World Class.... again

The PISA results for 2015 have been published and Canada is once again top ten (6th) in the world.  I imagine this means I'll once again attend a bunch of Canadian educational conferences with American (30th best in the world) speakers who want to tell us how we need to completely re-imagine our (their) failed system.

I tend to take statistics as less of a truth and more of a vague indicator of what's happening.  They don't explain complex systems like human education very well but they do take the temperature.

Since Ontario is the largest single education system in Canada we lend a lot of weight to the country's successes and failures in these UN tests.  If Ontario is performing well it tends to push the country's scores in that direction, so we must be doing a pretty good job if we're sixth in the world.

There are a variety of statistics pulled out of the OECD PISA data that are interesting to consider.  To begin with, the top Asian countries only pitch their most gifted students at PISA while Canada, Finland and Estonia are representative of their entire populations.  From that perspective all Canadian students were only beaten by the highest streamed students in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.  If this were an apples to apples comparison we'd have done even better.

Another interesting statistic is truancy (on the left).  There are a number of countries, Finland among them, that have seen a surprising jump in truancy.  Unsurprisingly, the countries that are only putting their strongest students in also don't tolerate truancy.  Canada, as in every aspect of the results I've seen so far, exceeds the OECD average and performs well in this area, even when we include all socio-economic and geographic areas of the country.

The other argument I'd be expecting from the neo-con right is that we pour tons of money into education so of course we get good results, except we don't.  When compared to OECD countries world-wide, Canada is mid-pack in percent of GDP spent on education.  Australia spends slightly more than us and the US only slightly less to get significantly worse results.  Finland spends significantly more of their GDP on education than Canada does and finished behind us this time around.

It's a quiet time in Ontario education right now but I'm sure the Ontario Liberal party is already concocting stories in order to villify Ontario educators in the next round of bargaining.  While that's going on I guess we'll just keep producing world class results at a reasonable cost.

NOTES

Playing with the data in the World Bank is always interesting:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS

The official results page:
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf

https://www.statista.com/chart/7104/pisa-top-rated-countries-regions-2016/

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46580959.pdf

http://www.peopleforeducation.ca/pfe-news/canada-well-above-oecd-average-on-pisa/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-ostapchuk/most-and-least-paid-teachers-in-the-world_b_8970800.html
Teacher pay by country.

I wonder if publicly funded private religious education systems in Canada brag about these UN numbers because they ignore this:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/un-says-funding-of-catholic-schools-discriminatory-1.175008
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/joshua-ostroff/end-public-catholic-schools_b_8712316.html

The Learning Expert & The Skilled Master

The other day a tech-handy colleague said over coffee, "I should get my tech qualifications in computers, what did you have to do to take the course?"  I replied that I had to provide five or more years of industry experience and recognized qualifications in order to qualify for the training; he seemed put off.

I understand his response, I battled the same one when I was applying to get qualified.  It was a kind of knee jerk reaction, a 'how dare you ask for specific qualifications!  I'm an expert learner with years of educational experience!'  I dug up my references and certifications and went through the process after putting away that ego.

This has me thinking about the duality of my educational background.  From high school dropout I attended a year of college before dropping out.  I then apprenticed as a millwright and returned to high school to graduate.  This eventually led me to university.  After university I was once again working in the trades as a automotive technician before eventually finding my way into information technology and finally teaching.  In the trades I worked in mastery focused experiential learning situations that were intense and demanding.  Academics were also demanding, but in a different way which usually had more to do with figuring out how to feed myself.  I got paid to apprentice in a trade, you are a customer when you are working through post secondary academics.  I saw a number of people being passed through that process simply because they wouldn't quit.  You saw less of that in the trades because if you couldn't do it, you often got injured and/or fired.

I took English and history as my teachables because it was easier to simply toss my degree into the ring than it was to cobble together all those technology requirements.  Most teachers in a high school are academically produced, the minority get into teaching through experiential/trades learning.  Those academically produced teachers are expert students themselves, they had to be or they wouldn't have survived the educational process.  An expert student is as much a politician as they are a learner, they've figured out how to survive in what is really an arbitrary social construct.

Having worked on the experiential and the academic sides of learning, I'm now trying to define the differences in the two types of learning:

Experiential versus discovery learning.  When you're learning a stochastic (experiential, non-linear) skill, you
need an expert in that experience to guide your progress.  When you're learning academics you need an
expert learner to show you how to self direct your learning and survive the system.

I'll talk about fundamental learning skills in another post, but in this case I'm focusing on the secondary learner who has already developed fundamental learning skills.  That student is capable of self-directing their learning, and in an information rich world like the one appearing around us this is a vital portion of their engagement in the learning process.  Where once we expected students to sit in rows and be portioned out information, nowadays teachers should be facilitating self-directed learning.  A 21st Century teacher's greatest ability is their own expertise in information fluency, which they provide in order to produce similarly self-directed learners.

'That's academic' has long meant a course of action that has no practical purpose, but academics do generally produce self-directed learners who have had to survive the vicissitudes of many education systems over the years and have become self-taught in spite of the best efforts of many of their educators.

In management and education the goals are
abstract, fabricated and ultimately political

In comparison to my academic background my experiential learning has been uncertain and demanding with no guarantee of success.  The tension between success in a fabricated situation and success in a genuine situation that allows for failure became more apparent to me as I proceeded through university.  Matt Crawford brings this up in Shop Class As Soulcraft when he refers to the magical thinking conjured up by management to justify their decisions.  Education, like business management, is a social construct and produces what Crawford describes as 'psychedelic' justification for its own existence.  As his quote here suggests, when you're learning experientially in a realistic environment you don't get to say, 'hey! great job!' if you're looking at your dismembered finger laying on the floor; reality doesn't put up with that crap.

As someone who has bounced back and forth between both sides of the education spectrum I can see the value and challenges in both.  What surprises me is how unwilling academic educators are to appreciate the advantages found in the hard-knocks school of experiential learning compared to the complex political dance of the academic classroom.

I know a lot of teachers who get angry with Shaw's pithy little quote about a character who is upset with his writing teacher, but I know a lot of teachers who teach writing who don't do it themselves.  I know a lot of teachers in a number of subjects that don't practice what they teach; it's hard not to see some truth in that statement.

Watching some teachers struggle with the surging availability of information makes me wonder what they'll do when an algorithm is created that does everything they do (I give it ten years).  There will come a time when our learning management systems become sufficiently intuitive and make the learning expert teacher redundant (while simultaneously personalizing education in a dramatic way).

It's a tough thing to be made irrelevant, ask many factory workers.  The teachers who will avoid being replaced by software in this inevitable future are the experiential masters who are guiding learning through doing, yet another reason why I reopened my experiential past and got tech-qualified.  It's too bad that not everyone practices what they teach.

Get off the Bus and Drive

The transition from institutionalized, single platform education technology to a decentralized model is in full swing at our school.  I'm getting blow back from various teachers who want things to remain as they've always been.  I don't think they mean ditto machines, facsimiles and telegrams, but they might.  There is always a tendency to fight advances in technology, it's difficult to change ingrained habits.

The difference between this and previous technological shifts is that we've institutionalized helplessness into educational digital technology.  We've convinced teachers that computers are an appliance and networking is a utility.  We treat internet access the same way we treat electricity or water delivery; it's off loaded to a bureaucracy who guarantees delivery.  As the old guard retires and their traditional thinking around passive technology use fades, we are left with whole generations of teachers who have been taught to do nothing except sit on the institutionally provided bus and go where it takes them.  Complaining about it is about all they can do.

Any decision making about educational technology has long been taken from teachers.  Digital learning tools are seen as remotely operated apparatus that should be dropped the moment they don't perform as expected.

When I suggest that teachers can get off the #edtech bus and drive their own educational technology they get anxious; driving a car takes a lot of effort compared to sitting on the bus.  You not only have to drive it, but you've got to look after it too, make sure it has gas, service it, take ownership of it.  The reward is much finer control over how you travel on your journey.

If you want to get where you're going (making education relevant and useful to your students?) driving your technology will get you there much sooner.  You'll get to decide what vehicle to take, what options to put on it, and even how you want various technologies to enhance your teaching.  Diversification of technology is vital to a better understanding of what it is and how to use it effectively. Digital technology isn't one app or one platform, it is a sea change in how we access and share information.

Driving your own technology usage does take a lot more effort than sitting on the #edtech bus, though it's just a different kind of effort.  All that energy you used to expend on worrying when the bus would show up?  or why it's so old and dilapidated?  You can now spend deciding what to get, what options you want and how you want to implement it.  You get to decide what, when and how your students are using technology to enhance their learning; you get to actually control your digital learning environment.

That last bit is perhaps the most enjoyable part of driving your own technology use; being able to control your #edtech environment is a key factor in customizing 21st Century learning to suit your students.

If we treated classrooms the way we treat digital learning environments, all rooms would be exactly the same, with the same seating plans, the same chalk boards and the same size.  Those classrooms would also be years out of date, and the teacher couldn't move a table or chair if they wanted to, because they'd all be nailed to the floor.  If you dare to ask why the furniture is nailed to the floor you'd be reprimanded with a fear based diatribe on how not keeping everything locked down and the same is potentially dangerous to your students and staff.

A Digital Skills Continuum: Differentiation of technology is a key to technical fluency!

If you're teaching using technology you're also teaching technology, and it would behove you to know what's under the hood.  Being ignorant of the machinery you're operating makes you a very bad driver indeed.  You don't necessarily need to be a full-on mechanic, but a tinkerer's mindset allows you to understand and look after your own needs in terms of the technology you use.

There are going to be some crashes with all these new drivers coming onto the road, but each collision will result in a learning experience.  I only hope that teachers who are inexperienced are willing to look past the messiness of their own learning to the possibilities opening up to them in a digital world.  At some point we'll tip over and teachers will accept that competence in technology isn't someone else's job but an integral part of their profession in the twenty-first century, just as it has become a basic fluency in so many other professions.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

Cyborgs are all around us now, and 
they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you'd think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you'd be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn't a student only issue. The teacher in question won't even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized.  The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room  you could separate them, you can't do that any more.  You can't do that if you move them to a different class... or a different school.  I've had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone's back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified - that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some  interesting new psychology in the classroom.  That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences.  Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected.  Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them.  In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because  you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence.  In the other direction you've got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it's almost impossible to consider let alone manage.


Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student's mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting),  coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant.  Many teachers don't consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn't really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can't self manage) is only one part of the problem.  In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

***
had to add a wee update. It's Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube.  It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.  

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general.  Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don't want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they've seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to.  The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online  influence creates a classroom unlike any before.