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.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
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.
************************
Culture
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.
9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning
So much of the focus on assessment misses the target--the rubber hits the road with students and teachers, working together, with parents and the broader community, to support learning. Ryan
1. The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so. Where questions about educational mission and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care about.
2. Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process. It entails not only what students know but what they can do with what they know; it involves not only knowledge and abilities but values, attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect these understandings by employing a diverse array of methods, including those that call for actual performance, using them over time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of integration. Such an approach aims for a more complete and accurate picture of learning, and therefore firmer bases for improving our students' educational experience.
3. Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented process. It entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations -- those derived from the institution's mission, from faculty intentions in program and course design, and from knowledge of students' own goals. Where program purposes lack specificity or agreement, assessment as a process pushes a campus toward clarity about where to aim and what standards to apply; assessment also prompts attention to where and how program goals will be taught and learned. Clear, shared, implementable goals are the cornerstone for assessment that is focused and useful.
4. Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Information about outcomes is of high importance; where students "end up" matters greatly. But to improve outcomes, we need to know about student experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching, and kind of student effort that lead to particular outcomes. Assessment can help us understand which students learn best under what conditions; with such knowledge comes the capacity to improve the whole of their learning.
5. Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated, "one-shot" assessment can be better than none, improvement is best fostered when assessment entails a linked series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean tracking the process of individual students, or of cohorts of students; it may mean collecting the same examples of student performance or using the same instrument semester after semester. The point is to monitor progress toward intended goals in a spirit of continuos improvement. Along the way, the assessment process itself should be evaluated and refined in light of emerging insights.
6. Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of enacting that responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may start small, the aim over time is to involve people from across the educational community. Faculty play an especially important role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without participation by student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators, and students. Assessment may also involve individuals from beyond the campus (alumni/ae, trustees, and employers) whose experience can enrich the sense of appropriate aims and standards for learning. Thus understood, assessment is not a task for small groups of experts but a collaborative activity; its aim is wider, better-informed attention to student learning by all parties with a stake in its improvement.
7. Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about. Assessment recognizes the value of information in the process of improvement. But to be useful, information must be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. This implies assessment approaches that produce evidence that relevant parties will find credible, suggestive, and applicable to decisions that need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how the information will be used, and by whom. The point of assessment is not to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that starts with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering and interpreting of data, and that informs and helps guide continous improvement.
8. Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning is visibly valued and worked at. On such campuses, the push to improve educational performance is a visible and primary goal of leadership; improving the quality of undergraduate education is central to the institution's planning, budgeting, and personnel decisions. On such campuses, information about learning outcomes is seen as an integral part of decision making, and avidly sought.
9. Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a compelling public stake in education. As educators, we have a responsibility to the publics that support or depend on us to provide information about the ways in which our students meet goals and expectations. But that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such information; our deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and society -- is to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement.
Authors: Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia Cross; Elaine El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese; Kay M. McClenney; Marcia Mentkowski; Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran; Barbara D. Wright
This document was developed under the auspices of the AAHE Assessment Forum with support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education with additional support for publication and dissemination from the Exxon Education Foundation. Copies may be made without restriction
1. The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so. Where questions about educational mission and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care about.
2. Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process. It entails not only what students know but what they can do with what they know; it involves not only knowledge and abilities but values, attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect these understandings by employing a diverse array of methods, including those that call for actual performance, using them over time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of integration. Such an approach aims for a more complete and accurate picture of learning, and therefore firmer bases for improving our students' educational experience.
3. Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented process. It entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations -- those derived from the institution's mission, from faculty intentions in program and course design, and from knowledge of students' own goals. Where program purposes lack specificity or agreement, assessment as a process pushes a campus toward clarity about where to aim and what standards to apply; assessment also prompts attention to where and how program goals will be taught and learned. Clear, shared, implementable goals are the cornerstone for assessment that is focused and useful.
4. Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Information about outcomes is of high importance; where students "end up" matters greatly. But to improve outcomes, we need to know about student experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching, and kind of student effort that lead to particular outcomes. Assessment can help us understand which students learn best under what conditions; with such knowledge comes the capacity to improve the whole of their learning.
5. Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated, "one-shot" assessment can be better than none, improvement is best fostered when assessment entails a linked series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean tracking the process of individual students, or of cohorts of students; it may mean collecting the same examples of student performance or using the same instrument semester after semester. The point is to monitor progress toward intended goals in a spirit of continuos improvement. Along the way, the assessment process itself should be evaluated and refined in light of emerging insights.
6. Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of enacting that responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may start small, the aim over time is to involve people from across the educational community. Faculty play an especially important role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without participation by student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators, and students. Assessment may also involve individuals from beyond the campus (alumni/ae, trustees, and employers) whose experience can enrich the sense of appropriate aims and standards for learning. Thus understood, assessment is not a task for small groups of experts but a collaborative activity; its aim is wider, better-informed attention to student learning by all parties with a stake in its improvement.
7. Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about. Assessment recognizes the value of information in the process of improvement. But to be useful, information must be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. This implies assessment approaches that produce evidence that relevant parties will find credible, suggestive, and applicable to decisions that need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how the information will be used, and by whom. The point of assessment is not to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that starts with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering and interpreting of data, and that informs and helps guide continous improvement.
8. Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning is visibly valued and worked at. On such campuses, the push to improve educational performance is a visible and primary goal of leadership; improving the quality of undergraduate education is central to the institution's planning, budgeting, and personnel decisions. On such campuses, information about learning outcomes is seen as an integral part of decision making, and avidly sought.
9. Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a compelling public stake in education. As educators, we have a responsibility to the publics that support or depend on us to provide information about the ways in which our students meet goals and expectations. But that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such information; our deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and society -- is to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement.
Authors: Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia Cross; Elaine El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese; Kay M. McClenney; Marcia Mentkowski; Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran; Barbara D. Wright
This document was developed under the auspices of the AAHE Assessment Forum with support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education with additional support for publication and dissemination from the Exxon Education Foundation. Copies may be made without restriction
Dewey
I have to admit this seems really obvious to nay thinking human being--he hit the nail on the head! Perfect, no, it is the product of the times but has so much to say about good teaching, leadership, engagement.
My Pedagogic Creed, John Dewey
John Dewey's famous declaration concerning education. First published in The School Journal, Volume LIV, Number 3 (January 16, 1897), pages 77-80.
ARTICLE I--What Education Is
I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it or differentiate it in some particular direction.
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.
I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.
I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct.
I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal--that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.
I believe that each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other. In order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions, is that which arises through putting him in complete possession of all his powers. With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests-say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms.
In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted--we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents--into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service.
ARTICLE II--What the School Is
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.
I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.
I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.
I believe that as such simplified social life, the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home.
I believe that it should exhibit these activities to the child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be capable of playing his own part in relation to them.
I believe that this is a psychological necessity, because it is the only way of securing continuity in the child's growth, the only way of giving a back-ground of past experience to the new ideas given in school.
I believe that it is also a social necessity because the home is the form of social life in which the child has been nurtured and in connection with which he has had his moral training. It is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of the values bound up in his home life.
I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be ]earned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.
I believe that the moral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.
I believe that the child should be stimulated and controlled in his work through the life of the community.
I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life.
I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.
I believe that the discipline of the school should proceed from the life of the school as a whole and not directly from the teacher.
I believe that the teacher's business is simply to determine on the basis of larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child.
I believe that all questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of the most service and where he can receive the most help.
ARTICLE III--The Subject-Matter of Education
I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.
I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.
I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.
I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
I believe that education cannot be unified in the study of science, or so called nature study, because apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and time, and to attempt to make it the center of work by itself, is to introduce a principle of radiation rather than one of concentration.
I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification.
I believe once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man's social life and progress it becomes full of meaning. I believe, however, that it cannot be so taken excepting as the child is also introduced directly into social life.
I believe accordingly that the primary basis of education is in the child's powers at work along the same general constructive lines as those which have brought civilization into being.
I believe that the only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which make civilization what it is.
I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as the center of correlation.
I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school.
I believe that they are not special studies which are to be introduced over and above a lot of others in the way of relaxation or relief, or as additional accomplishments. I believe rather that they represent, as types, fundamental forms of social activity; and that it is possible and desirable that the child's introduction into the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through the medium of these activities.
I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is.
I believe that one of the greatest difficulties in the present teaching of science is that the material is presented in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar kind of experience which the child can add to that which he has already had. In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject-matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated.
I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought. It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.
I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect, an aspect of art and culture, and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.
I believe that to set up any end outside of education, as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the educational process of much of its meaning and tends to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in dealing with the child.
ARTICLE IV--The Nature of Method
I believe that the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature. Because this is so I believe the following statements are of supreme importance as determining the spirit in which education is carried on:
1. I believe that the active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature; that expression comes before conscious impression; that the muscular development precedes the sensory; that movements come before conscious sensations; I believe that consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to project themselves in action.
I believe that the neglect of this principle is the cause of a large part of the waste of time and strength in school work. The child is thrown into a passive, receptive, or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste.
I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational processes) also result from action and devolve for the sake of the better control of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective action. To attempt to develop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment, without reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without.
2. I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.
I believe that if nine tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.
I believe that much of the time and attention now given to the preparation and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child's power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact in his experience.
3. I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator.
I believe that these interests are to be observed as showing the state of development which the child has reached.
I believe that they prophesy the stage upon which he is about to enter.
I believe that only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood's interests can the adult enter into the child's life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully.
I believe that these interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below the surface and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest.
4. I believe that the emotions are the reflex of actions.
I believe that to endeavor to stimulate or arouse the emotions apart from their corresponding activities, is to introduce an unhealthy and morbid state of mind.
I believe that if we can only secure right habits of action and thought, with reference to the good, the true, and the beautiful, the emotions will for the most part take care of themselves.
I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.
I believe that this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action.
ARTICLE V-The School and Social Progress
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.
I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.
I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly individual because it recognizes the formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is socialistic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results.
I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.
I believe that when society once recognizes the possibilities in this direction, and the obligations which these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and money which will be put at the disposal of the educator.
I believe that it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.
I believe that education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.
I believe that the art of thus giving shape to human powers and adapting them to social service, is the supreme art; one calling into its service the best of artists; that no insight, sympathy, tact, executive power, is too great for such service.
I believe that with the growth of psychological service, giving added insight into individual structure and laws of growth; and with growth of social science, adding to our knowledge of the right organization of individuals, all scientific resources can be utilized for the purposes of education.
I believe that when science and art thus join hands the most commanding motive for human action will be reached; the most genuine springs of human conduct aroused and the best service that human nature is capable of guaranteed.
I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.
I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
******This piece has been reproduced on the understanding that it is not subject to any copyright restrictions, and that it is, and will remain, in the public domain.
My Pedagogic Creed, John Dewey
John Dewey's famous declaration concerning education. First published in The School Journal, Volume LIV, Number 3 (January 16, 1897), pages 77-80.
ARTICLE I--What Education Is
I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it or differentiate it in some particular direction.
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.
I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.
I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct.
I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal--that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.
I believe that each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other. In order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions, is that which arises through putting him in complete possession of all his powers. With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests-say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms.
In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted--we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents--into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service.
ARTICLE II--What the School Is
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.
I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.
I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.
I believe that as such simplified social life, the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home.
I believe that it should exhibit these activities to the child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be capable of playing his own part in relation to them.
I believe that this is a psychological necessity, because it is the only way of securing continuity in the child's growth, the only way of giving a back-ground of past experience to the new ideas given in school.
I believe that it is also a social necessity because the home is the form of social life in which the child has been nurtured and in connection with which he has had his moral training. It is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of the values bound up in his home life.
I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be ]earned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.
I believe that the moral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.
I believe that the child should be stimulated and controlled in his work through the life of the community.
I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life.
I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.
I believe that the discipline of the school should proceed from the life of the school as a whole and not directly from the teacher.
I believe that the teacher's business is simply to determine on the basis of larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child.
I believe that all questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of the most service and where he can receive the most help.
ARTICLE III--The Subject-Matter of Education
I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.
I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.
I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.
I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
I believe that education cannot be unified in the study of science, or so called nature study, because apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and time, and to attempt to make it the center of work by itself, is to introduce a principle of radiation rather than one of concentration.
I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification.
I believe once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man's social life and progress it becomes full of meaning. I believe, however, that it cannot be so taken excepting as the child is also introduced directly into social life.
I believe accordingly that the primary basis of education is in the child's powers at work along the same general constructive lines as those which have brought civilization into being.
I believe that the only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which make civilization what it is.
I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as the center of correlation.
I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school.
I believe that they are not special studies which are to be introduced over and above a lot of others in the way of relaxation or relief, or as additional accomplishments. I believe rather that they represent, as types, fundamental forms of social activity; and that it is possible and desirable that the child's introduction into the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through the medium of these activities.
I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is.
I believe that one of the greatest difficulties in the present teaching of science is that the material is presented in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar kind of experience which the child can add to that which he has already had. In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject-matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated.
I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought. It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.
I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect, an aspect of art and culture, and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.
I believe that to set up any end outside of education, as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the educational process of much of its meaning and tends to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in dealing with the child.
ARTICLE IV--The Nature of Method
I believe that the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature. Because this is so I believe the following statements are of supreme importance as determining the spirit in which education is carried on:
1. I believe that the active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature; that expression comes before conscious impression; that the muscular development precedes the sensory; that movements come before conscious sensations; I believe that consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to project themselves in action.
I believe that the neglect of this principle is the cause of a large part of the waste of time and strength in school work. The child is thrown into a passive, receptive, or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste.
I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational processes) also result from action and devolve for the sake of the better control of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective action. To attempt to develop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment, without reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without.
2. I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.
I believe that if nine tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.
I believe that much of the time and attention now given to the preparation and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child's power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact in his experience.
3. I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator.
I believe that these interests are to be observed as showing the state of development which the child has reached.
I believe that they prophesy the stage upon which he is about to enter.
I believe that only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood's interests can the adult enter into the child's life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully.
I believe that these interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below the surface and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest.
4. I believe that the emotions are the reflex of actions.
I believe that to endeavor to stimulate or arouse the emotions apart from their corresponding activities, is to introduce an unhealthy and morbid state of mind.
I believe that if we can only secure right habits of action and thought, with reference to the good, the true, and the beautiful, the emotions will for the most part take care of themselves.
I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.
I believe that this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action.
ARTICLE V-The School and Social Progress
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.
I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.
I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly individual because it recognizes the formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is socialistic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results.
I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.
I believe that when society once recognizes the possibilities in this direction, and the obligations which these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and money which will be put at the disposal of the educator.
I believe that it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.
I believe that education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.
I believe that the art of thus giving shape to human powers and adapting them to social service, is the supreme art; one calling into its service the best of artists; that no insight, sympathy, tact, executive power, is too great for such service.
I believe that with the growth of psychological service, giving added insight into individual structure and laws of growth; and with growth of social science, adding to our knowledge of the right organization of individuals, all scientific resources can be utilized for the purposes of education.
I believe that when science and art thus join hands the most commanding motive for human action will be reached; the most genuine springs of human conduct aroused and the best service that human nature is capable of guaranteed.
I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.
I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
******This piece has been reproduced on the understanding that it is not subject to any copyright restrictions, and that it is, and will remain, in the public domain.
Complexity in Education
I was playing with some ideas about organizing education along big themes as a way to make this make more "real world" sense to teachers and students.
Complexity
1. Purpose, motivation within a context, a community, a reason for learning
2. Process to seek answers through a team-based problem solving
3. Project, process of collection, finding creating
4. Presentation to a community, a group, that matters and creates a voice
Large thematic examples
• Ecology
• Climate
• Genetics
• Transportation
Subtopics/skills/components
• Urban Design
• Architecture
• Field science
• Space science
• Teams, team-based problems solving
• Self organization
• Homeostasis
Interesting topics
• Fire and climate
• Robotics, AI
• Salmon and fishing
• Salmon and coastal development
• Public health and changing behaviors
Mathematics
• Chaos theory
• Fractals
• Models of complexity
• Statistics and probability
Computers
• GIS
• 3-D Models
• Modeling
• Graphical analysis
• Databases
Jargon
• Complexity theory
• Systems thinking
• Networks, Network dynamics
Ryan 3-04
Complexity
1. Purpose, motivation within a context, a community, a reason for learning
2. Process to seek answers through a team-based problem solving
3. Project, process of collection, finding creating
4. Presentation to a community, a group, that matters and creates a voice
Large thematic examples
• Ecology
• Climate
• Genetics
• Transportation
Subtopics/skills/components
• Urban Design
• Architecture
• Field science
• Space science
• Teams, team-based problems solving
• Self organization
• Homeostasis
Interesting topics
• Fire and climate
• Robotics, AI
• Salmon and fishing
• Salmon and coastal development
• Public health and changing behaviors
Mathematics
• Chaos theory
• Fractals
• Models of complexity
• Statistics and probability
Computers
• GIS
• 3-D Models
• Modeling
• Graphical analysis
• Databases
Jargon
• Complexity theory
• Systems thinking
• Networks, Network dynamics
Ryan 3-04
De La Salle- thoughts of teachers
The affection of those a teacher inspires is life-long
Dignity - Seriousness, assurance, and presence: acting with composure.
Calmness - Stillness and peace, not just silence, marks the ideal atmosphere.
Humility - Modest, unassuming; willing to admit mistakes; courtesy and respect.
Prudence - Level-headed, of sound judgment, reasonable; a steadying quality.
Patience - Remain composed and even-tempered in difficult moments.
Self-Control - Reserve and restraint when annoyed or provoked.
Gentleness - Meek, respectful, refined, amiable, kindly, and with good manners.
Zeal - Keenness, enthusiasm: a warm, cheerful involvement in one’s vocation.
Vigilance - Caring presence, with a watchful eye.
Thoughtfulness - Raising up one’s mind and heart to other’s lives.
Generosity - Unselfish, giving, and unconcerned with measuring one's own gain.
Wisdom - Discernment and sufficient knowledge to make sound judgments.
Adapted by Ryan Collay, August 22, 2006
In his "Recueil", published in Paris in 1717, De La Salle lists twelve qualities which every good teacher should possess. Brother Agathon (1731-1798), Superior General, popularized the Twelve Virtues, dedicating nearly a third of his 1785 circular to the virtue of gentleness.
Dignity - Seriousness, assurance, and presence: acting with composure.
Calmness - Stillness and peace, not just silence, marks the ideal atmosphere.
Humility - Modest, unassuming; willing to admit mistakes; courtesy and respect.
Prudence - Level-headed, of sound judgment, reasonable; a steadying quality.
Patience - Remain composed and even-tempered in difficult moments.
Self-Control - Reserve and restraint when annoyed or provoked.
Gentleness - Meek, respectful, refined, amiable, kindly, and with good manners.
Zeal - Keenness, enthusiasm: a warm, cheerful involvement in one’s vocation.
Vigilance - Caring presence, with a watchful eye.
Thoughtfulness - Raising up one’s mind and heart to other’s lives.
Generosity - Unselfish, giving, and unconcerned with measuring one's own gain.
Wisdom - Discernment and sufficient knowledge to make sound judgments.
Adapted by Ryan Collay, August 22, 2006
In his "Recueil", published in Paris in 1717, De La Salle lists twelve qualities which every good teacher should possess. Brother Agathon (1731-1798), Superior General, popularized the Twelve Virtues, dedicating nearly a third of his 1785 circular to the virtue of gentleness.
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