Integrated curriculum

A friend spotted this article on curriculum reform in Finland and sent me the link.

The very idea of the total abandonment of traditional teaching subjects and their replacement with topics is certainly provocative. I recall writing a paper for my previous Head in the 90's in which I supported the notion of an integrated curriculum, one in which a lot of content was taught via topic based research and development.

However I don't think I am brave enough to suggest that we go as far as the Finns are suggesting with a nation wide reform.

I'm a little more conservative than that. For me the answer lies somewhere in between. The traditional subject/class teaching of key subjects such as English and mathematics to support the development of deeper learning of a broad range of subjects using an integrated topic approach.

I would currently classify myself as an anti 'Modern Learning Environments' crusader. I would however accept the label I heard from colleague Pauline Henderson yesterday as a pro Modern Learning Pedagogy proponent.

This needs a little more thought.

Course to discourse?

I've begun my year with my traditional online forum discussion using the forum tool embedded in our Intranet software package Moodle. The course I teach is NCEA Level 2 Economics, a course that requires deep thinking, and a lot of analytical writing. The literacy expectations of the course are well expressed by the fact that the three external standards all provide UE literacy (Writing) credits, while the internal standard we offer provides UE  literacy (Reading) credits.

The topic I choose is a discussion of the issue of the free market. It almost invariable ends up as a discussion of the libertarian paradox as we embrace issues such as power imbalances and inequality associated with markets.

My approach is always the same, The boys post in response to my fundamental question about the benefits or otherwise of the free market. As they post, I respond individually to every post written by every boy. However my response is NEVER to give answers, ALWAYS to pose further questions. My response to every boy is unique, asking questions that are specific to that boy's post, steering and guiding in a way appropriate to that boy's current knowledge (as revealed by his post) and the specific angle that the boy appears to be taking in the discussion. I think that this is a fantastic way to differentiate learning.

This year's result is strikingly more sophisticated than in previous years. I have been more careful about my responses, trying to make sure that I even more appropriately tailor each response to each boy. Regardless of the medium (online, on paper, face to face) this has always been true.

The result has been a significant amount of learning, created by constant (socratic?) questioning. At no stage have I given any of the bis specific knowledge/content, yet the learning has been apparent and significant. I asked the boys if they had learned much, and they universally agreed that they had.

Course to discourse? I'm not sure that I necessarily understand what that means, but I hope so.

Secondary schools and the work force

... a class-based theory of how and why we have a fundamental labour force imbalance.

Introduction

In this post I want to describe some thinking that has been 'brewing' in my mind for some time about the work of secondary schools in New Zealand for the past four or five decades.

My parents were 'great depression' children. They were born in the '20's (the 1920's) and grew up in the 30's. These were times when unemployment was high, when families struggled to feed their children, when children went to school without food or shoes (some of that seems a little too familiar at the moment).  My mother would tell me stories of what it was like to grow up in a working class family at the time, and these were common themes in her stories. This continued into my own childhood, we were a working class family.

The one thing my parents held to be true (if I remember correctly) was the value of education. They did not want us to lead the lives that they had lead. They believed that better eduction was the key to avoiding the poverty that they experienced as children, and so they pushed us to attain the highest possible levels of education that we could. Their own experience had been to be forced to leave school at the end of their Standard 6 (Year 8 in our terms) in order to get a job to help support their families (or maybe to be less of a burden on those families). They suggested that this was common at the time.

To them, a university education was the ultimate, and they pushed us in that direction. Now for our generation they were probably right. I gained a university degree and went on to teach, beginning my career in 1979. We were a generation of new teachers who possibly came from those working class origins, the product of a generation who held this aspirational belief in a university education.

I 'm not suggesting that these attitudes were unique to working class parents (whatever that may mean), but I think that they had a significant impact on attitudes towards education.

This is relevant background to what I believe to be the root cause of a significant labour market condition in  New Zealand.

Theory

The over-riding value was (and still is) that the higher the education the better. A university degree is the best education that anyone can aspire to, the best that money can buy. And here is the root cause of the problem. As a child of depression generation parents, I too grew up to believe that the higher the level of education the better. When I began my teaching career I took this belief into the profession with me, and for a while continued to perpetuate this view with my own students. I would counsel students to aspire to a university education. There was an unintended consequence of our beliefs. It created a 'hierarchy' of jobs and activities.

This situation has been exacerbated by the EFTS based funding formula for universities. More students means more funding. This incentivises the recruitment of more and more students.

In my opinion we now have too many people equipped with inappropriate degrees, and too few people trained in what 30 years ago might have been called the trades. The result is that I pay anything between $100 and $200 an hour for a plumber, or an electrician or .... you get the picture. These charge-out rates to some degree represent a skills shortage, one which we have seen exacerbated with the massive increase in housing demand driven by Auckland's growth and Christchurch's rebuild.

What am I theorising as the root cause? The desire of a generation of working class parents to ensure that their children would not be subject to the deprivations that they had experienced, and the belief of that generation that education (well, a university education actually) was the key.

Since the 1970s ( and maybe earlier) we have had ready access to university, with the belief that a university education is the right of every child. I support the belief that everyone should be able to access a university education. With regard to universal access we still have much to do of course. Cultural and socio0economic barriers mean that some groups do not actually have the same opportunities as others. The 'tail of under achievement' is something that we need to address.

I am challenging the belief that it is in society's best interests that everyone should have a university education. The introduction of tuition fees has not slowed the growth in university rolls. Nor until now perhaps has the increase in the level of the bar required to access university.

The 2015 drop in the numbers of New Zealand students gaining a UE qualification is probably the result of the latest lifting of that bar. The lifting of the bar took the form of requiring students to achieve Level 3 NCEA in addition to a literacy and numeracy component, and reasonable achievement (14 credits) in each of three level 3 subjects. Universities have found that students who entered their halls without Level 3 NCEA tended to have a much higher failure rate in their first year.

This is in my opinion a far better rationing mechanism than the imposition of ever growing fees. The growth in fees disenfranchises those from the very working class from which people like me have sprung. If instead the bar is created in terms of ability, with subsequent lowering of costs to students gaining entry,  then perhaps we are more likely to get the most useful populations of university students from the perspective of New Zealand society, and the economy.

So, summarising, I am suggesting that we have had a generation of secondary school teachers who had come from  a 'working class' background who have pushed students into a university education. The result is that we have had too many students attend universities and too few take up alternative forms of tertiary training/education. The result is that we have a serious labour market imbalance. We also have a university system that has grown beyond what we can support. Instead of funding high level research, and the education of our academic best, we fund a much larger population of university students who take on large debt for possibly little gain. We also have a shortage of people wiling and able to work in trades, and other non academic work. Arguably we may also have a less entrepreneurial society than we need.

Evaluating the argument.

1. Where's the data? Is it true that a majority of secondary school teachers recruited in the 60's and 70's came from 'working class' backgrounds?
2. What were school leaving ages like ion the '30's and 40's? Was it in fact a typical experience, or something only forced on a relative few?
3. Were real wage differentials large enough in the 60's and 70's to justify the belief that a university education would make someone better off than say a trades apprenticeship?
4. How significant is the current wage differential? If it is real, does it really represent a longer term shortage in labour markets, or is it merely a short term phenomenon?

This post is the result of some thinking. Research may already have been done that might prove or disprove the 'thesis'.

But .. I was just thinking.

What matters most?

What sort of society do we want to live in? Regardless of your particular persuasion - Christian or Atheist, Muslim or Hindu, this is a question you have either thought about, or ought to have thought about, at some time. And at Christmas time, as stories come out of children who have no Christmas, we see the national past-time of welfare bashing develop momentum ready for the post Christmas frenzy.

Like it or not, we have vulnerable people all around us. I believe the view that you can judge the quality of a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members.

Apparently it is difficult to attribute the sentiment to any one person. For example:

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi

"A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying," ~Pope John Paul II

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.~Samuel Johnson, Boswell: Life of Johnson

All of these quotes I found with a simple Google search on http://askville.amazon.com/measure-civilization-treats-weakest-members-accurate-quote/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=4718239

It is with a paradoxical degree of irritation then that I read and hear some incredibly intolerant views expressed by others in society. News stories of those unable to help themselves regularly evoke responses that range from intolerance to outright belligerence with accusations that include 'idiots', 'bludgers', and other labels I'd rather not print. So how come we have vulnerable people in our society?

So, let's try to put some thinking straight. Here's one perspective.

A common view is that people at the bottom of the 'social heap' simply don't want to help themselves. That's interesting. It assumes that we are all the same. It assumes for example that we all have the same abilities, or the same personality profiles. It assumes that we have the same risk profiles, or the same 'intelligence' (whichever model you prefer to use to identify those measurable attributes that we call 'intelligence'). That's not just tricky, it's downright untrue. At the risk of lecturing, any attribute of a naturally occurring population is spread across that population in a normal distribution.

Without that we wouldn't have this:

or this:

But just as there are those at the top of the pile, so there are those at the bottom. That's why we see this:

and this:

I am not suggesting anything here other than that we don't all have the same capabilities. Some of us are born with more short twitch fibres than long in our muscles making us more suitable to one type of running over another. No amount of training is going to make a sprinter out of someone with the wrong muscle twitch fibres, for example. (See the work of Stephen J Gould in his book 'The mismeasure of man' for an alternative view about the normal distribution though).

There are also arguments abounding about 'nature vs nurture' and the impact of each on our development as adults. And of course there is the argument that birth doesn't have to define destiny, that any of us is capable of changing our position in life with the right application.

L

However, laying blame is the easiest response. You might even label it the 'lazy' response, but it doesn't help the situation in any way shape or form. 

Those in wheelchairs don't chose to be there. I'd also venture the generalisation that those living in poverty don't chose the live that way either. Don't get me wrong. I am not stupid enough to suggest that every person who lives in poverty is incapable of helping themselves. There are always those that choose not to help themselves. 

Consider the accusation that those at the bottom of our supposed social heap should get off the bums and work. Let's get them all to start their own businesses. Well, starting your own business requires a good idea, a huge work ethic, and a risk profile that accepts risk. 

How does that look? It depends on the personality type model that you use. Here's one:

There are many different models of personality type, and argument amongst psychologists on the validity of any or all of these too. The point is that we are different. Not all of us have a risk profile that lends itself to new ventures. There are those amongst us who are risk seekers. There are those amongst us who are more risk averse. It seems reasonable to assume that the willingness to accept risk will be distributed normally across the population, like any other attribute. Why have I never started up a business? I am relatively risk averse, simple!! For some of us simply changing jobs, or even accepting a job, is a 'risk' that pushes us too far.

If we talk about accepting employment from others, the economist might argue that there are no jobs for them, or that there is a mismatch between the skill sets of job seekers and the job market. We could equally argue that the drive, the 'get up and go' required to search out a job isn't equally distributed amongst us all.

However my argument is that we mustn't generalise across everyone in any of our artificial categories. As I said earlier, laying blame is the 'lazy' response, but it is not a helpful response. A more productive response might be, what can I do to help? How could I change the situation? Maybe I 'pay it forward' with a coffee for someone else in the coffee queue. Maybe I donate some long unused clothing to the City Mission. What matters in my opinion is that we generate a more caring society.

Every human being has value, every human being has talents and skills, every human being has something to offer to society. The bigger and more challenging question, the tough question, is how we get more and more of those at the bottom of our social pile to see their talents and skills? How do we encourage more and more people to be the best they can be, and make the best contribution they can to the society in which they live? And how do we care for those most vulnerable in our society?

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi

One year of BYO laptops

There it is - the end of our first year with BYOD .. well BYO laptop to be precise. What do I think I might have learned?

1. Laptops make a difference.
2. Staff will shift their practice when they are good and ready, and not before.
3. Laptops make a difference.
4. Staff will shift their practice when they can see some advantage to themselves - reduced workload, more efficient work flow and maybe, just maybe, improved learning for their students.
5. Laptops make a difference.
6. Many people (staff and students) believe that 'elearning' is delivery using electronic media.
7. Laptops make a difference.
8. Many people (staff and students) believe that staff delivering content is true learning.
9. Laptops make a difference.
10. Laptops enable engagement in ways not possible without them. Teachers can engage with students in ways that are difficult to achieve without laptops.
11. Laptops make a difference.
12. Laptops enable feedback in detail and volume that is very difficult to achieve without laptops
13. Laptops make a difference.
14. Life would be incredibly tedious if not boring for any student if all teachers in their lives did the same things with laptops every day.
15. Laptops make a difference.

Hmmm... is there a theme there? Of course I say all of this with no quantitative data at all to support my arguments. I did say this is what I THINK I have learned. Let's look for the data.

Student engagement with Twitter Take 2

In earlier posts I have detailed how I have made use of Twitter in classes by asking students to tweet responses to questions that I have posed them in and out of class (mostly in class), or of posing questions that occur to them during the more didactic episodes in the lesson. I was in a planning meeting with friend and colleague Pauline Henderson (@paulinehendog) and we were discussing some research question on the impact of Twitter in classes.

In order to do this I had to explain more fully to Pauline how I use Twitter. One of my uses was inspired by an example related to me in a Masterclass run by Alan November last year. He related the example of a Maths teacher who tweeted to her students examples of Maths in real life. As time went by they began to tweet back to her and the rest of the class examples that they had seen too.

Engagement? I think so.

This inspired me to start to tweet articles of interest in my own subject area of Economics. Often I would hold a brief class discussion on the articles, working hard to 'decode' the economists' language to make the material more accessible to my students.

The interesting behaviour (and the one I had hoped for, even mentioned to the students themselves) is that they began to tweet interesting articles that they had found. Out of 30 boys in my classes, four boys have taken the trouble to tweet articles to me and the rest of the class, in all cases more than once. I know that that's not too many, but it's four more than none.

The articles have all been relevant to the content of the time. 

Our arguments (that is, Pauline and I): 

1. To bother to do this is a sign of engagement.
2. To be able to do this those boys must have engaged in some pretty serious thinking. The focus of our course is on deep thinking, and on that score this was pretty deep.

In each case I made sure I took the time and trouble to then discuss the relevant articles with the whole class. I felt that this was important in order to legitimise their posting behaviour. The articles themselves were also genuinely interesting and relevant, and in most cases they were articles that I hadn't found myself.

We talked these articles through together, the posters often taking the lead in the discussions. We were all learners together.

Improving the learning with Web2.0 tools

Improving the learning with Web2.0 tools 

The teaching profession is filled with good people, well intentioned people, people who want the best for the students that sit in front of them. These are people who would often almost literally give the shirts off their backs for their students.

Yet these are also all too often people who fill their daily working lives with practice based upon little more than mythology. Challenge it and the response is all too often that wonderful professional 'put down' - 'well of course it works, and you'd need to be pretty stupid to think otherwise.'

That observation leads to more than a touch of nervousness when I start to describe the impact of what we might call 'Web2.0' tools in the classroom. In between those bouts of Senior Management 'stuff' that fill my day, I teach two Level 2 Economics classes, and over the past 5 years I have progressively brought several new tools into the class repertoire. The focus of the work has been on developing students' ability to think critically, and to express that thinking in writing. It is no coincidence that the three external Level 2 Economics standards now count towards UE literacy (writing) in NCEA terms,  a commentary on the reasoning and writing expectations of these standards.

I now have a well established pattern of development through the year. Running in amongst the more traditional 'direct instruction' I begin by developing students' ability to reason and write with the use of online discussion forums. I moderate these carefully, giving every student detailed feedback on their posts (perhaps one of the more powerful differentiation tools?) before setting them to the process of constructing and deconstructing argument with each other.

As students develop confidence in their ability to argue, and to record those arguments in writing, I then transition them to more formal writing using GoogleDocs. I create a writing structure using the SOLO framework, ensuring that their written work closely matches the expectations of the NCEA standards and assessments. Each piece of work receives detailed feedback from me in writing.

While content tends to be developed through more than traditional direct instruction, I often use GoogleForms to elicit responses to content related questions. I gather this data under 'test' conditions. This provides a rich array of thinking, not all of which is correct. Students then take this response data (which I have shared back with them) and in groups co-construct the correct answers to a range of questions that help them to develop their understanding of subject content. Throughout all of this classes are engaged with the use of Twitter both inside and outside the class.

I am also teaching specific writing techniques (in particular the Statement, Explanation, eXample/evidence structure with which our English colleagues are enamoured).

Finally, because our external assessment system still requires students to sit examinations in which they write their answers using traditional pen and paper, I then start on the final transition to answering questions on paper.

What have I found? I can hear the voices (quite rightly) calling 'where's your data?' I have no reliable, authentic, replicable data on the outcomes.  I have some observations to make.

Consistent with international research (Goldberg et al), students in my classes right more and write better than they ever did before. Whereas 10 years ago on paper they might have written a paragraph of 5 lines, now they will write anything between 15 and 30 lines in explanation (mostly - there are ALWAYS exceptions). The reasoning is clearer (in general) and the examination results improved. The students are now more often writing responses  that I would classify as Relational and Extended Abstract as they respond to questions. A class taught without these approaches over the same period saw reasonably static results.

This year for the first time I ran an NCEA internal assessment using GoogleDocs. The results were dramatically different. The overall pass rate went from 55/75% to 94%. There is almost no evidence of collaboration (the task had to be completed independently). The answers were fuller in nature, the reasoning clearer and more accurate with most students. I have clear evidence of metacognitive thinking. As I supervised one of the 'in class' sessions of this assessment I watched over the shoulders of students as they used the comments function to pose questions of themselves on what they had written, ready for review later before they submit their work. Interestingly (perhaps??) this was not something I'd 'taught' them to do.

I see great engagement amongst students with both the class work, and the subject. The use of Twitter has been enlightening as students pose questions, offer answers to questions (both in and out of class), and tweet interesting resource material to me and the class. I run a unique class hashtag for each class.

Is any of this conclusive? NO!!! Is this any better than the mythologising of which I accused too many colleagues at the start of this post? Probably not.

It is quite possible that the results have nothing whatsoever to do with the technology. What is needed is some quality research. I'm a numbers man, I need quantitative data. I have little other than probably meaningless word and line counts (there are the NCEA achievement stats for both internals and externals), but I am not bold enough to try to suggest cause and effect yet. That's next year's Teaching as Inquiry project.

References

1. Goldberg A, Russell M, and Cook A "Meta Analysis: Writing with computers 1992-2002", Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative, Boston College.
2. Hattie J "Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning", Routledge, 2012