Discovering Passions

Today we took delivery of some gadgets for our little classroom MakerSpace. So far we have received a Raspberry Pi and a Makey Makey. Last week I showed short videos that demonstrated how each of the gadgets worked. Needless to say, the kids were excited to get their hands on them. We divided into three groups during class: one to explore the Makey Makey, one to explore the Raspberry Pi and one to explore the Google Cardboard viewfinders that we received last week. The learning was awesome!

Caleb and Trevor had some experience with the Raspberry Pi and want to use it for their 20% Time project, creating a video game app. Derrick also had some experience with the Raspberry Pi and so those three boys took charge of leading the group exploration of that technology. Meanwhile, Ian, Linsey, Taylor, Dylan and Andrew were busy working with the Makey Makey. In the hallway, Nicole, Hannah, Alexa, Steph and a few others were exploring the capabilities of the Google Cardboard.


This class period was the kind of learning we love to see. The kids were animated and fearless. They tried, failed and tried again. They saw each device as a puzzle to solve. They shared ideas, debated, experimented and finally solved some of the immediate problems like what apparatus is necessary for each device and how to properly hook up the boards. The Google Cardboard group was busy discovering an entire YouTube section devoted to Google Cardboard environments. Such cool stuff.

We hope that exposure and access to these devices will expand kids' thinking and help them come up with a 20% Time idea that will interest them for a long, long time. Already, Andrew wants to come in before school to rearrange the room so that we have a proper space for the Raspberry Pi station and Trevor and Caleb are working with our tech specialist to get the Raspberry Pi ready with all of the necessary peripherals. They have taken responsibility to create their own learning and learning space. Isn't this what we say we want? It sure is!

For and against computers in schools - Kelvin Smythe inspires an important debate.

Tairua

I too read the Stuff article about Tairua School placing technology 'centre stage' at their school with some misgivings and have been intrigued with the responses to Kelvin’s critical posting aboutthe use of computers in education and also to his followup posting.

I was motivated to read the information on the school website and to view all the class blogs to see for myself.  I have   also had the occasion to drive past the school the past year and have often thought what a wonderful environment Tairua is for the children to explore – with or without the use

of technology.

It would seem to me that technology is being seen by most/many schools as the ‘silver bullet’ essential to ensuring success for students in the future –  so called ‘future proofing’ .

There are a number of phrases I  agree with in the Stuff article about the school but I don’t see technology as ‘centre stage’. It is, if used properly, a powerful tool for students to deepen their learning; conversely it is all too easy for the use of such technology for shallow learning. I don’t think students being ‘plugged in’ any guarantee of real learning. Students these days are 'plugged i almost all their waking time; the virtual world is taking over from the real.

The success with using technology is the interpretation of Tairua’s phrase - a ‘genuine process of discovery’. I wasn’t able, looking through the class blogs to ascertain this. I would need to visit and read /view what the students have produced.

When I visit classrooms I like to read some of the inquiry learning research on show. Ideally the classroom walls (and individual student work) should replicate the in depth thinking seen in the best of Science Fair exhibits. In such research the challenge, or research questions should be on display, the process of inquiry  obvious and the findings made clear and often   include further things to explore from unanswered questions arising throughout the study - all knowledge is tentative. And for all this learning to be assisted by the use of technology.

I am usually disappointed. Cutting and pasting – learning via Google is more often the case. 

Student research, if it is genuine, ought to feature markers such as ‘I used to think’,’ I now think’,’ I am still confused about this’ to indicate the changing of students’ minds as they ‘construct’ their own knowledge.  And ideally students need to be able to defend their conclusions and teachers need to challenge students to do so. This is beyond ‘facilitation’.

I have no idea if this is the case at Tairua.

As for the comment that Tairua has  removed   art from classroom environments because it 'distracts ' students I have mixed feelings.

 An attractive room environment featuring current research/inquiry studies and students ideas expressed through art and language is vital. Some call the room environment the ‘fourth teacher’ (after the teacher, the material to be learnt, and the ideas of other within the classroom and online).

A teacher’s classroom is an important ‘message system’. If it is full of teacher distractions, posters etc   it is the teacher’s class. If it is full of well displayed inquiry, language and art work , all featuring the students identity and ‘voice’, then such an environment is not a distraction, it is a celebration of student thinking

I have to agree with Kelvin that the ‘heart, vivacity and substance of curriculum areas’ are all too often missing in classrooms replaced by an emphasis on technology.

It does seem to me that some teachers are captured by technology and, if this is the case, such technology is itself a distraction from real learning.

A futurist has stated in a world when students are connected almost every minute of their waking hours that now the ‘offline is the new luxury’ and that humanistic schools should cultivate the offline – the real world almost as an antidote to be ‘plugged in’ all the time.

Any new technology has both positive and negative consequences - the most obvious example atomic power. Even the humble book, as a result of the printing press,  allowed ideas to spread but  caused   the loss of oral language and story telling. As Sophocles wrote, ‘Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse’.

What does it mean to be human in an increasingly digital world?  What might be lost?

Einstein has written, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’ and it is imagination that is at stake our education system today. We must be careful not to throw out creativity with our obsession with technology. We need to protect at all costs a humanistic education – the holistic Kelvin believes so strongly in.

We must be suspicious of people who look to technology as the solution to everything.

We must fight against the standardised teaching that computer power is introducing into our schools. 

We must be careful not to be captured by those selling ‘Silicon Valley snake oil’. Technology is a tool, a powerful one, and one all the more dangerous if used unquestionably.

Elwyn Richardson

When I had the occasion to drive past Tairua School I thought what a rich environment to create a 21^st C learning environment it would be.  An environment with its genesis in the kind ofcreative work that Elwyn Richardson put into practice in his small rural schoolin the 1950s but with the added advantage of the sensible use of modern technology.

This holistic learning has all but been lost - not helped by the introduction of National Standards, the continuing use of demeaning ability grouping and formulaic  'nest practices'. This emphasis on standarisation is not providing the necessary personalisation required to 'future proof' students.

A school ought to be community of scientists and artists, as in Elwyn's school, with students exploring their immediate world and the wider world students’ now have access to.

What does it mean to be human in a digital world? Maybe ‘offline is now the new luxury’?

 Maybe this is the really important question. 

The comments to Kelvin's critique about the use of computers show this is an issue worth debating.

That'll teach him

My school years were patchy to say the least. My father was in the Royal Air Force, so I spent most of my formative years travelling, and switching schools on a regular basis, which played havoc with my education. I went to 10 schools in total, starting in Gibraltar at St George's Primary School and completing my schooling in Brunssum, Holland at the AFCENT International School. My school years were difficult for one important reason. There was no National Curriculum, which meant that every school taught what they considered to be most important. Because I switched schools every year or so, I learnt some content two or three times, and I missed some content completely. I learnt more about process than product during those turbulent years.

On reflection, I can now see exactly how teachers can either make or break a child's education. The old maxim 'Doctors save lives, teachers make lives' is true. I recall one teacher in particular who took me on and inspired me to learn new things. Mr Handel was one of the two primary teachers at Cherhill Primary School near Calne in Wiltshire, who stand out in my memory. He spent time with me helping me in the areas I was struggling with, and he really went the extra mile, to make sure I achieved to my full potential. The other teacher in the same school was the polar opposite. I once asked her a question about English grammar. She looked at me with contempt, told me I had asked a 'stupid question' and then made a big joke out of it. The whole class laughed at me, and I went bright red with embarrassment. I was only 8 years old, but I can still recall how it felt. It taught me a lesson. I never asked another question in class throughout the whole of my school life. I will refrain from naming that teacher.

Many teachers are excellent at what they do, and really care about the children in their care. I try to do the same, aspiring to be like Mr Handel, taking time to give my students individual attention if they are struggling in some difficult area. I try to instil some of these values in my student teachers too. But there are a very few teachers who can stifle creativity and discourage individualism - exactly the traits we need to draw out from our learners so that they can develop the skills to transfer into lifelong learning. Teachers can make all the difference, but sometimes it is time and pressure that militate against this. I look at my own children now as they negotiate their way through school and into work, and I sometimes cringe at some of the things they come home and tell me about their school experiences. It's as tough for them as it was for me. But school isn't the be all and end all and nothing is graven in stone.

My travelling took its toll on my formative years, and I left school with very few qualifications. I made a lot of friends, and had to keep making new ones, so I became very adept at interpersonal skills, but was very weak on content. All of my academic achievements have been made because of my own efforts and due to my own passion for learning, and all of them after the age of 30. The week I finally left school, my form tutor met with my parents. 'Steve is a great lad, and is very sociable' he told them, 'but don't ever expect him to become an academic'.

Photo by Cam Good on Flickr


That'll teach him by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Podcast: Ideas and EdCamp

In this episode, we talk about idea generation, the kids' thoughts about the originality of their ideas, our very first student edcamp and our upcoming presentations and professional development dates. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes to get every episode and follow us on Twitter @dayankee and @melissahellwig4

Creative teaching readings - for teachers who want to fight back

By Allan Alach

I welcome suggested articles, so if you come across a gem, email it to me at allanalach@inspire.net.nz

What Parents Can Gain From Learning the Science of Talking to Kids

“The widening education gap between the rich and the poor is not news to those who work in education, many of whom have been struggling to close the gap beginning the day poor children enter kindergarten or preschool. But one unlikely soldier has joined the fight: a pediatric surgeon who wants to get started way before kindergarten. She wants to start closing the gap the day babies are born.”

http://bit.ly/1Lwui66

What The Martian Teaches Us About Scientific Literacy

“I see scientific literacy as a set of basic rules about how the world works, a student can apply to a novel situation in order to derive insights, make predictions and better decisions. The

‘Martian’, although he had never grown potatoes before, now had to do so in an alien environment. His understanding of these basic rules (e.g. manure contains valuable nutrients, plants need earth-like atmospheric pressure, water can be extracted from the air) allowed him to plan his survival. Most of these basic rules are not confined to a single discipline, but span across.”

http://bit.ly/1LAOUKu

An introduction to Mindful Teaching

‘The mindful teaching approach is slightly different and it does start with a question, but a question of a different kind. The mindful teaching question would be “Tell me what you do understand?”’

http://bit.ly/1W3fSvN

Is Anybody Listening? Research finds no advantage in learning to read from age five

“A University of Otago researcher has uncovered for the first time quantitative evidence that teaching children to read from age five is not likely to make that child any more successful at reading than a child who learns reading later, from age seven.”

http://bit.ly/1OHaNuc

How People Learn: An Evidence-Based Approach

Teachers will always need to use their knowledge of students and content to make professional judgments about classroom practice. However, we believe the art of teaching should also be informed by a robust understanding of the learning sciences so that teachers can align their decisions with our profession's best understanding of how students learn.

http://bit.ly/1GRZV4w

What if we radically changed the way high schools work and exist?

It's that schools were designed to crank out future workers at a time when the Industrial Revolution was in high gear. Most of us don't realize that our education system hasn't really changed since then, when it was designed to crank out factory workers. The whole goal was get people ready for repetition, routine, and defined tasks. Factory education, if you will.”

http://u.pw/1ksVKHR

Contributed by Bruce Hammonds:

Could Rubric-Based Grading Be the Assessment of the Future?

“Institutions of higher education are under pressure from students and employers to prove that graduates are gaining the cross-cutting skills — such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and quantitative analysis — necessary for success in the real world. Now, a consortium of 59 universities and community colleges in nine states is working to develop a rubric-based assessment system that would allow them to measure these crucial skills within ongoing coursework that students produce.”

http://bit.ly/1W49yJI

More schools are working to integrate the arts into classroom learning

For creative teachers worldwide it would seem; stating the obvious!

“The arts also do so much more.They engage kids in school, motivate them to learn, develop critical thinking, and equip them to be creative.”

http://wapo.st/1Kn3AHT

Questioning for learning, Questioning for life.

This is the ultimate responsibility of education – one that all too often not realised and one that underpins the philosophy of creative teachers..

Rachel Carson

“Esteemed biologist Rachael Carson once stated , ‘If a child is to keep their inborn sense of wonder alive he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, mystery and excitement of the world around him.’”

http://bit.ly/1NSPBkT

Am I Failing the Introverts in My Classroom?

Bill Ferriter:

“The way in which certain instructional trends—education buzzwords like “collaborative learning” and “project-based learning” and “flipped classrooms”—are applied often neglect the needs of introverts.”

http://bit.ly/1W4aKwJ

Nonacademic Skills Are Key To Success. But What Should We Call Them?

“More and more people in education agree on the importance of learning stuff other than academics. But no one agrees on what to call that “stuff”."

http://n.pr/1ZVHK9W

School Is Bad For Children

John Holt:

“Almost every child on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling – or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruc­tion, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years.”

http://bit.ly/1W6BSLu

From Bruce’s ‘goldie oldies’ file:

Education at a crossroad - while many teachers seem confused in educational no mans' land

“There is a battle being fought for the minds of our future citizens between those who see

education as a means to achieve narrow political or economic ends and those who see education as developing the full potential, or gifts and talents, of all students.  In the centre of this battle are teachers distracted by defending the status quo.”

http://bit.ly/1PFwPg6

An amoeba - a model for future change!

Lessons on learning and change from an amoeba.

“It seems strange to think of one of natures most simplistic animals as metaphor for an organizational model for the future but the amoeba is a good choice, as it has survived almost as long as life has been on the planet.”

http://bit.ly/1hRC8eF

Rip van Winkle and schools

‘Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred year snooze and is of course utterly bewildered by what he sees.

Every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when finally he walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school”, he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906”’

http://bit.ly/19Q84e0

The Red House opens

The Red House in Plymouth

Throughout my professional career I have had the pleasure to visit many excellent schools across the globe. Each one offers me a little more understanding and insight into the grander picture that is education. I count it a privilege to learn from the students and staff at every school I visit. But to be there at the birth of a school is a quite extraordinary honour. Tonight, along with more than one hundred others - supporters, parents, children and teachers - I saw the Red House officially opened by Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate Gallery. The Red House houses PSCA - the newly established Plymouth School for the Creative Arts.

PSCA is a history making school. Situated in the heart of Plymouth's drab dockland area of Millbay, it is a colourful haven for creativity and self expression. It is the first British school to open as a free school under the patronage of a College of Art, and  - as its visionary head teacher Dave Strudwick said in his speech tonight - it is a school from reception through to employment. Currently with just over 400 children on roll, ultimately it will be a place of learning for more than 1000 students.

Some of the children performing at the Red House opening 

As leader of this creative community, Dave Strudwick has a progressive vision for the curriculum of the Red House. He wants to ensure that the expressive and performing arts have equal time with the STEM subjects. He refuses to accept the oft accepted belief that children cannot succeed if they are poor at maths or science. Failure is not an option when learning through doing and making is the norm. The Tate Gallery's Sir Nicholas made his own prediction that PSCA will very soon become a template for contemporary education that many other schools will copy. PSCA, he said, contradicts the views of politicians that arts and creativity should take second place to STEM subjects. He said he expected government ministers to eat their words when they visited in the future.

The Red House is a beautifully designed space within which learning and creativity can flourish. Built on three floor levels, it gleams boldly in contrast to Millbay Docks international ferry port and the adjacent industrial units. This is almost a metaphor for the fight it has endured against its critics. Instead of classrooms, the school features studios and other open, flexible and creative spaces. As one might expect, dance, music, drama and other expressive arts feature largely in the school curriculum. Students can develop their thinking through a number of traditional and non-conventional curriculum activities. They might find themselves designing the menu and cooking the school lunch, under the supervision of a teacher called Andrew (students know their teachers by first names) - who incidentally has also been an award winning chef in his time. Teachers come from all backgrounds. There is an award winning composer who has worked for BBC radio and the Ministry of Sound, foreign language, geography and history teachers who are passionate to connect their subjects to learning to many other subjects, and a deputy head responsible for performance and pedagogy. The curriculum draws on evidence, expertise and understanding from psychology, neuroscience and social history. Creating Individuals and Making Futures is the school's defining document, guiding all their practises and processes.

Many of us will follow the development of PSCA over the coming years, as it blossoms and develops into a beacon for creativity, in a city that has re-created itself over and over again.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


The Red House opens by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Backing the future #BackToTheFuture

Image source: Deviant Art http://mjmstudios2020.deviantart.com/art/

Many people are excited about today - Wednesday 21st October 2015. The reason? It's Back to the Future Day - the day the fictional characters Marty McFly and Dr Emmett Brown arrive from 1985 into 'the future' in the wonderful science fiction movie trilogy Back to the Future. There will be many blogs and articles celebrating this today. So here's one more (I refuse to be left out). Back in the late 80s and early 90s, the films were a must for everyone of a certain age. Those of us who were the same age as Marty, late teens, early twenties, were fascinated by what we might be doing in the future. Would we still be alive when 2015 arrived. What age would each of us be? What would 2015 bring us? How would we cope with all the new technology? What jobs would we be doing? Would we have children? Grandchildren? These are the reasons why so many of us are excited by the fact that the date has finally arrived, so we can look back on time, and compare what we hoped and expected with today's reality. We are all time travellers - in one direction at least.

In Back to the Future 2, Doc brings Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer, into to the future to try to avert a personal disaster. This is the old timeline trope where you go back in time to change something there, in the hope that it will make your own present better in some way. However, the twist in Back to the Future Part 2 is that Marty has to travel into the future to redeem his present. Along the way there are many twists and turns, and a temporal dance of intricate proportions results. It's a splendid yarn, and it kept us entertained for some time back in the day. Yet, looking at the movie now, how many of the technologies that were predicted actually exist, and what does it mean for us, living in 'the future' of 2015?

Source: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/amphalon/sets/

Flying cars are a classic example of a technology that has been predicted for more than a century. The French artist Villemard painted images of flying vehicles back in 1910. We are still waiting, because, after all, do we really need or desire flying cars? How might they make our lives better, and what attendant risks and challenges might the flying car bring to our already complicated 21st Century lifestyles? Driverless cars are probably enough to be grappling with right now. Other similar technologies featured in BTTF2 included self lacing footwear, self-drying and adjusting clothing, and yes - the hoverboard. Back in the eighties, skateboards were new and exciting. Now it seems they are largely consigned to the hardcore of youths who regularly try to severely injure themselves by performing dangerous tricks on hard surfaces in deserted city centres in the evenings. Whether or not hoverboards have been invented or indeed are commercially viable is open to discussion, but we already have Maglev trains that work on a similar principle, so we could say that this prediction is partially fulfilled.

Other technologies are conspicuous by their absence. There is no mention of the Internet in the movie. Where are smartphones and social media? All are missing because they either didn't figure in the minds of the writers, or they simply hadn't been invented at the time the movie was being made. Other technologies are laughable by their inclusion - think of the Fax machines middle-aged Marty's boss uses to fire him from his job. Does anyone still use fax machines in 2015? Controlling the weather? Hmmm. And what about the inverted, gravity defying orthopaedic frame used by Marty's ageing father George McFly? Hardly credible then, or now.

One interesting technology that does appear in the movie was nascent in 1985, but it did exist - video conferencing, and it is portrayed accurately in BTTF2. Note that several times in the movie, the characters communicate with each other through wall screens that project images and sound. I first saw videoconferencing in 1972, it has been around for a while in various forms, and it was already featuring as a futuristic means of communication in such TV shows as Star Trek. It wasn't hard to include it as a future means of communication, and of course this is particularly accurate with the advent of FaceTime, Skype and other similar visual media. But it's an isolated case of accuracy in the midst of mis-predictions.

Image and graphics by Steve Wheeler

We run the risk of ridicule when we try to predict the future. No-one has been there. It's impossible to predict it with great accuracy. Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the telephone, was so excited by his wonderful idea he made this declaration (left). He was right. Every town in the U.S. has a telephone. But it's a ridiculous statement, in hindsight. The fact is, everyone who wants a cell phone has one (or more) in their pockets. Bell couldn't predict the future beyond his current frame of reference, because as Voltaire once pointed out: 'Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.' Those who can break out of their current thought culture, and imagine a different future, are the visionaries who create that future.

Voltaire also said 'The present is pregnant with the future'. Go make your own future.

P.S. I'm a big fan of the Back to the Future trilogy, so if you try to suggest I'm dissing these movies, your comments will die at the moderation stage. :)


Backing the future #BackToTheFuture by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.