Recording of my TCC2016 keynote: The Distributed Teacher

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This is the recording of my keynote at the TCC2016 online conference, on the nature of learning and teaching: the inherently social, distributed nature of it, why e-learning is fundamentally different from p-learning, and how we harmfully transfer pedagogies and processes from physical classrooms to online contexts in which they do not belong. If you want to watch it, skip the first 5 minutes because there was a problem with the sound and video (I hate you, Adobe Connect): the talk itself begins at a few seconds after the 5 minute mark.

Downloadable slides and details of the themes are at https://landing.athabascau.ca/file/view/1598774/the-distributed-teacher-slides-from-my-tcc-2016-keynote

Address of the bookmark: http://squirrel.adobeconnect.com/p1bvy7grca7/

Cheerful to a Fault: “Positive” Practices with Negative Implications – Alfie Kohn

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One in a long series of excellent posts from Alfie Kohn, this time examining the problem of praise. The problem with praise and related things mostly only arises when you praise the person, not what they do. All too often it is a rather unpleasant means of asserting authority, and thus it causes a focus on meeting extrinsic goals, to the detriment of the intrinsic pleasure of doing something. We all need feedback, and it is great to know how we are doing through someone else’s eyes, but it’s much too easy for helpful reactions to turn into extremely unhelpful judgement, much too simple for that to reinforce or establish unhealthy power relationships, and absurdly easy for that to become the reason for doing something.

The post covers other issues too, notably the risks of too much focus on happiness and cheerfulness (neither of which are always appropriate responses to circumstances). I particularly like his translation of “Only Positive Attitudes Allowed Beyond This Point.”  as meaning “My Mental Health Is So Precarious That I Need All of You to Pretend You’re Happy.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/cheerful

Over two dozen people with ties to India’s $1-billion exam scam have died mysteriously in recent months

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“… the scale of the scam in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is mind-boggling. Police say that since 2007, tens of thousands of students and job aspirants have paid hefty bribes to middlemen, bureaucrats and politicians to rig test results for medical schools and government jobs.

So far, 1,930 people have been arrested and more than 500 are on the run. Hundreds of medical students are in prison — along with several bureaucrats and the state’s education minister. Even the governor has been implicated.“

A billion-dollar fraud scheme, perhaps dozens murdered, nearly 2000 in jail and hundreds more on the run. How can we defend a system that does this to people? Though opportunities for corruption may be higher in India, it is not peculiar to the culture. It is worth remembering that more than two-thirds of high school Canadian students cheat (I have seen some estimates that are notably higher – this was just the first in the search results and illustrates the point well enough):

According to a survey of Canadian university & college students:

  • Cheated on written work in high school 73%
  • Cheated on tests in high school 58%
  • Cheated on a test as undergrads 18%
  • Helped someone else cheat on a test 8%

According to a survey of 43,000 U.S. high school students:

  • Used the internet to plagiarize 33%
  • Cheated on a test last year 59%
  • Did it more than twice 34%
  • Think you need to cheat to get ahead 39%

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/universities/

When it is a majority phenomenon, this is the moral norm, not an aberration. The problem is a system that makes this a plausible and, for many, a preferable solution, despite knowing it is wrong. This means the system is flawed, far more than the people in it. The problems emerge primarily because, in the cause of teaching, we make people do things they do not want to do, and threaten them/reward them to enforce compliance. It’s not a problem with human nature, it’s a rational reaction to extrinsic motivation, especially when the threat is as great as we make it. Even my dog cheats under those conditions if she can get away with it.  When the point of learning is the reward, then there is no point to learning apart from the reward and, when it’s to avoid punishment, it’s even worse. The quality of learning is always orders of magnitude lower than when we learn something because we want to learn it, or as a side-effect of doing something that interests us, but the direct consequence of extrinsic motivation is to sap away intrinsic motivation, so even those with an interest mostly have at least some of it kicked or cajolled out of them. That’s a failure on a majestic scale. If tests given in schools and universities had some discriminatory value it might still be justifiable but perhaps the dumbest thing of all about the whole crazy mess is that a GPA has no predictive value at all when it comes to assessing competence.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theprovince.com/health/Over+dozen+people+with+ties+India+billion+exam+scam+have+died/11191722/story.html

Exam focus damaging pupils' mental health, says NUT – BBC News

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A report on a survey of 8,000 teachers and a review of the research.

The report sponsors observe…

“Many of the young people Young Minds works with say that they feel completely defined by their grades and that this is very detrimental to their wellbeing and self-esteem.”

It seems that at least some of their teachers do indeed (reluctantly) define them that way…

One junior school teacher said: “I am in danger of seeing them more in terms of what colour they are in my pupils’ list eg are they red (below expectation), green (above expectation) or purples (Pupil Premium) – rather than as individuals.”

Indeed, it appears to be endemic…

Kevin Courtney, deputy general-secretary of the NUT, said: “Teachers at the sharp end are saying this loud and clear, ‘If it isn’t relevant to a test then it is not seen as a priority.’

“The whole culture of a school has become geared towards meeting government targets and Ofsted expectations. As this report shows, schools are on the verge of becoming ‘exam factories’.”

He argued the accountability agenda was “damaging children’s experience of education”, which should be joyful and leave them with “a thirst for knowledge for the rest of their lives”.

This is terrible and tragic. So surely the British government is trying to do something about it? Not so much…

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Part of our commitment to social justice is the determination to ensure every child is given an education that allows them realise their potential.

“That’s why we are raising standards with a rigorous new curriculum, world class exams and new accountability system that rewards those schools which help every child to achieve their best.”

Helping people to realise their potential is a noble aim. A “rigorous new curriculum, world class exams and new accountability system” is a guaranteed way to prevent that from happening. Duh. Didn’t those that run the UK government learn anything in their expensive private schools? Oh…

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-33380155

The death of the exam: Canada is at the leading edge of killing the dreaded annual ‘final’ for good | National Post

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Good news!

There’s not much to disagree with in this article, that reports on some successful efforts to erode the monstrously ugly blight of exams in Canada and beyond, and some of the more obvious reasoning behind the initiatives to kill them. They don’t work, they’re unfair, they’re antagonistic to learning, they cause pain, etc. All true.

Address of the bookmark: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-death-of-the-exam-canada-is-at-the-leading-edge-of-killing-the-final-for-good

Smart learning – a new approach or simply a new name? | Smart Learning

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Kinshuk has begun a blog on smart learning and, in this post, defines what that means. I particularly like:

“ I have come to realize that while technology can help us in improving learning, a fundamental change is needed in the overall perception of educators and learners to see any real effect. Simply trying to create adaptive systems, intelligent systems, or any sort of mobile/ubiquitous environments is going to have only superficial impact, if we do not change the way we teach, and more importantly, the way we think of learning process (and assessment process).“ 

This very much echoes my own view. At least that fundamental change is needed in the context of formal education. Outside our ivory towers that fundamental change has already happened and continues to accelerate. Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter, Reddit, StackExchange, Facebook and countless others of their net-enabled ilk are amongst the most successful learning technologies (more accurately, components of learning technologies) ever created, arguably up there with language and writing, ultimately way beyond printing or schools. 

Kinshuk goes on to talk of an ecosystem of technology and pedagogy, which I think is a useful way of looking at it. Terry Anderson, too, talks of the dance between technology and pedagogy with much the same intent. I agree that we have to take a total systems view of this. My own take on it is that pedagogies are technologies – learning technologies are simply those with pedagogies in the assembly, whether human-instantiated or embedded in tools. Technologies and pedagogies are not separate categories. Within the ecosystem there are many other technologies involved in the assembly apart from those we traditionally label as ‘learning technologies’ such as timetables, organizational structures, regulations, departmental roles, accreditation frameworks, curricula, organizational methods, processes and rituals, not to mention pieces like routers, protocols, software programs and whiteboards. But, though important, technologies are not the only objects in this ecology. We need to think of the entire ecosystem and consider things that are not technologies at all like friendship, caring, learning, creativity, belief, environment, ethics, and, of course, people. As soon as you get past the ‘if intervention x, then result y’ mindset that plagues much learning technology (and education) research, and start to see it as a complex adaptive system that is ultimately about what it means to be human, you enter a world of rich complexity that I think is far more productive territory. It’s an ecosystem that is filled not just with process but with meaning and value. 

On a more mundane and pragmatic note, I think it is worth observing that learning and accreditation of competence must be entirely separated – accreditation is an invasive parasite in this ecosystem that feeds on and consumes learning. Or maybe it is more like the effluent that poisons it. Either way, I’d prefer that accreditation should not be lumped under the ‘smart learning’ banner at all. ‘Smart accreditation’ is fine – I have no particular concerns about that, as a separate field of study. In some ways it is worthy of study in smart learning because of its effects. That is somewhat along the lines of studying oil spills when considering natural ecosystems.  Assessment (feedback, critical reflection, judgement, etc), on the other hand, is a totally different matter. Assessment is a critical part of almost any pedagogy worthy of the name and so of course must be part of a smart learning ecology. I’m not sure that it warrants a separate category of its own but it is certainly important. It is, however, highly dangerous to take the ‘easy’ next step of using it to assert competence, especially when that assertion becomes the reason for learning in the first place, or is used as a tool to manipulate learners. That is what predominantly drives education now, to the point that it threatens the entire ecosystem. 

That said, I’d like to think that it is possible that the paths of accreditation and assessment might one day rejoin because they do share copious commonalities. It would be great to find ways that the smart stuff we are doing to support learning might, as a byproduct, also be useful evidence in accreditation, without clogging up the whole ecosystem. Technologies like Caliper, TinCan, and portfolios offer much promise for that. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.kinshuk.info/2015/05/smart-learning/

How Do You Motivate Kids To Stop Skipping School?

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Not like this!

This article starts with the line ‘it seems like a no-brainer’  and indeed it is. The no-brainer solution to low attendance is to make the schools relevant, meaningful and interesting to the kids.

However, bizarrely, that is not what seemed obvious to the writer of the article, nor to the ones that carried out this harmful and doomed research, who thought the obvious answer was an incentive scheme, and inflicted it on 799 kids, mostly age 9. Basically, they told the kids they would get two pencils and a cute eraser if they turned up 85% of the time during the 38-day study.

It seems that they did not bother with a literature review because, had they done so, they would have found out right away that rewards are totally the opposite of what is needed to motivate kids to attend school. There is over 50 years of compelling evidence from research on motivation, in many fields and from many disciplines, that demonstrates this unequivocally and beyond any reasonable doubt. The only possible consequence of this intervention would be to demotivate the kids so that, at best, they might revert to former behaviours at the end of it, and that many would be even less likely to attend when it was over.

Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what they found. The reward program did indeed increase attendance while it was in effect  (this is the allure of behaviourism and why it still holds sway – it does achieve immediate results) and, when it was over, kids were indeed even less motivated to attend than they had been before, exactly as theory and empirical research predicts. In fact, many of the kids got off very lightly: formerly high attenders and those that were not great attenders before but that succeeded in getting the reward only fell back to baseline levels as soon as it was over, which is actually pretty good going. A more significant reward or longer study period might have had worse consequences. Unfortunately, the effects on the ones that were the real target (those who were initially low attenders, 60% of whom failed to meet the goal) was disastrous: once the intervention was over, these already at-risk kids were only a quarter as likely to attend as they had been before the intervention began.

One of the surprised researchers said:

“”I almost felt badly about what we had done,” she says. “That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all.”

Almost? Seriously. This borders on child abuse. I generally think of research ethics boards as an arguably necessary evil but, when I hear that experiments like this are still going on, I could easily become a fan.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/22/407947554/how-do-you-motivate-kids-to-stop-skipping-school

The new axis of evil — Canada: One third of American 8th graders think we live in a dictatorship

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You could look at the ‘fact’ that a third of American 8th grade students think Canada is a dictatorship as just another tragi-comic indictment of the US educational system, or of the blindness of the US to the existence or validity of any other country, or of a failure to get the message across about Canada, or that the message about Stephen Harper’s style of government actually has got out, albeit in a slightly distorted form. All likely have a glimmer of truth.

But, actually, the headline from The Province newspaper is false: I am pretty sure that very few US 8th graders really think that Canada is a dictatorship. They just don’t know. It was just a vaguely plausible option on the MCQ (note that the actual candidate answer did not mention dictatorship, though it was implied), so they made a disinterested guess because that’s what they have been taught to do. There’s no belief implied at all.

Should a kid in early teenage know about the political systems of other countries? Why? On the whole, things matter if they matter to those around you, and/or because you are curious about how they work, and/or if it has relevance to things you do or want to do. it is far from clear that any of these conditions is true for the kids in question.  If it is forced down your throat with the threat of reward (or punishment) but no one you care about cares about it, it doesn’t inherently interest you, and it doesn’t address any actual need you have, then why on earth should you learn it? But why are the kids not interested enough to know this? The answer lies, I think, in the means used to discover what they do not know.

Exam - public domain

 

Educational systems that are designed to churn out kids that get the right answers on tests like this have two main options. The first is to build rich, curiosity-driven learning communities in which teachers and learners share the journey, enthusing one another, supporting one another, discovering paths, sharing delight in their discoveries, and overcoming challenges together. This is how learning happens lastingly, efficiently and meaningfully. But, and it’s a big but, such a path may not cover what will be on the test at the time the test needs to be taken. There’s a great deal of intrinsic reward in such a path for all concerned but the extrinisic reward structures (most especially those tests), for both teachers and students, tend to actively militate against it. It certainly doesn’t help when all (teachers and students) are forced to do the same thing at the same time in lock step, whether it makes sense, interests anyone or has any relevance or not. The second path to getting those test results is much more direct: apply coercion (reward or punishment) and make students ‘learn’ what will be on the test. With enough pressure, it can work well enough to get the required test results, even though in the process it has disempowered teachers and learners, forced them into a controller/controlled relationship in which maintenance of discipline becomes a major teaching function and, as a result and perhaps most heinously of all, has likely destroyed any innate and lasting interest in the topic for the vast majority of students. To add the final cherry on top, the vast majority of what has been ‘learned’ will be forgotten once the need to pass the test has passed. Only the greatest teachers and most passionately interested learners can overcome this systemic failing. It’s not the kids that are ignorant. It’s the people who designed and continue to support the system used to teach them.   

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theprovince.com/news/national/axis+evil+Canada+third+American+graders+think+live/11063581/story.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Why do we not ban use of cellphones in online learning?

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Banning mobile phones is cargo cult science is a good, laudably brief, dismissive, critical review of the dangerously-reported recently published study by the London School of Economics that, amongst other things, shows a correlation between banning of mobile phones in schools and improved grades. As the title of the post suggests, the report does not show that banning mobile phones in schools is what improves grades in any way at all, despite the fact that the report writers do seem to believe that this is what they have shown: indeed, they recommend banning mobile phones as a cost effective measure to improve grades! That is so opposite to the obvious conclusion it is not even funny. To me, it shows a terrible failure at a massive systemic level. It’s not cellphone use that’s the problem – it’s the teaching. More precisely, it’s the system of teaching. I am sure that the vast majority of individual teachers are doing wonders, under extremely adverse circumstances. But they are doing so in a completely broken system. 

The interesting thing for me is that this would never come up as an issue for online and distance learners. Well, almost never: perhaps occasionally, study guides might recommend you set aside undistracted time for some (not all) kinds of study and webinar leaders might suggest that participants switch off phones and other distractions. But this is only at most a bit of practical advice, not an edict.

The point here is that command-and-control teaching methods of traditional classrooms have no meaning or relevance in online learning. This makes it all the more odd that we continue to see substantially the same pedagogies being used for online teaching as those found in the over-controlling environment of teacher-led classrooms. Obvious culprits like lecture-based MOOCs are just the more visible tip of this weird bit of skeuomorphism but the general principle runs across the board from instructivist textbooks through more enlightened uses of social constructivist methods in discussion forums. Too often, implicitly or explicitly, we act under the illusion that how we teach is how people learn, as though we still had students trapped in a classroom, controlling (almost literally) their every move.  The unholy and inseparable continued twinning of fixed-length courses and the use of grades to drive student progress is very much to blame, though a lack of imagination doesn’t help. These technologies evolved because of the physics of classrooms, not because they are good ways to support learning. In almost every way, they are actually antagonistic to learning. Online learning can, does and should liberate learners, giving them control. So let’s stop teaching them as though we were the ones in charge. It is crazy that we should voluntarily shackle ourselves when there is absolutely no need for it.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.educate1to1.org/banning-mobile-phone-is-cargo-cult-science/

What exams have taught me

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http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/45251.html

I have argued at some length on numerous occasions that exams, especially in their traditional unseen, time-limited, paper-based form, without access to books or Internet or friends, are the work of the devil and fundamentally wrong in almost every way that I can think of. They are unfair, resource-intensive, inauthentic, counter-productive, anti-educational, disspiriting, soulless products of a mechanistic age that represent an ethos that we should condemn as evil.

And yet they persist.

I have been wondering why something so manifestly wrong should maintain such a hold on our educational system even though it is demonstrably anti-educational. Surely it must be more than a mean-spirited small-minded attempt to ensure that people are who they say they are?

I think I have the answer.

Exams are so much a part of our educational system that pervade almost every subject area that they teach a deeper, more profound set of lessons than any of the subjects that they relate to. Clearly, from their ubiquity, they must relate to more important and basic things to learn than, say, maths, languages, or history. Subjects may come and subjects may go but the forms of assessment remain startlingly constant. So, I have been thinking about what exams taught me:

  • that slow, steady, careful work is not worth the hassle – a bit of cramming (typically one-three days seemed to work for me) in a mad rush just before the event works much more effectively and saves a lot of time
  • the corollary – adrenalin is necessary to achieve anything worth achieving
  • that the most important things in life generally take around three hours to complete
  • that extrinsic motivation, the threat of punishment and the lure of reward, is more important than making what we do fun, enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding
  • that we are judged not on what we achieve or how we grow but on how well we can display our skills in an intense, improbably weird and disconcerting setting

I learnt to do exams early in life better than I learnt most of the subjects I was examined on and have typically done far better than I deserve in such circumstances. I have learnt my lessons well in real life. I (mostly) hit deadlines with minutes to spare and seldom think about them more than a day or two in advance. I perform fairly well in adrenalin-producing circumstances. I summarise and display knowledge that I don’t really have to any great extent. I extemporise. I do things because I fear punishment or crave reward. I play to the rules even when the rules are insane. A bit of high blood pressure comes with the territory. Sometimes this is really useful but I am really trying hard to get out of the habit of always working this way and tp adopt some other approaches sometimes.

There are many other lessons that our educational systems teach us beyond the subject matter – I won’t even begin to explore what we learn from sitting in rows, staying quiet and listening to an authority figure tell us things but, suffice it to say, I haven’t retained much knowledge of grammar, calculus, geography or technical drawing, but I am still unlearning attitudes and beliefs that such bizarre practices instilled in me.

Assessment is good. Assessment tells us how we are doing, where we need to try new things, different approaches, as well as what we are doing right. Assessment is a vital part of the learning process, whether we do it ourselves or get feedback from others (both is best). But assessment should not be the goal. Assessment is part of the process.

Accreditation is good too. Accreditation tells the world that we can do what we claim we can do. it is important that there are ways to verify to others that we are capable (most obviously in the case of people on whom others depend greatly such as surgeons, bus drivers and university professors). Except in cases where the need to work under enormous pressure in unnatural conditions is a prerequisite (there are some occasions) I would just prefer that we relied on authentic evidence rather than this frighteningly artificial process that tells us very little about how people actually perform in the task domain that they are learning in.

The biggest problem comes when we combine and systematise assessment and accreditation into an industrialised, production-line approach to education, losing sight of the real goals. There are many other ways to do this that are less harmful or even positively useful (e.g. portfolios, evidence-based assessment, even vivas when done with care and genuine dialogue) and many are actually used in higher education. We just need more of them to redress the balance a bit.