Refocusing on Learning Conditions (Teacher Working Conditions) in Ontario Education

 All sides are going to drag their feet for as long as they can with the new teacher contracts in Ontario. I'd certainly like my pay to keep up with inflation, but that hasn't happened in any time recently, so I'm not sure why it should be a show stopper now. My buying power, even with the sub-par increases we've eked out, is significantly less than it was in 2010. This isn't a 'this government' thing - the last one was pretty good at making us poorer each time too. The difference these days is that this one also likes to cripple learning conditions.

A problem with how we get to a contract in Ontario is that you'd be lucky to find anyone at the table who has been in a classroom teaching recently. Most professional unionists have levitated out of classroom teaching, in some cases for decades. On the other side of the table there is most likely no one who has ever taught a day in their lives. These are the people deciding teaching working conditions and student learning conditions in our schools.

I'm already out of pocket significantly, so another 1% per year raise isn't going to do much, but I know where resources could be put that would make a difference both to myself as a teacher and to my students as learners. I'd accept a three year deal that gets us to the end of this provincial government's mandate with NO RAISE, but only if we also did the following:

1) Reduce Ontario College of Teacher fees back to prepandemic levels and freeze them there for the duration of this 'we don't get a raise so you don't either' contract.

2) Restore public education funding to prepandemic levels. In 2021, while COVID droned on, almost a billion dollars was cut from education in our province. Restore that.

That gets us back on an even keel by removing the system damaging politics that have withered public education in Ontario. With the politics deflated, lets look at how we can make the system more efficient so that we can maximizing our funding and produce better learning outcomes. I suspect many teachers would be willing to focus on improving our classroom learning because student learning conditions are also our working conditions.

Here are some ways to shake the tree and put the focus back where it belongs (...with kids' learning? ...in classrooms? No?).

 

3) THE FLUSH: Any teacher past retirement age is welcome to stay on, but they aren't seconded and doing office work in a board or ministry or elsewhere. I've seen too many 'teachers' who are collecting top tier teacher pay who haven't taught in a classroom in years (sometimes in decades). In many cases they are doing 'support', but how can you possible support a classroom that you have no experience in? If the last time you taught was in 2007, you have no idea how much things have changed no matter how well intentioned you may be.

3.1) THE FLUSH Part 2: make cross training is the point of curriculum support. No more life-time non-teaching roles for teachers. Every teacher can have a two year secondment to curriculum support, but must be back in the classroom for two years before being able to apply for another one. This would go far to end the nepotism and favouritism that defines many of these roles.

This focus on classroom familiarity includes vice principals. They should be teaching one class a year. You could then have more VPs in training in schools with the money saved. Cross training and future career progression should be the focus of curriculum support and junior administration roles.

4) THE REBOOT: do the maths. With this many resources on the table (restored funding, no extra money needed for raises, expensive senior teachers retiring etc), what could we do to bring class sizes down? If you told classroom teachers that their class caps are all dropping by 20% in the new contract, I imagine they'd be very happy. No one wants to lose kids in need in overcrowded classrooms. I suspect classroom teachers would be thrilled with this approach, but they aren't the ones at the table.

4.1) REBOOT part 2: as part of class size restructuring, include multipliers for students with special needs.  If I have a class cap of 24 students, none of whom have special needs, the learning will be equitable and the class manageable.  If I have a class with ten students with special needs and they are weighted (for example, a student with high needs might weighted as a 2.2 in their IEP under the new, lower class caps), then the class cap wouldn't be 24. That 2.2 student alone would lower the class cap to 23 and other IEP students would lower it further. Quality of learning is maintained because we've focused greater attention where it's needed.

We currently have an Individual Learning Plan (IEP) system that is vague about students with special needs and offers little in terms of in classroom support. If you want students to learn productively (especially in destreamed classes), and good teachers to stay in the profession, include mechanisms that automatically reduce class sizes for students with special needs so that teachers can do what they are trained to do: help. Watching the system systemically work against that goal is one of the saddest things about teaching in Ontario these days.

5) Give classroom teachers time for professional development and improve their practice. PD has died in Ontario education in the past couple of years. The Great Squeeze has chased many teachers away from the profession and created a shortage. Encourage young teachers and potential new ones to come back to the profession while looking after them as they develop best practices. Currently classroom teachers are in such short supply that teachers are given no time to improve their practice. It's demoralizing.

6) Offer earlier retirement. Teacher retirements haven't changed in years. The pension fund is healthy. If it can offer tired pre-retirement teachers who have fought their final years through COVID and plummeting work quality a way out, then it should. The system benefits from this as senior teachers with maximum qualifications make more than twice what a new teacher with beginning qualifications does. You'd think senior teachers would be helping junior teacher training (they do, but they aren't compensated for it). The people who are compensated for training teachers often have only a fraction of the classroom experience needed to do the job (see #7).

7) Honour classroom specialists by giving them time to support newer teachers. My last two teaching reviews were done by administrators with less than a quarter the classroom teaching experience I've had. I've worked with classroom specialists who are Jedi masters in terms of classroom and learning management, but they never get a look in on teacher training or reviews. Honouring expertise in education from actually working in classrooms isn't something that happens, but it should. The education org chart is remarkably rigid and, frankly, quite top heavy. Teachers who pass into support or administration roles can find themselves reviewing and supporting teachers who have done the job for 10x longer than they ever did.

It's the combination of worsening learning/working conditions and pay cuts for years on end that have driven many away from teaching in Ontario. Smaller caps with even lower limits for classrooms with high needs learners makes destreaming make some kind of pedagogical sense instead of being used as an excuse to stuff more kids into a room in the name of equity. Many students in non-academic streams aren't less capable, but they are struggling with learning challenges, so modifying class caps to focus more teacher attention in classes with these students seems obvious, yet it has never happened other than in streaming, which we're in the process of phasing out.

This round of contracts will end up being whatever it ends up being - classroom teachers won't have much say in it, but it'd be nice if Ontario decided that reasonable funding focused on smaller classes with more equitable learning outcomes for a wider range of students is something we could all get behind. Would I like to just once not get a pay cut thanks to inflation? Sure, but it isn't likely any time soon. In the meantime, focus resources on improving learning conditions (which are also teacher working conditions).

Education Will Never Become What It Should Be Until It Is Freed From Politics

Education is a leaky, old boat.  It limps forward, year after year, attempting to do a difficult thing: raise everyone who darkens its doors toward their intellectual potential.  It does this with as few resources as it possibly can.  Students in the system span the full range of human society, from future astronauts and doctors to serial killers and drug addicts.  With the same simplistic, systemic process, education attempts to meet each of them where they are, which can range from years ahead of the curve with loving support from parents, to intellectually challenged and abused children who don’t know what a safe home is.  Those two students often wind up in the same class.

To further complicate things, education is run by politicians.  These are people whose first inclination is to ensure their own re-election, regardless of how cruel they need to be to satisfy their angry, ignorant, myopic supporters.  The education system knows nothing of long term planning or sustainability, which is why it struggles to keep up with societal shifts such as the evolution of technology.  Depending on the vagaries of Canada’s outdated first past the post system, a small minority of Canadians can vote in a ‘majority’ government that has four years of free reign with no checks or balances.  Plans and programs can disappear in a single election cycle to be replaced by whatever self-serving project the sitting government decides suits it.  The Ministry of Education isn't really about education, it's about governments exercising unchecked power.

The rubber hits the road in the classroom where teachers attempt to ply their trade under seemingly random changes of management.  As a teacher your goal isn’t to cherry-pick the best students and forget the rest, as in business, though that is what many teachers fall back on due to a lack of training or support in our changeable system.  The true goal of public education is to have everyone finish their year better than they started it.  That alone would be a difficult ask, but in the lost world of public education teachers also have to force students with a wide range of socio-economic and developmental disparities through standardized testing that demands all students of a certain age, regardless of their personal circumstances, perform similarly in reading and mathematics.  Privilege is systemically rewarded in public education.

A worthy long term pedagogical goal would be to ensure every student ends the year better intellectually equipped than they began it, and a viable graduation requirement would be for every student to have attained a proximity to their own specific developmental potential, but none of this is the case.  Grades are a fiction designed to compare students to an average that doesn't exist.  If every graduate was operating close to their specific potential, society would benefit greatly and we wouldn't wound students by educating them as we do.  Instead, as in society at large, the education system rewards privilege and exacerbates social inequities on a massive and meaningless scale.  No wonder so many students and the adults they become hate the education system, but in fairness, our education system is merely a reflection of the shittiest aspects of our society.

At times of stress, such as during a pandemic, education’s low resolution, stigmatizing approach to learning is cast into a clear focus.  When suddenly asked to learn from home, it becomes apparent that many children don’t live in home that can or does focus on maximizing their potential.  The most obvious examples are socio-economic in nature.  You can’t be a student in a home where you have neither the space nor the resources to use the digital tools needed to continue your learning remotely, but these students never had these means of enrichment, though they're expected to be fluent in them.  Academic students go home to stable, literate and enriched home lives, applied and essential students go home to intellectual deserts.  This isn’t always socio-economically driven.  A student can be just as intellectually impoverished when their parents decide to buy them game systems and toys instead of multi-purpose computers and other tools capable of something other than mindless entertainment.

The stigmatizing nature of our education system also produces its worst outcome: school is something that is done to students against their will.  They are passive victims of their own education - a dehumanizing process that they are dragged through unwilling and something they come to despise as a great injustice in their lives.  When an emergency prompts remote learning, this culture sees students walking away in droves the moment the Minister of Education tells them marks don't matter any more.  Marks never mattered.  These same children, disenfranchised from their own potential, grow up to vote in anti-education politicians who gleefully eviscerate the system further, usually by instituting punitive standardized testing that moves education ever further from its primary duty of helping everyone attain their potential.

Our society is broken in so many ways, and our education systems reflect that dysfunction.  Individual pedagogical needs are subsumed by systemic processes driven by the punitive aggregation of individuals into dehumanized, simplistic levels.  The system divides children into Brave New Worlds of academic, applied and essential levels of learning based as much how a child’s social circumstances have influenced their intellectual output as what they are actually capable of.  If you don’t have to work thirty hours a week to help your single parent keep a roof over your head, you have much more time to put a shine on your school work and enter the rarified academic stream.  That also happens to be the stream that the instructor at the front of the class wants to teach.

Imagine an education system that is considered an essential service and exists to meet a rigorous set of requirements based on scientifically demanding best pedagogical practices.  This system exists beyond the reach of callous politicians and the angry, bitter people who put them in power.  Its only function is to raise everyone in it year over year and graduate them as close to their human potential as possible.  This imaginary system does this as safely and progressively as it possibly can.  It embraces change and works continually to develop the science of pedagogy.  Adults working in the system are held to the highest standards and success in it takes more a privileged home life.  Imagine an education system blind to privilege that can see a student's potential clearly, wouldn't that be something?

By refocusing on individual student needs this imaginary education system would radically differentiate itself.  The idea of a ‘standard’ classroom would fade away to be replaced by responsive learning spaces that can adapt to individual needs.  Engagement would play a role in this, but it wouldn’t be the cart-before-the-horse that it is now.  Education would come into a high resolution relationship with each student.  Standardized testing might also play a role, but only insofar as it helps direct system efficacy, never as a punitive outcome for the students taking it, or the teachers who have to administer it.  Imagine testing that helps a compassionate system recognize the need for more support in a low-literacy neighborhood instead of one that just lowers real estate values.

The backwards class size arguments made by people who know nothing of the science of instruction would also disappear in this system.  There are class sizes that produce optimal learning outcomes.  That is how big classes would be.  In a class where a number of students have learning challenges, the class size would be smaller.  In a class full of capable senior students, classes would be bigger.  The idea of a simplistic cap that ignores who is in the room would no longer exist.

Graduation would fall out of its yearly lock-step.  Instead of low-resolution grading and group assessments leading to fictional, impersonal grades, students would be required to individually demonstrate mastery and would then move on individually.  Students may still find themselves in loosely grouped cohorts by age, but their learning is individually analyzed and advancement is based on mastery rather than the year they were born.  In this way some students might graduate high school when they are fifteen, while others may do it when they are twenty.  The stigma we apply to age and grade would fade away in a system when individual student mastery was what defined advancement.

This fictitious education system, as an essential service, would be lean.  Its main focus would be on student learning.  Positions in the system that did not directly support differentiation and personalization of learning would be rare and only filled by peer reviewed experts.  The moment such a position had met its goals it would release the teacher back into teaching.  People who didn't want to focus on teaching wouldn't exist in this lean system.  The current bureaucracy in education that insulates privileged people from the harshness of the classroom would blow away. In Canada’s essential education service everyone is in immediate proximity to teaching.  Non-teachers are hired to manage administrative details, but these specialists have no financial or administrative control over pedagogical decision making.

Massive secondary education factories would give way to smaller radically localized schools that embrace immediate community connections.  The walls of schools would be much more permeable than they are now and the concept of school would seep out into community centres, old age homes and local businesses.  Students would work with peers of different ages and these localized schools would be connectivity hubs for their areas, providing digital literacy to both students and the community at large.  The majority of students would walk to these localized digital school houses rather than being herded on busses to age specific, remote locations.  Canada’s education service would also be a green revolution with a radically reduced school busing system no longer spewing diesel and making our roads less efficient in order to benefit an antiquated, age based school system.

Virtualization means that some teachers would spend the majority of their time providing their expertise through specialized instruction to a wider audience in cyberspace.  Augmented and virtual reality would have students and teachers meeting in immersive, meaningful ways not based on geographic proximity.  Advanced experiential simulations would offer students learning opportunities that today’s analogue, geographically limited systems can only dream of.  Rapid development of these systems and home connectivity provided by radically localized schooling means that remote teaching in a pandemic isn’t a disaster but an opportunity for enrichment.  In such a culture of learning, students and teachers wouldn't find reasons not to learn and teach during a crisis.

The various bureaucracies that have attached themselves to the current school system in order to defend it from politics would fade away as education becomes an essential service that self organizes around individual learning needs and instructional effectiveness.  As geographic groupings became less relevant and the benefits of wider networks of distributed expertise came into focus, the service would have an increasingly wider focus, eventually eclipsing national boundaries.  At some point in the distant future, a student in Ethiopia would be able to participate in a virtual class happening in Ontario, Canada, all of them operating under the same best pedagogical practices.  Education would finally become the great enabler in an interconnected world.

Until public education is unhitched from our increasingly myopic and self-serving political system and placed in a protected category of an essential service focused on maximizing individual potential, it will continue to limp along as a broken reflection of a society in distress, augmenting societal inequalities rather than mitigating them, and graduating generation after generation alienated from their own potential.

Ewan McGregor after visiting a school in Ethiopia on Long Way Down.  In places where education is still recognized as the opportunity it is instead of an expected government service that aggrevates privilege, students approach learning in a very different manner.

NOTES

The UN describes education as enabling "upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty", but it's the first thing cut to support 'financial experts' intentionally destroying the economy in western democracies.

Schools are poorly maintained on radically cut budgets, and classrooms limp along on equally eviscerated budgets (my program is enjoying a budget one-third of what it was five years ago, while trying to serve 25% more students).  

Ontario pays less than the Canadian average per student in public education, while also running the largest and most diverse (Ontario takes in as many new Canadians as the rest of the country combined) education system in Canada.  Canada itself pays significantly less tax per person than any other G7 country for education and other government services, but produces some of the highest education results in UN testing, beating all those other G7 countries that pay more for less.  And still, education is a political scapegoat.

Bending People to the Data

The idea of data driven learning has become very popular.  This isn't surprising since data is beginning to drive everything.  Where it becomes problematic is when data is manipulated for its own sake rather than for an intended purpose.

It's a complex series of events that have led us to this point.  We're living in an age of data where we are recording much of it for the first time.  We mistakenly describe this as 'creating information', but we've always done that.  What digitization does is allow us to save that data on a massive scale.

We're not creating any more information than we used to, but we are recording it now at an unprecedented rate.

We've been experiencing this information forever.  If I went for a ride on my motorbike in the 1950s I would have experienced roughly the same 'data' that I'd experience going for a ride now.  The difference now is that the go-pro on my helmet and youtube means that data is saved and shared.  We're not creating any more information than we did before, but we're recording it and allowing others to experience the data.

Since this mass recording and access to data is a relatively new phenomenon we should probably take care to contextualize it, but we don't.  We recognize that data driven methods yield results, but in our rush to enter this brave new world of data we happily ignore what doesn't suit our goal and take other data out of context if it serves our cause.  When politics or self-promotion drive data selection the benefits of data driven management are in doubt.

Since it is so much easier to record and share data we're tempted to structure our activities around data creation rather than genuine experience.  I suspect we'll get better at this as technology becomes less invasive and allows us to capture a moment with minimal interference.  The evolution from TV to video to go-pro video is a good example of this progress, as is the smartphone camera and Google Glass.  But in the early stages of this evolution we're still awkwardly focusing on data collection rather than genuine experience.  Selfies at the Tour de France this year are an example.  If you watch any sports event where people are focused on recording rather than experiencing the moment you'll know this is endemic.  From the World Cup to the Olympics, the focus on data collection gets in the way of being there.  This creates some interesting changes in experiential value.  You now need to share the experience rather than relating it after the fact.  Being there is less important than your recording of being there.  Every experience is one step removed.

Education is no different.  Rather than focusing on ways to capture genuine experience in as non-invasive a way as possible, we create artificial situations that produce data for its own sake; standardized testing is a fine example.  Rather than integrating literacy assessment into genuine experience, we create an artificial testing environment that is designed to produce data, students and the complexities of literacy are minor components of that process.  We then base management decisions on the corrupted data that is produced from these artificial situations.

If data collection is the point of the exercise, then the data you're producing is an analysis of data collection, not whatever it is you think you're assessing.

Technology needs to be pushed to produce non-invasive ways of collecting genuine data.  Not only will this allow people to bask in the moment rather than ignoring first hand experience to create second hand data, but it will also serve student learning by focusing on it instead of data gathering processes.  

We need to stop bending the people to the data and start demanding that the data find us where we are, in genuine experience.  In the meantime it is vital that we don't blindly believe that there is truth in data that is produced in self serving contexts.

The End of Public Education

What if public education was merely the result of the need
for factory workers in a newly industrialized society?  What
if education has never been anything more than an
expression of economic need?

I was directed to this interview about capitalism and education by the wise woman of twitter.  It always amazes me that intelligent people are able to see where society is going and can do nothing to avert the disaster.  History is rife with intellectuals warning of impending doom, but the doom happens anyway because the weight of social expectation crushes any individual insight.

You can find all sorts of people abolishing slavery before it finally turned into globalism and got hidden from sight in the third world.  Slavery was abolished and re-instituted for centuries, and still exists today because it provides an economic advantage to the rich.  If the rich can't use you, then society is changed to suit.  What is worrying about that article (which you really should read) is that the moneyed class no longer has need of a large swath of society.  If the public education system was created to support industrialization, it's about to lose that support as human capital becomes worthless.

"as automation and globalization renders whole swaths of the labour force useless to capital. .. From the perspective of capital, an ever-increasing portion of the population is no longer seen as a resource to be cultivated"

I believe that public education is one of the most powerful things we've ever created as a species.  It leverages more of our population to maximize their potential than anything else we've come up with (yes, even democracy, capitalism or free markets).  Even if it was slovenly economics that prompted it, the benefits of public education go well beyond making a few rich people richer.  What's worrying about that interview is that David Blacker has pretty much seen the future as it will unravel, though there is little we can do to stop the social momentum we carry.

His description of schooling is sickeningly accurate:

"in cities and other places, my argument is not that schools are going to dry up and blow away, that we will stop having things called schools. In fact, we might have quite well-funded places called “schools.” Prisons are more expensive than schools. So I think even though the things are called schools, their internal nature is moving further away from citizenship goals, forget learning for its own sake. Those institutions, their level of funding may even increase. To do surveillance and warehousing… maintenance of a school-to-prison pipeline can be quite expensive. So I wouldn't see an increase in funding of school systems and school employees and school buildings as any particular cause for optimism."

This warehousing is already happening in Ontario education.  The learning to eighteen laws enacted in Ontario in 2006 ensure that students are warehoused in schools until they are eighteen years old by placing punitive limitations on them to ensure compliance (parents and students can be charged for not attending school).  An increasing amount of money is spent in Ontario education every year to try and cater to a vanishingly small percentage of students who would rather be elsewhere, but the warehouse is where they must stay.  I'd suggest that the edutainment and student engagement push in education also caters to this kind of thinking.

The real crush comes when governments decide to cut education even while expecting it to move from a training to a holding role.  It's a no win situation for educators who are stuck between having to cater to high needs students who don't want to be students at all and a system that wants to cut their pay, demand extracurriculars and increase class sizes.  It's especially confusing when many teachers assume that their job is still one of teaching.  

The problem is that governments are treating schools more like prisons than they are schools, but when  you're trying to game an economy designed around the devaluation of human capital by forcing kids to stay in school, the increasingly worthless people (that would be all of us) are the ones who lose.  The only political cost is the vilification of teachers, something many people in the general public are happy to do.  In the meantime we're all trapped in a neoliberal agenda with no way out (unless you're Iceland).

We're not even arguing about the same thing any more, education isn't about teaching people or training them for jobs, it's about storing all that now worthless human capital.  If we accept that then the attack on teaching as a professional activity suddenly makes a very different kind of sense.

No Heroes & Distractions

I suspect the general public thinks that teaching is easy.  I'm not talking about classroom management, that everyone agrees is difficult, but teaching, the process of enabling learning, is generally seen as easy.  Anyone can tell someone else what to think, right?  Pretty much everyone has been through school, so they all know what it is and how it works.

I've talked about the terrifyingly vast concept of pedagogy before, but most lay-people have never heard the term and so don't know or care about its complexities.  Strangely, few teachers or administrators seem to want to talk about it either, but that's for another post.  The process of creating a rich learning environment is subtle, ever changing and very difficult; reflection is a good teacher's best defence against this challenge.  By constantly reflecting on our teaching, we hope to cull bad habits and maximize the learning environment around us.  Honest reflection isn't something that seems to come up much in PD either.

Normally pedagogy would be my focus, one of the joys of my job is how intellectually challenging it is.  I use this blog mainly to try and tackle the challenges of pedagogy in a rapidly changing technological situation, but for the past month I and many teachers I know in Ontario have been distracted by politics.  We have to be because the circus that is modern politics oversees our profession, and we are one of their favourite whipping boys.

Unlike heroic police officers, firefighters and doctors, teachers don't get a halo.  If the internet doesn't convince you of the banality of teaching turn on the TV.  How many heroic teacher shows do you see on there?  Emergency services are protected by their halo, and since we're all public servants it's pretty obvious who is going to get thrown under the austerity bus.  Whenever the political class decides to vilify public servants to collect some vapid public support we know it'll be us, hence the distraction.

The public perception is that teachers are overpaid, under-worked and largely clerical in what we do.  Unlike those men (and women, but let's face it, the hero professions have a male face to them) of action, teachers are presented publicly as female, supportive and administrative rather than as action heroes.  Any time a government wants to take a swipe at public servants teachers make an easy target, like last year when teachers across the province had their wages and benefits illegally stripped even as the OPP enjoyed big year on year raises; it's a financial emergency, but not for everybody.

In a climate like this our unions urged us to carefully consider our votes in strategic terms because the Ontario Progressive (sic) Conservative party had adopted tea-party American ideologies and was prepared to cut Ontario to pieces while following Michigan and the rust belt down the rabbit hole.  That urge to strategically vote worked very well encouraging many public servants to participate in this election, it also unified and focused non-conservative votes.  The result deposited the morally bankrupt Liberal party into a four year majority.  This was the same party that stripped contracts and forced work conditions through illegal legislation.  It's also the same party that will do what Hudak and the PCs promised, they just won't do it on an election year.

It begs the question, is it better to be stabbed in the front or in the back?

Teachers seem to be relieved by the Liberal win, but our profession with its poor public perception will be the first (again) to be thrown under the bus by Wynne and the Liberals.  It's ironic that the meritocratic Liberals are going to throw a world-class education system under the bus because of optics.  If we do our difficult job well it won't matter because ignorant people think we're lazy and poll chasing politicians can use that.  The social and political environment we've been draped in for the past two years makes basic positivity difficult, let alone cultivating an attitude of improvement, and improvement is where we have to be if we want to maintain our excellence and keep up with the technological revolution happening all around us.

There are a lot of ways we could make education more efficient in Ontario rather than just cutting people's wages and benefits and worsening their work environment.  When I first started teaching there was a guy who ran the Simpsons in his class and then sat in the English office eating his lunch at 10am.  He later got suspended for over a year while they reviewed claims that he'd slept with a grade 11 student.  They are a small minority in the system, but there are teachers who are incompetent or simply unsuited for the profession, and the system as it stands makes it almost impossible to remove them.  As a Liberal (that's a large L Liberal who believes in the values of liberalism rather than blindly voting for a political party) I'd be all for making the removal of incompetent teachers easier, though not if it's done by administrators who haven't been teaching for years or pencil pushers who have never taught a class in their lives.  Peer review by a group of experienced, working teachers would be a fair way of doing this, but if it ever does happen it'll be forced on us, probably by illegal legislation that punishes us for political advantage.  It would be nice to work in a system focused on excellence instead of political gain.

Then there is the whole weird duality of the Ontario public school system, but no one will touch that... the optics are bad, and you'll never pry a publicly funded private religious system out of the hands of a majority, even if the UN does object.  It's hard to consider hack and slash politics like Bill 115 fair when the system protects incompetent teachers and encourages very one sided religious favouritism.

There is a storm ahead for educators in Ontario and it's going to be hard to focus on the complexities of pedagogy, the challenges of technological change and all that social work that we do as people with little or no understanding of education make decisions based on optics rather than reason or fact. 

Doctors and nurses won't be expected to justify their profession, police officers and firefighters will continue to produce heroic television, and I'll be painted as a lazy clerical worker doing a job that anyone could do.  While all that's going on I'll do everything I can to prepare my students to hack a technocratic neo-liberal future that makes it harder and harder for young people to find good work and become independent.  The same thing stepping on our profession is stepping on our students.

Student Driven Curriculum

One of the nice things about teaching computer technology is that you tend to get a lot of fanboys in the class.  They're already giddy about the subject and keen to explore it (something sadly missing from many English students).  I'm hoping to harness that experience and energy this semester in senior computer engineering.

Ontario Comp-Tech, everything from programming to robotics!

Last summer I took my final, senior computer technology AQ, and we did a fair bit of focusing on curriculum expectations.  Those expectations are so broad that finding a teacher who is an expert in all of them would be pretty much impossible.  Fortunately for me I love being taught by my students (I'm as giddy and curious about comp-tech as they are).

Rather than present yet another linear, teacher-centric semester plan, we're going to have a con-fab and talk about how to address the curriculum expectations.  They are trapped in the prehistoric tree sap of Ontario Ministry of Education documents which, at best, make for dry, inaccessible reading for students.  To make it accessible I summarized the key points in a prezi.  When the semester starts tomorrow we're going to self organize around what we need and how we're going to reach the remarkably diverse goals of the computer technology curriculum.

Hopefully the prezi format will make the goals of the course more accessible and allow us to plan out an approach that gets to all the expectations while allowing students to self direct their learning - a vital skill in an engineer.

There are threads in the course that run through the many diverse fields found in the curriculum document.  The design process is one of those keys to engineering that will serve us well while we plan out how to approach our learning.


The engineering design process is basically a forced feed-back loop that self corrects, leading to a solution.  It would work on everything from essay design to project management - it also leads to successful engineering projects.

If it works for NASA, it'll work for us!

In our case we're going to apply it to the curriculum of our courses.  Based on the time we have, access to equipment and experience in the class, we're going to create a customized, student driven curriculum plan that (I hope) will also encourage student buy in.

I want to make our lab into a maker space, so my focus is going to be on facilitating equipment in order to feed hands on engineering projects.  As long as students are effectively exploring computer technology and expanding both their interests and the breadth of their knowledge, then I'm happy with the process.  My role will be to amplify their learning rather than direct it, and I hope to start that process with a self directed semester plan that we generate together next week.

While I'm at it, I'll also get some feedback on my expansion plans to computer technology.  Who better to ask than my target audience?

Straddling the Divide

I usually blog here to work out my thinking on a variety of education and technology situations I come across.  This one is no different.  I just read a series of suggestions for dismantling computer studies at our school.  I'm honestly curious as to the intention behind these suggestions, but in the meantime I'm trying to get the bees out of my head on this subject...

My school is odd in that it has a computer studies department.  This department is a combination of technology focused computer engineering credits (ICE/TEJ) and theoretical/math focused computer science (ICS) credits.  That our school combined these two very different disciplines into a single department has been both challenging and very forward thinking.

There is a push on now to align our headships with those of other schools.  Since the idea of a department that combines all aspects of computer technology under a single headship hasn't happened anywhere else, the urge is to dismantle computer studies.  The thinking behind this doesn't show a great understanding of what the computer subjects are (it was suggested the whole department just get put into business studies - a department that neither side of computer studies has anything to do with).  WIth so few people understanding what the fundamental computer subjects are, it makes it challenging to explain how things might evolve.  Ignorance drives many management decisions around digital technology education.

Trying to run computer studies has been a tricky ride.  Our computer science teacher only comes to our school for a semester, so the courses only run in the second half of the year.  On top of that other teachers aren't lining up to teach comp-sci.  Computer science would be better served in our school by being placed in our mathematics department and being taught by a variety of teachers, but then those teachers qualified in it should want to teach it and I get the sense that very few do.  

Computer science has been held captive by some strange teacher scheduling.  Attaching it to a larger department would be healthy for it.  I've tried to make moves in how and who teaches it, but nothing seems to have worked.  I'm frustrated and ready to hand it off.

Computer engineering is a hands-on technology course, much like auto-shop or manufacturing programs.  This course of study focuses on electronics and information technology.  Compared to computer science it's much more of a hands-on building and experimentally focused subject; it would logically belong with other technology credits.

The argument that we should re-align our headships with other schools feels like a step backwards to me though.  In five or ten years would our students be better served by a strong, comprehensive computer department, or by a traditional and arbitrary split in the subject?  Unfortunately, combining abstract mathematically focused computer programming with real-world engineering isn't easy, especially with how Ontario has handled teacher qualification in the subject.

Up until the past decade, computer science was the only computer qualification.  Like the guys in Big Bang Theory, the vast majority of computer science teachers have very strong theoretical backgrounds in the mathematics behind programming, but little experience in actually making computers work.  When computer studies was established as a technology course those theoretical computer science teachers were grand-fathered in as computer engineering teachers, though many of them had never installed a CPU in their lives and would have no idea where to even begin.  Asking them to provide onsite information technology support would be an impossibility for many of them.

That tech-ed certification took a mountain-load of paperwork
including industry certifications and proof of years of industry
experience.  If you were comp-sci when they brought it in, you
just got the certification...

So here we are in 2014 with many computer studies teachers who actually have little or no experience with the mechanical side of computing, though they have been given the OK to teach it.  This will eventually go away as those grand-fathered comp-sci teachers retire and future teachers will be expected to actually have an industry technology background in computers if they want to teach engineering.  In the meantime we've further muddied an emergent subject area that holds the key to producing  technologically fluent students who can function in the modern workplace.

What I suspect will happen with our forward thinking computer studies department is that it will be split and sent to math (comp-sci) and technology (comp-eng), and the onsite fix-it teacher role will not be considered a headship even though it manages just as much budget and far more equipment than any single department head.  This might be better for comp-sci, which has been dead-ended in our school as far as scheduling goes.  I don't think comp-eng will be hurt by moving to the tech department, so the splitting of the subjects into other areas doesn't really bother me, though it does make me wonder if we're moving in a direction opposite to social expectation.

I've been thinking about computer studies in terms of a specialization as well as a general fluency.  Perhaps future computer studies streams will include general technology fluency credits as well as specializations in engineering and coding, but I doubt it.  With computer fluency being a school (society?) wide expectation as well as the traditional fracture between computer science and computer mechanics, I fear that management energy will be spent on dividing and diminishing a subject that should instead be taking a central place as an integrated, adaptive department that produces 21st Century fluent graduates.

Mastery Learning, Digitally Empowering Idiocy & Being Humble Before the Task

I ended up presenting on what mastery learning is and what mastery might look like in digital realms at ECOO13 last week .   

HERE is the prezi.

Developing digital mastery in a digital world

The Humble Egotist: A teacher who encourages learning...

In untangling what digital mastery might look like I had to back up and describe mastery learning in general.  This ended up clarifying my ideas around the process of learning itself.  As much as we'd like to think we impart learning as teachers, the process itself is very much internal to the learner.  Teachers aren't nearly as central to the process as they like to think they are.

I started studying instructional technique when I was still a teen in air cadets and through coaching sports.  That progressed into technology instruction in business and then language instruction in Japan.  Finally getting my B.Ed. years later was just the latest in an ongoing personal journey to understand learning.

I'm self taught in so many things that I have trouble remembering being taught.  I've dropped out of every kind of education you can imagine, and finished some too.  I have real trouble with authority for the sake of authority and I've always found a strong element of that in teaching.  There is no doubt that a teacher can be an important influence in a young person's growth (I have several who were, we all do), but those people were never magical because they taught me something, they were magical because they enabled me to learn something.  No one else has ever been the architect of my learning, it has always failed or succeeded because of how I tackled it.  A good teacher looked at me and figured out how to enable my tendencies toward learning something effectively.  A bad teacher would sabotage my learning, usually because my hero worship wasn't up to their standards.

Teaching is a tricky business.  It takes a lot of self confidence to do the job, but it also takes a lot of humility to get out of the way and let people learn.  Self confidence and humility seldom co-exist comfortably in the same person.  The urge to sage on the stage is strong in a lot of teachers, they really enjoy the attention and the social status (no matter how staged it is).

Not unless you do it you don't,
learning isn't downloaded,
it isn't given, it isn't easy

But learning is an internal process, you can't have learning implanted in you (this was one of the reasons it seems so magical in The Matrix), as the learner you have to be the active agent, learning is hard work.   We confuse this with a lot of edu-babble about engagement and over-focus on how entertaining a teacher can be but this ignores the essential issue.  If a student doesn't want to learn then they won't.  The value of learning should be self evident.  It takes a colossal amount of work by the education system to assume responsibility for learning and hide the truth that students are the real agents of their learning.

During the ECOO presentation I described a good teacher as an awesome roadie, you can't even tell they are there until they adjust or fix something to better enable the show.  The learner is the one on stage doing the learning, a good teacher, like a good roadie, makes the show run smoothly but they aren't the main act.

I see far too many full period lectures with sages on stages.  Those people retire and are immediately back in the classroom because they miss the audience, they miss being in a socially constructed place where people have to listen to them.  They don't do much in the way of encouraging learning, but boy do they talk a lot, and they have no idea that students live in an information rich world and don't have to wait for the slow drip of a teacher's talk to learn a fact.

This isn't to say that the flipped classroom is the obvious way to manage this.  Learners have to internalize their own learning, but students who are many miles away from what they need to be broken out of their habitual patterns if they are going to learn something new.  Sometimes this takes a teacher who is the centre of focus in a classroom.

How do you manage a room full of digitally super charged ids?

This is especially true when educators attempt to integrate digital devices into learning.  Digital devices slavishly satisfy the desires of their users no matter how asinine or repetitive.  An idiot on a digital device becomes an empowered idiot.  A teacher can be a vital influence in breaking that destructive, repetitive cycle, but not if they are as habitual and limited in their use of digital tools as their students.  Being humble before the task of learning gets even harder in a digital environment where every stupid urge is moments away from being satisfied. The teacher cannot facilitate student learning in an environment that they themselves are also oppressed by.

One of the key pressure points in learning is breaking someone out of
habitual use in technology (the pink bit), but that's impossible if the
teacher is as habitual and illiterate as the student is...

If you've ever seen how many students (and  teachers) treat school computer labs you know what I'm talking about.  Rather than selecting the tool for the job, a teacher with low digital fluency will ask students to use computers as an analogue for something else.  The computer is treated like a book, or a paper and pen.  Booking a lab for this purpose is akin to renting a car to drive to the end of your street.  You're not using the technology for it's capabilities, you're using it to exacerbate your own habits.

That's assuming the teacher didn't book the lab as a digital babysitter while they get marking done (or so they could just surf the net in the same way as their students).  In those classes I'm having to replace vandalized computers and students may as well be at home doing whatever they do there online.  This damages digital fluency for everyone in the room by actually encouraging habitual usage, and it's expensive.

Trying to focus on learning is difficult in the hyper-personally empowering digital realm.

Developing mastery of any kind isn't a focus in education, trying to do it now with digital narcissism at every fingertip is even more difficult.  Classes are set with 50% credits and minimal expectations around attendance in order to facilitate pass rates.  In terms of digital mastery, administration seems to think this is about device access, but it's more about people, self-discipline and work habits.  Digital mastery falls back on the habits of the learner.  A strong, self-directed learner is empowered by a digital environment,  a weak, dependent one is impoverished by it.  For the strong it empowers their ability to learn, for the weak it offers them a constant stream of distractions so that they can stay in the most base, trivial, superficial and habitual parts of their minds.

 If we practiced mastery learning across education then digital mastery would follow.  If we took teaching digital fluency seriously (in both staff and students) we would have a chance at using technology to create amplified learners who are able to access information and self direct their learning at a rate unseen before.

Sometimes I wonder if we aren't dropping the digital football just to keep the traditional power structures in play.

note:  this is the 4th re-write of this post, it's an ongoing attempt to figure out some big ideas, I'm still not happy with it but I'm going to let it lie and move on.  I suspect I'll be trying to clarify the ideas in here in future posts.

Individual Education Plan

Many moons ago as I was finishing up my B.Ed. at Nippissing U. we got invited to an educational technology symposium for special needs students.  We were shown the (then) cutting edge Kurzweil speech to text software, fantastic education tools to use with Palm Pilots and other PDAs (!) and even early online access to text books.  I thought it was all wonderful, but I couldn't help but wonder why this technology was reserved for special education students, wouldn't everyone's learning have less friction with these tools?

Except you're not, are you? Some of you get individual
education plans, the rest get the system.

Today I'm going to the latest IEP meeting for my son.  As a teacher I've never understood the individual education plan in Ontario education.  Like that technology all those years ago, wouldn't every student benefit from an IEP?  Doesn't every student deserve one?  Aren't they all individuals?

I'm gong to argue for my child's special needs again today and wonder why I have to do that.  Is it so the school can do well on standardized testing?  Is it so my child isn't run over by a teacher who is determined to get him to conform to bench marks decided by the Ministry?  Is it so he can conform and be more easily manageable?  My son is not rude, or nasty, or dangerous, he is a delightful fellow who thinks laterally the way most people think linearly.  His problem isn't that he can't do things, it's that he does them differently from how most people do them.  Watching the education system try to force his circle into a square hole isn't easy.

As a parent I'm even more baffled by education than I am as a teacher.

A number of years ago my fearless wife demanded an IEP review.  It was grudgingly given, and after some expensive private psychological review (that many families would not be able to afford) a formal IEP was prepared.  At first I was against the idea, but as I continued teaching and saw the number of times a student is held academically accountable by teachers for circumstances beyond their control, I started to realize that an IEP is nothing more than a shield against a system intent on enforcing conformity; protection against teachers who think they are producing widgets instead of people.  Our nineteenth century school system is still building human cogs designed for production lines.  The fact that there aren't a lot of people working on production lines any more seems to have slipped their minds.

In these IEP meetings my son's educators are facing off against two parents with all sorts of familiarity with the system and credentials that help them deal with it.  What happens to the child who should have an IEP but doesn't because their parents are intimidated by the panel of 'experts' in front of them?  What happens to the student who doesn't have a parent who can get to those interviews?  Who wouldn't even think to ask for one because they are a single parent working sixty hours a week?

What about the student who is going through a nasty divorce at home?  The student being abused?  The student who has to work a full time job outside of school to support themselves?  The student who has fallen into drugs?  No IEP for them, though they need individual education plans every bit as much.

If every student in Ontario had an IEP what would it look like?  How would that change the process of teaching?  Instead of trying to catch students out or stream them for post secondary, what if every student was using an IEP to reach their maximum potential?  What if there were no standardized tests but individualized education was put at the forefront of everything we do?  What if there were no streams?  We're not in the factory business any more, almost no one is.  Robots do a lot of that work now.

The nail that stands up gets the hammer.

Years ago in Japan a student told me about a Japanese saying when I asked about conformity and how it's viewed there.  They told me, "the nail that stands up gets the hammer."  That kind of brick in the wall thinking might have served Western education in the last millennium, but it's a foreign way of thinking in a post-industrial world.

I'm going to walk into the education factory today and ask them to not hammer my son into a slot that he doesn't fit into.  Fortunately the IEP shield is in effect, so he's protected from the worst of the hammering (he just has to suffer the small day to day whacks).

I wonder what happens to all those kids who aren't individual enough to be entitled to an individual education plan.



Followup:  posted by a very forward thinking Ontario Educator this morning:

“The most effective way to provide enrichment to every student at a school is already in front of us. All children, in all schools, should have an IEP. Grade levels in classes should be eliminated. High stakes testing should be dropped. Lockstep schooling should be eliminated [to end comparison thinking] There would no longer be “third grade” or “tenth grade”. All students should work toward mastery learning. When they have mastered a skill they move on to the next one. When they finish the required and elective curriculum, they graduate. Slower learners are never “held back” . . . There is no grade to be in. . . . They learn at their own pace, moving through the learning at the pace at which they can show they have mastered the curriculum.” (189).
Jensen, Eric. (2006). Enriching the brain: How to maximize every learners potential.
San Francisco, USA: Jossey-Bass