The Way of Learning

Part 1: A look at why we need to change

Our educational system is really good at what it was designed to do: prepare students to directly enter a productive life. That is, to work or enter a trade vocation or to continue on in education to prepare for a lifelong and singular career/profession. The 19th century is alive and well within the halls of American education. Our education profession has an inertia that is fueled by the notion that the ideals of a time of information doubling over the span of centuries is still alive. Who today can hope to hold only one job for an entire lifetime? One major reason for this I contend can be traced to the fact that educators and their regulators entered their profession as apprentices at age 5. We teach how we were taught and changing that approach is really difficult having been ingrained with the "model" for so long. What other profession has its practitioners endure at least 16 years of preparatory schooling?

The problem becomes a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious as Bernajean Porter would say) when you visit the statistics — and by that I mean, what is going on outside the walls of our schools. Information is currently doubling every 18 months. (Yes, that means the crap information as well). Technological information is doubling every two weeks. 3000 books are published daily. 80% of the web sites you will be able to search next year do not yet exist. Turn over time for product revision or adoption is approaching two months. This is so fast that workers are now being trained via virtual means on site during production because technical training done in a classroom is too costly in time and resources. The average graduate today can expect to have at least three distinct and different careers and hold as many as 5 positions with each. The average time for an American school to implement a major change remains about 50 years which make us currently on spot to produce students to fully cope with the 1960's. The number one described attribute for new hires by major businesses is creativity or put technically, a person who strongly displays right brained behaviors such as design, story telling, sympathy, empathy and an ability to play. Taking all these facts in mind, forcing students to leave their multifaceted world and enter our hallowed halls every morning is a practice in irrelevance and probably a contributing factor to the #1 reason students drop out of school today...boredom.

The Way of Learning
Part 2: To tackle the problem

In part 1 I gave you some reasons to consider why a change in our school model is a dire need. A thinker would have had some questions and could make quite a few valid points in favor of the literacy that our current system fosters. My answer to the need for literacy training is, YES...it is a must. Everybody has a basic set of literacies to master and school will still have to provide those. That said, competencies in dealing with the geometrically increasing amounts of information, vetting that information for relevance and applying it in a timely fashion are not taught. Being able to turn information gathering into a learning practice is essential. Using information gathered and combining it with attained and traditionally fostered literacies to produce new information, concepts, products, innovations, stories, correlations is the skill set we have to add to what is already taught. Along with this we have to make the stakeholders in education understand that changing the model is in its interest. Recall, that those who drive the educational model have decades of training and are entrenched in their experience. We are faced with teaching old dogs new tricks. The dogs?—teacher preparatory facilities, existing teachers, board members, parents, and students to name a few.

I do not mean to imply that tricks will get us into a successful model of education. The job will be more like achieving the impossible. But that is what people have been doing throughout history. BFO! Isn't wanting something different and innovation what actually put us in our current pedagogical situation? So, what can be done? How is this to be approached? We need an action plan. Action plans address a specific issue, along a specific time line, for and through a set of stakeholders, identifies objectives/outcomes, materials needed, specific courses of action and finally, a means of evaluation.

We know the problem, and we know that it will need redefined as we progress. We know when to start—today. We have already identified some of the stakeholders. The remainder of the stakeholders are those who will benefit most directly from the effort; that would be potential employers and self-employing individuals both now and those in the future. The objective is make students producers of understanding and what that entails will have to be examined in an ongoing fashion. A good place to start would be to identify and appeal to teachers who can buy into the big picture and will work to make the changes needed. Develop and provide persuasive arguments for those teachers and those who control school policies. The materials we can use would be anything that is within our control. Since technology is exploding in communications, learning to effectively exploited new communication technologies can be a key material. Developing and exploiting personal networking is another avenue of spreading the message. Developing alliances with known friends of education to support the action plan efforts is a must. Finally, learning how to and then to develop lessons that recognize and move toward classroom experiences that address the shortfalls of our current methods. The timeline is obviously going to be ongoing and thus the evaluations should be reasonably short periods, say semesters. Evaluation will need to be able recognize a move of the classroom experience away from the purely literacy mode we own today and toward a transforming mode where a body of evidence that demonstrates understanding is produced.

The Way of Learning
Part 3: How do do the impossible

The task of changing the educational system is phenomenally huge. One of the first issues will be to address a major human obstacle obstacle, information anxiety. Simply put, in an age of information expanding exponentially over incredibly short periods of time the more you lean the more you begin to realize you will never, ever be able to keep up with what there is to learn. The anxiety of approaching to digest such a huge volume of learning is often debilitating. You know people who are debilitated by this condition. They shun technologies, make excuses or offer rationals for outdated behaviors, or exhibit flustered and emotional gestures when confronted with professional change. The cure is varied but lies with the individual to finally realize that to not participate in change is to accept being left behind with what little he knows. We keep the physical worlds counterpart to the terminal information angst in museums. These people want schools to be monuments to their small worlds. This is both selfish and destructive. So, got anxiety...get over it. We are all in the same boat on this.

The next understanding needed is to realize how we are shortchanging the students so we can change that. An examination of the teacher practices shows that as a group we are teaching proficiencies or literacies. Our students are being tested on weather they can solve a particular problem, use a particular program to solve a specific problem, to collect information to answer specific question in a know presentation format. We try to rationalize that the need for dispensing the knowledge about how to do basic things is our purpose. In part it is, but it needs to go way beyond that.

To move beyond literacies toward the integration of informational transformation to our goal, we will likely move through an adapting phase. That means we will most likely try to adapt what we have been doing to use current technologies; rationalizing that this action brings our efforts into the 21st century. In essence, we blend a technology into the solution of the same problem and to come up with the same answer gotten without a technology. The result is no movement toward a solution. There can be a small benefit if adapting is a relatively short transition period. The teacher gains a competency with a technology. This is good if the time is short. Rome was not built in a day after all. The country is rife with adapting education providers and they are finding that infusing technologies into old lessons is not working. Whether you use a book or computer to look up information to write an essay is still the same assignment. The use of the computer produces nothing new here. It is decorating a lesson with a technology. By the way, computers are not technology to our students.

The trick, if it can be called that, is to use technology if you can or must to get the student to produce, to use understanding to create, to find information and correlate it for greater understanding and to communicate this to everyone. The people who are doing this are driving the information explosion. The number of people doing this is growing while we pretty much twiddle our thumbs and sit in our museums. We need to get with it. And by we, I am including the students. Although students are comfortable with technology, being generally described as digital natives, they are casual users and not plugging into the intentional use of technology to produce a body of evidence of their understanding. Like you, they are not born knowing how to do so much. If they are not self-starters, and most aren't, they will need a push-start in the correct directions (there are many ways to go). If they eventually catch on, evidence is mounting that they will, students will be preparing for life-long learning that is applicable to life/workforce skills. The life/work skills they will need to be competitive in their expected job markets.

The Way of Learning
Part 4: The joy of learning

Einstein once inferred that he never taught a pupil, but rather only attempted to provide the conditions in which he could learn. Why can we not take a cue from a known genius?

I am going to borrow an analogy from Dr. Chris Johnson and describe the "O-oh" reaction. If you are a parent, you may have witnessed in action the most efficient learning machines the world knows...1-2 year old. For example: should this tiny human stumble into a chair being rebounded harmlessly to the floor there are two scenarios of behavior. The child will look around—for an adult. If an adult is located, the child will cry. If no adult is perceived, the near infant utters "o-oh," (which is typically the first word an infant utters) and moves on. These "o-oh" moments are learning in action; epiphanies if we are lucky enough to have them. All that is needed is to be in a position to fail or experience a situation that has an unclear outcome that does not overcome us. What ever happens produces an "o-oh" moment. "O-Oh" moments are joyful because it is a discovery. People love discovery! It brings joy.

When was the last time you saw a kid in your class joyful over your lessons? Or are you joyful for that matter? Students are indeed rarely joyful to be in school. In fact nationally the statistics show that only 17% of students find anything scholastic useful or relevant. This could be because we do not foster those "o-oh" moments. We give them everything to succeed in terms of what we believe success is but nothing so mush to let them succeed in learning. Would a student or would you leave a joyful situation if given the choice? I know my answer.

Fostering "o-oh" moments to produce understanding requires a major bucking of the system as we know it. Testing of left brained activities in a right brained world of expectation is a major stressor in for our students and is a mentality that needs to be addressed. It has a place with literacies, but generating a literacy during discovery of understanding is far more productive and efficient. Being stuck teaching to a didactic test is counterproductive, and it sucks the joy out of all of us. By carefully directing discovery we can produce specific learning as a by product. By attempting to master this technique we should find time available to work on cross-curricular concepts like reflection, text literacy, and evaluation of source quality. With greater understanding of these latter concepts students and teachers will increase their learning, will increase their joy, and will provide everyone the conditios in which learning can take place.

Restoration Progress

Since last December the progress on the Jag restoration has come a long way.

The intakes and SU carbs (six separate units) have been completely restored and assembled to factory specifications with the exception of some stainless hardware in areas that the regular hardware finds undue deterioration. And the Cylinder head is ready for final painting and assembly. I am so glad that I chose a profesisonal to do this. I actually would have tried to put it together...upside down. Well, at first anyway.

The engine block had some dubious work in previous major overhauls that has proved difficult to resolve. Stock cylinder sleeves that would normally be replaced in an extensive overhaul could not be used due to some liberal and undocumented machining in a previous overhaul. The machinist, an artist of sorts, found six cylinders of the correct diameter that he collected from all over the US to accommodate the oversized holes. They thought were a bit too long…that being far less a problem compared to too small in diameter. All said, the new sleeves are in and the mating surfaces honed to specification. Once painted the block will be complete ready for engine assembly.

The crankshaft was fine with the exception of one rod journal (#5). It being egg shaped meant grinding all six journals to a new specification. That should have been accomplished just hours ago.

So, in the next weeks the engine will be assembled. More than a year in the making and yet to be accomplished, the engine will be ready to go...soon.

And there is more. The rear suspension and drive train is being remanufactured. This has been at a restorer for 9 months and it too is nearing completion. The only wait element here is the cadmium platting of parts. Otherwise, it is ready for assembly. So, optimistically speaking in the next few months all the elements of the drive train will be completely restored.

THE Jag

The Jag...one of the reasons for the blog name. See Jag Update 11/30/08 audio editon on the right.

The good old days are hear at last!

Working in education as a teaching coach, I get a lot of exposure to new web tools and ingenious ideas for their use. I have bought into them and the concept of 21st Century teaching. I can think of dozens of ways to get classroom lessons involved with higher Bloom’s skill sets. But getting teachers to think that same way--they need a coach. Technology has never intimidated me. I have been involved with high end user technologies all my life from aviation to photography, from computer maintenance to technical consulting. Technology is great. However, I need to add that it is a great “tool”. Technologies alone do very little for me or for education for that matter. The science that brought them about is always interesting and very, very erudite anymore. It is above the huddled masses with whom I reside. So, the crux of my job is to daily come up with ways to bring the now technologies as learning tools into “classrooms from the past.” I do not exaggerate. When your kids walk into the average classroom of today’s schools, they traverse a time warp as they pass through the door frame. Back, back to teaching methodologies of the distant past. I know teachers who miss ditto machines. That is just plain creepifying!
Not to say that everything from the past has got to go--far from it. The basics are still the basics and there are basic things to learn at all levels of education. There are many didactic lessons out there of great importance. What I am saying is, we are expecting students to learn only how to function in a single, specific classroom. They walk out of a world where so much is provided, easy and even taken as given into classrooms that treat what they know and use everywhere else as tainted. These poor students are handicapped immediately. They nearly become nonfunctional. As nonfunctioning students they struggle to get the simplest of lessons. They are like a fish out of water. They are in a class where they have to dig matter from a book of what copyright? As compared to, for instance, browsing the web where they search with a tool for specific information and find up to the minute results in seconds? Which one is real to them? Remember now, kids want relevance. (That would be relevance to them.) The collective creativity of the web talks to learners where they are. The information can be and is often a combination of visual, aural, and kinesthetic origins. This is just what the educational experts say how people learn best. That fill-out worksheet is looking pretty drab at this point compared to interactive blogging over the finer points of a piece of literature, or math problem solution technique, or science experiment. They not only get to give their two cents worth, but can see what everyone else thinks, get to consider and comment other points of view and maybe do it with a person who lives in another country; and all this in real time. How about a Spanish class where the conversation is with students who natively speak Spanish? That is exciting. That is real, or, as we say in the vernacular, authentic. The good old days of teaching--they are here at last! Well, with a little coaching.

Boredom

I hear the term so often, but I have never felt what it means. Not a single time in my entire memory can I recall being bored? “I’m bored” is a phrase I hear all the time being a teacher in a typical rural US high school. How can youngsters with so much going on around them feel as though there is insufficient stimulus to generate interest in something? Totally baffling!
As long s I am observing teenagers, have you noticed how kids, maybe people in general are always looking for some stimulus from other than what is around them? Phones, iPods, videos, TVs, computers are the usual culprits, drugs, books yes, but much, much less often. My theory is, people are afraid to be alone. Don’t much like the company I suspect. When a person can’t interest himself in himself, I see the signs of an underachiever. This is just a plain worrisome observation. Not to mention a downright waste of brain power. Everyone has something to contribute, however large or small. That contribution will not so often be stimulated by redundant or derivative behaviors.
Obviously, not every waking moment can be an engagement in production, but they can be in prelude to achievement. Being plugged into an iPod “because I’m bored” has yet to demonstrate, to me any way, a culminating behavior that warrants endless hours of blank expression and off key, whiny, muted voices mouthing the lyrics of some song over and over again. A tree might be observed doing the same thing as its leaves rustle in the breezes day in and day out. Should I expect great things from tress as much as I do from bored students? Perhaps that is a misplaced expectation on my part! Trees are at least gathering photons to grow and produce tree parts and oxygen, slow as they may be in the process. What visible product comes of endless hours in mindless stimulation? Totally baffling!

How much do we need technology?

Now here is a conundrum. I am a Classroom for the Future Coach. That means I advocate learning in a variety of ways and often link those ways to realization by, organization with, or expression through the use of technological means. I admit that this learning mode is way cool, can be very efficient and eminently more interesting than some more traditional ways. And before you scoff, the work involved is intense and can more than often exceed levels of comparative learning with traditional methods. That said, I and most of the world for that matter can get along with a far less amount of technical wizardry than currently available. To wit, humanity has only been so “plugged in” for only a few decades. From all antiquity to the advent of “the new technologies” mankind got along just fine. And I dare say will fair OK after the societal collapse that the current political madness, of which no part of the globe seems to be immune, leads us into what will be a second dark age. In fact, those of us who cannot learn and excel in the traditional learning climate will be the lost crowd; and by lost I mean dead or worse, severely dependent. For all the understanding of learning available to us today, the lessons of the past are lost to so many of us. The reality of harmonious co-existence and prosperity through mutual respect, ownership, hard work, and a natural understanding that doing the “right thing” is accomplished by preserving a harmonious-co-existence. If it gets more complicated than that well, you see what the world is like today. Every culture eventually drowns in its plethora of rules. And what are rules? …the exceptions and caveats to behaving in harmonious co-existence.

Not all rules are so bad. What makes a rule not so good is a preponderance of them. After so many, each additional actually isolates a little bit of what heretofore was acceptable as unacceptable. Extend the number of rules to the absurd, the definition of government, and you eventually make natural behaviors unacceptable. Enforcing rules becomes an end unto itself. Creativity is stifled. Humans are creative by nature and as they have so often in the past, will invent the instrument to remove the rules, again. Draw your own conclusions. Can you learn from history?