Tag: Curriculum

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Learning the Lessons of Teaching in a Block Schedule

 

Teach in the Block
Teach in the Block

I’ve been preparing for an upcoming two day workshop at Nassau County SD (FL) – assisting high school teacher with strategies for teaching in a block schedule. It got me thinking about my attitude about class length and how my perspective evolved as my instructional vision changed.

When I first started teaching high school social studies the central planning question I asked myself was, “What am I going to do with my students?” The focus was on my activities, because I thought my job was to convey information to my students – to tell them things they didn’t know. Then they could practice working on what I told them. Finally my students could prove they “got the things” by giving me back what I gave them on a test. Thus my curriculum planning centered about how I was going to deliver the information to them. I had a lot of information to cover and had to figure out how to cut it up into 180 bites. “This year I hope we can at least get to WWII!”

Seen from the “lecture” perspective, I liked short classes – holding the attention of 30 high school kids was a challenge. I remember when our class periods got cut from 48 minutes to 45, I thought – great, now I don’t have to talk as long. I can shave a few minutes off my delivery.

When I first started teaching, the question I repeatedly asked myself was, “What am I going to do with my students?” The focus was on my activities, because I thought my job was to convey information to my students – to tell them things they didn’t know.

After a few years of lecturing, I had the realization that I was the hardest working person in my class. I was doing most of the learning – research, analysis, synthesis and preparation of summaries to share with my students. And so I began the long journey of redefining my role as teacher from “teacher as talker” to “teacher as designer of learning environments.” I had to figure out how to create situations where my students could “research, analyze, synthesize and prepare summaries” to share with audiences (other than me). And as I made the transition, I longed for longer blocks of instructional time. I found that students needed time to decide how to approach a task, trouble shoot their approach, execute their plan, present what they learned and reflect on how it went.

Thus I learned the first lesson of transitioning to the block schedule. Don’t ask teachers who lecture to suddenly work in a block schedule – get teachers comfortable with student-centered learning and wait for them to demand longer class periods. In other words, instructional vision precedes organizational tinkering. (Later as an assistant superintendent, I put that lesson to good use.)

So how will I structure this week’s block scheduling workshops ? For starters I won’t spend the day talking at them. Of course, teachers will want specific strategies they can use. While I will share many approaches, the workshop has to be more than a collection of lesson ideas. That’s too much like my early method of teaching – me simply delivering information. Besides I won’t be the smartest person in the room.

Staff development should model what you want to see in the classroom. As Donald Finkel has written, teaching is “providing experience, provoking reflection.” My goal will be to give the teachers the experience of transitioning through a variety of learning situations of varying lengths. I want them to see the learning strategies in action and get a feel for how their level engagement can impact their sense of passage of time. I want them to leave with more than teaching ideas. I hope to provoke their ongoing reflection on what happens when students have more time to take ownership of the content, process and evaluation of their learning.

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Why Don’t We Teach Sequencing Skills? It’s an Essential Higher-Order Thinking Strategy

We spend a lot of time in school getting students to learn sequential information – timelines, progressions, life cycle of a moth, steps for how to. Typically the teacher teaches the student the sequence and the student correctly identifies the sequence for teacher on the test. Thus we treat a sequence as a ordered collection of facts to be learned, not as a thinking process for students to use.  This memorization reduces the student's "mastery" of the chronology to lower order thinking. I was guilty of this when I first started teaching history "Can someone give me two causes and three results of WWII?" 

When students are asked to observe a process and develop a sequence they have an opportunity to use a full spectrum of higher-order thinking skills – they must recognize patterns (analyze), determine causality (evaluate) and then decide how they would communicate what they've learned to others (create). Sequencing can be taught across the curriculum at a variety of grade levels – we simply have to ask the students to observe and do the thinking.

There is some interesting research that demonstrates that students have trouble when asked to develop sequences. It comes from the Program for International Student Assessment.  PISA is an assessment (begun in 2000) that focuses on 15-year-olds' capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy. PISA studied students in 41 countries and assessed how well prepared students are for life beyond the classroom by focusing on the application of knowledge and skills to problems with a real-life context. For more examples of PISA questions and data see my blog post.

Sample sequencing problem from PISA 2003.

The Hobson High School library has a simple system for lending books: for staff members the loan period is 28 days, and for students the loan period is 7 days. The following is a decision tree diagram showing this simple system:

Hobson

The Greenwood High School has a similar, but more complex library lending system:
All publications classified as “Reserved” have a loan period of 2 days.
For books (not including magazines) that are not on the reserved list, the loan period is 28 days for staff, and 14 days for students. For magazines that are not on the reserved list, the loan period is 7 days for everyone.
Persons with any overdue items are not allowed to borrow anything. 

Task
Develop a decision tree diagram for the Greenwood High School Library system so that an automated checking system can be designed to deal with book and magazine loans at the library.  Your checking system should be as efficient as possible (i.e. it should have the least number of checking steps). Note that each checking step should have only two outcomes and the outcomes should be labeled appropriately (e.g. “Yes” and “No”).

The student results were rated on a rubric scale.  Only 13.5% of US students were able correctly answered the question. Their international 15-year-old peers didn't fare much better – 14.3% of them answered correctly. 

The correct response looked something like this.

Greenwood
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Free the Information (in Museums and Schools)

Museums share at least one thing in common with schools. They have traditionally functioned as repositories of information. 
Visit a museum and you can view the information (art) that a curator has selected, organized, and presented. Often its significance and meaning will be explained to you in a wall label. In the traditional school, curriculum experts select information that teachers organize and present to students. Most teachers talk a lot, so students spend much of their day being told what information is important and why. Later they sit at their desks and fill out worksheets that reinforce what they just heard.
Schools, museums and other traditional information gatekeepers (think newspapers, publishers, etc) got along fine when they were able to control information and its flow. The one who “owned the presses” decided what was important. Most of us were accustomed to this asymmetry of information production and distribution. After all, it was much easier to read a book than to write and publish one.
 
What is “revolutionary” about the information revolution is not all the “cool” new technologies – it’s the fact that the information monopoly enjoyed by the gatekeepers has been broken. We can now control the information we access, save, alter and share.
 
Today’s New York Times features a story about how museums are re-thinking their web presence in light of the rapidly changing information landscape. “To Ramp Up Its Web Site, MoMA Loosens Up” NY Times March 4, 2009.

The museum wants the site to transform how the public interacts with an institution that can sometimes seem forbidding and monolithic.

“The notion of opening up the museum’s singular voice is really the driving thought behind this,” said Allegra Burnette, creative director of digital media for the museum, who has been working on the redesign for a year and a half. She added, “We’re opening the doors, though not necessarily throwing them open.”

The site, which she and other MoMA officials stress is a work in progress, will now include what its designers call a “social bar” at the bottom, which when clicked will expand to show images and other information that users can “collect” and share after registering for a free account at the Web site (moma.org). A user could build a portfolio of Walker Evans photographs or Elizabeth Murray paintings and send them to friends, Ms. Burnette said. The site will also eventually make it easy for users both casual and scholarly to trace lines of interest, digging up more information about works from publications and curators, she added.

 
So what lessons can school learn from MoMA? 

Put aside all the social networking / Web 2.0 features MoMA is adding to its site, and it’s really about giving viewers more functionality and control over how they interact with the museum’s collection. MoMA and other museums realize that they will need to stop treating their audience as passive consumers of information. 

I’m not suggesting schools need to run out and build new 2.0 websites. Actually we already have an audience of students sitting in the classroom who can interact with information and each other without the need to go online. What educators need to do is rethink what teaching and learning is all about. It’s no longer “teaching as talking.” Nor is the purpose of school to simply dispense information to students. Schools need to function as thoughtfully designed learning environments where students can investigate information and be given a chance to reflect (with their peers) on what they learned and how they see themselves progressing as learners. That can be done with a variety of technologies including pen and paper. A social network is already sitting in the classroom.
 
Image credit: flick/Bonnie BonBon
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Educate for 21st-Century Skills: Fad or Necessity?

educational fad
educational fad

Another shot at progressive education. The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skill By Jay Mathews Washington Post January 5, 2009. He writes: 

Granted, the 21st-century skills idea has important business and political advocates… It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?

Actually millions of students are learning to think and work creatively, it’s just not in school. They do that stuff at home on their own time. Meanwhile much of their class time is now mandated on mind-numbing test prep on those “19th-century skills.” Teachers who want to have a more engaging classroom have to sneak it into the curriculum – project-based learning has been pushed to the back of the class. 

Columnist’s like Mr. Matthews have to realize that new technologies have already put students in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share. Students are using new digital media to share their creativity with the world. 

What can schools do to support learning in the digital age?  Monitor the information flow and and thinking in the classroom. This changes the role of teacher from dispensing information to instructional designer. Students can’t simply give information back to their teacher. They need a chance to to create a product that asks them to communicate their thinking to a more authentic audience. Teachers will need the support and training to create supportive learning environments that considers basic questions like:

  • How is information flowing through my class?
  • What level of thinking skills are students being asked to use?
  • How do students get to share what they’ve learned? - Who is their audience? - What is their purpose? 

Image credit: flickr/boskizzi

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21st Century Skills or Adequate Yearly Progress?

The Boston Globe (October 30, 2008) recently reported on efforts to redirect district curriculum to "skills the district has deemed necessary for survival in the 21st century, including critical thinking, invention, problem-solving, and multicultural collaboration."

In a town known for top-notch schools, a Sharon School Committee member has launched a grassroots movement that she and other officials hope could lead to less emphasis on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System statewide.
"Accountability is a good thing. Learning standards are a good thing. But is focusing on one test a fair measure of student success? I think that answer is, 'No,' " said Laura Salomons, a School Committee member since May and a mother of four.
Salomons has submitted a proposal that seeks community support for allowing teachers to avoid tailoring their lessons to the MCAS. Instead, she would like to see teachers directed to instruct students on skills the district has deemed necessary for survival in the 21st century, including critical thinking, invention, problem-solving, and multicultural collaboration.
"I have come to the conclusion that we, as a school district, may be overly consumed with doing well on MCAS," Salomons began in her eight-page proposal. "The focus is a detriment to reaching the school committee and superintendent's goal of 'providing students with . . . learning opportunities that encourage lifelong learning skills and that support a student's artistic, social, emotional and physical development.' "  More

I find that I rarely get asked to do staff development to "bring the scores up." Increasingly I'm asked to help teachers create more engaging learning environments for students.

While NCLB began with the admirable goal of narrowing demographic performance gaps and putting an end to sorting kids on the “bell curve,”  it may be doing just the opposite. Many of our schools are now compelled to force feed the content required for “adequate progress” as measured by standardized state tests. Does test prep = academic "feed-lot?"

Too little time is left for student-centered, project-based learning that allows students to work at the upper level of Bloom. Innovation requires much trial and error (Bloom’s evaluation). Learning to self-assess your problem solving approach is not a skill fostered in multiple-choice test-prep environment.

NCLB correctly put the focus on student achievement. Our students will need a strong foundation in core concepts. But schools can’t be filled with routine tasks. They need to be fluid environments focused on helping students take responsibility for thinking and problem solving where there sometimes isn’t a right answer.