Tag Archives: education

Doing STEM

‘Doing STEM’ or ‘Doing STEAM’… there is a saying, “Put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”

I don’t want this to sound like a rant, and I don’t want to knock teachers for trying to do STEM projects. I do want to say that if 5 years ago a teacher did a project with kids where they broke them into groups and had them assemble a limited number of straws and a specific length of tape into the tallest possible tower, and if they do it again today it isn’t suddenly a STEM project.

Now, if that same lesson included teaching geometry and/or structural integrity; or if students had to design it such that their design had to have a function such as offices or apartments; or hold a weighted satellite dish; or if it had to factor in wind resistance (such as a blow dryer at close range); or if they had to model their design first and estimate the height they will achieve… if there was some thinking, designing, modelling, or estimating that was required before or even during the build process, well then it’s looking more like STEM.

Hands-on does not equal STEM. Building something does not equal STEM. Group challenges does not equal STEM. Meaningful integration of cross-curricular concepts, where problem solving requires thinking in more than one subject area relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math is STEM. It doesn’t have to check all the boxes, but it should include thoughtful integration of at least a couple of these.

It’s about making the cross-curricular connections explicit, or at least thinking through how the outcomes and expectations relate to these connections. It’s about developing competencies in the areas of STEM and not just doing a project that looks like STEM.

First Day of School

I’m genuinely excited about the year ahead. I know things are far from ‘back to normal’. I know safety is still a primary concern, and we’ll be wearing masks for quite some time yet. I know there will be unexpected challenges that come our way…

But the first day of a school year always holds so much promise! There is so much potential for us to do awesome things, and to watch our students shine. It’s an opportunity to look forward knowing that as educators we make a difference in people’s lives.

“With great responsibility comes great power”… that’s the reverse of the Spiderman quote, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and a teacher, John Sarte at Inquiry Hub, uses this to explain to students that while we give them a lot of time to work independently (a lot of responsibility) that comes with a lot of power. This is something that teachers understand, because they are given the great responsibility to teach, and they have tremendous power over what that experience looks like.

And collectively we have so much power over what the year ahead looks like… Let’s keep our optimism up, and make this school year exciting, engaging, and full of meaningful learning for everyone (teachers and students alike).

Choice time for teacher Pro-D

Last Friday I had a Pro-D, Professional Development Day, with the Inquiry Hub staff. We started the morning with a book talk, sharing what we have learned from books we are reading.
A few weeks ago, I had my teachers fill out a form sharing the title and link to a book that they wanted to read for their own personal development. I said that it didn’t have to be education-related, just something they wanted to learn from. Even though I said no obligation for follow up, my iHub staff suggested the book talk as part of their Pro-D day.

I loved hearing all the ideas and educational connections they made to the books they were reading.

Next, we moved on to personal learning time. We each shared what we were exploring, planning, or investigating, and then had an hour and a half to work on it. For example, two teachers worked on updating a questionnaire we give students when the apply to the school. Another teacher worked on a unit in one of his courses he thought needed work, and another teacher created a ‘Diversify your feed’ document and shared it with our staff and students:

I decided to create this image using information our team developed at our previous Pro-D. My way of making sense of our vision for the school:


We got together again (digitally, we weren’t meeting face-to-face) after lunch to share what we’d done, then we did some group planning around our timetable next year… a real challenge in a small school with a small staff that offers so many options for students.

Most of our day was about choice. Teachers got to share learning from a book of their choice, then they got to choose what they wanted to work on, before getting together for collaboration time. We spend a lot of our day at Inquiry Hub giving students time to work on things they want and need to work on. Our students have a lot of self-directed time at our school. It only seems fitting that when it’s time for our staff to learn, that we do the same.

Even though teachers got to choose what book they learned from (it didn’t have to be the one I gave them, although that seemed to be the one they mostly shared from), they were able to be really diverse in their sharing. Even though there were no constraints on what their personal learning time was used for, we shared our intentions before splitting up to spend that time on our own, or together by choice. We had accountability built into the day, but it was filled with personal choice.

It’s not just our students who benefit from choice in learning, our teachers benefit greatly too!

Teaching and Trust

I surveyed our Grad 9’s a couple days ago. Coming from middle school, and getting stuck in a single cohort, they really didn’t get the experience at our school we wanted for them. At Inquiry Hub our students usually connect across grades, and interact as a larger community, which is important in a really small school. But although we were able to give them full days, unlike large schools with a lot more cohorts to manage, the environment our 9’s came into is far more like an extension of a single class in middle school than a high school. That said, they really don’t know what they are missing compared to a regular year here… they’ve never seen it.

I asked them to write on a piece of paper, a positive, a challenge, and/or a suggestion or wish, and I collected them. They could write about any or all of these.

Here are a few of them:

The challenges and suggestions were all related to covid restrictions, with less clubs, and a lack of connection with other cohorts. Beyond that the comments were very positive.

“I like the open and just overall welcoming environment.”

“I like how you can structure your own day…”

“I like how our courses let us set our own goals and learning paths.”

“Even though our community is so small, I like how close we’ve all gotten.”

One comment in particular was quite interesting to me:

“I love how much the teachers trust us here.”

I agree that our teachers give students a lot of freedom, and choice. And students at iHub get a fair bit of unstructured time to work on what the want/need to work on. But I never thought of this through the lens of trust, like this student.

When students feel trusted, they feel empowered, they feel they have a responsibility to keep that trust. It’s an interesting lens to see the dynamic of the classroom through. How does the relationship between the students and the teachers change when trust is given and valued? Where does the responsibility for learning fall in a trusting relationship? What else is fostered in a trusting environment?

Kudos to our teachers for creating such a wonderful learning environment in these challenging times.

More like real life

I enjoy seeing teachers talk about assessment like this:

The best part of the clip is when Mrs. Lemon says, “I wrote better tests that focus less on recall and more on application.”

Although, I love the ending too… “At the end of the day, this is more like real life. There are very few circumstances where are you don’t know the answer to something and can’t look it up.”

What future are we preparing students for? How is our assessment demonstrating this? Are we showing what we value by what we measure, or are we just measuring what’s easy to measure?

Back to it

After a very restful March break, I’m back at it tomorrow. While the break was wonderful, and a part of me wants to just curl up in bed for another week, another part of me is excited for some busy normalcy.

It’s interesting, but I seem to get more of what I want done when I’ve got more on my plate… the very times that I wish I had more time, are the times when I get stuff done.

I’m looking forward to seeing staff and students. I’m looking forward to getting back into my morning workout routines. I’m looking forward to thinking about education in ways that I haven’t been too thoughtful about over the break.

The end of the year will come quickly now, and I know that in a few short months I’ll wonder where the time went. But for tomorrow, the focus will be catching up and connecting with my community, and then the ‘To Do’ list can officially start on Wednesday.

Cruise ships and education

It’s going to be a long time before cruise ships are going to reintegrated into people’s holiday schedules. Covid-19 has probably hit their market as hard as any other market. I actually had my first cruise planned through the Mediterranean last summer, but with that cancelled and refunded, I have no plans to ‘do’ a cruse any time soon.

The pandemic has also massively disrupted schools… but I fear that things will be business as usual soon, and kids will be ‘doing’ school just like they used to.

What was learned from remote learning and altered schedules?

What skills became more important?

What skills and competencies should we focus on?

What can students do at school besides going to block after block of classes?

I hope that we don’t just jump back into the way things used to be. Just as many will be cautious about getting on a cruise ship any time soon, we should also be cautious about heading back to school like it was in 2019.

Blockchain and education

Blockchain defined: Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network… ~ IBM

One place that I see blockchain technology being used in education is credentialing. Right now a general arts degree at a good university is a credential that says, ‘I know how to study, write essays, and express my ideas’. Unlike professional programs like engineering or law or med school, a general arts degree is about building more general skills. More and more jobs are not requiring a professional focused degree, but also demand more specific skills than a general degree.

Can a potential job candidate manipulate pivot tables in Excel? Or understand the basics of coding in python? Or use a design thinking process? These questions aren’t always answered by a degree, and might be answered by a certificate. What if Microsoft or other large companies delivered skill-based credentials through online courses? What if when you received certification of completion of the course, you didn’t just get an easily copied and doctored paper certificate, you also got digital certification that could not be doctored by you, but could be verified by anyone?

Imagine having a digital portfolio that linked to all your credentials in immutable ledgers. Your skills could be verified and job descriptions could include expectations of specific skills and credentials. What do you know? What can you do?

So, maybe in the future a college degree will be less impressive than a series of verifiable skills. Maybe high school students will start getting these credentials before they graduate. To me this had a few implications to think about:

1. If we move to a more skill-based economy, how will this affect our school curriculum?

2. If credentials and credentialing become a major driver to workforce hiring, will this force more specialization in high schools?

3. Where does that leave the soft skills like communication, critical thinking, and creativity?

Some people think that credentialing like this can replace teachers, I don’t. I think teachers become more valuable. Let credential testing and digital training measure the skills that are easily measured, and let teachers loose on helping students be more creative, more entrepreneurial, and better problem solvers. Let teachers focus on helping students trying things that are epic, things that are so big they are likely to fail, and help students understand perseverance. Have teachers focus on developing communication and cooperation skills, and helping students understand the importance of learning and process.

Credentialing won’t diminish the role of the teacher, it will magnify their importance in creating leaders and problem solvers. And to me, that’s the more exciting part of being a teacher.

Welcome to Clubhouse

Well, I kind of broke my social media vacation a day early. I was invited into Clubhouse by Mike Slinger. For those of you that don’t know what Clubhouse is, it is a voice/conversation based social media platform where people create rooms where anyone can join and chat or listen. Moderators can run the room like a live podcast or as a room where they invite anyone in to join the conversation.

Very early this morning I joined a room, Connect EDU. The host, Giancarlo Brotto, quickly invited newcomers into the conversation to share their background.

I really see potential here. The sharing of voice is powerful. I can imagine people having some really great conversations ‘out loud and in the open’ but live with an audience who can raise their hand and contribute. I also see the potential for some strong community-building.

I had an idea for a text-based environment similar to this a few years ago. I imagined a private chat that is publicly viewable, and a side chat for the audience. Imagine two to five people having an in-depth Facebook-style text conversation but if you were reading from the outside, you couldn’t comment directly… the conversation is theirs, but that there was also a side panel for the audience. Then the people having the conversation could invite the audience in, if they see and like something in the audience chat.

Clubhouse does this with voice rather than text, and I think this new social media platform is going to explode! I’m reminded of radio call-in shows, and I can foresee some incredible communities being built. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it yet, but I’m pretty sure Clubhouse is going to be a platform you hear more and more about in the coming months.

How many students?

How many students are being rushed through the curriculum?

How many are doing hours of homework to keep up with the quarter system or blended or online learning?

How many are doing well, out of sheer effort?

How many are going to get ‘A’s because they are compliant and do what the teachers ask?

How many are reading textbooks but haven’t had time to read for pleasure?

How many students are being successful at ‘doing’ school? But not doing big projects, sports, theatre, or lunches with their friends.

Sometimes the ‘successful’ students are not thought about, because others take so much time and energy. But how many students are doing well despite the education they are getting?