I'm going to blog throughout the summer

I can remember deciding to continue my blogging through out the summer last year, and I've decided to do the same this year.

I'm excited to keep the momentum.

If you are someone who plans on reading this blog at all through out the summer, I'd love to hear from you via a comment.

Inspirational Posters

Here is a guest post from a student of mine.




I decided to make these slides because quotes like these inspire me, when I'd feel sad and lonely I would go on the Internet and look at inspiring quotes and they would calm me down and make me happy and make me think about the good things in life. What I noticed though was that some of the quotes did not make sense with the picture and I wanted it all to connect and create an image that you can picture in your head that can make you smile. And make you realize that you are worth it and you can do what ever you set your mind to, and that's exactly what I am going to do in my life.

To view the posters, click on the picture below:

Acknowledgment

One of the best things school can teach kids is that they can acknowledge others' achievements without feeling diminished or competitive.

You say you want this, so then why are you doing that?

If we can agree that there is a good chunk of the population that hated their time in school, then we need to think about how we can make school a little less like school. If the consensus among educators and parents is that we want lifelong learners then we need to play a little game called "You say you want this, so then why are you doing that?"

Here's how you play the game.

First: we have to be willing to admit that school can be improved. Then we need to admit that to improve school, we need to change school... check.

Second: we have to agree that we want children to become lifelong learners... check.

Third: we have to rethink some of the most recognizable characteristics of Old School such as homework, grading, rewards, punishment, discipline, hand raising, multiple choice, honour rolls, competition, testing, lecturing, standardization, lesson planning and curriculum... check

If you take the time to follow the links above you will see how each one of these traditional practices can be challenged.

If this game is bothersome or uncomfortable to play, that's ok. You're human. So if you need a little help, consider what Winston Churchill and Mark Twain had to say about this little game:

Churchill: However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

Twain: It ain't what we don't know that get's us in trouble, but what we know for sure that just ain't so. 

The results are that the status quo of Old School is no longer sustainable. Many students continue to vote with their feet and leave school - what's sad is that for many students their time during school has them feeling less captivated and more just like captives.

In his article How to Create Nonreaders, Alfie Kohn chimes in:

When parents ask, "What did you do in school today?", kids often respond, "Nothing." Howard Gardner pointed out that they're probably right, because "typically school is done to students." This sort of enforced passivity is particularly characteristic of classrooms where students are exlcuded from any role in shaping the curriculums, where they're on the receiving end of lectures and questions, assignments and assessments. One result is a conspicous absence of critical thinking - something that (irony alert!) the most controlling teachers are likely to blame on the students themselves, who are said to be irresponsible, unmotivated, apathetic immature, and so on.

Unfortunately, myths are often more satisfying to us than the truth - in education we are satisfyingly distracted by a great many myths.

Do we not recognize that there are a lot of children who hate school?

For too long, school has acted for too many kids as the greatest extinguisher of curiosity. If we are serious about creating lifelong learners, school needs to stop looking so much like school. If we want to make things better for our children, we need to start questioning what we consider to be the obvious.

This is why the most successful parents and educators are constantly reflecting on their own beliefs and practices. They are in a constant state of acute mindfulness.

And it starts by asking the question: I say I want this, so then why am I doing that?

My slideshow:

You say you want this

View more presentations from bowerjj.

Rethinking Failure

Here is a project I've done with students on rethinking failure and mistakes.

The project is for them to create a motivational poster about failure. To gather information, we watch a handful of videos and read a couple short blog posts. Here they are:

First we watch this Michael Jordan commercial:



Here are some of the ideas my students write down from that clip:

• I've failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.
• Failure leads to success.
• Failure is good in many ways.
• Without failure its impossible to succeed.
• You'll never get good at something until you make mistakes.
• Failure lets us know what we need to learn.

Here are some of the ideas my students take from this second Michael Jordan video:

• Failure can give you strength.
• It may not be God that give you talent but it is your effort.
• Failure leads to talent.
• Pain can be motivational.
• You have to start small to create big.

Here's the final video we watch:

Some of the names like Lucille Ball, and Ulysses S. Grant were not recognizable for my students, but others such as Michael Jordan and The Beatles were. There are many lessons to be taken from this video, but perhaps none are as powerful as the idea that mistakes and failures are never the exception - they are the rule.

After discussing these videos, I hand out this small collection reading on mistakes and failures. Click on the picture to see the PDF.

I then provide the kids with larger poster paper and other supplies so that they can create a motivation poster on rethinking failure and mistakes.

The fear of exclusion

When we confuse harder with better, we run the enormous risk of allowing a scarcity of success, via desperate competitiveness, to creep into the classroom.

When we brag about how many kids couldn't cut it in our class, or how quickly we can cull the heard, or efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff, we frame learning as an act of compliance.

When we take as much pride in the number of students who fail as we do with those who succeed, we invest in a learning environment built on exclusion.

When we define our own success as educators by wearing students' failures as a badge of honour, we teach powerful lessons to not only those who are excluded but to all of us who witness the exclusion. Under these threatening circumstances, we wonder and worry what it means for us and for own safety and desperate need to be included - we eagerly comply to be included out of a fear of being excluded.

Under these conditions, real learning doesn't stand a chance.

Finding what we look for

In their book The Myths of Standardized Tests, Phillip Harris, Bruce Smith and Joan Harris tell this story:

"What are you doing?" a helpful passerby asks.
"Looking for my car keys," answers the drunk.
"Did you drop them somewhere around here?"
"I don't think so," replies the drunk.
"Then why look here? the puzzled would-be helper wonders.
"It's the only place where there's any light."

What we find is largely dependent on where we look. The more we tighten our focus on highly prescribed curriculums that are enforced by test and punish standardized exams the more we miss. Ironically, an intense focus requires a kind of tunnel vision that blinds us to the wider consequences of our decisions.

Here's what I mean:

Before you read further, you might want to try out this selective attention experiment.



One of the designers of the experiment, Dr. Daniel Simons, explains what he's learned from conducting this experiment around the world:

We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do. We feel like we are going to take in what's around us. But we don't. We pay attention to what we are told to attend to, or what we're looking for, or what we already know. Top-down factors play a big role. Fashion designers will notice clothes. Engineers will notice mechanics. But what we see is amazingly limited.

In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan puts it this way:

We see what we expect to see, what we're looking for. And we can't see all that much. 

And when Heffernan asked Simons if some people see more than others here was his response:

There is really limited evidence for that. People who are experienced basketball players are slightly better at seeing what's happening in the video - but that's probably because they're more accustomed to watching passes; it isn't so hard for them to read what's going on. You can train yourself to focus on more than one spot. You might improve your eye muscles somewhat. But the limits are pretty fixed. There's a physical and an evolutionary barrier. You can't change the limits of your mind.

The point to be taken here for educators is that our attention and vision is biologically limited, and the more time and effort we spend collecting and analyzing test scores, the less time and effort we can expend looking at things that are never found on tests like creativity, perseverance, empathy, resourcefulness and work ethic. In life, there's always too much data. The trick is knowing which to collect and which to let go. The same is true with learning. And unfortunately, today's accountability regimes are encouraging educators to become slaves to the wrong sort of data.

Here's Simons:

For the human brain attention is a zero-sum game: If we pay more attention to one place, object, or event, we necessarily pay less attention to others.

The more we focus on data-driven decisions based on measurable outcomes, the less we attend to educating the whole-child. This might look something like this:

"What are you doing?" a helpful passerby asks.
"Looking for learning," answers the teacher.
"Is there learning in that test?"
"I'm not sure," replies the teacher.
"Then why look here? the puzzled would-be helper wonders.
"This is the easiest place to look."

Ontario teacher opts child out of testing

Here is a comment left on a guest post titled Alberta Teacher Excuses Their Child From PAT:

I'm a teacher in Ontario, and my eldest daughter is in grade three next year. I've already made the decision that I'm going to opt her out of the grade three testing at the end of the year. I already know how well she's doing, as does her teacher. I already know what she reads and how well, what interests her, what she struggles with. Her teachers know this too. So the test isn't benefitting her or us directly. If it's only being used to pit schools and teachers against each other, to stress them out over a measure they cannot truly control, and to take away valuable exploratory learning in favour of lessons about how to take a multiple-choice test and how to at least try to answer every question, why would I subject my daughter to it?
I'm going to ask her teacher next year if it would be possible for her to spend test-prep periods in the library reading, since she won't be taking the test. Hopefully she'll get the opportunity to explore more books that way and actually learn something of value