I've just returned to Australia after three weeks in the USA. So what did I learn, and how will it influence my curriculum planning and pedagogy?
Below are the strongest themes that came out of hearing presentations, seeing some practice in schools and discussions with teachers in the US and with other teachers and educators on the study tour.
In creating this blogpost I've explored these themes in terms of the Higher Order Thinking Skills of analysing and evaluating. See earlier blogposts for the remembering stuff!
Here they are My Top Ten Take Outs in no particular order!
01. Device? What Device? Does it matter anyway?
It seems in every school district we visited or heard about, there were big budget cuts [as there are for the whole nation]. In schools this often was being dealt with, by cuts in resources, staff or amazingly in some cases by cuts in instruction time. [In the USA, the school year is shorter than the 193 or so days that students are in classes with teachers in government schools in Victoria.] To meet budget cuts buying / leasing hardware, the Bring Your Own device was often the solution talked about [particularly in high schools]. There are some social justice initiatives for students without access to these. Essentially this model is a cost saver, where the student brings a device [laptop, smartphone, netbook, tablet etc, whatever they have]. The school only provides robust internet pipe, access for disadvantaged students and hopefully some type of learning management system or at least access to the cloud for document storage [Dropbox, Evernote etc.] and access to collaborative tools such as Google Apps]. Now I think it is a shame that the "BYO Device" is based on budget cuts, but it does also bear thinking about on pedagogical grounds. As schools and teachers are we too obsessed with platforms and applications? Are we better off to focus on the process and the product of student learning rather than the shiny toolbox [the school computer] and what it contains [the applications]! Obviously, we need to teach students what's in the toolbox and the possibilities for each tool, but then should we just let then go with whatever application, online space and device is available? The jury has just gone out on this one!
02. Confirmation just doesn't happen in church.
Off all the visits, presentations and discussions I was part of, there was no WOW factor. Great stuff was happening in many schools and classrooms in the USA and it was great to see it and discuss about it. But similar great stuff in happening in Australian schools and classrooms. I really didn't come across anything new there, but it was great to see US teachers dealing with the big themes of eLearning, communication, creation and collaboration. Learnt a lot about many things that fire me up in Australia: Moodle, Challenge Based Learning, ICT Coaching, Google Tools and Apps, Leadership, Professional Development Models, eLearning integration across the curriculum and 21st century teaching and learning. So all this was confirming about my planning, practice and pedagogy as an ICT / eLearning teacher.
03. The iPad should be about creation and the other Higher Order Thinking Skills.
O.K. confession here …. while I've organised professional development on iPads in the Classroom, I don't actually own one and only have limited sandpit time with them. In fact when I was involved in purchasing a class set of devices for my primary school, I went MacBooks rather than iPads. Why? Because a Macbook was more suited to changing the classroom pedagogy of my colleagues at this point of time. I'm still happy with that decision, however, what I did see at Apple - Cupertino, Marymount School - NYC and at ISTE 11, was the use of the iPad applications related to Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and the creation of ePubs [essentially either teacher generated texts for students or texts created by students as assessment pieces or as content for other students]. These can be easily made in Pages and exported as ePubs for iPhones or iPads http://www.apple.com/itunes/inside-itunes/2010/04/using-itunes-to-add-epub-files-to-ibooks.html. Teachers making there own textbooks is really powerful stuff and uses the higher order thinking skills of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. See also a presentation I heard at ISTE 11 on some great iPad apps and how they relate to the HOTS of the Taxonomy. https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhsgv8zv_4143np48dg
04. Face to Face Networks are still vitally important.
Met some great US teachers, administrators and educators and had some great discussions with them. But it was really having discussions with the rest of the study tour that was the best network experience. We were a good mix from five different states and primary, secondary and university teachers / educators. So there was plenty of time on buses, trains, hotels, bars and restaurants to de brief, compare and contrast with what we do in the different parts of Australia and reflect on our current practice. A couple of Keynotes that Gary Stager delivered were controversial in part, but great discussion starter which, made many of us at least justify our positions
05. Good pedagogical models for students can be good pedagogical models for teacher professional learning.
It was great to meet my Challenge Based Learning mentor, Katie Morrow from O'Neill HS, Nebraska, where so much CBL is done. See http://www.slideshare.net/katiemorrow/presentations for some of here work. We were both at a session run by Larry Baker from Michigan. Larry outlined his experiences of CBL in his high school. Nothing new about this, but then he went onto explain how he was given responsibility to engender school change and how he used CBL as a professional development model. I'd never thought of using CBL this way. Read more at Larry's blog http://larryrthoughts.blogspot.com/2011/06/iste-2011-presentation.html
06. Teaching is a Team Sport.
Some one said this, forget who! It's not rocket science, but we often forget about this, when we want change in our schools, faculties or institutions. Like all teams schools have champions and average players, key position players and all rounders, youth and experience, inventive players and those that repeat what they have always done. The point is that great teams acknowledge these differences when setting the team’s directions. Sports teams, like schools and universities have plans of where they want to be in 2, 5, 10 years time. But in the education context for today's or next week's or next term's teaching and learning experiences, we can only put current players [teachers] that are currently sitting in the staffroom. So build teams, take teachers from where there are, to towards where you want to be, support those who are uncomfortable with change and celebrate successes. This will be an ongoing process, like sports teams there will be some better performances than others, but always have your eyes on the prize [and have high expectations for yourself and your students about what the prize is!]
07. 1 to 1 just a math ratio, it's the classroom planning and practice that it important.
This was a bit of an epiphany for me. It didn't come out of one presentation or discussion. It was more listening to those presentations and discussions and reflecting on my current thinking. I teach at a school that has just moved into wireless based computing. We currently have trolleys [class sets] of Netbooks running Windows and MacBooks. Why the two sorts? Well the Netbooks were a donation. The MacBooks support the rest of the computers in the school [eMacs & iMacs]. Now looking at this I think it is a good idea, here students have access to different devices that can be used for different purposes. Rather than 1 to 1 where a student is "locked to a device" via user agreements, parent co-contributions etc and teachers feel that they have to use that device all the time, otherwise students [or their parents] will complain that this expensive devise is a waste of time. My thinking currently, would be that a class set on iPads would be my school’s next acquisition, [ for the reasons above].
08. Collaboration between students and teachers and students and students is so, so, important.
We would all agree with this I think, but it doesn't happen enough in schools. In visiting Google and talking to teachers from the Google Teaching Academy, I realised that I haven't used their apps and tools nearly enough. Do I add online collaboration into units of work I design for students? No, not nearly enough. I need to make sure that collaboration is added to units / courses I plan. We also need to teach ourselves as teachers / educators and our students to be good collaborators.
09. Creative, pedagogically sound teaching with can still succeed despite under resourcing and lack of systemic support.
I heard some inspiring stuff from some US teachers who are working under an economic recession and budget cuts. They are still doing some great things, but it is happening across classrooms and schools rather than [generally] across schools districts and states. One school leader [from a High School that will remain nameless] was doing some great relationship building to improve the educational standing of his school. The school had a number of relationships, sponsorships and support networks, as many schools do. The key is [as that High School has done] to combine what you have into a unified direction that supports the school's teaching and learning program. I mentioned teaching teams above, this is building a "team" out of your school resources and networks, i.e. have all resources supporting a focused direction.
10. Explicit teaching is vital, it's just that that the teacher and student nexus has changed in the 21st century.
Nothing is new about what the role of the teacher is in 21st century learning, but as teachers we need to be aware that things have changed for teaching and learning and we need to support this in schools and systems. I think that content still needs great teaching [see also below], which does not necessarily face to face. The challenge is that a teacher has to be both a teacher and a learner. They have to be a learner all the time but as well an explicit teacher, facilitator, organiser etc for only some of the time. The trick is to work out the balance between these roles. When to intervene, when to let go!
It's like the baseball hitter who has a split second to decide whether to swing or bunt or leave the ball. Not all right decisions result in a home run, but wrong decisions can make you look stupid!
And one more
11. The Flipped Classroom needs more investigating by me.
There was some discussion about the flipped classroom, were student access the content of lessons at home or on the way to school via podcast or some other form of online delivery. This covers the lower order thinking skills and leaves the teaching session for the higher order stuff - the analysis, the evaluation and the creating the new content. Well that's the theory, and I'm not being critical at this stage, as I do need to read and think more on this. Content delivery is still very important, but more important is pitching the content to the students in terms of understanding were they are at, what the appropriate learning sequences and how the students are picking up the content as they are going along. Now, this is not to say that that this can't be done in the flipped classroom. But, it is something that as teachers we need to be very aware off. In the US it seemed as a methods of dealing with budget cuts etc. i.e. learning by podcast costs less that putting a teacher in front of students. If we embrace it the content has to be well pitched and well presented and it has to based on improved pedagogy, that is it allows for more concentration on the HOTS! This blogpost is a good start to find out more.
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture
