Category: Mechanical Sympathy

Computer refreshes approach!  An ideal opportunity to reconsider all the bad habits we have in educational technology!  @banana29 had the following questions for her admin which might help frame a discussion around where we might go with our edtech:

Some interesting ideas there. What can we do to present relevant learning situations to our students (how can we begin to join the disparities between the information rich world in which they live outside with the information poor one we present them with in class? What trends are we following into the future? How to we develop useful learning habits in digitally swamped students? How can we organize our digital tools to that optimize learning? 

These questions lead to some other questions around digitized pedagogy: how can digitization assist in learning? How can it hurt learning? What does good pedagogy look like in a digitally enhanced learning environment? Between the ‘gee-wiz ipad’ crowd and the ‘it’s paper and lectures or nothing’ crowd, there has been precious little consideration of how the digital revolution we’re in the middle of is affecting learning. The forces trying to monetize the process further muddy these waters.

These big questions lead to some awkward realizations.  What occurs to me first is that we have adopted educational technology following a business I.T. model rather than pushing for an educational focus. The private businesses that circle education hoping for a quick sale are quick to fill educational CTO positions in school boards.  Put another way, find a CTO in Ontario who was ever a teacher.  Education has different goals than business.  Modelling our I.T. on a business model has created foundations that lead educational technology as a whole in the wrong direction.

One of the reasons I became a teacher is because it seemed like a particularly credible profession.  The process of becoming a teacher appeared to have more in common with an apprenticeship than an abstract degree.  My teacher’s college in particular was focused on getting us as much in-class time with a working, mentor teacher as possible.  Once in the profession, it takes a teacher twelve years to earn full pay, once again implying that this is an apprenticeship that takes a great deal of time to come to fruition.

I’m in year eight of teaching and life on the ground has been somewhat less affirming.  The vast majority of teachers I’ve met do little to expand their teaching skills, unless they are new and so desperate for a position that they spend thousands of dollars collecting additional qualifications.  Many older teachers I know still have the two teachables they started with, and in some cases aren’t even actually qualified to teach the subjects they are teaching.  A surprising number have never updated to honours specialist so they could top out on the salary grid (though that would be hard to do if you don’t actually have a degree or any background in what you’re teaching).

Having found an online community of teachers who are actually interested in improving their craft (and recognizing the changes digitization is having on education and society in general) has been a saving grace, but I still face comments like, “why in God’s name would I want to talk about teaching when I’m not at work?” or “oh great, another pointless PD day” when I’m on the ground in school.

To that end, I’d like to consider revisions to the much maligned ‘grid’ that determines teacher salaries in Ontario.  Ranging from just over forty thousand a year (which isn’t an awful lot when you’ve just spent over one hundred thousands dollars on five years of university), to just over ninety thousand a year more than a decade into working, the grid relies mainly on years in the classroom as a justification for pay raises.  The difference between an honours specialist in a subject and a teacher who has never lifted a finger to try and improve is less than 5% of pay at the top of the grid.*

I would suggest that there is a lot more to the craft of teaching than years in the classroom, especially if you’re not one of those very special teachers who like to trot out the same old lesson, year in, year out (one you probably photocopied from someone else in the first place).  In the great scheme of becoming a master teacher, your activity both in and beyond the classroom are vital to your understanding of how your profession works as a whole.

Teachers who are active in their professional organizations (ECOO, OHASSTA, OLA, OAME, ELAN, OCTE, and others), are working to enhance their craft by working with colleagues in their various disciplines.  How this isn’t a consideration in a salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who are active in school leadership roles (such as department heads, directions teams members, etc) are currently offered a rather silly little stipend to do what is essentially another part time job.  They do this with no time given from regular teacher duties, and for a couple of bucks a day.  Why these ‘positions of additional responsibility’ aren’t considered in the salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who take on student teachers and do one of the most important jobs in our profession?  Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school teams and clubs over the long term?  Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school events like graduation or grade nine introductory programs?  Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend their own time and money away from home attending professional conferences to enhance their practice?  You got it, nothing on the grid.

I’m not advocating for a pay per-extracurricular approach here, but I am asking for a grid that works from something other than how long you’ve been doing the job.  If we graded students the same way we salary teachers, they’d get higher and higher grades the longer they are in school, regardless of what they are doing.

Talk of extending the grid from 11 to 15 years is as myopic as basing the grid primarily on years of teaching in the first place.  Seniority has its place in teaching, there is no doubt.  How long a teacher has been teaching is an important metric in determining their quality, but it certainly shouldn’t be the key factor in calculating their pay.

If we’re going to overhaul the salary grid, let’s really examine what determines a teacher who is trying to perfect their imperfectable craft, and then make a grid that isn’t solely based on how old you are as a teacher.  That grid would be fluid and flexible, with people moving up and down in various elements of it.  You’d still enjoy seniority bumps, but a senior teacher who does nothing other than show up and go home, offering no mentor-ship to younger teachers, no direction for their school, no enrichment for their students, and who has no specialization in the subject they teach, wouldn’t be able to make within 5% of the trained specialist who offers up their time to lead departments, train new teachers, or lead subject enrichment.

This kind of grid would encourage the kind of meta-cognition we expect to see in our students, and encourage senior teachers to mentor and improve the craft, rather than closing the door to their classroom five years early while they glide to retirement.  It would also support teachers who recognize how changeable the world is at the moment and who take steps to try and prepare students for a future that will be quite unlike the past.

If we’re going to fix the grid, let’s fix it.  Seniority is only one (relatively minor) metric in considering how hard a teacher is working at becoming a better teacher.

Note:  teacher pay based on student test scores are another American myth that are designed to diminish the profession while cloaking justifications (usually financial) in fictional, statistical validity.  Standardized tests are inherently limited, and teachers who teach well to them are probably such compliant, mechanical creatures that they are actually poor teachers.  US world rankings would suggest that trying to standardize teaching around this kind of testing is a disaster.  A well designed salary grid would recognize the many individual ways that a teacher could improve their craft, without grossly simplifying the metrics for excellence (such as basing the grid almost entirely on seniority).

From the Prezi brainstorming graphical interface: http://prezi.com/mlmks5pq65dz/dancing-in-the-datasphere/

If we live in an increasingly data-rich, but resource poor world, what do we need to do as teachers to give our students a fighting chance?

There is no reason to assume that Eric Schmidt is blowing smoke.  If we really are generating this much information, and now have a means of saving, reviewing, organizing, and learning from it, we need to radically re-think how we educate our children.  Knowledge itself is now plentiful and accessible, teachers are no longer the font of knowledge.

Traditional classrooms work on a data-drip of information, out of the teacher’s mouth.  Many of these teachers are willfully ignorant of the radical revolutions going on in their disciplines as information is no longer confined to the limits of human specialists.  Interdisciplinary studies are prompting radical changes in how we understand just about everything.  Teaching your twenty year out of date university experience out of a ten year out of date text book makes you about as pertinent as a dodo.  Many of our current teaching habits assume nothing is changing, but it is, radically, quickly, meaningfully, everywhere but in the classroom.

When I was a kid I was an astronomy nut.  I memorized the nine planets, the meaningful moons, I knew distances, sizes; the universe was a (relatively) small solar system with stars beyond.  We currently know of over 600 planets, and discover an average of a dozen a week, every week.  We are discovering solar systems so bizarre in nature that they beggar belief; but none of that is in the text book, and most teachers won’t bother with it because accessing the datasphere is too difficult with limited technology access in school (fixable with this).

We are discovering these things with drastically improved sensing technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution.  We record this data in abundance using storage technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution.  We often fail to access it for years after the fact because we have not yet caught up with our ability to observe and record the universe around us.  Fortunately we’re now developing systems that sort their own data, and make connections without human oversight – the data itself is beginning to self organize.  The future will be smarter than we can imagine as individuals.

This acceleration is happening in all fields of human endeavor.  We are teasing free nuances in archaeology, history, and science.  We understand in greater detail how the masters painted five centuries ago, we have seen to the edge of reality and felt the remnants of the explosive expansion that started everything.  What we haven’t done is evolved education to prepare our students for this deluge of data.  We still mete out information because we define ourselves as holders of knowledge.  We’re holding a cup of water as the dam breaks around us.

We drip feed students information in class and then complain that they are unfocused, disinterested.  We then agonize over how to make our lessons more engaging.  We wring our hands over outright lies and insinuations instead of letting the datasphere show the truth; we cater to myth, habit and tradition of paper based learning.

In the meantime a steady stream of data overwhelms our students from social networks that dwarf in size any their parents or grandparents had.  We belittle their circumstance by demeaning their means of communication, and overvaluing our traditional modes of contact.  Because they don’t ‘pick up a phone’, they don’t demonstrate meaningful relationships like people of a certain age do (oddly similar to what the phone-people’s parents said about them when they couldn’t be bothered to go and visit people face to face any more).  Kids nowadays, their social networks are empty things devoid of real meaning.

Worst of all, we don’t teach them how to manage the avalanche of data that threatens to bury them; then we criticize them for not managing it well.  Many teachers manage it by ignoring it entirely

We spoon feed them vetted data in tiny amounts because we think that is credible, safe and real, but that isn’t the world they are going to graduate into.  Being able to manage multiple, often conflicting data, organize information out of the noise and critically analyze material is far more relevant than memorizing the right answers to the same questions we’ve been asking for years.

Until we take our responsibility to prepare our students for the 21st Century seriously, we will continue to think that slowing them down, unplugging them and ignoring the datasphere that continues to grow around us at a prodigious rate is not only the easier (cheaper) thing to do, but it is the right thing to do too.

What we aren’t doing is making them familiar with their likely future circumstances, and we do it because it’s easier to ignore a revolution than recognize it, even if it’s happening all around us.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been wishing for a couple of Apps…

Idea #1:

Don’t you wish you were a fly on the wall?

FLY ON THE WALL:  an app that lets you share live video from webcams at a conference you couldn’t attend in person.  You get a flavour of a conference by following the twitter feed, and you can even interact with it, but you miss the moment to moment ideas, and you’re ultimately limited to what other people consider important.

Fly on the wall creates a live stream that people can watch, similar to the Edupunk spreecast we did the other day.  This doesn’t need to be a huge bandwidth deal, and multiple streams from the same location can be upvoted if they are better situated.  If people wanted to see the conference through the eyes of a friend, then their choice to stay with them would keep the feed active.  People could even offer voice overs or supporting commentary as part of their feeds.

The benefits to conferences would be obvious, they could even tier attendance and offer a discount rate through an official fly on the wall feed to conference presentations.  Virtual presence in conferences would become a regular part of the process.

Anyone want to have a go at this with me?

Idea #2:

I’m the sun!

Gravity: a web3.0 app that shows me as the centre of the system and social networking comments in orbits that are closer if they are more important to me.

Tweets that mention me are closer than general tweets, tweets that refer to demonstrated interests orbit in closer.  Over time this app would get a sense of what my interests are and float in ‘interest comets’, making suggestions on items that should suit me.  Facebook, twitter, Linkedin and Google+ (as well as other social networks) would be synced though Gravity to push objects of interest into your orbit.

A well trained Gravity system would feed you the must see and keep out the flotsam of your social networking feeds.

Idea #3:

Deep Reader: A web app that blocks distractions while you adopt a deep, meditative reading pose with online material.  The interwebs are a distraction engine.  Trying to read online is a difficult process with constant interruptions.  Deep Reader holds off the onslaught while giving you the time and mental space to really grok an author’s thoughts as you used to on paper.

The problem with deep reading isn’t reading a screen, as any Kindle or Nook will show you, it’s trying to read while being in a medium that encourages a shallow surfing of information.

Deep Reader gives you a space to read as you are meant to.

I’d love to see those three.  Got any more you’d love to see?

In a recent conversation with a techno-phobic (or at least reticent) colleague she was bemoaning the constant state of connectedness that modern technology forces upon people.  I’ve heard this complaint from a lot of people who struggle to remain unplugged.

The conversation:

she: I choose to remain present and not in a state of constant inattention!

me:  It’s more of a oneness with the datasphere, you’re never alone, a living cell in a massive organism… a heightened state of awareness, the world is all around you, information conducted by you…

she:  Wow…sounds almost like Zen Buddhism. Ohm.

One of the reasons this onlineness isn’t work for me is because it’s cathartic.  I never feel like I’m doing work, it feels more like self expression.  I’m the one who directs it, it’s empowering.

What I find exhausting is sitting in traffic, fascism , traffic lights, current Canadian politics, indoctrination and standing in lines.  If I had to do that 24/7, I’d go mental, yet millions of people accommodate  these things as the necessities of daily life.  When I’m online I’m orchestrating my interests, communicating with people I enjoy and feeding my mind.  How would I ever get tired of that?

And as for information overload…. well… 

This topic has come up before, but I’ve been rehashing it in my mind over the past day or two after having a twitter-talk with @innovativeedu.

Michael Enright is interviewing 4 “new” teachers on Sunday Edition today (though I’m not sure a year 7 teacher qualifies as new).  Here are the questions he asked these bright and shiny teachers from across Canada.  Once he settled them in, the discussion got real!

Being an interrogative, tarnished, unpicked teacher, I thought I’d throw in my two cents too!  Feel free to grab the questions and reply for yourself below…

Why did you become a teacher?
I got downsized 3 times in business, and started to get the sense that you’ll get used and tossed by business no matter how hard you work at it.  You’ll put in years above and beyond and get chucked when it suits them.  I’d taught in Japan for a couple of years and my wife was a teacher.  When the last downsize happened she encouraged me to go take teacher’s college in Ontario.  I didn’t like school, didn’t do particularly well at it, and still think it’s a bit of a holding cell for disenfranchised young citizens (if the voting age was changed to 16, graduation age would quickly follow it).

I’ve learned in many different environments from classrooms to online to machine shops.  In my experience classrooms tend to be more about control than learning.  Every year before I go back into the classroom I listen to Another Brick In The Wall, and then promise never to do that to anyone.  It’s very easy for education to become a mechanical system.

I love learning, and I see my students as people, not statistics.  I loved being Sensei in Japan, being ‘teacher’ in Canada isn’t quite as renowned, but I’m dedicated to my professional practice and believe that what I do matters.

Are you a minority in your field (gender? race? age?)  What’s that like?
I was the oldest in my teacher training program by many years.  Most of my colleagues were career eductionalists (public school straight into university straight into teacher’s college straight into teaching).  I often found myself applying experience to what was a challenging teaching program while the pro-students choked on the work loads.

I’ve often found it difficult to see eye to eye with how academic teachers do things.  But one of the most important things about teachers is that they represent all aspects of society.  If the only teachers students met were academic A+ average robots, many students would be alienated.  It’s important that we have a diverse teaching population for a diverse student population.  Mentors aren’t found in ranks of similar people.

Has being a teacher changed you?
I’ve really enjoyed building a profession knowing that I can commit myself to it and not get dumped because of a spreadsheet.  That sense of security allows me to do an important job well.  It allows me to justify the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on my own qualifications without fear that it may be wasted.  Teaching is a long view profession that I enjoy developing year after year.

There has been a lot of latitude in job options, so I’m never bored.  Teaching hasn’t changed me much, but I’ve finally found a profession that matches my intensity.  If it’s changed me at all, it’s made me a bit more reluctant to argue ideas (believe it or not), while I work out all sides of an issue.  Teaching makes you less likely to jump to conclusions.

Regionally, what’s challenging about your job?
On the edge of rural and urban Canada, I have a great deal of difficulty dealing with students driving to school with large rebel flags in their pickup trucks.  The overt racism can be shocking (though it tends to be repeated from the dinner table and is based more on a lack of experience than a sense of actual hatred).  I enjoy taking as many students as possible on field trips to Toronto – it’s good for them, though many fear they will be murdered.

Anyone spread too thin by teaching?
I tend to jump into breaches, suddenly find myself teaching pilot programs, heading departments, running sports and clubs, presenting at conferences, representing in the union… often all at the same time.  My wife teaches too, and between us I feel a great deal of tension wanting to participate in the full spectrum of teaching related work and keeping up with family commitments.

One of the hardest things I’ve found in teaching (I’m going into year 9) is the gearing.  You go at 110% all semester and then suddenly it’s exams.  In June it then means summer.  The change in gears is stressful, it’s hard to put it down, and it gets awfully heavy if you don’t.

I’ve had half a dozen distinct careers… none have been remotely as emotionally, physically and intellectually exhausting as teaching.  If you’re at work, you’re full on, all the time.  There are no easy days when you feel like taking it slow.  If you’re away, you’re still planning all the work, so you’re never really off.  When you are there, you’re surrounded by people, an unfortunate percentage of whom are of questionable personal hygiene.  You get sick a lot.  You make your family sick a lot.  All while going 100%, all the time.

Are we asking teachers to do too much?

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/08/16/broten-tackles-teacher-pay “no average Ontarian would expect a 5.5% pay hike in these economic times,  just because they took the summer off and refused to negotiate” Average Ontarians don’t have 5+ years of higher education. The vast majority of teachers don’t take the summer off. Teacher’s didn’t refuse the negotiate, the government did and then created an illegal forced contract that has since been struck down.

If their bosses are going to publicly humiliate them and ignore the actual job in favor of public illusions about the profession, then yes, we are asking teachers to do too much without recognizing what the job actually is.  I have been teaching for 8 years and have yet to have a ‘summer off’.  I know some teachers do walk away and do nothing, but many more don’t.  If you’re going to represent a profession by their worst members, no job in the world is going to look appealing.  Teachers don’t mind doing the extra work, they tend to do it for the right reasons (passion), but not if it’s going to be used against them, which it has been.

How do you deal with the bureaucracy?
Cautiously, especially now that I understand I work for a ministry that is run by morally bankrupt vote grabbers who stand for nothing and are willing to toss any ideal they claim to represent into the fire if they think it’ll satisfy the mob.

I’ve found my school admin to be relatively easy to work with.  The vast majority are professional and dedicated to fair, reasonable work.  I’m finding the larger, political structures to be somewhat less trustworthy.

What is the relationship between teachers and the ministry (bureaucracy)?
See above.  No real problems until this year.  We do our job very well, they support us, we look fantastic in UN rankings of world education systems.  Apparently we can trash that if it means winning a single by-election.  Now I am trying not to be hostile, though it is hard when your boss openly lies about you in the media.

Yes, going to school this year has been overshadowed by some very negative politics.  The only thing I find more frustrating are head-in-the-sand teachers who refuse to acknowledge anything about it.  It affects them, but they think they’re above it.  How they can call themselves genuine when they are willfully ignorant of the hypocrisy hurting their profession is annoying.  Meanwhile, they appear to be content letting other people throw themselves into a fight that will benefit them while they do nothing about it.  I wonder how they teach students about democracies and human rights, it isn’t through example.

Do teachers drive students to do well in standardized testing?  Is it a race?
I hate that they do, but they do.  Test scores have dictated where I live, which makes me sad.  Not all schools are created equally, and people grasp at anything to distinguish them.  I’m an advocate of saving the millions we spend a year on testing by cancelling it.  The only way we can get better is by NOT following bad US habits down the toilet.  Simplifying learning into standardized testing is beneath the standard we’ve set for ourselves.

How do you handle parents with unreal expectations?  or an abiding dislike of teachers?
The second bit I get a lot of around this very conservative (never been anything else) riding.  As a general rule I try and deal directly with students, my covenant is with them.  Having said that, I use technology to try and make my teaching as radically transparent as possible.  If there are no surprises, there are usually no complaints.

I also approach teaching trying not to prejudice students.  I’ve seen too many teachers gossip about a student and destroy any chance for them to build a new relationship with a different teacher.  I’ve had very good relationships with students who have been nightmares for others.  I try to avoid that kind of talk – it leads to confrontations with parents.

Even the most hateful parent won’t have a complaint if I’m straight up and direct with the student and them about what a course is and how to do well in it.  The fact that I can talk to them from their own experiences (not just as an Ed-bot) doesn’t hurt either.  It’s a lot easier to commiserate with someone who has been downsized when you’ve experienced it yourself.  The shiny educationalist would find that challenging.

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, you’ve never worked in the private sector, They expect results! (shudder)”.

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CLICK HERE to listen to the original interviews.  As mentioned, once they get settled in and get past the bright, shiny stuff, it gets real!

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Here are the questions boiled down.  Feel free to copy and paste in to go face to face with Enright yourself!

Why did you become a teacher?
Are you a minority in your field (gender? race? age?)  What’s that like?
Has being a teacher changed you?
Regionally, what’s challenging about your job?
Anyone else spread too thin by teaching?
Are we asking teachers to do too much?
How do you deal with the bureaucracy?
What is the relationship between teachers and the ministry?
Do teachers drive students to do well in standardized testing?  Is it a race?
How do you handle parents with unreal expectations?  or an abiding dislike of teachers?