Blindsight

The definition for blindsight can be viewed as looking or holding a view  of something with a bias without knowing a particular view is held.  I wonder how it develops.  Is it through experience, social conditioning, education etc?

When I think of this word it reminds me when our ESL department wanted to move towards eliminating marks and in its place  to use rubrics which would let parents know how their child was progressing in their English language skills.  We addressed the 4 areas of language development, reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  However, we had an imbalanced rubric because the section on writing was so heavily weighted.  Were we “blindsighted”?  We as a department didn’t realize it till someone outside the school said, our rubric heavily weighted writing.  How did we get that way?  We had a departmental discussion on this  and concluded that we took on the lens of the English department, who always complain about the lack of writing skills when ESL level 4 students enter mainstream English.  We obviously agreed and subconsciously produced the first rubric with its primary emphasis on writing.  We were our own barrier till we revised the rubric to make it more balanced.

Before we even got to this point of even creating the rubric we tried to get departmental consensus over the idea and implementation of this new way of assessment.  All of us agreed except one person.  She felt that the parents would not be accepting of this new way of assessment.  We couldn’t get her to agree, although she did attend the meetings when we tried to work on the criteria and language.

We were told by the administration and I think our department head agreed that no one could be forced to implement it and we could move forward with or without her.  Our VP had some heated discussions with her in our meetings when we were working on the rubric.  Both VP and teacher wanted to know WHY and WHY NOT?  Most of the department was willing to implement the changes.

We finally met with parents to explain our reasons for assessing students with the rubric, and without too many problems the parents were receptive to the change. From that day, the teacher who resisted change felt a lot differently about the rubric.

When it comes to technology, I know there are teachers who are on board and teachers who are not on board to implement technology into their teaching practice or into the learning experience of their students.  Some say that it is a big investment and that retirement is coming and don’t want to spend the time to make the changes.  Others are just fine with what they are doing now-curriculum hasn’t changed or some don’t have the patience with the infrastructure that makes it hard to use technology.  There are many reasons not to use technology, but the phenomena of technology is here and with new changes to the education plan, we will be mandated to implement technology and we won’t be ready unless we start.  The why and the how are such important questions- a little scary to even try to or attempt to answer.  Educational leadership??

The final project, a blog which is trying to help teachers collaborate is coming along, but I’m a little scared to launch it because I can foresee the “blindsightness”.  I guess I need a plan to address the “what if” scenarios.