamed about before.  Of course, he also had some great hooks, I am sure I am not the only one who remembers him showing Dog Island, The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus among other sites around information literacy.

So, why on that particular day, did that talk change my thinking?  I think it is because:

  1.  I was already thinking about things differently but needed someone to help me pull the ideas together
  2. I felt confident in my job, and ready to move beyond “just getting by” to be open to new ideas
  3. There was a culture in the District I worked that was open to new ideas
  4.  I could see how the conversation in education fit into a larger shift in the world beyond school
  5. Some speakers just hook you in.

Several of us looked back on this event and referred to it as the “November Awakening” in Coquitlam.   This was the right event at the right time.   Of course, we never change our thinking based on a 2-hour-talk, but sometimes we can look back on certain sessions that really helped pull our thinking together.

So, who was it for you?  If you had to identify one speaker you heard who changed how you think about your practice who would it be?  What was it about that speaker on that day that led to a change of thinking?

 

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »