Joel Westheimer in Red Deer November 5

On Thursday, November 5, Joel Westheimer will be speaking in Red Deer, Alberta. Joel is an education columnist for CBC Radio and professor of democracy and education. Joel is the author of What Kind of Citizen? and he tweets here.

To attend this free event, register here.

I'll see you there!

Here is a nice preview of Joel Westheimer's message around Citizenship:

Progressive Education: What it isn't

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This is an excerpt from a larger article found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Misconceptions about progressive education generally take two forms. Either it is defined too narrowly so that the significance of the change it represents is understated, or else an exaggerated, caricatured version is presented in order to justify dismissing the whole approach. Let’s take each of these in turn.

Individualized attention from caring, respectful teachers is terribly important. But it does not a progressive school make. To assume otherwise not only dilutes progressivism; it’s unfair to traditional educators, most of whom are not callous Gradgrinds or ruler-wielding nuns. In fact, it’s perfectly consistent to view education as the process of filling children up with bits of knowledge — and to use worksheets, lectures, quizzes, homework, grades, and other such methods in pursuit of that goal — while being genuinely concerned about each child’s progress. Schools with warm, responsive teachers who know each student personally can take pride in that fact, but they shouldn’t claim on that basis to be progressive.

Moreover, traditional schools aren’t always about memorizing dates and definitions; sometimes they’re also committed to helping students understand ideas. As one science teacher pointed out, “For thoughtful traditionalists, thinking is couched in terms of comprehending, integrating, and applying knowledge.” However, the student’s task in such classrooms is “comprehending how theteacher has integrated or applied the ideas… and [then] reconstruct[ing] the teacher’s thinking.”[3]There are interesting concepts being discussed in some traditional classrooms, in other words, but what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.

There’s another mistake based on too narrow a definition, which took me a while to catch on to: A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy. In fact, one can imagine an old-fashioned pour-in-the-facts approach being used to teach lessons in tolerance or even radical politics.[4]

Less innocuous, or accidental, is the tendency to paint progressive education as a touchy-feely, loosey-goosey, fluffy, fuzzy, undemanding exercise in leftover hippie idealism — or Rousseauvian Romanticism. In this cartoon version of the tradition, kids are free to do anything they please, the curriculum can consist of whatever is fun (and nothing that isn’t fun). Learning is thought to happen automatically while the teachers just stand by, observing and beaming. I lack the space here to offer examples of this sort of misrepresentation — or a full account of why it’s so profoundly wrong — but trust me: People really do sneer at the idea of progressive education based on an image that has little to do with progressive education.

***

NOTES

3. Mark Windschitl, “Why We Can’t Talk to One Another About Science Education Reform,” Phi Delta Kappan, January 2006, p. 352.

4. As I was preparing this article, a middle-school student of my acquaintance happened to tell me about a class she was taking that featured a scathing indictment of American imperialism – as well as fact-based quizzes and report cards that praised students for being “well behaved” and “on-task.”

12 characteristics of progressive schools

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

To create the schools our children deserve, it’s probably not necessary to devise specific policies and practices for every occasion. Rather, these will follow logically from a few core principles that we devise together. Here’s a sample list of such principles, intended to start a conversation among educators, parents, and (let’s not forget) the students themselves:

1. Learning should be organized around problems, projects, and (students’)questions -- not around lists of facts or skills, or separate disciplines.

2. Thinking is messy; deep thinking is really messy. Therefore beware prescriptive standards and outcomes that are too specific and orderly.

3. The primary criterion for what we do in schools: How will this affect kids’interest in the topic (and their excitement about learning more generally)?

4. If students are “off task,” the problem may be with the task, not with the kids.

5. In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.

6. Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

7. When we aren’t sure how to solve a problem relating to curriculum, pedagogy, or classroom conflict, the best response is often to ask the kids.

8. The more focused we are on kids’ “behaviors,” the more we end up missing the kids themselves -- along with the needs, motives, and reasons that underlie their actions.

9. If students are rewarded or praised for doing something (e.g., reading, solving problems, being kind), they’ll likely lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

10. The more that students are led to focus on how well they’re doing in school, the less engaged they’ll tend to be with what they’re doing in school.

11. All learning can be assessed, but the most important kinds of learning are very difficult to measure -- and the quality of that learning may diminish if we try to reduce it to numbers.

12. Standardized tests assess the proficiencies that matter least. Such tests serve mostly to make unimpressive forms of instruction appear successful.

Gary Stager on Progressive Education

This was written by Gary Stager who writes and speaks about progressive education. He is the co-author of Invent to Learn. Gary blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Gary Stager

Principles…

• Things need not be as they seem!

• Strong progressive public schools are the bedrock of our democracy.

• Knowledge is a consequence of experience.

• Learning is not the direct causal result of having been taught.

• Young people have a remarkable capacity for intensity and it is incumbent upon teachers and parents to build upon that capacity, otherwise it manifests itself as boredom, misbehavior or just wasted potential.

• The Common Core is on the wrong side of history.

• There is no sudden epidemic of bad teachers!

• Parents and teachers should do everything possible to help kids get through high school without hating it.

• Modern knowledge construction is inseparable from computer programming and every child needs a laptop computer.

• Schools will no longer enjoy the monopoly on children’s time they currently enjoy.

• Students are competent, but we may not behave as if children are competent if we behave as if their teachers are incompetent.

• We know what to do. Those of us who know better need to do better.

• Kids need constant access to diverse expertise.

• The desire for personalization or individualization may not supplant exposure to concepts, skills and ideas that kids may not know they love.

• School policy should provide clear and convincing evidence that our society loves children.

• In education, bad ideas are timeless and good ones are incredibly fragile.

• The best thing school can do is prepare kids to solve problems that school as not even anticipated.

• What if our education policies were based on the assumption that each educator wakes up each morning and asks themselves, “How do I make this the best seven hours of a kid’s life?”

Want to be a better teacher? Blog.

This was written by Dean Shareski who is a Digital Learning Consultant for Prairie South School Division in Saskatchewan, Canada. He also teaches pre-service teachers at the University of Regina. Dean works with teachers and students in understanding the power of the Read/Write Web. Dean tweets here and blogs here. This post first appeared here.

by Dean Shareski

Want to create better teachers? I know how. One word. Blogging.

Now before you roll your eyes or accuse me of oversimplifying the very complex issue of teacher evaluation and monitoring, hear me out.

I began teaching in 1988. It was a tough job and thinking about getting better was superseded by survival instincts. Early on in my career, there were several documents that the province produced in support of improved professional development. I didn't pay much attention to these but one phrase I saw in those documents some 20 years ago stuck with me. Reflective Practitioner. I sort of understood the concept but other than simply thinking about what you did in the classroom, I wasn't at all sure what to do with this term.

When I discovered blogs almost five years ago, I soon figured out what that term meant. Since that occasion I have sat down to write close to 1,000 pieces of reflection. While not all would be considered deep, most take me anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to craft. It may not always look like it, these are generally borne out of the times I spent observing, thinking and working in classrooms. The reflective writing has been valuable but definitely the nearly 4,000 comments have been even more of a learning experience. This is the single best professional development experience I've had.

Dan Meyer, a Mathematics teacher in California writes:

... blogging was the cheapest, most risk-free investment I could have made of my personal time into my job. You start by writing down things that are interesting to you, practices you don't want to forget. And then you start trying new things just so you can blog about them later, picking them apart, and dialoging over them with strangers. Periods of stagnancy in your blogging start to correspond to periods of stagnancy in your teaching. You start to muse on your job when you're stuck in traffic, in line for groceries, that sort of thing. That transformation has been nothing but good for me and it all began on a free Blogspot blog.

Thousands of other blogging educators could echo similar words. In fact, I've yet to hear anyone who has stuck with blogging suggest it's been anything less than essential to their growth and improvement. I've no "data" to prove this but I'm willing to bet my golf clubs that teachers who blog are our best teachers. If you look at the promise of Professional Learning Communities that our schools have invested thousands, more likely millions to achieve, blogs accomplish much of the same things. The basic idea of the PLC is to have teachers share practice/data and work in teams to make improvements. A good blog does this and more. While the data may not be school specific, great bloggers know how to share data and experience that is both relevant and universal so any reader can contribute and create discussion.

There's a natural transparency that emerges. The teachers who blog as professionals in this reflective manner in my district invite anyone to look into their classrooms and you can get a picture of what happens on a daily basis. This goes a long way in addressing accountability concerns.

Teachers have for years had to fill in a plethora of reports and forms which in essence are accountability papers. For the most part they are of no use to teachers and in most cases aren't very valuable for administration either. Busy work.

So here's my plan. Hire a teacher, give them a blog. Get them to subscribe to at least five other teachers in the district as well as five other great teachers from around the globe. Have their principal and a few central office people to subscribe to the blog and five other teachers as well. Require them to write at least once a week on their practice. Get conversations going right from the get go. Watch teachers get better.

Try that. If it doesn't work after a year, you get my golf clubs.

PS. The only people allowed to criticize or challenge this idea are people who have blogged for at least one year and written at least 50 posts. The rest of you can ask questions but you can't dismiss it.

Changing School

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do.

Let's talk about scurvy.

Between 1500-1800, it is estimated that at least two million sailors died of scurvy. In 1753 research was formally published that scurvy could be eradicated with fresh fruit such as limes and lemons, but it wasn't until 1795 that the Royal Navy introduced fresh oranges and lemons into their sailors' diets. It took 42 years to close the gap between what we knew about scurvy and what we were doing about it.

Consider this.

In the 1950s, Dr. Alice Stewart discovered that at a rate of 2 to 1 children who died from cancer came from mothers who had x-rays while they were pregnant. In 1956, Dr. Stewart published her findings, but it took 25 years for British and American doctors to stop x-raying pregnant women.

Like scurvy and childhood cancer, education also suffers from a considerable gap between what we know about how children learn and what we do in school. Many of us have experienced this first hand, which is why so many people know that school needs to change in order for it to be a good place for all children.

So how do we change school?

While our ultimate goals for children tend to be at least in the same ballpark (happy, trustworthy, responsible, caring, creative, critical thinker, etc), how we attain these goals can pit adults against one another.

As an educator and a parent, I've worked with others to rethink some of their unquestioned assumptions about school. Along this journey, I have learned a great deal about how to (and how not to) work with others to make school a better place for children (read: I've made mistakes and turned people off). I've often been described as passionate about education which can be a compliment (he gets it) and a criticism (he won't shut up).

Whether you want to talk about homework, testsandgrades, classroom management, religion, punishment, due dates, recess, literacy, numeracy, curriculum, technology, or lesson plans, here are the steps I try and use as both an educator and parent to engage people who may have a different vision for how to do school:

1. Develop a relationship. At the heart of all learning and progress are relationships. Without a healthy relationship, it doesn't matter how right or smart you are. People won't care what you know until they know you care about them.

2. Ask and listen. You're going to be tempted to start by sharing your own knowledge, expertise or perspective, but you're better off asking questions and listening first. Consider starting by asking others for their opinion. There are two goals here: 1) whoever you are talking with needs to know that you are listening and that you are not simply waiting for your turn to talk. 2) You need to listen carefully so that you can gain insight into their beliefs and motives. We all tend to have good intentions, so try and find out what their good intentions are.

3. Share a story. After you've gained insight and they know you've listened to them, it might be your turn to talk. Again, it is best to resist lecturing on your soap box. Instead, take a highly specific example for how your child or student was affected by traditional school. If you do this right, whoever you are talking with should experience this story not as a reward or punishment but as information. No judgement. The goal here is not to win an argument, but to engage in a two-way conversation.

4. Read and share. If you want to influence others, you need to be credible so you will need to be well read and well researched. You will need to familiarize yourself with both the anecdotal evidence and scientific research that supports and counters your position. Once you've nurtured a relationship, you can start to ask questions about how and why we do things and implicitly or explicitly share examples for how and why we might do things differently. Share articles, research and books. Engage.

5. Know when to be patient and when to pursue. People don't resist change -- they resist being changed. The whole idea here is to avoid adversarial relationships. Others need to experience you less like a judge-in-waiting and more like a safe and caring ally. The only way to avoid being ignored or labelled a trouble-maker is to do nothing and remain silent, but keep in mind the slippery slope of the status quo is fuelled by silence, so you will need to be selective with when it is worth speaking up.

6. Organize and mobilize. One person with a point or problem may be easily dismissed but two, three, four, five people with a point or problem are much harder to dismiss. Talk and work with others to create a connected network that influences change through collaboration.

I have some bad news.

Even if you do all this really well, you need to know about something called confirmation bias. When people hear information that contradicts their current beliefs, we tend to go out of our way to criticize, distort or dismiss it so we can maintain our existing beliefs - this is confirmation bias.

So can anything be done to break up the echo chamber?

Yes.

Some call it surprising validators.

Dismissing information that contradicts our existing beliefs may comfort us, so the challenge may be to have information presented by a source that we would be uncomfortable dismissing. In other words, disagreeing with contradictory ideas may be easy, but disagreeing with people we trust might be enough to make us rethink our positions.

Confirmation bias is most destructive where its least acknowledged. People who are wilfully blind lose awareness of what they are doing. Drawing attention to these destructive tendencies can help reduce their hold over us.

Change is fuelled by constructive conflict brought on by cognitive dissonance inspired by engaged conversations but is stifled by needless combativeness which breeds disengagement and defensiveness.