edchat – Page 19 – Mechanical Sympathy

Trust

I came across this excellent article by the Harvard Business Review about how trust relates to productivity in business. It turns out trust goes a long way towards creating a productive learning environment with students as well. Trust doesn’t end in the classroom though. Between teachers in a building, across entire school boards and in the education system in Ontario as a whole, trust is the cement that turns us from individuals into powerfully focusedl groups. After reading that article I couldn’t help but wonder at the damage done by the aggressive politics that drive out of date and combative management practices in education.

This week we were handed a remedy for a court case won by teacher’s unions in Ontario. In 2012 the Ontario provincial government decided to ignore the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and deny the right to strike and force a contract on teachers in the province because bankers had tanked the world economy a few years before and the government’s way to fix that was to vilify and then bleed public employees dry.

You couldn’t pick a finer example of broken trust within an organization. After a miserable late 1990s under a tea party style conservative government that was bound and determined to diminish the teaching profession in Ontario, the Liberal party was ushered in and a decade of rebuilding occurred. In that time Ontario shot up the ranks in terms of world education. Suddenly, in 2012, in a desperate attempt to garner conservative votes the Liberal party chose to ignore the Canadian Charter – the document at the foundation of our democratic rule of law – and force a contract on teachers, just to move some money around on ledgers so it appeared that they were more fiscally conservative. The strips to sick days actually cost Ontario more even before the government lost the court case and had to pay restitution. It was a case of desperate and illegal law making and profound mismanagement. The people responsible have never apologized. If your boss did that would you trust them?

Since then trust has been thin on the ground in Ontario’s education sector, yet this article on trust goes to great lengths to underscore how important it is to create a transparent, consistent and reasonable relationship between members within an organization:

“Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy, collaborate better, suffer less chronic stress & are happier – these factors fuel stronger performance”

Having worked in the private sector for fifteen years before coming a teacher, I’m often surprised at how unenlightened management practices in education are. Perhaps it’s simply a byproduct of being managed by politics rather than productivity. In any case, the mismanagement of Ontario’s education system over the past few years is neither cheap, nor productive.

I’ve worked for my current employer for over ten years. In that time I only ever asked for a single exception to being expected to come in to work every day. In 2012 my mother committed suicide. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a result but was expected to be in class teaching volatile teenagers. I went to my principal and asked for help. She called HR for me to navigate the process but we were told by a senior manager, “we have people at work who have had a heart attack and have cancer, what makes you so special?” I went back to work with images of mopping my mother’s remains off the floor still floating before my eyes. Can you imagine my level of trust since then?

This month I just got back from surgery. I went back to work 2 days before I should have because we are only allowed 3 days off before needing to contact HR – something I wasn’t going to do. I’d lost so much blood due to this surgery (sinuses, it isn’t a nice one) that I passed out at the end of the school day while stacking chairs in my classroom. I woke up on the floor in a puddle of blood, cleaned myself up and went home and called in sick again. Damaged trust isn’t easily forgotten and can put people in ridiculous situations that need not occur.

Trust looks wish-washy from a conservative mind-set, but it’s actually a fiscally powerful incentive.

Mismanagement has a trickle down effect. Board level administration is required to support and enable Ministry dictates, no matter how politically arbitrary, damaging to learning or asinine. School level administration ends up in a frictional relationship with their teachers as a result of this trickle down distrust. The end result is that people tend to duck and cover. It’s difficult to get people to raise their heads out of their classrooms and collaborate on anything because they doubt the veracity of the people who manage them.

“when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves. A Google study similarly found that managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work.”

Trust creates a bond between teacher and student and student and peer. Knowing you’re working with someone who has your best interests are at the centre of what they do makes learning more effective. A teacher who students can’t trust is a poor teacher. Students don’t know what to expect or what is expected from them. A teacher who surprises students with tests, sometimes on material not comprehensively covered in class, is a teacher students shy away from. For the rest of us who are trying to establish a trust relationship with our students in order to empower their learning, these teachers are a cancer on the profession.

When you think about your favorite teacher I doubt it’s because they gave you a high mark, or because they were hard to figure out. Teachers that enable us are honest, direct and help us to exceed our own expectations of ourselves. Trust isn’t a nice idea in those cases, it is the foundation of the entire process. After reading that article, I now realize that trust is actually a mechanical process hard wired into how humans think; it’s the mechanism that makes us so socially powerful.

Enabled, energized people in an organization, be it a board of education or a classroom, want to engage. Engagement is a big buzz word in education right now. It occurs in high trust organizations naturally. If it isn’t happening in your school or classroom look to how you are developing trust to see why it isn’t happening. Demanding engagement is a sure way not to generate any.

“Once employees have been trained, allow them, whenever possible, to manage people and execute projects in their own way. Being trusted to figure things out is a big motivator: A 2014 Citigroup and LinkedIn survey found that nearly half of employees would give up a 20% raise for greater control over how they work.”

I’m at my best in a classroom when I’m able to define goals, ensure students have fundamental skills in place and then give them the time, space, equipment and positive encouragement to figure it out for themselves. This light-handed approach means that when they get something to work they feel that they’ve figured it out themselves. This is very empowering. Another benefit of this light handed approach is that I’m not so focused on talking at everyone that I’m able to see what individual students need to move forward. I’m happiest when a student learns things they weren’t able to do before and feel that they did it themselves. I know I’m important to the process, but students need to feel engaged and enabled in order to own their learning. Trust powers that process.

My school and board is at its best when we have clear, tangible goals and decisions are made transparently and rationally. The more this happens, the more effective these institutions become as places of learning, and the more I trust the people who are leading me. When I trust my leader there is little I won’t do for them because I feel that we’re all working toward the same goal.

Much of this article drills into the neuro-science of trust. We are social animals hard wired to use trust as a means of working effectively together. If we want to best make use of our powerful social habits, building trust is where we should be concentrating our efforts, especially within the entire educational apparatus.

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Sharing Interests to Prompt Self-directed Writing

The idea of genuine communication and showing students teachers as people rather than representatives of the education system has appeared several times on the PLN lately. Consequently, transitioning from summer to the school year has me overlapping my writing subjects. This was originally published on Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries…

I’m back in the classroom again and teaching English for the first time in more than a year. I took a senior essentials English class mainly because few people want to teach it (teachers like to teach people like themselves – in this case academically focused English students), and it fit my schedule. Essentials English is just as it sounds. These are weak English students who are getting what they need to graduate and get out into the workplace, they aren’t post-secondary bound and tend to find school pointless.

The trick with students this bullied and indifferent to the school system is getting them to read and write at all. Rather than drag them into a text book or make them watch the department copy of Dead Poets Society in order to prompt some writing, I thought I’d introduce them to my insanity. In a week where we’re all getting to know each other it helps if students see what you’re into. Showing your hobbies and interests is a good way to have them become familiar with you and relax a bit. If they get excited about the idea of planning a trip and it prompts them to write, it’s a many birds with one stone situation.

With some support, students quickly got into planning a trip. 28 days, unlimited budget!

The plan was pretty straightforward: you’ve got four weeks (28 days) starting next Monday. Assume you’ve got an unlimited budget for a road trip (gotta travel on the ground). Where would you go? What would you do? On the second day I gave them some pointers on Google Maps and some planning tools like a calendar and how to make notes online and they were off. At the moment it looks like I’ve got pages of writing from students who generally don’t. The research they’ve been doing also lets me diagnose their reading level.

Needless to say, I bravely volunteered to present first. It doesn’t feel like homework when you enjoy doing it, and mine was obviously going to be a motorcycle trip. I probably could have gone more bonkers on bike choice, but I have a sentimental attachment and some practical necessities that prompted my choice (all explained in the presentation). Rather than go for the South American adventure, I decided to focus on The States, which has tons to offer, especially if you aren’t sweating the budget.

Norman Reedus’ RIDE gave me an idea of where I’d like to go, the question was, could I get to the locations in the show and back home in 28 days?

Here’s what I’m presenting:

I presented this to the class two days before it was due. Seeing an example helps and gave me a chance to explain my own process in putting together the trip (deciding on a vehicle, breaking the trip into sections, etc). Many of them had collected data but were having trouble formulating it into a written project or verbal presentation (their choice).

That photo I doctored of a VFR800 a couple of years ago came in handy!

Another side benefit of something like this rather than a boiler plate reading and writing diagnostic is that is gives students a lot of control over the direction of their writing, which means I get to learn what they’re into, which helps me remember who each person is as well as offering me relevant subjects I can insert into future projects.

I’m hoping they surprise themselves with the results. If I catch some of them in the future staring wistfully at Google Maps instead of playing pointless FLASH games I’ll know that they’ve been bitten by the travel bug too!

It’s a lot to try and pull off in 28 days, but when the budget is unlimited, I want more miles! Literacy weak students often have trouble with basic digital tools – they were all screen grabbing Google Map images by the end of the first day though. This’ll help in all sorts of classes.

Into the Rockies ASAP, then down the coast, across the mountains again, and then up the Appalachians home.

Multiple destinations on Google Maps is a simple enough process if you know how. Everyone does now.

Yellowstone! Riding over a mega-volcano. No one in the class realized we lived so close to this impending disaster. It led to an impromptu Geography lesson.

Death Valley and across the South West to the Twisted Sisters on the way to the Big Easy.

Back north in the Smokey Mountains and Appalachians.

I was thinking maybe an H2R or RC213 in a trailer, but then that meant driving a truck and trailer all over the place.
Better to be on two wheels all the time, and on the descendant of my first bike crush.
Students were very curious about my choices. How you travel says a lot about you.

NOTE: at the end of the course more than half the class chose this project as a summative five minute presentation, and they all exceeded the time, media and planning requirements on it. Who said English projects couldn’t be enjoyable and engaging?

Troughs of Disillusionment

It might seem a bit negative, but this process is anything but. Adopting disruptive technology is a difficult business, those inflated expectations create a lot of hope and enthusiasm (not things we like in education). With experience comes rationalization and a better understanding of how new technology can actually help. It isn’t all sunshine and flowers,but without a bit of heedless optimism, this kind of adoption would be too difficult for most to consider.

Alanna recently put me onto this idea of how the innovation adoption cycle actually works. It’s an interesting way of understanding how innovation ripples across established practices.

Though it’s business focused, it demonstrates how even flexible businesses have trouble effectively adopting and harnessing technological innovation. Education is much more conservative and inflexible, so this process is weirdly distorted in ed-world where many people still think that a chalkboard is sufficient.

In ed-world that technology trigger is usually ignored, along with the hype, excitement and enthusiasm. A kind of wilful ignorance blinkers many educators from even looking at technology, it’s all just a fad. What finally drags them into it is the fact that what they’re doing in the classroom is sadly out of touch with what the rest of the world is doing.

While teachers complain about lining up at photocopiers but won’t consider alternatives, the rest of the world got excited about cloud based documents and moved online. Even as school departments worried over photocopying costs (and forests moaned under the weight of learning the way it has always been done), tech-hype excited businesses were frantically connecting up cloud based solutions and searching out efficiencies. In business, management is often the most agile, forward looking part of the enterprise; the early adopters. Business’s willingness to adapt and seek out efficiencies is usually a lead by example process. Educational leaders tend to get there by towing a conservative line, they’re not interested in actually changing anything.

Without the lead-by-example business approach, technological change in education only seems to happen when there is no other choice. When a disruptive technology is finally so overwhelmingly apparent that educational management is forced to consider it, they aren’t leading by example and the vast majority of the people within their organization don’t want it either. Status quo rather than improvement is the point of education.

When it comes to education, we begin in the trough and usually don’t get out of it:

We ignore the trigger and have none of the hype that encourages people to experiment and explore possibilities, there is no hope for new technology in the educational apparatus. Beyond the classroom there is hope, excitement and possibility before finally dropping into the trough of disillusionment. I’d argue that this range of emotion when exploring new technology allows early adopters a better chance to grasp what a new technology is capable of and allows them to eventually optimize their plateau of productivity.

In education we grudgingly begin in the trough, grumble about the entire process and then pick it up as poorly as possible, never exploring it, never revelling in the possibilities it might offer. When it gets difficult we drop it, having never wanted to do it in the first place. The poor support around embracing new technologies is just another symptom of this.

If you wanted a perfect example of how not to effectively integrate innovative technology, you need look no further than the education system. There are outliers within the system who push against the morass of conservative norms that manage and run education, but they struggle to find support, often having to find indirect ways to explore and integrate new technology.

As long as schools are administrated by the most conservative elements in education (academia loves conservatism), we will always struggle to stay abreast of innovation, whether it be technological or otherwise.

Two Recent Examples

#1: I got an HTC Vive virtual reality headset for the computer lab. It’s an uphill struggle to get any staff to try it (students? No problem). The general comment I get is, “what did that cost?” My standard reply is, “less than your photocopying budget.” The Board is unable to connect the SteamVR software needed to update the drivers and programs on the headset, so I’m trucking the desktop home each week to update it at home.

Even during those rare moments when we do get current technology in, there is no hype, only criticism and doubt. For someone who gets excited about the possibilities of technology, this is a very exhausting environment to be in.

#2: We requested a Glowforge desktop 3d laser cutter in for the tech-design lab. Even though it comes equipped with Hepa air filters and doesn’t require any exhaust, we were stymied by board safety people whose default position is ‘no’, regardless of any facts we could produce.

Consumerist Learning

I tried carrots, sticks and begging. I offered repeated hands-on opportunities with thousands of dollars of equipment (that I maintain just for their use), access to the latest industry standard training methods and information, flexible deadlines, and just about everything else imaginable. We’re at semester’s end and I’m exhausted trying to get students to take an active role in their learning.

As consumerist thinking gets more deeply embedded in our culture more and more students think I’m some kind of educational store clerk who isn’t doing a good job of serving them. The only relationship they can understand me having with them in the classroom is that of an employee. This isn’t only a student perception. Many of the powers that be would love to see a de-professionalization of the teaching profession (it’s cheaper!). This is a current social trend.

Disaffected students looking to control how I assess them fall into two camps: the risk averse academic and an exciting new kind of student: the five-oh (a term coined by seniors at my school for a student who is aiming for a grade in the forties because they know it’ll be rounded up to a pass). You don’t have to do an awful lot to get a mark in the forties. You can miss weeks of class, not hand in major assignments and fail tests but still pull off a forty. You also tend to do a wonderful job of poisoning a classroom when this is your approach.

What drove me around the bend this week was several of these poisonous five-oh’s approaching me to complain about their term grade. One seventeen year old who had missed three weeks of class and failed to hand in multiple unit summatives, all while playing games on the class PC and ignoring instruction even when he was there, approached me to demand an explanation for his terrible grade. It was somehow my fault that he categorically refused to do anything useful. I suggested we look at his participation in the current group-study project for the final exam. He hadn’t even signed up for it – he is nothing if not consistent. I told him something that’s as much a survival mechanism for me as it should be a consolation for him:

“look, you don’t care. You seem to be OK with that, and I can live with it too, but not if you’re going to come up here whining about grades you haven’t earned. The grade you have is charity, but you come up here demanding more. If you’d have put in any kind of effort at all I’d be doing back-flips trying to help you, but you didn’t, and you still aren’t. Your grade is reflection of your terrible work ethic. I don’t know what you know, but what I’ve seen suggests it isn’t much. That’s also a result of your work ethic. Are we done here?”

It turns out we were done there.

Less bothersome because they don’t actively work to dismantle the entire learning apparatus of education is the risk-averse academic. I’ve run into ‘you don’t teach properly‘ frustrated student thinking before. This is inevitably spouted by a relatively successful student who has been taught to be a passive consumer of learning in an overly structured and systemic classroom. These students tend to be academic kids who have figured out the game, and like the five-oh, they are looking to exploit it while doing as little as possible themselves. You give me pointless, linear, obvious information, I consume it then regurgitate it for you. You think I’m very smart and give me an ‘A’.

Marking exams the other day I came across just such a ‘you didn’t teach us anything’, they got this in the response section:

“I didn’t really teach you? I have provided you with gigs and gigs of material and thousands of dollars of hands on equipment in an environment designed to support everyone from experienced to brand new learners. If you think learning is someone putting ideas in your head you’ve misunderstood learning (telling people what to think is indoctrination). You learn when you internalize information, and that happens best when you are the one discovering it. You can’t own knowledge you haven’t earned. Learning isn’t a handout, you’re not a passive consumer of learning, it’s an active endeavour on the part of the student. If you’re waiting for someone else to tell you what to think, you aren’t learning anything at all.”

This is a relatively successful student who refused to make mistakes and sat there passively, waiting for clarity. Clarity means getting concise, linear directions that make clear a pointless exercise (so you can follow the pattern and get an ‘A’). Guess what his parents do for a living? Yep, they’re teachers. Fortunately for him (if not for learning itself), he’ll find many teachers more than happy to play the game with him. I encourage and reward failure and admire brave attempts at understanding stochastic processes that defy easy description. I guess I’m a nightmare of a teacher.

Between the insidious five-ohs and the ever-so-smart risk-aversers, I’m exhausted. I’d day dream (as other high school teachers do) about teaching in post secondary, but this consumerist thinking has infected it too, with helicopter parents demanding to know what they’re paying for when their university child (in their twenties) gets a low grade. I’d prefer to teach high school anyway, you get to help a student find their way from the ground up. When it works it’s very rewarding.

Thank goodness ‘tech millionaires’ (the same people who have monetized your attention) have a solution to one of the last non-economic human relationships left in Western culture (I bet it involves monetizing the teacher-student relationship somehow!)

You’d think that teaching an optional subject like computer technology would get you out of the five-oh infection, but thanks to guidance dropping kids into a class they have no background in just to fill up their time tables, and the five-ohs themselves seeking out courses that they think will be easy (computer engineering? that’s video games, right?), I’ve had a rough semester. The next one doesn’t look much better since I’ve already found half a dozen students parachuted into senior computer engineering classes without the required requisite (computer engineering? that’s playing video games, right?).

I’ve spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of my own time getting comp-tech certified as a teacher and building a department up. This year is the first time I’m teaching a full schedule of computer-technology courses, but half way through it I find myself wishing I’d never left teaching English. I thought that teaching computer technology (a passion I’ve had since I was a child) would be thrilling, a chance to help other kids like I was develop into capable engineers and technicians, but between risk averse passivity and the rising tide of learning poisonous five-ohs, I’m left gasping for air.

Difficult Metrics: The end of Creativity & Play in Learning

CBC’s Spark had an interview with Scott Barry Kaufman this week about his theories on creativity. His identifiers for creativity include solitude, introspection, daydreaming and having new and varied experiences. This reads like a laundry list of things education does poorly, or not at all.

The linear and systemic nature of learning in the education system is always on my mind as summatives happen and semesters end. As I watch the system trundle towards final assessment (which means a lot of number generation), I’m always left wondering where the learning went.

Sometimes the internet feels like a meme confluence. In this case related ideas of creativity and play mix together, making me question education’s intent in designing learning environments that stifle both things. From the education system’s perspective, play is what you do when you’re not learning, that’s why they call it recess, yet Kaufman and a number of other thinkers believe that play is an incredibly rich learning opportunity.

A tweet by Mathias Poulsen on the marginalization of play in society got me thinking about the role of play in learning. Play and creativity are inexorably linked in my mind. When I play I create. When I create, I’m playing. I usually learn an awful lot in such a rich environment as well.

There are two aspects of modern society that drive the control paradigm Mathias refers to in his tweet. Both flourish under the watchful eye of neo-liberal value theory. Data collection is one aspect of this economic/social model and it’s happily provided by digital technology which seems designed to produce this sort of data. With everything itemized the next step is to monetize it. With absolute oversight better profits are ensured, but only for the people who can afford the absolute oversight.

Modern economic theory touts data driven metrics as the way toward a more perfect efficiency, and education has been eager to leap on board this very rational (at least that’s how it’s marketed) approach. By quantifying everything we’re able to better manage people and property, not that there is a distinction. The people who manage us are obviously big fans of this data driven approach. It lends the air of mathematical credibility while also offering an automated ease of use. No more worrying about people as people when you’re managing them from data.

toy_story_man_connect_dots — Data increasingly connects the dots and defines who you are. It used to be a more organic process but now it’s done by machine.

It seems like an air-tight trap. You are what you do and we can produce oodles of data that show what you do. But there are aspects of human being that still defy the data driven trajectory of our society. Creativity and the play that causes it to bloom are a pain to try and quantify and manage, even with the latest analytically insightful digital tools. The only way education has managed to make data from a process as complicated as learning is to grossly simplify that learning in order to produce data to feed the machine, but play and creativity defy even this heavy handed approach. You can grossly simplify learning with standardized testing, but all the testing in the world can’t capture creativity.

The best corporate thinking suggests making a fertile space for creativity and the play that can produce it, but keep management out of it! Education isn’t as driven by the need to innovate and tends to model its management practices after classroom management anyway. Education, with its hierarchical thinking and conservative approach, is a much riper environment for data driven absolutism than business ever was.

As a result of this data-driven press, play and creativity are increasingly foreign to the modern classroom. If it can’t be itemized, quantified and easily compared it isn’t really useful as an aspect of learning; it’s not part of the system. This is backed up by serious people with data who talk about how a rigorous, intellectually meaningful curriculum can only happen through the mathematical certainty of data-collection. Less time is given to play and creativity is re-cast as something only geniuses (or the very rich – they’re often the same) have, you can’t learn by practising it. Students are encouraged to get in step with the ‘real world’ and produce quantifiable material by following transparent and unwavering rubrics, lesson plans and standardized tests. The data produced in this fish-bowl of honesty allows the education system to accurately and completely (except for the bits we ignore) evaluate student ability and direct them to the most efficient career pathway. This is handy because career pathways are the only reason schools exist any more.

One of the benefits of a liberal society is the generation of a thriving creative class. If we can’t compete on the cheapness of human labour (because we don’t the produce quantity of people other societies do), then we can compete on creativity. Except our data driven approach to learning (and everything else, really) means we are letting creativity atrophy in our children.

The only people who think creativity is a natural talent you can’t teach are people too lazy to nurture their own. Those kind of people really like data driven thinking because it means they don’t have to do much thinking themselves.

The answer is yes. Sir Ken is a popular educational trope.
Teachers are encouraged to watch a video that criticizes
education and then they’re told to prepare students for

standardized tests and grade them with numbers.

Like any hard-won skill, creativity demands commitment to change, metacognitive clarity and growth, and it can be frustratingly non-linear. One sure way to spark creativity is to create an empty space, the solitude Kaufman spoke of, in which your mind is encouraged to produce its own outcomes. This can’t happen in an always-on society where your attention is constantly being sought by digital thought merchants who have monetized your attention. The habits you develop in this brave new world are so orchestrated that your mind quickly forgets how to structure itself; it comes to depend on digitally structured environments.

Another way to spark creativity is play, but not the kind of pre-determined outcome play you find in video games. Play in those situations is more like the training of a Pavlovian dog; small rewards for correct behaviour. You win because you’re scripted too. Open ended play means there isn’t a script to follow, there is no right way to do it. It means there isn’t a specific outcome, you’re back to conditioning when you demand specific outcomes. In play-space the outcomes are often unexpected, and can’t be described in win/lose terms (once again, a specific outcome).

Creativity has no required outcomes. The creative process does produce outcomes, but they aren’t handed down from on high by curriculum, nor do they look alike. In a class of thirty students (not much solitude there, but you deal with what you’re given), each creative outcome may look so unlike the others that it is nearly impossible to track them all back to the same starting point. As a standardized test result this is a disaster. How do you rubric that? How do you grade creativity? How do you determine if Billy is 3% more creative than Bob? The system demands numbers, you better give it them.

We’re here to teach people, not have fun… and intelligence has nothing to do with it!

Fortunately, education has found a scripted way to insert play into learning! Gamification connects well with educational thinking because they both are directed toward predetermined, specific outcomes. When educators get all giddy about applying gamification to learning they are harnessing the current digitally driven social trend of attention engagement for their own ends. They might feel that using this rather nasty process for the good of learning makes it alright, but the ends don’t justify the means in learning. How you do it matters.

Gamification isn’t play. You don’t magically produce play by gamifying a lesson plan, though our data driven reflex will happily accept this absurd simplification if it makes us feel like we’re with the times, and producing the same thing that Google and Apple are looking for: engagement. Teachers and multi-nationals all looking for the same thing? That’s got to be a good sign. Our students are trained by financially bottomless digital giants to spend hours connected online. Education should harness that reflex, right?

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, unless you can exactly measure the horse, the distance it has to travel and its circumstances and then manipulate the environment so that drinking becomes the only possible outcome. That’s gamification in education. Data driven thinking would suggest that with enough detail (happily provided by digital multi-nationals intent on not paying taxes while reaping record profits) we can engage a student and invisibly lead them to curriculum required (and usually very specific) learning outcomes.

Societies are societies because they’ve established patterns of thinking that the majority support. To diverge from that pattern is to move towards the edges of social acceptance. If you go too far you’ll have passed beyond social norms and become a pariah. Society is very good at inventing words to describe people who aren’t conforming properly. Creativity produces new thinking and so creatives tend to be outliers. A liberal society accepts these creatives more than a conservative one (it is a distinct advantage of a liberal society).

If there is one social mechanism that enforces social norms it’s the public education system. It has greater social contact with the population than the police or healthcare and focuses on the most pliable citizens (children). This is generally done as benevolently possible, except when society itself has made some poor decisions, then public education quickly changes from an agent of personal empowerment to a means of indoctrination. That education seems unwilling and incapable of fostering creativity through play shouldn’t come as a surprise. That kind of nonsense isn’t conducive to a well organized, radically transparent, data-driven, modern classroom. You’re not going to produce cooperative citizens if you ignore those societal truths.

Perhaps asking the education system to protect and nurture creativity and encourage play is beyond its capabilities. As an agent of social conformity education tends to be the anathema of creatives, the lowest point in their creative lives, but if education doesn’t nurture and protect creativity don’t expect Twenty First Century Canadian society to do it. Our society is becoming more stratified and rigid thanks to increasingly rigorous data driven control. In a world where our attention is monetized and trained to expect digital frameworks, we are increasingly defined and limited by the data collected about us. Play is a quantifiable waste of time and the creativity that arises from it is being cast aside.

Ironically, this is going to cost our society billions.

Emotionally Charged Engagement

Pettis‘ manifesto demands the freedom needed to make things work. Educators might get excited about Maker philosophy like this, but it isn’t what they want in classrooms.

This talk of Making at ECOO had me thinking about my own process of building, repairing and creating.

My engineering process is closely related to my creative process. Creativity came first as a toddler mainly because I found visual art intuitive to step into. Engineering followed shortly thereafter (about 6 years old?) when I found myself dismantling bicycles and toys, sometimes for creative purposes but mainly driven an intense desire to understand how things work. My mother was an artist, my father is an engineer; my behavior wasn’t a happy accident.

Both my processes have evolved and entwined, and both demand absolute ownership. I find myself fully committed to my process which makes the idea of going to committee abhorrent. If what I’m doing ends up not working it’s on me and me alone. That focus and responsibility is what allows me to work through frustrating, stochastic, non-linear builds and repairs that would cause most people to shrug and give up.

I prefer to work alone. If I’m going to seek help, I will initiate it. Being forced to accommodate collaboration prevents me from doing what needs to be done to make the thing work. Lateral thinking never works well when you’ve have to constantly explain every intuition, it breaks your flow.

How much faith do I have in my process? I drove my wife and newborn son home in a car I rebuilt the brakes on. I ride a motorcycle (with my son on the back) that I rebuilt from scrap. If I did it, it’s done properly, I regularly bet my life on it. This is what competency looks like when making something work is the priority; mechanical mastery can’t exist in any other circumstance.

intuition works best in silence

When I’m working on an engineering problem or a creative project I am radically engaged (fixated?) with what I am doing. This isn’t the kind of directed, controlled engagement that teachers encourage in classrooms. Being interrupted by a well-meaning teacher who wants to make my process transparent antagonizes the hell out of me.

Teacher interruptions in my process are vexing. I don’t seek an expert to do it for me, that doesn’t teach me anything. I’d prefer to ask another capable student who is struggling with similar issues and figure it out with them rather than ask a teacher who has done it a hundred times before. This is what mastery learning is and why it seldom happens in a classroom.

This all comes from my first post-secondary learning experience as a millwright apprentice. I left high school before graduation because it felt like a holding tank rather than a learning opportunity. In that apprenticeship I didn’t have teachers assessing my learning, I had people who were invested in it because it meant less work for them. That we were all doing the same work went a long way toward me valuing their expertise.

Collaboration isn’t the point of any engineering activity. It shouldn’t remove the focus from a project, it should amplify it. When teachers say things like, “we’re going to be makers, but what the kids are really learning is collaboration!” I would expect to see a group of frustrated students and a pile of newly purchased Arduinos and Raspberry Pis gathering dust in boxes. You’ve got to respect the skill and focus needed to make things work first.

My favorite kind of teacher is the one I try to be. I encourage skills development and provide expertise if asked (though I am reluctant). I provide materials and offer multiple avenues into how to get it done, but then I get the hell out of the way. What I hope to see is a student lose themselves in their process and improve as a result of this intensive engagement. You learn more in the doing of a thing than you ever do in the theory of it.

I observe, I offer help if it’s asked for, but I also allow students to fail if they refuse to take risks and engage in a meaningful engineering process. In the best cases I’m able to look at a finished prototype that shows resiliency, creativity, and works. That last bit is important, I’m not grading how hard they tried, or how well they get along with each other, I’m grading engineering. The student who built a working prototype feels a genuine sense of achievement because they went through real struggle to resolve complex, non-linear (non-textbook) problems. They seldom worry about what kind of mark they got, the value is self-evident.

Assumptions and cultural influences won’t get you far in mechanics – you need to be stringent and respect reality because it doesn’t care about your perceptions. This is the reason why two mechanics from opposites sides of the world with no shared language can still effectively communicate with each other. Reality is a shared language.

A highlight of a recent unit was watching a student who found the process of building Arduino circuits very challenging. In his presentation of a partially working prototype he angrily said, “… and it didn’t work again, until I realized, like a n00b, that I hadn’t plugged the power wire into the rail.” He was absolutely right, he is no longer n00b, and he should be frustrated with having made such a rudimentary mistake. His emotional engagement with his failure was telling – he is beginning to take pride in his skills.

Emotional engagement is at the root of my work with machines. Radical engagement makes my process an emotional one (or is it the other way around?). The sometimes stochastic, often non-linear and usually frustrating nature of building and repairing complex machinery requires an emotional edge. That edge is what powers my resiliency. I refuse to let a complication derail me, sometimes not giving up even when I should. If it continues to not work, emotion not only powers my resiliency but also my imagination, driving me to think laterally around problems.

Class bells, rubrics, teachers showing you how and assigned groups are the antithesis of my kind of radical engagement. Schools seem designed to prevent this kind of focus and break learning up into an arm’s length, carefully managed chunks. Learning is an organic process until you see it diced up into curriculum and fed to students who have no idea what it is they are supposed to be learning or why. The education system might work for basic skills but mastery isn’t what its set to produce. Education elbows its way between student curiosity and their natural tendency to learn in order to manage the process. The ultimate purpose of the education system is not to teach but to produce grades which everyone believes are an expression of student learning but are actually entirely fictional.

Radical emotional engagement is the antithesis of the clinical, rational engagement educators look to manage, but this emotional engagement is at the root of my empathy with machines, Education spends a lot of energy encouraging collaboration, linear consumption of curriculum and a cold kind of empathy between students, but ignores (stamps out?) human emotional engagement in order to retain control.

The difference between how I and many others learn, and the mono-cultural, rationalist’s philosophy of education is why you seldom see radical engagement in a classroom. It’s why you see outliers, especially highly engaged ones, do poorly in school. Education is designed to hit the medium, the comfortable middle class child who requires no emotional connection because they have it elsewhere. Deviants, whether they are eccentrics who want radical engagement in something they are fixated on, or students who need more from a teacher than grades, aren’t a good fit with the system.

The difference between applied and academic students has
a lot more to do with family dynamics and the need for
emotional engagement than it does with intelligence.

Education’s discomfort with emotional engagement lies at the root of Ontario’s high school streaming system. Applied students tend to come to school from less stable home lives and look for more emotional engagement with their teachers. This freaks out the academics who teach them. Academic students (and the teachers they turn into) prefer to treat school at arm’s reach – rationally and emotionally distancing themselves from it because information is all they require from a classroom. To these academics school is a job, one they have figured out and are good at. These are the students who get mad at you when you saddle them with a problem that may not have a solution.

This distance between student need and teacher approach is probably the single largest difference between academic and applied students. Some of the smartest kids I’ve ever taught have been applied level students. Teachers willing to support emotional engagement with learning often find these students are the ones who make the biggest leaps in high school, but they are challenging and often emotionally exhausting, especially when the rationalists who run the system think 30+ students in a classroom is manageable (and it is if you don’t treat students like people).

Ironically, all of those teacher movies that educators so love are the ones that emphasize this emotional learning connection but it just doesn’t happen that often in the real world. At a recent Heads’ meeting a rule was put up saying that people have to be rational and unemotional when making suggestions. They can’t be emotionally engaged in any debate. That’s how ed-quants like it in the classroom too. What a sure way to make something tedious, distant and uninspired.

Radical engagement is powered by emotion. It makes for a messy, demanding learning environment, but it’s also a vital key to differentiating learning that the vast majority of educators don’t just ignore but actively seek to stamp out. The doorway to mastery is one you have to walk through yourself, and you’ll never manage it if you’re dependent on the advice of others. It takes resiliency, courage and a lot of work to become that kind of proficient. Emotion is a powerful ally in getting there.

The Ebb & Flow of Pedagogy in Education

The intention of Dusty World is to work through ideas I’m having around teaching. Since I’m a technology teacher, a lot of those ideas are tech-focused. This week, after years of forced contracts and an unbelievably rough round of negotiation, my union has voted to accept an austerity contract that was bargained virtually at gun-point. Since our last bargained contract we’ve been wage reduced, had benefits striped and work load increased. By the end of this contract we’ll be looking at more than a 10% reduction in take home income when inflation is considered.

The politics of the agreement aside, what does something like this do to my work environment? Instead of focusing on pedagogy and excellence in learning, I find myself performing damage limitation. Knowing that my employer focuses on finances rather than pedagogy is difficult to hear, but when the school board association walks into negotiations demanding dictatorial control over teacher time, stripped benefits and wage reductions, you can’t help but come to that conclusion.

Teaching is a human activity, and I am the human face at the end of a large, faceless, increasingly politically driven bureaucracy. I’m supposed to be teaching my students how to manage digital technology so it doesn’t manage them, but increasingly I find my time being spent trying to protect my students from a system intent on doing less for less. When I’m cobbling together 8 year old computers just to give students a chance at hands on learning, or trying to calm agoraphobic students in overcrowded spaces, or sourcing fans to keep the classroom temperature from boiling because we have thirty two old machines huffing away in there, quality of instruction is obviously not the goal.

The education system goes through changes in focus all the time, and the effectiveness of learning waxes and wanes depending on the political climate. I began teaching in Ontario in 2004 and my early years were in a system in recovery from Mike Harris‘ “unprecedented disinvestment in public education, which destroyed a historical competitive advantage in the space of a decade.”

Ontario’s public education system, under reasonable management, saw huge steps forward in terms of effectiveness. Before the cuts began in 2012, Ontario’s education system was top 5… in the world, and, with BC, led Canada up the charts. You can imagine how satisfying it must have been to work in an environment like that. I’d often find myself developing lessons or reading about teaching techniques on a Saturday night. I didn’t take a summer off in my first eight years of teaching, taking many additional qualifications (at my own expense) and teaching online to expand my skills. With the amount of time I spent at it, I was probably dancing with minimal hourly wage, but I didn’t care because I threw myself into my profession and my profession looked after and encouraged me.

That sort of intensity appeals to me, I enjoy the challenge and get a lot of satisfaction out of doing a difficult thing well, but it depends on support. Anyone doing anything well does it because they have good support around them. If you don’t believe me watch any professional sport. When you suddenly find yourself losing common sense arguments around class sizes based on safety and access to tools, you start to wonder whether going all in is that productive, or healthy for you.

One of the best bits of advice I got at teacher’s college was,
“always be ready to go to work again tomorrow.” I didn’t
used to get frazzled running hard, but now I do.

It was nice to start my career in a time of such positive pedagogically driven education. I got to do that because the teachers before me suffered through a decade of cheap nastiness. We’ve swung back to the cheap nastiness now, but rather than fight it we vote for it. I was willing to fight for better, but the vast majority of secondary public teachers are ok with less. How will that translate to their work in the classroom?

I’m going to have to reconsider my survival strategies. If I throw myself all in and then get slew footed by a lack of support, I tend to get emotional about it. Rather than do that, perhaps a little distance is the better way; a less passionate, more circumspect approach to the classroom. How do you think that will play with students?

If I want to test myself by finding excellence in what I do, the Ontario classroom isn’t where that’s going to happen. In 2015 it has become a political wasteland of compromise and an excuse to do things cheaply for political gain. I’ll do what I can to protect the students I am given, but the goal isn’t excellence in learning any more, it’s do less with less.

Fortunately, I have a lot of hobbies. I’ll find other aspects of my life to throw myself into with abandon.

Implications of a Situated Intelligence in Learning

One of the big shocks I got in philosophy was reading Bertrand Russell’s Analysis of Mind. If you can get through it you come to the startling realization that we are barely conscious at all. Russell does a thorough job of demystifying how our minds work.

With The Singularity looming a number of films attempt to
imagine what a super-human intelligence would look like.

If you can imagine a being with the mental capacity to be constantly self-aware and conscious you begin to see just how different from us it would be. We have flashes of self awareness, moments of conscious consideration, but more often than not we fall back on instinct and autonomic processes. An always on intelligence would never surrender a decision to involuntary reflex, but we do it all the time. Basic processes aren’t the only thing at stake here. If you’ve ever found yourself in your driveway but unable to remember the drive home, you’re performing complex mental and physical processes without conscious thought.

That always on, aware intelligence is able to consider and respond in non-reflexive ways to all physical and mental challenges. Repetition is what we use to manage our limited ability to attend to the world around us. With sufficient muscle memory from repetitive action we are able to do pretty amazing things with our limited attention spans, but we have to offload cognitive capacity to our muscles and the world around us to achieve it.

The idea that we are dislocated minds that exist metaphysically is one of the last remnants of pre-Enlightenment thinking. From souls to Descartes’ ghost-in-the-machine, we’ve long cherished the idea that our selves exist beyond the mundane world in which we find ourselves. But the very idea of a self only happens because it is situated in reality. Context, rather than self awareness, is what gives us the continuity required to acquire a sense of self. Your ‘youness’ isn’t a magical property that exists in the ether, it’s a consequence of your mind interacting with the world around you. The circumstances you find yourself in are created by past action. People around you treat you as they do because of past action. What you think of as your mind is actually a series of circumstance that expand beyond your head and through your body into the world around you.

A skilled person recognizes this process and ‘jigs‘ their environment, using their surroundings to support their work. You see this in everything from a scientist’s lab to a short-order cook’s kitchen, to a teacher’s classroom; they all design their work environment to allow them to do their jobs better (assuming they are good at what they do – jigging an environment to perform well is a sign of mastery). In extremely performance focused jobs, like professional sports or acting, this jigging takes on talismanic power that look like superstitions to the uninitiated. Our psychology can be very sensitive to how immediate surroundings support or detract from our performance. The pre-game ritual of an athlete before a game or the actor before going on stage both reflect this. Our intelligence leaks out into the world, forming it to our will in order to get ‘our heads on straight’.

I take the concept of jigging my work space very seriously.

Jigging of their environment is a window into student learning. You can see how thoroughly a student understands a process by how well they manipulate their environment. The student who can’t find the right tool for the job probably doesn’t understand the job very well. My father always used to give me a hard time for leaving his workshop in a mess; I get it now. If you can’t find a tool when you’re in the middle of a complex task you won’t be able to perform the task well. Your continuity of thought is broken by poor workplace planning. My father’s assessment of the dirty shop was actually an assessment of my understanding of the craft of the mechanic.

True mastery learning requires an advanced practitioner to
jig their working environment to produce complex work.
This isn’t that.

The stock classroom is a Cartesian throwback to the disassociated minds myth: our minds are magical buckets which we can fill with information. Of course they aren’t, they are fractured, non-continual biological processes designed to interact with the world around them. A human mind only blossoms in the presence of an interactive reality. You have to shed the myth of a Cartesian mind in order to see the absurdity of the typical classroom.

If education is going to adapt to this simple truth it needs to recognize that learning isn’t confined to mental processes. Even cognitively focused courses of study like mathematics are recognizing that tangible representation improves student learning. If you teach students like brains in boxes you don’t get very far.

Recognizing tangibles in teaching concepts is only the first part of this incorporation of an accurate philosophy of mind in learning. The real power comes in creating adaptable learning environments that encourage student control. If you’re teaching anything sufficiently complicated then allowing students control of their learning environment will only improve their chances of mastery. If they can’t control their work space (or worse, it’s handed to them complete), they are being robbed of the opportunity to own their learning. Environmental control also allows teachers a vital insight into how well a student understands the material they are learning. If a student designs a non-functioning work space it shows you just how far from understanding the basic concepts of what they’re trying to do they are. It is a common occurrence for the least capable students to walk up to me days before the end of a two week engineering project and tell me they are missing key components to finish it. This is a valuable insight for both myself and the student into just how ignorant they are. The worst thing we can do is what we do now: put students in institutionally designed spaces that demand conformity and tell them to do it in their heads. A key aspect of mastery learning is recognizing how expertise is rendered in the world around us, and then using that information to assess understanding and improve learning.

NOTES

Bertrand Russell, On Mind
Finishing off Descartes’ ghosts
Rene Descartes, ghost in the machine
If we can’t have souls, we can have magical, metaphysical minds!
Matt Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
A modern dismantling of Enlightenment ideology that has run wild
I recently attended Stratford’s Possible Worlds.
It plays on a conceit that you see in a lot of drama (Jacob’s Ladder, Inception, The Matrix), that we would be incapable of realizing that the world around us isn’t real. This conceit trivializes reality and sends us back into that superstitious state of magical minds.

I’d argue that our existence actually precedes and produces our intelligence. We wouldn’t be what we are if we were brains in boxes being fed information; reality defines our intelligence. I had a lot of trouble getting into Possible Worlds because it used science and tech babble to lead the audience through a fractured dreamscape, depending on our belief in magical minds to suspend our disbelief.

A Thin & Fragile Pretense

I’m still mulling my way through The World Beyond Your Head, by Matt Crawford. It’s a slow go because I’m re-reading and thinking over what I’m looking at, often paragraph by paragraph.

On page 153-4 Crawford is talking about the way in which we depend on established values when transacting with each other. He is talking about how he bills his motorcycle repairs, but I found a surprising correlation between this and my current views on grading:

P.153-54 The World Beyond Your Head by Matt Crawford

This could easily be re-written to describe my own battle with grading:

Consider the case of a teacher. In handing a final grade to a student, I make a claim for the value of what they know about what I have taught them, and put it to them in the most direct way possible (a grade). I have to steel myself for this moment; it feels like a confrontation. (I hate grading, I feel it actively discourages learning by implying there is a definitive end)

The point of having posted criteria, rubrics, due dates, class rules, and the use of complex grading systems with byzantine weights and balances, is to create the impression of calculation, and to appeal to the authority of an institution with established rules. But this is a thin and fragile pretense observed by me and my student – in fact the grade I present is never a straightforward account of the skill of a student. It always involves a reflection in which I try to put myself in the shoes of the other and imagine what he might find reasonable. (Freeing myself from the tyranny of grading programs is both professionally satisfying and existentially terrifying – what are we all doing here if not making numbers?!?)

This lack of straightforwardness in valuing learning is due to the fact that learning is subject to chance and mishap, as well as many diagnostic obscurities. Like medicine, teaching and learning are what Aristotle calls “stochastic” arts. Especially when working on complex skills at the high school level, in trying to teach one discipline (learning how to code), I may unearth problems in another (the student has little grasp of basic logic). How should I grade for work done to solve a problem beyond the realm of what I’m supposed to be teaching? Should I hand off this new problem to spec-ed, or simply blame previous grades and move on? (I do neither, I consider a student who is able to overcome previous failings to catch up to his peers to be superior to a student who is simply going through the motions because this is easy repetition for them) This question has to be answered when I formulate a grade, and in doing so I find that I compose little justificatory narratives.

When a student receives a grade, I usually go over the reasons with them in detail, and I often find myself delaying the presentation of the grade, because I fear that my valuation isn’t justified (I can never have all the facts needed to be completely accurate). But all my fretting about the grade has to get condensed into a simplistic number for the sake of systemic learning on an established schedule (our education system is predicated on the receiving of numbers that are so abstract as to be virtually meaningless). Whatever conversation may ensue, in the end the grade achieves a valuation that is determinate: a certain amount of educational value exchanges hands. As the student leaves the class for the last time, I want to feel that they feel they have gotten a square deal in terms of me not using grades as either a gift or a punishment; I want to come away feeling justified in the claim I made for what I think they know and can do. (but many teachers don’t – empathy and grading can be safely made mutually exclusive thanks to the absolute truth of mathematics, the more complex the calculation, the truer the grade it produces must be)

Neurology: Is it the car, or the car and driver?

We had board PD today (a 3 hour lecture). It was a presentation on neurology in learning and layered curriculum by Kathie Nunley. I’m generally a fan of a nuanced scientific approach to human activity (as opposed to a simplistic approach to things that usually support buying something). Dr. Nunley’s neurological approach to education offered a number of insights to what we’re doing wrong. If we don’t consider biological imperatives in learning we will never be as efficient as we might be.

There was a moment where I came to the end of neurological approach and the ‘ol philosophy degree kicked in. Nunley had a slide stressing the importance of the appearance of choice in learning. She stressed how engaging it is for students when they feel like they can choose their learning.

My knee jerk response was that this was manipulation, which led me down a metaphysical rabbit hole.

Neuroscience, because it’s looking at the brain, comes dangerously close to itemizing our sentience. It also tends to reduce multi-dimensional complexity into simplistic linearity. This idea that the appearance of choice would prompt more efficient learning would encourage any right minded teacher to manipulate their students into thinking they have learning choice in order to harness better retention. No right minded teacher should be manipulating anyone into anything.

An analogy immediately came to mind. Is neuroscience the car or the car and driver? On a neuroscientific level our minds are very complex mechanical devices. Our actions are driven by a brain developed from millennia of evolution. There is no free-will, only complex autonomous reaction. If that is what we are, you should have no trouble manipulating these processes to get a desired result, especially if it’s a good end. School systems should treat the people in them like cogs in a machine, because that’s all they are.

If neurology is the study of the car then we can make immediate and scientifically informed choices that will improve its maintenance and operation. As Nunley suggested in her presentation, dietary and developmental principles can be applied to maximize the functionality of our brains. If neurology is the study of the car and driver then there is nothing else to consider. In addition to the spiritual considerations that a number of people would find difficult to swallow, concepts like ethics or metaphysical ideals beyond the immediately knowable world of science (like honesty) may be ignored. Neurology is the rational tool that justifies treating people like machines because that is all they are.

One of the reasons I like teaching technology is because students don’t get to work in imaginary value structures. Those would be places where the science of neurology reigns supreme, where the teacher should manipulate students to lead them to success. It’s where a 60% means you’ve done enough. In the world of hands-on experience 60% is as useful as a zero. If you don’t believe me have 60% of your next brake job done and see how that goes.

Teaching technology means I get to take students inured to reality after years of ‘learning’ in a school system and put them in close proximity to what is rather than what we wish. Their discomfort is obvious. They respond with comments like, “it didn’t work, but I tried real hard. Do I get an A?” No, you don’t, and reality is unimpressed with your intellectual resilience and general work ethic. Thank goodness human value structures don’t decide everything.

Fortunately, and despite our best efforts, we don’t live in a reality based on human value structures. The large, unknowable universe that surrounds us makes itself felt constantly. The tiny portion of reality we feel like we have a grip on because of science is only a gross approximation; mathematics and human ideas that roughly simulate reality enough to make crude use of it. Science thinks in terms or breakthroughs and mastery, but neither actually happens. Neuroscience offers us some useful insight into how brains function, but it is still far from understanding our minds; the driver is still safely out of their hands.

I tend toward moral absolutism. One of the reasons I find science so agreeable is because it attempts to tell no lies, but in the case of neuroscience it seems to make some assumptions on how much it thinks it knows about being human. Brains aren’t all we are, even though we use them as a lens to make sense of the world.

I’m going to take many of the suggestions around how to best maintain and maximize brain efficiency from this PD, but I’m not surrendering morality in the process. If I’m going to give a student a choice it’s going to be a genuine choice because I believe those are superior to the appearance of choice. In ways not immediately measurable I know that treating students and the subject I teach honestly creates the kind of fecundity that science is still having trouble quantifying.