National Skills Competition Reflection

We're back from Skills Canada's National Competition.  It was my first time as a Team Ontario coach and it was a spectacular six days in New Brunswick.  The sight seeing was frenetic and then the opening ceremonies astonishingly loud and boisterous.  To say we were revved up would be an understatement.

After a weekend waiting for competition to start we were finally able to do what we went there for (compete), except we didn't.  I'd hoped for a top half finish.  Ontario's provincial skills are much more competitive than most other province's simply because we have the biggest population and therefore the most contestants; we had to beat more people to get to Nationals.  Aiming for a top half finish didn't feel like a long shot, especially when we'd done so well in provincials (a gold medal and one of the highest technical scores in all competitions).  I fear our good provincial results meant we didn't drive at Nationals like we should have.

I prefer Bull Durham's
dissonance over the pat
just be humble quote.
There is a place for
swagger in competition
as long as it doesn't blind
you to what you need to do

You need a bit of arrogance when you walk into a competition because, despite the platitudes, everyone isn't a winner, in fact the vast majority are losers.  When you dangle yourself out there in competition you need a bit of cockiness to survive the failures.  There were a steady stream of people bursting into tears and running out of the awards ceremony when they didn't medal.  Humility wasn't helping them keep their composure when they lost.  If you don't think composure in the face of failure matters you probably haven't competed much.

IT & Networking came up early and because of a screw up on the screen I'd realized we hadn't medaled before they actually made the announcement.  In that moment all that hope evaporated and I was struggling with disappointment.  As a coach, I felt protective of my student who wasn't happy with the result but didn't run out of the room in tears.  Since we were announced so early we had another hour and half to sit there watching others succeed.  It certainly set a reflective mood.

Our approach to Skills all along has been one of the long game.  Each competitor returns and brain dumps everything they can remember into a document that we can use to prepare better next time.  Our current competitors are often able to get in touch with alumni (the benefits of a small town) and get additional support and advice.  That'll happen with our first go at Nationals as well, so when we get there next time we won't be going in blind.  The three who did medal in this national competition had all been there and seen the scope of competition before.  Knowing what to expect is a key to success.

But there is another side to this that I need to consider beyond the long game.  I was very hands off with training my competitor after our successful provincial run.  He asked questions about subnetting and IPv6, and I provided him with material on it, but didn't follow up to see if he'd looked at it.  He hadn't.  I'd assumed he'd grabbed this opportunity with both hands and put his training into overdrive, but end of year distractions and a very successful provincial run had shifted him to glide.  After a long, exhausting first day of competition we were both sitting there going over material that should have been second nature instead of resting up for day two.  At that point hope replaced confidence for me.  I hate depending on hope.

I'm a big believer in students, especially seniors and even more especially competitors, being self driven.  I have no interest in hand puppeting students to a win, I want them to feel like it's their's because they are the prime movers in their own skills development.  I don't believe in moulding students in the likeness of my own learning, I want them to internalize it in their own most effective manner.  My job is to do backflips in the background making sure they have the information and tools they need to efficiently and effectively develop their own skills.

High school seniors on the verge of post secondary work in technology should have a developed sense of professionalism as a part of their skills formation, which means not off-loading blame when you fail, and taking on responsibility for fine-tuning your own expertise (I drive this home in class constantly).  Because these things didn't happen I'm at peace with losing - we didn't deserve the win - though it still irks me and has me wondering what I could have done differently.

Another reflective piece for me was remembering all of the curriculum I ditch in order to serve the relatively digitally illiterate students I get in computer technoology.  As we were going over subnetting I remembered how doing this used to be second nature for me as a technician, but I can barely get basic IP addressing across to the majority of my students let alone binary subnetting.  Dumbing down curriculum might make my program more palatable, but it didn't help us get ready to compete at Nationals.  That one's entirely on me.  If this experience means I'm not shying away from expected curriculum in the future, it might cripple my program's ability to take in the digital dilettantes and guidance refugees I'm expected to serve, but at least we won't get pwned again in competition.

When the lights come up and judgement begins, you don't want
to be hoping you might squeeze out a medal after missing
questions and going in unprepared.  Hope isn't how you win.

After losing for years (see below) and putting a good face on it (I don't like losing, I'm competitive by nature), I suddenly found myself, on only my third attempt, on Team Ontario, coaching my strongest Information Technology student yet.  That we didn't perform like we could have is the most disappointing part of this experience for me.

I don't care if questions are repeated so students who have been there before have an advantage, I don't care if the environment they put us in seemed intentionally designed to produce poor results (we were placed between an amplified loud speaker job presentation and millwrights hammering metal and running power tools) because everyone had to suffer through it.  What I do care about is approaching Nationals with a self-driven, professional mind-set, and I think that's what I'll focus on next time around.  Not shying away from complex material in my courses and keeping a focus on being properly prepared will help my competitors to do more than hope for a medal.  The valuable information we gathered this year on how Nationals are scoped means we're not going in blind next time either.


Losing for Years...
I stopped coaching soccer at my high school after a number of years because it was a constant hassle trying to get players out to practice (the fact that our talent pool was desperately shallow and we lost almost every game wouldn't have shaken me off like indifference did).  The time the student players decided (after losing another game) to just not show up at 7am the next day for the practice time they told me they had to have broke it for me.  I'd paid for daycare, put my own child into it at 6:30 in the morning and was standing there alone on the pitch in the pre-dawn light when I decided I'm done volunteering for this kind of abuse.  I'm glad I was able to find Skills Ontario/Canada as an outlet for competition that also helps improve my own program.

Skills Canada Nationals

I've never been on a provincial team before, it's quite the experience. In addition to the unnatural process of leaving school, getting on an aeroplane and flying away from the classroom in early June, it also puts you together with all the other gold medalists, some of whom you lost against in other categories, except now you're team mates.  

There are a lot of different students on Team Ontario, from the quietest introverts to the loudest extroverts you can imagine, yet they have all demonstrated advanced skills in their particular field of study and are proven craftspeople.  They range from cocky and arrogant to nervous and uncertain; there is no typical Skills Ontario gold medalist.  

There are a lot of different ways to coach a Skills competitor as well and the teachers here reflect that, but the one thing they all have in common is engagement - I've yet to see a shrug of indifference from anyone.  I've been accused of not always playing well with others, but when the others are this capable and willing, it's hard not to get caught up in it all.

We did a solid day of sight seeing yesterday (photos below) and today we've had the day off before the opening ceremonies in a couple of hours.  I'm studiously taking notes so I can understand this new part of the process we haven't done before.

I've brought the most experienced IT/Networking student I've had to date.  It occurred to me the other night that IT, like many other stochastic technology skills, depends largely on experience driven intuition to overcome unclear problems in complex systems.  A student who was willing to try and fail many times ended up developing into my best candidate because of that resiliency.  I've brought students more skilled in academics to Skills Ontario, but never seen them break through because everything had to be just so.  You can't clarify a problem let alone solve it if you aren't willing to flounder around in the dark trying things first.  If you read any modern text on how to teach, floundering around isn't favourable to a transparent, linear process of problem resolution.  If everyone else keeps doing that, we've got an edge.



If you're involved in Ontario education at all, the hashtags to follow on twitter are #teamON and #teamOntario, and the National Skill Competition hashtag #SCNC2016.  Re-tweets of Team Ontario are appreciated (there is a team spirit award based on social media participation).

Later today and tomorrow we'll be knee deep in the competition, and then I'll be able to assess how well we prepared for this unknown.  Until then, isn't New Brunswick beautiful?

Team Ontario at Hopewell Rocks in The Bay of Fundy

Pointe-du-Chêne

Dinner at Catch 22 in Moncton

9lb lobster is watching you - 9lb lobster is unimpressed

Failing Forward

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the

road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
- C.S. Lewis

Four years ago I decided to show what we know in the information technology focused computer engineering course I teach at Centre Wellington DHS.  The Skills Canada I.T. and Networking Administration contest seemed custom tailored to do that for us.  That first year we took two competitors down to Guelph and finished second and third to an urban(e) high school in the regional competition.  We took what we learned from that first round and applied again the next year, this time winning our way through to the provincial competition for the first time.  Had we not known the competition by failing at it the first time, we never would never have been able to re-orientate ourselves and get out of the regional battle.

That first student we sent to provincials was a polymath, gifted at pretty much everything, but once again we were unprepared and we ended up finishing fourth overall.  Like mechanics and other stochastic skills, I.T. is experiential.  You can be the sharpest person in the room, but the more experienced technician will usually figure it out first because the problems aren't always obvious and linear; instinct based on experience plays a surprisingly large part in analyzing problems.  Still, fifth in the province wasn't bad for our second go at it.   Our competitor came back and debriefed on the provincial competition just as our previous students had with the regional competition.

Our third go at it had two competitors having to face off challengers regionally.  They finished 1-2 and we were off to provincials again.  Our second run at the big competition showed just how much the scope of the competition could change year to year.  We once again finished in the top ten, but didn't medal.  As before, our competitor came back and did a thorough debrief, helping the next candidate (the one who'd finished second regionally) get ready in more detail than ever before.  The old adage goes: I was able to reach so high because I stood on the backs of giants.  In our case this is completely true.  Had those previous students not leapt into the breach and shown us the way, we would never have seen the steady improvement that we did.

We just got back from provincial competition once again.  We gold medalled in I.T. and then finished top three in all technology competitions combined - meaning we didn't just beat other competitors, we also got a near perfect score in the process.  The first thing Zach, our gold medalist, did when he found out he won was shout out to the people who came before him, thanking them for the doing all that dangerous reconnaissance blind.

We're off to Moncton next month to compete in Skills Canada at the national level.  Ontario's is the biggest provincial skills program with the toughest competition, and we scored highly, but it's our first time nationally.  I didn't consider changing our approach.  Our goal is to go there and learn.  Zach has benefited from the failures of previous students, and now it's his turn to go first and pave the way.

Can a small town school compete against massive, urban
school boards?  Yes, yes we can.

At first glance it might look like those previous students failed, but they didn't, they were part of something bigger than themselves that has succeeded.  I know some people look at competitions like Skills Canada and wring their hands over how harsh it is on tender adolescent egos, but our failures made us better and our approach meant we were resilient in the face of those failures.  Even when we were sending different individuals year on year there was a team feeling as new competitors read over the notes, advice and encouragement of now long graduated students (all of whom are enjoying post-secondary computer focused success).  In many cases current competitors connected with grads through social media in order to further develop this mentorship.

The education system has focused relentlessly on student success.  A big part of that push is to mitigate failure wherever possible.  When failure is removed from learning you can't develop nonlinear, experiential skill-sets or take risks on new challenges because those things in particular demand failure in order to learn.  You also can't learn to fail forward or consider your learning to be a part of something larger than yourself.  No fail learning is remarkably selfish on a number of levels, damaging not only a student's ability to learn stochastic skills, but also weakening their resiliency, resolve and humility before a task.

The concept of no-fail learning is very academic in origin, no real-world learning process would consider such an approach viable.  It's unfortunately ironic that one of my best teaching experiences and a unique learning opportunity for many students has to happen outside of the classroom, where the many benefits of failure are still allowed to happen.

A couple of years ago I realized were were on a multi-year trajectory, so I started putting up posters in the classroom for each competitor so that new students would realize they are part of a dynasty!

Our school mascot is a falcon... geddit?

Cookie Cutter 'Formal' Exams

We were recently told that our board is moving to a formal exam for every course model. We're told that this needs to happen because if we don't use formal exam days for formal exams, we'll lose the days.  Perhaps we should lose the days.  Formal exams are an echo from the past.  Desperately trying to 'keep' them by forcing them on everyone isn't the best approach to learning, it never was.  Clinging to status quo thinking seldom produces outstanding results in anything.

This conundrum once again has me feeling the friction between academic and technology classrooms.  To the majority of subjects in our school, an exam for every class simply means setting up more desks and running off more photocopies.

One of our auto-shop teachers tried running a 'formal' exam this semester.  He had tinkered with a car and then had students diagnose it.  Since he doesn't have a 24 bay garage, he has to have students approach the car one at a time in order to diagnose it.  Because he is expected to have all students in the room at the same time (exams are blocked into two hour scheduled time periods, one per day), he had students come up one at a time to diagnose and resolve the problems while the rest wrote written tests that  did not reflect how students had learned in his class during the semester.

Cookie cutter exam schedules for cookie cutter learners.

The formal exam structure didn't work at all in the shop.  The first kid up shouted out, "do you want me to change out this fuse?" and suddenly everyone in the room knew an answer.  It then kept happening.  When you've been teaching students to collaborate on diagnostics all semester, why would you suddenly have a summative that demands they don't?  Even if that's what a 'formal' exam is?

All that effort to create a genuine assessment within a standardized exam structure was wasted, but that doesn't stop us from being expected to bring meaningful assessment to all our technology students in this cookie cutter final exam format.  How meaningful can this two hour window be when our courses are tactile, stochastic and experiential?  In a class where there is a linear progression from question to answer, and were the skills are assessed on paper this works a treat, but not in tech.

Coop avoids the exam problem by creating individual summatives (each student has an interview).  Of course this means that each teacher is handling 25+ hours of assessment for each class they teach.  I'm surprised that they can stuff all that meaningful assessment into a single exam week.  While this resolves the problem of trying to fit individualized exams into cookie cutter academic schedules, it doesn't address the complexity of creating an entire class set of experiential problems of equal complexity (you couldn't have the same problem because the first student out would happily tell the rest what they are about to face).  Creating individualized, immersive simulation for each student might be the ultimate in summatives, but a factory styled school system isn't remotely designed to produce that kind of individualized learning opportunity.

Is this what an exam for every course looks like?  Kinda like
the floor of a very serious factory, or a university...

Would I like to create a 'formal' exam that offers my computer students real-world, immersive, experiential computer technology problem solving?  You bet, but expecting me to do that in a two hour window for dozens of students at a time suggests that the actual goal here isn't meaningful and genuine so much as generic and formulaic, like most 'formal' exams.

'Formal' exam is code for a university-styled, written, academic assessment.  It typically involves lots of photocopying and students sitting in rows writing answers to the same questions.  The teacher then spends a lot of time trying to assign value to this dimensionless form of assessment.  Like many other aspects of high school, formal exams are high school teachers imitating the university professors they wished they could be.

For hundreds of thousands of dollars with corporate sponsorship
 and post-secondary support, Skills Ontario championships
create meaningful, experiential tech-assessment.

If you're looking for an example of an immersive, complex, skills based assessment, we have a fantastic home-grown example.  Skills Canada does a great job of creating experiential assessment of technology knowledge and tactile abilities, but with million dollar budgets and support from all levels of government, private business and post secondary education, they exist in a different world from my classroom.  They're also catering to the top 1% of 1% of technology students.  I have to cater to the other 99.9% with nothing like that kind of budget.

I've been mulling over how I'm supposed to create meaningful assessment for my technology students in that two hour time slot and I'm stumped.  No budget is forthcoming to purchase equipment and tools so that I can have every student doing the same thing at the same time - I don't even have enough screwdrivers for all students to be building computers at the same time, let alone the computer parts needed to build them.  Those would be computer parts that some students would not ground themselves properly when installing.  Funding wouldn't just need to be there for tools, it would also have to be there to replace breakage due to incompetence.

Technology teachers already struggle trying to explain technology costs to academics with only a vague understanding and little experience in apprenticeship and the trades.  When students are heavy handed or absent minded it costs us money to replace what they break, yet we struggle to get funded on par with academic courses that do most of their work on paper.

Now we face the prospect of being forced to reduce our tactile, experiential, immersive learning into cookie cutter summatives that jive with the pre-existing academic scheduling.  Just when you think we might be evolving beyond the 20th Century factory model of education it rears its ugly head and demands reductionist assessment for all.  Wouldn't it be nice if we were looking to diversify summatives instead of cramming them all into the same schedule that existed fifty years ago?

Lessons From Skills Canada

Friday I chaired the video creation Skills Canada regional competition in Guelph.  Ours was a competitive division with five teams who had to film, edit and post-produce a preplanned thirty second ad in four hours.  Only three teams could place and only the top team could move on to the provincial competition.

Some observations stood out:

• The hard deadlines came as a shock to many of the students, who aren't used to them any more (we don't really require hard deadlines in class any more)
• The competitive nature of the competition concerned a number of the teams, who couldn't comprehend being allowed to lose in school (we don't really integrate competitive winning and losing in class any more)
• The sense of satisfaction that resulted from getting a quality piece of work done in the time given surprised many of the students (we don't really allow students to develop a sense of satisfaction from completing work on time - on the contrary, a number of students recently told me at parent teacher interviews that they are sick and tired of knocking themselves out to complete work by deadlines only to see slack and idle students hand in the same thing whenever they get around to it).
• At the rewards ceremony many of the students were at a loss as to how to act when they'd won (stony faced and blankly indifferent were the norm, broken up by the odd grin).  They were also unable to recognize what losing gracefully looked like.
• In the automotive technology section the announcer said, "congratulations gentlemen" only to realize that one of the gold medalist was female (from our school!) and back pedal.   If we're going to break the gender assumptions around skilled trades, it starts here (and is).
• Skills Canada has reinforced for me (yet again) that media arts isn't an arts course so much as it's a technical skills course that includes artistic input (like carpentry).  We just got rather brutally cut for new students while being administered by the fine arts department, I think in great part because what we're teaching is being administered by a department that doesn't know how to present us or what to do with us.

Skills Canada is a wonderful program that empowers students to embrace their passions in the skilled trades.  Often looked down upon by the academically prejudiced teachers (all university grads deeply ingrained in academia), many of these students with smart hands and kinesthetically focused minds look like failures to the pen & paper classroom teacher.

Our school is fortunate to have a busy and wide ranging technology department with many course options.  Those hands-smart, kinesthetic thinkers must suffer in smaller schools full of class rooms and little else.

Having participated in Skills Canada for two years now, I'm a fan.  I plan to encourage our computer engineering students to put their names in for the IT competition, and our media arts students to jump into the crucible, they come out tempered by the experience.

As one of the grade 12s said at the end of the day, "I was put off by the competition and now I'm sorry I never tried this before.  It was a great experience, and a great challenge.  I wish I had a chance to do it again, now that I've tried it, I want to do it again better."  That is the greatest lesson of competition, it clarifies how you can improve in no uncertain terms, and then offers you another chance to show what you know.  Of course, as a senior he won't be here next year.

I've got to find ways to get younger students involved in taking this risk, the rewards are great, and by grade 12 they'll be weathered veterans who can take a competitive run at the medal stand.  Nothing they do in class helps prepare them for the world they are about to walk out into more.