Schools for today and tomorrow

The more I got involved in educational development, as a school consultant or as a teacher trainer, the more I got aware that school buildings and facilities represent a major obstacle to innovative educational concepts and policies. On rare occasions contemporary school design offers new perspectives to teaching and learning but unfortunately most of the time new schools are not better than old ones even if they look better.

When I contemplate the structure of most schools, I always ask myself: Will these school facilities support the learning design of tomorrow? Would I enjoy going to this school as a teacher or as I student, and would I be able to develop a sense of belonging in these walls and school surroundings? Is this an environment that inspires collaboration, autonomy and communication, diversity and community, transparency, participation, and appropriation?

Of course high quality teaching can happen anywhere, even in the shade under a tree in the desert. The best equipment and the coziest environment cannot prevent uninspired teachers to sap students’ motivation to learn or undisciplined and frustrated students to undermine teachers’ motivation to teach. But, education is not limited to what happens in a classroom or to the relationship between a teacher and his students. The environment itself plays a significant role in the learning. Here I refer to the Scandinavian school models or the Reggio Emilia approach, where the environment is said to be the "third teacher" the first being the children themselves and the second the teacher or the adults in general.


When one sees the computers, the interactive whiteboards, the high quality ergonomic furniture the well designed architectural details and the exclusive materials, the question must be permitted if these components really shake off old structures and generate a new quality in learning and teaching. Do they make a difference when a classroom has the same proportions as those that were built one hundred and fifty years ago? It's not because everything is new and expensive that it may not be poor.


I don't think that a poor school design in a pedagogical sense is the result of a major communication problem between educators, stakeholders and architects. Their expertise maybe different but unfortunately their visions of school facilities are most of the time very similar. I doubt that most architects, stakeholders and teachers have other tenets to define what a school should look like besides aesthetic architectural considerations like harmony, symmetry, proportions and materials or basic characteristics that most of us consider being intrinsic truths of educational environments which are: 15 to 30 students will have to be instructed in a room separated from other rooms, accessible through one or two doors, with a blackboard at the front or a whiteboard or both, windows on one side, wall cupboards on the other, enough individual seats and worktables for each student and "one" desk for "the" teacher.


Do school planners think of education as a multidimensional collaborative and constructive process? Do they assume that the actors involved may be organized in networks and sub networks and multidimensional hierarchical structures defined by multiple levels of expertise instead of linear top down relationships and centralized instruction? I am convinced that they don't. The internal structure of modern schools and also their surroundings are seldom open to appropriation, in a constructionist perspective. But appropriation may well be a precondition so that the inhabitants of a structure can identify themselves with the environment in which they evolve, learn, interact, and think … In this respect, the German Peter Hübner, who sees "building as a social process" could offer some inspiration for anybody involved in school development and planning. Unfortunately schools are seldom conceived ass social meeting places as he sees them.


At least in Luxembourg we have schools that are disconnected from cultural centers and libraries (if there are any) and we have separate buildings for after school activities and lunchtime. Those buildings are empty during school time, and schools are empty during after school time, as if it were obvious that students need to flee from school after 4 or 6 hours of teaching. In every structure the students meet with a different staff, that has its own separated view on them. We build schools without libraries or open spaces for leisure and after school care structures without surroundings that offer the slightest potential for exploration. We have a ministry for education, one for family and yet another one for culture, and of course we have one for regional planning, one for public building, and last but not least one for environmental planning, but they hardly seem to communicate when it comes to developing a sound vision of educational infrastructures for today and tomorrow.


So far, I cannot but draw the following conclusion: First, for what schools have to offer, they are too expensive. Secondly, the total costs for separated structures are to high and none of them offers the richness and interconnectedness that they should. Finally, if stakeholders persist in believing that it is better to have separated structures for every aspect of education, and if, what we have is the maximum of what one can get for the money that has been spent, then, schools are not expensive enough.

ICT for Schools: What you buy is what you think

When I have a difficult subject to discuss, I sometimes like to start off with a graph to visualise my ideas and the complexity of the subject. The first draft of this one was hand-made. I did it during a discussion I had with teachers about choices of ICT equipment, systems and applications. I argued that you need to have a sound framework for ICT decision-making in education.

Any choice that you can make has multiple reasons and consequences. Decision about ICT in education are always – consciously or unconsciously – based on a theory about and a vision on learning and teaching, media and society. Most of the time people are not conscious about their own theories that are guiding their choices and they rarely have a realistic idea of what effects of their decisions will have on learning, teaching and school organisation for instance.

If you are in favor of a computer lab you have a different view on learning organisation and learning processes than if you prefer distributed equipment. The same is true if you expect a wireless laptop cart to be the best solution for using ICT with your students. If you think you need specialised educational software you probably also have a different view on learning, literacy, instruction and teaching than if you prefer production-oriented software with no predefined content. In case you have a limited budget for equipment, the decision to spend it on interactive whiteboards says something about your teaching concept. It probably differs from the concept someone has, who would prefer to spend the same amount on computers with free software, cameras, camcorders, digital microscopes or robotics sets first. The second fosters simultaneous and autonomous hands on activity by many, the first promotes centralized lecture style activity of one at a time.

Most decision makers have hardly an overview on the short term and long term effects of the decisions they make. Some effects are purely financial or technical. Of course they ought to be considered even if for the moment your budget is big enough.

Some effects are organisational. A computer lab for instance is fine, if you don’t use computers on a daily bases. If the classes who use it are few and if you are near to the lab, you can use it whenever it’s free. If every teacher wants his time share for using the lab and if there are many teachers and classes, they will have access once a week or once every two weeks. If at the assigned time a technical or organisational problem comes up, you will have to come back two weeks later – unfortunately that’s when you had planned your field trip. The same logic applies to mobile systems like laptop carts.

The most important however are the effects on teaching and learning. Do the invest in ICT serve old ideas with new means or are your invests a stepping stone to new educational practices? And, what else is needed to implement new educational practices?

As an educational ICT consultant I have experienced that teachers' views are often guided by considerations of high availability (for themselves and for today), handling, short term productivity, control, fast familiarisation, and technical modernism.

Schoolboards and politicians are focused on costs and social equity, but sometimes, if the salesman has good convincing skills, their hunger for modernism overwhelms their decisions, with the consequence that costly hype equipment is bought without any noticeable effect on education.

Technicians mostly concentrate on reliability, efficiency, maintenance and standardisation, but are also driven by ideology and by the option to take control over the technology and the users.

Architects are generally concerned about budget limits – if equipment is part of the project package – about design issues of cabling and computer furniture.

In the end what is lacking is a sound framework connecting teaching, learning, equipment and software to guide people to choose from all the options that are available.

Which is the dominant learning and teaching style in our school today, and where do we want to go from here? Which technological strategy will help us develop our school? Which are the competencies that our students really need to develop, when we consider that they are three, eight or fifteen years from entering the job market or playing an active part in social, economical or political “adult” life? Which are the competencies that teachers need to develop in order to serve as guides or even role models for their students? What are the implicit and explicit “messages” to the learners and the community, of the different hardware of software solutions that schools can choose from? Are students treated as responsible autonomous learners or are they vessels to fill with information that is expected to morph into knowledge? Do we talk about standards to the learners meaning specific software that “everyone” uses in the office, or do we talk about standards in the sense of information management, communication, non-linear production processes and so forth. Are ethics, authorship and empowerment important aspects of schools considerations, and are they connected to technology, or are technological resources seen as value free “tools”? Is the learner in control of the machine or is the machine in control of the learner? And who controls the machine that controls the learner?

Such questions are never left unanswered even if they are not raised. At least the answers are hidden in the choices schools make regarding hardware, software and distribution of technology.

At times where choices have to been made, my graph doesn’t necessary simplify the task but it helps to critically analyse possible scenarios and describe the interconnectedness of some major layers that maybe considered.

A new way the money goes

When I see the capital that is needed to save the banking sector and the automotive industry, and maybe there will be other sectors, I can't help but asking myself if this money is more real than the one these sectors have produced so far. There must be some endless reservoir somewhere. Maybe politicians have finally managed to find the only endless resource in the Universe before scientist have.

Anyway, as there seems to be no limit regarding the money that states manage and are asked to bring up, the other question that strikes to my mind is, if it's not time to seriously consider the proposition of a "Guaranteed minimum income" (GMI) for every citizen, or as I would prefer to formulate it, for every human being on earth - child or adult.

If you think this is a crazy idea which is not practicable, you probably have have one excuse and one reason for that. The excuse may be that you never have considered the idea - and therefore you have never taken the time to think it over in depth.

Recently I have read an interesting and convincing book by Götz Wolfgang Werner, a quite famous German businessman. The book is called Einkommen für alle. Der dm-Chef über die Machbarkeit des bedingungslosen Grundeinkommens, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2007, ISBN 978-3-462-03775-3.

If this guy, who has proved many times in his career as a successful business man, to have a profound knowledge on a lot of what has to do with money, is convinced that the GMI is a feasible concept, I think it's worth considering the idea. I invite you to take the time to read about this visionary proposition come back to the negotiation table, when you have made up your mind on the basis of your own arguments and on the basis of arguments that you can find in quite a few sereous sources. So far for the excuse.

Now what about the reason for possibly rejecting the idea? You actually may think that people will never be mature and responsible enough to make a substantial contribution to society if they are not forced to work to earn some money and that this would be the end of society how it works today.

To this I must answer with two questions: Isn't the option to make a substantial contribution to society dependent on decent life conditions? And second, what in the end has been the substantial contribution to society of those who have a major responsibility in probably one of the biggest worldwide economic crisis the world has seen so far?

I don't want to go in a detailed discussion about the success of current economical models, as I don't want to speak to much about the necessity to save automotive industry in order to save jobs of ordinary employees or corporate jet users, when at least one of the main reasons for the decline of this industry, besides mismanagement, is that people have stopped considering buying cars as one of their priorities for the moment.

What I'm mostly interested in is what the effect on education would be of such a measure like providing every person on earth with a basic income that would be high enough to live decently and safely.

What would education be like if teachers and parents would not feel obliged to tell their students and children "If you don't learn you won't get a job, and you'll suffer all the consequences of being unemployed; no house, not enough food, no decent living for your children, no whatever you can think of that you only get if you got a job and enough money?"
What would the messages to the coming generation be like if there were no such threats like : "If you have no job, you will be forced to live in the street, to steel, to beg or at least you will always be dependent on someone else to survive?"

Maybe you would ask children more questions like: "What would you like to do in your life? What occupation would you find challenging?" Whatever their answer would be, you could reply: "Fine, if that's your life project, wouldn't it be great to find out what could be important to know if you want to do that?"

I'm sure there would still be people wanting to be astrophysicists, politicians, teachers, farmers or car builders. I can also imagine that there would be people doing nothing or doing the wrong things - as many do today - paid or not. We would also have to think of what incentives could motivate people to collect our garbage.

But what I am sure of, is, that we would develop a different viewpoint on what is important and interesting in life and what education is for. At least we could ask everyone what her/his life project is, without being sarcastic.

image source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marketmakers.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jakarta_slumlife43.JPG

2009

To all the children in this world I wish at least one caring elder, enough food, a meaningful education, the intelligence to know which role model to follow, and a safe place to stay in this world of adult madness and perversion of power.

For all my friends, relatives and page visitors : May the beauty of life be with you!

Original images found on Wikimedia Commons.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Children_in_Middle_Vietnam.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palestinian_children_in_Jenin.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Children_in_Namibia(1_cropped).jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Babasteve-three_boys.jpg

Croatian Thoughts

My recent family holidays took me to Croatia, a beautiful country which I already wanted to visit years ago, before Yugoslavia split apart. We drove through Germany and Austria before arriving in Slovenia and finally in Croatia more exactly to the Plitvice Lakes. When the Third Balkan War broke out back in 1991, the maps which were displayed during the head news on TV always made me aware of how close to the country I lived an armed conflict was taking place in Europe.

Now, driving my way through Slovenia and Croatia, I couldn't help but thinking about this tragic event and I scrutinized the landscape to detect some scars that could have been left by this war. But I noticed that in the area we drove through most oft the streets and houses were quite new. Only a few house fronts were covered with bullet holes.

While I was in Plitvice I read in one of my travel guides that it was exactly in this area of these beautiful lakes, that some of the first people had been killed in late March 1991. This "Plitvice Lakes incident" is also known in Croatian as "Plitvice Bloody Easter". This incident "contributed significantly to the worsening ethnic tensions that were to be at the heart of the subsequent Croatian War of Independence." as explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plitvice_Lakes_incident). Now I was there with my family to spend some enjoyable days and to contemplate the striking beauty of the landscape.

I read also that Slovenia, the first province of former Yugoslavia to declare it's independence and the first one to be accepted as a full member in the European Union, had been (maybe still is) opposed to the admission of Croatia in the EU because of territorial conflicts between both countries and I thought: Crazy! Political problems are being exported from one structure - Yugoslavia, and imported into an other one - the European Union. Inveterately human!

Reading "The Goddess and the Bull" by Michael Balter about the excavation of the neolithic site in Catalhüyük - I came across interesting fact that it was not agriculture that made people choose a sedentary life and that settlements hat been created long before agriculture was invented. This leads to a important question which archaeologists try to address through their exploration of the past: What made people want to live together in the first place? I liked very much how Balter linked this issue to our present and future by writing: "if we could understand a little better why we all wanted to live together, maybe we would bet better at doing it."

The language differences between the former Yugoslavian provinces and regions has also been a major issue during the conflict and remains an important element in the endeavors to gain or to construct a national identity. When years ago people were said to speak Serbo-Crotatian now they speak Serbian or Croatian which in itself is a mix of the dialects Chakavian, Kakavian and Shtokavian. In a language forum I found an interesting post with questions concerning the similarities or differences between the languages Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian and a very interesting answer which gives an indication of the complexity of the matter http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=36982.

Reading about the language conflicts I could recall a situation in one of the schools I work with, where a few girls tried to teach me the differences between Croatien and Bosnian or Bosniak. The words they chose as examples were very close and sometimes differed only by their intonation. The process of bringing up language differences to construct ethnic or national barriers seemed to have been triggered already. Language is never a neutral or non-political subject. Some may say that it's not the role of the school to address political issues and many teachers will avoid this kind of subject or will simply not be aware of their implications. Especially in Europe we should take this very seriously and teach young people how and why language conventions are constructed, that language barriers are as artificial as territorial barriers and that language is not only a tool to think with but also a tool to construct realities and an instrument that is used to include or exclude others.

The recent conflicts in Belgium between the French-speaking region of Wallonia and the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders is a current example which shows the deep political implications of language differences. If teachers in schools don't want to tackle such problems, who else will? Should we wait until children are grown up to discuss their histories, differences and similarities and how much the construction of their identities is linked to language?

Jacques Duez: On listening to the children

In the last week I was very absorbed by Jacques Duez's work and busy preparing an event where I presented it to teachers. Jacques Duez has worked for more than 30 years as an ethics teacher in Mons (Belgium). In his early teaching he was very soon frustrated with giving lessons to students during which they were When he noticed that what students brought up themselves was much more interesting to them and to him, he started first tape recording and soon video recording what they said about a certain topic and to share those recordings among different classes. He became famous in Belgium at the moment where Wilbur Leguebe a director of documentary movies working for the national broadcast company RTBF and Agnès Lejeune a journalist made a series of five TV documentaries on Duez's work. One of the most interesting aspects of these documentaries was that they contacted Duez's former students to find out what memories they had of their primary school years and their ethics lessons with Jacques Duez, and to what extend it influenced their later life. The sequences showing young adults sharing their perception of themselves as children while reviewing video tapes showing them during their discussions ten or fifteen years ago are quite remarkable.

When I discovered Jacques Duez's work a few years ago (unfortunately after having left teaching) I was very much impressed by his approach, his way of talking to the children and their profound reflections. His approach is very close to that of Vivian Gussin Paley and in the best tradition of people like Françoise Dolto the famous French doctor and psychoanalyst. I was particularly impressed by a story of a boy whose difficult family situation affected his behavior in school and generated the usual difficulties in the relationship with his teachers, classmates and of course with learning. Only after viewing a video sequence on how this boy explained his situation in Jacques Duez's class his teachers realized how difficult this boy's life was, how little they knew about him and how they had kept teaching and expecting a certain behavior from him without any regard to his social background.

What I intended by showing extract of Duez's work was to sensitize teachers to the potential of children's reflecting and to the importance of considering their socio-cultural background when judging their behavior in an educational setting. I also wanted to sensitizing teachers to the fact that school development needs to be considered not only in the light of meeting new or higher standards. First and foremost, school development should aim at improving the general context for learning and for reflecting about learning, and I see listening to children and children's thinking as one of the preconditions to meet that aim.

Event announcement: http://www.olefaschool.org/community
Event picture gallery (pictures by Xavier Maquil, Luc Gilbertz, Christian Schwarz)

Parents / Enseignants … La guere ouvert? Book including DVD and one documentary by Jacques Duez : http://www.decitre.fr/livres/Parents-Enseignants.aspx/9782870034613

Le Temps des Enfants (printed document with DVD, edited by the Observatoire de l’Enfance, de la Jeunesse et de l’Aide à la Jeunesse:
http://www.oejaj.cfwb.be/rubrique.php?id_rubrique=31

Designing Tools for Evaluation

Back in 2000-2002 during a research project called MIRA Multimedia Interface for Research and Authoring I created a tool for reflective practitioners in school called Multimedia Clipboard. Later on, most of the features of this tool have been integrated into the OLEFA IMS-CMS http://www.olefa.com which offers a powerful web based environment including a database module that can be designed and personalized for multiple uses.

Multimedia Clipboard permitted the collecting and grouping of multiple types of data in order to create layered and multi-perspective descriptions and interpretations of learning situations.
With this kind of tools teachers can evaluate students learning products and processes by creating chunks of information, and include background information of situations and concepts in which these products, processes and their interpretation are embedded.

Once an item is created by importing for example a video clip, the interpretation can be broadened by adding descriptions from different perspectives (comments by students, peers, teachers, parents etc.) and deepened or "thickened" by adding layers of information and interpretation (see the concept of "thick descriptions" by Clifford Geertz and Gilbert Ryle).
This approach is a lot different from a quantitative evaluation, but also from a so called evaluation by competencies in which learning is split up into modules, key stages and key competencies and in which students learning outcomes are, in the end, always compared to normative clusters of knowledge.

The greatest difference however lies in the fact that evaluation by competencies is proclaimed to be formative but neither sets the learner nor the teacher in the focus of an inquiry but the implicit norms.

In opposition to this, a descriptive and interpretive (ethnographic) approach puts the learner and the teacher(s) in the focus because their judgments, ethical considerations and theories become part of the evaluation process. Here, teachers are not observers, but actors in a learning process, and an evaluation is created or co-constructed through collaboration and negotiation. And, students are not objects of evaluation and inquiry but co-evolving subjects. A tool like Multimedia Clipboard is as much a instrument for evaluation as a means to gain insight in the functioning of evaluation and the nature and power of the hidden theories involved - including those which gave birth to the tool itself. Furthermore, and because of the non-linearity of the tool, a small change in the tool has the potential to open a high variety of new possibilities to interconnect information. A small change in a check list of competences - which I consider to be a linear system - will never have such an impact.

By adopting open instruments and ethnographic approaches, evaluation will take the shape of a narrative based on self-organization and reflection instead of a diagnosis conforming to a given structure. We will also reach a high level of unpredictability, variety, redundancy and even messiness, while simultaneously reducing centralized control and normative comparability between individual learning outcomes. On the other hand we will open to all actors involved a space for self-reflection, creativity and double-loop learning.

As there is a growing demand for alternative forms to evaluate students learning, I think that evaluation by normative competencies cannot be but a transitional stage before adopting open tools like Multimedia Clipboard which will extend the possibilities and concepts of so called learning records and portfolios and which will at the same time force teachers in a position of self-reflection.

Can school change society or do we have to change society first to have a different school?

This week I attended a conference on the PISA and PIRLS surveys. As the conference had been organized by a teacher union there were some tension concerning the interpretation of the results of the surveys. If the results are poor, it could well be that not only the government but also the teachers have their part of responsibility because they may be doing a bad job or because they had their say in the defining of the curriculum in use. That neither the second nor the latter conclusion can be easily accepted by teachers and their representatives is easy to understand.

What was raised then, was that education may well be victim of circumstances set by society itself. Circumstances that were mentioned were growing individualism, consumerism and strong economic interests. From this perspective it is clear, that society is responsible for the disaster and that it should change first. But is it as simple as that? Maybe the science of complexity could help us out.

According to complexity theory, school is a complex adaptive system which is embedded in and connected to other complex adaptive systems. School is not loosely connected to society, it is an itegral part of society. The actors in the educational system are at the same time actors in other systems like the national economy. Furthermore, what makes school special, is it's long-term influence on an individual - from early childhood to adult life. And as schooling is continuously being extended, the probability is growing that it will have a strong influence on the individuals hence on society. So why shouldn't educational systems be in a position to change other social systems?

If there are doubts that school can change society, we have reasons to doubt that any subsystem (unions, non-profit organizations, governments, laws, family structures etc.) can have a considerable impact on the global system. Is this the case? If we turn to what the science of complexity tells us, I would say that the answer is yes and no.

What is highly probable is, that small changes in school, won't lead to major changes in short-term. At the same time some of the changes will have a long-term effect, but it is impossible to predict which of the changes will have a major effect, when this effect will be perceivable, and if this effect is going to beneficial. Changes in the curiculum, in the the training of teachers, in the way schools are organized will without any doubt, have a short-term impact on school life, but long-term outcomes remain unpredictable.

We have also to consider that while changes in the educational system take place, other subsystems change at the same time, influencing one another and the global system like the society in which they are embedded. We cannot stop the economical system from evolving to have enough time to analyse the impact of changes brought to education. This means, that we make decisions on assumption at a certain stage of a process an this process, or parallel processes are changing the conditions that have lead to these assumptions.

The question is now, how we should decide on what actions to take, if we have no possibility to identify what long-term outcomes an action or a decision could lead to.

In his book "Complexity and Creativity in Organizations" (1996), Ralph D. Stacey posts that "The criteria for quality actions become, not ends, but ethical considerations and criteria having to do with maintaining positions, keeping options open, retaining flexibilty, and revealing errors as fast as possible. The quality action is not one with a predetermined outcome, because that effectively excludes all creative actions, but the action that is morally good in itself, the action that keeps options open by allowing an organization to stay in the game (...)."

If this is true, which I believe to be the case, then we should invest time to define an ethical framework that would help us to choose between possible actions. We should also set conditions in which creativity of a large number of actors is possible so that through a double-loop learning process innovation is possible. The science of complexity also tells us, that there is no justification to an organizational model in which change is built on a decisional hierarchy where "a few do the thinking and the creating while the many do as they are told." (Stacey)

For all those who would like to know precisely what to do (stakeholders or teachers alike), who want to be in controle of the outcomes, who need a blueprint for change that they would then impose on others, and who think that self-organization only leads to disorder, this may not be a very satisfying position. From such a perspective there is no guarantee for success, not even a lot of control and obviously many actions will be futile and will have neither visible or beneficial short-term nor long-term outcomes. But if uncertainty is the price for creativity (and according to complexity science we need a lot of creativity to increase the probability of innovation and to avoid that a system gets stuck in a stable equilibrium) then, we should opt for uncertainty instead of top down control.

The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Frank Smith

This is one of the books I regularly reread and one of those that I wish I had written. On 120 thought-provoking and illuminating pages the author retraces the roots and illustrates the consequences of some of the well established practices that inhabit school. Most of these practices are taken for granted by teachers, parents and politicians. Among these practices you'll find learning through repetition, hard work, individual effort, conditioning, reinforcement, exercises and corrections, testing, rewards and control.
He opposes this "official theory of learning" to a "classic view" of learning which says that most of the time "you learn from the company you keep" from the individuals and the groups you most identify with. We learn "new things" from them by connecting those things to what we already know, to what we have discovered, imagined or understood and by connecting them to our beliefs and theories, and to what we would like to learn.
Smith also says that the question should never be if you are learning, but always what are we learning, because you always learn. I totally agree with that. In reading lessons you could for instance be learning that reading opens new doors to imagination and understanding, or you could be learning, that you are a poor reader, that you will never be a member of the "literacy club", or you could be learning which strategies are most effective to avoid reading until you end up being illiterate - as school expected you to be from the start.
If you are asked to memorize word lists, you may be learning that putting things into short term memory helps getting good marks in tests or, if you have difficulties remembering those words, you may be learning that you probably have a learning disability, that you don't fit, that you have no talent for languages, that your brain is not made for learning, that learning is an endless struggle and a continuous war against forgetting.
Smith also questions the value of testing, measurement and standardization as a means to achieve quality in education. On the contrary, continuous testing diminishes the motivation and the self-confidence of the low scorers. On the other hand the high scorers "become so addicted to tests (...) that thy are reluctant to read or write anything, in school or out, unless a score or a grade will be attached."

Besides the devastating critic Smith has also to offer some interesting suggestions on how to change school, well knowing what questions they will generate. Regarding these suggestions he anticipates:
"The teachers then ask who should bring all this change about. My answer is that they must. Teachers shouldn't expect people outside the classroom to improve their working conditions for them; all their problems were created by people outside the classroom. Teachers must take charge of their own professional lives. How might teachers take charge and improve what goes on in schools? I have a simple answer. They must change the world. And when they ask how they could possibly change the world, I have another simple answer - a little bit at a time. I suggest they start with their own classrooms."

For me, one of the key statements in the book is this one:
"You learn in communities of people who do what you are expected to learn."
My interpretation of this is the following : If you expect your students to write, you have to write and share your writing. If you want them to read, then read and share your readings experience with your students. If you want them to reflect on their learning, then you should reflect on your teaching and share your reflections with them ...
Teachers - think about this!

Is Minister Goldilocks going to reform education in Luxembourg?

First I wanted to entitle this post : The Goldilocks Zone of pedagogical innovation and educational reform. But then I liked the idea of having a Minister of Education called Goldilocks.

But let's be serious for a moment. Do you know what the Goldilocks Zone is?

The Goldilocks Zone is the zone where life is possible, where it is neither too hot nor too cold but just right so that water won't boil and evaporate or freeze, but where it will remain most of the time in a liquid state.

This concept can easily be applied to pedagogical innovation or educational reform. In effect, to be accepted at a given time in a given socio-cultural and economic system, change in education (on a larger scale) usually only happens in Goldilocks Zone.

Reform is accepted when there are differences enough to the standards in use, innovative enough to be noticed as such, intentionally new but not threatening or too challenging. And change has to be conservative enough to be accepeted by stakeholders that emphasize the benefits of a traditional system in place.

Every person taken alone operates in such a zone if he wants to nourish his image as an innovator without taking the risk to be evaporated or frozen. For some people this zone is very large, for others - less courageous or should I say blessed with more political intelligence - it is very narrow.

When more stakeholders are involved - and usually, it is not one person alone who takes all the decisions (at least not in democracies - although our Prime Minister is sometimes suspected to take all the decisions alone) the Zone is obviously small. The acceptable change has to take place in the limits of the intersection of all stakeholders depending on their relative importance, status or power : The Ministry of Education, the Government, the Teacher Union etc. The more stakeholders involved, the smaller the intersection area will be where a consensus is possible, and of course the slower change will happen, resulting in a kind of Darwinian evolution of the educational system. And we all know how slow such an evolution operates, don't we? Only very long-term observation could reveal change - if there is change. (So far nobody has seen the giraffe's neck grow longer. Or could it be that it is shortening?).

But there is also different concept of evolution - one which is not slow and continuous but rather jumps from a certain stage in a very short period to a very different stage. According to this scenario educational reform could be experienced during a teacher's working life, or even a child's school career

I am curious to see, if the new school law will be followed by an evolutionary jump or if educational reform will take place in the shared and very narrow Goldilocks Zone of all the stakeholders involved.

The cathedral and the bazaar in Luxembourgish education

In his book "The Cathedral & The Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary" Eric Raymond writes about the rise of the Linux operating system and of open source software but his metaphor can easily be applied to education in general and also to ICT in education. What I observe in education in Luxembourg for example are several attempts to enforce or construct educational change following a centralized, more or less coordinated top down approach. Intended is the building of controlled innovative hot-spots (cathedrals) that could, if successful, serve as transferable models, lightning the path for the rest of the educational community.
Surprisingly - and maybe not surprisingly after all - the same stakeholders that argue in favour of fundamental educational change persistently ignoring emergent creative efforts in the bazaar and giving disproportionate weight to the innovation they think they are controlling.
To me there is a significant mismatch between what is said to be intended and what is happening real-time in school. I'll come back to this subject in short ...
If you have comments on this I would be glad to hear from you ...

Obama's Educational Program

As always education is a big issue in the debates preceding presidential elections. So it is in the US.

Barack Obama's comprehensive plan to bring forward education in the US focuses on the following subjects:

• Reform No Child Left Behind.
• Ensure access to high-quality early childhood education programs and child care opportunities so children enter kindergarten ready to learn.
• Work to place effective teachers in every classroom in America, especially those in high-poverty, high-minority areas.
• Reward effective teachers for taking on challenging assignments and helping children succeed.
• Support highly-effective principals and school leaders.
• Make science and math education a national priority.
• Reduce the high school dropout rate by focusing on proven methods to improve student achievement and enhance graduation and higher education opportunities.
• Close the achievement gap and invest in what works.
• Empower parents to raise healthy and successful children by taking a greater role in their child’s education at home and at school.