Tryangulation

Reinventing project based learning

I just had a great experience participating in NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) in Atlanta, Georgia, from my desk here in Ankara.

Around the same time I wrote a post about project-based learning I got in touch (via Ewan) with Jane Krauss, who has just written a book with Suzie Boss titled Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-world Projects in the Digital Age. Jane and Suzie also write a blog on the same theme and created a Flickr group to collect photos of school projects around the world. Yesterday in Atlanta Jane and Suzie gave a presentation on project-based learning. They surprised me by inviting me to join in the presentation via Skype, along with Linda Hartley in the UK. It was a little strange talking to a room full of people I couldn't see, and because of the headphones I had some trouble hearing my own voice as well, but still it was very cool and fun. Linda created a wiki to write a summary of the presentation.

After my little piece during the session, I started wondering (since I couldn't see faces) if maybe I miscommunicated one of my points, so I'm offering a clarification here by way of a short case study:

Our school is in the vicinity of one of the last remaining habitats of a critically endangered wildflower that in Turkish is called yanar döner (Centaurea tchihatcheffi). Teachers and students had been thinking about how the school could get involved in this problem, but a lot of the thinking was limited to what students could do inside the school building, so most of the suggestions were for creating a website, slogans, a poster contest in the school, and other media projects targeting the school community.

I conducted a simple problem analysis exercise with the students and one of our biology teachers, where we stated the problem (threat of extinction), and then ask why (loss of habitat). You ask why again (urban sprawl, intensive agriculture), and keep asking why until you get the big picture that shows how this problem relates to a larger system. As we looked at the bigger picture, we saw that a media campaign in the school community would not touch people who were close enough to the problem to make much of a change. But we did realize that we could take a different  and more effective approach by collecting seeds in the wild and propagating them on our campus. The creative juices started flowing and we saw the potential for producing enough seeds to share with other schools in the area, and even for establishing a low-tech seed bank to help protect other endangered wildflowers in our province.

Although some of our students might have felt content with a nice website and a contest, bringing in a learning tool from "the real world" helped us find a solution that could have a genuine and sustainable impact.

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A different kind of multitasking

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

-- Alvin Toffler, post-industrial futurologist.

Can we 'unlearn'?

A recent post by Will Richardson on The Steep "Unlearning Curve"  suggests ten things that we need to unlearn as we adapt classrooms and education to global changes. Here are a few items from his manifesto:

• We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in may cases, they can now be our teachers as well.
• We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.
• We need to unlearn the notion that our students don't need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

I've used the word "unlearning" myself, often when suggesting the very same changes as Will. After reading some of the excellent comments on Will's blog I might agree that this is perhaps not the best word for what we want to say. I was gratified that one of the comment writers in fact reminded Will of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, a favorite author of mine, and that might actually enlighten us here.

We sometimes use negative words (unlearn, deschool, deconstruct) in the context of a process that seeks a positive outcome: recognizing where we have learned (and taught?) the wrong thing, and finding new words, thoughts and actions that correct the wrong and move us forward.

Will (and many of his commenters) are basically saying, "This is what's wrong with schooling" but with words that also carry the seeds of the solution. When talking about our spirituality we often use words like "reflect," "repent" and "reconcile" to say that we were on the wrong track, and we want to change. In both cases, this process requires self awareness, humility, and a recognition of our responsibility to ourselves and those around us as we seek what Illich calls conviviality.

Maybe that's not such a new idea, but it's the hard ideas that bear repeating.  Thanks Will.

(By the way, Will is author of an excellent book I just got and have started sharing among our teachers.)

Fast language learners' brains shaped differently

The University College London has published a report about research showing that people who are faster at learning languages have more white matter in the left auditory regions, and in a different position of the brain than people who learn languages more slowly, and also a greater volume of the parietal lobes in the left side of the brain.

I believe research like this supports the demand for more individualized, learner-centered instruction. We've known for a while about different learning styles and people have argued for instruction that is tailored to the ways an individual can best learn. However studies like this suggest that we are different not only in our temperament and upbringing, but that we may differ biologically in ways that affect what and how we learn.

The news article from UCL can be found here.
 

Learning about versus learning how

In recent weeks several of my favorite blogs have hit on the clash between the learning about paradigm and the learning how paradigm in the goals and practices of schools.

First, Kathy Sierra's discussion of the failure of university science programs to teach students how to do science.  She says "What experts use to do their work are the things we don't teach. We focus almost exclusively on how to talk about the work."

Will Richardson's recent post says "the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students."

Then while tidying up my del.icio.us tags I found this by Ewan McIntosh: "if ... we are looking to give learners the opportunity to direct their learning then what is the role of the teacher? Well, in order to teach you have to be the person you want your students to be."

Last week I had more conversations yet again on the topics of (1) a recent teacher seminar on innovative instruction, delivered as usual in a classical lecture style, and (2) the irony and contradictions of implementing a portfolio based curriculum in an environment where all K12 education focuses on performance on ONE 195-minute university entrance exam (if you read Turkish you can visit this link to read more).

And then today in a meeting colleagues and I discussed how to institutionalize the IBO's recently released Learner Profile when, no matter how much we value the characteristics of the ideal learner, those characteristics really aren't the kind of thing that show up in the standardized tests required by our students to graduate from the national high school program.

Will and Ewan are talking (mostly) about the implementation of Web 2.0 tools to free up learning in schools, and Kathy is talking about the future of innovation (one of the pillars of the US economy), but they're all talking about learning how to learn.  That's why it's good that we learn the scientific method or web-based research tools or collaborative writing with wikis. That's why we also need to learn to risk failure, to embrace error and to reflect on our own experience. I'm liking my recent metaphor of burning rubber more and more.

So in our nicely compartmentalized subject areas like chemistry and history we learn all kinds of facts and theories, but the tools and skills used for creating knowledge in those fields don't look very much like chemistry or history. Even more ironic is that we also teach tools (Internet research, PowerPoint, DreamWeaver, whatever) outside the context of using those tools to communicate and create knowledge. 

Imagine four years of art class where all you do is learn about brushes, and never get to paint!

Those who teach, learn

Here's another installment on the theme of access in the IB

We're excited to announce that we have received funding approval for a project we proposed to the European Council of International Schools (ECIS) under their outreach program. The project we will implement is designed to help our IB students share their experiences in international education and critical thinking with future teachers.

A key participant group for the project is women university students from the interior of the country who live in a government-run student residence in Ankara. We proposed this project because our students will learn from sharing concepts from TOK, literature, CAS and other IB activities, and the university women will also be able to learn some things about cross-cultural understanding that they can one day impart to their students.  The women who will participate in the project are from places where, for economic, social and geographic reasons, there is far less exposure to cultural diversity and learning how, as the IBO puts it, others can also be right.

We'll use the project funding to establish a cultural resources library, attend concerts, plays and exhibitions, host film nights and guest speakers, and sponsor other activities to set the scene for discussions about literature, critical thinking and cross-cultural understanding. I expect we'll all learn a lot.

The name of our project is Those Who Teach, Learn. I think that's a nice way to sum up the two-way street of learning to teach and teaching to learn.  I'll keep you posted.

Burning rubber as a learning indicator

This week I took advantage of an extended holiday to teach my sons how to drive with a stick shift.  We went out to an unused stretch of road, and took turns sitting in the driver's seat and trying over and over to get the car to move:  (1) forward, (2) smoothly and (3) without stalling.

If you drive a standard transmission, you know that just explaining the process is not enough. You have to try over and over again. You learn by failing a lot, letting someone else have a turn while you think about it, trying again and the next time doing a little better. The teacher (Dad) can demonstrate, repeat, encourage, advise, crack a joke, give a break, but the learning is really in the hands of the learner.

It just dawned on me that there's a key here to something that's bothered me about learning in general, and more specifically about a lot of writing on technology integration in education.  It seems there are plenty of cases where the expectations for people learning new IT skills is far higher than the actual learning that is taking place. This gets people thinking about what it means to learn a technical skill versus learning an academic subject like history or math.

In the articles I cited in a post from a few weeks ago (click here), a common thread was that IT skills learning is difficult because there aren't any analogies from our own experiences.  I now believe that this is not the case. There are plenty of analogies in our own experience, but those of us who work full time in education probably overlook at lot of "extra-educational" learning that doesn't fit our paradigm of what learning is supposed to look like.

We learn things all the time. The irony is that--except for just learning to remember facts and theories--  almost none of what we really learn comes from sitting in classes, listening to lectures and prepping for exams. Most of what we really know comes from what we do. Most of what we know best comes from what we did wrong the first few times. And most of what we value knowing is learned continuously and interactively with others. David Pollard's list of reasons why people don't use collaboration tools includes:

• the tools are often unfamiliar
• training doesn't match the way people learn
• we're not used to learning with others

I suppose if Pollard thinks of learning only as what I call education (which is not the same thing as learning), then maybe he's right. But if you look away from classrooms and exam halls, and look at how people learn to bake a cake, play a guitar, or drive a stick shift, you'll see all around you that learning is about getting familiar with the tool, with the teacher, and with oneself.

Learning to drive a manual transmission is hard. You fail miserably and repeatedly, burning rubber and getting whiplash, getting embarrassed because your brother is also in the car, and impatient with yourself for not getting it the first time, and then getting a thrill when it all comes together. But that is the only way you will learn to drive a manual transmission. And the day ends with some awesome successes.

As a Dad I wouldn't have it any other way.

If I had known I'd live this long...

"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now."

-- Quote from a woman in her 90s, reported by Kathy Sierra.

Why we don't learn more

In keeping with the theme of using technology to improve access to education, I thought I'd share some thoughts about some reading I've done recently on why ICTs haven't caught on more, and how that fits into general theories about how people learn - or in some cases, how we don't learn.

One of my favorite blogs out there right now is Creating Passionate Users. Kathy Sierra writes about how designers and marketers of software and other technological products can do more to help people use their products successfully. However, there is plenty in her site that can be transferred to education, whether or not you're using the latest information technology. A post that Kathy wrote some time back that turned me into a regular reader is titled Most classroom learning sucks. That doesn't sound like something a teacher will want to read, but here's how it starts:

The best learning occurs in a stimulating, active, challenging, interesting, engaging environment. It's how the brain works. The best learning occcurs when you move at least some part of your body. The best learning occurs when you're actively involved in co-constructing knowledge in your own head, not passively reading or listening... Forcing people to sit in a chair and listen to (or read) dry, formal words (with perhaps only a few token images thrown in) is the slowest, least effective, and most painful path to learning.

So why do we all do it that way? I recently found an article by Grandon Gill,  5 (Really) Hard things about using the Internet in Higher Education. Grandon discusses some general obstacles to adopting new technologies in education, but in my opinion none of the excuses he gives (lack of models, having to keep up with changes, not being understood by others), is exclusive to ICTs in education, but rather are the same old excuses used by anyone who resists innovation. By the end of the article you realize that Grandon is actually in favor of being a pioneer,  but I think he creates a picture of innovators and early adopters working in isolation from each other and fighting alone against the current, when that really isn't the case.

Usually with innovations (and not just the ICT kind), you get a few enthusiastic early users, who might enjoy using the innovation for all kinds of wrong reasons purposes not intended by its creator. These early users tend not to be good examples for the ones who follow, those who try to implement those innovations either out of coercion or a misunderstanding of the innovation's purpose. Like I hinted at before in this site, innovations are best adopted when they help us do something that already needed to be done.

In Grandon's case, he teaches in an MIS department, and found that the new ICTs tools available for teaching create opportunities for different ways of learning. Student-to-student interaction becomes easier and more creative, and the role of the teacher changes into that of a facilitator.  Of course if a teacher isn't ready to become a facilitator and co-learner, technology integration in the classroom is going to be a rough ride.

Lastly, David Pollard wrote on why collaboration tools are so underused. Like, Grandon Gill, several of the reasons he gives have more to do with how people think communication, group work, and learning are supposed to happen, and then have trouble with tools that create opportunities for new paradigms. I'm very enthusiastic about the potential for wikis and podcasts and other cool web 2.0 tools for helping people learn and create knowledge. But if people don't know how to work well together in the same room, then the best wikis, intranets and telecom systems in the world won't help. 

So why don't we learn more, or better? I believe that we try too often to learn the wrong thing: a tool that doesn't fit the job we're trying to do, a skill that impresses but doesn't satisfy, gaining more information rather than gaining wisdom. It's always easier to figure out how to go somewhere if you first know where you're going.

60 ways to get it wrong

Back in April I wrote a post titled We're all less biased than everyone else. In the post I mentioned an article from the New York Times which cites research about how frequently people think themselves to be less biased than others.

I have since found on Wikipedia a very interesting List of Cognitive Biases, a  thorough pathology of how we can incorrectly interpret information.  While browsing this shockingly long list of biases, I recognized many immediately, not necessarily by their name (e.g. "the Von Restorff effect") but certainly by the symptoms ("the tendency for an item that 'stands out like a sore thumb' to be more likely to be remembered than other items").

What's more troubling is that not only did I recognize them, but some of them are old friends of mine. How much is there that I don't know because of their interference? Seeing them in this light will maybe make me more aware of them the next time they try to make an appearance.

If you're brave, maybe you can take a look at the list, choose to abolish one of these biases, and see what new things you learn.