Tag Archives: education

Design vs Use

One of our middle schools in the district sits on the edge of a steep hillside. There is a large set of stairs, and to the side of that, a long wheelchair ramp. Between the stairs and the ramp is a steep grassy wedge. There is a huge forested area with trails nearby, but three boys, two with GoPro cameras on their helmets, are riding up the ramp, and riding down the grassy embankment as well as the stairs. You can see a trail down the embankment from continued use… use that was never intended.

I remember reading about a new college or university that didn’t install walking paths until after students had created foot trails through the grassy openings between buildings, allowing form to fit function.

There are so many ways that poor design misses the point that the use of an item is more important than the look. Here in Vancouver, the overhangs in front of malls, stores, and buildings will have massive gaps between them. But these are decorative, not functional. They might ‘work’ in California, but it rains a lot more here in Vancouver, and people would rather be dry, instead of having decorative overhangs that let the rain come through.

Design vs Use in Schools

Schools lack inviting spaces to hang out that result in the use of hallway or stairwell alcoves where kids like to congregate, making the hallways and stairways more of a hangout and much less functional to walk through. Rectangular desks only let chairs fit in 2 of the 4 sides. Library stacks don’t move, making the design of the library fixed in form and function.

Multiple choice tests are easy to mark, but force the focus of tests towards content. “All of the above” answers allow student to be partially correct but not get credit for knowing what they know. The questions are ‘closed’ as opposed to open ended.

The bell schedule with blocks of time push schools into teaching subjects in silos. Blocks limit collaboration between teachers. Grouping students by age in those blocks limits the ability to combine students by passion and capability.

We should always be thinking about designing for use. We should have empathy for the user. And we should celebrate when users make the design work for them.

Smart A$$ Responses

Ask yourself, if you aren’t getting the answers you want, are you asking the right questions?

Here are 2 worksheets where students got very creative with their answers.

Did the students give the teacher a response that they wanted? No.

Did the students deserve the response that they got? No.

Regarding the first worksheet, I created this image to make fun of it:

“You’ve got to ‘love’ worksheets typed on a typewriter and copied so many times that parts of the letters are missing.”

Did the student spell any of the 10 words wrong?

What if the teacher said, “Haha, that was sneaky, now look around the room and find 10 more words that you can spell”?

Looking at the second worksheet, what if the student gave the examples shared as their answers? What would the teacher have done then? (And who ‘jumps’ with their family???) The question coupled with the examples makes this a painfully boring task. The musical response by the student actually makes the assignment interesting.

Why the big red X?

“Not the answer I was looking for.”

No it wasn’t, but it is a very clever answer! One that should be recognized as creative.

What if the teacher said, “Haha! That’s great! What other action verbs do you know?”

Is the purpose of a worksheet to get the answers right? Is the purpose of assessment to count marks or to check for understanding? When someone doesn’t give you ‘what you are looking for’ does that mean their response is wrong and deserves a big red X?

Or is a smart a$$ response a wake up call that maybe you can ask better, more interesting questions?

Some kids…

Some kids are easy to like. They make an effort to connect with you. They want to do well. They seek your approval.

Some kids are hard to like. They don’t want to make an effort to connect. They are defiant. They don’t want your approval, or maybe they do, but they sabotage their own efforts because that don’t believe they’ll get your approval even if they try.

Some kids don’t fit either of those categories, and others switch between the two on a given day, or even within an hour. Some kids come to school to learn, some to socialize, some to get out of their house. Some kids don’t want to come to school at all.

Some kids deserve a second chance, while some kids deserve a sixth or ninth chance. Some kids are willing to say sorry, and some of those kids mean it. Some kids make others feel unsafe, some kids do things to make themselves unsafe. Some kids are resilient, while some kids lack the strategies and the confidence to believe that they can be successful.

Some kids make working with them feel like hard work, while some kids help you bring joy to your work day. Some kids are happy, positive, and peaceful and others are sad, negative, and angry.

Some kids deserve more effort, thoughtfulness, patience, love, tough love, and care… more care than you want to or feel that you can give… more forgiveness and acceptance than you want to share.

All kids deserve to be cared for by adults who believes in them; who want them to be better than they are; and, who see the good in them, even when it is hard to see. All kids need to see the goodness in you. They need to know that you believe in them. They need to know you care.

And as for the toughest kids to work with, the ones that drive you crazy, the ones that don’t appreciate what you do for them… they are the ones that can read you the best. They know if you are working from a place of love, or acceptance, or tolerance, or impatience, or anger. They are the kids that most deserve the best you that you can give them. Because only the best, most resilient, and most caring you can get the best out of them. It isn’t easy, but it’s extremely rewarding.

Flawed message

I’ve seen this post a few times now and while it has a message that will get a lot of ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ on social media, it completely misses the points it should want to make.

Here are my 2 biggest issues with the post:

1. It pits the school against parents, saying ‘these are the things you are responsible for’ rather than, we need to work together to instil these things in our children’. The approach is an attack rather than saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. No, instead of that it says, “you do your part, let us do ours”… “You teach manners and etiquette, we will do that teaching thing.”

2. Here is the teaching thing shared in the poster,

“Here at school, on the other hand, we teach language, math, history, geography, physics, sciences, and physical education. We only reinforce the education that children receive at home from their parents.”

This is extremely problematic thinking about what a school does or should do. It says, ‘we are about teaching subjects, not students’. It says content and subjects are the purpose of school, rather than helping to create critical thinkers, and problem solvers, and compassionate, educated citizens.

Signs like this water down what a good school should be doing, while taking a jab at parents… Parents who we should see as partners, rather than blaming them for not making perfectly polite and compliant little learners, so teachers can focus on ‘subject matter’.

Waving a disapproving finger at parents accomplishes nothing. Sharing a poster like this also accomplishes nothing, because the ideas it supports are flawed.

Potential

This time of year, the word ‘potential’ resonates with me. There is so much potential in a new school year! What will be accomplished? What surprises await?

What questions can we ask to maximize the potential we and our students have? Here are a few that might be worth asking:

What will I do to build a good culture in my school and my classroom?

What can I do to inspire my students to go beyond the curriculum?

What can I do to support open communication between myself, my students, and their parents/caregivers?

How can I extend the learning beyond the walls of my classroom?

How can I connect my school and my classroom to the community?

What questions and challenges can I give my students to help them become more resilient problem solvers?

The questions we ask help to define the directions we go in, and the goals we want to achieve.

What questions would help you and your students meet or even exceed their potential?

A little reminder to educators

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself as well as to others. This isn’t something I’m preaching, it’s something important enough to keep at the forefront of my mind, our minds, as the new school year is about to begin.

There is always so much to do at the start of the school year, and there is the curriculum that must get started… but above all, there are human beings that are coming into our buildings that we need to get to know.

Human beings who have had wonderful summers. Human beings that lost a loved one. Human beings that arrive to school hungry. Human beings that help take care of their younger siblings. Human beings that love their pets, video games, riding their bikes, fashion, art, history, and science.

Get to know these amazing humans. Start there. Not just with the ones that make this easy, with them all. Take the time, your students deserve it.

“I’m a hard marker”

This is one of the most puzzling statements a teacher can make, and yet some teachers wear it like a badge of honour.

Who does this benefit? What is the gain?

‘Welcome to my class, you will get a lower mark than your peers in other classes because “I’m a hard marker.” Sure this might be your lowest mark on your report card or it might hinder your ability to get into the university you want, but I’m doing this for you! Yes, that’s right, by being a hard marker, rather than a fair marker, I’m going to give you feedback that will make you even better. I’m sure I could mark fairly and give the same feedback but we both know that won’t motivate you nearly as much as if I’m being hard on you. Because it isn’t about how good you are, it’s about never being good enough to meet my unrealistic standards, which are above the expectations of the course. You are so lucky to have me as a teacher.‘ #Sarcasm

Teachers, please have high expectations. Please help inspire students to do the best they can. And please do so and grade them fairly.

—

Two related ideas:

• How important are marks anyway? “The case against grades” by Alfie Kohn

And,

• A recent #Dailyink post: “Start off hard”

“Start off hard”

Yesterday on Twitter, I read this tweet by a first year teacher, Ms. Beatty:

Recently got the advice of, “Start off hard, you can always get softer,” in terms of student relationships at the beginning of the year. What do you make of that? Is it good advice? Or misguided?

This was my response:

Start with (your personal) high expectations. This can be hard to start, but it’s not starting off intentionally hard… If you don’t share your high expectations early, it gets harder later.
I think these two things get confused and purpose gets lost in the message.

I understand why advice like ‘Start off hard’ would persist in education. A lot of new teachers come in wanting the students to like them, and wanting students to have a wonderful time in their class. So, these new teachers might go overboard being accommodating in ways that potentially, in the long run, hinder their ability to push students to be their best. You might say that they ‘start off being too soft’, and so the ‘go in hard’ advice becomes the counterpoint.

But what’s the purpose or intention of ‘going in hard’? What is it that is being achieved? Is it a need to manage behaviour? Is it control of the class? Is it that you need to assert dominance?

If that’s not it, then what is it you are trying to achieve… And how else can you achieve that? If you are going into a new class to be especially ‘hard’, what does that look like?

Turn that around now and think of ways that students can buy into your (high) expectations, rather than complying to your hard rules and heavy hand. Can they help create class rules and expectations? Can you share your expectations in a positive way?

Once these class rules or expectations are created, then sticking to them isn’t being hard. What’s hard is doing this fairly.

Students will make mistakes… how is this handled? Has this been determined?

Teachers will make mistakes… such as not being fair – giving one student a break, but not another, or breaking the rules ‘because I’m the teacher and I can’.

I think the hard part of the new school year is:

1. Clearly establishing expectations (hopefully with student input).

2. Being consistent with those expectations.

I also think these can be done without being intentionally hard on kids.

Sfumato in education

“The word “sfumato” comes from the Italian language and is derived from “fumo” (smoke, fume). “Sfumato” translated into English means soft, vague or blurred.”

Sfumato “…is a painting technique for softening the transition between colours, mimicking an area beyond what the human eye is focusing on, or the out-of-focus plane.  Leonardo da Vinci … used it in many works, including the Virgin of the Rocks and in his famous painting of the Mona Lisa. He described sfumato as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane“. (Wikipedia)

I think we need to soften some of our edges in education:

• School isn’t its own entity. We need to soften the edges between living and learning; Parents as teachers, sharing expertise, and; learning happening in our community... as part of a student’s school day.

• Assessment isn’t formative or summarize, it’s both, it’s continuous, it’s self-reflective, and it can be conceptually/curricular based as well as competency based.

• Subject lines need to be blurred. How can we learn about the biology of crisper without talking about philosophy and geopolitics? (Should scientists be altering the human gene code? If we don’t think so, who in the world should decide? And do we have the ability to stop research in other countries? Will we create a different class of humans?)

Here are some others to think about:

• Bell schedules

• Universtiy entrance exams

• promotion by age

• Does every kid need to learn to code? Or to do Calculus? Or… (insert skill here)

• Write the same test

• Do the same art project

• Be assessed on the same scale

I think there are many ‘hard lines’ in education that should be blurred, softer, and less definitive.

Where would you add a little sfumato in education?

Alphabet Soup

Vocabulary is a currency in our world.

Vulnerable learners, English language learners, students with reading and learning challenges, all start with a deficit of this currency.

What are we intentionally doing to reduce this deficit?

We don’t all have to use big fancy words, but if our students aren’t articulate and can’t thoughtfully get their messages across, their futures are likely to be hampered.

Be it learning challenges or environmental challenges (some kids grow up in homes where they aren’t read to by an adult, or lack a variety of books, or struggle with a new language), some kids start off with a vocabulary deficit.

But vocabulary is the currency of communication, and how we are able to express ourselves is becoming far more valuable in our amazingly connected world.