Face Your Fear! Maths Trauma & Inequity in STEM Education

In January the president of the Ontario Association for Mathematics Educators (OAME) sent me an email after seeing our online activity around game development and coding and asked if I might present at their conference in May.   If you'd have told high school me that I'd one day present at a maths conference I would have thought you're having me on.  For me, maths and science were the hammers that the education system used to teach me that I wasn't good enough, but I'm rethinking that egotistical framing.

One of my co-presenters also didn't have a positive maths experience in high school and we were both worried that it would be like being back in class again.  That's where the teacher would single you out and make sure everyone in the room knew that you didn't know what you were doing, then they'd fail you, usually with a caustic remark about how 'this isn't for you'.  I'd internalized the idea that maths (and science) went out of their way to make me feel stupid, but after doing our presentation (everyone was lovely, of course), I'm reconsidering my failures in maths and science from another angle.

We immigrated to Canada when I was eight years old.  A lack of research had us moving to Montreal right after Bill 101 came in, which wasn't great for a little kid from rural England.  By 1980 we'd moved to Streetsville on the edge of Mississauga and that's where I grew up.  Various calamities happened both financially and emotionally while I was in high school.  I didn't play school sports because I worked every day after school from the age of 12 on.  School sports, like maths and science, are for those privileged children of leisure who have the time and money to participate - that's why we shape entire school cultures around them.

In senior high school my dad was in a near fatal car accident that had him hospitalized for months.  During that time I was working as well as doing all the home things that he usually did.  This meant that the hours of homework meted out by maths and science teachers didn't get the attention it demanded.  The tedious and repetitive/rote nature of S&M homework didn't help either.  Before grade 11 science I was daydreaming of becoming an astronomer.  After I failed it, not so much.  High school accommodated my lack of socio-economic clout by guidancing me to go find a job that Canadians don't like doing - like a good immigrant should.

I dropped out of grade 13, worked as a night security guard (full time) while trying to attend Sheridan College for visual arts.  I dropped out of Sheridan when I couldn't get to class after not sleeping every night before class.  Eventually I  found my way into a millwright apprenticeship which offered me the economic stability I needed to finish high school, which I did at the age of 22.  I eventually left millwrighting and went to university, finally settling on English and philosophy degrees, but even there my maths trauma haunted me.

A requirement for my philosophy degree was to take the symbolic logic course.  My first time through it was run by a computer science prof who didn't like how big the class was so he used every rotten maths trick in the book (surprise tests, undifferentiated instruction, sudden changes in direction, etc) to shake out the 'arts' students who needed it for their degree.  That course could also be used as an 'arts' credit for the STEM types who took it as a bird course.  That prof succeeded in chasing out all the philosophy students from that philosophy course.  The next semester I tried again, this time with a philosophy prof.  I told her of my fear of maths and she went out of her way to differentiate both instruction and assessment.  I ended up getting an 'A' on the mandatory course I thought I'd never finish.  I can do maths and complex logic, just not when it's weaponized against me.

As a millwright I never had a problem tackling applied maths when I needed it.  When I transitioned into information technology, again no issues using applied maths as I needed it to do my job.  It appeared that I wasn't as bad as maths as the education system had repeatedly told me I was, though I still carried that luggage with me.

My anxiety was high as I got ready for this presentation.  Alanna made a comment that resonated though.  If you work in a secondary classroom you've probably heard teens talking about how this or that teacher 'hates' them.  Alanna reminded me that this is a great example of everything-is-about-me teenage egotism.  My maths and science teachers didn't hate me and weren't vindictively attacking me for my failures; no student matters that much.  Having done this teaching thing for over two decades now, I can assure you that 'hate' isn't something most teachers feel.  To be honest, when we're not at work even the most difficult students aren't on our minds.  For the teachers who do feel hate for students, you need to find another career.

Looking past the teen-egoism of my own mathematical inferiority complex, I got along with my STEM teachers pretty well.  I certainly wasn't a classroom management headache.  In retrospect, what happened to me in class wasn't vindictive on their part, it was a result of my lowly socio-economic status.  Had I been a stable, well off, multi-generational settler whose ancestors were given whole swarths of Canada for free, I'm sure we'd have gotten along just fine.  Were I not in the middle of family trauma, perhaps I would have stuck it out.  Had I been a student of a less creative nature who thrived in structure and repetition, I imagine I'd have found a place in STEM even without the financial means - I did eventually embrace my technical skills despite the system's best efforts to alienate me from myself.

Last week one of our maths teachers emailed the entire building asking how she could punish students who are skipping tests in order to give themselves more time to prepare for them.  Our principal emailed all reminding everyone of Growing Success, but this didn't stop a science teacher from jumping in with our written-in-the-1950s student handbook which still contains escalating penalties (including handing out zeroes) for late or missing work, even if that is directly contrary to Ministry direction.

In my last round of IT testing for my grade 10s I left each chapter test available for three tries, and students could take it open book if they wished.  When you finished the test it would even review it for you and tell you what the correct answers were and why, if you could be bothered to do that.  Ample class time was provided to review the material both on screen and hands-on.  You could not design a more equitable and differentiated approach to learning computer technology.  Our class average on these three tries/open book tests/wildly-differentiated and in-class supported tests?  11.07/20 - that's a 55% class average.  Even when you differentiate and build in equity to support assessment in COVID-world classes, many students won't bother doing any of it anyway, and this is in an optional subject they chose to take!  I turned down the weight of those results, not because I think my subject doesn't matter, but because the COVID malaise on students is real  (it's real on staff too, not that anyone cares) and holding them to pre-pandemic standards is neither compassionate nor pedagogically correct.

If someone wants to skip a period to get more study time in, let 'em.  What would be even better is having open and honest communications with your students to the point where they can simply ask for extra time rather than feeling like they have to skip because they know you won't give give it to them   They probably won't use their extra time anyway and the result will be what it is.  Clinging to schedules and testing that only examines rote memorization (another issue in STEM that produces A+ students who don't know how to apply what they know), is the kind of undifferentiated and tedious 'learning' that made me despise maths and science in high school.

After COVID swept through our family recently, my son returned to class only to get no lunches for days on end (while still recovering from the virus) as he took test after missed maths test.  When he didn't do well on them we had to intervene and ask for some compassion.  Why do S&M subject teachers believe that curriculum comes before differentiation based on circumstances (especially IEPs!), or even basic wellness?  We're all in exceptional circumstances.  I suspect these teachers believe that this 'rigour' makes them a credible and serious discipline of study.  I'm not sure how you change that rigid culture founded on privilege, conformity and exclusion.

My maths trauma in high school sent me on a crooked path before I was finally able to come to terms with my intelligence and abilities; it made me doubt myself and misaim my expectations.  I'd hope public education would do the opposite of that, but it still doesn't.  We've got too many classes still predicating success on hours of homework using undifferentiated and repetitive rote learning under the assumption that everyone has the time and inclination to find success in that.  It's even worse now two years into a pandemic.  During quadmesters it was particularly acute with students in S&M heavy quads telling me they were expected to do 4+ hours of homework EVERY DAY - even as the working ones were forced to take on extra hours as 'heroic' front line workers.

In my classroom I aim to find every students' talents and help them find digital pathways that will support them in our technology driven economy.  My senior classes are supposed to be 'M' level post-secondary bound students (which is why they cap me at 31 like an academic calculus class), but in actuality the majority of my students do not attend university and good percentage go straight into the workplace.  We also frequently have essential level and special needs students finding their way in our program because we differentiate even when the system holds us all back with an inequitable distribution of resources.  My stuffed classes serving all pathways help make grade 12 academic physics classes with a dozen students in them happen because those very special kids need that credit for university.

In order to find student strengths I focus on foundational skills like practicing an effective engineering design process, which is more about organization and self-direction than it is about technical details.  I could drill them on tests about technical specifics and fail the ones who skip rote memorizing reams of facts for a variety of reasons (they can't afford the time, their IEP doesn't allow them learn like that, etc), but then I'd be doing exactly what was done to me in high school.  That'd be a jerk move.

"You! Yes, you! Stand still laddy!"

When we grew up and went to school

There were certain teachers who would

Hurt the children any way they could

By pouring their derision

Upon anything we did

And exposing every weakness

However carefully hidden by the kids"

We don't need no education, but we all need direction to help find our strengths... especially in STEM.

Imitation Isn't That Flattering

Yoda didn't say that in a vacuum, he was an
attentive and differentiating instructor!

Over the past couple of years I suddenly find myself considered a 'senior teacher'.  You might think this comes with all sorts of resources like extra time to work on training other teachers where you can show them the tricks of the trade, but this is public education so you just do it for free.  You might think that it would result in a curriculum support role where you can prompt system-wide improvements based on your decades of classroom experience and pioneering curriculum development, but those jobs are all full-time permanent gigs for very specific people with criteria for admission that I don't evidently possess.

A previous principal told me that my classes are too difficult and I need to turn them down.  When I pointed out that no one had failed any of my courses since he'd arrived for his stint in our community, that held no weight with him; some students and parents want daycare, not education.  I have no interest in providing daycare so I simply ignored his misguided observation.  I get where it's coming from though, daycare is much cheaper to provide than education.

One of the things we do in my program is get into Arduino microcontrollers in grade 9.  Arduinos offer a tactile introduction to basic electronics circuit prototyping with breadboards and electronics components as well as a coding connection through the C++ based language that runs the microcontrollers.  I've been doing this long enough and in such a brutally honest reflective practice stance that I've gotten pretty good at it.  One of the things that less experienced teachers (which includes many admin) fixate on is the placement of responsibility for engaging with this hands-on learning on the student.  To the unaided eye this looks like I'm chucking them in the deep end and watching them drown, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Pulling apart tech to show students how it
works is a core learning tool in my computer
engineering program. Tech isn't magic!

I present this introduction to circuit building in a remarkably structured environment.  I build the first couple of circuits in front of the students, repeatedly reminding them how the electricity is passing around the circuit which also has the added benefit of showing them the stochastic nature of what we're doing.  Sometimes you do it all right but the part you're using is broken, so you have to approach everything critically, iteratively and with sensitivity and patience.  I then leave those working 3d examples in front of them to look at.  Modelling the work establishes with them that I know what I'm doing and encourages them to ask questions.  I also show them a pulled apart breadboard so they can begin wrapping their heads around how this new-to-them (though they spend their whole social lives on it these days) technology works.

It's that cognitive breakthrough that I'm actually looking for (the hands-on skills are just muscle memory practice).  Some students with strong tactile skills and good visual reasoning are able to imitate the circuits without understanding how they work.  This becomes a problem when they get into more complex circuits later in the unit.  When a student finally begins to see how the electrons are flowing, that's when they begin understanding basic circuit building in our applied technology class.  If you're not a teacher reading this, are you beginning to get a feel for the yawning gap between education and daycare?  Could you email the Ontario Minister of Education and fill him in on it too?

To support that hidden cognitive focus I'm on (metaphorical - health and safety would never go for it) roller-skates when I'm teaching grade 9s in the first day of circuit building.  Alanna knows these introduction to circuit building days are one of the toughest teaching days of my semester because I'm not focused on chucking everyone in the deep end and seeing how many fail, I'm focused on getting everyone from misplaced developmentally delayed students to the previously experienced and gifted (all dropped into the same open level tech course) over this challenging cognitive realization.

Some students require one on one support, some figure it out immediately. Some are able to imitate understanding through mimicry but then run into problems later.  I'm keeping a running tally of all of that in my head as I'm running round and round the room helping those who need it.  I'm doing all this by leveraging technical skills that took decades to hone along with teaching skills that have also taken decades to develop.  I understand that recognition is difficult for many, but just because you don't understand it doesn't mean you should simplify it so you can.

The sink-or-swim misunderstanding creeps back in when less experienced teachers watch me interact with students who aren't engaging with the material.  When the system-trained giver-upper waves me over and tells me they don't know what to do (after extensive set up and support), I don't cater to their apathy inspired edu-hack (ask the teacher to do it for them).  I'm often left wondering how they got 9 years into the system without anyone calling them on this weak move, but many 'teachers' are all about systemic success at all costs - it makes for good statistics and happy management.  I'm in this for the teaching - which is why I'll never find myself with the power to make system wide improvements.  For those edu-hacker students who have learned that helplessness gives them a free pass, I'll often prompt them quite roughly with something like, "you haven't even opened up the how-to webpage or attempted to build the circuit.  I'll come back when you decide to make an effort."

This often knocks them back on their heels.  A teacher expecting them to participate in their learning?  How dare they!  I'm going to get my mom to call the principal and tell him this needs to be easier (code: daycare).  Strangely enough, many of these reticent students end up gaining a great deal of confidence as they come to understand how to build circuits in in my thunderdome - it's the first chance they've had to experience a genuine sense of achievement.  No one learns anything from having other people do it for them, no matter how much cheaper that is at a systemic level.  It's a frustration that this myopia has infected people without enough classroom experience (or common sense) to know that it's nonsense.

Fail fast only works if you have enough
skill to realize why you're failing. Failing
fast and clueless is both expensive & pointless.

Over the past couple of years I've watched several teachers imitate my approach and it ends up feeling like a rather embarrassing caricature drawing (my nose isn't that big - actually it is).  They see what looks like a rough approach that mulches students in order to look for talent, but this isn't that.  What's happening is that I'm creating a very structured situation for learning something hands-on and difficult (reality is a cruel teacher) while also placing the responsibility for engaging with it clearly where it belongs: on the student.

Another of the many supports in place are the GREEN BRICKS OF DOOM (!!!).  This is a spreadsheet that is put up on the projector showing who has completed what circuits (you get a greened out block in the spreadsheet when you show a working circuit).  It very quickly becomes apparent that some students are quicker than others, but I don't consider that a secret, I use it as a learning support.  If you're sitting next to the girl who has already done the circuit you're struggling with, ask them what's going wrong.  This also has the benefit of showing me those students who are faking an understanding rather than building their circuits based on deeper knowledge.  I've been told that slower students would find this mean, but they generally lean into the information as it helps them.  That is also recognizes students who are engaged and working it out is something I have no problem with.

I once used the term 'pedagogy' in context with a new administrator and she replied with, "pedagogy? what does that even mean anyway?"  I found this response frustrating though unsurprising from someone aimed at system management where you often have to enforce cost cutting measures that cause harm in order to do the job (something I'd be bad at and another reason why I'm never likely to have any system reach).  But wouldn't it be something if pedagogical best practices drove everything we did instead of being dismissed?  Perhaps then more people would have a better idea of what I'm doing in my classroom.

Teaching complex, technical skills is challenging, but you can provide supports without
taking away the immediacy of experiential learning. Some will struggle to understand it though.

The Ebb & Flow of Pedagogy in Education

The intention of Dusty World is to work through ideas I'm having around teaching.  Since I'm a technology teacher, a lot of those ideas are tech-focused.  This week, after years of forced contracts and an unbelievably rough round of negotiation, my union has voted to accept an austerity contract that was bargained virtually at gun-point.  Since our last bargained contract we've been wage reduced, had benefits striped and work load increased.  By the end of this contract we'll be looking at more than a 10% reduction in take home income when inflation is considered.

The politics of the agreement aside, what does something like this do to my work environment?  Instead of focusing on pedagogy and excellence in learning, I find myself performing damage limitation.  Knowing that my employer focuses on finances rather than pedagogy is difficult to hear, but when the school board association walks into negotiations demanding dictatorial control over teacher time, stripped benefits and wage reductions, you can't help but come to that conclusion.

Teaching is a human activity, and I am the human face at the end of a large, faceless, increasingly politically driven bureaucracy.  I'm supposed to be teaching my students how to manage digital technology so it doesn't manage them, but increasingly I find my time being spent trying to protect my students from a system intent on doing less for less.  When I'm cobbling together 8 year old computers just to give students a chance at hands on learning, or trying to calm agoraphobic students in overcrowded spaces, or sourcing fans to keep the classroom temperature from boiling because we have thirty two old machines huffing away in there, quality of instruction is obviously not the goal.

The education system goes through changes in focus all the time, and the effectiveness of learning waxes and wanes depending on the political climate. I began teaching in Ontario in 2004 and my early years were in a system in recovery from Mike Harris' "unprecedented disinvestment in public education, which destroyed a historical competitive advantage in the space of a decade."

Ontario's public education system, under reasonable management, saw huge steps forward in terms of effectiveness.  Before the cuts began in 2012, Ontario's education system was top 5... in the world, and, with BC, led Canada up the charts.  You can imagine how satisfying it must have been to work in an environment like that.  I'd often find myself developing lessons or reading about teaching techniques on a Saturday night.  I didn't take a summer off in my first eight years of teaching, taking many additional qualifications (at my own expense) and teaching online to expand my skills.  With the amount of time I spent at it, I was probably dancing with minimal hourly wage, but I didn't care because I threw myself into my profession and my profession looked after and encouraged me.

That sort of intensity appeals to me, I enjoy the challenge and get a lot of satisfaction out of doing a difficult thing well, but it depends on support.  Anyone doing anything well does it because they have good support around them.  If you don't believe me watch any professional sport.  When you suddenly find yourself losing common sense arguments around class sizes based on safety and access to tools, you start to wonder whether going all in is that productive, or healthy for you.

One of the best bits of advice I got at teacher's college was,
"always be ready to go to work again tomorrow."  I didn't
used to get frazzled running hard, but now I do.

It was nice to start my career in a time of such positive pedagogically driven education.  I got to do that because the teachers before me suffered through a decade of cheap nastiness.  We've swung back to the cheap nastiness now, but rather than fight it we vote for it.  I was willing to fight for better, but the vast majority of secondary public teachers are ok with less.  How will that translate to their work in the classroom?

I'm going to have to reconsider my survival strategies.  If I throw myself all in and then get slew footed by a lack of support, I tend to get emotional about it.  Rather than do that, perhaps a little distance is the better way; a less passionate, more circumspect approach to the classroom.  How do you think that will play with students?

If I want to test myself by finding excellence in what I do, the Ontario classroom isn't where that's going to happen.  In 2015 it has become a political wasteland of compromise and an excuse to do things cheaply for political gain.  I'll do what I can to protect the students I am given, but the goal isn't excellence in learning any more, it's do less with less.

Fortunately, I have a lot of hobbies.  I'll find other aspects of my life to throw myself into with abandon.

Anti-Edtech or Anti-Distraction?

Is technology in the classroom a distraction or a tool for improving learning?  The results of vastly improved student learning from technology haven't materialized, yet we continue to throw money at educational technology hoping that it will help.

A wise internet jedi recently shared an article in which a new media professor is putting an end to digital distraction in a class in which he teaches about digital distraction.  A better person to explain the assumptions we make about digital technology you'd be hard pressed to find.  He had a couple of quotes that really punched assumptions about edtech use in the face.

"Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption."

"Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting; when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change."

The concept of multitasking has long been championed by the rise of the digital native crowd.  It's something we poor immigrants to this brave new world simply can't do like they can, except it isn't.  If you want to follow the science rather than the marketing, you'll find that multi-tasking is indeed a myth.  If you want to do something well, you focus on it.  That might seem like simple common sense, but you'll find a lot of digital education evangelists pushing for it anyway.

For the Luddites that want to attack computers themselves for this dilemma, he had this:

"programming, a famously arduous cognitive task, will acquaint you with stories of people falling into code-flow so deep they lose track of time, forgetting to eat or sleep. Computers are not inherent sources of distraction — they can in fact be powerful engines of focus — but latter-day versions have been designed to be, because attention is the substance which makes the whole consumer internet go."

As a philosophically minded technologist I straddle this uneasy divide between the tech-hater and the fan-boy/girl, and I like neither.  Where I see computer technology as a tool to use, many others either vilify or champion it from an emotional angle.  I struggle mightily in class to get students to stop this emotional love/hate relationship with computers that many model on the adults in their lives, but it's a simple truth when Shirky says our computers are now designed to be distractions.  If you're only going to be a user, you're going to be a loser.

Clay Shirky goes on to describe the intellect as the rider atop an elephant of emotions, desires and urges.  The rider may direct the elephant occasionally, but when the two are in conflict the elephant will usually win.  This is what happens when you put a distraction engine like the modern internet in front of a child whose rider is still working out how to direct the elephant (not that many adults are better).  No wonder I find it a continual frustration to direct students... and I'm teaching computers designed to distract!

The engagement game we play in education nowadays is based on this battle with software designed to distract.  As Shirky says, we're bringing whiteboard markers to a gun fight, and losing badly.  When we decide to get in sync with the modern world we are actually downgrading education in order to play the distraction game in the same split attention, broken thinking world that has people driving into each other.

Educational IT should be the leading edge, designed to vary student access to digital technology in order to promote pedagogy at every step.  What it shouldn't be is what it is, a hand-me-down variety of the very software and hardware that is causing the problem in the first place.  This realization puts concepts like BYOD, tech-branded education and open internet access in a very awkward place if you want to champion learning over engagement, though I get the sense that engagement has infected educational management much as it has everything else.

This infected thinking, the kind that has monetized the internet and made a generation of software engineers billionaires, demands constant human attention.  When everything touched by technological integration gets infected with the idea of deep psychological engagement, people in the world become little more than variables in an economic equation.

Education is now just another enabler in a digital distraction  end game that is infecting society as a whole.

"You Never Teach Us Anything"

I had an interesting chat with a student yesterday.  He's yellow, I'm green:

"You never teach us anything."
"By teaching do you mean do it for you?"
"Um, yes?"
"I don't do everything for you because unless you figure it out for yourself, you haven't figured out anything at all."
"... but you never help."
"I don't think that's true, I offer suggestions, and give you a framework to develop ideas in, I've provided you with thousands of dollars of free equipment and access to professional level learning resources.  Have I never helped?"
"Ok, so you've helped, but you don't teach."
"What do you think teaching is?"
"When someone tells you what you should know..."
"Do you think that's what a lesson is?  When someone gives you information?"
"Yeah, isn't it?"

Good question that, isn't a lesson when you tell people what they should know?  Isn't teaching when you do everything for the student so they can be passive receptacles?

That a strong student who has 'figured out' the education system has such a poor view of our profession is worrying.  I wonder how many teachers it took before he saw pedagogy as a fill in the blank exercise.  

I wonder what it will take now to have him take possession of his own learning.  I don't imagine that will happen before post secondary, and when it does it will be a shock.

Binary Thinking

More notes from Phoenix, along with some editorializing:

Education is an analogue, non-linear, complex, biological process because we are non-linear, complex, biological organisms.  Data and the technology that produces it are none of those things.  Data might point to a vanishingly small piece of this complex puzzle, but it will never explain, justify or encompass education, no matter what vested interests might tell you.

We are such chameleons. The dominant thinking of our time actually changes how we see ourselves. When the social norm was religiously defined we saw ourselves as angels and demons. When industrialization occurred we described ourselves in terms of the machines we were creating. In the information age we define ourselves in terms of digital data. It's important to remember that we are none of these things, but rather the creator of all of them, and therefor greater than them all.

Digital technology is turning our thinking binary.  How do you feel today? A) good B) bad By participating in this data gathering process you have reduced your complex mental state to an absurdity.  Every question is reductive, every piece of data a feathery abstraction of a deeper, more complex meaning. Every time education acts on this reductive logic it becomes less a form of human expression and more an act of compliance with digitally limited technology. There is a branch of thinking that suggests that this is simply because technology hasn't become fast and vast enough to manage the data, but even at its best digital technology will always be limited to how it works. Even at near infinite speeds with infinite amounts of data you're still reducing reality to ones and zeroes, which it isn't.

If digital technology forces reductive binary thinking then any cost savings realized from it will come at the cost of our ability to express ourselves in all the ways that we can.

This is a transitional thought, it led to this line of thinking:

Rigour doesn't exist in data or the statistics derived from it, rigour exists at the limits of human expression. It is never dictated by the limits of hardware or software.

What do I mean by rigour? Thorough and careful - digital data is neither. It is accurate, but only in a very specific sense. We take that fine accuracy and direct it at a far larger array of cause and effect than it could possibly represent, mainly because recognizing the limits of data doesn't suit the people peddling it. Statistics never encompass the truths they claim to.

Mastery is the result of genuine experience. No one ever gained mastery from taking a test.

If genuine experience is what drives leaning, why do we keep inventing abstractions like testing to drive it?

The answer to that one is obvious: it's cheaper and easier to manage if we grossly simplify learning to the point of abstraction. Of course, that kind of hypocrisy and self-serving nonsense provokes awkward questions:

If learning is for the learner, why do we do most of what we do in education for everyone else involved?  Is education motivated by politics or pedagogy?

The easiest most self-serving way for 'educators' to dehumanize students is by reducing them to data. This becomes more self-evident when you realize that most data collected from education is focused on the system rather than improving student learning.

Data Exhaust

At a recent educational technology conference in Phoenix Constance Steinkuehler mentioned the term 'data exhaust' in passing to describe the numbers pouring out of testing.  The idea of data as pollution has been with me for a while.  The statistics I've seen derived from data in education have often been farcical attempts at justifying questionable programming.  It's gotten to the point that when someone starts throwing charts and graphs up in a presentation I assume they are hiding something.

Constance's term 'data exhaust' had me tumbling through metaphorical implications.  If the data we generate out of education is the exhaust, what are we doing when we turn the education system toward producing data exhaust for its own sake?  No student will ever face a standardized test in the working world, it's a completely unrealistic and limited way in which to measure learning let alone prepare students for the rest of their lives.  Using standardized testing to measure learning has us revving the education vehicle at high rpm in neutral; we're making a lot of smoke and not going anywhere.

Is data always useless?  Not at all, but the tendency to find patterns and turn data in statistics takes something already abstract and abstracts it even further.  That people then take these inferences and limited slices of information as gospel points to the crux of the crisis in American education.  We end up with what we think are facts when they are really fictions that use math of lend an air of credibility.

Even with statistics and data metrics off the table, the idea of looking at the data exhaust pouring out of education as a way of directing future action demonstrates staggering shortsightedness.  Education is not a data driven, linear or binary enterprise, it is a complex human one.  We are not producing expert test takers, we should be producing well rounded human beings that can thrive in a complex, competitive, data rich century.  No standardized test can measure that.

We pay less and
produce more by
focusing on pedagogy
via USC Rossier's
online Doctor of Education 

If you took your poorly running car into a mechanic and they just kept revving the engine harder and harder while watching smoke billow out of the back you'd think something was wrong with them, yet that is how American education is tuning itself.  They then wonder why they aren't scoring well in world rankings.  If we want the education vehicle to take us somewhere we need to crack open the hood and take a look at the engine, but what is that engine?  What actually makes the engine of education run well?  It isn't fixating on the data exhaust.

Canada has performed very well in world education rankings.  We find ourselves able to keep up with some of the world's best education systems, like Finland, and we do it at a much lower cost per student than the US has managed to.  It looks like all that testing and data exhaust fixation costs a lot more than your students' well being, it's also hugely inefficient.

A well running education system focuses on pedagogy.  It is what fuels it, it is what makes the system serve its students using the best possible learning practices.  Pedagogy is a tricky concept, and it doesn't offer simplistic solutions that digital technology companies can app-up, but it does give everyone, no matter how much they may disagree on the details, a common goal.

There was a lot of talk about coming together and pulling in the same direction over the Common Curriculum at this conference.  We aren't all on the same page in Canada when it comes to processes or how the system should run, but pedagogy is on everyone's mind.  Best practices have to drive education.  Having standards isn't a bad thing, but when you're so fixated on the data exhaust you're producing that you forget fundamental pedagogical practice, you've lost sight of what education should be in the data smog you've created.

ASU/GSV Summit

I went to the strangest education conference of my career this past couple of days.  Wikispaces invited me down to attend and what a learning experience it was.  Surrounded by a struggling US education system that spends more and produces less than our own, I found it difficult to follow the circumstances they've invented for themselves.

Being a stranger in a strange land I wasn't necessarily trapped by the expectations of the other people in attendance, though I wasn't the only one questioning what I saw.  There seems to be a clear split in American education.  There are the Common Curriculum fans (check out that webpage, ride the hyperbole!), and then there are parents & teachers who are questioning the value of such a regimented, testing focused approach to learning.  Strangely, very few education technology companies seem to be questioning this approach, though they all appear quite interested in education.

The whole thing occurred on the surface of a conference that was more an educational technology trade show than an examination of sound pedagogical practice.  That politics and the business that feeds it drives the US education system rather than sound pedagogy became more apparent to me as the conference went on:

The only time I heard someone actually refer to pedagogical practice, best practices in teaching and learning, was when Michael Crow, the ASU president, gave a thoughtful talk on how we adapt to technology use in changing times.  Everything else was urging people to get on board with the common curriculum (and buy our system that caters to it).  That educational technology in the States is so focused on the politics of testing rather than best practices should concern every Canadian who adopts American technology in the classroom.

I've got a lot of notes and ideas I want to chase down from this experience.  In the next week or two I'll write to them after mulling it over.

In the meantime, here are some photos of beautiful Arizona in bloom...

The ASU/GSV Summit Blog Posts:
Data Exhaust
Who Owns Your Data?
Dogmatic Digitization

One Day Edtech Will Amplify Pedagogy Rather Than Stealing From It

Pedagogy ORIGIN: late C16th: from French pédagogie,

from Greek paidagōgia , from paidagōgos,  

Sometimes etymology can be wonderfully ironic.

This one is complicated.  Trying to work out the relationship between pedagogy, technology and money is the trial of our times.

The other day Alanna was reading a passage about how little technology has affected pedagogy.  Rather than revolutionize how we teach, technology has merely become a new, more efficient medium for the same practices, it's done nothing to advance pedagogical practice.  This got me thinking about the relationship between pedagogy and technology.  As I was pondering those two, money crept in, as it always does.

Pedagogy is a rather terrifyingly open concept, but I've always found its breadth to be its saving grace.  With a sweeping definition like "the method and practice of teaching", pedagogy is applicable to the full spectrum of teaching and learning, and that range is truly staggering.  Pedagogy can be found in everything from the coach who reduces their players to mush after a hard practice to the use of a chalkboard in a math class.  It lives in the first turn of a wrench by a budding mechanic and the circling of a grammar error by an exhausted English teacher.  That pedagogy is in everything related to teaching and learning is its greatest strength, it becomes an ideal in an education system that otherwise exists as a series of compromises.

In our real world of compromise pedagogy often makes uncomfortable demands.  This is where money sneaks in.  When we consider sound pedagogy, we consider best teaching practices to maximize learning.  But we don't go searching for best practices in an ideal environment, instead we attempt as much effective pedagogy as the money allows.  Good pedagogical practice costs money.  Educational technology costs (a lot of) money.  Both are reaching for the same finite, decreasing pot of funding; this can't end well.

Does this mean more money always equals better pedagogy?  Not at all, but pedagogy is one of the first things you see diminish in money challenged situations.  Poor schools tend to lack the student to teacher ratio or basic equipment to provide strong pedagogy.  Rich schools can offer smaller class sizes and better trained teachers, both of which support sound pedagogy.  That these pedagogically proven concepts have to compete with the same funding that feeds ed-tech is where the equation gets more complicated.

Digital technology, an expensive new medium of communication, offers unprecedented access to information and democratizes publication.  There is no doubt that it is important as both a skill to learn and a tool with which to learn other things (though education seldom recognizes that distinction and just assumes digital natives magically know how to make technology an effective tool).

Outside education, digital communication has revolutionized everything from manufacturing to broadcasting.  Inside education it has let students type the same essay assignment they would have done on pen and paper twenty years ago, though it has made plagiarism easier.  Instead of making a poster for a presentation, students can now make digital presentations.  All technology has done in education is to offer a faddish means of producing the same old work we've always done.  That faddishness appears to take care of the dreaded engagement problem, which excites many boring people.

Digital technology hardly seems revolutionary in the school context.  If all we're using it for is as a replacement for paper then it's just a new, more expensive, less environmentally friendly way of doing what we've always done.  If technology doesn't have an additive relationship with pedagogy it's a lost cause, and from what I've seen it doesn't.  It does however take a lot of limited funding away from other, proven pedagogical strategies.

The money creep goes further than stagnant pedagogical practice.  It turns out you can make a lot of money convincing educational systems to buy in to technology.  Even if your teachers aren't considering digital pedagogy, someone still gets rich pushing it.  There is no doubt that money and technology go hand in hand, and with limited funding, as edtech eats more everything else gets diminished by necessity.

When ed-tech eats a big piece of the education pie the assumption arises that the technology itself provides the pedagogy, so you don't need to (that appearance of engagement pushes this thinking).  Giving students already overdosing on habitual, uninspired technology use technology in the classroom is a recipe for pedagogical disaster.  The relationship between technology and the actual process of learning is tenuous at best.  It only gets worse if we assume the use of technology will magically produce engaged, productive learners.  Engaged maybe, productive?  Not so much.  This peaks when the teacher then throws the same assignment they've been doing for fifteen years on a Google-doc and calls it 21st Century learning.  What we end up with is a poor learning environment ripe with distractions that encourages the same habitual use students are already mired in.

The engagement we're so excited about in educational technology is a smoke-screen.  It is little more than us giving addicts access to more of what they already have too much of and don't know how to effectively leverage.

***

What is digital pedagogy?  What does digital educational technology allow us to do better in terms of the actual learning process?  Until we answer this question edtech is nothing more than an expensive environmental disaster that has us producing digital dummies.

To appreciate what technology could do for education it might help to see what it's doing for

The Third Industrial Revolution

everything else.  Manufacturing, once a large scale, capital driven process, is becoming accessible to smaller and smaller concerns.  Where once you had to buy million dollar milling machines and the experts to maintain and run them, you can now manufacture complex parts in a small machine shop using digital tools.  Not only  does this free us from a production line mentality, it also frees us from production line products.  We're moving further and further away from Henry Ford's idea of product customization.  Digitization is allowing for smaller runs of customized parts in more niche workshops.  As the Economist says in the link above, this really is the birth of a third industrial revolution, the re-democratization of craftsmanship and personalization in production.

Broadcasting has been staggered by digitization.  From a music industry that was forced to change decades of old habits to television that has had to diversify offerings just to remain relevant in a world that can suddenly tell its own stories, digital media and the internet have fundamentally changed how we see ourselves in media.

1920s office, look familiar?

Over the course of the Twentieth Century education has been influenced by industrial methods of production even more than business itself.  The classroom, the school bell, the rows of desks, it all points to a Taylorist love of systematization.  It seeks to quantify and sort people in the most cost effective manner possible.  In order to do that it clings to ideas of standardization because it believes this leads to credibility.  It happily ignores sound pedagogy in a blind charge toward clinical efficiency, it's the most perfect example of a production line ever developed.

What if, as in broadcasting or manufacturing, education were to consider how digital technology could re-individualize education?  Instead of producing modernist widget-students we could use digitization to embrace radical customization.  The systemic methods we use in education - the marking, the timed classrooms, the report cards - are there to process as many students as possible as efficiently as possible.  We reduce them to numbers because we don't have the resources to treat them like people.  What if educational technology solved that problem instead of replacing paper?

A sufficiently complex Learning Management System would assist in assessment and maintain a current and complex analysis of student achievement.  We see this in a very rudimentary way in online systems like Code Academy, where students are able to review their learning and get acknowledged for their achievements but can only proceed when they have demonstrated sufficient understanding.  The immediate benefit is that each student can move at their own pace.  LMSs should be driving toward this level of complexity, instead they are used as replacements for handouts.

Digitization offers us an opportunity to individualize learning once again.  After a couple of centuries mimicking industrial practices education has a chance to reinvent itself as a digitally empowered, personally focused system of learning, like pre-industrial apprenticeships but on a massive scale.

What does a post-industrial, digitally enhanced, individualized education system look like?  In that relationship, technology enhances pedagogy, it doesn't eclipse it.  In that relationship there may be monetary efficiencies, but they are a byproduct rather than the point of technology implementation.  In no instance would pedagogy be financially victimized by educational technology.

If you're still 'teaching' information, you'll quickly find yourself irrelevant in a post industrial education.  In a world where information is abundant, the ability to access it is more important than the ability to afford a teacher to say it to you.  Skills development will still be a vital piece of the education puzzle, and skills based teachers who develop understanding through experience will always have a role, but information delivery is a dying art, assuming we begin teaching effective technology use.

The LMS used in future school is a constantly evolving construct that can access all facets of a student's learning.  This virtual assessment tool doesn't just review a student's ability to retrieve information, but instead looks at them holistically.  In assessing their skills and knowledge, a future LMS would consider learning habits and then suggest individualized tactics for producing best results.  A teacher would be able to see a student's zone of proximal development before trying to assist them (I have a live graphic playing in my head of what this would look like).  Your progress as a learner includes everything from demonstrated writing ability to the most complex numeracy you're shown.  It considers your patterns of absence, when you produce your best work and who you do it with.  That future LMS is actually an learning management system, not a glorified webpage.  It can reach across other systems to see examples of student progress in a variety of ways.  When a student activates their LMS it supports their learning and aids a teacher in both teaching and assessment.  Perhaps the modern, virtual equivalent of a paidagōgos.

Instead of being an onerous task done poorly by time harrowed teachers through a computer system that merely mimics the paper based reporting system before it, post-industrial student assessment is detailed, accurate, holistic and personalized.  The machine assists the teacher in customizing the education of each student instead of just producing neater, printed reports of letters, numbers and generic comment banks.

Wouldn't that be something, if digital technology were to amplify sound pedagogy and revolutionize our industrialized education system into something personally meaningful?  Until we break the mould and begin leveraging digital technology for what it is capable of, we're just diverting money from the task at hand: effective pedagogical practice.

Fear & Arrogance

Quote from Bull Durham

The industrial mindset around education tends to look away from this approach to learning, but there is something to be said for bravery in the face of overwhelming odds; it's a true commitment to what you're learning.  Of course, if you're going to learn something like it matters then failure should be an expectation if anything other than competence is demonstrated.  In a school system that prides itself on stats it generates about itself, this kind of without-a-net learning doesn't happen.

When I say true commitment I mean a willingness to put your learning to the test (and I don't mean a standardized test).  There is a reflective aspect to learning that we tend to ignore in education.    We like to say we're looking at meta-cognition and self-aware learning, but only without questioning the context we frame it with.  Unless a student is considering the school system in which they find themselves complete with all its financially forced lunacy, the metacognition they are asked to endure in class is little more than another attempt to pretend rows of desks and student numbers are the ideal.  In that environment the student who shrugs and walks out of class in order to truly test themselves in a trade or other real pursuit is the only one answering the metacognitive question correctly.

Learning without concrete, relevant feedback is empty, pointless.  The type of feedback students get in school tends to be abstract to the point of emptiness.  We then wonder why their poor grades don't motivate them to try harder to get better abstract numbers, and then teachers agonize over how to 'engage' them.

When I first started to teach in Japan I tried to understand why my classes were so different even though the lessons were the same.  In looking at my learners I realized that some were intrinsically motivated and some extrinsically motivated.  The doctor who came in to work on their presentation to have their work shared in an international conference?  Those classes were stellar.  The employees who were required by management to upgrade their English?  Tedious.  Intrinsically motivated learners are a joy to teach though also a great challenge because of how voracious they are.  When we create an education system we iron out intrinsic motivation in favour of standardized, extrinsic motivations (grades, standardized test scores, report cards).  Any fear or arrogance in daring to explore and expand beyond our comfort zone is stamped out in favour of standardized assessment.

I've been learning the art and science of motorbike riding over the last couple of months.  I can't think of an activity that requires a greater commitment (except perhaps tight rope walking).  The learning process for this activity is ruthless and demanding.  I don't get days off or time to relax when I'm working on my craft.  I don't have someone constantly correcting my behavior to keep me on task.  And it hurts doing it, let alone if I do it poorly.  What got me on a bike in the first place?  Fear and arrogance; the chance to do something difficult well.  Thinking that I could learn this thing with grace and skill was a dare I've always wanted to take.  That I want to be successful in something I've seen kill other people is perverse and satisfying.

We don't like students to learn things that are challenging to them, we like them to all do the same thing on a bell curve.  We process them as statistics that we can then manage.  If you've ever tried to submit a class of all failures or all perfects you know this to be true; they want a bell curve of grades with a median in the Bs.  Student centred learning tries to put an individualized face on this, but the assessment rubric will quickly bring it back in line again.  It's unreasonable to expect a teacher to individualize learning for thirty people, but if we're going to run this like an assembly line we can't bemoan the loss of individual learning.

The real trick with learning is to want to do it.  Once you're there and you have a deeply seated need to figure out what it is you want master, you can begin to develop those skills.  In addition to fear and arrogance (two methods of not being daunted by learning a challenging skill), you should also embrace patience and a willingness to laugh at your failures without ignoring them.  With a flexible, resilient approach to learning in place you are sure to succeed at your craft, though not always in ways you may have imagined.

Mastery takes longer, but this'll get you over the steep bit
at the beginning of the learning curve

I stumbled across the chart on the right a few weeks ago on Google+.  Whenever I hear someone say, "I wish I could draw", or, "I wish I could code", or any other longed for learning you care to name, I think back to this chart and wonder why they never spent the time if they wanted it that badly; they obviously never wanted it that badly.  Learning isn't magic and teaching isn't a dark art.  The learner has to recognize the value of the learning and have an emotional need to achieve it.  The teacher has already walked that path to expertise and cultivates that love of the material by challenging the student to achieve that which is barely within their reach.  Their expertise allows them to dare the student to appropriate challenges.  Learning is a visceral, thrilling self-driven, emotional experience, not a pedantic, systemic process to be forced on rows of victims.

These moments of learning greatness where students reach for more than they should and see success (and failure) happen in schools all the time, but they are usually the result of a good teacher trying to protect students from systemic processing.  They also tend to happen in stochastic learning or extracurriculars more than the ordered learning of the class room.  In the kinetic action of arts, technology or physical education students still have the freedom of unregimented, hands on learning toward less specific ends. That stochastic space allows them room to attempt greatness, to bypass the routine learning and realize a eureka moment.  Formal classroom education irons that out with curriculum, formalized assessment and systemic teaching practice.  The freedom still evident in stochastic learning tends to unnerve the professional student and educational administrator, both of whom have learned to play the game of Education rather than simply encourage people do what they are naturally predisposed to do.  For the true apprentice hands on learning is the last bastion of real learning in our education system.  It may be the unspoken reason that killing extracurriculars in Ontario this year cut so deeply.  Only in sport and other physical activity can we appreciate the immediacy of failure and the joy of real success.  You can't bell-curve reality.

All is not lost.  We could begin revising education towards learning rather than self serving statistics gathering.

Imagine an education system that didn't work to generate its own self-serving statistics.  A school system that was focused on developing an environment in which students were able to develop a deep, intrinsic love of learning, where no extrinsic motivation existed to force them into a mold of grades and average expectations.  Failure in this system could be brutal and obvious, but students would be encouraged to attack their learning with fear and arrogance (and patience and humor) knowing that they would never be demeaned for failing but only for ignoring their failures.