The Failure of STEM

This has been taken apart and rewritten several times now.  It started with a colleague sharing an article about how STEM grads aren't particularly useful to STEM based industries.  I've long found STEM to be overly white collar focused and exclusive.  This article about how the predominantly wealthy, white, males of STEM aren't being benefited by their exclusively designed courses made me start to deconstruct my own experiences (mainly failures) in STEM, and led to this...

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What this actually means is Google isn't
happy with how we're teaching STEM?

I've seen several articles about how we need to produce less STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) focused students.  Most recently Google noted that the soft skills it needs aren't found in STEM focused students.  This isn't a function of the STEM subjects being taught, it's a function of how they are taught.  STEM has traditionally been treated as an exclusively academic discipline.  This white collar approach to STEM means that teachers focus on theory and academics to the exclusion of everything else.  If any applied activity does happen in a traditional STEM class it's a pre-conceived experiment with a directed, single outcome.  Students in many traditional STEM classrooms aren't given open problems to solve and generally don't tend to solve what they are given collaboratively.  Traditionally, STEM defines itself by heavy, repetitive, solo workloads.

Not so strangely, Google and other technology companies aren't finding these theoretically focused science-matheletes particularly good at actually building things, or working with other people.  In fact, Google has found STEM graduates lacking in all of the 4 C's that are generally considered vital for success in the 21st Century workplace.

Critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration aren't unique to the liberal arts, but when I was in high school one of the things that alienated me from maths and the sciences I wanted to make a part of my future was a stubborn disregard for all of those things.  My maths and science teachers made a point of grading based on theoretical knowledge and individual work, usually based on hours of daily homework that a kid working seven days a week found difficult to get to.  If group activity happened at all, anything that came of it was based on solo, theoretical analysis usually shunted to after school hours when I was busy working.  There was always a proper way to do something with very strict process guidelines - my STEM teachers thought that good students all hand in logically and visually identical hours of homework.

Perhaps it is my messy, and mocked liberal arts background has enabled me to approach STEM in an applied way that many STEM teachers find less academically rigorous, but then I don't think demanding thirty identical projects from my students to be particularly academically rigorous, I'd actually call it academically lazy.  That supposedly academically rigorous STEM program doesn't appear to be producing STEM grads that STEM industries find useful, though it is handy at making a socioeconomically homogeneous STEM culture.

Who this homework heavy, compliance based learning does benefit are the socially enabled, neuro-typical alpha academics - the kids who tend to look like the white, middle-class, neuro-typical people who populate STEM jobs.  These students are pre-selected for STEM success because homework is the only work they have to do, and they play for grades because they have a socioeconomic status that allows them to focus on school work to the exclusion of everything else.  Socially enabled, neuro-typical, wealthy, white, North American males tend to fall into STEM for these reasons.  The party line is that these are the best students.  The fact that they all tend to come from the same background is a happy accident.

As a neuro-atypical student from a lower SES, I was preordained to struggle with STEM.  Expectations of hours of homework, easily picking up the mathematics and the promise of some exclusive future in STEM industries which my family had no experience with had no currency with me and seemed designed to diminish me.  When you come from a lower income background you tend to be pragmatic.  Being an immigrant with ASD and constantly wondering why people are doing what they are doing tends to make you pretty damned pragmatic too.  I have always been proud of my hands-on skills and how they have provided for me, but now I realize that those skills are a necessity of my socio-economic status as much as anything else.

I just finished reading Guy Martin's autobiographical When You Dead, You Dead.  Guy has always had an impact on me because he's an ASD technician who has stumbled into celebrity.  Guy is fiercely proud of his hands-on skills and still considers being a mechanic his primary focus even though he is also a successful motorcycle racer and television personality.  Any neuro-typical person would drop the dirty work and immediately double down on the celebrity, but not Guy.  I identify with him because he too comes from a lower SES and has found success in spite of various social pressures against him.  Between this book and the research for this piece, I'm left with the belief that STEM is what it is because it has been designed to knock all but a certain class of people out of succeeding in it.  If we're wondering why wealthy, white males constitute the bulk of our academically focused, homework heavy STEM programs, then this singular focus on socio-economically enabled, homework intensive, conformity driven learning is a clear reason.

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A senior student build presentation to lead junior engineers
through why communication and collaboration can lead to
better creativity and problem solving.  Exactly what Google
feels is missing from STEM graduates, but mine learn it.

This semester I'm teaching another packed to capacity class of software engineering students.  As a kid who dropped out of computer science because he wasn't good at doing everything by someone else's exclusively particular and time consuming rules, this might seem odd.  However, my software engineering class isn't designed to chase students out with steep academic demands.  In fact, my students range from essential to applied to academic, and they will all see success and feel that STEM is something they are capable and worthy of.

Applied engineering courses, especially in software, are thin on the ground, but they are exactly what we need to be doing to fill the gap between what we're graduating and what companies like Google need.  Academically focused STEM teachers need to recognize that they can't keep producing one trick ponies who are only good at being in school.  That skill-set becomes useless the moment you graduate, and while they are producing graduates people find difficult to work with, they are excluding the majority of students who should have at least a passing acquaintance with STEM as it has so much influence over our lives.

“We don’t want to just increase the number of American students in STEM,” President Obama said in March. “We want to make sure everyone is involved.”

On the left is a slide from one of my grade eleven student's introductory presentations to the course.  Her skills are well rounded and jump all over the look-fors Google wants.  The purpose of these presentations is to get hired into student designed and built projects that run in the second half of the semester.  These feel like job interviews as everyone in the room is looking for who they can most effectively work with, they feel high stakes and important.  The last thing on anyone's mind are hard technology skills or a lack of theoretical knowledge.  Some of the juniors worried about it in their presentations, but as one of the seniors said while teaching the seminar on Friday, "if you can listen and work with us, we can teach you the technical stuff."  And that work will happen in class, not on your own time in the hours after school.

This course has been packed to cap with 31 students each
semester over the past 2 years while academic senior science
classes run half full - prejudice in action? Students recognize that
this course teaches them the tangible skills needed to get into
competitive post-secondary programs in the field.  Many of
our graduates can attest to that now that we're in year four.
Most of them are applied students in college.

I've worked hard these past five years to develop a program that helps students from all streams into a working relationship with computer technology.  I've graduated a number of engineers in a variety of disciplines, which is very satisfying, but my greatest successes have been enabling applied students to find their genius in technology.  Those students, overlooked or punished for their lack of academic prowess in other STEM classes, find themselves winning provincial competitions and going on to successful careers through college programs.  As Obama suggests, STEM should be for everyone.

The engineers were always going to find their way (and unsurprisingly they have all been socially empowered middle class white males), but enabling a student who was never considered STEM and who had been labelled essential to find her genius in electronics and gain access to a competitive post-secondary college program?  That feels like the kind of magic STEM is capable of.  It's what drives me.

Helping another into a technically challenging digital arts program with almost impossible entry requirements?  Yet another STEM refugee finding her way back to what she has a talent for.

Taking a student from struggling to show up to school to finding his genius as an IT technician, winning a provincial championship and going on to succeed in a challenging post-secondary program?  He was considered mediocre by other STEM programs.

Unsurprisingly, a number of ASD and other neuro-atypical students find their way to me because I give them a space to express their love of technology and the science that supports it without the arrogance and exclusivity.  All of these disenfranchised people are who STEM should have been helping in the first place.  Computer technology programs like mine run in less than 30% of Ontario high schools.  For the vast majority of Ontario students, you better be well off and able to spend hours a night on homework to prove yourself STEMworthy.  If you live in a conservative area like I do, you also better be male, because those science and technology jobs are for boys.

All Ontario graduates, regardless of gender, race, SES or neuro-atypicality need flexible and inclusive access to STEM programs, and those STEM programs need to be about so much more than theoretically intensive, homework heavy courses designed to chase economically disadvantaged and/or neuro-atypical kids out of the STEM classroom.  My son is heading to high school next year and it is through his ASD that I've come to better recognize my own.  I fear most for him in STEM classrooms.  I remember how it felt to be told I was incapable in science and math.  Getting the STEM dreams beaten out of me in high school took years to unravel and repair, and I'll carry the bruises my entire life.

Every graduate we produce should have some grasp of STEM as it's a vital 21st Century need.  STEM needs to be accessible to everyone regardless of their circumstantial ability to deal with expectations founded on abusive, compliance driven workloads.  This would not only prevent the pre-selection of circumstantially advantaged students making STEM programs more diverse, it would also make STEM programs more functionally useful to the industries that need these graduates.

We've designed a system that creates a stunted skillset that only does a few things well.  In doing so we've done a disservice to dimensionless STEM graduates who industry finds impossible to work with.  While that is going on, the majority of students are chased out of STEM because of a mythology of academic stringency that is really based on socioeconomic circumstance.  Our STEM education appears to not be working for anyone.

If there was ever a time to re-vamp how we teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics, this is that moment.  In the 21st Century we need everyone to have a working knowledge of STEM as it touches all our lives all the time.  We also need to diversify the pool of STEM experts in order to create a resilient and creative industry that reflects the people it serves.  Then there are all the applied STEM jobs we aren't able to fill because academically focused STEM programs ignore them.  The obvious place to start is in public high schools where we need to stop pre-selecting for a dangerously homogeneous STEM population that is increasingly unable to understand, let alone represent the interests of us all.


Some Research on how we've handled STEM:

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1144312   "...low-SES students are disadvantaged in the pursuit of STEM majors. Higher family SES compensates for negative predictors of STEM enrollment, such as gender and race, and strengthens the effect of positive predictor, such as math preparation. The gender and racial gaps in STEM enrollment narrows for students from higher SES families, and the positive correlation between math preparation and STEM enrollment strengthens with the increase of family SES"

How Socioeconomic Inequality Affects STEM Education:  "schools give “unequal access to rigorous mathematics content” between low- and high-income students" - the correlation between SES (socioeconomic status) and Ontario's streaming system in high school is well established.  We save the rigorous mathematics for the socially empowered kids, so they get the nice STEM jobs.  Except evidently we're not even doing them any favours.

STEM Education: "...gender disparities continue to be a defining characteristic of STEM education."

The STEM Workforce: An Occupational Overview:
"In STEM, there is under-representation of women and minorities; where minorities and women are employed they are often concentrated in lower-paying technical occupations."
"Black and Hispanic or Latino STEM professionals still earned thousands of dollars less than White and Asian STEM professionals in 2014."

Understanding the STEM Path through High School and into University Programs: "...key determinants of the decision to stay on the ‘STEM preparation path’ are the students’ previous grades in science and math, especially at the point when the subject becomes optional."   ... and especially in the sciences.  

I'll take a swing at this one.  The "gatekeepers of university" I met as science teachers in grade 10 and 11 failed me despite my obvious interest in the subject.  The main reason I didn't get the grades I needed in STEM courses was because working 20+ hours a week (I was helping pay for my family's mortgage) meant my homework was never as shiny as the wealthier kids whose job was homework.  Having ASD, I also had problems understanding and meeting the very specific communications conventions that others seemed to grasp intuitively.  Those gatekeepers are still alive and well in high school math and science classes all over the province now.  Want to know why lower SES students aren't in STEM?  It's reserved for the neuro-typical rich.  A lower SES kid touched by ASD never had a chance.

That fake sense of 'academic credibility' tied to an inflexible schedule that caters to wealthier students' ability to concentrate on studying to due dates means the kids who don't have to work or worry about food or a safe place to spend the night get to be successful.  The digital divide has only exacerbated this since my time in school  The neuro-atypical kids who need extra time to grok the material?  They too are excluded.  Ultimately, if you want to be in something intellectually demanding like STEM, you need to be advantaged.  That is why STEM is predominantly an upper class, white, male field.

Science minister, Trudeau encourage young girls to pursue STEM studies at U of T conference:
"We are committed to strengthening science in Canada by improving the representation of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines,”
“We try to shake the stigma attached to studying math that many young women experience in high school,”
Science Minister Kirsty Duncan

Equality And Diversity Toolkit: socio-economic background:  "Those facing the greatest inequality are more likely to be young people who are disabled, from lower socio-economic backgrounds, refugees, ethnic minorities, asylum seekers, Gypsies and Travellers, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and young mothers."

THE INEXCUSABLE LACK OF DIVERSITY IN GENETIC STUDIES:
"Whites of European ancestry still make up the vast majority of subjects in large genetic studies — over 80 percent."

Business is now dominated by white, privately educated 'tech bros' – and that's bad news for the rest of us


Neil deGrasse Tyson: Scientific Illiteracy Threatens U.S.

These are just a few of the articles and research I found on a lack of diversity in STEM.  If you don't like these links, there are thousands of others.

An experiment:  

Googling Scientist produced 40 identifiable people.  23 of them (58%) are white males.

Googling Engineer produced 46 identifiable people, 42 of them (91%) white males.

The Essential Catchall

I've raged against the inflation of grades and streaming to minimize expectations on otherwise capable students before.  I'm at the end of another semester of teaching essential students and once again I've been injured by the process.  Just as in last year's essential English class, I'm given a single class with mixed grade elevens and twelves (because teaching essential classes is easy?).  In that split focused class are a majority of genuinely essential level students who need close support and a lot of one on one attention to manage the work.  This I have no trouble with.  These students tend to be very genuine and eager, but have trouble thinking through what needs to be done.  They make me feel valued as a teacher, which is lovely.  In all cases when I bump into them in the hallway outside of class we have positive and supportive interactions with each other.

Hidden among these students (the ones least able to resist their animosity) are capable students who have matriculated into essential classes because they have failed academic and applied courses in previous years.  They haven't failed these classes because of an inability to manage the learning, they simply haven't done it.  These students tend to have months of absences in a semester and when they do show up you can expect disruption, disrespect and constant sabotage.  At the end of it all is an expectation to pass these students (usually with a fifty), even though they have been a poison in the room.

Needless to say, teaching in an environment like this (in a split three way classroom with a handful of saboteurs who have been carefully moulded by a system seemingly intent on not expecting anything from them) isn't an enjoyable experience.  Halfway through the semester I had to fill out my annual learning plan and I ended up asking that the essential classes I had been working to begin for years be stopped.  If it means not catering to using essential classes as a catchall for miscreants, then I will happily make a place for genuinely essential students in my open M level classes and look after them better there without them having to sit next to a learning troll.

These poisonous apples are a tiny portion of our school's population, I'd guess no more than thirty students out of almost thirteen hundred, but they damage whole rooms of learners and diminish the school's ability to function.  In some cases they are hanging around the school to sell drugs, in others they are hanging around the school simply because no one else expects anything of them either.  The rest of us are going to end up spending the rest of our lives paying for these people, and the system seems intent on teaching them that they can do what they want and expect no consequences.

I've watched these students accumulate months of absences without any observable consequence.  When they are in class you can expect them to walk in twenty minutes late (and after initial instruction), actively disrupt any work others are doing, take twenty minute toilet breaks and then walk out early without permission.  I'm told I'm supposed to spend my lunch giving them an in-class suspension, but they refuse to attend those too.  In any case, I usually leave my room open for the other 99% of students who want to do something productive.  Given a choice I'll look after that vast majority.  Meanwhile, back in class, I've watched these lost boys maliciously and intentionally break technology in my shop, driving up the costs of what I'm trying to do with no discernible benefit to anyone, themselves included.  That's the saddest part about this, they are wasting their own potential and no one seems to want to do anything about it.

Ontario's Bill 52:  Learning until 18, was obviously instituted with the best interests of all students, including those who would previously have dropped out, but there is benefit in having a student leave school if they are unable to make use of what is still a fairly inflexible education system.  Changing this bill to learning until 16 with a variety of options beyond sabotaging high school classrooms would be a logical step forward.  Giving apprenticeships and work to these students might prompt them to care enough make productive use of their potential.  It would also stop the system from punishing vulnerable and genuinely essential level students by dropping delinquents into their midst because the only response to a failing grade in our rigid education system is to move the offender into a different stream.


There is nothing inherently wrong with Ontario's streamed high school system except what politics has done to it.  With some rational adjustments we could fix this for those students who have lost the ability to develop their own potential, as well as everyone else.  Going to work and getting dirty and tired for a couple of years did wonders for my educational motivation.



NOTE:  It appears the TDSB is trying to manage this problem: "students who study at the applied level in Grade 9 are less likely to graduate and streaming has led to inequitable outcomes for marginalized students."

As I mention above - marginalized students are matriculated from academic to applied and then essential level classes because the only way the education system assesses students is on how well they can adapt to the academic stream in high school.  Anyone unable or unwilling to sit in rows in a room of 31 students and work out of a text book quickly finds themselves bumped down this fictional ladder of capability, eventually ending up in essential classrooms with students who genuinely struggle with curriculum.  We might have started streaming as a means of differentiating instruction and offering a less generic classroom, but it has turned into a punitive process driven by cost cutting.  The problem with addressing socio-economic and other student specific inequalities is that it takes resources, and resources cost money we don't have because we had to bail out banks and multinationals.

"Although the Ontario government promised “zero tolerance” for bad behaviour in schools before the Safe Schools Act was enacted, and the Act prescribes “mandatory” suspensions and expulsions, the presence of mitigating factors in the current legislation precludes it from being strictly characterized as “zero tolerance”. Likewise, although the TDSB Safe Schools Foundation Statement Policy speaks of “zero tolerance” and “mandatory” suspensions and expulsions, the direction to principals and teachers to apply mitigating factors in disciplinary matters precludes it from being strictly characterized as “zero tolerance”. The real issue is whether there is a practice of “zero tolerance”."  The Ontario Safe Schools Act: School discipline and discrimination  Safety is secondary to reducing parent blowback and paperwork (there is less when you don't suspend a student).  The result is an inflation in unchecked poor student behaviour that spreads from a tiny percentage of students into the general school population.  A lack of alternative options for these students exacerbates the situation.  The goal should be intervention and directed support to get them back on track, not benign indifference.

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.

Positively Encouraging: Teachers Doing No Harm

In another confluence of events I'm reflecting on just how much of an effect teachers have on a student's trajectory.  A misread tweet on how damaging assessment can be was followed by a post on Google+ and punctuated by a graduated student showing up unexpectedly this week.  It all got me thinking about how damaging to students teachers can be.

I got into computers when I was ten years old.  By the time I was twelve I'd published code and was writing my own programs.  It took a single dismissive remark by my computer science teacher to knock me off that trajectory for years.

I did grade ten computer science on a freaking computer punch card reader and did well.  I'm not a mathlete and struggled with the theory, but as a hands on coder I'm more than capable - I sympathize with the machine and understand what it needs.  In grade eleven we finally got to move to 286x86 IBM PCs and I was very excited.  I'd signed up for grades eleven and twelve in consecutive semesters, but after the math teacher running the program basically turned it into a math course, I didn't do very well.  When I walked into the grade twelve class in semester two he looked down his nose at me and said, "Tim?  Really?"  I dropped the class shortly thereafter.  If you asked him now he'd probably say he was doing me a favour.  He did me no favours.

Last week I had a young man drop by who graduated a couple of years ago.  He asked me if I remembered what our computer science teacher at the time had said to him in grade eleven.  He'd basically done to this kid what my computer science teacher did to me.  Jake said he bounced back because I essentially designed our new software engineering course around his suggestions, which encouraged him not to give up on his love of coding; he's about to finish the programming course at Conestoga and he's debt free because his game studio is making him enough money to pay for his college.  Teachers who have never published anything telling people what they can and cannot do really get on my nerves.

This student and I both tend toward a right-brained approach to things, thinking laterally and often intuitively about problem solving.  We're foreign beasts to predominantly left brained math and science types.  That linear, concrete thinking allows left brained teachers to place a lot of faith in grades - they believe that they are something more than a vague, abstraction of a student's abilities.  When these mathlete computer science types look down their nose at you in condescension, they believe that the D they gave you means something.  I would posit that their certainty makes them a liability in any classroom.

Becoming a high school teacher was never a goal of mine.  With a few exceptions I didn't enjoy school when I was in it and I certainly wasn't aiming to make a career of it.  Now that I find myself teaching I'm constantly aware of just how damaging those gatekeepers in my own background were.  

In grade ten I wanted to be an astronomer more than anything else, but a series of science teachers made a point of crushing that dream.  I'm hardly stupid, and I was willing, but it was their way or the highway and I don't bow to authoritarianism very well, especially when my scrappy, experimental approach to problem solving bares fruit.  They didn't like that I struggled to a solution myself rather than following the well trodden path of 'the right answer'.  In retrospect, and with some pedagogy to back me up now, I'd wager that my hard won answer is still with me today while the A+ students who memorized the process have long since forgotten it.  Learning is supposed to be messy.

When you think in absolutes you have the potential to do some real harm to children.  Every day I make a conscious effort to consider how what I'm saying will encourage genuine learning in my students.  I'm not an easy teacher, and often have the biggest friction with the A+ crowd who just want to know what to write so they can do what they're told and get that A plus they've become accustomed to.  In those cases I celebrate their efficiency while expanding their resiliency.  You don't need to belittle someone because they do things differently to you.

As teachers we could do a lot worse than following the Hippocratic oath doctors use.  If at any point you think you're helping a student by disciplining them with assessment, you're not - that was the subtext of my tweet to the Ministry.  

If at any point you dismiss a student's approach to a subject because it's not the same as yours, you're protecting yourself more than you are helping your student.  In my experience this approach is usually founded on a lack of confidence in your own abilities.

Try and be what you're supposed to be: the adult in that student's life who can dispassionately see their potential and then do everything possible to realize it.  This can be much harder work than simply attacking kids with numbers because they don't conform to your process, but it's much more rewarding.

So many secondary teachers fall into a comfort zone around their familiarity with their subject and are unwilling to see any other way to do it.  It might take a bit of lateral thinking, but seeing the value in how a student approaches a subject instead of assessing them based on how closely they follow your methods would be a significant pedagogical step forward.  We'd suddenly be assessing how they are grappling with their learning rather than forcing our methodology on them, and that would mean far fewer teachers slamming the door in student's faces with or without realizing it.

Facilitators

This provocative article was shared on Facebook recently.  Teachers sharing and talking about education during March Break, I know, crazy, right?

There is an technologist slant to this article that, like everything else people do in the age of information, reduces complex human interaction into a simplistic informational exchange.  We fall into this trap in every age we live in.  When society was church based we defined ourselves as souls and saw ourselves as intangible spirits in a material world.  When we industrialized people started to see themselves as machines.  In the information age, unsurprisingly, we treat ourselves like computational nodes in a network.  We always seem trapped in our sense of self by the reflection our society casts casts back at us.  In every case we're taking what we are and reducing it to the limitations of the flawed technology we are producing.

By forcing our definition of people to fit the technology at hand we make humans an integral and exploitable part of that technology.  If you can reduce complex human social interaction into simplistic social media exchange and centralize the profits from those interactions you've made a fortune.  The same companies doing this do everything possible to avoid paying taxes to support the societies providing that data.  This is one of the best examples of business leaching off society (other than the stock market itself) that I can imagine.

The fortune to be made reducing students to data is often dressed up under the guise of happier more engaged children, but in my experience the self directed learning suggested by the author of this article is neither efficient nor particularly engaging. Self directed learning requires the kind of focus, self discipline and appreciation of future benefit that most children are incapable of because they haven't developed that bit of their brains yet.  

Many adults are equally stymied by self-direction.  For most, getting into a directed course of action means happily surrendering free will in order to work out of habit.  This a much less stressful way to live a life.  Developing routines and sticking to them means you get to off-load responsibility for the outcomes of those routines onto the people or devices that manage them.  Being able to complain about this while taking no responsibility for what is happening (you're a helpless cog in the system) is one of the most cathartic things your typical human being does in modern society.  Schools are a favorite target of the lazy or aimless; an easy institution to hate because they are trying to develop you into a more fully functioning human being against your every effort.

The brave new world of self directed child geniuses being monitored by cheap, non-professional facilitators that require no special training get a lot of neo-liberals excited about the cheap and engaging de-institutionalized future of education. In the coming age of machine intelligence, computers will do all of the thinking and management. Human beings won't have to do anything more than assimilate with those machines... and complain about them. 

Perhaps this writer has a point.  In 20 years when AIs are doing the jobs of most of the non-specialized workforce, why waste money educating them? Students can go to school and perform the same mind numbing habitual activities they do at home. Once we've achieved this nirvana we will have taken the final step toward becoming nothing more than the technology we create.  We will then have truly found the end of history.

Trust

I came across this excellent article by the Harvard Business Review about how trust relates to productivity in business. It turns out trust goes a long way towards creating a productive learning environment with students as well.  Trust doesn't end in the classroom though.  Between teachers in a building, across entire school boards and in the education system in Ontario as a whole, trust is the cement that turns us from individuals into powerfully focused groups. After reading that article I couldn't help but wonder at the damage done by the aggressive politics that drive out of date and combative management practices in education.

This week we were handed a remedy for a court case won by teacher's unions in Ontario. In 2012 the Ontario provincial government decided to ignore the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and deny the right to strike and force a contract on teachers in the province because bankers had tanked the world economy a few years before and the government's way to fix that was to vilify and then bleed public employees dry.

You couldn't pick a finer example of broken trust within an organization. After a miserable late 1990s under a tea party style conservative government that was bound and determined to diminish the teaching profession in Ontario, the Liberal party was ushered in and a decade of rebuilding occurred. In that time Ontario shot up the ranks in terms of world education. Suddenly, in 2012, in a desperate attempt to garner conservative votes, the Liberal party chose to ignore the Canadian Charter - the document at the foundation of our democratic rule of law - and force a contract on teachers, just to move some money around on ledgers so it appeared that they were more fiscally conservative. The strips to sick days actually cost Ontario more even before the government lost the court case and had to pay restitution. It was a case of desperate and illegal law making and profound mismanagement.  The people responsible have never apologized.  If your boss did that would you trust them?

Since then trust has been thin on the ground in Ontario's education sector, yet this article on trust goes to great lengths in underscoring just how important it is to create a transparent, consistent and reasonable relationship between the members of an organization:

"Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy, collaborate better, suffer less chronic stress & are happier - these factors fuel stronger performance"

Having worked in the private sector for fifteen years before coming a teacher, I'm often surprised at how unenlightened management practices in education are. Perhaps it's simply a byproduct of being managed by politics rather than productivity.  In any case, the mismanagement of Ontario's education system over the past few years is neither cheap, nor productive.

I've worked for my current employer for over ten years.  In that time I only ever asked for a single exception to being expected to come in to work every day.  In 2012 my mother committed suicide.  I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a result but was expected to be in class teaching volatile teenagers.  I went to my principal and asked for help.  She called HR for me to navigate the process but we were told by a senior manager, "we have people at work who have had a heart attack and have cancer, what makes you so special?"  I went back to work with images of mopping my mother's remains off the floor still floating before my eyes.  The only saving grace in this was my principal, who did everything she possibly could to mitigate the damage done by the board.  You can you imagine my level of trust with my employer since then.

This month I just got back from surgery.  I went back to work 2 days before I should have because we are only allowed 3 days off before needing to contact HR - something I wasn't going to do.  I'd lost so much blood due to this surgery (sinuses, it isn't a nice one) that I passed out at the end of the school day while stacking chairs in my classroom.  I woke up on the floor in a puddle of blood, cleaned myself up and went home and called in sick again. Damaged trust isn't easily forgotten and can put people in ridiculous situations that need not occur.

Mismanagement has a trickle down effect.  Board level administration is required to support and enable Ministry dictates, no matter how politically arbitrary, damaging to learning or asinine.  School level administration ends up in a frictional relationship with their teachers as a result of this trickle down distrust.  The end result is that people tend to duck and cover.  It's difficult to get people to raise their heads out of their classrooms and collaborate on anything because they doubt the veracity of the people who manage them.

"when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves. A Google study similarly found that managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work."

Trust creates a bond between teacher and student and student and peer.  Knowing you're working with someone who has your best interests are at the centre of what they do makes learning more effective.  A teacher who students can't trust is a poor teacher.   Students don't know what to expect or what is expected from them.  A teacher who surprises students with tests, sometimes on material not comprehensively covered in class, is a teacher students shy away from.  For the rest of us who are trying to establish a trust relationship with our students in order to empower their learning, these teachers are a cancer on the profession.

When you think about your favorite teacher I doubt it's because they gave you a high mark, or because they were hard to figure out.  Teachers that enable us are honest, direct and help us to exceed our own expectations of ourselves.  Trust isn't a nice idea in those cases, it is the foundation of the entire process.  After reading that article I now realize that trust is actually a mechanical process hard wired into how humans think; it's the mechanism that makes us so socially powerful.

Enabled, energized people in an organization, be it a board of education or a classroom, want to engage.  Engagement is a big buzz word in education right now.  It occurs in high trust organizations naturally.  If it isn't happening in your school or classroom look to how you are developing trust to see why it isn't happening.  Demanding engagement is a sure way not to generate any.

"Once employees have been trained, allow them, whenever possible, to manage people and execute projects in their own way. Being trusted to figure things out is a big motivator: A 2014 Citigroup and LinkedIn survey found that nearly half of employees would give up a 20% raise for greater control over how they work."

I'm at my best in a classroom when I'm able to define goals, ensure students have fundamental skills in place and then give them the time, space, equipment and positive encouragement to figure it out for themselves.  This light-handed approach means that when they get something to work they feel that they've figured it out themselves.  This is very empowering.  Another benefit of this light handed approach is that I'm not so focused on talking at everyone that I'm able to see what individual students need to move forward.  I'm happiest when a student learns things they weren't able to do before and feel that they did it themselves.  I know I'm important to the process, but students need to feel engaged and enabled in order to own their learning.  Trust powers that process.

My school and board is at its best when we have clear, tangible goals and decisions are made transparently and rationally.  The more this happens, the more effective these institutions become as places of learning, and the more I trust the people who are leading me.  When I trust my leader there is little I won't do for them because I feel that we're all working toward the same goal.

Much of the article that kicked off this blog post drills into the neuro-science of trust.  We are social animals hard wired to use trust as a means of working effectively together.  If we want to best make use of our powerful social habits, building trust is where we should be concentrating our efforts, especially within the entire educational apparatus where trust is (or isn't) the glue that binds us together in the complex social task of teaching and learning.

https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust

The gallows humour of Despair.com is mostly based on people identifying with how
little trust there is in their workplace.

Institutionalizing Success and Teaching Millenials

This was shared online this week and it prompts some thinking about how we deal with the generation we teach.

Simon Sinek

Four social circumstances that have millennials struggling:

1) Failed parenting strategies include children being told they are special and can do whatever they want just because they want it.  They have won awards their entire lives for simply showing up.  This award inflation devalues excellence and embarrasses the failures these children experience.  They've learned not to strive for excellence because it doesn't matter.
2) Technology: Millennials are surrounded by filtered social media where everyone appears to have it figured out and puts on a good face.  On top of that they have the same relationship with social media as a gambling addict has with a casino, except this addiction is only ever a touch away.
3) Impatience:  They want to reach the summit and have a 'big impact' but are unaware that the summit lies at the top of a mountain.  Is this related to number one?
4) Environment:  Companies (and schools?) should be rebuilding the confidence and resilience of this generation by reconnecting them to personal relationships and long term goals.  This means stepping up to combat number 1, something that most school administration really isn't willing to do.

Now imagine standing in front of thirty one of them.

I've struggled with the vagaries of the millennial mindset in the classroom many times over the past few years.  From the grade inflation of risk averse learners and five-ohs to the complaints of industry, I'm familiar with the millennial challenges Sinek refers to in his interview above.

Battling these frankly bewildering and fictionally driven parenting strategies seems to be a lost cause for most educators.  Since banks and multi-nationals decided to burn the economy down and cause years of austerity, education (and governments in general) have taken on business-think in an unprecedented manner (some kind of Stockholm syndrome?).  The modern approach seems to be 'the customer is always right even if they have no idea what they're doing'.  Rather than expecting competence on the part of the student I often find myself defending a failing grade from a student who has never completed any work at grade level and has missed weeks and weeks of class.  Parents don't want to hear that their child is incapable and they certainly don't want to accept responsibility for that incompetence.  Their only goal seems to be finding ways to blame anything else.

We're not doing a lot of either these days.

Technology is another place where education has thrown in the towel.  Students can do whatever they want with their devices.  Any attempt to redirect a student away from inappropriate technology use is wasted as these devices are now considered to be a constitutional right.  It isn't uncommon for me to ask a student to focus on what we're doing and have them tell me they are in the middle of a text conversation with their parents which is obviously much more important than whatever's happening in class.  They're probably planning a two week absence from school for a holiday - another exciting new millennial parenting tactic that would have been foreign to my parent's way of thinking.  Sinek's no smartphones in a meeting rule wouldn't fly in a modern classroom.  You can't helicopter parent without the tether.

How education is becoming less able
to manage these dangers we face.

Patience isn't lost in all students but even the most capable are dwindling in attention duration.  At the beginning of our last unit I showed exemplars of previous projects done over the past few years.  The top student in my class asked, "are people getting dumber and dumber?"  Good question.  They certainly seem to be less and less capable of developing skills complex enough to tackle curriculum level theory and practice.  Perhaps if they weren't taking weeks of unexplained absences and holidays during the semester things would be better.  Perhaps if they were expected to attempt all course work to the best of their abilities skill-sets wouldn't be deteriorating.

In modern high schools students take the courses they want, not the ones they are capable of.  Students who fail advanced courses get a variety of options to regain the credit and are seen at the same level next year regardless of how little they've proven they can do.  Parents demand access to advanced classes for students who barely find time to attend school and are unwilling to actually do anything.  If I fail anyone I have to justify the failure, not so the absent, incompetent student.  Even trying to offer a range of courses doesn't work because everyone is an academic all-star who should be getting the most advanced credits.

The complaint from people in post secondary education and the work place is that we're producing graduates incapable of working effectively in the 'real world'.  Sinek's comments go straight to this.  Any absence or student failure isn't an administrative issue; the system won't even address it.  There used to be a limit on unexplained absences and then a student was kicked out of a course, that doesn't happen any more.  There used to be criteria for failing late work, that doesn't happen any more.  There used to be requirements for staying within an academic stream, now it's do whatever you want.  When a student is absent or obtuse teachers are told to contact the parents who caused the situation in the first place and work it out.  In Ontario this approach has been institutionalized using laws like school until eighteen no-matter-what.  By keeping students in school at all costs we've effectively removed anywhere to drop out to.  With no bottom to fall through, graduation rates are on the rise!  We've effectively institutionalized failed parenting strategy number one:  everyone is a winner!

The internet is full of memes that suggest the approach we're taking isn't helping.