Tag Archives: Why School?

07/5/13

As the week draws to a close…

For this post, I chose to focus on two of the six questions that I found most intriguing, along with some personal reflection.

As the week began, I felt overwhelmed. I consider myself quite technologically literate, yet it felt like so much was coming at me from different angles. The communication prism shared in class today illustrated this – so much, everywhere around me, leaving me unsure of where to turn.

As we moved through the week, a level of awareness began to engage. I realized that while I was a happy consumer of many of these technologies, I didn’t necessarily use them in the classroom or teach my students how to use them. I did model the use of applications such as Twitter, show and discuss TED talks, access and share news stories from newspapers around the world, yet I didn’t fully engage my students in this process. Moving forward, I want to focus on ways to bring my students in, while keeping at the forefront why I am doing so.

How were your ideas about ICT in school settings influenced by Will Richardson’s book, “Why School”?

I found the book somewhat problematic. Many of the concerns we’ve addressed in class and on Twitter, namely increasing the number of students for whom a teacher is responsible, lacking a proper infrastructure to support increased technology centred learning, lack of teacher time and training, and concern over not losing many of what we find valuable in the current education system. I’m hoping perhaps that his book was meant more to shock and intrigue as opposed to form a basis for a new educational system. There were many ideas that could be brought in, such as student centred learning and teaching students more independence and focus on what they want to learn.

What issues, interest, or opportunity have you identified as a key topic for your inquiry work next week?

For next week, I believe I would like to start looking at connecting students with the world, and alternative ways of publishing work. I’d like to do so focusing on the use of Twitter. I need to learn more about potential pitfalls, merits, different ways of doing so, thinking about different ways to target audiences, how it can be used curricularly, and more. When looking at my personal Twitter account as a potential topic for 10 Minutes of Fame, I had never realized some of the amazing connections I’ve made. Twitter is part of the reality for our students, and could be an amazing way to bring more of the world in, send them out into the world, rather than just following their friends and a few celebrities.

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07/3/13

Why School?

Will Richardson’s Why School? seemed to reach out strongly to readers as evidenced by our in class discussion today. In it, Richardson posits that a new educational model is needed, one that moves away from traditional methods and the focus on testing. He states that “institutional change is everywhere,” and the institution of school is not immune (Richardson, 2012, p. 108).

Over the course of our discussion, we hit on many shared opinions. We agreed that many of the practices that Richardson recommends are already used by teachers, or perhaps more specifically, the effective teachers that we have encountered in our careers. An example of this is inquiry-based learning, something several of us do in our schools. While we agreed that ideas such as inquiry are incredibly important, we struggled with the extreme that Richardson seemed to endorse. We shared his view that there are skills that all students need, ideas that need to be learned, but felt that teacher direction and modelling have a stronger place than what seemed to be indicated (Richardson, p. 283). A group member brought up that perhaps this model was more suited for some subject areas than others, such as Social Studies, and worried about needing sequence such as in Math.

There are rival schools of thought when it comes to what students need in the future. A web search reveals an incredibly interesting article on CNN entitled Classical Schools put Plato over iPad. The article explains that there are schools in the United States taking a different approach to what they feel will be needed, namely an appreciation of “truth, goodness, and beauty” (Duin, 2013). Where the classical approach seems to differ is the belief that “you can’t reflect on something if it’s not in your brain in the first place (Duin, 2013).

I personally found it both interesting and difficult coming from a self-directed high school where I both graduated and taught. Since the opening of the school, the self-directed program has been scaled back year after year, with more constraints and controls put into place. When I attended, I think the school was the best combination of Richardson’s ideal and the reality of a public school with detailed IRPs and PLOs. However, the community struggled with students taking more time to complete work (yet with the highest GPA and exam scores in the district, and high levels of success in university), with students not necessarily being taught what they were familiar with, in the format that they were familiar with, and with the idea that students did not always need to be under direct instruction from a teacher.

In discussion, we came to the conclusion that any change needed both support and time to have a chance at success. A change such as Richardson’s would be difficult within a single classroom or single school, without the support of the larger community, which would include the school district, the public, and the Ministry of Education.

Duin, J. (2013, 06 21). Classical Schools put Plato over iPad. Retrieved from http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2013/
06/21/classical-schools-put-plato-over-ipad/

Richardson, Will. (2012). Why Schools?.

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