Miguel guhlin's Public Library

I've spent chunks of the past year in classrooms all over the world, pondering this question.

One of the worst experiences was in a respectable public middle school in North America where I was giving a talk in the auditorium. Teachers patrolled the sides of the room like prison guards, silently threatening the children by looming over them when they showed the least bit of enthusiasm.

I was telling the kids stories and asking them questions, and they were getting all excited figuring out answers despite the menacing presences. Finally, one of their teachers sidled up to me and said: "Don't ask them questions. Just tell them what you want them to know."

I formed the image that she wanted me to just zip open their heads and pour in the information, unfiltered by their own ideas. It felt like she thought their brains were just storage silos.

Is it a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land? Or to encourage upward mobility? Should it build character? Endow morals?

Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don't?

In What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education, he notes that one of these hidden, ancient images is of a boy preparing for the priesthood. That model, developed 4,000 years ago, holds that knowledge is the "eternal Truth," never to be questioned.

"The image of school as monastery persists up to the present and the classrooms of Mesopotamia, 2500 B.C., would be instantly recognizable to the students of today," he writes.

Today, many parents and teachers believe that the best defence against an uncertain future is to teach children to learn how to learn. To them, that is the goal of education.

They believe the education system should unearth and ignite their children's passion, their intrinsic desire to learn, the deep joy of discovery.

The teacher becomes a guide and model, a co-conspirator on the engrossing quest for understanding and self-knowledge.

And what should they guide and model? The higher-order habits of mind that characterize the expert investigator, researcher, thinker and learner, says Claxton.

Writing about thinking is challenging. For this reason, it's best
not to start out having students write about unfamiliar mathematical
ideas. First get them used to writing in a math class:



• Begin with affective, open-ended questions about students'
  feelings.





Sample Direction #1: Reflect on your participation
in class today and complete the following statements:








I learned that I...





I was surprised that I...





I noticed that I...





I discovered that I...





I was pleased that I...





 








Sample Direction #2: Describe how you feel about
solving _________ problem.

Once your students have become accustomed to writing about
their attitudes and feelings toward mathematics in their journals,
they are ready to write about simple, familiar math concepts. It is
important not to make the writing too difficult by asking them to
write about unfamiliar math ideas. Using writing to review familiar
math ideas will increase confidence and skill in writing as well as
revisit important math concepts.

When you feel your students are ready, ask them to write about
more complex mathematical ideas, including concepts being taught at
their current grade level. To help you move your students into this
more advanced level of writing about their thinking. Here are some
other suggestions to help you:




1. Encourage your students to use drawings and graphs to explain
their thinking.



• Research shows that using simple visual aids (diagrams,
  graphs, etc.) improves mathematical problem-solving ability,
  especially in female students.
• Ask the group to write a summary of how they reached a
  solution, including any "false starts" or "dead ends."
• Ask each individual to write an explanation of the group's
  work on a problem. Have the small groups discuss the individual
  explanations.
• After a small group assignment, have students "explain and
  illustrate two different approaches to solving a problem."

• What concept, skill, or knowledge am I trying to assess?
• What should my students know?
• At what level should my students be performing?
• What type of knowledge is being assessed: reasoning, memory, or
  process (Stiggins, 1994)?

• Identify the overall performance or task to be assessed, and perform it
  yourself or imagine yourself performing it
• List the important aspects of the performance or product.
• Try to limit the number of performance criteria, so they can all be observed
  during a pupil's performance.
• If possible, have groups of teachers think through the important behaviors
  included in a task.
• Express the performance criteria in terms of observable pupil behaviors or
  product characteristics.
• Don't use ambiguous words that cloud the meaning of the performance
  criteria.
• Arrange the performance criteria in the order in which they are likely to be
  observed.

• Checklist Approach When you use this, you only have to indicate
  whether or not certain elements are present in the performances.
• Narrative/Anecdotal Approach When teachers use this, they will
  write narrative reports of what was done during each of the
  performances. From these reports, teachers can determine how well
  their students met their standards.
• Rating Scale Approach When teachers use this, they indicate to
  what degree the standards were met. Usually, teachers will use a
  numerical scale. For instance, one teacher may rate each criterion
  on a scale of one to five with one meaning "skill barely present" and
  five meaning "skill extremely well executed."
• Memory Approach When teachers use this, they observe the
  students performing the tasks without taking any notes. They use
  the information from their memory to determine whether or not the
  students were successful. (Please note that this approach is not
  recommended.)

Online learning is the solution for extending learning time....

The Silent Epidemic study [from] the Gates Foundation [showed] 88 percent of [dropouts] had passing grades and could have finished, but they're dropping out because they're disenfranchised. They feel like they're not challenged. They wish classes were more rigorous. If we keep doing the same thing and just hold them in school for longer hours, to me that doesn't make any sense.

Teacher shortages are a major problem. It is a solution for teacher shortages, changing the distribution of teachers.

Engagement is a huge problem for students in the current model. Dynamic online courses and curriculum and training teachers in new strategies to improve that engagement and personalize instruction: [online learning] is a huge solution for that.