Group items tagged

What spaces can we build online that aren’t quantified, tracked, scored, graded, assessed, and accredited?

What we have is a series of online classes with no real infrastructure to support the work that students do on college campuses outside and between those classes

Up to now, online learning has taken little notice of the web upon which it’s suspended

Today, the road to access doesn’t necessarily detour through the university, and anyone, of just about any age, can travel it.

We’ve created happy little caskets inside which learning fits too neatly and tidily (like forums, learning management systems, and web conferencing platforms). We’ve timed learning down to the second, developed draconian quality assurance measures, built analytics to track every bit of minutiae, and we’ve championed the stalest, most banal forms of interaction — interaction buried beneath rubrics and quantitative assessment — interaction that looks the same every time in every course with every new set of students.

But an over-reliance on summative assessment can distort the quality of education by becoming the dominant focus of school activity.

Removal of the currently over-specified and repetitive national curriculum from primary schools in favour of clearly defined goals on literacy, numeracy, science and computer science.

more stretching

judged by Ofsted

Move the focus of our exam system to 18 and develop clearly rigorous and stretching standards for both academic and vocational A-levels, with maths and English retained until 18 for both

A study

should be commissioned to advise on the right balance of timing and the optimal mix between formative and summative assessment

Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.

some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.

First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills

Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained

inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks

Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.

In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.

At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.

if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.

The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges

first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training

Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.

But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.

We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.

education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.

teachers don't use them.

Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method

these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.

These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.

constant juggling act

greater collaboration among teachers.

But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?

professional development is a massive undertaking.

Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.

The first challenge is the cost.

measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.

Students should be counseled not only on the risks to their physical safety, but also on the ways that the texts they are composing today, and believe they have eliminated, often have lives beyond their computers, and may reappear in the future at a most inopportune time.

learn methods of critically analyzing the ways in which others are using multiple semiotic systems to convince them to participate, to buy, to believe, and to resist a wide range of appeals

It also implies the process of uncovering one’s own cultural, social, political and personal (e.g. age, gender) backgrounds and understanding how these backgrounds can and often do influence one’s own ways of communicating and interacting with others in virtual and face-to-face encounters.

nstances of anti-social behavior in online communication such as using hurtful language and discriminating among certain members of virtual communities have been reported.

allows their members to construct and act out identities that may not necessarily be their real selves and thus lose a sense of responsibility toward others

Professional development for teachers and teacher educators must be ongoing, stressing purposeful integration for the curriculum and content, rather than merely technical operation. It also needs to provide institutional and instructional support systems to enable teachers to learn and experiment with new technologies. Offering release time, coordinating student laptop initiative programs or providing wireless laptop carts for classroom use, locating computer labs in accessible places to each teacher, scheduling lab sessions acceptable for each teacher, and providing alternative scheduling for professional development sessions so that all teachers can attend, are a few examples of such systems. Finally, teachers and students must be provided with technical support as they work with technology. Such assistance must be reliable, on-demand, and timely for each teacher and student in each classroom.

educators must address plagiarism, ownership, and authorship in their classrooms.

strategies to assess the quality of information and writing on the Web

help students develop netiquette

Such netiquette is thus not only about courtesy; more importantly, it is about tolerance and acceptance of people with diverse languages, cultures, and worldviews.

Teachers and teacher educators must examine with students the social processes through which humans grow individually and socially, and they must expose the potentially negative consequences of one’s individual actions. In doing so, teachers and educators will be able to reinforce the concept of learning as a social process, involving negotiation, dialogue, and learning from each other, and as a thinking process, requiring self-directed learning as well as critical analysis and synthesis of information in the process of meaning-making and developing informed perceptions of the world.

The research confirms what we know to be true. The arts impact all learning.

Neuroscience has also provided an emerging branch of research related to studying the arts. For instance, "Learning Arts and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition" reinforced the positive impact arts learning has on a young person's ability to retain information.

Neither the arts nor the sciences have a monopoly on teaching creativity, collaboration, or problem-solving skills.

The design process proved to be as important as the finished product.

Schools must provide opportunities for students to learn across disciplines. No longer can we teach in silos.