This particular podcast, we will be focusing on the question, “How Do We Connect Technology and Classroom Instruction Seamlessly?”
We’ve presented at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai and ETC in Kuala Lumpur on our work at ISB on moving towards an embedded curriculum focused less on tech skills and more on the 21st Century skills that you read so much about in the edublogosphere. We wrote about our thinking in our blogs and as guest bloggers on Dangerously Irrelevant. We’ve put up our work to share and collaborate with in wikis, initially in newliteracy and then as an ISB21 team.Now we are excited to take questions, speak to solutions, and tackle issues that relate to implementation on these very Big Ideas.
SOS is a biweekly podcast produced by educators in the Asian region discussing the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning. Join us on Ustream.tv for the live broadcast. Listeners will have an opportunity to Skype into the conversation “on the fly” as well as listen to an archived version via iTunes.
Winner and Hetland ask “Why do we teach the arts in schools?”
They argue that despite popular opinion, they had not found causation between arts learning and academic achievement. They cite a Gallup poll that 80% of Americans believe that learning a musical instrument improves math skills.
Winner and Hetland claim that their research in some schools in Boston show that while corelation exists, causation does not. Following up on this and reading around, this gets disputed places, to which they have responded. I’m going to focus on the points in this article.
Interestingly Winner and Hetland refute the commonly held idea ideal that learning the arts improves the math and science learning that schools often focus on in “a test-driven education system”. Instead, art education is valuable for more important reasons:
There is, however, a very good reason to teach arts in schools, and it’s not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on. In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum.
They go on to add:
In our analysis, we identified eight “studio habits of mind” that arts classes taught, including the development of artistic craft. Each of these stood out from testable skills taught elsewhere in school.
The other 7 habits are persistence, expression, making clear connections between schoolwork and the world, and in their words, “we were particularly struck by the potentially broad value of four other kinds of thinking being taught in the art classes we documented: observing, envisioning, innovating through exploration, and reflective self-evaluation.”
I have written before about the need for a thinking curriculum - one less focused on content knowledge.
But let’s think about those last four skills: observing, envisioning, innovating, and reflection.
These are the powerful skills that we talk about constantly as required in our 21st Century Learners.
Here’s what Winner and Hetland had to say about each:
Observing - “Seeing clearly by looking past one’s preconceptions is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law. Naturalists must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen observational skills too, as do doctors.“
Envisioning - art teachers were asking questions “prompting students to imagine what was not there.“
Innovation - “Teachers in our study told students not to worry about mistakes, but instead to let mistakes lead to unexpected discoveries.“
Reflective self-evaluation - Students are “asked to step back, analyze, judge, and sometimes reconceive their projects entirely.”
These are the skills - the only skills - that will allow our students to change the world for the better.
I’ve done a lot of quoting this post, so I’ll let Winner and Hetland’s words finish it off:
We don’t need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skills - we already target these in math and language arts. We need the arts because in addition to introducing students to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.
For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking.
Those who have learned the lessons of the arts, however - how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes, and how to envision solutions - are the ones likely to come up with the novel answers needed most for the future.
Image “je dois apprendre aux curieux” by drunkprincess, found at Flickr Creative Commons
Ian Shapira from The Washington Post has written an article this week describing how many young teachers in Washington DC have Facebook accounts that are publicly accessible and are filled with content that represents them in inappropriate ways. Essentially, they are being young adults, but in a way that they don’t realize is in the public domain.
It’s almost like Googling someone: Log on to Facebook. Join the Washington, D.C., network. Search the Web site for your favorite school system. And then watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional — or both.
The article goes on to ask whether teachers should be judged on their out-of-school lives if it doesn’t affect their effectiveness with students:
Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don’t see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?
In states including Florida, Colorado, Tennessee and Massachusetts, teachers have been removed or suspended for MySpace postings, and some teachers unions have begun warning members about racy personal Web sites. But as Facebook, with 70 million members, and other social networking sites continue to grow, scrutiny will no doubt spread locally.
Whether they “should” or not is a big discussion point, but whether they “will” or not really isn’t.
In today’s society where political correctness reigns and public scrutiny and “moral” standards are held in front of everyone’s face, there is no doubt that Washington DC will follow the other states in removing teachers for social networking behavior.
Do adults need to be re-taught what privacy means since it’s meaning has changed with the coming of the internet?
Do they know how to manage their own Facebook accounts - never mind teach students how to protect theirs?
Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.
Are young teachers in training ready to defend their Facebook profile in an interview?
“I know for a fact that when a superintendent in Missouri was interviewing potential teachers last year, he would ask, ‘Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page?’ ” said Todd Fuller, a spokesman for the Missouri State Teachers Association, which is warning members to clean up their pages. “If the candidate said yes, then the superintendent would say, ‘I’ve got my computer up right now. Let’s take a look.’ “
Ultimately, the lessons of cyber-safety and responsibility that we teach our students needs to be shared with our teachers too. It should be included in their professional training (along with learning to use web 2.0 tools to enhance education of course).
All students, no matter what future profession they go into, also need to see the importance of knowing what they share and how they share online. And what better way to model this for a teacher than to share the very impact it has on our own lives and how we are perceived through what we and others share online.
Too many believe that the rules of public behavior are abandoned in Facebook. Here’s a terrific video which makes this very clear. Thanks to Brian Lockwood for the link to this on Twitter.
We were all set for the MS Concert for Climate Change on Thursday, April 24th, in conjunction with Project Global Cooling.
Then the storm hit.
Wednesday night we had a storm in Bangkok like we haven’t seen in some time. Power was knocked out and stayed out as lines were down going into ISB. The school administration made the quick call to cancel school for Thursday.
As a result, the MS Concert for Climate Change didn’t happen, but happening all day Friday, April 25th is a live stream of the ES Earth Day Festival. Student music, film, poems, and performances, all part of the Earth Day festivities here at ISB.
Join us and stay tuned for the rescheduled time for the MS Concert for Climate Change.
Cooling the globe with youth, music, YouTube, green schools - and you.
Justin, Kim, and I have joined this network and through the amazing work of Kerry Dyke and the ISB Green Panthers, ISB will be adding our students’ voices to the global voice calling for awareness and efforts for global cooling.
We are in Earth Week here at ISB, with a wealth of activities bringing the school together in its efforts to be more green - all organized by the Green Panthers and supported by the concerned students, faculty, and admin of ISB.
Join us as we stream two concerts of music, performances, student work showcases, and participation in the name of climate change.
(presentation can be found here - just scroll to the bottom)
It was great to see so many people interested and joining in on a conversation about a different approach to technology learning. In particular, thanks to the ISB and ISKL folks who also came as a show of support.
(It helped.)
(And I hope you got something out of it.)
Special thanks to Kim and Jeff for their support during the event, to Chad for the tech support, and of course, as always, to Justin for the work and getting me thinking aloud ;-).
It’s ETC time again. This year the conference is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - my old stomping grounds. Lived there 8 years, got married there, and 2 of my 3 kids were born there. It’s going to be fun to be back.
Since then, other great minds (not that our own were great) have contributed to refining it to an awesome starting point for an embedded technology curriculum that focuses on thinking rather than technology. We have formed an ISB21 team to build it, support it, and enact it. We still have work to do, but it’s coming along nicely.
Kim Cofino, from Always Learning is part of that team and will also be presenting in KL on “Developing the Global Student: Practical Ways to Infuse 21st Century Literacy in Your Classroom”.
If you are going to be in KL this weekend for the conference, I hope that you can swing by that session and my own workshop:
IT Curriculum 2.0, Session V, 11:45-12:45, Johore Room.
How does and information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century? In the face of exponentially changing times, old I.T. Scope and Sequences became outdated the moment they were printed. Schools need an embedded I.T. curriculum that ensures that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology. It must focus on habits that provide students with opportunity to succeed not matter what their futures hold. This session shares a new model that speaks to these habits and makes 21st Century Learning accessible to teachers and students. Begin the conversation here and continue it at your schools.
Hope to see you there, if not at the workshop, perhaps at the pub!
Entries (RSS)