I’ve been working on my philosophy of education and thought I would post it here. It is always subject to revision and change based on my socially-constructed knowledge experiences.  I’ve used my 21st-century wheel here. 

            Too often, education is viewed as taking place in a classroom surrounded by four impenetrable walls, where knowledge is transferred from a teacher into the minds of students.  This didactic approach to teaching and learning does not provide young men and women with the opportunity to construct their knowledge and develop a conceptual understanding of content.  Teachers and teacher leaders need to facilitate the development of skills, dispositions, and knowledge of students to make them competent, contributing members of society.

            Secondary educators have such amazing opportunities to allow learning to transcend the classroom walls.  Frequently the expression, “like real life,” is used within the context of learning tasks provided by teachers.  Unfortunately these synthetic scenarios only partially mimic an authentic situation.  There is no reason that learning and learning context cannot be truly genuine.  Making meaningful connections with the community, whether that community is defined as a local environmental organization, the medical field, the computer gaming industry, or perhaps the local news media, is critical to provide an audience for the production of student products.  When students have an authentic audience who value the learning products they create, they take greater ownership and produce higher quality work.  They also develop the skills necessary for their future success.

Twenty-first-century skills

            Dubbed twenty-first-century skills, educators have developed a framework to identify the life skills that are necessary for today’s learners.  The skills and dispositions associated with a twenty-first-century learner include: critical thinking, problem solving, innovation, creativity, self-directed work ethic, collaboration, written and oral communication, and leadership development. Information technology (IT) skills are often listed within twenty-first-century frameworks, however it seems more reasonable to integrate IT skills as a bridge between core instruction and twenty-first-century skills because it is the emerging, common, fundamental link that connects them (see Figure).  The concept of twenty-first-century skills is really not novel; they make logical sense and have been long extolled by the education community.  However, they provide educators with a valuable framework to ensure they are providing their students with valuable learning opportunities.

Information Technology Bridging the Gap between Twenty-first-century Skills and Core Instruction  (LaBanca, 2008).

 

When truly considering the implementation of twenty-first-century skills in conjunction with core instruction, educators must reconfigure their instructional strategies. Most recognize that constructivist-based knowledge acquisition occurs through a situated learning schema where students not only learn from the “Sage,” but from social interaction with one another. Knowledge flow can occur in two directions. Therefore, students need to become producers of information, not just consumers. Implementing novel knowledge production in this bidirectional fashion certainly will cause changes to teacher pedagogy. It is probable that many educators will need direct and specific training and mentoring to implement this type of change.

Problem Solving and Problem Finding

            Secondary school teachers have long valued developing student problem solving skills

Indeed, problem solving has become an integral part of instruction across curriculum areas. Students are challenged to use a variety of strategies to identify problems and their implications, develop action plans, utilize a variety of relevant sources, information, and data to address the problems, and formulate solutions. Problem solving, a twenty-first-century skill, often involves the integration of other twenty-first-century skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and written and oral communication.

Problem solving techniques can be highly idiosyncratic. However, in perhaps too many educational settings involving problem solving, teachers provide students with the problem or question, and sometimes even the methodology for determining the solution. This approach may be due to curricular requirements, time factors, the limited scope and goals of particular learning modules, or the inability of teachers to effectively employ inquiry-oriented instructional techniques.

What, therefore, seems lacking are opportunities for students to problem find: to develop their own unique ideas for study. While problem solving requires primarily logical and analytical thought processes, problem finding is a creative process. Students benefit greatly from a more holistic instructional approach, which includes experiences in both problem finding and problem solving. When these opportunities become authentic, there is potential for great gains in student learning and achievement. Educators can simultaneously develop students’ creative and innovative potential while improving critical thinking skills.

Teachers and Instructional Leaders as Change Agents

Bidirectional knowledge acquisition as an instructional strategy is not a simple process. It involves a major rethinking and a paradigm shift for teaching and learning. Too often the educational enterprise has focused on good teaching.  While good teaching is important, it is not as critical as meaningful learning.  If there is a shift in focus from teaching to measured learning, there will be benefits to the educational enterprise, business and industrial communities, and most importantly, our students.  Twenty-first-century skills are critical to the needs of society, as we develop autonomous, self-directed learners. The only way this process can potentially approach success is through communication and sharing of ideas with all stakeholders. The collective expertise of many people, facilitated by informed leadership, can help to continuously improve the process where students become producers of information that is shared with an audience that transcends the classroom walls.

My final statistics graduate course took place last week.  I’ve graded the exams and submitted the grades and stand happy with what I’ve done.  It has certainly been a challenge, but it has shown me that I am capable of teaching at the university level and that I’m interested in doing it!  This is an interesting situation, since becoming a college professor would require me to take approximately a $30,000 pay cut from my current job as a high school department chair. 

Teaching at the university level would afford me the opportunity to do some of the things that I am very interested in pursuing:

• Conducting my own research
• Continuing to supervise other research
• Intellectual thinking, writing, and publishing
• Continued development of my own personal 21st-century skills

Nonetheless, I think I will still watch for interesting opportunities that may offer me options for my own professional growth and the ability to share my experiences.

One immediate challenge for me is this blog.  I have written here with the intention that my students particiapte in the discussion, but I really want to strive to get a larger audience that does not have an obligation to participate, but rather desire to share and develop my own ideas.  This ultimately would be one of the best ways to develop my 21st-century skills.

I’ve often challenged students to think about conceptual learning and big ideas.  I’ve never been one for learning isolated facts, because those “facts” are usually lost after a summative assessment.  If students focus on concepts, they are more likely to retain their knowledge and be able to connect these ideas to new knowledge better.  Conceptual learning certainly would resonate with anyone who would subscribe to a constructivist philosophy of education.

Recently I read a blog post by Wesley Fryer touting a new Web 2.0 tool, Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here’s a Wordle for this blog:

I was pleased to see how often the words “students” and “learning” appear in my writing. Close behind were “technology,” “instruction,” and “data.” This represents what I would think my major thoughts and musings are.

I thought about how powerful this tool might be for allowing students to examine their own writing. Willing to evaluate myself, I processed my Review of Literature from my dissertation. No surprises here either:

Now finding this VERY interesting, I thought I’d do a comparison of my Results Section:

I really have a sense of what my study was about when I examine the Conclusions:

Wordle is not content audited, so teachers who might choose to use this tool should be sensitive to appropriate Internet safety for their students. However, the power to allow students to creatively interpret their written work, and then examine content trends seems very powerful to me.

I am currently sitting in a computer lab in one of our district schools having a demonstration of a school data management system, PowerSchool.  (We are considering a migration from our current system.) The presenter is doing a real time demonstration of the system online, and all of the teachers, secretaries, IT dept members, and administrators are sitting at the computer stations.  

People are frantically taking copious notes on paper – they’ve pushed their keyboards out of the way and are scribing their information.  Only two of us are taking notes on the computer.  I recognize that some situations work better on paper – drawing figures, computing math, and the likes, but this (now) is different.  This is text-based knowledge acquisition.

How can we encourage 21st-century learning skills in our students, integrated with information technology, when so many of us are still entrenched in practices that do not reflect best practice use of technology?  It’s hard to teach effective use, when we don’t necessarily know how to do it well ourselves.

I am in the process of writing a manuscript about 21st-century learning and the integration of technology. I have developed a three-tiered system to identify types of learning activities that integrate technology. Their descriptions are provided below. Can you help me by providing practical examples from the classroom of the different technology integrations? Your comments would be greatly appreciated.

Retrofitting
The simplest integration of technology into teaching and learning is retrofitting. There is little change in instruction, but rather a different tool is used to facilitate similar learning strategies. This level of implementation has the instructor performing the same tasks, with the same teaching and learning strategies, only using the technology as a new tool. The teacher still delivers information directly to students and may have interaction via questioning. The use of the technology does not intellectually challenge students in any new or novel format. Instruction, although perhaps enhanced in some fashion, really is not altered in any meaningful way.

Retooling
The next level of information technology integration offers educators more tools for learning. Retooling expands options for learning. For example, instead of being limited by the books available in a classroom or library, a virtual world of extensive, seemingly endless information becomes available using online tools. The information is generally available upon demand and is easily cross-referenced and verified by a cautious, critical eye. Although there is an increase in options for knowledge acquisition, there is still only a one way flow of learning: from source to student. Educators have the ability to do more to enhance student learning.

Reconfiguring
When truly considering the implementation of twenty-first-century skills in conjunction with core instruction, educators must reconfigure. Most recognize that constructivist-based knowledge acquisition occurs through a situated learning schema where students not only learn from the “Sage” (whether the Sage be a teacher or a website), but from social interaction with one another. Knowledge flow can occur in two directions. Therefore, students need to become producers of information, not just consumers. Implementing novel knowledge production in this bidirectional fashion certainly will cause changes to teacher pedagogy. It is probable that many educators will need direct and specific training and mentoring to implement this type of change.
Many web-based tools are specifically designed with interactive features. Sometimes dubbed Web 2.0 or the read/write web, these sites allow simple production and the ability for others to provide reactions or comments. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, discussion forums, photo albums, instant messaging, and voicethreads allow students to produce original work, publish it online, and solicit feedback from other classmates, the teacher, or the online world in general. Student-producers do not have to be savvy at programming. Rather, the web tools are menu driven, object-oriented, and often have interfaces that look like common word processing software packages. This is important because it allows students and teachers to focus on content, concepts, and ideas, not the distracting minutia of web coding.

Disclaimer: I am generally very pleased with the education my daughter is receiving at her elementary school. She comes home excited about learning, and I can see her growth in reading and especially writing. She is adept at finding patterns in numbers and we often “play games” to reinforce her math skills. This “rant” is an attempt for me to evaluate my own practices when assigning homework.

My 1st grade daughter comes home on Thursdays with a homework packet, which is to be done over the course of the week. The paper requests that for management purposes, the papers not be returned until the following Thursday. The assignments have caught my attention, but unfortunately, in a negative way.

I was quick to notice that the top portion of the paper has the date the assignment is given and it is followed by the date it is due. Usually the day (Thursday) and the month is typed in, but the numerical date always seems to be handwritten.

I inquisitively wonder how many years these papers have been recycled. I was particularly aggravated last week, when one of the “handwriting assignments” wasn’t even copied correctly – the children couldn’t even see the full word.

The assignments are uniform across all 8 sections of first grade – our neighbor’s child, in a different class, also comes home with the same work. There is little to no differentiation on the pages, and I find many of the assignments to be busy work. I work with my child diligently, but I really see very little learning taking place, besides the responsibility of a parent to work with a child to complete this work. Perhaps skills are being developed, but I see very little attention being paid to higher-order thinking. In fact, the one time I see a potential higher-order thinking assignment, it’s assigned to ME!

As part of our fire safety program, please create a simple map of your home showing at least two fire escape routes from your child’s bedroom as explained in the packet.

My child’s? I recognize this is most likely an error on the part of the original writer, and that my daughter is the one that is supposed to complete the assignment, but it just illustrates to me the lack of care that goes into the preparation of these documents.

As many know, I am a strong advocate for 21st-century skills. To me, they are just as relevant in elementary school as they are in high school. If we are preparing our students for the challenges and demands of a 21st-century society, I think we are obligated to request meaningful work that challenges them (as developmentally appropriate), but moreover asks them to use those skills that are so critical: critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, effective written and oral communication, creativity, and the likes.

I think it just reminds me of the importance of relevance when we give students work to complete outside of class. I need to be mindful that an assignment should be a learning experience, and challenge my students to make connections with previous knowledge, build skills, and certainly use higher-order thinking. If we are not promoting thinking and acquisition or refinement of knowledge, we are not valuing the time our students are spending doing work outside of class.  Meaningful work can take a long time to complete – that’s acceptable, because learning is taking place.  What I must try to avoid are assignments that don’t have meaning, and don’t stretch students to learn.

Equally important is to provide feedback to students, even when the work is good.   We always talk in education how there’s room for improvement, and our students need similar feedback.

I hope I haven’t insulted too many people.  Moreover, I hope I assign homework that follows my model.

Tomorrow, I will begin to teach a doctoral course in statistics. I am excited about the prospect of working with highly motivated, engaged teachers. What concerns me most is the “fright factor” that some have. To me, statistics has always been a tool to help explain whether or not a phenomenon, a teaching strategy, or perhaps student learning changes due to influencing factors.

That said, I think of statistics as an applied tool. Statistics don’t exist in isolation. They exist IN CONTEXT. The challenge for me will be to translate some technical mumbo-jumbo into meaningful concepts that these teachers can realistically apply to their research or even to their understandings of their own students.

When I learned statistics, I was working in a bacterial genetics laboratory examining DNA restriction fragments of human chromosome 6, locus HLA-C (major histocompatibility complex of the immune system). I needed to determine the significance of different fragment lengths to see if our human genome project mapping strategy was working. Now, realistically, I know that most won’t even understand the nature of this genetics project, and that doesn’t matter. The fact was, that I needed to use statistics to explain what I had done experimentally. My data was IN CONTEXT for me. That being said, statistics for educators need to be in context for them. It’s not just good enough to examine fictitious educational data, we also need to consider meaningful data to the student-constituents.

My colleague and good friend, Krista Ritchie sent me some interesting literature recently and one
paper caught my eye:

Singer, J. D., & Willett, J. B. (1990). Improving the teaching of applied statistics: Putting the data back into data analysis. The American Statistician, 44(3), 223-230. (Argues against artificial data sets for learning statistics – that false data makes statistics seem dry and dull. Argues for learning statistics through authentic research).

I had the opportunity to present to this group of students earlier this summer, talking about 21st-century skills and their application in the classroom. I guess now it’s my turn to put up and show that authentic teaching and learning can be a reality. I will attempt to use this blog as a point of reflexivity for both me and my students, I’ve established a collaborative wiki for us to share ideas, and I will attempt to get an online survey working as well. I thought this would be done before writing, but alas, I am having technical difficulties with the limesurvey freeware. If I can’t get it to work by tomorrow’s class, I will resort to paper (maybe bubblesheets from Apperson?). I think the online survey will be valuable to my students, not only as an expository activity, but as a potential tool for their dissertations.

Challenges await for both the students and me. As Marcy says, “I take no prisoners.”