These articles focus on education.
Hidden Curriculum: do as we say, not what we do
When talking to education specialists you sometimes get to hear them mention the phenomenon the ‘hidden curriculum’. There is some confusion in how the term is used, but I’m taking it to mean the mostly unintentional curriculum that we teach our children because of the way that we present our learning practices; the way that we give our children assessments; and then the way that we grade those assessments and even reward those grades.
I’ll try and put this into a practical demonstration and that will hopefully make the concept clear.
Now as most parents know, children on the whole are very smart. They quickly seem to find the hidden location for the birthday present that you ordered ahead of time, and they choose to interpret the instructions to take the rubbish out for the rubbish collection as loosely or literally as they can, whichever makes the least work for them (“oh you meant take it out this Tuesday morning and not next Tuesday?”); and they seem to always find the most dangerous part of a garden, park or compound to play in. However, what this unfortunately works against them when it comes to education and the hidden curriculum. This is because children appear to pay more attention to what parents and teachers actually do, not what they say.
A School’s Worst Job – Career Counselling
I feel that one of the worst areas that schools cover is their career counselling options. This is how my room mate (name changed) at University described his career counselling session during his secondary school.
‘Mr. McIver, I see you have excellent grades in science – you should apply to medical school’,
‘Well actually I’d like to study engineering’,
‘Don’t be silly your grades are easily good enough to get into a good medical school.’
‘But I like engineering!’.
‘Son, I don’t think you’re hearing what I’m saying - it’s a certainty you’ll be accepted into a medical school!’
I believe at that point he excused himself, and went onto do electrical engineering and started his own engineering company, but there aren’t many that are as strong willed as he. As far as the careers advisor was concerned, the purpose of education is to get good enough grades to become a medic, or a lawyer, or even an accountant; I guess he thought if all else fails and at a last resort – one could become an engineer!
Sports & Strategic Thinking in Education
Previously I wrote a blog suggesting that PE at school should not stand for ‘sports’ but should instead be focussed on physical activity for middle and mature aged health. However, sports should remain an important curriculum topic in education in my opinion and this article explains why.
The sporting arena is many things to many people. One hopes it is fun; it provides opportunities to demonstrate a competitive spirit; it can help develop a sense of ‘fair play’; or a sense of responsibility to one’s team, and so on. As valid as these areas are, I feel that these are secondary to the idea of using the sports arena to teach children how to think strategically.
During a school ‘PE’ session, I observed how during a team game, the ball fell unexpectedly into the hands of one our less abled players who happened to be right at the goal mouth. A better player to her left side shouted ‘To me!’, and she obligingly passed the ball to him; he took the shot and missed, which was not a big surprise given the extreme angle that he was shooting from. I’m sure most of you have seen or been part of similar situations. However, I would like to dissect this scene a bit more. I am confident, knowing the personalities of our two students, that the thought processes went something like this:
Singing in Harmony in Education
This article is supposed to be about ‘education’ but some of it will read more like a science essay. The ‘education’ component is at the end of the article but one needs to know the science in order to understand an educational strategy that teaches children the concept of ‘synergy’ – one of which is to have children sing songs with harmonies.
On one of the earliest theories in psychology is ‘Gestalt psychology’. ‘Gestalt’ is a German word not easily translated but it approximates to the German word for ‘figure’. In psychological usage its meaning is closer to ‘whole’. Gestalt psychologists were interested in how we tend to make ‘figures’ and create ‘wholes’ through our perception and sensation.
For instance take these three objects like the ones in figure 1;
Should education be a matter for politicians?
What a stupid question – of course it should!
Education needs the central guidance of a government that decides with the help of experts, what is best for our children. This model has been shown over the decades to improve the living standards of nations who have committed themselves to educational policies that are initiated by central government policies. This is so self evident that this kind of question should never be asked.
That is certainly what I thought, until I recently read a fascinating book called ‘What’s the Point of School?’ by a British education specialist, Dr. Guy Claxton. Naturally the content has a strong British context, however, I believe the issues are universal. One of his main points is that the British education sector has substantially lost the plot because it is a system that was developed for a completely different mind set and work force. He asserts that the ‘problem’ with education as decreed by British parliament, is that they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Imight not be forgiven for simplifying his argument, but that is not going to stop me trying.
The London 2011 Riots & Education
Is there a connection between the recent London riots and education? I would like to argue there is.
Recently we witnessed the rather shocking news and images of riots in London in early August of this year. Seemingly sparked off by the accidental death of a young man shot by police officers, the riots escalated for several nights throughout London, but then spread to other major cities such as Birmingham where tragically young men lost their lives.
What is unusual over these riots is that it seems that the main cause of the riots had nothing to do with a principle, ethnicity or social status but appears on the surface to have been motivated by simple greed. People felt that this was a legitimate excuse to simply loot shops and cart out ‘their’ flat screen televisions and brand new microwaves. Some of the looters appeared to be as young as 10 or 11 years old. This is sadly a scene that is not unfamiliar to those of us that lived through the events of May 2000 in Fiji, although thankfully Fiji did not see teenagers accused of arson and even murder as has happened in the UK.
Resilience & Character – relevance to education
A friend of mine, recently moved back to the US from Fiji, has pointed me to two articles related to education. They seem to have a common core in them which is something to do with the relevance of education for the children at the school.
Resilience
The first article is an account of a New York Times correspondent (Clifford Levy) who was posted to Moscow, Russia for a period of five years. Unusually, the parents decided to place their children into a private but completely Russian school. Their children had no Russian language and yet all the topics were conducted in Russian. The article describes how the children went from essentially depressed and 'culture shocked' children, to children who showed their resilience by assimilating themselves into the Russian school and making significant Russian friendships. The children having apparently not only learned the language but even gone onto be some of the higher grade scorers with their respective classes as well as representing the school in school competitions. As my friend says that the article:
Learning to Teach Phonics
So in my last blog, I was talking earlier about how at MIS we were embarking to teach how to read in what is called a 'synthetic phonics' approach. This is the first update of our current adventure and involves a bit of a blend of both the pedagogy of teaching something to the children at MIS, and also the pedagogy of distance learning.
Our first task was to figure out what to teach our children. My initial foray led to me reading Diane McGuinness's book "Why Our Children Can't Read: and what we can do about it". I ordered from Amazon. Whilst I was there, I saw also in the 'people also bought', another book also including an author McGuiness although different first name (Carmen who it turns out is Diane's daugther in law married to her son, also a co-author - Geoffrey). Reviews by the readers made it clear that their book (Reading Reflex) is the practical teaching manual that supports the theoretical book by Diane McGuiness. It was a no brainer, a few clicks later the book was also ordered.
Dyslexia rules KO!
Aside from the obvious 'fun' that this quote has (I have it as an email signature, along with 'Don't anthropomorphise computers - they hate that'), there is a serious side to this which I've only recently become aware of. I've tried to use a wee pun here too, i.e. that Dyslexia, the biological condition needs to be 'KOed' as in 'Knocked Out' from the boxing ring.
If you follow the received wisdom then most of us can learn how to read, but a number of us have got some sort of biological (probably neuro-anatomical) inconsistency that makes it hard for us to learn how to read, or spell, or both. Those that fall into this unfortunate condition are called 'dyslexics'.
I say 'unfortunate' because it turns out that if you can't read or write in our modern society you're pretty much f*!^ed! There's more than enough literature to show that most dyslexics score poorly in various quality of life indices later on in life. Of course there are notable exceptions of diagnosed dyslexics who succeed spectacularly (e.g. Richard Branson) but the majority don't.
The Fiji Education Commission 2000
Recently, some students made some interesting comments on the blog that I'm maintaining for their course. This is a course in which there are many experienced 'in-service' teachers, ie those that are already teaching and they are upgrading their qualifications.
Some of these comments were related to the apparent inability of the Fiji Ministry of Education to listen to the actual teachers who were 'on the ground'.
That reminded me of an incident that happened over a decade ago (eeeek! how did that decade slip by so quickly?) which as the Fiji Education Commission of 2000. The previous education commission had occurred (I believe) in 1969, ie prior to Fiji's independence. That's a long time to not have the state of the country's national educational system appraised or gone over. However, it was an attempt at the time to try and redress the apparent lack of consultation between not only the Ministry and the teaching staff, but also the general public.
In what way is Fiji like Finland?
- The language? – nope.
- Both countries have names that start with ‘Fi’? – yes.
- A love of cross country skiing? – err, no!
However, I would like to talk about where I believe Fiji should aspire to be like Finland and that is in their education system.
A Newsweek article in 2010, rated Finland the number one country ranked by health, quality of life, politics, economics, and of course education (by the way the USA ranked #11). It has the highest graduation rate in the world and the highest proportion of graduates of a population in the world. From results gathered in 2009 and published earlier this year, standardised tests compared children at age 15 across many countries. Finnish children overall outperformed their counterparts. They came just behind China is maths and second to South Korea in reading comprehension, and outranked everyone handsomely on science results. I guess this makes sense from the country that gave us Nokia mobile phones. Remarkably Finland is able to do this by providing less school contact hours than their European counterparts.
'Soft' Assessments?
A number of parents at our school have expressed concern that our assessment strategies are too 'soft' and others have said that our assessments are too 'subjective'. I take this to mean that because MIC does not favour examinations as a valid way of testing our children, that we are somehow molly-codelling our pupils with a sort of 'anything goes' attitude. This smacks of the misguided view points that took a (probably perverse) neo-Freudian view point that children should never experience failure of they are to grow up without severe personality traumas.
I'd like to dispel the myth that somehow assessments other than the examination hall are the 'soft' option by definition, or indeed that they are subjective. To be sure there are such approaches but by the same token 'examinations' are not the panacea to genuine 'authentic' assessments either. I wrote about this here.
Children should understand the word “Pedagogy”
If the common lore is to be believed, the reason that the practitioners of the emerging medical profession of the 15th and 16th century insisted on naming all the body parts with latin names (‘patella’ instead of ‘kneecap’) is because they wanted to ‘appear’ clever, and so justify their expertise, acquire status and thus justify the high fees they would prefer to charge.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that educationalists feel or felt the same way about the science of education. Hence we have really fancy sounding words like ‘matriculate’, ‘graduate’ or how about ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’? I mean let’s be honest, these aren’t everyday words even if we’ve heard some teachers talk about them. As a parent these phrases used to made my eyes glaze over with no real understanding as to what they meant.
Benchmarks or Competitive Assessment?
Imagine that you’re on an operating table and you somehow learnt that your surgeon is an ‘A’ grade student, but their ‘real’ scores in their final surgeon’s exam was actually 45% (which means the rest of his class did worse than this). Would you be happy to know that you’re about to be operated on by a 45% exam scoring surgeon? Would you assume that the reason for the low marks was that the examination set for the relevant year was too hard? Would you instead consider the possibility that the whole class were poor learners, or perhaps they had a terrible lecturer/demonstrator? I know I would err on the side of caution and ask for another surgeon. What has this to do with education?
Examinations appear to be a rite of passage for the vast majority of learners. However, the exam (for better of for worse) is an integral part of the education system that determines one’s passage through the educational system and finally one’s career prospects. I still have nightmares about turning up to examinations late, or completely forgetting anything that I thought I learned about a subject, and this was for exams that I took decades ago. Clearly examinations are incredibly stressful and in an extreme case may sadly end in suicide. The topic of how, when why and where examinations are held, is worth taking seriously.
Education's Purpose
I’ve found that if there’s one thing that may provoke a big ‘talanoa’ is to gather your friends around and ask ‘what is the purpose of going to school?’. The question seems so incredibly easy that no one really bothers to ask it. Here’s my challenge: ask the question and keep asking ‘what for’, or ‘for what purpose’, or my old favourite ‘yes, but why?’ every time they answer. Here’s what I mean:
‘What is the purpose of education?’
‘Well it’s to learn things’,
‘… for what reason?’
‘So you can get a good job’,
‘… OK, but why?’
‘So you can earn a good salary’,
‘… why?’
I warn you though, be gentle with your continued questioning, I’ve had to duck from the occasional object being thrown at my head when I continued this line of annoying questioning.
Eventually though I believe that most people come to the answer that we go to school so that we can learn to survive as adults. Moreover, I think we can also say that we go to school so that we can not only survive, but survive well. In other words we obtain an education so that we can thrive as adults.
PE should NOT mean Sport!
What will humanity look like in the medium term future? According to a recent Disney-Pixar film called Wall•E, humans will have distinct balloon features complete with sausage fingers and toes, and who are otherwise so weak that they cannot stand on their own, but need to be carried around on hover chairs. It’s a funny film but it has many serious messages for us, such as our tendency to pollute our environment, and of course the way we abuse our bodies through lack of exercise and poor nutritional choices.
I’m personally interested in this because my PhD involved sports psychology; because I definitely feel that my own physical education was lacking (my nickname at school was ‘Sack’o’Potatoes’) and to this day I’m still struggling with my overall weight which is clearly on the side of ‘unhealthy’ rather than ‘healthy’. I’m sadly not alone. The developed world is struggling with an obesity pandemic. Fiji is also looking at very high rates of circulatory diseases and diabetes relative to the size of the nation. These trends have been traced to poor nutrition and exercise habits. The Ministry of Health tries their best with posters and TV adverts, but sadly I think most of us are guilty of simply letting our eyes and ears simply wash over these sensible messages.
Rewarding Teaching the Wrong Way?
Modern societies reward our teachers across the different teaching levels. These rewards are financial and status in society. Here are the two extremes: our tertiary educators receiving the highest status/salary; whilst the lowest paid and lowest society status belong to our early childhood and ‘Kindy’ teachers (from now on I’ll be referring to both labels as simply Kindergarten). In other words if you are looking for high salary and status, go for being a tertiary lecturer; if not possible then a secondary school teacher; if unable to then become a primary school teacher; and finally - if all else fails - become a Kindergarden teacher!
Consider the two extremes of tertiary and Kindergarten teachers. Tertiary educators (I’m one of them) are not required to get undergo any kind of training to receive practical teaching skills, let alone any kind of theory of teaching and learning. It used to be argued that since tertiary students are no longer children, that this training did not matter. This view point is slowly changing but we are not there yet.
Nice Numbers
I should have talked about our maths programme before at the Multiple Intelligence Centre. In reality it's very exciting for us. It came out of a curriculum workshop that we were doing at MIC and somehow we stumbled through our maths programme.
Focusing on 'backwards design' and 'understanding by design', we suddenly realised that we were taking the logic of our maths curriculum to it's logical extension and suddenly we had a completely new curriculum that not only made sense to us, but we think will make even more sense to our children.
Let's start at the beginning.
I wrote before about the issue of 'backwards design' and 'authentic learning'. In our workshop we were wondering aloud about the authenticity of our modern maths curriculum. Specifically, what actual maths do most of us use when we enter the adult world and with our first set of paying jobs. The list that we came up with were:
Language Instruction @ MIC
This year at MIC, we've embarked on a new initiative which is our language instruction. When we first started two years ago, we were unsure about what language instruction we should follow. We knew that learning a second language was important but to be honest we didn't know exactly why. That raises all sorts of dilemmas, principally:
- What language should we teach?
- How sophisticated should the instruction be?
- What support or resource material do we need to acquire?
These seemed to us at the time to be relatively easy questions to answer, but when we tried we were thrown off course straight away. Take for instance what language we should teach as a second language? Should it be French (the traditional diplomatic language and with a large segment of the Pacific speaking French - not irrelevant)? What about Hindi? However, the Hindi spoken in Fiji is noticeably different to that spoken in India. If we teach Hindi spoken in Fiji, it might not be considered as relevant as Hindi for most of the Indian sub-continent. What about how sophisticated it should be - do we include writing, grammar, literature? Do we buy text books, hire a specialised teacher, purchase a language lab?
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