Watchwellast

Here is a collection of media that can be used to work with and engage students around a wide range of everyday problems. These videos all come from a pretty cool YouTube Channel called Watchwellcast. This is a part of a project focused on working with and engaging students in ways that help them make positive changes and/or informed choices in their lives.

I hope to add more content to this page. Please consider leaving a comment with your suggestions for more video, poetry, short stories, still images, quotes, music videos and lyrics, art and books.

Joel Westheimer's talk on citizenship and education

I had the pleasure of skipping hockey tonight to listen to Joel Westheimer talk about citizenship and education. Here is some of what I learned:

• Students may rarely see teachers being human because they see them so often just in their classroom teaching. Students rarely get to see teachers engage with other adults and agree and disagree in a way that model citizenship.
• In the last few decades, we have seen a narrowing of the curriculum to literacy and numeracy. We have moved away from broad goals of schooling to very narrow academic goals that can be measured on bubble tests.
• Imagine you were visiting a school in a totalitarian nation governed by a single-party dictatorship. Would the educational experiences be markedly different from the ones experienced by children in your local school?
• Should anything be different from schools in a totalitarian dictatorship and a school in a democracy?
• What responsibility do schools have to be democratic so that children can grow up to be adults who are democratic?
• Having standards is not the same as standardization. 
• Census testing is an unnecessary burden. Sample testing tells what we need to know and more efficiently. 
• There is no teacher who belongs to the group of teachers who don't care about whether children learn how to read, write or do arithmetic. Most teachers want more than the basics for every child they teach. The back to basics movement is a straw man argument that needlessly attacks teachers.
• The Alberta Teachers' Association's A Great School for All is impressive. 
• We don't remember teachers who successfully made their classroom more uniform or standardized with other teachers.
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) may be an unintended consequence to standardization of curriculum and assessment in schools. 
• There is a disturbing trend among teachers' professional learning communities. Standardization is trumping quality.
• Teacher's "subjective" grades are a better predictor of students' successes in post-secondary than the "objective scores" from standardized tests and the SAT.
• Opt out movement from standardized testing in the United States is picking up remarkable steam.
• Economists don't know much about the economy and yet they speak about education like they know what they are talking about.
• Less of life is about individual accomplishments and more about collective teamwork.
• In the workplace, people who work together are called collaborative. In school, students who help each other out are called cheaters.

Students from a totalitarian nation

No Child Left Thinking

This was written by Joel Westheimer who is the author of What Kind of Citizen? Westheimer tweets here.

This is an excerpt from Westheimer's book.

by Joel Westheimer

Imagine you were visiting a school in a totalitarian nation governed by a single-party dictatorship. Would the educational experiences be markedly different from the ones experienced by children in your local school? That may sound like a facetious question, but I do not intend it that way. It seems plausible that good lessons in multiplication,  chemistry, or a foreign language -- perhaps with some adjustments for cultural relevance and suitability -- would serve equally well in most parts of the world. So if you stepped into a school somewhere on the planet and politely asked to observe some of the lessons, would you be able to tell whether you were visiting a school in a democratic nation or a totalitarian one? Or, conversely, if students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a school in your neighbourhood to continue their lessons with new teachers and a new curriculum, would they be able to tell the difference?

The children in your local school would probably learn how to read and write, just like students do in, say, North Korea or China. Students in your local schools might learn to add numbers, do fractions, and solve algebraic equations. But that's what students in Uzbekistan learn too. Maybe students in your local school learn how not to hit one another, to follow the rules, and not to break any laws. They might sing the national anthem and learn about steroids and the life cycle of the glowworm. Maybe they even put on plays, learn a musical instrument, and paint pictures. I know of schools in Eritrea and Belarus that do those things too.

My point is that citizens in nondemocratic countries governed by a single-party authoritarian regime, or even a military junta, learn a lot of the same things in school that our children learn. So what goals would be different for schools in a democratic society? For example, do students in democratic countries learn how to participate in public decision-making (the kind of participation that is required for democracy to function properly)? Are they taught to see themselves as individual actors who work in concert with others to create a better society? Are they taught the skills they need to think for themselves and to govern collectively?

Most of us would like to believe that they do. While a school in North Korea or China might be teaching students blind allegiance to their nation's leaders and deference to the social and political policies those leaders enact, we would expect that schools in the United States or Canada or Finland would teach students the skills and dispositions needed to evaluate for themselves the benefits and draw backs of particular policies and government practices. We would not be surprised to learn, for example, that North Korean children are taught to abide by an "official history" handed down by the single-party authoritarian regime. After all, a school curriculum that teaches one unified, unquestioned version of the "truth" is one of the hallmarks of totalitarian societies. Democratic citizens, however, should be committed to the principles and values that underlie democracy -- such as political participation, free speech, civil liberties, and equal opportunity. Schools might develop these commitments through lessons in the skills of analysis and exploration, free political expression, and independent thought.

What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good

Joel Westheimer is the author of the book What Kind of Citizen: Educating Our Children for the Common Good and is speaking in Red Deer this Thursday, November 5, 2015.

Joel's book asks us to imagine the kind of society we would like to live in and shows how schools might best be used to make that vision a reality.

Westheimer challenges us to answer some pretty tough questions about our schools:

• What does an ideal school look like in your mind?
• What lessons are being conveyed?
• How are children and teachers interacting?
• What kinds of responsibilities are students being asked to take on?
• What vision of the "good" society is this school asking students to imagine?
• Are they learning the skills and habits they would need to help bring that society into being? Are they learning to recognize injustice and work with others in their communities to diminish it?

Westheimer writes:

I prefer to think about schools, not as vehicles of transmission of knowledge (though they are that too), but as places where children learn about the society in which they are growing up, how they might engage in productive ways, and how they fight for change when change is warranted. 

Schools have always taught lessons in citizenship, moral values, good behaviour and "character". Even before there was formal schooling, informal education was replete with these kinds of goals. Contemporary schools inevitably teach these lessons as well. For example, schools teach children to follow rules, and to be sure, sometimes following the rules is necessary. But does being a "good" citizen ever require questioning those rules? What is the proper balance between rule following and thinking about the origins and purpose of those rules? We can imagine classrooms that aspire to that balance.

Teaching children content like reading, writing and arithmetic in isolation of morals is developmentally inappropriate. 

I did not become a teacher so that I could merely prepare children to live in a cruel and unjust world. I became a teacher so that I could help children grow up and make the world a better place.

The real world is not a fixed and known place -- the real world can be made and unmade by the people who live there. I want to teach my students to be prepared to live in the real world while inspiring them to make it better.

I'm reading Joel Westheimer's book What Kind of Citizen? and looking forward to hear him speak this Thursday, November 5, 2015 in Red Deer.