For Teachers
Thoughts and ideas for college teachers and learning professionals
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Learning from Experience: recognition of Prior Experiential Learning
Want to gain admission to a course but your qualifications do not meet the entry requirements?
You may be able to use a Recognition of Prior Experiential Learning (RPEL) process
Many people have asked for more information on Recognition of Prior Experiential Learning (RPEL). I have prepared a presentation that explains the process and how it works in National College of Ireland. Comments are welcome.
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SITE Conference
I recently attended the SITE Conference in San Diego, California. SITE stands for the Society for the Information Technology and Teacher Education and it is one of the biggest conferences in this field. Chip Bruce and I had submitted a paper based on the Digital Literacy in Primary Schools (DLIPS) project.
I attended many other sessions and it was very useful to catch up with developments across the field. One thing that struck me is the use (perhaps overuse) of short abbreviations to describe areas of interest. Thus a session might be described as dealing with TPAC for SET in K-12 – decoded this means Mhisra and Koehler’s (2006) Technological, Pedagogical And Content Knowledge (TPACK – worth a future blog!) for Science Engineering and Technology (SET) subjects in primary and secondary schools (K-12).
The presentation associated with our paper is posted below. The basic idea is an exploration of the connection between learning as inquiry and new digital media. Essentially we argue for a new approach to pedagogy based on the Inquiry Cycle and making the most of digital media capabilities to initiate, sustain and enhance that cycle.
It’s not so much that the vision of learning as inquiry is new – it is in fact a well established idea but that the new media of today make it possible to realistically achieve in a school setting. See my previous blogs on An Organic Approach to Teaching and How Digital Media Make it Possible and my discussion and links on the Inquiry Cycle in my Why We Blog post for further insights.Digital literacy in primary school site presentation 2010View more presentations from Leo Casey.Mishra P, Koehler MJ. 2006 Teachers College Record Volume 108, Number 6, pp. 1017–1054
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“Grade Inflation” Getting Everything Wrong
This is a really important issue for Ireland and for everyone in the education sector. It is vital that get a clear understanding of what the problem is and what we need to do to rectify it.
First of all, the problem we need to solve is not “Grade Inflation” and it would be a huge mistake if we were all to get in a muddle comparing the numbers of first class honours’ degrees or 600 point Leaving Certs in the past few years.
Just like all measures based on our social circumstances, such as the spending power of the average weekly wage or the average life-expectancy, over time we should expect to see a gradual improvement in similar measures of quality and achievement in our education system.
Today, we are educating more people to a higher standard than ever before and I will be surprised if the emperical evidence from the soon-to-be released study will not show this to be the case.
But I do not believe we should be congratulating ourselves – there is a problem and a new challenge and we need to get to the heart of it.
Let me use one source Dr Craig Barrett, former CEO and Chairman of Intel and a frequent visitor to Ireland:
“Your primary and secondary schools are only average,” he said. “It is no longer good enough to be average. You have to be excellent at what you do … at the end of secondary school your young people are average. Your education system is being challenged by improvements in the rest of the world. Things have changed, the educational attainment of other countries have been increasing, and that increases competition for attracting investment.”Source: http://www.examiner.ie/opinion/columnists/matt-cooper/for-ireland-to-make-the-grade-we-need-radical-education-reform-111903.html#ixzz0h0o2hsCx
Barrett is providing us with a global perspective and he, rightly in my opinion, points to the progress made by other countries. Later in the same interview Barrett lays down the challenge:
“It is possible for Ireland to continue to be successful, but you have to worry about the capability of your workforce and what it does,” he said. “Why not a race to the top? Why not have more capability and jobs where you can add value? Increased capability and education is where you increase value.”
Later”Teachers should not be just competent but masters,” he argued. “How do you excite children about a subject? By having high-quality teachers. You must treat education like any quality service you aim to provide. Your employees have to be good and get paid on the basis of performance.”Source: http://www.examiner.ie/opinion/columnists/matt-cooper/for-ireland-to-make-the-grade-we-need-radical-education-reform-111903.html#ixzz0h0qGJr4JNow, let me make plea: let’s not get ourselves in a flap over grade inflation or comparisons between institutions. Let’s talk about what really matters – quality of teaching and quality of assessment.
It is a not sufficient for the Department of Education and Science to look to the State Exams Commission (note “exams” not “assessment”) to produce year-on-year comparisons of Leaving Cert grades – why don’t we look at what the Leaving Cert is really measuring – mostly memory, recall and strategic learning. Genuine problem-solving and creative thinking are not nurtured and not sufficiently recognised.
Similarly, in third level we are certainly guilty of over rewarding students who do not ask questions, suggest alternatives, write critically or challenge the norms of society.
This is the real threat! In short, it’s not that we are giving too many high grades in exams, it’s that we are not measuring what we should be measuring.
Certain skills are more important for competitive and connected workplaces – these include inquiry, problem solving, technical and scientific skills, critical thinking, research, collaboration, presentation and good writing.
These skills need to be nurtured and measured at all levels of education. This is the real challenge. -
Learning and Motivation
Motivation is used as a catchall term to describe how people are moved to act in a certain manner or direction. In everyday use there is a tendency to conceptualise motivation as mono-dimensional we often seek the motive for why a person acted in a particular way.Single explanations for people’s actions or goals are often inadequate and misleading. People tend to justify past-behaviour and will report a retrospective rationale. However, models of motivation, if they are to be of use, need to provide predictions of future behaviour.
The term motivation is used in many different contexts and can mean different things in everyday language. Motivation is often used to describe a level of commitment even energy such as during half time at a football match where a manager gives a team a motivational talk to ‘lift’ the team for the second half.
In such uses of the term motivation is likened to a psychic booster; one could imagine an internal M meter reading either high or low. This meaning of motivation is not limited to physical activity – people might say “coming up to the exam I became really motivated and studied for five hours every day”. It’s even the case that certain speakers at business conferences describe themselves as ‘motivational speakers’. However important it is to be ‘psyched up’ and however interesting it might be to study motivation as degree-of-determination or drive toward a particular goal – this is not the aspect of motivation that is of interest here.
What I wish to focus on is the decision to set goals, the ‘why’ of action and in particular, decisions to learn. In order to explain most human behaviours a fuller spectrum of influences needs to be appreciated. Serious consideration of the concept of motivation leads to a realisation that motivation is both complex and multi-dimensional.
Ryan and Deci (2000) refer to motivation in terms of the ‘energy, direction, persistence and equifinality of activation and intent’. Equifinality, a term borrowed from systems theory, in this case meaning that the same result can be arrived at through many different paths or trajectories.A dictionary definition such as in Colman’s A Dictionary of Psychology (Colman, 2006), describes motivation as a driving force or forces responsible for the initiation, persistence, direction, and vigour of goal-directed behaviour. This introduces the notion of goals and goal-directedness within an individual. Where learning is the goal we may, within the framework of the above definition, regard motivation-for-learning as having a cuasal relationship with learning oriented behaviours.
Ahl (2006) summaries different theoretical orientations gleaned from her extensive literature review of learning motivation. Ahl argues that the concept of motivation is itself questionable and she challenges three assumptions that are often implicit in many of the theories: first that such an entity as motivation exists; second, that it resides with the individual; and third, that motivation causes behaviour (Ahl, 2006). Ahl argues the large variety of definitions of motivation from the literature contribute to the questionability of the motivation construct.Wlodkowski (1999) seems to support this:
We have invented a word to label this elusive topic –motivation- but even its definition continues to baffle the most scholarly of minds.(Wlodkowski, 1999: 1)Ahl also points out that motivation is socially and psychologically construed and that operational measures such as self-report surveys are mearly reinforcing research-generated concepts. For example, to ask people to report on their need for achievement is to create the notion of a ‘need for achievement’.The importance of learning decisions cannot be over-emphasised; almost all learning theorists make a seemingly obvious point that adults learn what they choose to learn. Time and again the capacity to make one’s own decisions and to self-initiate and self-manage learning is identified as a key characteristic of adult learning – see for example Knowles (1978), Cyr (1999) and Merriam, Cafferella and Baumgartner (2007).
Learning decisions are therefore important sites of investigation and can provide powerful insights for educators and policy makers on the development of skills and competence in future populations.
References
Ahl, H. (2006). Motivation in adult education: a problem solver or a euphemism for direction and control? International Journal of Lifelong Education, 25(4), 385 – 405
Colman, A. M. (2006). A Dictionary of Psychology: Oxford University Press.
Cyr, A. V. (1999). Overview of Theories and Principles Relating to Characteristics of Adult Learners: 1970s-1999. Access ERIC: FullText (070 Information Analyses). Florida.
Knowles, M. S. (1978). The adult learner : a neglected species (2d ed.). Houston: Gulf Pub. Co., Book Division.
Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., & Baumgartner, L. (2007). Learning in adulthood : a comprehensive guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being, American Psychologist (Vol. 55, pp. 68-78).
Wlodkowski, R. J. (1999). Enhancing adult motivation to learn : a comprehensive guide for teaching all adults. The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series.
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The School
The recent 3-part RTE series “The School” broke new ground in terms of education and television.
What takes place in schools is both familiar and mysterious to most adult viewers.Our school experiences resonate throughout the entire span of our lives and, for many, learning identity forged during teenage, years remains fixed and unchallenged long after our initial schooling is complete.
Every society looks to young people to reproduce and reinvent itself for the future. Put simply, organised societies that are good at education will survive and outlast societies that fail to do so. Schools and education are our biggest investment apart from health systems.
Strangely, unless you are currently an active participant in the school system, there is little visibility of what’s going on. We seldom get an opportunity to compare schools today with the schools of our childhood. This issue is more important that a simple need to satisfy our curiosity: we need to know about how much has changed, the improvements, new ways of teaching, a new understanding of learning, and new thinking on what should take place in schools.
Since we left school we have grown and developed into who we are today – few of use would say that we have not radically changed since the day we left school. And yet, we often assume that the school system that we left so long ago has remained fixed and unchanged. Obviously this is not the case.
And this is why “The School” as a television series did us all a great service. It provided an opportunity to ‘open our minds’, to see and to experience contemporary school life.
The school principal, Eamon Gaffney is a good friend of mine. Eamon, the staff and students of St Peters Dunboyne showed great courage and self-confidence in facilitating the making of these programmes. I remember Eamon saying that he felt that this story needed to be told “people need to know about schools of today, the breath of learning and the holistic approach to education”.
“The School” has captured something that’s important to us all.
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Problem Based Learning: The Apprentice?
Those that know me will know that I am a fan of Problem-Based Learning, usually referred to as PBL.
Ireland’s version of “The Apprentice” is being aired on TV3 and watched by many including our household. The idea is that contestants are fighting it out to get a big job as apprentice to Bill Cullen (Ireland’s best known, self-made entrepreneur).
For each episode the contestants are asked to complete authentic tasks usually with a sales or design element.
We get to see them work in groups, select a project manager, set goals, solve problems and think and act creatively. As television it’s quite absorbing and informative and there is plenty of learning taking place, for the contestants and vicariously, for the the viewers.
When I first watched these sequences I was impressed to see a good instructional approach transferred to television.
However, all this is let down by the final sequences of each programme. These scenes take place in the boardroom where groups are asked to report on the process.
Bill is naturally a good teacher and in fairness, he tries to balance his negative criticism with supportive comments.
But the show’s structure calls for an inevitable reduction by one contestant (you’re fired!) each week. This leads to verbal abuse, recriminations and outright humiliation for some of the participants.
All this makes great television but the message is too savage for genuine learning and personal development.
Most importantly, Bill looks for “the creative spark” in the actions and thinking of the contestants.
Genuine creative thinking arises when we relax our learned inhibitions – creativity requires a safe and secure foundation (see Bowlby, for example).
Faced with the prospect of ridicule on national television few people are going to genuinely take a risk and truly express novel thinking.
We need innovation in the workplace – to nurture innovation we need to provide ‘safe spaces’ for exploration – we also need to encourage learning from failure as well as from success. -
Problem Based Learning
Students from the Post Graduate Diploma and Masters in Learning and Teaching participating in a Problem Based Learning Workshop in the Centre for Research and Innovation in Learning and Teaching at National College of IrelandThis year we are running a new course at National College of Ireland – the Post-Graduate Diploma and MA in Learning and Teaching. I am course director for this course and I present a module on Theories of Learning and Cognition.We have a core of sixteen students with some additional attendees from the PhD course and faculty development. The students come from a wide variety of backgrounds with one thing in common – a passion and commitment for learning and education.We used an instructional approach know as Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as a means of integrating the three semester one modules on Theories of Learning, Research Methods and Philosophy of Education.PBL was structured around a series of workshops on Tuesday evenings and Saturdays. My colleague Rachel Doherty from the School of Business organised the students in groups to complete a series of authentic tasks.In the first exercise the group tasks were to compose and present a series of student induction presentations – the kind that would be presented to new students starting a college course.
Each group was given a different profile for the entry cohort. In one case the students were adult returners with no previous formal education, another had to prepare for recent graduates continuing to a post-graduate course and still another had to present to a group of busy professionals attending a career oriented course.Organised in this way students had to draw on theory, research and underlying philosophy to prepare their solutions to the problems. This is PBL in action.Afterwards, students were asked to write a reflection – on the whole PBL was very enthusiastically endorsed.From a teachers perspective there is a lot of work involved in preparing the workshops – thanks to Rachel for doing this – and we needed to work out a fairly detailed assessment matrix to make sure that individual and group participation was recognised. Most of the marks go for the process rather than the outcome – this is characteristic PBL. -
Carl Wieman Lecture
I attended a lecture in DIT Bolton Street by Dr Carl Wieman titled
“Science Education in the 21st Century; using the methods of science to teach science”
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This was of great interest to me as in the distant past I studied science and, like many others, I believe that we need to do more to stimulate effective practices in science eduction.Many science teachers at school and college level are passionate about their work and are often willing to explore new pedagogic methods to stimulate student engagement.
Wieman focused on teaching methods and as his title suggests he uses analytical methods to assess different approaches and strategies.
He contrasts two educational models:
Model 1
Teacher encounters a new problem or concept
Teacher figures it outTeacher explains to students
Students demonstrate that either (a) they know or (b) they don’t know the concept or problem
If outcome (a) – student learning is effective
If outcome (b) – student not making sufficient effort (lazy student!)Model 2
Teacher encounters a new problem or concept
Teacher figures it outTeacher establishes learning goals
Teacher guides student activities (the design of these activites is the practice of teaching and is informed by research and expeience)
Teacher measures learning outcomes
(a) students solve relevant problems
(b) students cannot solve the problems
If (a) all well and if (b) quesion either the goals or the activities (note not the student effort)Wieman of course advocates the second model and he maintaines that through well planned activities and frequent data gathering and analysis the ‘goals and activities’ approach is consistently better for student problem performance and concept attainment.
Expertise
Experts regardless of context (scientists, musicians and chess players) are characterised by three components
(1) access to lots of factual subject-specific knowledge
(2) an ability to recognise patters – an organisational framework
(3) an ability to self-monitor one’s thinkingPerhaps traditional teaching has emphasised the first of these components and neglected the other two components.
All of this makes a clear case for greater use of problem based learning.
One thing I disagreed with was when Carl Wieman said that in thinking about his ideas on teaching we should ignore the fact that he has a Nobel prize for science – oh no – not at all. We would not all be there if he had not achieved so much and his opinion does carry significant scientific authority.
Wieman’s ideas on teaching are very much in keeping with current thinking in the scholarship of learning and teaching – what is really encouraging is that a great scientist is advocating that we think again about our approach to education.
Perhaps more will listen to such a voice.
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The Meaning of Work – Aronowitz on Schooling in a Time of Crisis
On Tuesday I had the good fortune to attend a seminar (in NUIM) by Stanley Aronowitz – he is Professor of Sociology at City University in New York and has written extensively on many topics to do with knowledge, education and economy.
His ideas are radical and challenging and yet timely.
He presented his analysis of this “first truly global crisis” based on his experience (in the US steel industry) and many years as an author and teacher. Aronowitz posed critical questions that challenged our conception of labour in developed economies. He pointed to the structural changes in industry evident since the seventies when high numbers of workers were employed in big industries such as steel production. Faced with the challenge of a militant, frequently striking (US!) workforce and a troublesome trade union movement, the response by industry was to reduce labour through mechanisation and to move labour by a process of outsourcing and financialisation (build now pay later).
Aronowitz sees our current predicament as the inevitable outcome of US economic policy and the globalisation of the industrial model for developed economies. His outlook is gloomy – there will always be a struggle – they will always want more (government and employers).
Don’t worry – so the current rhetoric would have us believe – in Ireland we live in a Knowledge Economy. Our economic future is pinned to a belief that knowledge is a sure thing and our most recent strategy for growth is called Building Ireland’s Smart Economy.
We’ve never really had a large industrial base, little reliance on steel or automobile manufacturing. Our ‘new’ economy is built on software, internationally traded services and high-tech-brought-in manufacturing like HP and Intel.Well I am worried!
Not just by Aronowitz’ analysis but also by our collective acceptance of an illusion – the unsubstantiated but soothing notion that all we need to do is to be smarter than the Chinese and we will build our future by design; design of goods and services to be manufactured elsewhere in places like Mumbai and Beijing. What arrogant rubbish!
At best, we may experience a temporary opportunity for wealth generation by positioning our competences higher up the manufacturing chain. However, this fragile position of advantage will quickly be undermined as the fluidity of global manufacturing economics inevitably takes effect.
If there is real competition for smartness, I for one, would not like to take on the wisdom of the East or the passion and commitment to education in places like the Philippines and Jordan. I have visited both of these countries and as a result, I will always challenge that, equally unquestioned, myth proposing that education in Ireland is especially valued and our recent, short-lived, economic boom was a consequence of our highly educated workforce.
What then is the alternative? Aronowitz hints at new possibilities – shorter working days, time to participate in democratic structures, a renewal of learning. These are just ideas – developed outside the current orthodoxy – nothing clear-cut or strategic. That’s probably his point – the current system is not working we need alternatives and in seeking these alternatives we will need to extend our thinking. I agree but it’s hardly grounds for hope.
Aronowitz titled his talk Schooling in a Time of Economic Crisis and we had to wait until near the end before he addressed the issue of schooling. Schooling is not education. His use of the term schooling extends through kindergarten to further and higher education. Aronowitz regards schooling as an instrument of the state – a means of extension of the dominant ideology in our case capitalism.
What is the function of schooling? One might say – to prepare people for work. This is the great myth. The notion of middle-class investment – schooling now for quality employment in the future; all the more sensible when we consider ourselves as living in a Knowledge Economy.
Who should control schooling? Obviously, one might think, as we are concerned with our economic well being, we should look to employers, economists and policy makers for guidance on what skills we will need for the future. This is the real danger and it will lead possibly to future despair – not success.
Education is about learning for life, not necessarily paid employment. Yes we should be concerned with learning for the future but the question is – how best can we prepare for the future? John Dewey, a great American philosopher and educator suggested that in order to prepare people for the future we should teach them how to experience the present to its fullest extent. I take this to mean that we should be critical (questioning) of the world and that we challenge all our assumptions especially our interpretations of what we need to learn and how best to secure our future prosperity.
I suggest that we should direct our scrutiny at the current discourse on knowledge and economy and we open our minds, in the present, to ideas such as tabled by Stanley Aronowitz.
