Tag Archives: learning

School Ambassadors

Last Friday six of our students presented to 34 middle school cohort student teachers from the University of British Columbia. They had prepared the presentation for two visiting Northwest Territories teachers a few weeks back but I didn’t get to see it. In preparing the presentation I had asked them not just to share some of the amazing inquiries they get to do at Inquiry Hub, but also ones that were challenging and did go as well as planned. I didn’t get to see their first presentation but I watched this second iteration.

Most of them didn’t just share a challenging inquiry, but their worst ones. They had me and their audience laughing as they described how things went epically wrong, or how what they thought would be a topic of great interest barely held their attention for 2 days. But more than that, each and every one of them eloquently expressed their learning from that epic failure.

Sitting behind the students, there were a few times I had the urge to say something, but I forced myself to stay quiet. Each time I had the urge, the students ended up helping each other fill in the blanks I thought were missing, and in several of those cases better than I would have… and allowing them to lead, without speaking up, gave more authenticity to the presentation experience than I could ever have contributed. I did come in at the second half of the Q&A and answered a few questions, but at that point the presentation was basically over.

I wrote this in an email to these students and their parents. I couldn’t be more proud of these young learners and leaders:

Greetings to our Inquiry Hub Ambassadors and their parents,

A few weeks back, I asked a few students to present to two educators from the North West Territories during our Pro-D Day. Today, those same school ambassadors provided school tours and presented to 34 Middle School Cohort Student Teachers from UBC. I didn’t get to see the presentation to the NWT teachers but I did get to watch today. I just want to say that it was an honour and a privilege to have these 6 wonderful students represent our school, and share their inquiries and learning experiences here at iHub. 

They represented our community, and their learning, extremely well and the student teachers were impressed, and I’d even say ‘blown away’ by their presentation. Their ability to respond to the Q&A questions the student teachers asked was also exceptional. 

I wanted to share this with them and their parents and to say on behalf of our school… Thank you!

Have a great weekend,

Dave

AI is Coming… to a school near you.

Miguel Guhlin asked on LinkedIn:

“Someone asked these questions in response to a blog entry, and I was wondering, what would YOUR response be?

1. What role/how much should students be using AI, and does this vary based on grade level?

2. What do you think the next five years in education will look like in regards to AI? Complete integration or total ban of AI?”

I commented:

1. Like a pencil or a laptop, AI is a tool to use sometimes and not use other times. The question is about expectations and management.

2. Anywhere that enforces a total ban on AI is going to be playing a never-ending and losing game of catch-up. That said, I have no idea what total integration will look like? Smart teachers are already using AI to develop and improve their lessons, those teachers will know that students can, and both will and should, use these tools as well. But like in question 1… when it’s appropriate. Just because a laptop might be ‘completely integrated’ into a classroom as a tool students use doesn’t mean everything they do in a classroom is with and on a laptop.

—

I’ve already dealt with some sticky issues around the use of AI in a classroom and online. One situation last school year was particularly messy, with a teacher using Chat GPT as an AI detector, rather than other AI detection tools. It turns out that Chat GPT is not a good AI detector. It might be better now, but I can confirm that in early 2023 it was very bad at this. I even put some of my own work into it and I had Chat GPT tell me that a couple paragraphs were written by it, even though I wrote the piece about 12 years earlier.

But what do we do in the meantime? Especially in my online school where very little, if any, work is supervised? Do we give up on policing altogether and just let AI do the assignments as we try to AI proof them? Do we give students grades for work that isn’t all theirs? How is that fair?

This is something we will figure out. AI, like laptops, will be integrated into education. Back in 2009 I presented on the topic, “The POD’s are Coming!”

(Slideshow here) About Personally Owned Devices… laptop etc… coming into our classrooms, and the fear of these devices. We are at that same point with AI now. We’ll get through this and our classrooms will adapt (again).

And in a wonderful full-circle coincidence, one of the images I used in the POD’s post above was a posterized quote by Miguel Guilin.

It’s time to take the leap. AI might be new… but we’ve been here before.

The task of education today

This quote was shared with us in our Principals meeting yesterday:

“This is the task of education today: to confront the almost unimaginable design challenge of building an education system that provides for the re-creation of civilization during a world system transition. This challenge brings us face to face with the importance of education for humanity and the basic questions that structure education as a human endeavor.” ~Zachary Stein

One of our Assistant Superintendent’s added, “We are trying to build a utopian society in triage conditions.”

There is no doubt that it is much harder to be an educator today than it was when I started my career over 25 years ago. And as we navigate ‘building an education system that provides for the re-creation of civilization during a world system transition,’ we are bound to struggle a bit. How do we mark assignments that are written or co-written by AI? What skills are going to be needed for the top jobs of 2030? How different will that be for 2040?

Ultimately we want to support the education of students who will become kind, contributing citizens. But how do we do this in a world where Truth seems arbitrary to the sources you get it from, and politicians, religion, and corporations are all pushing conflicting information and agendas? I think this goes beyond just working on competencies like critical thinking. It requires mental gymnastics that most adults struggle with.

Meanwhile, the majority of school schedules still put students into blocks of time based on the subjects they are learning. “Let’s think critically, and do challenging problems, but only in this one narrow field of study.” We aren’t meeting the design challenges we face today if that’s what we continue to do.

More than ever students, future citizens, need to understand complex issues from multiple perspectives. They need to understand nuance, and navigate when to defend an idea, when to compromise, and when to avoid engagement altogether. They need to be prepared to say “I don’t know,” and then do the hard work of finding out, when the accuracy of information is incomplete or even suspect. They need to be prepared to say, “I was wrong,” and “I am sorry,” and also be prepared to stick to their convictions and defend ideas that aren’t always the accepted norm.

That’s not the future I prepared students for 25 years ago. It is indeed an ‘almost unimaginable design challenge‘, and as we navigate new challenges we have to recognize that mistakes will be made… but not changing is far scarier than trying.

Error correction

“When you tolerate an error, you rob yourself of learning.

When you ruminate on an error, you rob yourself of happiness.

Notice it, improve it, and move on from it.” ~ James Clear

I really like this quote. It is very insightful. We don’t learn unless we make an effort to adapt, or improve after a failure or an error. But perseverating on our errors isn’t healthy.

Notice, improve, and move on. But how many of us can easily do this?

How many of us repeat mistakes? How many of us spend too much time ruminating and don’t move on? How many of us spend more time worrying about our errors and less time celebrating our successes?

Notice, improve, and move on.

There would be far less learning if we spent more time avoiding mistakes. There would be less improvement, and less to move on from. And so while we are learning from our errors, we need to remember to feel good about the learning we’ve done, and the journey we are on.

Different, not easier

Yesterday I saw this question asked by Dean Shareski on LinkedIn,

“I talk to educational leaders every day and for the most part, they are willing and in many cases excited to embrace the potential of Generative AI. When you consider its role in education, what are the specific elements that excite you and what are the aspects that give you pause?”

I commented:

“What excites me is how we can collaborate with AI to generate and iterate ‘with’ AI in ways that would never have been possible before. What gives me pause are when tools are used to make work easier, and the level of challenge becomes low. Different, challenging work is where we need to head, not just easier work, or work avoidance by using AI… so the work itself needs to be rethought, rather than just replaced with AI.”

The easy way out

I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?

Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.

@imemezy

Kids know every trick in the book…i mean computer #computer #maths #homework #madeeasy #lol #children #schoolwork #schools #hack #hacks #tricks #tips #test #exam #learning #learn

♬ original sound – Memezy

If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.

There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.

So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.

These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.

I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.

Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.

All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.

The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.

The blame game

It’s easier to point a finger outward than it is to point it inward.

It’s more comfortable to see the faults in others than to accept the faults of our own.

It’s less work to hold others accountable than to accept responsibility.

Accusations are not as scary as being vulnerable.

It’s simpler to rationalize than it is to be critically introspective.

Accepting responsibility rather than blaming is hard work. Owning your own shit is hard work. Making things right when things have gone wrong is hard work… especially since sometimes right just means better, and no matter what you do, you can’t get back to the way things used to be.

But when you play the blame game nothing gets better. In fact, things usually get worse. Most punishment and discipline is about blame. Being restorative means sharing the responsibility to make things better.

Accepting ownership of your own actions and consequences, that’s when personal growth happens. That’s when we get unstuck. That’s when we begin to create an empowered reality rather than a sense of victimization.

How do we make things better? That’s not always an easy question to ask, and it’s usually very hard to answer. But the answer is never blame.

Bad questions

One of the dumbest tropes in education is that, ‘There is no such thing as a bad question’. Yes, yes there is. Yes there are. There are many bad questions. We live in a world filled with bad questions.

Why are people still asking if climate change is real? Why do people still question if the world is flat? Why do people still question evolution and want creationism taught in classrooms?

Because we live in a world where bad questions are asked and people respond to them. With each justification there is a rebuttal, and when millions of people hear the dumb, illogical, misleading, and inaccurate rebuttals some of them will believe these bad ideas.

Bad ideas spread from debating bad questions.

Good questions deserve debate. Bad questions should be ignored… or redirected. ‘Is climate change real’ is a dumb question based on a bad idea. A better question is, ‘We know humans are impacting the climate, what can be done to reduce that impact?’ Spending time rationalizing the first question is literally giving the question too much power, and the ignorant responses an opportunity to be shared.

It’s worth saying this again, it’s the problem we face today across many fields, spreading through news and social media… and when we participate, we are part of the problem:

Bad ideas spread from debating bad questions.

So the next time someone tells you there is no such thing as a bad question, you might want to disagree, just don’t waste too much time debating the point.

Process, product, and purpose

I love this quote from David Jakes:

“Design creates useful things. Much has been written by various educators about valuing process over product, but in the real world, people create things. It’s easy to value process over product when the product is a grade or points on a test. In your classroom, shift from a transactional approach to a design-based transformational one where the product has value and meaning to students and has the potential to impact intellectual growth, spark personal development, or contribute to improving the human condition.”

There is a lot of talk about process over product. However this comparison is built on a false dichotomy. It’s not about one over the other, rather it’s process with the purpose of producing a product.

For example, when looking at design thinking, we start with empathy for the end user. The final product is the goal, it’s the purpose we are designing for, but the process of design thinking is the journey we go on.

So, it’s not process over product, it’s process with purpose. The final product is important, be it a presentation, an app, a business or business plan, a play, or a piece of art. How you get there is important too. Understanding the purpose, having a real reason to produce a final product is the reason to go through the process.

What’s exciting is having students learn, value, and be motivated to go through the process to get to that final product. That’s a shift from a more traditional test, or a cookie-cutter assignment where everyone produces an identical final product. Instead the students are part of the process, and understand the purpose of getting to the final product… which they have constructed or co-constructed.

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Here is a specific example: There are a couple educators from the Northwest Territories coming to visit us at Inquiry Hub. They are heading this way to see Trevor Mackenzie on Vancouver Island, and he recommended they come visit our school. Unfortunately the only day they can come is a professional development day when there are no kids at our school. So, I asked 6 kids if they would be willing to come in and present to these teachers.

Once they agreed, I sent this in an email to the teachers coming to visit:

“As an FYI, I’ll be handing over the presentation fully to the students, they will design what it looks like. With the design thinking model in mind, the big question is “What does the end user want/need”… so, please give me a short write-up of what you are looking for.

They will give you the shape of our day, what the student experience is like, but beyond that what do you want to get out of the visit? Whatever you share is exactly what I’ll be sharing with them to prepare with.”

Our students will design the presentation, they will understand the purpose of their final product, and while the process is important, and while they have had a ton of practice producing great presentations, they know that delivering a good final presentation to an authentic audience is what will matter in the end.

It’s not one over the other, it’s process for the purpose of a good final product.

Here we go

The school year begins. 180 school days.

I am nervous about the balance of things: work/home life/exercise; leadership/management; priorities/budgets; teaching & learning; support & independence; planning & follow through; time & efficiency.

I may be nervous but I can feel the potential… the promise of a great year ahead. Physiologically there is almost no difference between anxious nervousness and excitement. So I’ll reframe my thinking, I am excited.

I hope all educators are equally excited. We are in an incredible occupation. We change lives. We make learning fun and engaging. And our teaching goes well beyond the curriculum. We don’t teach subjects, we teach kids. We teach kindness, collaboration, cooperation, and creativity. We don’t just teach classes, we teach young adults who want to do well, who soar, who struggle, and who do the best with the resources they have.

Some come to us full of support and resources, others come to us with much less. The less the resources, the more compassion we need. The greater the challenge, the more patience we must have. The more we are challenged, the higher we must rise.

We can be the purveyor of the status quo, or we can be the change agents we want to be. It all begins today… here we go!

— — —

I wrote the following in 2011:

My Open Educator Manifesto

‘We’ educate future citizens of the world

Teaching is my professional practice

I Share by default

I am Open, Transparent, Collaborative, and Social

My students own their own:   (Learning)

• learning process

• learning environment

• learning products

• learning assessment

My students belong to learning networks

Every student deserves customized learning

• Student voice

• Student choice

Every educator deserves customized learning

I have high expectations

I Care, Share, and Dare

I am a role model

I am the change I want to see in Education!