First of all, any school curriculum that does not adequately include teaching learners about the past is no curriculum, in my mind. Moreover, as I’ve been pushing since day one on this blog here and here, it shouldn’t be an either/or proposition. History and the other core subjects are essential; and so is teaching students the skills they need in today’s world. There is time enough for a skilled teacher to fit them both in.

Julie Lindsay addresses this topic in her e-Learning Journeys blog. An excerpt:

I tried to explain that my class does not end when the students work out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. My students interact with each other, they interact with me, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of ‘social networking’. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, folksonomy, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else I can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning. I do not apologise for this. I do not essentially see anything wrong with this in 21st century learning. In fact this approach has changed my whole teaching style and changed the way I interact with the students. The development of PLEs (personal learning environments) and ubiquitous and mobile computing means I now start my classes with ‘…open your blogs, refer to the class wiki…etc’ rather than ‘..take out your books and copy from the board’.

Read more.

Photo by San Diego Shooter

The student’s nightmare began when he was a fifth grader, when his father began to keep track of his academic ranking in the class.

Ranked only within the top 10, he was frequently subjected to ridicule by parents and relatives.

“If you fail to enter a key university, you had better kill yourself, and I would not drop a single tear …” he quoted his father as threatening.

Like nearly all students of his age, he was put on a quasi-military regimen.

A college can provide a brief respite from pressure, but soon the specter of employment expectations will begin to loom.

This approach to education is not limited to China, but is evident throughout most Asian countries. I think it’s clear that the effects of such an approach to education are having and will have deleterious effects in the long run; the question is whether Asian nations believe the trade-off is worth it.

Cartoon by Zhou Tao

The agenda covered a whole range of school-related issues, including marketing, next year’s calendar, staffing, upgrading and use of technology, curriculum (language and MYP), new policies and procedures for managing budgets, etc. As I said, we covered a lot of ground.

The sessions were led by our executive principal, Paul Lieblich, who did a good job with pacing and keeping discussions from getting stuck. There was plenty of great input from all my fellow EtonHouse principals.

I guess the most valuable thing I took away from the conference was a new way to look at 2nd language assessment and how certain ways of evaluating student progress are not really so indicative of actual learning. We’re moving more in the direction of performance outcomes and assessing students strictly according to that kind of scale rather than simply giving a student an “A” because he did well on all his written and oral tests. The main focus is on communicative competency, and I am certainly in favor of that approach.

Although we principals spoke frankly of frustrations we’re having, I think that most of us left with an upbeat feeling about the leadership that Dr. Lieblich is providing. The question is whether EtonHouse corporate management will allow him and us to move things forward as we wish to.

For those of you thinking the current recession is the jarring event that will result in a revolution in learning; think again. Although a speaker at Online Educa in Berlin this past December predicted that entire training departments will be obliterated in the recession, that’s only likely to happen if the rest of the organizations these departments serve are obliterated. Otherwise, what we have learned from previous recessions is that training receives

]]> http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/02/the-death-of-the-classroom/feed/ 0 http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/01/the-problem-with-fuzzy-math/ http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/01/the-problem-with-fuzzy-math/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:05:01 +0000 Kevin Blissett http://kevinblissett.wordpress.com/?p=75 This article by Matthew Clavell brings forth a strong indictment against so-called “Fuzzy Math” (a.k.a. “Constructivist Math) as exemplified in the Everyday Mathematics program. I’m particularly interested in this because my boss is directing my school to use it. I have to say, I have not been impressed with the program, nor the philosophy behind it, either before and after reading the article.

Defenders of critical thinking say we need to rescue our schools from a repressive

]]> http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/01/the-problem-with-fuzzy-math/feed/ 0 http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/01/not-forgetting-arts-and-letters-in-the-race-for-information/ http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/01/not-forgetting-arts-and-letters-in-the-race-for-information/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:02:59 +0000 Kevin Blissett http://kevinblissett.wordpress.com/?p=67 In his article, “Pleasure, Beauty, Wonder,” John M. Eger, communications and public policy professor at the University of San Diego, intones a familiar refrain in today’s discussion over how to educate students: Is the beauty in our world and in education being lost in the race for information?

Eger points out the following statistics to illustrate the task assigned to educators:

• The top 10 jobs for today’s students don’t even exist yet.
• Adults will change jobs 10 times by the time they reach age 42.
• Some reports indicate that the amount of data and information has doubled every year in this century.

Clearly, getting a handle on all of this information and determining which is relevant is a major task for the 21st century workforce. However, there is another dynamic working here: In this high volume information age, the arts seem to be taking a back seat to more technologically oriented studies. Eger believes that this is a mistake, and I agree.

Correct use of all of this information is essential. Character, ethics, and a grounding in the humanities are crucial components to properly processing all of the data out there. Eger continues:

Addressing an education conference in late 2006, Dana Gioia, then the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said that we need “a system that grounds all students in pleasure, beauty, and wonder.

]]> http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/04/01/not-forgetting-arts-and-letters-in-the-race-for-information/feed/ 0 http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/03/28/another-eitheror-choice/ http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/03/28/another-eitheror-choice/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:00:00 +0000 Kevin Blissett http://kevinblissett.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/another-eitheror-choice/
Digital Education reports that UK schools will be forgoing some content in the National Curriculum in favor of learning classroom 2.0 skills like Tweeting, blogging, podcasting, social media networking, etc. This is another one of those choices that I don’t believe is “either/or.” Learners will need some instruction in learning these skills, but I doubt that a considerable amount of content needs to be excluded in order to accomplish the task. Quoting from The Guardian:

“The proposals would require…children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication.”

And from Digital Ed:

Even before the new documents are released they are fueling debate over content in UK schools. I can just imagine the response it will bring from subject-area specialists: Without the content, will students have anything meaningful to blog about?

]]> http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/03/28/another-eitheror-choice/feed/ 0 http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/03/28/content-vs-skills/ http://www.kevinblissett.com/blog/2009/03/28/content-vs-skills/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:16:00 +0000 Kevin Blissett http://kevinblissett.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/content-vs-skills/
Andrew J. Rotherman analyzes “21st century skills” and confronts the perennial conflict between content-oriented and skills-oriented education and comes to the conclusion–with which I agree whole-heartedly–that this discussion presents a false choice.

Rotherman correctly contends that whether to focus more on how to learn rather than what to learn has been debated since the days of Plato, though you wouldn’t know it from the fact that some education circles label it as a “new” approach. The International Baccalaureate Organization, for example, has been using an “inquiry” approach to education for 30 years.

Rotherman’s main point is that having the skills without the proper amount of content does not provide an adequate context for using the skills and critical thinking. That is, learners must have the content foundation upon which to exercise these skills.

To critically analyze various documents requires engagement with content and a framework within which to place the information. It’s impossible, for instance, to critically analyze the American Revolution without understanding the facts and context surrounding that event. Unfortunately, state, national, and international assessments show that despite a two-decade-long focus on standards, American schools still are not delivering a content-rich curriculum for all students.

…

Unfortunately some 21st-century skills proponents believe these skills should replace the teaching of content. They believe that because so much new knowledge is being created, students should focus onhow to know instead of knowing. This view threatens to reopen a debate in American education that is not new either: content pitted against critical thinking rather than the two complementing each other.

Ultimately, schools need to use both approaches, and I’m not sure that either philosophy is more important that the other. Students need to be able to provide a content context for information and also need to be able to analyze and expand upon it. To the degree that schools do both, they will be successful in preparing learners for the 21st century, in my view.

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