"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?"

Some books are so profound they leave you gasping, both at their clarity and their message, and at the basic question of why you never saw things like this before?

"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?" by Katrine Marcal ( ISBN 978 1 84627 564 7) is almost one of those, although the last statement less so I am pleased to be able to say.

Marcal (lead editorial writer for the swedish newspaper Aftonbladet) presents what is billed as a feminist critique of the economic theory that lies at the basis of modern market economies. She questions the complete omission of women from economic modelling, particularly the billions of dollars of unpaid work that women complete every year around the globe.

Her analysis then proceeds beyond that to the underlying assumption of economics at the micro level: the existence of 'economic man' and his capacity for rational decision making.

It is this latter part on which I am pleased to say I often teach the shortcomings of economic theory and models. In my classes I describe what I call the 'weirdness quotient', our propensity to behave in ways that are most often very far from rational.

If you were to dismiss this book as a simple feminist attack on economics you would be selling Marcal and the book short. Her book questions at a deeper level what it is to be human, and how effectively we can ever hope to 'model' the erratic messy irrational ways in which we behave.

The proponents of 'Big data' may well take issue with her basic contention that we are far too illogical to be as predictable as economics would have us believe, but this work is to me one of those timely reminders that we need to keep asking questions about the 2008 GFC and its causes. We need to question the economic environment of which we are a part.

We need to stop accepting without question the theorising of economists as a valid representation of human behaviours at both the individuals level and en masse, and we need to ensure that we retain our critical thinking capacities, we need to 'keep our wits about us' in this far from logical world.

The translation from the swedish is at times clumsy and makes the book read less elegantly than I suspect it would have done in swedish, but at just short of 200 pages it is still eminently readable and engaging.

Thoroughly recommended.

A new take on 'literacy learning'

Today's Literacy PD with Dr Ian Hunter was fascinating.

Some opening statements:

"Good readers make good writers" ..  it's a myth!!

However, "Good readers read a lot good writers write a lot".

We discussed perceived shortfalls in boys’ writing and came up with this list:

• Ability to plan/structure an argument and link ideas together
• the logic of deeper thinking (or they can say it but they can’t write it)
• Range of technical/subject vocabulary (meta language)
• Ability to structure sentences with simple grammar
• Lack of general knowledge.. do we prepare our juniors sufficiently wrt general/world knowledge

First weapon to improve writing is the questions we ask, and how we phrase those questions.

The question you ask effectively ‘trains’ the students in analytical thinking skills. Boys will write the way we model. Hence our own writing skills are paramount to our boys' improved writing,. and their improved results.

There is no correlation between engagement and confidence. With boys confidence is the route to success.

The best pattern of paragraph length is short intro, shorter paras, one good e.g. per para,

40 130 130 130 etc this rains boys for thinking skills. Most over write.

Conclusion should be as long as a body paragraph.

Regardless of whether external exam or internal we should impose word limits on all tasks to develop better writing skills.

Year 11 650

Year 12 800

Year 13 1000

Maybe Art and PE require a few more words.

This is harder work but you reclaim the ground as a teacher. The boys will learn to be sharper writers. Train by active policy of refusal. Imposing word limits will push boys to use their subject language. Boys are being overworked and are expected to write far too many words.

This was a fascinating PD session, successfully engaging staff and boys in ways I've never seen before. The number of emails I've had from staff commenting on how good they thought the PD was has been huge. They were engaged by both the presentation style, leadership, and practical nature of the presentation material.

This won't end here. It's the beginning of the next phase in our own long term literacy development project.

For the greater good ... altruism lives?

I've noted the development of an interesting behaviour amongst boys in my class. Many of them take notes/develop meaning using Google Docs. In economics there are often complex diagrams that are quite a mission to draw electronically. Some will search the web for something appropriate, but increasingly one of them will take out his phone, check with me for permission, and then take a photo of the diagram that we have just constructed on the whiteboard.

The diagram is then tweeted using the class hashtag so that anyone can use it in their own notes. It looks like this:

Boys don't formally take turns, but they do seem to informally share the task around. I think they quite like being the one to do this first.

I rarely give notes these days, but rather have the boys construct meaning that we then test and share. This seems to be  a good tool for the purpose.

School leadership and 'moral purpose'.

I have been interested in the concept of 'moral purpose' in education. This has increasingly been a feature of the leadership literature.

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education has this to say:

Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school. Barber and Fullan (2005) explain that: “The central moral purpose consists of constantly improving student achievement and ensuring that achievement gaps, wherever they exist, are narrowed.” For a school to achieve this, there needs to be a shared commitment to explicit values.

Source http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Attitudes-values-and-ethics/Moral-purpose-and-shared-leadership

Professor David Hopkins, in an article titled 'Leadership for powerful learning' (ACEL Journal Term 2 2015, Vol 37 No 2) states:

Leaders are driven by a moral purpose about enhancing student learning. Moral purpose activates the passion to reach for the goal and prompts leaders to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities"

Now there's a powerful statement.

Eric Mazur on "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"

Last week I had the privilege of attending this year's Edutech 2015 conference in Brisbane. Much about the conference was a mere shadow of the previous few years, but the stand-out session was the opening keynote address by Eric Mazur of Harvard University titled "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"in which Mazur posits that current assessment is not fit for purpose.

My colleagues and I co-constructed some notes during the session, but it is doubtless easier to watch an earlier version of the same address given by Mazur in 2013. It is very similar to that which he gave last week.

Where's yer evidence Part 2

Here's a nice counterpoint to my previous post, written by Claire Amos.

Where's the research? Why we need to stop looking in the rear vision mirror at longitudinal research and data.

Thanks Claire.

Educational mythology... where's ya data?

The world of education is awash with myths and has been for decades. In my early years practice was so disconnected from data and evidence that to claim teaching as a profession might have seemed to be stretching the truth to those ‘in the know’ (although oddly I suspect that it was viewed as more of a profession by the general public at that time than it is now).  I recall pondering (only very briefly) how I would have felt being attended by a doctor or dentist who paid similar regard to research evidence (thankfully I never have been). Things have changed, and teachers generally not only incorporate the use of achievement data into their practice, but also the growing body of good robust research evidence that has accumulated worldwide on what helps cause learning.

One of the seminal moments in this regard must be the publication of John Hattie’s book ‘Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement’ (2008). In the book Hattie and his international research team brought together a vast amount of research data, all carefully sifted to ensure that only quality data was incorporated. The book makes heavy going as a piece of reading as the density of quality material is so high. However it has made for a much better informed profession. Sadly despite work of this sort, some serious myths persist.

One of the classic myths is the ‘learning styles’ debate. In his later book ‘Visible learning for teachers (2012) Hattie says “.. it is not intended to delve into learning styles (visual, kinaesthetic etc), for the effectiveness of which there is zero supporting evidence, “. Professor Steve Wheeler of Plymouth University takes up the cudgel in this debate as well in a blog post titled ‘A Convenient Untruth’ (http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/convenient-untruth.html) in which he says:

“In an excellent expose on learning styles, Riener and Willingham (2010) argue this:

"...learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming “common knowledge.” Its widespread acceptance serves as an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon called the confirmation bias. When evaluating our own beliefs, we tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore contrary information, even when we encounter it repeatedly. When we see someone who professes to be a visual learner excel at geography and an auditory learner excel at music, we do not seek out the information which would disprove our interpretation of these events (can the auditory learner learn geography through hearing it? Can the visual learner become better at music by seeing it?)" “

Another more recent controversy arises over the current concept of Modern Learning Environments or MLEs. This is the notion that we physically and intellectually deconstruct the classroom. We place two or three classes of learners into one space with several teachers, and allow student choice of what they learn and when. Apparently there is a massive intuitive appeal to the concept, one pushed by the Ministry of Education across the state school sector, I understand. While I have serious concerns over the concept, even more concerning is the fact that this major change to education is being pushed in what appears to me to be an absence of data. If there is robust replicable data out there, I can’t find it. I have looked. A lot. The debate resorts to a lot of rhetoric, with the suggestion that the value of MLEs is so common sense that you’d be a fool to challenge it. Apparently this is where the modern business world is going, and we’d ignore that trend at our peril.

I was intrigued to see a piece in the business publication ‘The Main Report’ titled ‘HR - Does a cool office really matter?’ (The Main Report, 11 May 2015) in which the opening statement is:

Recruiting experts Hays says the technology sector’s famously alternative work spaces are being replicated by many businesses, but it asks - do they have the desired impact on employee productivity, performance and retention? The answer is - it depends on the organisation's culture.”

As I see it, someone has decided that alternative open plan workspaces and collaboration are the way of the future. However in the school context it seems to me that this fails to recognise two factors:

1. Employees in the workplace are not adolescents who are right in the middle of that process of testing boundaries and learning about themselves and the world around them.
2. Even in these alternative work environments people need space to sit down at a desk in a quiet environment and think, create or problem solve. They need to be able to close the door to the rest of the world and get on with things.

Am I a fan of Modern Learning Environments? Possibly not as they are currently portrayed. However I AM a fan of what you might call Modern Learning Pedagogy. There are new ways to learn, and there is a growing body of research evidence that these new approaches work. We observe in our classes many of those things that the research evidence seems to support. However we monitor what the research says, and modify our practice in the light of research and experience. For example in the midst of the laptop programme we are considering the issue of reading. It is perhaps no surprise to many that reading electronically is different to reading on paper. It seems that there is often less comprehension, less depth to reading done online, or on electronic devices. The nice thing is that this thing called neuroplasticity of the brain seems to mean that we can retrain the brain to read carefully, closely, with an eye to detail. For four years now we have had a focus on critical literacy at College. This embraces a spectrum of issues from the basic skills of reading and writing to the more complex skills of critical thinking and analysis. As she scanned research literature and articles on the subject (part of a regular routine for most of us) a colleague found a fascinating article  in ‘The New Yorker’ titled ’Being a better online reader’.   It can be accessed here: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/being-a-better-online-reader

A: Yeah, me too.

At College we maintain what we call a blended learning environment. That is, one in which we use the right tool for the job, and there will be times when laptops are not the right tool for the job. So while a lot of reading takes place online, we also have boys reading from and working on paper. We have boys interacting  in person as well as online. We have boys putting their laptops away and taking up a hammer or a paintbrush, throwing a ball or sprinting down the length of Upper.

As a consequence of this sort of data, and our own daily data gathering  in classes, teachers modify their practice. Reading is important, and reading a traditional paper book is  valuable exercise. Staff acknowledge this and encourage reading at every opportunity. I have mentioned in previous columns that we need to continue to encourage reading. This will at times mean reading online, but it should also mean reading on paper. Perhaps it’s only true for those of us of a certain age but there is something about the feel, the smell, the look of  a paper book that makes it appealing. It would seem that that is what the research confirms. I find it a little ironic that in an educational era in which we emphasise critical thinking so much, so many people continue to buy into educational myths revealing perhaps a lack of critical thinking.

Incidentally, if valid robust data comes to light to show the MLEs do indeed cause more significant learning than the existing alternatives, I will of course recant. Put another way I will of course ’think critically’ about the evidence and my position.

And as a footnote, last year I was transporting some junior boys to sport and their conversation went something like this:

A: You got a kindle?

B: Yeah

A: Got many books on it?

B: No, I prefer paper books.