Teacher in Development

More and more I see a tendency towards personal learning. Students are tired of course books. Teachers are tired of them too. I know I am. I also know my students are.

Sure, sometimes the text can be interesting and relevant, but the more I think about Alger’s post around curriculum and how it creates a certain aloofness, the more I’m seeing esl textbooks in the same light.

Curriculum forces you into a scheduled environment. It’s 7:30 a.m. - English time. Your English time lasts until 9:00 a.m. where you’ll leave the “English environment” and enter your real world. English, more often than not, slides away until it’s time for the next block of English time.

A fantastic quote from David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth:

“It isn’t about the technology. It isn’t about the machine! It’s about the information. So, with this in mind, what if we instead said…

…kids should only be allowed to learn from textbooks they have written themselves.

The sentiment is the same. Kids are learning by teaching themselves, within their own information environment. They are accessing information, doing something with it, and expressing it in a way that will be valuable to themselves and/or to others in the future.” (Warlick)

and

“The point is that students are learning, not merely by consuming content, but by interacting within an evolving information environment and producing valuable content. In addition, they are learning by building a personal network of content, and ultimately, a network of trusted people as sources of knowledge. It’s the best way I can think of for students to learn contemporary literacy as a learning skill.”

Learning is not only consuming information, but it is also reflecting on it, producing value added content - where value added is the information of origin with the student’s own informed addition to it - and connecting with others who are also speaking into the same body of information.

I especially like Warlick’s comment that the content should be drawn from within the student’s own information environment. How true, and how far off we are sometimes.

Most course books attempt to be relevant, but they just cannot. Atleast not for long. Market Leader used to be a course book on the cutting edge of business English. But that was several years ago, back when faxes and memos were the rage. E-mail was just arriving on the Mexican business scene. Market Leader targets business people, it attempts relevancy - and for a time it was successful. But in the end, it was just a course book that took a snap shot of it’s environment, was adopted into curriculum by many language schools - I know I brought it into ours - but now has and is phasing out of relevance.

I like Warlick ask, why can’t we have the student bring in content? Why do we have to latch onto course books, when we should be basing our content on the student’s world. Their “information environment.”

I’ve started doing this in my classes, tired of the frustration of a course book that is no longer meaning much to my students.

In my legal class, my students have started bringing in actual legal briefs - in English - that they are working through, and struggling over. Their information world is starting to become our content.

The results have been….amazing. We’re still in touch with grammar and vocabulary - but now it’s grammar and vocabulary and sentence structures that are useful. Relevant. Why? The student said so.

Learning is no longer passive, but is very much a prosumer activity. I see the classroom content of the future as being something that is live - highlighted by the student as being important to them (hello rss , blog content, day to day papwerwork etc.)

Curriculum will likely always play a role, but it will have to be personalized - and the teacher will need to be an expert on the horizon (the big direction that students have to be moving in) but also incredibly flexible around the steps involved in the journey that will get them there. I think the effective trajectory coach is unafraid of developing fluency in what their students are involved in.

I’m no tax lawyer, but my students are. Relevant content for them is tax law. Is tax treaties. Slowly but surely I’m starting to tap into this pipeline. My bloglines account is now a buzz with spirited activity of several tax blogs (holy cow, lawyers blog too!).

While I don’t plan or pretend to know everything about tax law, I have made it my mission to become a student of it, so I can be relevant to my students.

I’m still moving towards curriculum set goals and proficiencies, but I’m doing it from within my student’s information environment.

the conversation is open…what do you think?

If you’ve been working in ESL for any length of time, or if you’re working to learn a language yourself, you likely have faced the flatline, where language learning and useage seems to stand still, with little noteworthy progress to spur you on.

Basic students usually enjoy sharp, or at least a steadily rising learning/application curve - where they are constantly taking in new vocabulary, using it, and making themselves understood in English. It’s exciting. It’s motivating. It’s fun. You can really note the difference from when you first began, to where you are now.

Then the slump hits. You break into intermediate level fluency, and everything seems to grind to a halt.

I’ve been noticing this with my students, all of whom are at a high intermediate level of English. I’ve been working with some of them for over a year and a half, and with the exception of one, all continue to make very similar mistakes, and still seem to be stuck in a lower geared level of fluency.

There have been improvements, but they’ve been about as measureable as watching a tree grow. You just don’t see immediate, noteable growth overnight. Instead we’ve entered slow grow. It’s about years vs. weeks or months.

I’ve noted considerable increases in confidence, the ability to express thoughts - and have everyone else understand them - has also gone up. However, they are walking the flatline.

Seth Godin has an interesting post around this that I thought was quite interesting. It’s about understanding the local max, and developing the staying power to break through to the BIG MAX.

The local max, borrowing from Godin, is when you or your students are flatlining. When they’re wondering if they’ll ever be able to speak English well, if they’re checking in on how many years they’ve been at this whole English thing, if they’re about ready to try something else, or just plain throw in the towel.

But Godin pushes for something more, something you’re not seeing yet, but should be.

“You’re not succeeding because you haven’t started yet.” (Godin)

While my post is geared towards esl, I think principle applies to many areas, inside and outside of education in general.

If you feel you’ve maxed out, that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped moving forward. More than likely you’re heading towards a minor dip before the next big climb.
Seth’s Blog: Understanding Local Max

More thinking around Brian Alger’s post - Curriculum:The Design of the Prerequisite.

If you’re involved in course/curriculum design, of if you live and work inside of one, you should grab a cup of coffee (make it extra strong!) and try to wade through his post.

All I can say is that my head is still mostly spinning after a third read of this amazing piece. Lots of things to think about and ponder that’s for sure.

“Education and Curriculum are interdependent.” (Alger par.4)

We’ve been discussing the use of blogs in the classroom and the difficulties and walls we seem to be bumping up against from the system we work within. I would like to venture a guess that what we’re running into is the curriculum.

Agler points out that “curriculum is the most basic technology for control and authority in education.” To me, this means that if you are involved in educating - or “training by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession”(qtd. from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) then you are by default, also heavily involved in a curriculum.

Tonight’s thought:
Perhaps curriculum is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It simply exists. It’s a part of our educational institutions, and is likely to remain so for a very long time. A curriculum can become a bad or good thing depending on the one who wields it.

In the hands of the wrong person, a curriculum becomes a one sided speech that students are forced to listen to and obey. It becomes ” a one-way technology - a push technology - a system of mass communication.”(Agler par. 5) One way. Push. Tune into this program or you fail the year or you fail the big exam at the end. One message to many, and many dialing in on one message.

Curriculum can cooly kill off passion and joy in the classroom as teachers are forced to follow the track and not deviate, and students are downgraded into passive receivers of information.

J.M., a fellow teacher who is also my brother, has written a fantastic post which explores the tension between following the curriculum and blogging.

“Part of my angst is over the seeming contradiction between the inherent open-endedness of the blog platform versus the mandated, closed nature of the literature 12 curriculum. From the research I have done, blogs and social software have been created for a multiple of personal topics. My own blog categories is indicative of this, as it ranges from education to faith and social justice. The blog reflects the blogger.”

“The lit. 12 platform seems to be on the opposite end of this spectrum. It is reflected in the proscribed reading list, and lack of flexibility in teaching (I will give the curriculum this, they do openly state that these are the ‘minimum’ readings and that students should be encouraged to read beyond the course requirements, but as an educator who is trying to equip his students for success in this course–read success on the provincial exam as well as in the course– I have a lot of cognitive dissonance over introducing any ‘extra’ texts into the course package and adding to the workload of all. So, in short, it seems that although ‘going beyond the course’ is encouraged, there is no intrinsic ‘reward’ for classes who do so. In this sense, I find the curriculum, ie the mandated reading list, to be constrictive and confining.” (Palimpsest redux)

It’s personal, social connectedness, and exploration vs. perscribed, lack of flexibility, constriction and confinement.

If we’re at all interested in our students, and being student centered teachers - and boy we had better be because it’s all about them in the first place, then we need to be thinking hard about the curriculum we are working with and under.

Curriculums BY NATURE, according to Agler, are “fundamentally a technology designed to control and impose authority.” (Agler par. 3)

While we do need to follow through with the “must knows,” we need to also make space inside the curriculum for the student and ourselves. If not, we run the terrible risk of falling into a deep joyless void where the curriculum

“exclude(s) the thoughts, ideas and experiences of the students in the educational process, or at least (…) denigrate(s) the role of student to receiver. The effect is much the same for teachers since they do not have any meaningful input into the fundamental structure of curriculum. Often, the best as teacher can do is to try an integrate creative approaches to instructional design. The problem here, of course, is that the nature of this creativity is completely subsumed, framed and shaped by the curriculum - a force that is external to them as well.” (Agler par.5)

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, gives a great explanation around the word responsible. We are the only ones on the planet who can be exposed to a stimulus, and choose our response. We can think about what we will do as a result of something that happens OUTSIDE OF OUR CONTROL, and then act. There is a space between the stimulus and our action where we can learn how to think first, and act more responsively. We are a response - able people.

Curriculum is something that is largely out of our control. We can either get run over by it, or learn how to respond in a way that is congruous to our “must knows” but also that is friendly to student and teacher.

To be continued, but until then the floor is yours…