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

Rethinking the Architecture of Teaching

To be able to scaffold students’ learning and to amplify their cultural awareness and their selfawareness, teachers should engage in a process of investigation on how young people see the world and themselves, how they feel about learning and schooling, how they build concepts of something and how they reflect on their own thinking, doing and being.

Teachers don't know more about their students as their students know about themselves. Students and teachers are equally information providers as they are receivers of information. Furthermore, in an active learning community, students and teachers have the opportunity to collaboratively explore multiple ways to construct concepts and generate knowledge, especially if this learning community is guided by a teacher-learner concept where the adult is not necessarily the teacher and the child or the adolescent is not necessarily the learner.

My conviction is that all teaching and learning situations defined by superiority-inferiority, observer-observed, giver-receiver, knower-ignorer, naive thinker - advanced thinker dichotomies should be questioned and systematically reshaped to become opportunities for collective and critical inquiry – breaking down the boundaries between teaching, learning and research.

If teachers are supposed to engage in a professional development they have to develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that define educational relationships and ask questions like: Why and what do I teach or learn? Do I teach or learn what I think I teach or learn? What defines a school and an educational relationship? What differences are there between teaching and learning? What is teaching? What is learning? Who decides what has to be taught an learned?

This is true for students as it is for teachers. If young people are supposed to develop a critical attitude and critical thinking they must be encouraged to observe, to study and to analyse their context and to gain a deeper understanding of how social practices and including educational practices are generated.

But, how should young people gain critical understanding, if they are supposed to think critically about everything that happens in the “outside” world but not about what happens in school, the place where they spend a representative part of the day and the context which sometimes even structures their life and thinking for the rest of the day?

This paradigm shift in education requires an honest curiosity by teachers and an intense faith in young people’s will to learn and in their potential to acquire an understanding of the world around them by developing their own view points, by re-building shared concepts or constructing new ones.

Of course, to develop something which we may call research literacy, students should be encouraged to explore a wide range of learning styles and interest and they should also be encouraged to develop a critical position against any intellectual monopoly. It also requires teachers to become participant observers, in an anthropological sense, and to spend more time than they do today, on reflecting on education than on pre-structuring schooldays for their students and on preparing detailed lesson plans and materials in order to transmit pseudo-objective content to the next generation.

To use M. Mead’s three types of enculturation (postfigurative, cofigurative, prefigurative), I think that school is still to much based on the postfigurative model where knowledge is passed from adults to children and where adults have difficulties to conceive of another future for the next generation than their own lives.

The question remains if it is possible for teachers to act as transformative agents in an institution they are supposed to serve? Is it conceivable, that they engage in a critical discourse with their students about knowledge and social practices when at the same time they feel obliged to follow a fixed curriculum, textbooks and participate in national tests?

Yes and no. The answer is no, if teachers think that they can do project-based learning, reflective education and collaborative inquiry and, at the same time, avoid the curriculum, textbooks and tests as a object for critical inquiry.

The answer is yes, if curricula, textbooks and tests are critically analyzed and deconstructed and if their hidden objectives and underlying assumptions are made transparent. If critical thinking is one of the aims of education, then young people must be encourage to think critically about learning, schooling and curriculum, about pseudo-objective textbook contents and testing.

After the PISA surveys conducted by the OECD, Luxembourg, tries to bring major changes to education by changing the way schools evaluate students' learning. I think that indeed there is an urgent need to change evaluation practices but I have serious doubts that a tangible progress in education is possible without a fundamental redesign of the sanitized textbook and worksheets pedagogy and thus the teacher-student-knowledge relationship.

Thoughts on Education

I have set up a new website with my past and current short publications on learning and teaching. You can find it at the address http://www.fiermonte.lu. Some articles are in German, others in English or French. Only one has been translated from French to English. (If someone is interested to provide a translation for anything I have written, feel free to contact me.) Most of the articles have been published in print and some can only be found online. As I am not working in school anymore I have more difficulties to find the time to write although I have quite a few ideas on interesting subjects that I should consider thinking over more in depth. This could best be done by discussing it with other professionals and by writing about it of course. Today I know, that during my teaching days, I didn't write enough to make my thinking more transparent and explicit - to myself and to others. I can remember very well when I said to Gérard Gretsch and Christian Wolzfeld with whom I started to work on different projects in the beginning of the nineties - "I can't write!" because this was what I thought of myself and what was left of fifteen years schooling during which I d been untaught how to write.
I'm convinced that teachers should be encourage - and take the courage and the time - to investigate more on their teaching by writing and sharing their thoughts, but I also know how difficult it is to put something on paper or on the computer if you always expect it to be near to perfection or if you think that others may have such an expectation.

As I have no big ideas and no academic position to defend - which could prevent me to reveal to soon what I'm working on - I will also publish draft articles on what I am currently interested. This does not mean that I wouldn't be happy to be quoted if you use any of my contributions in your work or if you find some interesting ideas in my writings.

To make it easier for everyone to decide on how to use the stuff I've written I will publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution License. You will find a notification regarding this license and links Creative Commons licenses under every article on www.fiermonte.lu.

If only teachers could all be Pygmalions

40 Years ago, in 1968, the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and the principal of an elementary school Lenore F. Jacobson conducted their famous study to test the hypothesis if children would become brighter when expected to by their teachers. The study was conducted in 18 primary school classes from which 20% of the students were randomly chosen to be the "brighter" kids after they all had taken a non-verbal intelligence test which in fact was not taken into account to choose the children.
After 8 month the study apparently showed that a strong "interpersonal expectancy effect", also called "Pygmalion effect" or "Rosenthal effect" had influenced the attitudes of the teachers in a way that as a matter of fact, the randomly chosen kids showed intellectual gains than their non-chosen classmates.

Funnily enough, on this 40th birthday of the Pygmalion-in-the-classroom-study, Luxembourg has introduce standardized testing for third graders for the known reasons which there are, raise the standards after the disastrous PISA study results, accountability and better student's orientation (!). Funny also, that when years ago standardized testing was introduced at the end of the primary school, I said that this would only be the beginning and that it was just a matter of time until standardized testing would be introduced in lower grades. Now here we are. But as it took quite a few years, I can affirm that I was not at the origin of a self-fulfilling prophecy I made - at least I hope so.

For those who would like to get a short overview of the study by R. Rosenthal, here are his own words which I took the liberty to transcribe from the video below. This is a must read for all the teachers especially those in third grades in Luxembourg.

R. Rosenthal: "What we wanted to show was the extend to which teachers expectations could actually effect pupils intellectual performance, for example their IQ scores.
So what we did was, we tested everybody in the school with a test that pretended to be a test that would predict academic blooming - the so called Harvard test of inflected acquisition - and allegedly on the basis of that test but not really we gave each of the teachers in the school the names of a handful of children in her classroom that would get smart in the academic year ahead.

These kids names were taken out of a hat. We chose them by means of a table of random numbers. The children themselves did not know in any direct way that teachers were holding certain expectations for them. Teachers were told not to tell the kids and of course we didn't tell the children either. So the children never knew.

And then when we tested the children a year later we found that those kids who'd be alledgedly to their teachers be showing or going to show intellectual gains, in fact showed greater intellectual gains than did the children of whom we'd said nothing in particular. So the kids actually got smarter when they were expected to get smarter by their teachers.

We've come to feel that there are really four factors that operate in the mediation or communication of these self-fulfilling prophecies, especially in a classroom but not only in a classroom.

So what are these four things that teachers tend to do differently to kids for whom they have more favorable expectations?

The first factor is the climate factor. Teachers tend to create a warmer climate for those children for whom they have more favorable expectations. They are nicer to them. Both in terms of the things they say and also in the non-verbal channels of communication.

The other very important factor is the so called input factor. That one probably won't surprise anyone. Teachers teach more material to those kids for whom they have more favorable expectations. After all, if you think a kid is dumb and can't learn you are not going to put yourself out to try to teach him very much.

Two other factor though make a difference. One is the response opportunity factor, that is
kids get more of a chance to respond if the teachers expect more of them. They call on them more often and when they do call on them they let them talk longer and they help and shape with them the answers that the kids speak out - kind of working together to put the response out.

The last is feedback. The feedback factor works in this way: As you might expect if more is expected of the kid, the kid is praised more, positively reinforced more for getting a good answer out, but interestingly enough is given more differentiated feedback when they get the wrong answer.
One of the ways in which you can sometimes tell a little bit that the teacher does not have very high expectations for a kid is that the teacher is willing to accept a low quality response or won't really clarify what would have been a good quality response. Maybe because he or she feels well what's the use, the kid is not smart enough to profit from this additional clarification.

So those are the four factors climate, input, response opportunity and feedback."

Source:



Additional resources:

Covert Communication in Classrooms, Clinics, and Courtrooms
by Robert Rosenthal - Harvard University
http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_121.asp

T&C TOWER - Rediscovering the Pygmalion myth in today's education
Expectation stimulates the mind
http://maincc.hufs.ac.kr/~theargus/378/theory_01.htm
(His conclusion lead to the title of this blog post. Thank you Lee Hyae-myung.)

Rosenthal, Robert & Jacobson, Lenore Pygmalion in the classroom (1992). Expanded edition. New York: Irvington

For details on the Pygmalion myth or the play by George B. Shaw, go to wikipedia.org.

Bad times for teachers and students stealing images

As a producer of web technologies that provide teachers and learners with online content production tools I often find myself involved in a discussion around the legitimacy to use images found on the internet in students' and teachers' personal projects.

Although teachers over the globe complain that the internet facilitates plagiarism and encourages copying and pasting of text they usually don't show the same criticism when it comes to using/stealing pictures and graphical data.

It is quite common that teachers themselves consider the web as a free online clip art gallery and that they see no harm in using whatever they can find to pimp up their worksheets, slides or website pages without crediting their sources.

No wonder then, that they apply the same logic to images that students can find and copy-paste to decorate their personal printed or online work. Obviously teachers' sensitivity is different depending of the nature of the data that is used or stolen. In school, written text has a much higher status than an image. While copying and pasting graphical data is considered common practice, copying text without quotation marks and indications of the source is considered being a unscrupulous temptation to cheat and to avoid personal effort.

With TinEye by Idée Inc. now comes a search engine based on an image identification technology capable of finding images and variations of images on the internet. TinEye provides authors of visual data with an easy way to detect copies of their creations on websites even if the original version has been cropped, scaled, merged, renamed or colored.

Of course this is not the only application of TinEye but it is one that could have a major effect on schools.

My advice to teachers: Start today with using license free images (for example from Wikimedia Commons) or own creations. Don't make a difference between respecting authors of written text, of sound productions or of images, name your sources and teach your students to do the same.

(Got the hint from Slashdot)

Image source and copyright information :

"This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art. The original image comprising the work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. (...)"