Meaningful involvement of learners in classroom activities

Prescribed media for the week:

Effective pedagogy - teaching the whole child
Applying mindfulness to mundane classroom tasks

Something else, which is a little off topic but good none the less:
On catching the train

As the title of the post suggests, today is all about the meaningful involvement of learners in classroom activities.

Let's start with a quote from On catching the train by AG Gardiner. (Memo to self: read more Gardiner.)

"Any peg will do to hang your hat on. The hat is the thing."

I think that, especially with CAPS ruling the school as it were, that achieving specific aims at the end of the lesson can cloud the whole business of education, i.e. we as teachers may be so focused on getting through whatever is in the syllabus for the day that we forget that education is about more than just getting through the facts of the subject. Education is also about sculpting learners into young adults. This is what Effective pedagogy is hinting at. Teaching should always aim to be holistic. This implies that teaching, education, can't be a one way street. If we are going to sculpt young adults, we have to sculpt them to, for example, know that their opinions matter. And how can we do that if we don't show them that their opinions matter? How do we show them that their opinions matter if we don't listen to them in class? If we don't involve them in what happens in the classroom?

Applying mindfulness to mundane classroom tasks makes this point, even though the point is hidden behind the whole mindfulness business. The task of moving the tables out of the way was something the teacher hated because it was noisy and destroyed the calm atmosphere she wanted in the classroom. With a little though and creativity she transformed the activity into one that made the atmosphere suitably Zen for her needs. That's all great. But what I found cool about the lesson is that she then asked for learner input into the lesson. She asked the learners how they felt after completing Table-Moving 2.0 and comparing it to how they felt after Table-Moving 1. This is the important part - she allowed the learners to express their thoughts and feelings. She also showed them that their opinions mattered to her, because she wrote them down and used them in subsequent lessons. The learners noticed this. Table-Moving became meaningful to them, because the teacher paid attention to what the learners were saying. Table-Moving became important to the teacher, because she involved the learners in a meaningful way.

The hat's the thing.

5 reasons why distance learning is AWESOME!

Don't you just hate click bait?

Media for today's blog is The Independence Project (TIP) and The standards of critical digital pedagogy.

This entry is supposed to argue the potential of technology-mediated self-directed/distance learning.

First things first, though. Let's look at the media.

TIP is thought provoking. A handful of students, many of them underachievers, taking their education into their own hands for a semester. They decide what to study. They ask the questions. They figure out the answers. They also do an individual project - whatever they want to do. They work hard, give presentations, and get school credit for it. By the look of it, it's a lot of work. The end result is students who are passionate about learning. Quite a difference from where many of them started.

As for Standards of critical digital pedagogy, I'm not sure I quite understood most of it. Here are the parts that I think I understood, in good old PowerPoint bullet form, because some horses just won't die, no matter how much you beat them:

• The national standards for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) literacy is oppressive, for some reason.
• It's probably oppressive because it forces teachers to keep to the prescribed standards, and to do that, teachers become bankers who try to stuff information into students' brains. This stops everybody from having the freedom to learn what and how they want to.
• The ICT standards assume everyone has the same access (in all its forms) to technology, which is bad because that makes proper communication, on equal footing, impossible.
• This leads to the deeper question: "How do we learn, and how do we learn from each other?"
• Even if student achieve all the outcomes outlined in the standards, what can they actually do? Wouldn't they have learned much more if they were allowed to play around with the technology, if only for a little while?
• How much room do the standards leave for creativity? How much room is there for students to create cool new things?
• Is it possible to have more fluid standards, standards that change as the context in which they are taught, changes?

Now, let's try to pull these together and move on to the question of the possibilities of self-directed/distance learning. Let's, put those together. What are the possibilities of self-directed distance learning? This isn't too much of a stretch, because if you are going to trust teenagers to direct their own learning, you can just as well trust them to do it from the comfort of their parents' basements.

The success, if only in terms of student motivation, of TIP shows that standard practices are missing something. This is not necessarily a problem of the teachers missing something, but rather of the system not understanding the students. (Oppressive much?). Different students learn in different ways. Teachers can't possibly cater to all the needs of all the students. The system makes it difficult, because teachers are forced to adhere to the standards set by the powers that be. The TIP solution seems to be simple, then. Get the teachers out of the way, let the students decide how and what they will learn, see if they come up with anything good and give them credit for it. Distance learning makes this quite easy. The internet is a wonderful thing, filled with information (and disinformation, and just plain wrong information. And cat videos.), easily accessible. There are tonnes of good things, well designed courses, learned people who are just waiting to answer questions, right at your fingertips. Communication (the problems with access notwithstanding) is important, though, especially if we are going to shine the social constructivist light on learning. But it has been done before. Message boards are desolate landscapes; ego, stupidity and bad spelling the only cacti breaking the vast horison, but even there one can usually find an oasis in the form of an underpaid, overworked teaching assistant eager to have an intelligent conversation. And of course, the internet doesn't have to be the only platform for discussion. Real life is a shining utopia, waiting just outside your front door. If one isn't bound to a physical school building the whole day, it is quite possible to find others in the vicinity who are working on the same problems. More than this, it should be even more possible to find someone to come up with problems with, and find the answer together. (I suppose this would also take care of a couple of the access to technology problems. Even if one person doesn't have the access that their study partner has, they can still construct meaning together, even if only through critical dialogue. The access to information comes in the form of the dialogue they have. Yeah, it's a stretch, but we are talking about possibilities here, after all.) Social constructivism, check.

This approach would also take care of Freire's dreaded teacher-student problem, because students will become their own teachers, and the teachers of others. Another win there.

Self-directed distance learning leaves much more space for creativity. This is another thing shown by TIP, where individual projects seem to be, more often than not, creative ones. Not only that, but it allows time and space for tinkering with the toys we already have, breaking them, and putting them back together in a new way so that we can put them to use in creative new ways. Fair enough, it's often difficult to do this if you don't already know how to use the toy in the company approved way, but it's possible. (Not really a good example, I suppose, but if nobody told me Github was a repository for code, I could easily see myself using it for writing collaborative Star Trek fan fiction. Goodness knows, anything would be better than that awful second JJ Abrams script.)

So the possibilities are there. Something we haven't talked about in class yet, is the fact that most MOOCs fail in the sense that they have a really high percentage of students who never finish a module. I don't think this is a fair representation of what distance learning could, or should be. For one thing, except for the fact that you can choose which modules you take, it isn't really self-directed at all. You think to yourself "Game theory, yeah! Bring on poker night!" and then you are left with boring models on economic risk taking. Even though you choose the module you want, you don't choose the application you want. You are stuck again with Freire's problem. The teacher gets in the way. And you are stuck in that desolate wasteland, trying to make meaning of something which is utterly meaningless to you. Like cat videos, and with equally bad spelling.

Social media in a science classroom

Davies
Provenzano

Both Davies and Provenzano list ideas of how to use social media in a classroom. They also argue that since kids use these tools anyway, we should embrace them. The apps, not the students.

They mention some useful ideas. They even mention some good ones (I'll come back to those), but from the first two weeks' readings and rantings it has become clear that we shouldn't have students start blogs just for the sake of starting blogs. That proviso noted, here are some ways in which I think I can incorporate social media into my classroom. There aren't many, unfortunately, but I'll try.

I like the idea of using a tool like Remind, since I can use it to remind students of homework,  tests, changes in schedule/procedure, etc. Since it's one way communication, it will also stop a potential flood of questions and complaints, so I can sit back with a glass of red wine and grade papers in peace.

I also think I could have students either blog or vlog their progress on projects. Part of the scientific process is communicating findings with peers. Communication, in general, is important. The CAPS statement also has the development of scientific literacy as one of its aims. Writing about one's progress, or making a video about it, or a podcast if there is a lot to say, are good ways of developing communication skills. The added benefit is that peers can write comments, giving the whole exercise a social dimension. Social constructivism, yada yada.

I like the idea of using Instagram to share photos of real world examples/application of things we have learned in class.

There might be less of a social aspect to this one, but I think I could also get into the habit of using Socrative as a tool to quickly test understanding, get students to voice their opinions anonymously, and have some fun.

Finally, I could also use Twitter as a place where students can ask questions and give answers. Not about the homework, mind, but about concepts, weird things they come across in daily life, etc. This, again, promotes conversation and discussion, which goes back to communication.

So there are things to use. If one uses them in a mindful manner. And if one makes it accessible to the whole class.  The limited list of what I can use in my class is not a reflection of the crappy nature of my subject, but rather the crappy nature of my creativity. Fortunately, this is a career, not a race, so I guess I have some time to come up with new ideas.

Decoding digital pedagogy

Blog posts here and here.

So, it seems that digital pedagogy has made us all worse teachers. Finally, something to blame. The blame bubble is quite big, since people still can't arrive at a consensus on what digital pedagogy actually is, but the blame bubble is there and I'm not in it. So all's well.

Actually, that's not true. According to the blog posts, bad/non-existing digital pedagogy makes us worse teachers. Not so cool anymore, since the blame bubble is shrinking, and it seems to be shrinking in on me.

What's the problem? Well, it seems that, on the one hand, we forget that there is a difference between being a teacher and being a pedagogue. Pedagogy is a skill (albeit a skill which can become very meta if you think about it too much). And it is a skill that one developes over many years of constant questioning, examining, experimentation, and some more questioning.

Blame bubble shifting somewhere else. Good news.

On the other hand, teachers (and pedagogues)... well, they become lazy. They throw everything at the digital wall and see what sticks and then they don't have to work or worry about it ever again. They give up, because the work has been done and the powers that be are happy. And in the context of online learning, they don't have the human interaction with the students anymore, so that motivation - and guilt - is taken out of the equation as well. The essence of what makes a good pedagogue, the ability to reflect, be critical about a lesson and try something new if it didn't work, evaporates.

Fly, blame bubble, fly!

It's not all doom and gloom, though. The blog posts suggest that a lot of the problem is trying to unlearn pedagogy that isn't useful in a digital sense, and replacing it with pedagogy that is (or spending time trying to create pedagogy that is). And when it comes to digital pedagogy, I'm a tabula rasa, a clean slate. So half the battle is won, right?

I think what it boils down to is playing with your toys and breaking them and then putting them together in new ways. Mindful ways that will enrich your teaching, not detract from it. Just because PowerPoint has some really sexy bullet points, doesn't mean you have to use them. For example, I once observed a microteaching lesson by a Korean elementary school English teacher. She made a picture dictionary. PowerPoint. Nothing new there. Until we came to the word comb (v). Now, how do you explain that verb? How do you explain it with a picture? She used an animated GIF. (Yes, PowerPoint is great for viewing those.) Magic! The motion is there, students instantly know what is happening, the teacher doesn't have to stand in front of class and pull her fingers through her hair. The teacher took an old and busted toy and gave it new hotness, which ended up enriching her teaching.
(Yeah, probably not the best example, but it is Monday, so be kind.)

I guess there's no need for a blame bubble, because there is no excuse. The most important things about creating an effective digital pedagogy are tinkering with toys, bucking conventional wisdom, and realising that if you don't need it, don't use it. But if you do use it, don't be lazy about it. Be critical. And have fun.

Digital pedagogy and teaching naked

(First things first: this will be an English blog post by a very Afrikaans guy about things digital and analogue. I'm sure that Afrikaans has by now caught up with all the jargon of the digital age, but I haven't. So broken English will have to suffice. And the blog has English spell check. Love me some spell check.)

The reading for this week poses a lot of questions. Have we become too obsessed with using technology for the sake of technology in the classrooms? What happens if ESKOM fails us and we can't use all the tech toys we wanted to? Can we use the digital tools of this day and age without wires and electrons and 1's and 0's?

However, it also got me thinking; how can I use these tools, whether ESKOM dependent or not, in my science classroom? And, more importantly, how can I use it in such a way that it helps the learners engage with the content, rather than it just being a case of me making a couple of random PowerPoint slides and patting myself on the back for a job well done?

(Oh, PowerPoint, the opium of the modern teacher!)

Not all of these questions are easy to answer. The reading makes a good argument for not just blindly waiting for a deus ex machina to arise from our dull, badly designed PowerPoint presentations and save our subjects. It cautions that, while the tools are there, the pedagogy doesn't always work with them.

Surely, though, it isn't all bad. And it's not. There are a number of things we can take from the electronic world and hack so that it allows us to cut the chord, and engage with our subject matter in a way that brings new meaning to what it is we are discussing in the classroom. A great example from the reading is the one about text mining. One of my favourite shortcuts is Ctrl-F (Or whatever the equivalent is for Apple fanboys. You know who you are.). Who needs to waste precious seconds skimming through random text? Ctrl-F, baby! The words are even highlighted for you. Yet, I think that's the point of the text mining example. Ctrl-F disconnects you from the text. With a little more effort, you can easily do the same with a highlighter and a book. (Or a book book, as IKEA calls it.) The advantage of the second method is that you are bound to bump into context at some point in the exercise. Even if you don't, it is much easier to go back in the book, look for the words you have highlighted, and read the whole paragraph.

So yes, we can use our electronic tools for good, and we can adapt some of them in case of load shedding. But now, what about in my own science classroom?

This is a little more difficult to answer, and it is something I'll have to really think about. What do we use electronics for in the classroom? PowerPoint and YouTube, PowerPoint and YouTube. Wash, rinse, repeat. I don't know. Maybe I can have learners write their prac reports on blogs and read and comment on others. Maybe they can make vlogs documenting the progress of their research projects.

Maybe I'll learn something clever from the comments.