Reflections on Reflections: mastery & expertise and long standing inequalities

The revive old post plugin on Wordpress is great (and
random) , and gets you re-reading old reflections.
Learning Expert and the Skilled Master shone a light on the
PD I was about to walk into that morning.

Things keep happening at work that I've just had surface online.  The resonance between ideas from years ago and now always make me wonder about the progression of education.  The more things change the more they stay the same, I suppose.

Last week before our first PD day of the year I was re-reading a three year old post comparing learning experts with skilled mastery (when you've been blogging for six years you get to see a lot of old ideas remembered).  

Learning experts are like chameleons, perfectly camouflaged by their quick minds.  They're able to effectively consume large amounts of information and present it effectively in an academic setting.  They are very proficient in communication and embedding themselves in organizational structures.  They're who you want to explain to you how an internal combustion engine works, but they aren't who you want fixing one.  Learning experts tend to have a finger in a lot of pies.  They don't focus on developing a single set of skills because they prefer the rarefied air of pure learning; they tend to be informational creatures.

By contrast the skilled master is someone who has spent a lot of time honing stochastic skills though trial and error in the real world; their's is a situated intelligence.  They might have an encyclopedic knowledge of their specialty but they tend to shy away from theoretical recitation in favour of relying on personal experience.  Their expertise is in the particular, not the general.  They are able to demonstrate that expertise concretely.  Learning experts shy away from that sort of tangible skills demonstration.

High school teachers are expected to have mastery of their subject area, but you'd be amazed at how many English teachers don't write and how few science teachers do science.  In fact, in my experience, the vast majority of high school academic specialists don't practice their specialty in any discernible way.  They come dangerously close to making that annoying Shaw quote look accurate.  One of the exceptions I've found is in the technology department where our chefs chef, our technicians repair and our materials experts do carpentry and metal work, every day.  Constant examples of their expertise pop up all over the school.

We spent PD last week doing the learning expert thing as we always do.  We began by being given statistics so laughably incomplete as to be essentially useless and were then asked to suggest sweeping changes to our school based on them.   After being handed a Ministry document so dense in edu-speak as to be practically incomprehensible (which isn't a problem if tangible results aren't a requirement), we were asked to apply whatever it was to how our department teaches.  We then spent time touching so lightly on mental health as to barely register our presence before ending the session blasting off into the school as the resident experts on it, ready to develop deep personal connections with all the students who least want that.  In the afternoon we learned how to make our own statistics to justify any course of action we choose.  At the end of the day all the learning experts felt like they'd done many things, I felt like I'd been desperately treading water for eight hours.  

I'd suggested the tech department head over to the wood shop and learn how to use the new laser engraver.  By the end of the day we'd have all been able to make effective use of a tool that would have offered immediate benefits to all our specialists.  It would have been a day of specified training leading to a clear learning outcome.  The benefits would have been demonstrable by everyone in our department.

Tangibles from our day of learning expertise?  Nooooo.  We don't do tangibles.


NOTES:
The sub-text of our data driven morning was that our school doesn't do enough to support our essential and applied students.  Seeing as we're not sectioned to run those courses and have to squeeze them into existing classes, it's little wonder they aren't being served well.  Rather than trying to pry this open with insufficient statistics why not talk to the actual problem (our essential sections are given away to a school miles away)?

Since then there has been some top down pressure on making open courses easier.  Essential and applied students don't need easier, they need curriculum delivered to their needs.  It's hard to do that when we prioritize running a dozen half empty grade 12 university bound science courses but barely any non-stacked essential classes.  I'm guessing because these stats weren't given, but we spend more than half our class sectioning to satisfy university bound academic students who compose less than 30% of our student population.


LINKS:
consumerist learning: less challenging classes aren't what students are looking for.
proliferation of fifties:  we already pass students we shouldn't.  How low should we go?
situated intelligence:  it's the only real kind we have. Everything else is politics.

Does Applied Mean Easy?

Today I was told that my grade nine classes are too difficult and I should make them less so.  I'd never heard this before and this one time it was mentioned in passing while on another topic of conversation so I was kind of stunned by the comment.  Seeing as I have a perfect pass rate in an open grade nine course, 'too hard' doesn't seem very accurate.  Do I push my students to do their best work, certainly.  Is it challenging?  Absolutely.  Do I expect a lot from them?  You bet.  But too hard?  I have some thoughts on that...

My classes are hands-on and reality is pretty demanding.  I can't tell a student they have great ideas like I used to in English when I was handed a grammar abysmal paper.  If the circuit they built doesn't work, their work is obviously inferior.  I can't tell a student that they're brilliant at coding if their code doesn't run, because it doesn't run.  Unlike slippery academic courses where students are producing abstractions within abstractions, I'm facing reality with my students head on, so being stringent with them isn't an option, it's a necessity.

Reality is all about mastery, not learning expertise; it's a boots on the ground situation, not a generals talking around a table kind of thing.  The students who often struggle with my class the most are the A+ academic types who are have figured out how to game school and get great grades; they aren't used to this kind of non-linear struggle against such an implacable foe (reality).  The people considered the 'middle' of our learning continuum ('applied' students) are my main audience.  My top students tend to be college bound applied students, though I try to tend to the academic and essential needs as well.  These students tell me they enjoy the demands I place on them because most other teachers take applied to mean just do less (ie: make it easier?), which I've never done.  Maybe that's why this passing comment stuck in my craw so much.  If the entire system assumes non-academic courses mean make it easy and fun then I think we have failed a large portion of our student population.  Education shouldn't be easy and fun, it should be challenging and satisfying in a way that easy and fun never is.

My grade 9 classes are hands-on computer technology classes that have students race across a wide variety of curriculum because computer technology, in spite of being an emerging kind of literacy, is treated as a dumping ground for any related material.  Electrical engineering has less to do with programming or information technology than physics does with chemistry or biology, but the sciences are logically separated.  Computer technology curriculum in Ontario is like taking SCIENCE (all of it, at once), and yes, it's a lot to do.

In TEJ10 I'm covering all sorts of not really related specialties at once, but I'm still able to effectively operate an open level course that delivers me everything from grade 9s who can't read to grade 9s who will one day become nuclear physicists, and I'm able to challenge and engage them all.  The only ones who might complain that it was too hard were also the ones that took a couple of weeks off each semester for a family holiday and then missed a pile of other days for reasons.  When they are in class they are looking for reasons not to be.  Anyone who is there regularly is engaged by the hands on and collaborative nature of the course.  I'm not going to dumb it down because it's an applied course and I'm not going to cater to the students (and parents) who want to treat school like a sometimes daycare by demanding lower expectations.

I feel better about this already.