My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
November will be a rather out-of-routine month for me. My changes of routine began last weekend when I attended the biannual ISAS Heads’ meeting in San Antonio. It continues this weekend as I attend a strategic leadership forum in Chicago conducted by NBOA on the theme of “change leadership in the 21st century”, and it will continue into next week when I travel to China to finalize negotiations and hopefully sign a sister school relationship between Awty and a school in Shanghai.
The ISAS conference in San Antonio was an excellent opportunity to receive input on emerging trends in education as well as spend time with fellow Heads of Schools. I found three of the sessions especially interesting and worthwhile.
The first was a three hour session on “The Emerging Culture of Teaching and Learning” by Alan November, the Senior Partner of November Learning. The emerging culture which was the focus of his presentation was technology in the classroom, including the use of interactivity and social media, “anytime, anywhere” learning and real time assessment. His address involved the use of some of this emerging technology to exemplify his points, including Poll Everywhere, targeted and effective use of powerful aspects of Google (and other) searches, diigo, student publishing through Newsaction, using WolframAlpha as an information generator rather than as a simple calculator, Mathletics, some kindergarten-level iPad apps such as Screen Chomp, and the effective use of hash tags on Twitter to create a safe and controlled learning discussion for students.
Alan November emphasized that he does not like the term “one-to-one” computing (i.e. one computer per student), which he sees as a marking slogan only. His preferred term is “one-to-the-world” because of the global access to information that technology can now bring to the classroom. He illustrated this with some blogs by teachers such as Mrs Cassidy’s class and the use of Twitter to engage in discussions and answer questions such as this site. As he commented, the key question to ask is ‘what kind of global relationships do we want in the classroom?’ rather than the question that is posed more commonly in schools: ‘what kind of technology do you want?’. Indeed, as his demonstration of WolframAlpha showed, a key skill for young people is knowing how to ask the right question.
He concluded his presentation by referring to the example of Eric Mazur, a physics lecturer who has increased the level of conceptual understanding among his students at Harvard University from 20% to 80%. He has achieved this by shifting the focus of his classes from teacher-centered presentations to using his students’ questions to form new concepts, as shown in a YouTube video that demonstrates shifting the classroom culture from questions to concepts. Over a period of years, Eric Mazur carefully catalogued 4500 of his students’ questions (many of which he had never considered might be questions in their minds), and focussed his teaching around these queries. His point was that most teachers do not understand what their students’ questions are, and the longer teachers teach, the less likely they are appreciate a beginner’s queries. The other important thing that Mazur discovered was that students are far more willing to share their questions anonymously online via a website rather than face-to-face. Using the questions as a basis for instruction, he used Poll Everywhere as a tool to get students to teach each other, which he found resulted in the huge leaps in conceptual understanding.
In the discussion following Alan November’s presentation, questions were asked about internet safety and security – just as you might expect when a group of School Heads meet. Alan responded by referring us all to an article on MindShift that provided information and advice from the education authorities. Many of the points in this article surprised my fellow Heads who were very pleased that the educational constraints for schools were not as tight as they had previously been led to believe.
The second session that I really appreciated at ISAS was presented by Tim Fish, the former associate headmaster at McDonogh School in Maryland and now and president of FolioNetwork. The topic of his presentation was “Building a Faculty Growth Process That Really Works: The Journeys of Two Schools”. Tim’s starting point was the evaluation and professional development processes in many schools are described as being ineffective, bureaucratic and cumbersome. He then proceeded to describe the pathway he had undertaken in a couple of schools to develop a software-based collaborative tool known as “Folio” which, to cut a long story short, is now being used in about 20 schools. Tim led us through a process of identifying the key characteristics that make certain teachers more effective in the classroom than others, and then asked us to relate the relevance of the processes of faculty evaluation currently used in our schools to those characteristics.
His thesis was that most of our current models of faculty evaluation are not building a culture of growth, partly because many systems focus on processes (such as how frequently class visits will occur) rather than the growth that follows from professional conversations. Among the points Tim argued should be part of an effective process of faculty evaluation, he mentioned the importance of goal setting, involving large numbers of people to provide feedback, self-reflection, and focussing on learning rather than teaching – which means obtaining student input.
A similar presentation to the one Tim provided can be seen online at http://www.napsg.org/Media/foliographics.pdf.
The third session that I found especially inspiring focussed on Finland’s education system, which international studies have consistently found ranks among the best in the world. We spent the time watching the film “The Finland Phenomenon” in which Harvard researcher, Tony Wagner, travelled to Finland, visited schools, spoke to educators and drew conclusions about the lessons that schools everywhere can learn from Finland.
This is the second time I had watched this one-hour film (the previous occasion being in July when I attended the IB Americas conference), and in some ways I felt I learned more the second time through – perhaps I was able to think more deeply about the points being made rather than trying to process all the new information during the first viewing. It is difficult to do justice to the arguments made in this thought-provoking film, but some of the key points that struck me about education in Finland were the following:
•Finnish schools do far less testing than schools in the US, which results in less pressure for students (and faculty), more collaboration and more learning time;
•Finnish schools have structures in place to address learning problems as soon as they are detected to ensure that no child is ‘left behind’ – as a consequence the gap between the highest and lowest performing schools is only about 4%;
•Each teaching period in Finland is about 75 minutes long, followed by a 15 minute break between each lesson – this keeps young minds fresh, reduces time lost in moving from class to class, allows for a variety of learning styles each lesson and more in-depth discussions;
•There is a high level of interdisciplinary work that is said to save time (for students) as well as provide students with better understandings;
•Teachers in Finland are highly esteemed and respected – there are no formal evaluation procedures but there is instead a high degree of trust which arises directly from the requirement that all teachers must have advanced degrees as well as the high level of transparency that comes as young teachers observe the lessons given by experienced teachers;
•It is difficult to become a teacher in Finland as the competition for places is so strong – teachers are ‘knowledge workers’ rather than pedagogues;
•Teachers in Finland spend only a little more than half the time doing face-to-face teachers than is normal in the US (600 hours per year in Finland as opposed to about 1100 hours per year in the US), and the extra time is used for lesson preparation, professional collaboration and helping students with individual needs;
•The focus of schools is academic work – sports and club activities tend to be handled by outside organizations;
•Finnish schools tend to be less formal than US schools in various ways such as dress code and modes of address;
•Students in Finland receive very little homework (perhaps 4 to 5 hours per week);
•Lessons in Finland tend to be highly collaborative and advanced technology is used to foster collaboration between students;
•Great use is made of ‘digital portfolios’ in which students can publish their work, track their progress, and make their learning more transparent; and
•Related to these two last points, there is a high level of trust – teachers are trusted to perform well without being inspected, and students are trusted to work effectively if the teacher is not present.
That comment made me curious, so I did some research after returning to Houston, and I found some evidence to support this claim (see graphic to the right, which comes from http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2011/05/trust.jpg and which can be clicked to enlarge). If this graphic is true, it may be a difficult task indeed for us to enjoy the excellence of education that Finland exemplifies – although I do not believe that this should prevent us from making the effort.
I hope to be able to share “The Finland Phenomenon” video as a discussion starter for the faculty here at Awty in the not-too-distant future. Maybe it will even be possible to arrange a skype connection with Tony Wagner at the end of the film for a question-and-answer session as we managed to do at the ISAS meeting in San Antonio. I think that would be a great example of the kind of directions that Alan November was advocating in the first of these three great sessions.
Meanwhile, the students at Awty have continued to enjoy what I think is the best international education in the United States. Rather than trying to describe the various special events this week, I will let the photos below speak for themselves as they show scenes from the Halloween Parade on Wednesday, last weekend’s Fun Fall Festival, the charity food drive we conducted together with the Houston Rockets and the latest landscaping work for our new buildings.
Three great sessions at ISAS
Sunday, 4 November 2012