Ideal OSU Grad

The genesis of this in not clear--some curriculum council created the original, the someone else edited it at the suggestion of Rebecca Sanderson.

Created by an OSU curriculum Council around 2004/5

Profile of Ideal Undergraduate Student Upon Graduation in 2007

• Ability for critical thinking & problem solving:
• Have the ability to learn and problem solve wherever they are.
• Know what a team is.
• Differentiate between what a text says and personal beliefs and to demonstrate ability to understand meaning of text.
• To understand biases.
• To read all kinds of texts below the surface.
• Ideas for components of outcome statement:
• Open minded observations/intuition
• Education deductions
• Reasoning/Analysis
• Applicable processes
• Uncertainty
• Critical thinking skills to use in problem solving and decision making.
• Design a solution supported by engineering theories.
• Articulate a theoretical framework that is applicable to the solution.
• Analyze issues/problems from a variety of contexts or paradigms.
• Articulate and discern advantages/disadvantages of various approaches or perspectives.
• Uncertainty
• Understand what they read/hear relating to their field.
• Recognize/seek evidence for statements.
• Critique/assess the quality of evidence.
• Draw conclusions on state of knowledge.
• Communicate their analysis and conclusion.

• Experience working on an interdisciplinary team:
• In a class, student organization, research group, internship, students coordinate with fellow students of different academic disciplines/backgrounds; faculty and staff mentors; community members and work to common goals.
• Recognize roles and responsibilities of team members.
• Understand the dynamics of a team system.
• Develop respect for others’ ideas and opinions.
• Integrate multiple perspectives and expertise into a common product.

• Technical literacy in information services (library, web, etc.):
• Students will use and demonstrate technical resources to enhance information gathering designed to solve problems for different purposes.

• Scientific literacy:
• Use data to accurately solve complex problems.
• Evaluate scientific information to understand its creditability and where and how it might be applied.

• Communication skills-writing, speaking, media:
• Be able to write career approach communications with few or no grammar/spelling errors.
• Students will demonstrate the ability to write thoughts and ideas using proper syntax, grammar, and sentence structure.
• Articulate ideas clearly, legibly, and understandably with correct spelling and grammar to produce grants, news articles, reports, letters, memos, or research documentation.

• Solid substantive knowledge in several fields.

• Awareness of and concern for international affairs:
• Awareness of Multiple Perspectives and Concerns for Diversity
• Demonstrate the ability to understand and share perspectives in a respectful way.
• Analyze impact of multiple perspectives when problem solving critical local and global issues.
• Understanding that one’s own perspective is culturally shaped and is not universal.
• Respect
• Demonstrate an understanding of multiple perspectives.
• Respect understanding of multiple perspectives through writing, speaking, visual art or technology.
• Understanding of the dominant and its privileges.
• Articulate the influences that a diverse population brings to a community.

• Sense of societal responsibility, community services and citizenship undergirded by outreach and internship experiences.

• Ability to respond to the marketplace.

• Sense of membership in an ongoing community of scholars at OSU that would develop into a desire for lifelong learning.
• Be able to adapt written and oral communication to audience and control specific situations.

• Ability to take information from one or more sources, determine the relationships between the information, integrate the relationships, and use it to solve a problem.

• Interdisciplinary Teams:
• Practice listening; feedback to ensure meaning.
• Identify/integrate diverse views/perspectives.
• Develop an array of solutions/improvements.
• Analyze possible consequences.
• Agree consensus decision.

• Understand:
• Increase knowledge of historical and present social and political issues that impact diverse communities of minorities.
• Effective in communication/relating to diverse groups.

Learning to Make a difference

Significant Civic Engagement: Service Learning Pedagogical Framework (the six Rrr's)

·      Responsive

·      Reciprocal

·      Recursive

·      Reflective

·      Resourceful

·      Responsible

We know that the actions of engaging in a project, in service or volunteerism engage students because what they are doing is "real" rather than academic.  That participants are intrigued by relationships, by their ability to make a difference, and that this makes the experience more concrete, less of an abstraction than just learning about things from "a book."

One the other hand, the skills required to make sense of the experience in terms of learning are not common because of the very lack of the kinds of experiences stated above--there are not many learning experience that require one lives in two frames, the learner and the deliverer.

Outside certification--MSW, Teacher license, Carnegie Classification

Scholarship--what are the resources, the knowledge base, the scholarship and research that support these efforts?

Practice and reflection--seeing the specific in the context of the Big Picture (Judy Francis)

·      How do you deliver a program, engage in working with others while at the same time thinking about meaning making for yourself?

·      What tools help us to live in these divergent worlds?

·      Taking notes, making time to reflect, talking to others

·      But part of the key is to be clear about what is going on and what does it mean?

Tools for learning and observation (Thinking about observing in classrooms "how is culture communicated and by whom?")

·      Ethnography list (human relations, rules, artifacts)

·      Observations on a specific topic of interest (culture, safety, inclusivity)

·      A lens on the context (learning community, active participation)

·      The desire to learn a skill, better understand a process (teamwork, leadership)

The Resume Skills Set

·      What is your style of leadership and what tools do you bring in the Leadership toolbox?

·      How do you work with others, in your ability to work in a team?

·      How is your professional practice informed through your understanding the role of culture and diversity in working with people?

·      How do you define and solve problems?

·      What skills do you use in communication with others (both personal and technological?)

·      How do you function as a Life-Long Learner?

Community Engagement --Reciprocity with clients as leaders and learners

The assumptions:

·      We are all in this together

·      Each participant has a voice that contributes to the work at hand

·      You must learn from them to serve them

·      That it's only through reciprocity that we will meet their needs

Being Present

OSU Community Center

OSU Community Center (Center for Community Involvement and Outreach)

We need to enfold a number of essential functions at OSU into a center. These include:
• Outreach
• Service Learning
• Community Involvement
• Campus Climate

These share a number of essential characteristics and a central location would foster a network with both programming and academic faculty. It is also critical to reduce our dependence on students to create these essential functions. For too long, students have had to create programs from whole cloth. If these are essential, then we must Pony Up the money and support. Rather than depend on administration, we should enfold their energy into existing structures.

Similarly, we need to support both program and administrative faculty in their effects to serve students. It is essential to understand the issues related to campus climate, to recruiting and retention, and to have this problem attended to in a structural rather than haphazard way.

Additionally, academic faculty are under increasing pressure to provide substantial outreach as part of their research funding. To have individual faculty responsible for creating and delivering materials that is central to the outreach and Land Grant mission of the university is unrealistic. We must seize the opportunity as well as fulfill our mandate to provide programs, products and materials that have a sustainable impact on all our communities.

Related to this, we must support academic programs whose teaching and research provides the experience and rational for administering programs through the center. We need to develop experience in effective program delivery and design, in funding assessment for both campus as well and Oregon-wide programs. We need to support faculty and students in their endeavors to develop and deliver on their experience and expertise as we foster a supportive campus climate. How do we effect changes in poverty, support underserved communities? How do we connect our research to the fruitful application of this knowledge on campus and in Oregon?

Building on successes, overcoming barriers

OSU has a long history of successes. From student-run programs we can build administrative support. We have a successful history of outreach to underserved communities in Extension, 4-H and The SMILE Programs. We have a number of campus groups whose mission is improving campus climate. However, in too many of these programs, particularly those that depend on student volunteers, we have not established continuity. If we have a program that depends on graduate students to run the programs, we lose experience and momentum each year. For less essential programs perhaps this is acceptable but for programs like Community Life, this is not functional. It takes too long, we lose too much. If Service Learning is to rise to its potential as an integral aspect of each students experience at OSU, we cannot depend on the random nature of annual interns and volunteers.

We must create long-term institutional support for offices, faculty and programming staff. We msut provide a home to involeve those wonderful students into an existing, well supported, growing program. We can use their help. We msut not depend on their abilities to create something each year from nothing. It’s wrong, ineffective and inefficient.

Steps to success

In a number of areas, we have taken baby steps. We each know pieces of the puzzle. A few are aware of some details but we have nit yet created a sense across the cmapus that we will make a substantial change and a commitment to goal-oriented management. Unless we have the opportunity to step up, we will nibble around the edges. We must first communicate, convince, and demonstrate the need and our commitment. Then we can begin a step-wise process of creating a center for OSU’s commitment to communities.

Step 1

We need to create a cross-campus administrative unit to bring together these functions.
Where essential functions are missing or depend on volunteers, temporary workers; we set these areas as priorities to allocate funds.
We retool the OSU Strategic plan to better integrate efforts with these functions
We create a students’ group to inform the unit how to best integrate and support ongoing student-run groups

Step 2

We create through the mission and functional units a plan to seek funding through grants and foundations to support both the overall mission and the work of individual units with the structure.
We begin design work for a building to house those units without either an academic or an administrative home.
Through the creation of a strategic plan, we begin delivering services that support outreach, service learning and foster a positive campus climate

Step 3

We break ground on a sequence of buildings to house these functions
We create an endowment to support programs and faculty
We become a national center on outreach, service learning and campus climate

Learning To Get Along: Living in a Multiculture

The core understanding of “living in a Multiculture is first understanding that we are, we do, and we will live in a multicolored, multiethnic, multi-class, multi-gendered, world of complex peoples who want two conflicting ideas: they want to be valued as individuals and also have membership and access to multiple groups. Then the question isn’t of “If” but one of how? And in the “How” is the observation that we are not very good at any of the skills and holding complex, multi ideas at once—it may not be our nature, we see in “black and white" and yet experience the world in a rainbow of colors.

So the goal is multi-fold
• Develop a better understanding for the vision of a Multiculture
• To delve into what we are seeking as the result of this perspective
• To explore empowering and blocking metaphor for our living with the multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, wishes and desires
• To develop skills that help us define and hold elements for success in our new-found vision
• To deeply understand that we best live this life when we can have empathy for those for whom we disagree
• That through blending the specific and local with the global and with power that we create both a personal life as well as a culture.

Stages

What is the vision for a Multiculture?
Examples, little and big (the California story, urban neighborhood
Richness vitality, flexibility, entrepreneurs

What are we seeking?
Equity, voice, contributions
A sense of role and place, a sense of empowerment
A history and role in creating the present, a sense of creating a “new” future

Metaphor for a Multiculture
What is the core metaphor (melting pots, tossed salad, smorgasbord, ...)?
How do these metaphor play out as a Multiculture

Holding two idea at once
How do we foster multiple perspectives?
What are good examples of this task?
Is this a skill or intelligence?

Duality
Given the idea of multiples what are we balancing?
A difference of being while honoring differences
A sense of power without removing other’s power
A sense that we value the individual’s contribution as a person as well as part of a group
That groups doesn’t define one’s identity yet forms much of who we are

Groups and stereotypes
Groups are where we want to be, stereotypes are how other define us
We wish to create a sense of membership and stereotypic dress behaviors music language all play a role
We each wish to be judged by the character of souls not the color of skin


Products and outcomes

A picture of the perfect person—an outline of the peerfect multiculrualists
attributes, attitudes
what do they gain?
What are the concerns and barriers to “Getting Along”

Rights and Responsibilites

I often think that the founders of this country should have balanced the bill of rights with a similar bill of responsibilities. For example, while we have the right the free speech, this comes the responsibility that we understand the power of speak, we use it with thought and care, and realize the power of words to hurt, subjugate, and to disempower. We have the right to property free from search and seizure, but we also understand that we are connected to other’s properties and that we have a collective responsibility for the good as well as freedoms from undue influence.

I bring this up in the context of our discussion because I think we, as white males of great privilege; we have a heightened responsibility that comes specifically from these privileges. With “enhanced” rights, a greater voice, a greater chance at freedom, an education and economic livelihood, we also have the increased responsibility to do something more. Not just to give voice to the voiceless but also to add many voices, not just our own. To empower, to do more than just equalize rights. To not only rail against barriers and oppression but also to understand the need to give a boost over barriers.

Each perceived barrier, both internal and external, that we have promulgated (this bears on the GPA discussion), where some students not only see the barrier but see it as higher than we would.

So what of this is our responsibility?

It is more than a “tide that raises” all boats. It more than making things “equal”.

It is the enhanced capacity to re-equalize. Affirmative action is a concrete example but I think there are many more similar actions.

Thanks! Thoughts?

An Ed. op ed--never published

I wrote this in Oct '00--it's still pretty good, needs editing, oh well. Ryan

I just attended the Oregon Science Teachers Conference this last Friday and learned about some great teaching in engaged, active science in Oregon. It is so exciting to come away from these meetings convinced that some very good things are happening in our state. We know that students who engage in teacher lead inquiry learn not only the underlying content but also the process of science. They, perhaps more importantly, learn life-long skills that will serve them as members of our communities.

On Saturday the Oregon Dept. of Education held a “Science Summit” to further support teachers in effective classroom practices as part of an ongoing conversation on science teaching and educational reforms to improve education in Oregon. I attended that administrator’s meetings. I work with a math and science enrichment program at Oregon State University, and we shared of concern that too many assessments focus on pencil and paper, multiple-choice tests. We strongly supported the idea of “real world” assessments that require students to produce a body of work that demonstrates their learning. I also know that these forms of assessment both give us a clear of idea of a student’s work but are also fully integrated into their learning and give teachers needed feedback on the efficacy of their teaching. This is a win-win situation.

In science we should ask students to develop a question, design research to explore this area of interest, and produce a collection of products from their own research and experiments to show the depth of their understanding. I was so enthused and wished that all Oregonians could understand how wonderful this model of education is for teachers, students and parents. Then I found in my mail a brochure on education from George Bush.

George Bush is lying about education reforms in Texas and here’s why. He and his supporters are in favor of public funding of private schools and decreasing the state support for public schools. We see these lies in the stories of “inefficiency and waste” in public schools. We hear of overpaid teachers and low test scores. This agenda started with Ronald Reagan and the refuted “A Nation at Risk” telling us we are going to educational hell in a hand basket.

Here’s the lie. When asked about their children’s public school a large majority of parents give their schools and teachers an A or B, pretty good grades. When asked about schools in general they see public schools as failing. So from their own personal observation, experience they make one choice but where do they get the information about the later view of education in general? They get it from the onslaught of negative information about public education from a biased group with a national agenda. They get it from the media who, with out questioning the motive, report as fact material from conservative consultants whose vested interest is the dismantling of public education. We see this misinformation in our own state! For example we hear about test scores dropping. In most areas of content tested and at a variety of ages according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores are basically the same as they have been for thirty years. A few areas have decreased a little and more have increased a little. So over more than thirty year teachers are doing a pretty good job and this fits with our personal observation.

Oh I know, some people say that test scores should be constantly rising. Is this sensible? Aren’t kids pretty much the same year in and year out? For example in Texas they have a statewide system of education, talk about local control, which requires a multiple guess test and Bush is making a big deal of rising scores. Of course they rise, for a few years, as teachers drop everything else to teach to the test or lose their jobs. These students are not learning science, writing, learning to think, they are taking year-long test preparation classes. These tests designed to give a few in the state ammunition to close low scoring schools and fire teachers. If this is your vision for public instruction then vote for George Bush because he will require this nationally of all states to get federal money. Oh and by the way, this federal money was used to improve teacher’s teaching through Eisenhower grants and to pay a small part of special education. He proposes giving block grants and closing the Dept. of Education, something his national education advisor finally admitted to on the news the other night.

Bush also makes that point that minority tests scores are going up as well. This is a national issue. We have invested money in improving the test scores of all populations and while national tests stay pretty much the same if we are focus, for example, on select groups within a population we see populations that scores less well than the overall group. We know that for many programs like head start, early reading programs improve the readiness of children for school. We also know that increased expectations for all students increase test scores. Multiple-choice annual assessments do not improve teaching. Teacher training, small class sizes, improved school buildings do improve education.

If our goal is to bring every student's achievement to the same level then we need to seriously increase school funding, improve teacher’s professional development; focus on schools that need building maintenance. We should ignore the naysayers whose agenda is to undermine public education. We should work to invest in public education so that education is equally available for all students. As if our future depends on it.

The C's of Education

I have been playing with this theme for more than ten years--it started with a presentation to teachers at OSTA. It was the list of teaching "C" words as a method of considering why we don't have the attribute of "Comfy" in teaching. This is the version for '02 or 3

Content in a Community Context
Weaving Community

Nationally and locally, for a wide variety of reasons, we are again focusing on schools as foundational members of our community. Schools, public and private are a portion of essential glue that binds use together, reaches through time into our hopes for the future and our shared maturational experiences. For young people the very social fabric is woven from schools, social relationships and family. A school’s culture and the experience of learning drive the experience of enfranchisement of young people. Yet something is wrong.

We see symptoms of students’ disconnection, and ask ourselves questions about the role of schools in the greater community. Some of these roles, while seemingly obvious, have languished, for another variety of reasons, reasons such as tax reform, a focus on achievement and content reforms, increasing class sizes, and the disconnect of adults from many volunteer activities including, but certainly not limited to, their local schools. We ask questions about the importance of a school’s sense of community, beyond the traditional view of “school spirit,” driven by sports and a select few activities focused on the already successful students, the stars. How are schools perceived as members of our social fabric? What is the experience of a student in the school’s community? What examples do we share of the culture of school? What are our expectations for success in the culture? Even as national reforms have shifted to include support for after-school programs, lowering class sizes; we should be asking more fundamental questions. Only through the asking, and answering, these questions will we get a sense of what’s wrong, what needs to be re-woven into the community cloth. Of course the overarching concern exemplified by horrific acts as we’ve seen in too many schools.

On a positive note we are seeing ever increasing, strong evidence that learning within a “real world” context is a key aspect of life-long learning and serves as powerful motivation for both students and teachers. We know that content in context is more easily remembered, increases the quality of thought by leading to higher order evaluation of materials and increases a student’s sense of value in their participation in education. Perhaps it is no surprise that one of the reasons noted by students for their disconnect is a sense that they are “in storage” at school waiting for the real world on the other side of the fence. It should also be no surprise that they are angry at being locked out of what they perceive as important experiences and rail against these barriers. Here we are with a central dilemma: do we learn and make changes or simply move on.

If this understanding of learning and education is as powerful as it appears then we must reflect on student’s views on the culture and context of their experience. We must acknowledge this need for a cultural context and work to create clear links between their learning, growing and maturing and their role in the community as a whole. We need to be very aware of the powerful messages we send, intentionally and unintentionally, to children about their worth, the value of their voice and their role in the future of the community.

It is through connecting these two considerations that we begin to see the power to make a real difference. We see the power of a community context in schools as all participants hold a clearer idea of their role in the creation of the communities. In this way the school becomes a direct reflection, albeit a more nurturing community, of the society of adults. Students understand better the role of their education and teachers are better able to find contextual learning situations for their students. This sensible role for education, a clear idea of its connection and purpose, does lead to numerous conflicts with basic organization of schools, conflicts in responsibility for learning, and increasing the role of adults/parents in schools.

Context vs. Content?

All these issues revolve around one central theme: the role of Content, Context and Community in creating successful schools. We need to develop and codify a set of understanding for this role, particularly as it directly relates to considerable prior developments focusing on the creation of specific behavioral standards and outcomes for learning: Content Standards. Unlike most, I see these standards as minimum competencies and further, as ideas to be infused into a higher order ethics of teaching. First, I see the role of focusing on behaviors as a reasonable set point in the process of educational assessment, “Students will...,” but not as a foundational first step. “Students will memorize these facts before they can apply them in a problem solving/assessment,” is backwards to human reasoning. What are the foundational aspects in initial curriculum design?

Students come to school with inherent and foundational abilities along with learned skills and expectations about learning. These include problem solving, the desire to have fun, to enjoy their work and to learn. Further, built upon these abilities lies a student’s sense of competency and upon which hinges motivation. We need to build a foundation on these skills and competencies, resting upon are content and other specific associated content competencies. We must not lose sight of the innate human aspects of learning. We are, after all, programmed to play, to enjoy learning, to try new things, to practice skills. We learn and love language and find both joy and humor in our ability to communicate. Each child has an intrinsic motivation to learn: we call play. One of my colleagues posed the question about student’s motivation and related it to basketball practice. He said, “Why will students shoot hoops with a success rate of something like 10-50% and once they get proficient they will invent a harder shot, perhaps missing ten times and practice this at all hours of the night. Their Mom’s have to yell at them to come inside. All the while left to their own devices...but I can’t get them to do 30 minutes of homework even if I punish them if they don’t.” I think we need to realize that students are motivated by certain things, not others, and we need to do a better job of understanding the attributes of these types of learning. Certainly the basketball practice example is true for some children but not others. Some children do learn to create their own motivation by inventing games, thinking of challenges, all the while creating ever more difficult problems to solve. I would suggest that each child has something that fits into this example.

As a science teacher, I have seen similar issues played out too often in the classroom. Students, for example, are asked to memorize the parts of a cell before they understand the role of processes and functions in a cell. They then look at a cell in a microscope and learn about a variety of famous historical scientists whose work went into our ability to see the cells but not why the scientists cared to begin with. In a contextual sense these activities play little upon students’ context. Further, we will then jump to something like teaching the KREBS Cycle, memorizing a very complex set of electron jumps, and to what end? As I noted, all these steps in content are crucial to understanding a piece of the puzzle but what might we design if we looked instead at building upon skills and context?

One procedure is to notice these issues and take a step back to look at what each student brings to the experience. What generalizable skills they bring and which do they need more experience? How am I supporting their foundational abilities? The next phase is to look at what is the context into which the materials make sense. For example, if we look at the materials through the lens of “Science literacy” what is the needed level of understanding, how does it fit into the needs of the students, into their understanding of the use of data, the politics of problem-solving. If we look at “Science process” then we are asking questions about related topics such as research skills, communication, problem solving strategies.

In our specific program context we try to relate materials, find the contextual connection, in a variety of ways. For example we ask a number of questions: Why is this important?, What are the real world contexts?, What careers and people use this material?, How does this relate to a current issues/topic of general interest? Each serves to bring the material into a societal context, to make the material more vivid in terms of a student’s frame of reference.

A number of outcomes emerge as we build connections. For example, we are able to find connections to community members whose jobs relate to a topic. The key is to give them something they in turn can relate to and to bring that to the classroom. Both the students and presenters feel stronger about their role, teachers then become facilitators, and students are given a concrete context upon which to build.

Of course underpinning these ideas are to concrete outcomes. One is that students are clearer about their role and responsibility and therefore more motivated. Learning is embedded within a context from which the data/ information can often be derived. Students develop a set of generalizable skills that are applicable across disciplines, which serves them as life long learners. They learn that content, fact based information only makes sense in a context that then serves as information, and from which, along with experience, we can derive wisdom.

Perhaps, like the youngster practicing their basketball, we begin to depend on their intrinsic ability to make things make sense. One of the aspects of successful students is that they often create their own independent context within which learning makes sense. We need to build on these skills.

Designing Content

Even given the overall goals of program, we understand that all of us hold set ideas about education, teaching and the role of teachers and students in a community. We understand that it is difficult to step back from this long enough to create the needed changes, to recreate a “new” system out of whole cloth. It is difficult to design something "new" and yet we are trying to re-find aspects of learning and education to assure the success of all participants in the learning arena. One key step in beginning the process is that we must include ourselves in this learner’s arena. Another key is to focus on process, and standards that serve to build the foundation.

We must all refine our own sense of being learners. Teachers who are not excited about their own learning, even if in an area different from their content expertise, are not able to relate to the context of motivated learning. The meta- message is that we must do this, learn this, even if it is awful and boring simply because we must. Further we then become tempted to make it easy, dumb down the materials to simple concepts that we can memorize and move through. Life-long learners, problem-solvers look for challenges, seek new area, again like our basketball player, invite impossible shots, and make them.

Perhaps most important, we need to plan programs that matter, that really stands out in their vision of pride and excellence. In turn, we need to make previously hidden content and outcomes more explicit so that we understand all the agendas of our design.

We need to bring to the fore our thoughts about outcomes that are foundational to the experience. Outcomes such as, "How will students feel about their ability to learn?" We need to begin to connect the role of previously hidden outcomes. For example, "What else do I teach students by the way I judge or critique their work?"

We ought to pay attention to all the outcomes of our teaching. For example, "What do students learn when they can't feel a part of the classroom due to a cultural bias?" For example, we need look no further than our knowledge that some students do better in a cooperative community when compared to a culture of competition. What were our assumptions when we created a competitive atmosphere in our school’s and community? If the culture of learning creates a climate that is not conducive for a child to feel safe and supported, to be smart, then they are learning a implicit lesson about their vlaue and abilities.

We will define success differently as we look at tools needed to succeed rather than just test and judge by learning content. We will build a sense of community, charged with the role of challenging, motivating, involving students with a caring and compassionate manner of teaching. We will forge partnerships with all learners, built upon a mutual understanding of the goals for education, and establish respect for all our roles and responsibilities.

Setting Goals, Making Changes

How do we use these wonderful goals to create a program?
Are they in opposition or in concert with content?
Whose role is it to create these wonderfully successful programs?

To Paraphrase, “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it!”

To make changes in our teaching, and in associated planning , we need to think “Outside the Box’ about education. To help this I’ve prepared a list of words to reflect upon. In particular, to reflect on what education would be like if these worlds were in common usage in our defining and describing teaching and education. Reflect on these for a moment:

Caring
Celebrate
Challenge
Charge
Charter
Cheerful
Cherish
Child
Choose
Citizen
Clear
Clients
Climate
Cognition
Coherent
Colleague
Comfy
Comic
Community
Compassion
Competence
Compliment
Compose
Comprehension
Connections
Consensus
Consequential
Considerate
Consideration
Content
Context
Continuity
Contribution
Conversation
Cooperative
Cosmic
Council
Courage
Cozy
Craftsman
Create
Culture
Crystallize
Cultivate
Cumulative
Curious
Custom
Cyclic

Obviously we all hold a variety of thoughts about these words. One teacher reflected that they represent why they went into teaching. A couple seem to be the antithesis of teaching these days, comfy comes to mind as does Cozy.

What would education be like if we stared with cozy, comfy, curious, creative, consensus, culture or choose. Would we create a climate of learning that is very different or similar?

I’ve then pulled what I see as our three keys to the process, “The Three C’s,” whose role we have discussed but need to re-define so that they reflect our understanding of their role in effective education. I’ve titled this as:

The Three C’s: Designing Successful Programs

Content
What is it you really wish to teach? What are we, in fact, teaching?
• what about compassion, caring?
• what do the "clients" wish to learn?
• how can we challenge and motivate?

We need to think beyond the traditional fact-based content

Context
How do you build meaning? What is the role of cognition in teaching?
• how are participants in charge of building understanding?
• how do we present a transparent coherence of meaning?
• how do we create a climate of competence

We need to build connections


Community
How are students and teachers alike in their membership? How are involving students that makes sense?
• what is the sense of common interest, fellowship?
• how is there a continuity of thought and experience?
• how do we involve a culture of learners that cherish investigation?
• how do we share a clear role and sense of empowerment with students?

View learning as a cooperative process to reach mutual goals

So we use see the “C’s” of education as a method by which we can grow teaching into a contextually enriched, vivid sense of a role for learning. We thereby create a partnership for learning which, in turn, creates a very different relationship between teachers and students. I have often wondered what schools would be like if we made school so inviting that we had trouble keeping students out rather than keeping students in. Imagine they kept the enthusiasm for learning throughout their lives, that schools were places students would chose to be at, at all hours of the day and night, to learn, socialize, play and find their special contribution to a society that valued their energy and contributions. Where we had to lock them out rather than lock them in. Imagine teaching where the lessons didn’t focus on “classroom” management but on learning facilitation. Where teachers could teach, coach, facilitate and students could visit, check in for a lesson, work in the library, play some basketball, study. Where parents would know their children were safe and who felt responsible for spending time in the building, even perhaps taking classes and teaching a few themselves.

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom and wisdom is not beauty. Beauty is the best. It is through beauty that we get art. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What would teaching be like if we started with art? Perhaps we’d get students who learned to create with caring and compassion.

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Culture

• Create to rules by which we operate as a culture to support students, life-long learning and bemove or reduce barriers to life long success.
• We create a culture that fosters learning, supports risk taking, and gives each participant the sense they belong to something that buoys their success.
• We form relationships. Provide aplace for belonging and participation.
• Help students overcome barriers: intrinsic barriers to success and the skills to overcome external barriers that will be placed in their way.