Tag Archives: learning

Education focussed mind dump

I’m going to do a little mind dump of things on my mind about school, education, life, and learning, in point form – bullet format. Many of these could be entire posts on their own, and I want to share these as placeholders for future development:

  • Teaching is going to be more challenging in the future, but also more rewarding. Yes, technology will replace some teaching… an AI (Artificial Intelligence) based program can teach students who are learning to use algorithms better than a teacher in front of 30 students, when students could use just-in-time feedback and an adjusted curriculum based on their answers being right or wrong. However we are decades away from AI being able to teach problem solving, or critical thinking, or moderate a philosophical discussion. Teaching these things is exciting and can be very engaging for students, but also challenging to do well… this is the true art of teaching.
  • I’m tired of seeing ‘Remote Learning didn’t work’ articles. It is not ideal for every student and it magnifies the issue of privilege, and access to required technology. It especially won’t work when educators need to make the switch with no forward planning. That said, it has made us question a few things we needed to question, like traditional assessment practices for example.
  • Assessment practices needs to change. We can’t rely on information-based content as a means of measuring student success. ie. 1. We still need to know that students can use mathematical algorithms, but we also need to know that they are numerate and understand the concepts behind those algorithms. ie. 2. The so called soft skills that we want to see like critical thinking and collaboration don’t work well being marked in a traditional way. What does a mark of 77% in Creativity mean?
  • Blended learning is the future of learning in schools, and so two things need to change: 1. Block schedules/timetables where the structure is exclusively around a teacher at the front of a room teaching for a set time. 2. “Teach them while I’ve got them in front of me” mentality, where the face-to-face component of the blending is all about teaching as it used to be… Blended learning should be centred around creating ‘learning experiences’.
  • Student voice and choice needs to be the forefront of course and lesson design. Cookie-cutter assignments are not enough. That said, there can be considerable teacher influence and high expectations. A teacher-led inquiry with embedded opportunities for students choice can be much better than not giving students creative constraints (that they might flounder without).
  • We need to leverage blended learning, in order to create collaboration and professional development time inside of a teacher’s workday. The idea of a teacher working in isolation for over 85% of the school day is counter productive to creating a culture of learning at institutions (schools) that should be modelling a learning culture.
  • A well funded, free, and public education is an essential public service. It also has to foster the values we want to see in our world. Diversity, acceptance (not just tolerance), civics, kindness, and charity need to be celebrated and highlighted. Yes, we need to prepare students to function in society, and even be employable, but the most important thing we do in schools is make all students feel like they belong, and we help them become decent human beings.
  • We need to help students be tolerant of others with opposing points of view. We have to show them that despite the desire of attention-seeking news media to polarize ideas into different camps, ideas sit on a spectrum, they are not all dichotomous. And we do not have to agree with different ideas to be respectful of the people who hold them… That said, while “we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views“, we must also be, “unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference“.
  • We need to find a balance between ‘open’ classrooms and ‘private’ learning spaces. Students need a space where they can fumble and be less than perfect, having a private space to work out the rough edges of their work. They also need to be able to share what they want out in the open, and with the world. Everything doesn’t have to be on display, and we need to help students discern what is important to share, and what we keep to ourselves.
  • Mistakes need to be legitimately celebrated as part of learning. Failure is part of most challenging journeys, and while we talk about the importance of this, we freak out when students fail in a public setting. Mistakes are ok when we can fix them quickly, but we still admonish bigger public mistakes in ways that do not foster learning. This is an issue beyond schools, we seem to live in a world where everyone is judged (harshly) by their worst public mistake, and sincere apologies are not enough. This has two important, negative ramifications: 1. Public mistakes become something we can’t recover or learn from; 2. We can not be truly innovative when we can’t risk looking bad for our efforts. So many schools, school districts, and even companies, brag about being innovative, but when it is ‘innovative as long as it looks good’, well then all the risk is gone and so is the opportunity to do something daring.
  • Everyone has a right to their opinion, and everyone can share those opinions, but not all opinions are good, and not all opinions deserve an equal footing. Bad ideas can spread very easily these days. People need to be brave enough to speak out against bad ideas… in non-violent ways. We must celebrate the power of dialogue and use our words instead of our fists, if we truly want our society to be better. We have to challenge ourselves to take higher ground and not fight the fight that the spreaders of bad ideas want us to fight. There is a saying, “Never wrestle a pig, you both get dirty but the big likes it.” Bad ideas get unwarranted publicity when the battles get messy… and the weak-minded get fuel to oppose good ideas when those with the good ideas act in bad faith. You do not have to ‘turn the other cheek’ but you do have to act in a way that is decent and good, if you want to fight for things that are decent and good.

… Ideas To be expanded on at a future date.

School 2020

I used to think I had a good handle on where things were going. What does the end of the school year look like? What will September start-up look like? All this is out the window.

An online grad/annual celebration in June? Never would have guessed that was coming, I had a theatre booked for the occasion.

Students sitting socially distant from each other? I don’t have more than 4 single desks in the whole school.

There is a lot to think about with respect to the coming school year. How will the year start? How often in a week will students attend? How much will be taught from a distance? Who will struggle and who will thrive in this new environment?

We will adapt. We will make it work. But making it work isn’t enough over a sustained period. It’s one thing to ‘make it work’ for the last 3 months of a school year, and yet another for that to be your plan for a full year.

As busy as June is, it’s also a time to be creative. September 2020 will be here sooner than we think, and school will not be what it has been in the past. We need to create opportunities for students not just to survive the year, but for them to thrive.

One December 31st, 2019 I picked my #OneWord2020 to be Resilience… I don’t think I could have picked a better word!

A~B~C-R-A-P

It was my 4th or 5th year teaching and I had given out an assignment in Science that I had samples of from the previous year. I showed an example of what an assignment that got an ‘A’ looked like. Then I mentioned that if it was missing a specific component it would have been a ‘B’. A student blurred out a silly example, “What if I did _____, would it be a ‘C’?”

I responded, “No, that would be a C-R-A-P.” As the laughter came from the class I looked over to movement in my door and there was a parent of one of my students. To this day I don’t know if that parent got the joke or was mortified by my response? Still, I think it was funny and the Grade 8 class appreciated the humour.

It’s interesting to think about the way we describe criteria in schools and show good work as examples. This can be helpful, but also detrimental. Sometimes it gives a high bar for what is possible, and can stretch students’ desire to do something special. Sometimes it creates a cookie cutter scenario where every student does the same thing, limiting creativity and expression.

I remember visiting an elementary school and seeing the art displayed outside a couple Grade 2 classes. One had collages with a Santa part way into a chimney. Every house on every piece of work had the same colour and shape, every chimney had a larger top slab to fit Santa in. Every Santa was exactly half-belly into the chimney. Scales were slightly different, and cutting skills were obviously different too, but every piece looked good, and similar to the ones next to it.

Next door, the teacher had all the students make a collage of snowmen and the quality and look of every piece was different. Some had carrot noses, some didn’t have noses, one hade a red Rudolph nose. Some had top hats, some had cone hats, some had no hats. One had a mommy, daddy, and baby snowman, and one had a snowman with four snowball parts instead of three. One really stuck out because it had a black sky behind it.

So if you were a parent, which assignment would you rather your child did?

Sometimes we can set criteria and provide examples that push students to do a good job, to reach for challenging outcomes, and even to be more creative. But sometimes our criteria limits creativity and boxes in our students’ ability to go beyond what the teacher’s shared examples show.

Sometimes we have students that need to see an example and some who are better off without one… in the same class, doing the same assignment.

Specific and detailed criteria with examples can raise the bar and reduce the likelihood of students handing in C-R-A-P, but they can also limit the format, creativity and extension of learning that could be possible if we left things more open, and provided more choice.

Coffee after class

It was second semester of my first year at the University of Guelph. I had a night class on Wednesday’s from 6-9pm. Now, decades later, I have no idea what the class was about, yet taking that class had a profound impact on my thinking.

Another student taking the class with me was Brian, an older, round-faced, bearded gentleman in his mid 30’s whom I knew from a class the previous semester. We sat near each other in the first class and afterwards he asked me, and one other student that I didn’t know, James, if we wanted to go for a coffee. James, was a moustache-less but goateed, hip-looking young man who was probably no more than a year older than me, but he made me look young next to him. He said he was meeting his girlfriend, and could she join us?

Upon leaving the the class, James’ girlfriend, Lara, approached us and he introduced us. Lara was just as hip looking as James. She had short-cropped hair with coloured highlights, and a nose ring. Or maybe it was James that had the nose ring, my memory is a little hazy, this was 32 years ago. (I’m not even 100% sure I have the names right, but these will do,)

And so it began, 10 weeks of the four of us meeting for coffee, creating some unforgettable memories after sitting through a class that was completely forgettable. While we talked about life, the universe, and everything, the conversation always seemed to gravitate to religion.

To give a little personal background, I grew up in a Jewish family, but we were not religious and my dad’s views were both secular and esoteric. What little faith I had was rocked by Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. I saw this movie shortly after moving to Canada, not yet a teenager.

The part of the movie that most impacted me was the scene that sets the stage for Passover, the only Jewish celebration we did with our grandparents.

To borrow from Wikipedia on Passover:

In the Book of Exodus, God helped the Israelites escape from slavery in ancient Egypt by inflicting ten plagues upon the Egyptians before the Pharaoh would release the Israelite slaves. The last of the plagues was the death of the Egyptian first-born. The Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb. Upon seeing this, the spirit of the Lord knew to pass over the first-born in these homes, hence the English name of the holiday.

In the movie, a fog passes through the city bringing the plague that would kill the first born of the Egyptians and non-believers. You could hear the screams of Egyptian parents as their oldest children died.

Even at this young age, I remember thinking of this from the perspective of an Egyptian parent; A parent that did not wrong anyone, a parent who led a good life, in a loving family. I remember thinking, “What kind of cruel God would do this?” I could understand a God punishing the slave owners, but this was too much. It was vindictive, it was indiscriminate, and it was cruel. I thought, “I can not believe in such a vengeful God”.

The other three that met for coffee after class came from completely different religious standpoints. James was atheist. He had a Christian background, but his stance on religion was as indiscriminately hatefully as the Passover plague was to the Egyptians. Lara was Catholic, and while not fully devout, she held Christian values and principles. Her resolve in believing in God was as strong as her boyfriend’s atheism. Brian was… different.

Like the other three of us, this was Brian’s first year at university, despite being close to double our age. He joined the conversation not just with almost a lifetime’s more of life experience, but with life experiences that were rather unique. He was well travelled, articulate, and wise, but it was his unique religious background that made him quite an anomaly. Brian has been a “Hare Krishna devotee for 14 and a half years”. Looking back, it seems odd that he described his time with them that way. Why mention the 1/2 year?

Early on he was defensive about his time with this group. “People say that the Hare Krishnas drug their devotees… well I was head chef of our group for 9 years and I can tell you that not only are there no drugs, but they ate extremely healthy meals all the time.” As the weeks passed, he began to realize that we were just curious and not being judgemental when asking about his experiences in this faith. He shared a lot about them, but would never divulge what it was that made him leave.

Our conversations would routinely last until the coffee shop closed at 11. Sometimes we would stand outside for another 15-20 minutes conversing before we found a good place to stop. I remember a night where ‘James the Atheist’ became ‘James the Agnostic’. A week later, he was atheist again. I remember a ‘ladder and pyramid’ analogy for religions that Brian shared, that still influences my thoughts on religion today.

I remember having my thoughts and perspectives completely flipped, and also watching as my words would do the same to others. We used the Socratic method of asking questions to stimulate both argument and agreement. We got loud, but never angry. We learned from each other and honed our abilities to argue for the sake of good discourse.

I don’t remember seeing James or Lara after that. Brian didn’t come back to Guelph the next year. He went to India and was doing some charity work. I know this because he wrote a letter to update me. I have that letter in a box somewhere in my garage. I don’t remember any of the contents of the letter now, but I kept it because it was insightful, just like our conversations were.

If it was an era of smartphones and Facebook, I’m sure I would have kept in touch with Brian. He brought the four of us together. We taught each other. We challenged each other. We had one of the best ‘classes’ that I had at university. Four friends in a coffee shop.

It changes everything

I came across this quote last night:

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.” ~ Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

I’ve previously shared in a post titled, ‘Transformative or just flashy educational tools?‘

A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.

That’s how technology isn’t just ecological. Adding a caterpillar to an environment changes the environment, it changes the equilibrium in unforeseen ways, but ways that are inevitable based on all the moving parts seeking to find a new balance. The environment finds a new homeostasis.

Technology has bias. It has uses, and it has unintended uses. A technological advancement doesn’t just have unintended consequences, it also has unintended uses and misuses. When it is misused, the response is often an over-reaction. We’ve seen that in schools with internet filters, cell phones, and social media.

Technology also has bias in what we pay attention to. The idea of a multiple choice test is a technology that made questions about ‘the what’ of specific content more relevant than ‘the how’ and ‘the why’. It also invited teachers to develop questions and answers designed (on purpose and by mistake) to confuse the student… after all, it defeats the purpose of a multiple choice test to have only one answer be relevant, but only one answer is ‘right’.

A laptop in a student’s hands is a powerful tool for learning, and it’s a powerful tool for distraction. It’s a window into the world, it’s also a tool that can isolate students from their peers. It’s a way to transmit information to students, it’s also a way to give them voice and choice in a project.

In each of these cases, technology is disruptive. It alters the environment in unforeseen ways that do not move towards a new equilibrium. Technology doesn’t move the environment towards homeostasis, instead it undermines norms. It invites uses and misuses that are unintended or unwelcome, and that brings new concerns as well as new opportunities.

Technology doesn’t just change our relationship to the tool, it changes the relationship to our environment. It changes everything.

We can’t escape technological advancement.


However, we can expect tools to be used in unexpected ways, and we can respond with intention and purpose, which is a lot different that anger and frustration.

We can ask ourselves what the intentions of a tool’s use are, and we can reflect on whether these intentions are being met. Technology will fundamentally change our learning environments, technology will support and/or undermine our intentions. We are better off influencing this bias thoughtfully rather than letting unintended biases undermine us. Hammers can produce some amazing work, or they can cause a lot of damage.

Empty your cup

Empty Your Cup
A Japanese Zen master received a university professor who came to enquire about Zen. It was obvious from the start of the conversation that the professor was not so much interested in learning about Zen as he was in impressing the master with his own opinions and knowledge.

The master listened patiently and finally suggested they have tea. The master poured his visitor’s cup full and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the cup overflowing until he could no longer contain himself.
‘The cup is overfull, no more will go in.’

‘Like this cup,’ the master said, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’

Taken From: Zen in the Martial Arts By Joe Hyams, 1979, pp. 18-19.

This is a favourite parable of mine. However there is another perspective that I take which contradicts this in one way, and complements it in another.

Yes, when you are learning something new, your previous perspective and knowledge can ‘get in the way’ of what you can learn.

But what about cognitive load? What happens when the issue isn’t that you are espousing your knowledge and blocking new learning, what about when you’ve reached the point where you feel you’ve learned too much too quickly, and there isn’t ‘enough room’ to add anything new?

(I think a few educators are feeling this now, after 6-8 weeks of remote learning.)

This is where I find that this parable becomes a paradox… when cognitive load feels too much, an instinct is to feel like, ‘My cup is full, I can’t fit any more new learning in.” When this happens, it’s actually a great time to try something new! To step out of your comfort zone, empty your own cup and play. Learn something you don’t ‘need’ to learn.

When someone is teaching you, you need to empty your cup.

When you feel like you’ve learned too much, you can add a bit more, in a different field of interest, and this will actually empty your cup a bit.

Being ignorant of your cup being full puts you in a spot where you need to empty your cup. Knowing your cup is full, you can increase the volume of the cup when you stop adding the same tea.

Do you feel your cup is full right now? Choose something completely different and interesting to learn and you’ll find more room in your cup again.

Attention in online delivery of classes

There are some pretty funny and creative ways that students are avoiding class now that it is online. Here are some fun examples:

1. A video of a student using a video of himself on his phone, ‘paying attention’, set up with a tripod in front of his laptop’s camera.

2. This kid has different priorities:

3. And Zach, who is known for his video magic, has fun with Wi-Fi challenges.

All joking aside, it’s harder to hold a group’s attention for too long in an online setting, compared to having a ‘captive audience’ face to face. It becomes a matter of thinking this through thoughtfully, or literally ‘losing your audience’. Remember Bill Nye The Science Guy? I don’t think he ran any segment of his show for longer than 3 minutes. There were quick lessons interspersed with flashy examples and experiments. Compare that to a 40 minute lecture with a teacher, and compare that to a 40 minute lesson online?

Here are two simple questions to ask:

1. What is being done to engage the learner?

2. What is the learner’s experience?

I’m not saying we need to entertain like Bill Nye, but I am saying that if we don’t think of the end user’s experience, we are going to see our audience’s attention dwindle.

If I were to start a school…

This is a ‘10,000 foot view’ of something I’ve thought about for a while. It should be an essay, not a handful of bullet points, but I’ll put a few ideas down now and come back to this at a later date.

If I were to start a school…

  • It would be K-12, with under 1,200 kids. Three classes per grade.
  • Kindergarten to grade 5 would be Reggio based, and resource and support rich. There would be a lot of intervention at these grades to ensure students who struggle are given proven strategies and structures of support.
  • Grade 6 to 9 would not be IB, but would run with a similar model to Middle IB. There would be significant focus on cross-curricular, big thematic projects, a lot of opportunity to mentor and lead younger students, and a focus on doing projects that matter in the community.
  • Grades 10-12 would be inquiry and passion based. Some students would reach out into the community to explore trades and careers, others would focus on academics and the pursuit of Arts and/or Sciences. All would have passion projects, time to pursue them, and mentors to inspire them.
  • Teachers would teach for 60-70% of the day, have 10% prep time, and the rest of the time would be to collaborate, and/or to support students working on projects that go beyond the scope of anything teachers teach in class.
  • The school would be broken into separate pods, divided by the grade groupings suggested above. Students at those different levels would be separated except for planned events… but these would happen regularly, with many student leadership opportunities.
  • Teachers would be expected to connect with teachers and/or students in at least one other level.

That’s not earth-shatteringly different than what can exist, but it is cost prohibitive with class sizes and staffing needs. The driving forces are:

1. Students having autonomy, choice, and support to do big projects and follow their passions.

2. Educators having time to collaborate and work with students beyond course content and a fully ‘blocked’ and timetabled schedule.

3. A sense of community support, student leadership, and a focus on meeting the learning needs of students.

If you were to start a school, what would it look like?

Learning Experiences

Last month I wrote, ‘Just shifting online or shifting the learning?‘. This post looked at how to effectively shift engaging learning online, from a distance, as we moved to remote learning. Now we need to think about what we’ve learned, and what we want to bring back into our schools.

There will be limits that social distancing will challenge us with. But when we final normalize what school looks like, how will this global experiment in teaching remotely change what we do in schools post a Covid-19 vaccination? What lessons will we take from this?

Six years ago, I wrote,’Flexible Learning Opportunities‘

In this post I said,

“Blending won’t be something done to classes or students, rather it will be the modus operandi… the way teaching and learning happens. In fact, even ‘distance learning’ could have synchronous ‘face-to-face’ meetings in virtual worlds. It will be an exception to the norm, in a very short while, to have a class that is strictly face-to-face or solely online/asynchronous.”

I got timing of ‘a very short while’ wrong, and it took a pandemic to make it happen, but now I think we are approaching this. When students return to school are teachers going to just revert to old ways or will they rethink how they spend their time in class?

One of my schools that I’m the principal of is the district online school (Coquitlam Open Learning). For a while now, I’ve been talking to my teachers about the fact that over 95% of our online students are local, and asking how we can leverage this? Here are a couple examples:

1. Math teachers running a Numeracy event, where they brought students from many different classes together to solve numeracy problems and help them prepare for the provincial numeracy assessment.

2. The Biology teacher running fetal pig dissections to teach about the different body systems. Second year university med students taught our online & Inquiry Hub students about the different systems and did rotating demonstrations, then our students taught gifted middle school students in the same format later that day, with the university students assisting.

In both these cases, when the online students came together, it was for an ‘experience’, not just a lesson. How can we think about this as we bring some of the asynchronous learning to our synchronous classrooms? How can we rethink the experience of school when students all have access to resources, digital conversations, and videos and lessons that they don’t need to be together to see and do?

How can we leverage the digital access and connectivity to change what we do when we meet kids face to face?

Can we give them more guided time to work independently, with teachers providing just-in-time support?

Can we focus more on learning experiences, rather than lessons?

Are we just going to shift the learning back into classrooms, or are we going to start thinking more about how we can shift the learning experiences we provide while kids are in our schools?

A concrete example of this is that students at Inquiry Hub Secondary have about 40% of their day when they are not in front of their teachers. During this time, they work on assignments teachers give them (imagine group work where students never need to meet outside of school), they work in digital components of their courses (like video lessons), and they work on some pretty interesting student-designed inquiry projects (that they get credit for). You can learn more about how we make Inquiry Hub work here.

Are we just shifting the learning back into schools or are we also shifting towards different kinds of learning experiences?

What are students creating?

It’s a simple question, but there is a lot of power in the verb, ‘creating’. I was digging through old Powerpoints last night, and I came across a presentation that I did in Selno, Ontario, in April 2017. There was a slide in that slide deck that looked at what students at Inquiry Hub were ‘doing’: iHub - what students are doing - 1

It’s a bit overwhelming to look at a slide with this many words on it, but then my next slide played with the colour of the font a bit:

iHub - what students are doing - 2

The learning verbs we use are very powerful. Are students searching for data, or are they collecting their own data? Are students copying a cookie-cutter assignment where every final result looks almost the same, or are they being led to a final product that fosters creativity and choice by the student? When you think about it, the difference between these pairs of questions are determined completely by the teacher, and the kind of assignments they provide. The former are usually more about content delivery, and the latter are about creating learning experiences. Here’s one more slide to think about:

Role of the Teacher

Teachers across the globe are missing their students, and our students are missing their teachers. It may seem far away still, but when we get students back into our schools and our classrooms, what experiences are we going to give them that they didn’t get during remote learning? How are we going to foster learning verbs that are about students engaging with the learning in a meaningful way?

How can we foster students as creators of content, and not just consumers of it?  

(And there’s no need to wait for students to get back into schools to do this!)