The Futilitarian State

It has been a couple of weeks since last I posted. As a principal, this time of year is filled with the myriad of evaluation and assessment that needs to be done in order to fulfill the accountability expectations that our educational system and parent population require.

It is at this time of year that I slump into a futilitarian state. Often I feel that convention gets in the way of creativity. An opinion shared by Kris (an ex-student of mine) at Wandering Ink in her brilliant post about Killing the Next Da Vinci.

[an aside to this post. Kris' blog post has made the edublogosphere take notice. One of the best commentary posts linked to her post is here at Dave Truss' blog Pair-a-Dimes for your thoughts. Dave was Kris' teacher the year after me. These posts and subsequent reactions/comments are a must read for educators.]

Back to my point. In the last two weeks I have read a plethora of report cards, crunched data for growth plans, garnered consensus on goals and objectives and reviewed our results from our provincial Foundational Skills Assessments that we wrote in February.

Why?

Unnecessary and unfortunate comparison.

Innate in our system (in British Columbia, Canada), is a competitive thread. Convention if you will. It starts with the universities who require a particular Grade Point Average for entrance into their programs. This necessitates a grading system in the high-schools that is quantitative so that the method to achieve said grade appears to be transparent. The majority of the high-schools, therefore, use a percentage based benchmark where (for most) 86% equates to an "A" which counts for 4 points and 72% equates to a "B" which counts for 3 points and so on. The points are then averaged to get a grade point average. To most educators (and non-educators for that matter) this sounds like the typical experience. The issue that this evaluative mentality creates is that it trickles down to the early grades. Parents, who's last experience with the education system was high school, impose their experience and thus schema of evaluation onto the report card that their child in grade four gets for example. In British Columbia we start giving students grades in grade 4. Up to that point we use anecdotal comments that use performance standards language. Unfortunately, due to being so ingrained, many parents impose their letter grade schema onto the anecdotal language. As soon as you assign grades, students stop learning for the love of learning and they start learning how to play the marks game.

Let me share a story to illustrate. I watched as a 10 year old negotiated with a teacher to get an additional mark on a math test ( a very common experience for teachers). I couldn't help myself, I had to insert myself into the conversation. I asked the student to explain their interpretation of the question, their rational for their answer and the process by which they arrived at that answer. The student, who had scored a 14/16 on the test already, spent thirty minutes going through this process with me. In doing so, the student demonstrated an extremely advanced level of understanding of the concept being discussed. He had made a minor calculation error and thus ended up with the wrong "correct" answer so the teacher had given him part marks. Sounds fair, the student was given marks for process but lost marks for an incorrect answer (again, a very common practice).

Now here is my problem with this "common experience". The teacher lost that student and the teachable opportunity was killed. Let me offer an alternative scenario. Give the students the question or series of questions. Facilitate their struggles by asking questions rather than giving answers. Let them make the "mistakes". Point out fact to them i.e. "your process is sound but their is a calculation error on your page". Empower them i.e. "what did you discover whilst looking for your error?" "Share it with a classmate/class". Make note of this student's experience in an assessment log. Use this note in your communication with his/her parent.

The end result of the summative test with a mark of 14/16 (which is a pretty strong mark) was that this student felt slighted and all he took from the experience was that he had been "punished" for his miscalculation. The test was then filed in his binder (best case scenario) or more likely stuffed in his desk or in the garbage (worse case scenario). The student is more than likely going to eliminate the test experience from his mathematical schema to allow for the next cram session.

The end result of the facilitated math experience is that the student will have had his mastery needs met because he was able to fix a miscalculation, he was able to share his fix and feel safe about making mistakes and learning from them. This student is more likely to embed the concept into his mathematical schema. When the teacher communicates with the parent, the student's progress is reported rather than a comparison to a benchmark.

FACT: Students do not need marks to be motivated. Most of the best work I have ever seen came from students who were not worried about evaluative handcuffs.

Example #1 (I was made aware of this example by Dave Truss who is an administrative colleague of mine. The example is far to powerful to simply link to it and hope that you feel inclined to follow the link and thus I embed it here):

The assignment was as follows:

"Pick an issue in the school and then create a video that promotes awareness of the problem and/or a solution to the problem"

This assignment was given to the advisory classes at the Middle School that I used to teach at. The predominant mandate of advisory is to ensure that all students feel connected to an adult in the school who's relationship is devoid of the constraints evaluation places on said relationship. In other words, everything that they do in advisory is NOT for marks but rather for learning.

Here is the result of my ex-teaching partner's class. Wow!



Example #2:

In my last year of classroom teaching, I had become frustrated with the concept of marks as an evaluative tool. So I did the obligatory marks collection in May and then cut marks off for all of June. I told the students this. I then approached my teaching team with an idea. At our middle school we teach in teams. In our case three teachers shared 90 students. We told the students that they were going to write, illustrate and publish children's books for the kindergarten classes at the schools that fed into our middle school. We told them that they would have to apply for one of three positions, illustrator, writer/editor, and publisher/editor. We then took these application and created teams of 10-12 students. For the first week, all the artists worked with the teacher on our team who happened to be a graphic artist. The writers worked with the other teacher on our team, and I took the publishers. We all looked at children's books that we all loved. We determined what made them so good and created brainstorm lists that turned into guiding criteria. For the next two and half weeks, the teams of 10-12 students worked on creating their storyboards, drafts, and then finally published product.

The end result was that we had 8 fully illustrated stories. The storyboards ranged from action adventure to anti-bullying morality. The students then took these books to the kindergarten classes and read them. The writing, illustrating and publishing process was so intense that it dominated our curriculum for most of June and yet it was the students who drove this project. I have never seen students work so hard as they did on these books. Not a single mark was given out. Not a single answer was given. Our teaching team was truly along for the ride. We were a resource and we were guides. Nothing more. It was the best teaching experience that I have had.

So as I sit here up to my neck in report cards and growth plans, I pang for the days of learning for the sake of learning. I proclaim that my futilitarian state can be rebuked by those who teach children to learn not to jump through hoops. It is my goal to help my staff work within our innately competitive system to empower students to learn because it is there to learn. Marks be gone.....well as much as we are allowed to by law.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad and There You Have the Facts of Life...

Nancy Willard, the director for the Center for Safe and Responsible Use of the Internet wrote an article discussing the various aspects of internet safety. It is articles like this that worry me. Almost like a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Student use of Web 2.0 technologies is expanding, along with incredible opportunities for interactive educational activities -- and a host of risk and management concerns. Even the most die-hard techies now recognize that filtering systems are not the solution they were promised to be. In many schools, students regularly bypass the filter -- not to get to porn sites, but to access their favorite social networking sites.

This statement gives me hope. It is a recognition of two key facts of student internet use.

Fact 1: Filters are useless! In fact blocking social networking sites only creates a sense of taboo and heightens the natural and healthy rebellion nature of adolescent users. Many of my students see the filters as a challenge. I have, in the past, played right into this natural tendency and challenged my students to find me a YouTube clip that pertains to the area of curriculum that we are studying. Both the students and I knew full well that YouTube clips would be blocked and yet the students found a way around the filter using a proxy server. The interesting angle to this story is that the students that I was working with were in grade four. One of the students' brother had shown him how to use a proxy server. All he did was google "proxy server" and "YouTube" and in about 3 minutes we were watching a YouTube clip of an old Tom and Jerry cartoon. We were discussing the violence seen in cartoons.

Fact 2: Students (especially elementary students) do not seek the negative aspects of the net. We start with the premise that the vast majority of children wish to do good things and be good people. In fact, whenever I have experienced a "mistaken" destination that involved porn or the like, the students have always either pressed back and quickly told me about it or turned the monitor off and told me about it. They are more embarrassed than anything. We have alerted the rest of the students to the "mistake", added it to our learning experience and have moved on without making a big deal about it.

That was the good from the article (the sheep), now for the bad (here comes the big bad wolf).

Willard goes on to talk about providing 5 key and comprehensive strategies to keeping students safe. The first component is the one that bothers me the most;

Educational Use
Schools must ensure that when students use the Internet, their activities have an educational purpose -- class assignments, extra credit work, and perhaps some high quality enrichment activities as a reward. The more well-prepared teachers are to lead students in high quality exciting Internet-based learning activities, the more likely students will be on-task. And when students are “on-task,” problems dissipate.

My issue here is that by defining appropriate use of the internet as needing to be for educational purposes only, you geekify the integration of technology. Conversely, if we find ways to use the aspects of the internet that students gravitate to to teach the concepts from our curriculums, then we are more likely to increase the engagement level in our lessons. The statement that we should use quality enrichment activities as a reward really bothers me on a number of levels. First of all, being rewarded with high quality implies that those who are not being rewarded are not getting high quality. As a principal, I'd want to investigate this concept. Secondly, too often technology is seen as an add on, when you finish your real work, then you can use a computer for extra credit work. Again, those who subscribe to this paradigm are missing the boat. We need to be working hard to ensure that technology is being seamlessly integrated into the daily lives of learning.

In addition, I hated it when my teacher would put a whole bunch of notes on the overhead and then proceed to read them to me. I could read! Let me explore the topic on my own and create my own questions. Be there to guide my thinking. Don't be the sage on the stage, be my guide on the side. Scaffold my ideas and push me to expand my thinking. Don't lead me to the answers, teach me to ask the questions. Well-prepared teachers who lead will never be more engaging than teachers who facilitate student directed learning experiences. If I am directing my learning, then I am obviously engaged and have no reason to cause problems.

Willard's other strategies revolve around close supervision, monitoring, consequences, investigating accidental access to porn. To be frank, I see this as fear mongering. Strategies like these feed the beast that is justification for the filtering and blocking that Willard indicated was inappropriate.

What we need to do is take a hard look at why students behave. If we want them to truly be responsible and respectful digital students it has to come from within. In Diane Gossen's book "It's all about We" she quotes James Wilson as indicating that people behave for three reasons:

1. To avoid pain - What will happen to me?

2. For respect or reward from others - What will I get?

3. For respect for self - Who will I be?

The goal is to help students to ask and be able to answer question #3. Because ultimately, there is no punishment great enough to stop someone who does not care and there is no reward great enough for someone who does not care. The first two questions are agents of coercion. Coercion leaves negative legacies including guilt, resentment and conformity (among others) in its wake. Where as question number three empowers students to draw upon and evaluate their values and beliefs. In order for this to work however, we need to explicitly teach students to understand what they belief in and what they value. Not an easy task.

image from PhotoshopTalent.com

Launch Your Web 2.0 Exploration From Here...

Earlier this year I attended F.E.T.C. 2008. It was an amazing opportunity to network with other educators. One of the huge benefits was meeting Susan Brooks-Young (her blog can be found here)and her team during a presentation that they did on various Web 2.0 applications. The session itself was good, however I have since discovered that the best part of this encounter (other than meeting the people involved) was being part of a wiki called webtoolsforeducators. This site sends me updates (as most wiki's do), every time a new Web 2.0 app is added to the wiki. If you are just beginning your exploration of Web 2.0 applications or are looking to add to your repertoire, this is a great place to go.

Another piece for the puzzle...

In my YouTube search on motivation, I stumbled across this video. We can use it as another piece of the being responsible and respectful digital citizens curriculum. We are going to add it to our social responsibility carousel (this will be another post) at the start of the next school year.

What are your thoughts?