Volume 7 Issue 6

August 2003

In this issue:

An Alternative to “high stakes assessment” Schooling

‘High stakes assessment based curricula’, where students are held accountable for knowledge retention via their capacity to re-present that knowledge in simple written format, is regarded almost universally by all educators as a “nonsense” in terms of actual learning and understanding. Despite the fact that curriculum has been the core of high school “education” for most of our education/school history, alternative “curriculua” that have evolved past the trial stage seem hard to come by. Everyone, from parents through to politicians, recognizes key phraseology such as “Skills for the 21st Century”, “The strategic value of innovation and ingenuity,” “Awareness of the importance of information and communication technologies” and the “Mega trends” that are changing the workplace and society.

Implicit within the thinking and desires of politicians, parents, and other stakeholders is the conviction that a thorough review of the content of what is taught is well overdue.  Many curriculum documents are couched within the safe confines of setting “learning objectives” without defining specific content, leaving teachers to set this for themselves and their schools.  The net result of this is that sadly the format of the historical curriculum has survived numerous reviews, to remain deeply embedded and unchanged in the psyche and expectation of all stakeholders within education.  Consequently we still deliver, unconsciously, many concepts and ideas that are inappropriate both in terms of cognitive development and within contexts which students struggle to understand.

And while many other stakeholders may adopt the phraseology, not much thought has been given to the implied concepts within that phraseology, and their impact on education processes. We are deeply in need of key initiatives which revolve around "light-housing" sustainable education models which reflect the needs and skill sets that the 21st century will demand from our students.

Change is everywhere: Redundancy is built into everything we purchase, a fact which would appear to be not only accepted but also encouraged by consumers. We are overwhelmed by a bevy of tools and technologies that we are told make things more efficient and ever cheaper, and yet there still appears to be no more time in the day or money in the bank. BUT where are the education models/lighthouses that warn us of the dangerous rocks, and guide us both financially and culturally to the deep channels which provide the pathways to academic enlightenment? What is it that stops governments from being truly innovative and focused on developing education systems that would adequately cater for the needs of all strata of society in the 21^st Century?

We are all potential learners and hence education is no longer k-12/13. The education ethos is embedded in, and indeed demanded by almost every society. Education therefore needs to be seen in the context that lifelong learning is here NOW for everyone whether or not it is seen by any one individual as an essential element. 

Schools have gone through an interesting transition over the past 25 years in terms of how teachers “get” their professional development. As an ex director of a professional development centre for teachers, I have watched as one-off courses for individual teachers in isolation were largely replaced by the far superior whole school development programmes where entire staff were engaged collectively in shared professional development. It is to be hoped that these centres will continue to exist, but in doing so a new balance will evolve.  What we are also seeing is many teachers engaged in professional development, via Internet based offerings from tertiary institutions programmes, which are specific to their needs. Not only has this format broadened the content and scope of what is on offer to teachers but it has also reduced the cost and inconvenience generated by multiple meetings per week.

What does this development within teacher education tell us about the lifelong learning models in which our students might engage?.  My vision is that education centres (schools) will live on, but will be augmented by numerous courses offered to students over the Internet, and while they may well access them from home there is also no doubt that most will do so through their local "centre".  We already have students engaging in "whole group learning," hence we can expect also to have regional specialist centres (niche based schools specializing in drama, art, technology. . .) where students may attend short-term courses varying from days through to weeks.  In order to facilitate this model, schools would need to form associations or clusters and subsequently introduce:. 

1. Flexible timetabling across these clusters or associations of schools.

2. Flexible staffing across clusters and associations.

3. Individual progression time built into timetabling to allow students to pursue these flexible learning arrangements.

4. Software environments designed to facilitate and encourage communication and transfer of information between teachers, teachers and students, students and their peers and teachers, students and parents both within the school (intranet) and between schools (extranet), and with the community (internet). (http://www.knowledgenetworks.co.nz).

5. Personalised learning.  Not just a buzzword or another piece of phraseology but rather the capacity to design courses to meet the needs of the student and to empower them with the skills they need, and to reinforce and unleash the talent that they possess.

However, given that these things are set up, funded and well used it will still, to a large degree, be about attitude and the capacity to move beyond "what we always have done".  We need NOW to set our minds firmly on what needs to be done in order to empower our students for the 21st century.  We simply don't have the luxury of lots of time to think about this and legislate and committee ourselves to death. We already know what needs to be done; it's just a matter of doing it.

In a recent speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures (25.7.2003) Belinda Gates made the statement “The question is not, ‘can we educate all children well’ but rather, ‘do we want to do it badly enough?” (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/MelindaSpeeches/MFGSpeechNCSL-030725.htm) and to quote her husband: What we need in education is “heroic leadership and random acts of innovation”.

 . . . and it is this attitude that will drive the changes described above.  This type of attitude is necessary because the momentum embedded within the passion of the statement will be necessary in order to overcome the resistance to change exhibited by many of the stakeholders within education.

Using the NEWS in the Classroom

The news is a great resource to build an

• understanding of the world the students live in
• appreciation of critical literacy skills
• opportunity to carry out research skills
• opportunity to present their findings to their peers
• understanding of power interconnectedness to each other no matter how geographically remote they may be.

Having students report on the news is a very powerful tool.  Having students report their own news is even more powerful.  In a recent lesson teachers set students the task of reporting back to their peers on two new scientific developments:

• The first male pregnancy http://www.malepregnancy.com
• The new biotechnology company (Geno-Choice) offering parents the capacity to create their own genetically healthy child online http://www.genochoice.com/

The students reported both of these new developments with very little surprise or question because they obviously had come to rely on the veracity of Internet for many of their research findings/resources.  It is imperative that students are encouraged to be very critical of all information; not critical in a negative sense but critical in so much as they need to establish whether or not the information is indeed factually correct.  Both of these articles are obviously (I hope) fictitious but the web sites are very convincing, with Mr. Lee's pregnancy featured on the cover of Time magazine as well as Mr Lee allowing his pregnancy journal to be made available from the site along with a video archive of Mr Lee's pregnancy journey!

The news sources below are designed for students across a wide range of ages.

Just in case you need some more hoaxes you can check these out:

• http://www.ayleeorgnet.com/
• Boilerplate the 18th Century Robot http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/
• Bonsai Kittens http://www.bonsaikitten.com
• Stick Insect Appreciation Society http://brookview.karoo.net/Stick_Insects/
• Velcro Harvest http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html
• Frownies are now Copyright! http://www.despair.com/frownies.html
• http://www.d-b.net/dti
• For more check out this site http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoaxsites.html

The rise of the UK in web support of Education

You may notice in this month’s review of web sites that over 50% of the web sites reviewed are from the United Kingdom.  This sudden rise to significance has been due to government initiatives in encouraging multimedia developers to create web sites suitable for students and lifelong online learning for all.  This is part of a global push to create "learning objects" which can be used by any learner via the Internet.

Countries such as Singapore, New Zealand and Australia are committed to producing "Reusable Learning Objects" RLO’s.  There is a variety of standards for reusable learning objects and according to The Encyclopaedia of Learning Technology (http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Admin/TOC),

"A Reusable Learning Object (RLO) is an element of, or all of an instructional program that is delivered using technology. RLO's can be lesson plans, case studies, quizzes, simulations, or interactions."

In general a reusable learning object is a self-contained Micro-unit usually taking between 2 and 15 minutes to complete. It is reusable, aggregatable (objects can be linked or added together to form larger content modules), and is tagged with meta data. 

In CISCO's RLO/RIO Model, all information can be grouped as concept, fact, principle, process or procedure (CFP3). The following table gives a better illustration:

http://www.elearninghouse.com/clearinghouse/overview/overview-articlesECC_RLO.html
16.-8.2003

Many educators fear that Reusable Learning Objects will reduce teaching and learning to an atomistic process rather than focusing on building conceptual frameworks of understanding. Our view is that, as with most technologies, this will allow good teachers to become excellent teachers and teachers with poor practice to exhibit and utilise even poorer practices.

Meanwhile the UK is producing web site resources that are exemplary. As the world moves into an era of unparalleled teacher shortage and technology is drawn upon to make up that shortfall the quality of web sites and their increased “teaching” capacity is probably going to improve still further. The next big question for educators is how students interact with these resources and how they can be designed to maximise their learning capability.