Savouring the Ish

Planning for Inquiry-based Physical Education

2014-10-24T13:18:00.002-06:00

As a Phys Ed teaching team, we had a unique opportunity at the beginning of last year to reflect on our physical education program as a whole and to ask ourselves whether our approach was providing students with the best ability to develop deep understanding of a variety of curricular outcomes. We wanted to share some of the outcomes of a full year invested in this process, along with some of our continually evolving understandings.

"Inquiry"

"Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand" has been a perfect starting point from which to extend our conversations around what types of learning opportunities we were providing for students. Historically, our teaching in physical education has been didactic and demonstrative with rare opportunities in which students were collaboratively invested in their learning beyond attempting to follow a set of instructions. Our shift toward a more inquiry-based approach to developing physically literacy focused on encouraging students to invest in seeking information through questioning, rather than just merely waiting for it to be "delivered". From the teacher's perspective, this involved carefully designing a context and framework for specific units that might draw student questions out, and help focus thinking.

Traditional physical education focuses on the development of competence in the hopes that increased confidence will result. It often fails however, to account for the vastly differing competencies of students in various sports or activities. An inquiry based approach meets students where they are at. Increased competence and confidence inevitably result.

"Why Inquiry for Physical Literacy"

Physical and Health Education Canada identifies that "individuals (persons with unique abilities and characteristics) who are physically literate move with competence (proficient performance) in a wide variety of physical activities that benefit the development of the whole person (physical, cognitive, social)." An inquiry-based approach seemed perfectly designed to emphasize the individualized development of each of these unique characteristics. Our focus, was on developing a framework for each lesson in which the focus would always remain broadly centred around:

acknowledging and celebrating students’ unique abilities and characteristics
acknowledging the foundational importance of fundamental movement skills
emphasizing connections between sport and physical activity and,
accommodating students’ broad range of physical, cognitive and social skills

Setting the Stage

We began by defining our key understandings of how our teaching practice would shift as a result of our emphasis on inquiry-based pedagogy for both students and parents. The video we put together was brief and emphasized with both students and parents that the inquiry-based approach to PE above all would strive to ensure that there would be opportunity within each unit for students to take initiative in personalizing their learning experiences through tasks appropriate to their interest and ability.

Where to begin

The Physical Education Curriculum is a massive document. Even with the generosity of its most recent re-design which provides many rich and broad entry points into an exploration of health, activity and physical literacy, it can be difficult to navigate. With the understanding that we wanted to begin as teachers with curricular topics that had enough richness and complexity to embrace the full range of children's background, experience, abilities and previous knowledge, we began by reviewing and re-framing the curriculum so that those topics could be clearly identified. The end result was a more condensed scope and sequence that identified key learning outcomes specified by the curriculum for each grade from 4-9. Click here to view!

Characteristics of Inquiry-based Task Design (Galileo Inquiry Rubric)

The Galileo Inquiry rubric has always been a guiding document in my practice. For Physical Education, we focused on four characteristics identified in that rubric that aligned closely with the work we could and would be taking up in PE. They were:

Authenticity: We wanted to make sure that the problem(s), issue(s), or exploration(s) undertook in PE were significant to the broad range of disciplines within the physical education field (athletics, physiology, coaching, etc.) and that the tasks undertaken provided students with the opportunity to create, produce, understand or perform something relevant to students and to the discipline (outcome oriented).
Communication: It was important to us to provide students with opportunities to support, challenge, and respond to ideas and feedback from classmates during class, and to allow them to select ways of expressing their understanding appropriate to the task (including the use of technology when relevant).
Active exploration: We wanted to design learning tasks that would require student autonomy, collaboration, problem solving, management, and the recruitment of outside expertise while allowing for multiple/flexible approaches to learning.
Ongoing assessment: Our goal was to embed regular opportunities for students to reflect on their learning throughout a particular unit, using clear criteria that they helped to establish. We also wanted to encourage them to use those reflections to set learning goals, establish next steps and develop effective learning strategies.

Snapshots from our PE program

Circus Unit

What does it take to improve/refine motor skills? How much time? What kind of training? How much failure? How is this affected by your incoming skill set?

After an introductory class. Students had 5 days to choose a skill and work at improving it. They had unlimited resources, could work individually or in groups, and had to track their progress via video through Edmodo submissions. This glimpse provides an overview of some of the skills students worked to develop through the videos they submitted.

Fitness Video Unit

What makes physical activity/training inspiring/attractive/relevant/effective? How can we make use of our own skills and understanding and design similarly effective training, incorporating motivation, effective communication etc.

Our intro class for this unit had students participating in 5 minutes segments of viral fitness videos from the last several decades and reviewing key elements of each. We identified common elements to all videos (music, simple plyometrics, variation) and emphasized the idea that most routines had been designed based on a very particular are of athletics expertise (dance, hockey, skiing, martial arts). Students had 2 days to work with a group from a similar athletic background to design a 2 minute routine segment. The third day was for partner group feedback. During the fourth we arranged a dress-rehearsal to work on timing and provide some general feedback to the whole group. On the fifth day we had Grade 9 students set up for filming the entire routine and then reflected as a class.

Assessment

The re-thinking of our PE programs at Connect led to an inevitable re-examination of our assessment practices, something that has continued to evolve over the past 12 months from a tri-yearly quantitative approach to a more ongoing, formative, qualitatively reported outcomes-based assessment with an emphasis on triangulation of data through the collection of artifacts (done digitally via Edmodo), through observation (on a daily basis), and in conversation with students (via bi-annual 1-on-1 interviews with teachers). More to come on the evolution of our assessment practices in PE...

Resources

I've embedded some sample plans from last year's program as an example of our approach to planning for inquiry in PE...

Beyond the destination: A reflection on Outdoor Education

2014-06-26T17:48:00.004-06:00

My favourite moment was every moment. The quiet is beautiful...

When I was a kid, I used to see faces in everything. It’s been nice to find them again.

Grade 9 OE Student

Things I realized I forget to notice in the city: mountains, clouds and the way their shadows move across the peaks, baby trees, the sound of running water, the flight of birds. Awesome moments: getting to know people better, getting to know myself, diving into the glacial water, crossing streams, cooking by the creek, seeing the landscape at 7am.

Grade 8 OE Student

Outdoor Education on a very basic level is about developing learning experiences designed to enhance students’ knowledge and skills in natural settings. Although outdoor programs have always been an important part of our school, the question of how to deepen the quality of the experiences we provide is one that has recently led to many recurring debates and conversations among our staff team. Late last year, it was suggested that a focus on creating more opportunities for students to spend time immersed in the heart of the local backcountry might be a good way to help regenerate connections to nature that can be so easily severed in our technology-enhanced, production-driven urban environments.

This year, we expanded our Outdoor Education Electives program in order to attempt just that. With the goal of equipping students with the skills, understanding and awareness necessary to spend lengthier periods of time in the wilderness, we practiced tent/shelter set-up and take-down, thermo-regulation, backcountry cooking, packing, navigation and leave-no-trace principles. OE students were also held to high standards with respect to demonstrating leadership, initiative, organization and teamwork in order to earn the opportunity to participate in a final 3-day backcountry experience through Elk Pass. Although explicit outcomes for the OE elective were identified as: "the development of skills necessary to ensure safe and sustainable wilderness travel," it was our ultimate hope that the experience might result in heightened social, cultural and environmental awareness and connection. We didn't just want to travel safely in the backcountry, we wanted to reconnect with the heart of this place we live in and cultivate an appreciation for how everything belongs.

As an OE team we really tried to tread carefully, so to speak, as we prepared for and hiked Elk Pass this June with students. We were intentional about shifting our focus away from the destination to the moment and to things we too often grow accustomed to overlooking. The resulting student and teacher reflections were pretty powerful. Although there is always more work to do, this experience renewed my conviction that while there is something immeasurably important about providing opportunities for students to find themselves in the outdoors, it's not just about getting kids outside. It is our approach to natural spaces and our motivations as we move through them that have the potential to create or bypass the conditions for truly thoughtful ecological experiences.

Skip to 7.00 min for student reflections

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.

John Sawhill

Make Math Memorable (A response)

2014-01-26T22:44:00.001-07:00

I've had the opportunity to engage in further conversation about math education with Dr. Robert Craigen, Assoc. Math Professor and co-founder of WISE Math. My response to Dr. Craigen's most recent comment wouldn't fit in comments so I've included it, along with the initial response, here.

Thanks for your reply, Deirdre; I look forward to your full response.
I address the one point you make here about memorization.
Memory is the seat of learning. No memory, no learning. Those opposing memory work would do well to -- at minimum, acknowledge its importance (I presume you do not disagree, but I note that there is no hint of it in what you have written.) And, having acknowledged this, to explain why memorization of times tables is not a particularly good use of memory.
I can tell you why, to the contrary, it is a good use of memory.
Early-years learners are passing through a rapid acquisition phase during which important facts are committed to memory, establishing the foundation upon which later synthesis of cognitive understanding takes place.
The ease with which these particular basic facts are automatized at this age contrasts the difficulty faced by those who must do so later in life -- students who fail to memorize these elementary facts at this stage may struggle mightily with them later, and many will simply fail in the effort and never master them.
The goal of education is UNDERSTANDING. And understanding cannot grow in a vacuum -- it requires context. Context necessarily entails factual content about things, processes and relationships, committed to long-term memory.
Our long-term memories are very well suited to storage and retrieval of such trivia. (Long-term) memory is not the ANTITHESIS of understanding -- it is an integral part of understanding. Understanding is functionally impossible without a well-stocked memory. I don't think any of this is controversial in the least.
WNCP Math and the like forces children to adopt inefficient and ad-hoc mental approaches to even single-digit arithmetic, and in multiple ways.
How different is memorizing multiplication tables from WNCP's rote work? "Rote" means "repetition". The demand for children to revisit the same "strategies" by rote in WNCP is simply astonishing.
Grade 5 students are expected to "apply mental strategies" and use skip-counting, doubling, halving and looking for patterns, to "determine answers" (i.e. NOT facts they have yet mastered) "for basic multiplication facts to 81" (WNCP K-9 Framework, p104).
"to 81" = "the 9x9 times table".
Five years is FAR too long to force children to obsess over the mechanics of single digit arithmetic without closure! The 2008 NMAP report warns against "any approach that continually revisits topics year after year without closure", an indictment of WNCP Math, which specifies NO point at which these are to be mastered.
http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/report/final-report.pdf
Now it doesn't take a PhD in brain function to know that working memory -- particularly for abstract facts -- is extremely limited. Famously, humans can reliably hold about seven digits in their heads but few can do the same with fourteen digits. It is a very small working space.
A year ago a paper published in cognitive psychology quantified the rather obvious consequences. A team of researchers led by Dr. D. Ansari of UWO separated children according to whether they performed single-digit arithmetic with automatic recall or strategies. They collected longitudinal data on the same children years later from their SAT Math scores. Those who had, years earlier, committed the fundamentals to memory, significantly outperformed those who had been trained to use ad-hoc approaches.
http://www.jneurosci.org/letters/submit/jneuro;33/1/156 http://communications.uwo.ca/media/singledigitmath/
Some contend that those ad-hoc approaches constitute "understanding". In fact the WNCP Framework itself, in outcomes specifying that children "demonstrate understanding of" such-and-such a concept, the corresponding achivement indicators specify that the children are to show multiple strategies.
Yes, some call it "understanding". But I call it "clutter".

Thanks Dr. Craigen,

I wanted to begin by acknowledging that it seems we agree on several points. Learning is without a doubt the cultivation of memory. However I would argue that there is an important distinction between rote memorization and experiencing something memorable. Memory is formative and compositional. It requires judgement, connecting, shaping and reflecting. It is a creative, inventive process of making sense of experience.

You have written that memorizing times tables is a good use of memory. I would suggest that finding ways of making multiplicative concepts memorable is a much better use. My experience with “times table memorization” in schools is that it typically involves recitation with no conversation, no questioning, and no opportunity for students to recognize or identify patterns and connections between multiples. I have noticed that the WISE site lists John Mighton’s JUMP math program as a resource. I have used JUMP myself on occasion and recommended it to students, specifically because Mighton sets out to cultivate memory very differently to the way it is done in traditional math workbooks. As a basic example, he asks students to practice counting by 2s and 5s and guides parents to ask their children what they notice. He discusses multiples of 4 and multiples of 6 as connected to multiples of 2 and multiples of 2 and 3 respectively. The formulation of memory is connected to discovery and he creates opportunities for the students to notice patterns of fundamental importance and articulate them in their own words. The work the students are involved in goes beyond recitation in an effort to commit the basic facts to memory. This is worthwhile practice.

I think perhaps the essence of our disagreement is not whether students should have basic facts committed to memory (it seems we agree, they should) but as to how this is best achieved. You wrote “understanding cannot grow in a vacuum -- it requires context.” Absolutely, but I would add that committing factual content to long-term memory also requires context. This is what having students “skip-count, double, half and look for patterns” can provide. To be fair, I didn’t always think this way. Here’s some personal context because I think it’s an important part of the story.

I was successful in math class as a kid and through high school. My parents insisted I recite multiplication tables on long car rides and I had a gift for recall. Anyway, my high school IB scores exempted me from first year math in university. The four post-secondary math classes I did take boosted my overall average. I am not a mathematician, but I guess that makes me a relatively successful product of the system. Two years into my teaching career I found myself in a Grade 4 Math/Science classroom. Although my students had arrived from schools all over the city, my own success with classroom mathematics had made me pretty confident.

Half of my students came in overwhelmingly excited: “I already know my 9s tables,” while the other half were clearly dreading math. I had had them fill out an introductory survey and at least 50% had noted that they hated the subject. The first problem we introduced that year involved calculating costs of purchasing a variety of candies using either addition or multiplication. We just wanted to get an idea of where students were at with their understanding. It was a bit of a disaster.

Student: 3 x 32 cents = 15 cents
Me: The price of one candy is 32 cents. You decided to buy 3 candies and you have calculated that it will cost you 15 cents, does that make sense to you?
Student: Confused stare.
Me: How did you get 15 cents?
Student: Well 3 x 3 is 9 and 3 x 2 is 6 and 6 + 9 is 15.
Me: Why did you multiply 3 x 3?
Student: Because there’s a 3 on the bottom and a 3 on the top.
Me: But what does that 3 on the top represent?
Student: Blank stare.
Me: Does the “3 on the top” represent 3 cents or 30 cents?
Student: Blank stare.

“Alignment” mistakes from students using conventional multi-digit addition algorithms were also excessively common. It seemed they weren’t thinking, just executing.

Student: 24 cents + 13 cents = 154 cents
Me: How much is a quarter?
Student: 25 cents
Me: How many quarters in a dollar?
Student: 4
Me: You added less than a quarter to less than a quarter and got more than a dollar?
Student: Blank stare.

Some struggling students attempting to add double digit numbers were in tears because they just couldn’t remember what “carrying” meant and what column the number they were “carrying” was “meant to go in” (“my teacher just told me to put it there”). One student had successfully used multiplication to determine the cost of purchase of a whole variety of different candies but kept coming back to me to ask “is this right?” When I asked her if she could think of a way to verify whether she was correct using an alternative strategy, she couldn’t.

I’ll be honest, for the first few classes I did a lot of showing and telling. I figured, that’s how I had learned so it should probably work. I would be sitting next to students saying: “so these 3 candies are worth 10 cents each right? If you want all 3, you will have to add 10 cents 3 times to find out how much you owe. Since they all cost 10 cents though, you could also just multiply 10 by 3 right? Because that’s 3 tens. Three multiples of ten. Right?” The kids didn’t often have much to say though and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they still didn’t really “get it.” They were doing what I had asked alright, but relatively thoughtlessly. They also seemed determined that multiplication was a series of isolated concepts you memorized and then moved on from. “We’ve already done 5s and 6s so this year we do 7s.”

One weekend early on I was telling my husband about the “trick” I was going to use to teach my students how to remember multiples of 9. He responded with “why do they have to do it your way, that’s not how I do it.” Again, I am embarrassed to say that it had simply not occurred to me that there was a different way to remember multiples of 9. It did occur to me at that point however, that it might be worth reading a little bit more about how to teach math, so over the next few weeks I read as much as I could about how students construct mathematical understanding. I spent quite a few nights at the school until 8 or 9 with my teaching partner, reading and researching and thinking and we finally decided to have the students “review” multiplication with a hundreds chart. We had envisioned that the students would start by coloring multiples of one, two, three, four etc. on the hundreds chart, that it would help them recognize patterns and make connections between numbers and that it would help them remember.

We asked them to start by coloring in multiples of one and were shocked again when we were met with 50 blank stares. The students had no idea what the word multiple meant. So instead of coloring, we talked about what it means to multiply something and what constitutes a “multiple.” We used students as examples: “What would happen to Joe if I multiplied him by 2? If I had 3 Jessicas standing up here how many multiples of Jessica is that?” and then asked students to propose definitions for “a multiple of one” based on their understanding. As a group we reviewed their definitions and then added, verified or refuted their various conjectures through conversation. The result was a more engaged group of students than I’d seen all year. The conversations led to discussions and debates and lots of “Oooooh, now I get it!” I was hooked, the kids were hooked, it turns out math is really cool.

A few weeks into our conversation about multiples I had a group of students trying to figure out how many different ways they could make a box filled with 3, 5, 7 or 9 truffles and one little boy came rushing over brimming with excitement..

J: “Mrs. Bailey I discovered something!!! You can’t fill a box with two rows if you have an odd number of truffles!!”
Me: “YEAH J! Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s connected to something we noticed about multiples of 2?”
He paused, then his eyes lit up: “YA! Because multiples of 2 are always even, not odd.”
Me: “Awesome why don’t you go and add that conjecture to the board.”

J rushed off delighted with himself to add his conjecture to the ever increasing list of mathematical “conjectures” that we would review and debate at the end of class.

I’ve told this story about J a few times in the last several years for a couple of reasons. J came into grade 4 terrified of math. Every time we talked about numbers he’d nod frantically while blinking back tears. Most of J’s classmates had recognized ages ago (Grade 2 maybe) that odd numbers couldn’t fill a box with two rows. Much earlier that year we had, as a class, approved the conjecture that “all multiples of 2 are even” and J had nodded, writing it down in his book. J had even practiced his “two times tables,” at home. He was proud that he could remember “all twelve”. But he was remembering twelve different multiplication equations as isolated facts and they meant very little to him in a mathematical context. In a traditional math classroom this would have been overlooked. In the inquiry-based classroom however, we designed mathematical investigations such that it came up again and again until J finally had an opportunity to understand. While some of our students were writing conjectures about the frequency of prime numbers and how to identify least common multiples, J was discovering, really discovering, that odd numbers can’t be split in half evenly.

Someone once told me that every time a child has an “A-ha!” moment, a fundamental brain shift has occurred. I’m sure there’s no empirical evidence to support this statement. I have only taught math to a couple hundred students thus far in my career so my sample size is low. But everything I’ve seen in the classroom and everything I’ve experienced in my own learning supports that statement. “A-ha!” moments are fundamental to the cultivation of memory.

School is a lot more interesting and seems an awful lot more real and personal when kids are rushing around bursting with discoveries than when they are sitting at desks rushing through math facts. I guess maybe what I’m saying isn’t so much “don’t teach memorization” as “make math memorable.” Situating the development of basic skills more intentionally within mathematical conversation, encouraging student formulation and articulation of ideas and guiding students toward discovery has been, in my experience, way more powerful, more exciting, and more memorable, than having them practice reciting and writing their multiplication tables.

I agree that students should be provided with the opportunity to study multiplication early on. I also agree that by Grade 5, if these opportunities have been effectively designed, students should have already committed most multiplication facts to memory. My grade 4 students were able to point out that if you “knew” multiples of 2 you knew multiples of 4 and 6 and 8, and that if you knew multiples of 3 you knew multiples of 6 and 9, and 5s were fairly straightforward so that really only left 7x7 (“and by the way Mrs. Bailey, 49 is one of those numbers and that’s why you have to work harder to remember it..” “One of what numbers?” “You know, it’s not really connected to anything. Kind of like a prime number, but not, because it’s a multiple of 7”).

The word “rote” is associated with “mechanical or habitual repetition” of something to be learned. Synonyms include: mechanically, unthinkingly and mindlessly. I cannot subscribe to the idea that students should be taught to remember things “unthinkingly”. Yes to memory. No to “mindless”. I haven’t read the word “rote” in the Alberta Education curriculum. If I had, I would have thoughtfully ignored it. You mention in your critique the curriculum’s acknowledgement of multiple strategies but Alberta Ed uses the words: “such as” to suggest the different strategies students might describe or demonstrate. It is not prescriptive or prohibitive. It doesn’t mean that children need to memorize multiple different strategies for multiplying 6 x 7. It means that they need to be able to recognize that (5 x 7) + 7 and (3 x 7) x 2 are equal to 6 x 7 and that both of those are more efficient ways to calculate 6 x 7 than counting up by 7. If they work with these concepts regularly enough in meaningful ways, are engaged in conversations about what they mean, and are held accountable for what they know, where they struggle and what they should practice, 6 x 7 is easily committed to memory and the rest just follows because it makes sense. It’s not clutter.

Monkeys or Mathematicians (Math is More Than Memorization)

2014-01-21T22:32:00.001-07:00

Pedagogy trumps curriculum every time.

Dylan Wiliam

The recent parent-driven push for a “return to basics” shift in math curriculum in Alberta is not unexpected. Our post-industrial society remains regrettably focused on relaying and assessing content over process. The deeply embedded desire to quantify student thinking for the sake of a neat, uni-dimensional continuum that claims to represent student potential results in the inevitable association of learning with factual and procedural recall. Quite simply, we've designed schools to train and measure our children. We group them by age, divide their days into standardized units and test them at regular intervals in order to compare them to their peers. Memorization is easy to measure in math so we convince ourselves we’re holding kids accountable by measuring their recall. This also allows us to rank and sort students effectively without actually engaging them in conversation, something PISA has effectively mastered. However, making a judgement about the quality of an entire math curriculum based on data snapshots from a moment in time is not only irresponsible it's ridiculous. Advocating that because memorization scores have dropped, an entire curriculum should re-focus on memory work is incredibly shortsighted. We've already been there. It wasn't awesome.

Drilling students on basic math facts and the memorization of assigned algorithms for the past several decades has overwhelmingly killed interest in mathematics, hampered intellectual development and misused teaching opportunities (more on the complexity of assigning "standard" algorithms here). Math facts worksheets have been painful for all but those gifted in regurgitation (and not the good kind of worthwhile pain that is connected to something important). As Paul Lockhart writes, “I don’t see how it’s doing society any good to have so many members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams and clear memories of hating them.” The test results may have been good but it is safe to say that a fair majority of “old system” graduates continue to dread the thought of trying to explain math to their children.

The inquiry-based shift away from an emphasis on memorization was in acknowledgement of the fact that the cultivation of deep understanding is now recognized to be much less straightforward than simple transmission and regurgitation. "Inquiry offers a way of thinking about things that does not begin with isolated bits and pieces, but with webs of relationships," (Friesen & Jardine, 2009) meaningfully connected through experience and conversation. Although powerlessness has become a surprisingly seductive habit, society is slowly recognizing that it is no longer acceptable for high school graduates merely to be able to do what they’re told. Today’s students will have opportunities to collect, synthesize, analyze, connect and design and will need to be able to make use of these opportunities in order to be considered effective 21st century citizens.

Proponents of “back to basics” math education love to make comparisons between the importance of memory work and the necessity of “practice” in sports. It’s a good analogy. But advocating for a "back to the basics" math curriculum is very much akin to advocating for "less gameplay, more passing practice" approach to sport. When kids don't get to play the game, passing loses it's appeal pretty quickly.

We read to kids and we encourage them to write things before they can spell. It's what gives the importance of spelling proper context, makes it meaningful. The same should be (and is) possible in mathematics. Inquiry-based practice retains the rigour of strong work in mathematics without limiting kids to one perspective or strict procedural recall. Children work on problems using a variety of strategies. They are held accountable for justifying their thinking to their peers in class discussions. My experience with an inquiry-based approach to mathematics has never been that “basics” are ignored. It just structures learning so that things like arithmetic come up in authentic mathematical contexts. The emphasis is on conceptual understanding, not just procedures and practice of them. The result is that kids can not only think but can articulate their thinking. This video represents a range of grade 4 students explaining their solutions to a problem undertaken in class. Providing these students with the opportunity to share their thinking with peers and allowing their peers the opportunity to question their thinking led to some incredibly valuable conversations about efficiency, best practices, and worthwhile work in mathematics.

Inquiry effectively frames a question or topic of investigation, carefully guiding students to a solution but not directing their every move. I’ve continued to use the analogy of bringing students to a mountain and teaching them to climb but providing them with the freedom to discover their own way up rather than dragging them all up the main route. The approach involves checking in with students on a regular basis, discussing their experiences, missteps and difficulties, and supporting them as they work their way up (see Galileo Teaching Effectiveness Framework). Introducing students to a topic and subsequently abandoning them to their own devices is not inquiry, nor is it effective teaching. Nowhere in the current Alberta Math Curriculum does it state that students should “teach themselves.” High school students whose only strategies for adding 4+7 are counting up, or using their fingers are the result of ineffective teaching practice, full stop.

I recently posted the following quote to twitter:

In response I received the comment: “That way, arts graduates can appear to be competent math teachers.”

No. The opposite. The new approach asks teachers to challenge the curiosity of students with problems proportionate to their knowledge, guiding them toward strategies, conjectures, and conclusions that are mathematically sound and that they can justify with confidence.

Instead of: “Find the perimeter of a 4cm × 9cm rectangle,” we are asking: “Find a rectangle which has unit sides and a perimeter of 100. How many answers are there and how do you know you've got them all?”

Instead of: “Find the area and perimeter of a 3cm × 8cm rectangle,” we are asking: “If the area of a rectangle (in cm²) is equal to the perimeter (in cm), what could its dimensions be?” or “If the area of a rectangle is 24 cm² and the perimeter is 22 cm, what are its dimensions? How did you work this out?” (via nrich.maths.org)

Instead of worksheets like this:

Students develop puzzles like this:

And instead of videos like this, they make videos like this

As an educator, it is no longer enough simply to hold the answer key. In order to effectively guide students through the process of thinking mathematically, teachers need to have wrestled with the same problems themselves and be familiar with the range of mathematical possibilities and conceptual connections that each problem might elicit. In grade 4, in lieu of repeated memory work we determined what was worth memorizing (ex. students agreed that it was particularly helpful to have memorized what we called "friendly numbers" - pairs that we add to give 10) and why.

I want to acknowledge that the task of moving beyond sequential, transmission-based math instruction can be overwhelming and intimidating, particularly without support or access to powerful exemplars. As Sharon Friesen writes in Back to the Basics, “it’s not just that teachers [and parents] don’t like math; they don’t know what’s happening because they can’t remember what the real work really is, All they remember of math is the equations and the rules and the facts they’ve memorized - the surface activities with all the relations forgotten...” Math teachers province-wide, most of whom are graduates of the “drill-and-kill” system, have recently taken on the difficult and uncomfortable task of attempting to introduce mathematics as the complex web of relations it is, often with very little support. It is fair to say that inquiry-based pedagogy is still new and inconsistently executed. The answer to any resulting challenges however, is not a throwback to an outdated curriculum or oversimplification of the complexity of mathematics.

WISE Math, an organization actively advocating for "back to the basics" mathematics instruction, have written on their main page that "in order to become a competent piano player, a child must practice regularly and memorize piano scales, " stating that the same is true for mathematics. I do not disagree. Children who practice piano scales however, do not do so at their music lessons. In piano class, they play, they get feedback, and then they go home and practice scales because it makes a difference. They recognize that it affects the music. The new curriculum does not prohibit children from practicing math facts at home. It just acknowledges that there's more worthwhile work to be undertaken in the classroom. WISE interestingly has an article linked to their website called "'Drill and kill' no way to teach math in 2011" which concludes with a quote I thought particularly apt:

"Do we need a high level of proficiency in math teaching? Sure. Is our goal one of raising student achievement and equipping kids with the math tools they need to function effectively in society? Absolutely. But we do this through effective, reflective practice, not by blindly adhering to outdated approaches that have characterized instruction for the past century."

Also, this TED talk by 13 year old mathematician Jacob Barnett is well worth a watch:

Further reading

(a by no means comprehensive snapshot of academic research and writing I have found of particular value relating to mathematics education for the development of deep understanding)

Baroody, A.J. & Ginsburg, H.P. (1990) Children's mathematical learning: A cognitive view. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. Monograph, 4, 51-64

"Cognitive research indicates that it is essential to distinguish between meaningful learning and rote learning. It is not enough to absorb and accumulate information. Children must be given the opportunity to assimilate mathematical knowledge - to construct accurate and complete mathematical understandings."

Caliandro, C. K. (2000). Children's inventions for multi digit multiplication and division. Teaching Children Mathematics, 6 (6), 420-424.

"The procedures [the children] developed were meaningful to them and flowed out of their deepened mathematical understanding. Their procedures will not be forgotten. Memorized procedures, in contrast, are frequently forgotten and have to be reviewed again and again."

Carroll, W. (1997). Invented strategies can develop meaningful mathematical procedures. Teaching Children Mathematics, 3 (7), 370-74.

"By encouraging children to invent and use their own procedures, teachers allow them to use a method that makes them focus not simply on practicing computation but also on developing strategies for which computational approach to use[...] The reward of seeing students make sense of mathematical situations and the resulting appreciation of children's thinking and capabilities more than make up for the difficulties."

Friesen, S. (2008) Raising the floor and lifting the ceiling: Math for all. Education Canada. 48 (5), 50-54.

"I think it is important to note that students were not left alone to 'discover' the math for themselves. Rather, a series of lessons were designed to scaffold the student learning, ensuring that students uncovered and connected the underlying key concepts, worked through procedures related to measuring and calculating angles and arcs, length and perimeter, area and volume, congruence and similarity, and scale factors. They were asked to reason, to conjecture, and to justify conclusions."

Friesen, S. (2006). Math: Teaching it Better. Education Canada, 46 (1), 6-10.

"While the task of creating classrooms in which students understand abstract and difficult mathematical ideas, see relevance in the mathematics they are learning, and achieve mathematical competence seems daunting, as a mathematics community we are further down the road in knowing what to do to achieve these goals. We have made demonstrable progress by working together - mathematicians, mathematics educators, and teachers who understand that mathematics reform is a complex matter. There are no easy answers."

Jardine, D.W., Friesen, S. & Clifford, P. (2003). “Behind every jewel are three thousand sweating horses”: Meditations on the ontology of mathematics and mathematics education. In E. Hasebe-Ledt & W. Hurren (Eds.), Curriculum intertext: Place/Language/Pedagogy (pp.39-49). New York, NY: Peter Lang

"All of us at the table knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this solution was correct. But, equally, none of us knew at all why it was correct. One boy insisted, with an insistence that we all recognized in ourselves, "That's just how you do it, ok?" [...] Many of us in this classroom had, over the year, talked about that odd feeling of having learned, having memorized a procedure and knowing how to do it beyond question or hesitation, and yet suffering the terrible silence and feeling of cold and deathly immobility if anyone should have the audacity to ask a question about it."

Kamii, C. & Livingston, S.J. (1994). Young children continue to reinvent arithmetic - third grade: Implications of Piaget's theory. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

"Children's first methods are admittedly inefficient. However, if they are free to do their own thinking, they invent increasingly efficient procedures just as our ancestors did. By trying to bypass the constructive process, we prevent them from making sense of arithmetic"

Madell, R. (1989). Children's natural processes. Arithmetic Teacher 32 (7), 20-22.

"It is hard to follow the reasoning of others. No wonder so many children ignore the best of explanations of why a particular algorithm works and just follow the rules [...] The early focus on memorization in the teaching of arithmetic thoroughly distorts in children's minds the fact that mathematics is primarily reasoning. This damage is often difficult, if not impossible, to undo."

Steffe, L. P. (1994). Children's multiplying schemes In. G. Harel & J. Confrey (Eds.). The Development of Multiplicative Reasoning in the Learning of Mathematics. (pp 3-39.) Albany, NY: State University of New York

"[Children] can, indeed, be told to do something, but they cannot be told to understand [...] It is a drastic mistake to ignore child-generated algorithms in favour of the "standard" paper and pencil algorithms currently being taught in elementary schools. Other than the work already cited, there is solid evidence that imposing the standard algorithms on children yields discontinuities between children's methods and their algorithms (Easley, 1975; Brownell, 1935; McKnight and Davis, 1980). even when they are to some extent based on operative arithmetical concepts, the standard algorithms become essentially instrumental for the children (Skemp, 1978) and pose a serious threat to the retention of insight (Fredenthal, 1979; Erlwanger, 1973).

Stein, M. K. (2007). Selecting the right curriculum. NCTM Research Clips and Briefs. Retrieved from: http://www.nctm.org/news/content.aspx?id=8468

But, efficacy for what? It is important to note that students tended to perform best on tests that aligned with the approaches by which they had been taught, repeating the well-worn finding that students learn what they are taught. Combined with the findings from the analyses of curriculum materials cited earlier, the research examined here suggests that students taught using conventional curricula can be expected to master computational and symbolic manipulation better, whereas students taught using standards-based curricula can be expected to perform better on problems that demand problem solving, thinking, and reasoning.

(Also, Cathy Fosnot's entire series Contexts for Learning Mathematics, Christopher Danielsen's Talking Math With Your Kids, the University of Cambridge's nrich.maths.org and the Galileo Educational Network's Math Resource List)

My Story of Change in Education: Student Voice and Physical Space

2013-10-21T08:56:00.000-06:00

This story was put together as part of the Canadian Education Association's "What Standing in the Way of Change in Education" Conference in Calgary, October 21 - 22, 2013.

I only remember a few specifics from my first few weeks in the classroom. I had big ideas but the execution was definitely messy. I remember trying to keep track of things that worked and didn’t in those first few months and the second category was certainly larger than the first. I remember the first time I gave the students a math problem that asked that they apply an understanding of place value. Within ten minutes, three children were crying because they didn’t understand and were afraid to get the wrong answer. Somehow I hadn’t anticipated that my fifty students from all over the city would have such varying experiences and attitudes towards learning.

I was so thankful to be partnered with Amy Park, an incredible teacher and leader in inquiry-based practice. Her early perspective and support during our team-planning blocks quickly became a lifeline. It became evident that my thinking was always amplified through conversation with Amy. A lot more seems possible when someone has always got your back.

A pivotal moment in those earlier conversations came from the acknowledgement that a majority of students seemed to be struggling with anything beyond simple computation in mathematics. They kept waiting to be told what to do. As I tossed out possible learning opportunities, I remember Amy asking the question “are we teaching students what to think or are we teaching them how to think?”

We realized these 9 year olds needed an opportunity to practice thinking. We needed to start by talking about the art of having a thoughtful opinion and being open with it. Two weeks into the year we decided to team-up. We gathered all 50 students in an open space in the school and asked them to share conjectures about how they might define: “multiples of one.” Hesitantly at first, we heard “any number with a one in it, every second number, every number that ends in a one.” As students saw their ideas considered and supported, momentum for participating in the conversation grew. Partial agreements about some conjectures lead to conversations about whole numbers. The kids debated whether zero and negative numbers could be considered multiples. We looked at whether two non-identical conjectures could mean the same thing and both be completely correct.

Further conjectures from our future mathematicians

I learned more about mathematics and teaching that day than I could have imagined. I thought we’d have breezed through multiples of one. We didn’t even get past it. But what a waste it would have been to prescribe a definition and miss the magic of abstract discussion and debate among nine year olds. How could we presume to know what they understood, how would they know that they did, unless we allowed them to debate, to defend and to support their ideas?

I started my year with the expectation that my role was to help students understand exactly what it was that I wanted them to know; my goal was to track their progress and ensure that they were headed in the right direction. Unknowingly, I had intended to replicate my thinking in my students without ever having asked for theirs. That day in math class, I learned that even as a teacher, in a position in which I have theoretically earned the right to assume my expertise should direct the learning - inviting students to contribute blew my narrow perspective wide open.

As our year progressed, providing opportunity for students to engage in conversation and to push each others’ thinking continued. Our classes often combined to share their ideas and we found ourselves pushing desks and chairs out of the way on a regular basis. Conversations were always better when students weren’t at their desks so some old mats discovered in the gymnasium hallway were appropriated for class-wide “congresses.” We also found that students grew increasingly competent in advocating for different work spaces and were constantly moving back and forth between classes or pulling out the mats and lying on their bellies to discuss latest discoveries. It was sometime not longer after that I came across an article written by a university professor who had moved his classes to a nearby coffee shop in order to encourage his students to engage more readily in conversation and debate. He discussed the limitation of a desk-based classroom culture and the ease with which moving a to a less formal space shifted the attitudes of his students.

When we brought it up with the students, they quite willingly shared their ideas for how we might re-design our classroom space and the result was a unanimous vote in favor of completely converting one of our classrooms to a cafe-style area while keeping the other for what the students called the “university” - a space for more quiet, focused and individual thinking and writing. Our weekly blog had kept parents informed and involved in the process and that week we had bean bag chairs, arm chairs, and ikea side tables join the gym mats in what would become affectionately known as Barkley’s cafe. The cafe and university became fixtures at our school as the students helped us redefine what it means to be on task and engaged. It was the physical manifestation of a different kind of teacher-student relationship. One in which people could walk in right away and not know where the teacher was because we had become so much a part of the learning that we were also cross-legged on the floor listening to the students justify their thinking.

Barkley's Cafe circa 2012

One of the best results of this change was witnessing students engage in conversation with guests to the school about the design of their workspace and the rationale behind it. I remember a teacher from a visiting school sharing that one of our students had told her that this space was different was because students here were treated like their ideas mattered and could make a difference.

Looking back I have to acknowledge that there were a few pretty key pieces that contributed to this change. First and foremost, it was the students that were willing to share their unique vision with confidence. I’ve since learned that every time I forget to ask the kids, it’s a mistake. Our school also supports a risk-taking culture that encourages teachers to keep taking a step forward,recognizing that every time that step is in the wrong direction that it was a valuable learning opportunity. A few months after the change, Amy and I were discussing our evolving collaborative practice with our principal and we made a point of thanking him for letting us move all the furniture down the hall. He responded with - “To be fair, you didn’t actually ask - although you’re welcome - we trust you.” In a way, that confidence had the same effect on us that ours had had on our students - we were empowered.

This change in our classroom environment was a product of co-designing learning tasks in which student voice had space and validity. Kids are so innately curious and creative. All that is left to us, is to foster an awareness of the possibilities that surround them, to let them ask questions, make decisions and make things different.

I’m Deirdre Bailey and this is a story about bringing students into the conversation.

Students share their work with visiting teachers at #ConnectEdCa

Re-thinking inquiry-based practice in physical education

2013-10-17T08:56:00.003-06:00

While conventional education is often criticized for either segmenting learning into smaller pieces without ever giving kids the whole picture, or for letting kids read all about something without ever having an opportunity to engage in the process or "play the whole game" as Harvard School of Education Professor writes in his book Making Learning Whole, physical education does not often suffer the same criticisms. Kids play the whole game all the time - PE teachers might argue, whether it be basketball, volleyball, baseball, badminton or floor hockey.

My challenge to "traditional" PE programs however, would be that the games they are playing are the wrong ones. If the purpose of "playing the whole game" is that students are able to engage in real work
in a way that deepens a specific set of competencies or understandings, then the first question needs to be what general and essential skills and understandings do we want students to gain. One glance at the Alberta Education Phys Ed Curriculum was enough to make it clear that the refinement of an overhand serve in volleyball is neither a key competency, nor a specified curricular outcome. In fact, there are no sport-specific outcomes to be found anywhere in the entire document because physical education in Alberta is not intended to develop nationally-ranked athletes but rather to provide students with the necessary skills (both physical and social/emotional), understanding, and intrinsic motivation to remain active and healthy for the rest of their lives.

In June of last year I sat down with a copy of the curriculum to read through it and to attempt to make it understandable for our 600 students from Grades 4 - 9. What resulted, was a significantly condensed 4-page document (included below) that we printed and posted on the wall inside and just outside the gymnasium at the school. With this vision for PE visible, we began this school year by inviting students to engage in a conversation about the purpose of physical education, the definition of and importance of physical literacy rather than sport specific development. As part of the conversation, we were also able to connect the curriculum to student observations on the differences between youth and adult engagement in physical activity and to Canada Sport for Life research and the Long-term Athlete Development Model.

The curriculum re-write and resulting conversations helped us define physical literacy as a group and visualize different aspects of the PE curriculum more clearly. We envisioned a PE framework as consisting of four key areas:

Skill Acquisition: Consisting of the types of skills that are transferable from individual to team sports and throughout a range of environments. Insists that students take on the challenge of acquiring skills outside of their range of experience or expertise.

Understanding Health Benefits: Essentially - an introduction to exercise physiology. Developing the requisite knowledge and skills that allow us to make decisions about how to analyze, evaluate and develop strategies, ideas or approaches to optimizing health through physical activity.

Interacting with Others: How to be a part of a team; to lead, to follow, to assess your strengths and those of others' around you and develop the skills necessary to engage collaboratively in working towards a goal.

Assume Responsibility: Basically, inquire into intrinsic motivation and personal responsibility.

We concluded that in physical education, the real work might be the work of an athlete in training - but the real work might also be the work of a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a coach, a team member or an average adult with a busy schedule struggling to balance their daily demands with maintaining physical fitness.

With this in mind, we designed a much broader and more permissive introductory unit in physical education. The vision was that the unit would provide students with an opportunity to personalize an inquiry into the training of a particular aspect of physical fitness while gaining an understanding of principals of effective training and assessment over a 3-week period. Students were limited to the development of one component of fitness - assessment was carefully guided with the younger grades while older students had the option of determining how best to test what they were training, provided it was consistent from week to week. Students had access to a range of equipment and both teachers were actively involved in providing feedback and suggestions for training as well as modelling various activities throughout the duration of the inquiry. In general, we found that while the unit required more of students on a daily basis (research, planning, reflection) an overwhelming number invested wholeheartedly in their program design noting that they found particular value in being provided with opportunity for adding their own voice to the structure and assessment of their program.

We managed to capture elements of the process through video and have included a general overview below. We would definitely welcome further thoughts or questions in order to continue to engage in conversations about the possibilities or limitations of inquiry-based practice in physical education. More than anything I am grateful to inquiry-based pedagogy for the opportunity to be conscious and careful about how I design learning experiences for students.

Alberta PE Curriculum Re-Write by Deirdre Bailey

When Winning is the Dominant Discourse

2013-09-11T17:24:00.001-06:00

A hilarious post from the satirical CBC news show "This is That" made the rounds on social media late last week claiming that an Ontario Soccer Club had decided to eliminate the ball from soccer in an effort to curb competition. The article cites a pseudo spokesperson as saying:

"We want our children to grow up learning that sport is not about competition, rather it's about using your imagination. If you imagine you're good at soccer, then, you are."

Facebook and twitter feeds exploded in response to the spoof with overwhelming criticism of ball-less soccer as the next initiative in attempting to eliminate competition from sport. What I found most worrisome however, was that it was not the idea of playing soccer without a ball that seemed to enrage so many - but that their children would be losing an opportunity to "win". Predominant criticisms were overwhelmingly arrogant, ego-centric and condescending. It seemed that most were not actually advocating for competition to remain in sport - just winning.

The response to this article made it clear that there is a very real issue in in youth sport, but that it is not competition. The issue is that we continue to let the delusion that it's not who we are but who we've beaten, gain prominence and priority in our every day lives. We teach our children believe that the goal is not be good at something, it's to be better than everyone else.

It has become reality for children to be indoctrinated early into our ever-increasing obsession with victory. Pop culture, school systems and social media work together to rank and categorize on a daily basis. Athletes in second place rarely get air time and when they do, interviewers brazenly allude to how obviously disappointed they must be with the outcome of their performance. To paraphrase legendary Cross-Country coach Joe Newton, "it's no wonder athletes are afraid to fail. Because every time you win the bar gets higher. People expect you to break a world record, every time you run." Although every athlete by sheer numbers will inevitably lose more than they win we don't acknowledge the struggle and we don't celebrate it. Children learn from too young an age that winning is the only thing and we don't do a good job of teaching them otherwise.

The real issue in youth sport has been clearly identified time and again as society's epidemic over-emphasis on winning at the expense of skill, effort, persistence and a love of sport. No sport organization is advocating for the abolishment of competition in sport, but rather for a re-definition and re-focus. The Canadian Long Term Athlete Development Model is the product of years of research acknowledging that early emphasis on winning competitions leads to disillusionment, frustration and burn-out. Not because competition is bad, but because we don't make it clear to children that failure is essential to learning and that victory is not always a measure of success.

A few years ago, Olympic medalist Duff Gibson interviewed speed skating athlete Kristina Groves about her motivation in training and how it evolved as she struggled to find success. Kristina reflects on the evolution in her goal setting, from being focused on ranking and who she had beaten, to something more powerful and much more relevant.

"I'd been basing how happy I was with my races on the number next to my name.. but I have no control over the number beside my name. All I can control is how I feel, what I focus on... If I cross the line, shouldn't I know right away if it was a good race? "

"The funny thing about it is that now... I can remember standing on a podium and not giving a crap about the medal. But to this day, I can tell you exactly how I felt in that race. ...That's what I want in my races, and that's what leads to good performance." (3.48 min)

The shift away from an early emphasis on competition in sport comes from the determination to cultivate a love of sport that remains even when the outcome is less favourable. Sadness, disappointment and even frustration are inevitable with failure but should be balanced by the confidence and pride that comes from giving your best. It is the excellence of the opponent that makes victory truly great. Seth Godin wrote a poignant blog post last week about the Red Lantern prize for the last place finisher at the grueling Iditarod.

Failing to finish earns you nothing, of course. But for the one who sticks it out, who arrives hours late, there's the respect that comes from finding the strength to make it, even when all seems helpless.

At the end of his post, Godin asks that we seriously reconsider what we choose to acknowledge and how. Do we want a future generation who define their success by how many people they've beaten or should it be something deeper and more personal and much more worthwhile.

For more food for thought, watch this video:

read this article: What Parents Should Say as Kids Perform

or this one from Olympic Gold Medalist Kyle Shewfelt: Performance vs. Outcome Based Success

and check out this organization: True Sport Canada

Retrospect and Reinvention

2013-08-28T22:56:00.002-06:00

Looking back, I can without a doubt acknowledge that what has emerged most significantly from my early experiences in teaching is the idea that the most important measure of my pedagogical practice is the degree to which it has persisted in evolving.

I used to believe that the only alternative to structure was chaos
I used to believe winning was material
I used to believe in quantitative acknowledgement of learning and data-driven assessment
I used to believe that ambiguity was the enemy
I used to believe that learning could be bottled and finite

And then I got older, and I saw that everything was more complicated than what I had perceived. I learned to treasure the wonder of bringing students into a challenging space and asking them to think. I learned to live the reality that David Jardine so beautifully articulated at the conclusion of a Vancouver keynote this summer "Life is just as beautiful and just as difficult as you think it is. And when it's difficult it's not always a bad thing."

This year, having been presented with an opportunity to teach physical and outdoor education full time I still find myself regularly "justifying" the decision to "move away from teaching a core subject." Somehow, cultivating an understanding of human physiology, movement, social cooperation and environmental awareness in youth isn't similarly valued.

The thing is, teaching is teaching. The same opportunity for wonder exists whether the subject is mathematics or motor analysis. My goal more than ever is to persist in accessing and extending my understanding of inquiry-based practice and the instructional process in an effort to push education out of its industrial-aged box. The artificial idea that the cultivation of physical or ecological literacy is so distinctly different from "core curriculum" is at the heart of the fractured approach to pedagogy I genuinely hope to help piece back together.

I've taken the time on a few occasions over the last few years to ask myself "Why am I teaching this?" The answer remains, "because I care about it."

That still resonates.

There are more ways to abandon a child
than to leave them at the mouth of the woods.
Sometimes by the time you find them, they've made up names
for all the birds and constellations, and they've broken
their reflections in the lake with sticks.

… Here in the stillness of forest,
the sun columning before me temple-ancient,
that wonder is what I regret losing most; that wonder
and the true names of birds.

- Sue Goyette, The True Names of Birds

How To Build an Awesome Car (Engineering Thinking in Grade 4)

2013-06-03T06:51:00.001-06:00

Traditionally, Grade 4 "Wheels, Levers and Devices that Move" units involve hands on investigations in which students have the opportunity to build something. Often however, these building opportunities are heavily regulated and have students follow a specific set of instructions, put pieces together sequentially and then showcase a collection of virtually identical products.

While I can't pretend to know a whole lot about engineering, I am pretty confident that if the discipline were focused on building from instruction booklets, Chris Hadfield wouldn't have spent the last 6 months in space. As Dr. David Perkins' mentions in Making Learning Whole, kids don't learn to play the game if all they ever get are the pieces...
And so, in late February of this year, Amy Park and I were left tossing around the important question of how to effectively re-frame a traditional mousetrap car building challenge in a way that might provoke engineering thinking - significant to the discipline, and grounded in life outside the school. Inspiration finally arrived in the form of the following ingenious car commercial. I doubt that the Dodge Dart people had any intention of making their marketing campaign so applicable to the learning of nine-year-olds, but for us, it was perfection.

Students were quick to identify with the competencies and habits personified by the Dodge Dart engineers and mechanics. The challenge of "Changing Mousetrap Cars Forever" was an exciting one, and we were also able to connect immediately with our own University of Calgary's Solar Car Team, using their process as a reference.

With the only requirements being "must have 3 wheels," and "must be powered by a mousetrap;" many students' early design ideas were far-fetched or unrealistic (oranges for wheels, toothpicks for axels.) Negotiating constant re-design with students was a challenging and time-consuming process. Many struggled with the open-endedness of the task. Questions like "what exactly do you want me to build?" and "why can't you just tell me how to do it?" resulted in many cases of frustration and even some tears. We had several in-class conversations about the value of working and learning through the process (planning, building, testing, tweaking and reflecting), whether the final construction was successful or not. Building opportunities for feedback into every aspect of the process was instrumental, and having co-determined criteria for what "good engineering work" might look like to guide the learning was key.

While the learning was messy, there was tremendous reward at the end of this task as students re-connected with engineering students from the university, sharing strategies such as the tools that worked best in the design phase, how to work as a team to overcome difficulties, and when to let go of perfecting a design and just start building. Parents were also able to recognize the value of being able to engage their children in conversation about their process, and not just the product.

Inspired by the people at Dodge Dart, we've put together our own video of our process below...

Here's are copies of the rubrics that were co-built with students early in the process in order to guide their design and construction efforts...

I've also included a link to the GDoc that was shared in a recent ConnectEd Canada session, co-hosted by Erin Couillard, Jenna Callaghan, Kathryn Desrochers and I, on engineering in the elementary classroom.

The final parking lot

Cross-posted on Calgary Science School's Connect!

On Light, Shadows and Experience

2013-04-14T20:19:00.000-06:00

Co-authored by Jenna Callaghan
Cross-posted on the Calgary Science School's Connect!

We began a recent investigation into Light and Shadows in Grade 4 by posing the question “What is Light?” to our students. Before beginning the conversation, we reminded students that the world is not nearly as concrete or easily-understood as over-simplified statements of "fact" might often imply. We talked about how scientists are by nature inquisitive, always open to possibility and a reinvention of old ideas. We suggested that throughout our inquiry, they too might have the potential to share a completely new perspective, contribute to making new discoveries and either support or disprove current thoughts. With two of us in the classroom, we were able to capture some of our students’ opening ideas about 'Light' and have embedded them below.

Jenna
The complexity of the idea that the world is not completely knowable left me with an uneasy feeling this week as I was forced to acknowledge that even as the “teacher” I too have to admit that I just don’t have all the answers. Our opening conversation with students about Light was followed by an investigation into “What Light Isn’t”, and as students explored how to create and manipulate shadows in the classroom they were asking extraordinary questions; questions that I just didn’t always know how to respond to correctly. While scouring resources in order to continue to investigate the topic, I voiced my concern about not having all the answers to Deirdre. The conversation that unfolded was an important reminder for me of my real purpose as a teacher and the resulting understandings will certainly guide my role through the rest of this exploration.

Our role as teachers is not to be an “expert” in every subject and topic within the curriculum we teach. Education is learner-centred; it is no longer about the teacher as the source of all answers or holder of knowledge, and it wouldn’t be real to pretend that we could provide an answer to every question our students might ask. Our role is certainly to have an evolving understanding and curiosity for the ideas we explore in Science, but more importantly it is to be experienced in how to be a researcher, how to ask meaningful questions, and how to be genuinely curious about the way things in this world work. If we presume to always know the answer to every question that is asked there is no doubt that learning will be less meaningful for students. Who wants to investigate, only to be “given the answers” in the end? What is necessary is that we guide students, give them the tools to look for answers themselves, and continue to demonstrate passion for living in a way that is open to possibility. When students are asking questions that we don’t know the answers to, they are curious enough to look for answers. When we explore these ideas together, we are on our way to doing what good teachers should be doing.

Deirdre
My conversation with Jenna reminded me of how uncomfortable it can feel to be put in a space where there is the expectation that as teachers, we are the holders of all relevant knowledge. The perception that we should have all the answers is outdated and impossible. To paraphrase David Jardine in his article On the Nature of Inquiry: The Experienced Teacher: “it is troublesome to expect that teachers should have final, foreclosing or definitive knowledge, such that further experiences become less necessary, possible or interesting.” That said, acknowledging that teachers should not expect or presume to know everything about Light and Shadows before embarking on an investigation into the topic does not mean that we simply turn things over to the students and step back. Rather, it should be because of our own investigations into the topic that we are properly attuned to detecting important ideas, questions or opportunities in the students’ questions. I don’t have all the answers, but it is because of my own research and passionate interest in the subject that I am capable of helping the students identify the right questions. As Sharon Friesen reminds us in her brilliant EdTalk on Creating Knowledge Building Environments, “teachers can’t let go of good quality teaching. They must guide and steward student learning in a deliberate and intentional way. Capture and captivate student interests and learning so they can take their best next step forward.”

More to come as we continue to push each other to bump up against what we think we know to be true.

Link to our "Light and Shadows" Planning Document (In progress...)

Kindness - A Recurring Theme

2013-04-09T23:58:00.000-06:00

Every once in awhile all the pockets of spark that I come across intersect and whether it's true or not it really feels like the universe is pulling together to communicate something important. Today I had to write about it. The trigger was an impromptu conversation with my student teacher about how sometimes, teaching core curricular outcomes gets set aside for a period and this is okay. Because sometimes it's important to have a conversation about how to be a good person; about what it means to be kind, to make a thoughtful decision, to show compassion or respect. If real teaching is inspiring the hearts and minds of children, then taking time for these conversations, creating space and modelling the kind of brave compassion that leads to hope and change is the most important thing we do.

My contribution to the conversation was inspired by a few powerfully important points made a week ago by Philadelphia principal Chris Lehmann who blogged:

"The factory model of education that persists in most American high schools is designed to limit meaningful human interaction, not create it... That has to change. We have to recognize that teaching kindness is more than just modeling “being nice to kids,” we have understand that kindness is the essentially the act of extending one’s self in the care of another."

And then I ran across a terribly saddening article about the suicide of a Canadian teenage gang rape victim that just seemed to be crying for attention to be paid to the issue of how we cultivate kindness in schools. Rehtaeh was virtually abandoned by a community that should have rallied to protect and support her. As Kaye Toal blogged

"I’m sorry, Rehtaeh. I’m sorry that so many people failed you. I’m sorry that we are all complicit in a culture that shames and silences and browbeats victims literally to death. We created this. We built it."

But we can fix it. Kindness, thoughtfulness and compassion belong in schools - I cannot think of a locale where they might live more genuinely if treated properly. But we have to consciously invest in re-focusing our attention and our conversations. I was so grateful to conclude my evening by running across the most beautiful words of hope written by a mom, Glennon Melton to her son on the eve of his first day in third grade. She writes:

"Chase - We do not care if you are the smartest or fastest or coolest or funniest. There will be lots of contests at school, and we don’t care if you win a single one of them. We don’t care if you get straight As. We don’t care if the girls think you’re cute or whether you’re picked first or last for kickball at recess. We don’t care if you are your teacher’s favorite or not. We don’t care if you have the best clothes or most Pokemon cards or coolest gadgets. We just don’t care.

We don’t send you to school to become the best at anything at all. We already love you as much as we possibly could. You do not have to earn our love or pride and you can’t lose it. That’s done.

We send you to school to practice being brave and kind.

Kind people are brave people. Brave is not a feeling that you should wait for. It is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd. Trust me, baby, it is. It is more important.

Don’t try to be the best this year, honey. Just be grateful and kind and brave. That’s all you ever need to be."

Those words reflect what I hope for every child that ever steps into my classroom. Be grateful, be kind, be brave. If every school community could build the capacity to live those words it could change things. Really change them. As I was imagining a world in which everyone lived with that kind of support and confidence, I came across a post from the Exp.lore blog with the tag line: "Imagine a world without hate."

I'm imagining...

Mentorship and Collaboration in Student Teaching: A Video Reflection

2013-04-03T15:47:00.002-06:00

Co-authored by Jenna Callaghan
Cross-posted on the Calgary Science School's Connect!

Deirdre

Working with a student teacher these past few months has been an exciting and rewarding experience. From our first meeting, it was evident that Jenna and I shared a similar pedagogical philosophy; with a strong focus on reflection and discipline-based inquiry. Jenna’s early ideas and questions were guided by an honest vulnerability that allowed for a number of frank conversations around assessment, engagement and lesson design in an inquiry based classroom. My understanding of collaboration - developed and deepened through a powerful team-teaching relationship with Amy Park - had led to a familiarity with how professional collaborative relationships might evolve and I was excited to incorporate my prior understanding and experiences.

Inquiry based pedagogy has affected every aspect of my own practice and approach to collaborative learning and feedback. As Jenna and I often discuss, comprehensive assessment in an inquiry learning space is a collaborative activity involving both learner and mentor, and is intended as a tool to advance learning and improve practice. Face-to-face conversation is often the most natural and instrumental assessment tool for formative feedback in our classroom. Leading up to Jenna’s mid-term narrative assessment, we reflected on its purpose and identified that ultimately it should provide Jenna with a chance to solidify her understanding of what worked and was important in the classroom in as authentic a format as possible. We agreed that a face-to-face conversation would provide the best opportunity for Jenna to verbalize her perspective and ideas to date, and through shared conversation we might have the potential to reflect more meaningfully than through an individual, written process.

The power of Jenna’s reflection is not only that it provided her with an opportunity to share frankly and openly in a more casual format, it also provided me with an important opportunity to hear about the work that we undertake in our classroom articulated from the perspective of a partner educator. Her interpretation has allowed me to deepen my understanding of what we do in our classroom space; how and why. It shows tremendous courage and vulnerability that Jenna has been so willing to reflect on her learning in such an open fashion. It is this openness to self-reflection that I believe has been a major catalyst for the evolution of our collaborative relationship and ongoing professional learning. Sincere thanks to Jenna for her candid willingness to try new things, and to our school community for inspiring the re-thinking of student-teacher/ partner-teacher relationships and assessment.

Jenna
I clearly remember the day I received the email notifying me that my final practicum placement would be spent teaching Grade 4 Math/Science at the Calgary Science School. I was walking down the hall on my way to my Assessment class and actually screamed in excitement! I had long been intrigued by the school, and had hoped to have the opportunity to spend more time there since a morning visit for a presentation on inquiry in the first year of my BEd program. Even in my excitement, I could not have anticipated what an amazing experience this final Field Placement would become.

In previous experiences, I always got along well with my partner teachers, but none of these relationships ever progressed further than what I would typically think of as a student/mentor dynamic. It seems that Deirdre and I connected immediately. We have a common understanding of our purpose in teaching, and have developed a strong relationship from the beginning of this experience. Our student-teacher/partner-teacher dynamic has naturally evolved into a situation that involves more team teaching than individual teaching, planning everything together through constant conversation (before, during, and after each day), and finishing each others’ sentences more and more. As a result of this connection and our constant collaboration, we have been able to produce ideas and teach in a way that never would have been possible alone!

For my Midterm Assessment, I was given instructions to summarize a discussion between Deirdre and I with the purpose being to reflect on several areas of my teaching practice thus far. As Deirdre is a technology whiz, one of my goals for this practicum was to meaningfully incorporate increased technology into my practice. Furthermore, with our shared belief that vulnerability is key for teachers to learn and grow in their practice, it felt natural that we would complete this reflection in a way that we could then share with a wider audience. Sharing a video reflection online is a scary, intimidating experience, and I am certainly feeling very vulnerable because of it, but I truly believe any feedback will only push to me grow more and to continually develop a deeper understanding of what it is we do. Thanks Deirdre for allowing me the opportunity to take these risks, and for viewing me as a valuable educator within the classroom.

Outside the Lines: Student Perspectives on Inquiry Learning

2013-03-19T22:32:00.001-06:00

Sometimes it gets to me that my classroom is noisier and that my students’ work is messier. Why am I in constant negotiation with nine and ten year olds over quality, clarity, detail, what’s worth the effort and when it’s reasonable to expect to move on? Wednesday morning as I sat at my desk feeling uncertain and frustrated at the messiness of not having everything nailed down, categorized and properly evaluated, I decided to have a conversation with the kids about learning. I have to hand it to inquiry, it has made them good conversationalists and I have yet to regret asking students for their perspective in solving problems. This particular conversation was no exception...

Conversation originally recorded/documented on the white board and transcribed below.

I need your help working through a few things. We talk a lot about how important it is to be informed by the ideas and suggestions of as many people as possible so I need you to be really honest for this conversation. Please try not to only share ideas you think I want to hear or that you have heard at home. I want what you share to be your thoughts and your perspectives. Okay?
Lots of nods

I’m wondering what learning was like for you before this year...
“Well mostly teachers just told us the answer to stuff and then tested us on it.”
“Yeah. It’s like it wasn’t about learning, just doing what you were told...”
“And nobody trusted us to do anything right. Or to do it a different way.”
“Well we basically got to do a whole bunch of different problems that were really just the same thing - not very useful.”
“We never really knew what we were doing. We just did it.”
“Yeah and you had to do it over and over.”
“Like tracing! Writing in the lines so you make the perfect size.”
“Over and over again is habit, not learning.”

Did it work though?
“Well no, it doesn’t work unless you always use those lines. Because you’re just copying lines.”
“And you only did stuff for a period and then stopped. It might have worked if we learned things for longer than just a period.”
“We just rushed stuff.”
“Or memorized everything. But it’s different from learning. You never learn stuff if you just memorize it."
“It wore down my brain - I just stopped thinking.”

Okay, what motivated you to do the work before? Why did you write more neatly and “get your homework done on time?”
“To get good marks on tests.”
“Because people would be mad.”
“To get it over with.”
“For good grades on the report card.”
‘“Cause if you didn’t you missed recess.”
“To get candy”
“Because hockey depended on it.”
“We were forced.”
“We were bribed.”

So tell me about what it’s like learning in this classroom? The good and the bad.
“Well we have lots of different tools that can enhance our learning. OR add distraction - it all depends on the decisions we make and how we use them.”
“We’re treated like adults. Like our ideas matter. Like they came from someone with way more experience.”
“It’s messier. Because you don’t have desks and you don’t have lines and practicing is your decision so sometimes you don’t.”
“Teachers don’t just have consequences, they have conversations.”
“You’re never done - even when you’re done. Done’s not a word in this school. ‘Cause it can always get way better.”
“It’s easier to be lazy or to get off task.”
“Failing doesn’t mean you did a bad job, it means try again.”
“How you figured out the answer matters as much as the answer.”
“And we don’t get told how to get the answer. It’s sometimes frustrating.”
“Yeah we FIGURE OUT the answer.”
“And before we do we talk about why and what and how...”
“Effort counts.”
“Teachers trust us. And we know they actually care...”

How?
“Because they listen, and ask you questions, and look at you when you talk.”
“You can just FEEL it.”

Cool! So what motivates you to do your work this year?
“It’s actually useful.”
“And you don’t want to miss anything!”
“Because I want be a part of it. Like the building or experimenting.”
“Because it’s okay if I don’t get it right the first time so I’m not afraid to try.”
“Because we don’t have to do it just one way. We have so much choice and freedom about how we do it.”

So why do things sometimes seem to be messier and slower this year?
“Well because most of us were so used to the lines. When there are no lines you don’t know what to do - you might hesitate.”
“Yeah, writing in lines is like memorizing or like building lego using the instructions... It’s nice if it’s supposed to be quick - not if you actually want to learn.”
“And also, stuff takes longer because there are so many different ways to solve problems. And lots of failing. But you can’t learn if you can’t fail.”
“When it’s about the presentation, it’s worth writing neatly. But when you’re just thinking, sometimes thinking IS messy.”
“Also, sometimes our work is a mess because we’re only human and we’re not always awesome. But making good decisions about our learning is our responsibility - not yours.”

Why school?
To learn, to get better at learning and to find things you love doing.
To experience success.
To teach.
So you can do anything.
So you can figure out how to live in the world.
Discovery!
To figure out how to work with people.
To understand.

Random Thoughts from a Student Teacher

2013-03-13T08:27:00.000-06:00

by Jenna Callaghan

I had my first education board screening interview a few days ago. The majority of the questions were designed to gain an idea of my overall philosophy and views on teaching. Many were “what would you do in this scenario” questions. In the final months of my Bachelor of Education, I feel confident that I am well on my way to having a strong sense of my values and who I am as a teacher. One question on the interview, however, left me feeling stumped.

“Some people say that the expectations placed on students today are lower than they were 10 years ago. Do you agree?” In the moment, I quickly answer the question, explained my reasoning, and we moved on with the interview. However, a few days later I am still thinking about this and just can’t understand how that even needs to be a question on an interview! How could someone possibly think that schools have lower expectations of students now? Or am I one of few that adamantly disagrees with this statement? After some thought, discussion with my partner teacher, and one of our brilliantly insightful grade 4 students (who both agree with me), this is what I’m left thinking:

We still have high expectations; they simply look different than they might have ten years ago (and from what I remember of my own education). We do not expect students to be able to memorize information simply to regurgitate it or perform computations. We expect students to be able to explain what they have learned and how they know it. We want them to be able to deeply understand WHY they are performing a calculation, what it actually looks like or what the information they remember means. Often, this means that students are not following a specific set of directions given by us, the teachers, and it might give “spectators” the false impression that students are simply doing whatever they want, or that chaos is taking place in the classroom.

We give students the space they need to make these deeper discoveries, but we do so within certain boundaries. My partner teacher put it well when she said that “we give students the frame to work within”. We give them the freedom necessary to investigate, but we do so with specific parameters. From the outside, it might look like learning through inquiry is a free for all, and that lower expectations are the result.

The opposite is true. We do not have lower expectations; we still expect students to learn the same curriculum material. We simply have different expectations about how they will learn it and the depth of understanding we hope will be the outcome.

iPads for Learning

2013-03-06T18:02:00.001-07:00

At the start of our first year with a 1:1 iPad program in Grade 4, Jon Van de Raadt made a comment that resonated and has set the tone for our year. "I think you'll find that iPads are not a junior version of the MacBook and should not be used as such. The iPad is a significantly different tool, and if you are prepared to embrace it, you might even find it more useful than the laptop has been." Two thirds of the way through our grade four pilot year with iPad 3's, I can say with certainty that I agree wholeheartedly. iPads belong in the classroom. I cannot imagine a more useful tool for representing, consolidating, expanding or creating understanding on the fly. I have no doubt that the rapidity with which app and software developers react to user feedback and update accordingly makes it one of the few technological tools out there that can effectively react to the ever-changing needs of youth in education and the evolving 21st century classroom.

What follows is by no means a comprehensive or complete overview of what the iPad might be used for in the grade four classroom, but just a few brief exemplars from some of the artifacts we have had students create and present with the use of their devices. All apps (with the exception of the iWork apps) were free purchases. All investigations were co-developed with Amy Park and have been posted and archived in Edmodo and Google Apps.

Topic: Waste in our World - Environmental PSA

Students began by collecting samples of human "waste" from the school ground over a 5 day period, classifying and graphing their results in Numbers. Appalled by the data, they worked as a larger group to develop a script and plan key visuals for an Environmental PSA that would be shared with students throughout the school. Each student put together their own iMovie, selected their own images and made their own voice recordings. Title slides were developed in Keynote. Video clip was filmed and emailed from teacher ipad.

Topic: Waste in our World - Decomposition Lab

This investigation followed a similar path to the investigation of the same name undertaken by the previous year's students. This year, students chose to manipulate various conditions that they hypothesized might affect the rate of decomposition of a fruit or vegetable. The plan and process were documented in Keynote. Students used Skitch to make daily qualitative observations on top of updated images of their rotting fruit or vegetable. They kept track of quantitative weight changes in a numbers chart which they were able to graph. As part of their final product they took screen shots of each slide in their keynote and transferred them to iMovie to upload to youtube.

Students also downloaded the app Mag. Light to view their decomposing fruit and vegetable specimens up close. We shared some of the more exciting samples via Twitter.

Topic: Simple Machines - Pic Collage Investigation

In groups, students were tasked with researching a class of simple machine that they traveled around the school taking photos of. Their images were collected (and cropped) in PicCollage and supplemented with an overview (in their own words) of the key characteristics of their type of machine. Each group finished with a complete, 6 page overview of each type of simple machine with examples from inside the school.

Topic: Catapult Construction - Investigating Building

This task challenged students in teams of three to construct a functional catapult from a given set of materials within one 40 minute period. Pre-construction, the class co-constructed a "catapult" rubric in order to ensure they had a goal in mind. Once catapults had been constructed, students took a photo of their catapult, labeled the functional components (using Skitch,) and then the class tested the catapults with each group videoing three attempts at having their catapult launch a marshmallow accurately into the "heart of the castle". Key findings were summarized in iMovie with their image, an overview of their three attempts, an assessment of the effectiveness of their catapult and a group interview reflecting on the construction process.

Topic: Simple Machines Interacting - Lego and Mousetrap Investigation

As an investigation into how simple machines interact in more complex constructions, students assembled the mini Rube Goldberg machine from the Mousetrap game and constructed a Lego machine without instructions. They video documented the operation of both constructions and included images labeled in Skitch showing changes in direction and size of forces as a result of simple machines and their interaction.

Topic: Muffles' Truffles Multiplication Investigation

Students worked through this mathematical investigation primarily in their math journals with the help of small group discussion, larger math congress, white boards and unifix cubes. Once all students had reached a solution, they were asked to represent their understanding visually (either using the whiteboard tool built into Doceri or by taking a screenshot of the work from their journals) as well as orally, by articulating their strategies and some of their mathematical findings. Students were able to post their work directly to Edmodo via youtube from Doceri. We are SO excited about the potential of this incredible free app.

Topic: Semester 2 Reflection - Success, Passion, Support

We created a template in Pages and had students reflect on their successes, passions and supports from the previous semester. They edited their photos using PicCollage. They downloaded the QR code reader KaywaReader, copied and pasted urls from their videos and generated urls for their written work in Humanities by uploading to google docs using the GDrive app.

Tortuga

2013-03-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

I've got a turtle in my classroom. She's 25 years old and will outlive me. She likes to climb things, even though she's not built for it. She falls a lot but it never stops her. Once, earlier in her life, someone tried to drill a hole in her shell, maybe to flag her so they wouldn't lose her in the grass... It must have hurt. They probably thought she couldn't feel it. Maybe they never had the opportunity to get to know her so they didn't understand. Sometimes children forget that she can't see them properly and they try to pat her face. It's probably terrifying. She always comes back out though. Game face on, ready to forgive, adapt, and continue with her investigation, carefully negotiating her next obstacle; balanced, careful, determined.

Where in this wide world

Can man find nobility without pride,

Friendship without envy,

Or beauty without vanity?

Here...

This turtle in my classroom is the perfect educator. She invites imagination. She lives in a place of possibility. She's got no ulterior motives and you can't help but trust her because she keeps trusting you. She's a portal to the beauty of the physical world for children and an outlet for their fundamental need to care for something. She's changed our classroom. We're better people because she's part of it. Sometimes, powerful pedagogy is surprising simple.

Poem excerpt from R. Duncan's 1954 "The Horse"

Crowd Sourcing the Fourth Graders

2013-02-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

I've got a novel on iPads in the grade four classroom waiting to be written. Lots of discoveries, ideas, struggles and triumphs. I just need to find the time to document it all properly. This brief gem, however, is too awesome not to share.

Earlier this year, our teaching team's excited discovery of the Edmodo app as an excellent resource for collecting and organizing student work digitally and providing an avenue for ongoing feedback was stinted by the limitation of only being able to upload images or links from the iPads. Our optimism was recently renewed by updates to the iWork apps which made it possible to upload pages, numbers and keynote documents directly to Edmodo. The latest struggle has been with how we might be able to have students download iWork templates we post to Edmodo and open them using the associated app. It seemed that the only way to open a doc from Edmodo was as a preview and frankly, I was beginning to think it wasn't possible any other way.

Nevertheless, while driving home from the mountains yesterday I posted a sample template for students to track their mousetrap car results to Edmodo via the numbers app with the comment "let me know if any of you figure out how to open this document as a numbers template!" Honestly, I didn't expect much. This morning I woke up to 17 replies...

Problem solved, instructions posted. Clearly I wasted way too much time trying to solve this problem myself. I should have asked the fourth graders in the first place.

I love my job.

It's Hard

2013-02-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

It's easy to want something.

And of course we want it handed to us. I'd often prefer to look at it from afar, talk about it hypothetically as though I know, or copy someone else's version.

Sometimes we even try to buy whatever it is as though purchasing is possession.

But in the end it's only ours if we work for it. As frustrating as it is to bump up against something challenging over and over again until we've figured out how to adapt or overcome, that is work worth doing.

I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don’t. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.

Benjamin R. Barber

Work that is Real

2013-02-05T00:09:00.003-07:00

Just over a week ago today, Chris Lehmann concluded a conversation at #Educon with a question that struck me as really important:

What else will change if our pedagogy becomes more inquiry-driven... if it is authentic, does it live only in the classroom?

The answer is no; but it’s also not that simple which might be the point. Inquiry isn’t how we learn in the 21st century classroom, it’s how learning is.

In a consumption driven economy, education conversation inevitably revolves around the insistence that the purpose of schooling is to prepare students for the ‘real world’. Why? Because everyone needs a car and a house and a reliable job that makes good money when they grow up, ask any kid in Calgary. Reliability is synonymous with dependability making inconstancy and ambiguity the enemy. We can’t prepare for what we can’t predict which terrifies us. So though living itself is chaotic by nature, we lose ourselves in the idea that we can, if bureaucratically diligent enough, assure a utopian future with no risk or uncertainty, no need for further thinking, negotiating or venture. “Just do your homework so you can get a good job and have a good life when you grow up.”

This attitude inescapably precedes the idea that a didactic fractured pedagogy is the best tool for cultivating competence, security and safety. It worked for Ford’s cars. Right? At least if it didn’t, the process was simple, measurable, easy to follow and creditably efficient. It also lends itself to the notion that we can get ahead simply by speeding up, adding time to a growing list of commodities we presume to possess. It is hardly unexpected that as we negotiate the system, we learn to account for every minute and live in fear of ‘wasting’ them. Our work becomes inexorably detached from fun because with the proverbial clock always ticking away in the corner we’re scared of losing this made-up race we’re in; and when our species feels embattled we try to tack things down. How often do we rationalize with ourselves or with our children that if “we just get down to it” we’ll have fun after work?

The irony is that while rushing to stay a step ahead of life’s impending chaos, boxing things neatly so they can’t escape us and driving a wedge between passion and education in the process, we have completely forgotten that the trivialization of joy in learning isn’t the real world. In our rush for scholarship and superficial memorization of out-of-context data, we unthinkingly absorb the message that this just is the way things are. It isn’t the way things are, it’s the way we’ve made them. History has handed us over to a way of living and learning that doesn’t allow us the opportunity to know things properly. We have been born into a world within which the prevalent impression is that “knowing” can be bottled giving it an end and that the first man to the destination wins, but we are not born with this perspective.

Our nature is inherently inquisitive. A child’s first instinct is to search for understanding by questioning and exploring the collective memory of what is. We are all familiar with a toddler’s search for meaning through which every seemingly simple object becomes worthy of investigation. They answer every statement with a “why” which almost inevitably leads to the eventual acknowledgement by a besieged adult that they “don’t know”. Then, conventional schooling tends to forego in-depth inquiry for the sake of broad ground cover because “OMG more and faster is totally better” (see curriculum in general) and as a result children eventually come to accept that questioning has an end. The great tragedy of our school system is that it fails to clarify that circumscribing knowledge does not make it finite.

What if instead of “because that’s just the way things are,” the prevailing response to the relentless “why” question became “because that’s how things have turned out, but I wonder...” I’d like to imagine that how we learn and how we live might be different if we were more often encouraged to consider that today’s realities are often but a consequence of decisions that have been perpetuated throughout human history. Imagine if we were to shift from talking about what things are or what they aren’t, to talking about how they appear. Instead of what and how, we would have to ask why, on who’s behalf, in relation to what, in support of what, using what language and from where? What if we were comfortable enough to allow the multiplicity of a thing’s appearance to count as what it is?

My experience with inquiry-driven pedagogy began with asking kids what they wanted to know and how their questions could be effectively investigated. As I listened to their ideas, the dawning realization that they were capable stole gradually into my conscience until I was increasingly aware of the ways in which nature was almost asking to be questioned by this next generation, provided I was willing to hold the door open for them. I found myself purposefully turning worlds of knowledge over to children, offering them an opportunity to call things like additive systems or the scientific method into question and their impassioned investigations led to heartfelt articulation and re-interpretation of ancient ideas.

When we allow kids to write something, to read something or to mathematize, we provide language or mathematics with a future. Students who have managed to grasp regrouping in addition as a procedural series of algorithms will never invest in a defense of place value with the passion and conviction of those who have become sure of it, not thanks to columns and alignment but thanks to a researched conceptual understanding of base ten, expanded notation and equivalence. They have re-constructed mathematical ideas and discovered their conjectures to be supported by century-old findings and in so doing, have breathed life back into the world of mathematics. This reality has vertigo. Kids will lean in.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.”

excerpt from To Be of Use

Marge Piercy (1973)

Fire Building With 9 Year Olds

2013-01-22T00:11:00.001-07:00

Deirdre Bailey

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

Jack Kerouac

The more I learn as a teacher, the more I marvel that I was any "good" at school as a student. As I come to understand learning more deeply, I realize with increasing clarity that through most of my own schooling, I never really learned anything.

It is impossibly hard to explain to former high school or university classmates that I have learned more about mathematics teaching grade 4 than I did studying matrix algebra or vector calculus. This point is often met with dismissive assumptions that I must not have done well in school, that I had bad teachers, or that my brain capacity has deteriorated since. However, this realization is more a comment on the shortcomings of educational systems than of myself. To consider as fact the suggestion that I am now challenged by mathematical discourse with 9-year-olds would require the acknowledgement that in our school systems, it was perfectly possible for me (and countless others) to gain university credit in math for attention, obedience and careful reproduction without any real depth of understanding.

I'm not saying that I never thought in school, or that the odd piece didn't stick; just that I never really thought for myself. As a “quantitatively successful” product of the system, I grew-up viewing academia as a checklist to be memorized and regurgitated, not the abstract world of interconnected patterns and possibilities it is. I spent a lifetime happily checking imagination and personality at the door of each classroom for the sake of a grade. In the words of John Dewey, I put "seeming before being."

I now know the difference. I ask "what if?" and "how?" to questions I don't know the answer to. I lead investigations into uncovering exceptions to conjectures, ponder the concept of zero, inquire into the function and origin of place value or the properties and applications of prime numbers. Most days are spent in awe of the ideas, connections, and revelations that come from students as they explore the freedom to reorganize and reflect. "WHAT!?" "HOW have I never noticed that before?" "OH MY GOD that's CONNECTED to THIS!" "THAT. Is the BEST idea I've ever heard...” “DUDE!"

That's inquiry; it's not the topic, or the problem, or the technology, or the answer. Inquiry is engagement in the question, a connection with the community, and a nongoogleable search for truth and meaning. Real inquiry fuels a fire.

Trees, Roots, Water

2013-01-15T13:06:00.001-07:00

Deirdre Bailey

Reflecting on inquiry and ecological consciousness for University of Calgary EDER 693, Interpretive Study of Curriculum with David Jardine and Jacquie Seidel

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” (Wallace, 2005)

Humanity has evolved to seek meaning, to find beauty that stirs the soul and attempt to connect with it. We were born to experience, to understand from experience, to gain knowledge directly through the senses and the gut. But our sense have dulled. We have transformed beauty from a place to an object, confused it with pretty or attractive, mistaken it for happiness and assumed it can be possessed. “We suffer from being focused on “the wrong things” and from being without much focus” (Sewall, 2012, p. 15) and slip easily into diversion and distraction; our default settings.

And the so-called real world will not discourage [us] from operating on [our] default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. (Wallace)

It is an anesthetized existence. One in which more is better, and skepticism is safety, and power is success. It is a world in which we criticize rodeos for cruelty while gnawing on a McDonald’s hamburger, or condemn the oil sands for endangering ducks while fueling our SUVs. It is an existence in which questions become infuriating because their hollowness lays bare an appalling absence of wonder in youth who only want to know how to minimize effort, maximize comfort, and win a prize at the end.

The Lorax says he speaks for the trees and we watch as nobody listens and we say to ourselves that WE will speak for OUR trees but nobody really looks at the trees and nobody listens. Nobody notices that they already speak of solitude and fortitude and persistence, and that if we could only cultivate the ability to see them as they are, we would not find ourselves always so desperate to speak. And we might even find peace in their quiet confidence.

In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves… And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow… (Hermann Hesse, 1984)

I don’t want to teach plants, poetry or politics. I want to teach perception and awareness and sensitivity and vulnerability. I want to teach youth to deliberately exercise control over how and what they think and help them focus their attention on what matters. I want to teach trees and roots and water. Beauty is not a possession or an attribute. It is a perspective. How we look at things or choose to construct meaning can create beauty in the space around us. It is not a simple task, but we owe it to humanity to dig deep, take root, be still and grow hope..

...while reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water. (Wallace)

Flores Island, British Columbia 2010

Hesse, H. (1984) Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte Retrieved from http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/21/hermann-hesse-trees/

Sewall, L. (2012). Beauty and the Brain. In Kahn, P. H. & Hasbach, P. H. (Editors), Ecopyschology : Science, Totems, and the Technological Species. (pp. 15). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Wallace, D. F. “This is Water.” Kenyon College Graduation Address. Gambier, OH. May 2005 Retrieved from http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words

How to Love a Plant

2012-11-13T20:49:00.005-07:00

Amy Park and Deirdre Bailey

Earlier this year we had a pretty cool opportunity to connect with Mount Royal University professor Dr. David Bird to co-present on Plant Growth and Changes for the Calgary Science Network. We were most eager for an opportunity to ask Dr. Bird what one one thing he wished his university students came in with that we might be able to foster in elementary school. His answer was unhesitatingly curiosity. He wished his students arrived at university with a desire, confidence and ability to ask scientific questions. Overwhelmingly, many of them arrived reluctant to explore, preferring instead to wait for instructions on what to think or how to deliver in order to "pass the course".

We were excited to be able to share the following (recently completed) video with Dr. Bird and to have a conversation about the kind of thinking we tried to cultivate in our students throughout the process. Having effectively guided them toward deeper understanding of scientific research earlier in the year with our Rotten Tomatoes Decomposition Lab, our inquiry into plant growth invited students' to use their experience with the 'Game of Science' to develop their own questions this time around. They were free to choose how to structure and represent their research autonomously, based on their previous experience.

The results were messy and in some cases, disorganized. Maintaining controlled conditions was difficult, keeping outdoor plants alive in May was a challenge. Many students discovered on their own why quantitative observations are typically separated from qualitative data, how organizing information makes analyses much simpler, and which variables should be most carefully observed when documenting plant growth. Though some conclusions were surprising or skewed by human error, the real value was that our students wrapped up these experiments with an insatiable desire to discover more about plants, undeterred by the awareness that everything might fail.

Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom

2012-10-23T21:16:00.002-06:00

Deirdre Bailey

What follows is not a typical teacher learning plan. All my previous attempts have taken the form of New Year’s Resolution type finite lists with a very fixed outline and implied expectation of “pass or fail”. I reluctantly admit I don’t have a great track record with these types of goals. I have a history of making it through about one month of successfully checking my expectations off a list before I inevitably fall off the band wagon and resign myself to a renewed attempt the following year. This year our administration suggested that learning plans could take on personalized formats. For me, this prompted a fairly serious consideration of what has been ineffective for me in previous years and how I might re-direct my focus this time around.

I think the reason that a permanent check list has never worked is that I am not the same person from month to month. If inquiry based learning has taught me anything, it is that ideas, thoughts, environments, and perspectives are impermanent. As writing is one tool that has allowed me to effectively wonder aloud, I decided a while ago that my 2012-2013 teacher learning plan should take the form of a blog...

gapingvoid.com

I want to be able to competently articulate my evolving understanding of effective educational pedagogy and hold myself accountable for actually practicing what I believe in the classroom. While re-figuring my thinking is likely to remain a permanent state, it is important to me that I am able to express my educational philosophy in order to continue to advocate for more thoughtful and relevant learning in the school environment.

My own education has been guided by a learned push to consume. Twitter, blog rolls and other social media exacerbate this tendency. I feel I have overlooked the value of concentration, focus and memory, so vital to real personal development. I am worried that I am losing the ability to distinguish between what I know based on experience and what I think I know based on distractions, media, and a commercial agenda.

My goal is to cultivate comprehension through composure and mindful attention to everyday experiences and ideas both in and outside of the classroom environment. I have learned that at the heart of inquiry are simple considerations of experiential origin and historical wisdom. Discourse and disagreement are openings through which complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties can broaden understanding.

As I refine my ability to articulate what I am coming to understand, the aim is to learn to be suggestive and open with my language and approach, to open a space for consideration with a simple comment or question. I would like to be able to engage in dialogue that fosters respectful and thoughtful conversation around the assumptions and intentions at the heart of educational discourse. The more I understand about teaching and learning, the more I understand that knowing everything is neither a possibility nor an objective. What I can do is learn to effecitvely describe the work that is undertaken in our classroom and hope that the better that work gets, the more it will shine a light.

Math is beautiful

2012-10-20T16:44:00.001-06:00

Deirdre Bailey

It has been a bit of a battle this year to convince our students that mathematics is not disconnected. They seemed to arrive in our classroom at 9 years old with the conviction that the discipline exists sequentially, layered based on varying degrees of difficulty, some of which will remain inaccessible to the more artistically minded for most of their lives. We have been working hard to share that math is in fact a wonderfully complex web of recurring concepts, ideas, and patterns accessible through many different points from a variety of perspectives, and consisting of infinite possibilities awaiting discovery.

Our year began again with conversations about what we call multiples, what it means to be a multiple, and what a multiple of the number one is. We wouldn't let our students dismiss multiples of one as "obvious" or "easy," insisting that they consider what it means to be the number one. For example, how the number one can be manipulated without losing its integrity and how it is a part of other larger numbers. Before the fall break, we had explored multiples of one to nine, discovered patterns, noticed which ones fall into columns on hundreds chart, and noticed which multiples connected to others and how.

On Monday of this week we shared Perry the Platypus' birthday dilemma....

at this point in the year, students were quick to glue the problem in their journals and begin documenting their thinking as they worked through answering Perry's question. Some flipped back through their journals to remind themselves of previous discoveries they had made about multiples. Some organized their work in charts and some in diagrams or bullet points. Each was now familiar with the idea of writing down every thought or "a-ha!" that resulted from their considering the problem.

Almost all of the students jumped right to identifying that in one year Perry would be a multiple of 2, 4 and 8 because every multiple of 8 is also a multiple of 2 and 4. Many wrote notes to remind themselves that the smallest multiple of any number is that number itself. One cool observation that resulted from this problem was that Perry would be a multiple of every single one of these numbers by the time he was 12 BUT that when he was 11, he would not be a multiple of any of these numbers! One student wrote... 'It seemed important to notice that both 7 and 11 are only multiples of one and themselves...' PRIME! Another student noticed that when Perry was an odd-numbered age, then he was only a multiple of odd numbers and he expanded to state that odd numbers can only have odd factors!

The coolest part of the week however, was the conversations that resulted at the tables who had begun working through an extension to the problem which asked..

How long will Perry have to wait to be a multiple of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 all at the same time?

At first the question seemed overwhelming and intimidating to many students. They had been preconditioned to focus on finding a solution. We suggested that they look instead at which numbers on a hundreds chart were definitely NOT a solution. For example, which numbers on a hundreds chart were NOT multiples of 5... Right away we were met with excitement..

"WE JUST ELIMINATED 80 NUMBERS! A multiple of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 HAS to end in 5 or 0."

Students excitedly crossed 8 columns of numbers off their list when one double takes again...

"Wait... the number we're looking for also has to be a multiple of 2.. it CAN'T be odd... FIVES ARE OUT!"

"So we've got ten numbers left and we're looking to see which one of these ten is a multiple of 3, 4 and 6.."

"But if it's a multiple of 3 it HAS to be a multiple of 6.."

"Right so just 4 and 6.."

Looking at multiples of 6 students immediately eliminated everything but 30, 60 and 90. One noticed that multiples of 6 only end in zero if they are multiplied by a multiple of 5. The last step was to eliminate numbers that were not multiples of 4. As 30 and 90 were eliminated, another student noticed that multiples of 4 which end in zero HAVE to have an even number in the tens spot.

As we wrapped things up for the day on Thursday, one student commented as he reluctantly closed his journal; "Mrs. Bailey, I never knew math was so exciting. It twists and turns and loops and connects all over the place and it just seems to go on forever!"

Math is beautiful.

On Time. Again

2012-09-26T21:29:00.001-06:00

Deirdre Bailey

"I know exactly what time is until somebody asks me."

Augustine

With the school year now in full swing, the figurative "engine in the corner" is back at it, constantly racing forward, implying that the only way to get ahead is to speed up, that I'll fall behind if I hesitate. It is a struggle to regularly remind myself that I know ideas by their very nature to be interdependent and confusing and uncertain and that it is for this reason that they cannot be rushed. As I reflect again this week on "getting things done," obvious connections keep re-surfacing between time, conversation and learning space.

I recall an associated panic with just about any situation in which I have personally had the impression that time was limited. That panic is akin to a feeling I remember from a childhood spent racing upstairs at the end of an evening so as not to be left alone in the basement once the lights were off. The faster I ran, the more panicked I became until I would completely lose all ability to rationalize. Admittedly, I struggle with deadlines and tend to postpone things that are "due" in the hopes of avoiding the sickening feeling in my stomach of looming requirements. My "last-minute" scrambles are characterized by over-simplification of tasks, checklists and brevity. Under threat of impending deadlines, I become impatient and frustrated; I don't negotiate, I don't re-think, I don't compromise. I don't listen, I don't converse; I feel forced, unwilling, and defensive. I typically determine that bare minimum is "enough" and often cannot wait to quit whatever it is that I am working on because I associate it with the negative feelings of urgency.

When time is in abundance, the space I live in is drastically different. Things speak that wouldn't normally; trees, sunsets, facial expressions, soft-spoken children. I listen and I notice, and worlds open up. When nothing is demanding, life is interesting and I explore much more in-depth. I remember more from the times in which I explored things out of interest, awe, and genuine curiosity. In many cases, I have nothing "concrete" to show for it, but it is in these moments that relationships were built and fundamental brain shifts took place. It is in these moments that I was drawn into places that seemed inviting, often discovering something new about the world and myself.

John Dewey wrote: “the inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.” Given what we know of the "learning" that takes place under pressure, there can be no doubt that these conditions must preclude fixed deadlines and pressing checklists. Human beings are not machines, soulless workers to be adapted for subservience to an arbitrary authority in the "real world." If our interaction with the world was defined instead by an acute awareness of our interdependence and an openness to being shaped by experience, imagine what we might be able to collectively understand and to create.

Time is more than the absence of deadlines or a 40-hour work week. Realistically, deadlines and checklists do not help us to "manage time" at all. The concept of time can be broadened if we consider that it is characterized by respectful exploration, active listening, and careful consideration. Although we might often feel frustrated by our inability to physically create additional time in the day, we can change the feel of our classrooms through the intentional cultivation of these attitudes towards learning that allow space for inquiry. We can "leave ideas with our students in an interesting way," inspire them to "lean in," and teach them to listen. In other words, we can and should, through respectful practice, create the "essence of time," if not actual minutes and seconds.