Future Schooling
I am starting this discussion as a place for those of us interested in what the "classroom of the future" will be like, to discuss the groundwork to make it happen.
No, it is not all going to happen in the blink of an eye. It may take a decade or two to get a futuristic version of education off the ground enough to see how it works. But, if we don't start, we will never get there.
How do you see technology figuring into pedagogy?
No, it is not all going to happen in the blink of an eye. It may take a decade or two to get a futuristic version of education off the ground enough to see how it works. But, if we don't start, we will never get there.
How do you see technology figuring into pedagogy?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anne Pemberton on
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Derek,
You asked a question over in Introductions, and I thought I would answer it here. You asked if a student would not be able to learn the concepts of place value by some other hands-on means. The answer is yes. The development of robust computer games that also teach the concept will increase the number of children out of a class who are presented with a learning environment suited to their individual needs. Modeling of place value can certainly be done with the place value blocks, poker chips, colored beads, and lots of other materials. But, even with a variety of such means available, place value is still one of the serious stumbling blocks in learning math, as is learning multiplication and especially long division. I'm not sure that every child needs to learn to do long division, but I am sure that every child needs to have the opportunity to learn it. I really do not think there is one body of knowledge or content, so essential to future life, that it must be taught to each and every student. Let's continue with the specialization of talents wrought by civilization when mankind developed cities and diffferentiated tasks.
Anne
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Permalink Reply by Derek Brandow on
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Will you talk more about the last sentence?
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Derek,
Are you asking about the last sentence in the first post or the second.
The last sentence in the first post is what I am opening up to discussion here. Where can technolgoy be used as a tool for pedagogy? What can be learned better using technology? Should every teacher have a computer on her desk to manage her job? Or does pedogogy require that all teachers use green spiral bound grade books all purchased from the same supply house?
Much has been learned in the past thirty years about the variations in individual learning styles. Some, leading the way on these philosophies, advocate presenting new materials in as many learning styles as possible so that each child can be reached. Others say that children are moldable, and we need to decide on the most efficient deliver method and then insist that every child learn just that way.
Now, if your question was about the last sentence in the second post, that was just a passing comment on the fact that the human race has advanced as far as it has because as a species we learned (eventually) that different people have different talents and skills and the best way to form a society is by letting each one do their own thing - within limits of course.
I guess, if I think about it, the two sentences are related in that they assume the reader to be knowledgeable of different learning styles and why they fit so much better than the "empty vessel" characterization of students in times past.
Anne
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Wade,
Kuddo's for Kansas! I do believe they are a step ahead of Virginia. We have the objectives online and sample tests (without a tutorial), and varieties of links to resources, but nothing that could be used as the most elementary teaching tool - a quick "this is how it is".....
Having said that, I will add that this can be very tricky to get to actual work as intended. Little children are more likely to attend to a lesson on a screen. The older kids will try to jump over the "lesson", right to the questions, and then guess at the answers until they get enough right to "pass".
The kids I noticed it most were a wayward bunch in an "alternative" school for kids who'd been kicked out of their home schools. They had a "lesson system" for all subjects, which was said to be similar to Plato. And, I watched them figure out how to skip over the lesson, and then USING THEIR CRITICAL THINKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS, they made notes of the answers they tried to the various questions, which were wrong and needed another run through the test to get it right. When I took up the notes, one of them threatened me, even tho it was clear he was "cheating", but most important, as I said as I crumpled the note, was that he wasn't learning the content! He then told me what he thought of learning the content. Bear in mind that the kids (the whole class was doing it when I arrived mid-semester) could have gone back at any time and reviewed the teaching lesson to find out the answers to the questions, but they chose to keep notes on correct guesses and use that to pass the test. Creative thinking - out of the box. They solved the problem unconventionally.
Oh, I almost forgot .. is there a link that we can take a look at their tutorials and comment on them? No, not to criticize, but to learn about, and perhaps "think out of the box" and see what comes of it!
Anne
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Thanks, Wade,
I look forward to seeing what Kansas is doing that Virginia isn't.
I am glad to hear that you have better controls on the technology than I had in the placement that sent me to retirement .... The software these kids were using was definitely not well designed. It was being used by students who should have been using an elementary level of the same material - or at least should have had the option of listening when they coudln'r read. But, even those who were adequate readers, jumped over the "lessons" and began to keep notes.
So, I guess I am saying that if we are going to use tutorials or lessons, we have to be sure that the software does not let the child avoid the learning. As we design the classroom of the future, we have to keep a sharp eye out for what we already know about modern kids.
Anne
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Brilliant! What a great example of critical thinking and problem solving. I am impressed at how smart these kiddos are. I hope they were not removed from their original schools for lack of intelligence.
There was a problem for them- They had a task of no interest to them, no visible value to their lives and they wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. They collaborated to solve the problem and succeeded, and probably felt pretty proud of themselves I would guess, until they got busted. Even then I bet they felt good about figuring out a solution as a team.
I wonder if they would have "cheated" if they had a task that interested them, that they saw value in, where they made the choice to go after it and come to conclusions? And I wonder how they would have felt if they were guaranteed to receive the same response from the teacher if they didn't "cheat" or collaborate to solve the task/problem?
The tool that Wade speaks of intrigues me and I would like to see more as well. The discipline of math is a bit of a mystery for me in terms of its inclusion of the pedagogy I am considering.
I agree that we are all wired to learn in our own unique way, and that in the pedagogy I am considering, the learners who are more math inclined will more likely choose investigative paths that allow for that discipline to be revealed.
This makes the most sense to me, and I am sure to them.
We all need to understand the basics to function successfully in a society where there are still dollars and cents, and what Wade speaks of might be a step in the right direction to checking that off the list of acquiring basic skills necessary for our society. Outside of that, I am more likely to consider something drastically different for the interdisciplinary, and child centered approach to learning.
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Derek,
Yeah. I blamed the problem on the bad design of the software that was foisted on an administrator who didn't reallly want to accomplish anything with these students. No, they were not removed from their original schools for lack of intelligence - mostly for doing things like calling in bomb threats, blowing up bathrooms, and such nonsense. They had talked back to teachers one too many time. But, some of them were supposed to be in a special ed class, and no provisions were made at the school for such children. Very often, we intend education to serve only the average and sometimes the slightly above average children. We need to design education that involves maximizing the potential for each and every student, no matter the challenges or talents.
Child centered education is a nice concept, but it is given lots of lip service without considering the starting point, which is to put the child at the center of his/her education. You can't do that with 30-40 children in a classroom, even with each one seated at his own ccomputer or laptop. But Wade suggests that it may be possible to design a system that can let the teacher monitor the kids better even with large numbers. But, will the teacher just be able to punch a button or two to adjust a child learning-feed to more appropriately address his individual needs? We will need to define the "basics" that will be learned by individually tailored tutorials, and then address the rest of the curriculum in more creative and engaging ways. What? Why not do the same for the basics?
Anne
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We need to design education to involve maximizing the potential of each and every student, no matter the challenges or talent. I agree. So why aren't we? (rhetorical) We could both list a number of reasons I'm sure.
It seems to me that the lists we could make don't make a bit of difference because public education still isn't able to maximize this potential, or even figure out how to teach the kids in the special school setting you spoke of.
I believe child centered learning is absolutely possible and only able to be called that when the child is at the center of their own learning process taking responsibility for that process. It is possible, but I agree, near impossible with the number of students you speak of in a classroom you speak of...all components taken directly from any classroom we might find in any public school in America. It can work and will work when we make an environment for it to happen.
Aside for budgets and bureaucracies, and without looking through the glasses of public education which any of us have ever looked through, what will be helpful in this discussion would be if we could think creatively and discuss what a learning environment could look like, one we have never imagined before.
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Derek,
I was going to refer you to a link on my site with a post of a short story by Isaac Assimov called "The Fun They Had", but the site is down this morning. I'll post it later in the day when the site is working.
The story is a vision of Future Schooling that Asimov wrote about from a fifties perspective. School, as we know it in a building with kids coming together with a human teacher no longer exists. All children have a computer in their homes that is called the "teacher", and automates the instruction tailored to the student needs and interests. The kids still complain about school, A computer malfunction causes a child to miss a day or school, in which the children explore an ancient "book" about the old (current) way of schooling and pronounce it more "fun" sounding than what they are doing.
In order the make education both effective and child-centered, we need to expose children to the greatest span of subjects early on, and frequently as they develop, in order to find the child's intersts as they come up through. A child may, as a primary student, find great interst in learning about all the animlas of the earth, but may develop an interest in learning history at a later time in life. We don't withhold history until that interest develops, we keep some history in the curriculum, to entice the student to the subject, but keep the emphasis on what the child is interested in at the time. Child-centered or not, we need to keep an element of discipline in what the kids do so that they can develop discipline as they go. But, we must keep the presentation of the material child-centered. We don't need to have a child memorizing the periodic table in first grade, but if they are interested in the orderly collection of the elements, then it is the time to put the best face on learning the periodic table. A rich study of the elements, with exposure to where they are found, what they look like, smell like, taste lke, should be included.
I like to imagine that Future Schooling will be without walls and children will be encouraged to take lessons from the variety of sources in their area, and study the rest vicariously through "virtual" sites on the Internet. I like to think that travel will be an integral part of Future Schooling, with children of other cultures mixing with outs both on a f2f basis as well as virtually.
Anne -
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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on
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Wade, Could you provide a link for the site you mentioned? I teach in Kansas and it might be a reference my classroom teachers don't know about. N
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Anne,
Your last paragraph is where I would like to start. So let's take that imagination and make it a reality much like Walt Disney.
What do we need to do to make it reality?
Does it mean we should consider learning outside of Public Education? I don't know...
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Derek,
That isn't necessary. I suspect that most of the teachers in this forum are public school teachers who have the access and just need the rest of the stuff, like the content, to make it come alive. If you choose to work outside public ed, you will, in general, not be working with the kids who need the most from their educatiion in order to function in the world of their adulthood. Kids in private schools generally have access to the Internet at home, but it is the poor inner city kids who do not yet have a computer, that we need to focus our effort on. That is where the greatest need is, and where the greatest glory can be scored.
Anne
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