The optimal parent zone ...

Lists of critical success factors for schools often include strong parental engagement. Hattie ('Visible learning for teachers: maximising impact on learning", Routledge, 2012) cites 'strong positive relationships with parents' (Page 151) as one of nine such factors supported by the metadata.

My experience teaching in state schools certainly seemed to support the contention at the micro level of individual experience. However I have also seen situations in which there can be too much involvement from parents. This might involve the 'helicopter parent' behaviour in which children are not allowed the room to be themselves, to make their own mistakes, and take the consequences of inappropriate choices. It might also include that situation in which parents involve themselves overly in their children's' learning, completing work for them when it should be the children's work.

A recent work experience showed that the ubiquitous characteristic of e-learning tools seems to facilitate this behavior even more than before, or alternatively makes the same behaviour more obvious or transparent. After all haven't there always been parents who have to some degree 'done' the project or homework for their children? This specific experience involved a parent making direct edits of a student's work on Googledocs. Thank goodness for the 'See revision history' function.

So it seems that it is possible to have both too little and too much parent engagement.

It simply struck me that there must therefore be an 'optimal zone' in which you want this support to operate.

How would we measure it? No idea, but it's an interesting concept, and one that should engage us as professionals working in education. I do believe that it is a function of:

• school culture
• the degree of approachability of all professional members of the school community, 
• the ways in which we report to the parent community (the frequency, the tone, the quality of commentary, the 'accessibility' of the language, and the layout of reports
• the friendliness, the sense of welcome at parent interview evenings
• the degree to which parents are made welcome at school functions
• The welcome that new members of the school community (students and parents) receive when they first approach or join the community

I think the list is much longer, but that will do for now.

An assault on Sir Ken Robinson

Well worth the read...

http://julianadamson.sharedby.co/nclsm9

Love your work, but where's your evidence Sir Ken?

More on the 'knowledge' debate

Jane Gilbert in her own words, in response to the attack on schools for supposedly 'losing the plot' on knowledge.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/education/news/article.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=11127235

Google simplifies the 'flip'

Checking out the Google Blog, I see that they have literally just made some changes to Google Forms that make the flipped classroom so much more accessible and useful.

Users can now embed video into a Google Form.

It  becomes much more practicable to follow the Professor Eric Mazur methodology of getting students to preview content AND do something useful/meaningful with it.

Responses can be collected analysed to look for common misconceptions, or  shared easily with students the next day to encourage co-construction of knowledge.

VERY powerful. Well done Google.

The fate of knowledge?

Over this past weekend I have read two articles in the New Zealand niggling in that 'under-mining' sort of way at the NZ education and qualifications systems are.

This article in particular got me going - "Let's bring knowledge back into schools"

I was staggered. By coincidence I'd just written the following as a part of my regular fortnightly 'Curriculum News' in our College parent publication:

The whole concept of knowledge has changed. In my student days, knowledge was still largely a matter of ‘knowing stuff’. Only at post-graduate level did it become important to be able to ‘do something’ with that knowledge. Today’s world is very different. Knowing stuff is still important, but today it is equally as important to be able to ‘do stuff’ with that information. In my opinion one of the great strengths of NCEA lies in the demands it places on candidates to take what they know and think deeply about it. In 2005 Jane Gilbert (NZCER) published a book titled ‘Catching the knowledge wave’, in which she “takes apart many long-held ideas about knowledge and education. She says that knowledge is now a verb, not a noun—something we do rather than something we have—and explores the ways our schools need to change to prepare people to participate in the knowledge-based societies of the future.” This is not the forum in which to discuss the implications for society and the economy, but it certainly reflects on the fact that the demands on your boys today are far greater than they were on many of us as students. In my own subject area boys need to ‘know stuff’ about economics, but more importantly they need to be able to ‘do stuff’ with that knowledge, to think critically, to explain and analyse, to create meaning. In this sense NCEA places far higher demands on secondary students than ever before.

Suggestions that secondary schools are not teaching knowledge are at best mischievous. As I said in my column, we teach thinking, but we cannot think in the absence of knowledge. Perhaps the problem is exactly what knowledge do we teach. The rate of increase in the world's knowledge is so huge that it is almost impossible now to say exactly what knowledge we should teach beyond certain basics.

For example, we would probably all agree that everyone ought to be able to read and write. By 'write' do we mean with a pen? A keyboard? Using voice recognition software? Or are we in fact talking about the skill of putting words together to coherently, accurately and effectively communicate meaning regardless of the medium that we use?

We would probably all agree that students need to be numerate.  What does that mean? Probably something different for an accountant when compared with a plumber compared with a games app developer. Do we try to prepare all students in case they want to be accountants or economists?

If I stop being facetious for a moment I think that we could all agree on basic levels of literacy and numeracy that are required, but whatever field of knowledge we discuss, reaching agreement about which parts everyone should know is probably more difficult than it appears to be at first sight.

So schools take a stand, they 'draw a line in the sand' about what knowledge is required, but more important than the knowledge itself is the ability to think about that knowledge. Schools endeavor to teach students how to think, how to 'do stuff' with the knowledge that they gain. You only need to investigate the 'Excellence' level demands in most (if not all??) achievement standards currently on the Qualifications Framework to see what I mean. To suggest that schools have focused on skills at the expense of knowledge is in my opinion wrong. Where is the evidence I'd ask.

What is true I would theorise is that as Jane Gilbert says, knowledge has become a verb rather than a noun, and too many people have failed to realise how fundamentally our world has changed in this regard.

Twittering away ...

I began using Twitter in the classroom several years ago. My early uses were:

1. Projection of a class twitter feed onto the whiteboard, encouraging students to 'tweet' questions as we worked our way through course material, and
2. Encouraging student responses to class questions via Twitter.

Both approaches seemed to achieve pretty much what other teachers have found. Some students have become more engaged with the class and the material, and the traditionally quieter students have been given a 'voice' that they might otherwise lose simply because they are more retiring or less confident in class discussion. Better engagement is not universal however, some students choosing not to use the medium at all.

Inspired by some examples of the use of Twitter to support and extend student learning at the recent K12 ICT Leaders' conference, I have extended this. I now 'tweet' interesting course ideas, examples and questions, using a class 'hashtag'. Here is today's example:

You need to live in Christchurch to know why this building is significant.

Responses at this early stage are slim but promising. Students will either DM me via Twitter, or give a response using the class hashtag so that other students can see what they think.

As a teacher of economics, my focus has always been on taking the theory and helping students to see its relevance in the world around them. The use of Twitter to achieve this seems to help some (but not others). I quickly discovered that Twitter has yet to reach across to all younger people, it seems to be largely a tool for the slightly older. Early signs are promising, I'll persist.

Challenges of the laptop environment in schools

The first full year of our own 1:1 laptop programme is fast approaching. Our 'soft start' (as we like to term it) has meant that mobile devices of one sort or another have crept into the hands of approximately a third of our boys' hands on any one 'average' day. Of course these devices range from iPods to smart phones, iPads and laptops, and uses range from distraction to what I would describe as nicely rounded construction of learning using the Google suite of tools.

One of the earliest uses that boys have taken up is simple note taking. I heard a delightful phrase at a conference last month in which laptops were described as little more than $1000 pencils in some schools, and I'd be worried is this was the limit of use in our case. I'm glad to be able to report that that doesn't look to be the case, although it is still something that a number of boys have simply gravitated towards of their own volition.

This has presented an interesting problem. In our experience a significant obstacle for boys in their learning is that they are often (NOT universally I hasten to add) not well organised. They have traditionally kept an A4 arch file for each subject with pages kept inside the folder - sometimes. The pages are filed according to topics - sometimes. The pages remain in the file - sometimes. You get the picture. Consequently we have tended to stress organisation for the boys, guiding them in how to organise their learning materials so that they can readily access them when they need to revise.

The problem that we are already seeing with boys is this. They may start by taking some notes, or completing some work on paper. They might then open a MSWord (or equivalent) document and record some work. They might then complete some work on Google Docs, so now they have work in at least three different places, one of which isn't even electronic. This is shaping up to be an organisational nightmare. As adults we'd struggle to keep  a track of things. How will the adolescent boy brain cope with this fragmentation of learning resources?

We've been talking about this. Here's a possible solution: ePortfolios. In New Zealand the most likely tool is Mahara. If boys could put all of their electronic documents into their ePortfolio, and then use our copier technology to scan paper activities, resources etc (although it begs the question of why activities would be in paper form) then it may just be possible to give boys the tools to organise their work, with the added advantage that once it's there, it won't get lost, unlike the pieces of paper that occasionally populate their arch files.

At least with this solution, we are back to the status quo, it reverts to the same organisational problem we have now, with an electronic tool replacing a paper one.

I'd love to get other perspectives on the problem.