Discrepancy in Learning: Inside vs Outside the Classroom

Now, as perhaps never before, there exists a considerable discrepancy between the way young people learn on their own compared to the way they learn in school. If we assume that what one learns outside of school is more related to personal interest, motivation is likely a factor--anyone learning something they want to learn is likely to be more motivated and interested than someone who has to learn something--but it's not the main reason for the difference. The discrepancy exists because outside of school most of our students exploit the information sources available on the web while within the classroom, they do not.

Outside the classroom, young people know of and frequently and intuitively utilize a number of resources. When they want to know something, they Google it.  If they're unsure how to solve a math problem, they use Khan Academy. They use Twitter when they discover something of interest worth sharing and YouTube when hoping to learn a new skill. This is how many of us, both young and old, are learning, interacting, shopping, keeping up with acquaintances, and organizing these days.

However, in many cases the power of the digital age has not yet merged seamlessly with the classroom. Even though many classrooms have Wi-Fi access and many students have a device in their pocket more powerful than the computers of a only a few years ago, the use of web-enabled technology to support learning in a typical secondary school classroom remains low.

Rather than be incorporated into the learning routine of the classroom, smartphones and other devices are often banned because students are distracted by them. However, I fit firmly into the "if you can't beat them, join them" category; and believe that, instead of using these devices as a diversion from their lesson (by texting, updating Facebook, etc.), students should be using them to help support their learning.

There are two main reasons why student devices are not being used in classrooms. The first is, teachers tend to teach the way they've been taught. Therefore, without having learned in an environment that exploits information technology, teachers may not be sure how to incorporate it into their lessons. The second reason is, teachers are already very busy and few have the time or professional network available to them to create a completely new teaching and learning regimen. In order to teach in new ways and encourage students to learn differently, teachers will need professional development on how to incorporate technology and new classroom routines to follow.

Recently, thanks to a tweet by a colleague, I found an example of a teacher who has reduced and perhaps eliminated the discrepancy in learning between inside and outside the classroom.  Shelley Wright's Blog post The Flip: End of a Love Affair goes way beyond the title and covers much more than flipped vs unflipped classrooms. In the post, Shelley shares her classroom structure that combines inquiry, project based learning, student engagement, 21st century skills and technology. Shelley's classroom sounds like a place students would feel comfortable and familiar learning in.

I would encourage you to read and share Shelley's blog. Classroom structures such as hers combined with new curricula, that promises to support this new method of teaching and learning, could result in widespread changes to educational practice. Such changes will not only engage and challenge our students, they will also allow them to learn in a way that is familiar, accessible, and applicable to them.

Photo courtesy of Ambro at freedigitalphotos.net

Kicking and Screaming

Image courtesy of Ian Kahn

Some years ago when I was a classroom teacher, my Vice-Principal told me that he desperately needed my help. A student named Matt Martin (name changed to protect the guilty) was in serious trouble. Matt had burned his bridges with nearly every other teacher in the school and was now on a reduced program and earning just enough credits to graduate. I was Matt’s last resort to earn a grade 11 science credit and graduate that year. It seemed Matt had some issues. He could be angry, abusive, and at times even aggressive.  And those were his good days.

The VP was persuasive and I finally (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to have Matt join my Biology class.  The tone of the class changed instantly. Matt was everything he was promised to be and sometimes more.  The VP had offered to allow Matt to use his office if he got angry or frustrated and couldn’t cope with a class. There was a day or two when I suggested Matt pursue that option. But Matt kept coming back, day after day, sometimes working fairly well and cooperatively and sometimes not, and the school year (slowly) passed by.

June arrived and to many people’s surprise Matt graduated. Those of us who had taught him breathed a sigh of relief.  September was looking brighter already.

A few years later, I was shopping at a local big box retailer when a smiling young man walked up to me with a warm greeting and a big handshake. I recognized him immediately: it was Matt. He seemed genuinely glad to see me. He was working at this store and had been for some time. He was sorry, he said, for being such a pain (not his exact words). He also told me how much he appreciated the efforts of me, his other teachers and the VP in trying so hard to keep him in school and allowing him to graduate. Wow, what a transition in that young man’s personality! 

That event stands out as one of the best moments of my teaching career. It reinforced my belief that the troubled, difficult students are the ones that need teachers and other positive role models the most. The “good” kids, the ones that all teachers enjoy having in their classes, probably need us a lot less. If it came down to it, the bright, well behaved students could probably do a reasonable job of teaching themselves.  Matt clearly demonstrated that the students we have to drag through the system kicking and screaming are the ones who, in the end, may appreciate and need us the most. 

The Determination of Terry Fox

I am a storyteller. Often, when dealing with a misbehaving child at my school, I'll subject the unfortunate student to one of my anecdotes. Although often met with a great deal of eye rolling, every once and awhile you'll strike a chord. One of my favorite stories involves Terry Fox. But let me fill you in on some background first. Terry and I both grew up in Port Coquitlam. Terry was a year older than me and we attended the same junior and senior secondary schools. At first, I mainly knew Terry from sports: my pathetic attempts to make basketball teams and my more successful attempts to make rugby squads. Terry, meanwhile, made both teams with ease due to his athletic ability and sheer determination.

It wasn't until later, after he had his surgery to remove his cancerous leg, that Terry and I got to know one another better. We were lab partners in a Kinesiology class together at SFU about a year after his surgery. Terry was still undergoing chemo treatments. Terry was a class act. When another student commented negatively on his wig, Terry said: "I've got cancer. This is only until my own grows back". But I'm digressing.

The story to tell today, from a short time later, defines him, inspires me, and is one I have shared with hundreds of my students: I had arranged to meet a friend at a local school to go for a run along the Poco Trail. Coincidentally, Terry was at the school at the same time. What I saw did not look good. Terry was trying to run on his artificial leg for the first time. He was literally taking one step and falling flat on his face. He would then get back up and do it again. A quick check indicated that, yes, he was okay. Some time later, upon returning from my run, Terry was still at it. Now, however, now he was managing to get in 2 strides before falling face down. I thought to myself: I'd have quit by now. He must really be hurting. Another quick check indicated that he was still okay (although I couldn't imagine how that could be) and that, yes, he was going to get this.

We know the rest of the story already. But there are a lot of things I don't know that I wish I did. For example: How many more laps of that track and falls did it take Terry to master a sustained run? And I can't imagine how long he must have trained and how much pain he must have endured in order to be able to complete a marathon worth of running on a daily basis for months on end. I suspect that he may have remained on that track that day for some time, because that was Terry: determination personified and an inspiration to all who either knew him or know of him.

Khan Academy and Altruism

Some years ago, while I was working for an educational software producer, a teacher/customer suggested a change that would improve the user interface and educational potential of our product. I agreed with the customer, and indicated that I had been advocating for that same change. A company Vice President who overheard the conversation later said, "Our product works well enough as is. It would cost too much to make that change and we don't have room in our product development cycle to do it." Another VP commented, "We're about profit, not altruism." This event was a sure indicator to me that I was in the wrong line of work: I was too much of a teacher not to be concerned about improving the educational value of our product. Within a year, I was back in the classroom.

However, occasionally, you will find something inspiring and truly altruistic. The Khan Academy (khanacademy.org) is a splendid example. Salman Khan has produced over 2,000 tutorials on topics such as math, science, economics and civics that he provides for free on his website. He started small by producing tutorials for some cousins who were struggling a bit in school. Eventually he began posting the tutorials to YouTube and was surprised by how popular they were. 

A multi-degree holder from MIT and Harvard, Khan soon discovered that this type of teaching was his passion and formed his Khan Academy site. Interest in, and praise for his site has been remarkable. He quit his day job as an investment analyst and devoted himself full time to producing his tutorials. Many of these videos were produced in a small walk-in closet in his home—the only space he could find where he could work relatively uninterrupted. 

Thanks to some big infusions of cash from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google, Khan now has an office and employees. His software engineers are creating a management system to advance students appropriately though his instructional videos. 

A recent article in Wired magazine describes Grade 5 students in California successfully using Khan Academy and their management interface to learn math—some of these students had progressed to doing university level math! Nothing really new about Khan's concept: its mastery-based drill and practice design has been around since the beginning of personal computing. However, Khan's material is very different from the typical over-produced, glitzy (and sometimes boring) educational products on the market. He adds a very human touch, sounding like an enthusiastic, but very patient teacher as he delivers his lessons using fairly low tech means. He's also very good at explaining complicated topics in a simple way. 

Khan regulars say that they like that you can review the sections you don't understand over and over until you get it—an often stated virtue of technology based instruction.   Interestingly, it was an improvement to this aspect of our products that my customer was requesting a decade before. 

Khan Academy is already impacting classroom structure as more tweets and blogs focus on flipping the school day—having students learn at home and practice at school—but more on that topic in a future post.

Khan wants to start his own school. It will be interesting to track the success of this endeavor if it is realized. However, as with any instructional approach, I worry that too much learning with Khan's videos may become tiresome. I believe his products' strength may lie in a back up role supporting existing classroom instruction. 

If you haven't already, I suggest you have a look at Khan Academy. More importantly, suggest it to your students, other educators, your own children and their friends. Based on their comments, Khan's users seem to adore him. His website's motto, "Learn almost anything for free," is about as altruistic as possible. 

Pretesting: the Manageable Alternative to Retesting

Like many other teachers in the early 1990's, I was impressed by the promise of Outcome-Based Education or OBE. OBE was the new and improved version of mastery learning that stressed that all students can learn and that learning rather than content coverage should drive the pace of classroom instruction. Although I did, and still do, agree with many of the principles of OBE, I eventually became very disillusioned with the concept of student retesting.

Retesting is one of the key components of OBE. If students didn't master learning outcomes on a unit test, they were allowed to relearn those specific outcomes in a different way and then retest on those components until they had mastered them. This was where I found my first concern with retesting: the enormous amount of teacher time spent creating retests and relearning packages specifically tailored for individuals. My second concern was that my students weren't demonstrating the same gains in achievement as students in the literature were.

In fact, my students--as well-intentioned as most of them were--having diligently completed their relearning packages, showed up to the retest seemingly hoping that it was an easier version of the original. Generally, their results showed that they were not much better prepared for the retest than they were for the original test and very few significantly increased their score on the non-mastered concepts. I was demoralized and convinced that I was working harder at this than they were. As a result, over time, I largely abandoned the practice of retesting.

However, I wasn't quite ready to give up completely on OBE, I started offering pretests to students as opposed to retests.  I only had to create one really good pre-test per unit. Since I considered pretests as a type of formative assessment, they could be reused year after year and students could rewrite them as a review at any time. The critical components were that pretests be administered to students far enough in advance of the unit test to allow them time for reflection and review and that the students be provided with mastery reports by learning outcome based on their pretest performance.

The information contained in the mastery reports allowed the students to become metacognitive connoisseurs of their learning. Students began to come in for help much more often than they had prior to the implementation of pretesting, and accompanied by their mastery reports the students were much more aware of what they understood and didn't understand when asking for help.  Thanks to the information contained in the mastery reports, the students now knew where their learning gaps were. For example in biology class, students would point out that they had mastered the outcomes involving DNA replication but that they still needed some help with the translation steps of protein synthesis. These after school and in-class help sessions became very purposeful and focused.

The mastery reports produced a change in my instruction as well. Because the testing software could produce a mastery report summary by class, I could tailor my instructional and/or review activities to address the areas that most students were struggling with. The mastery reports took the guesswork out of lesson planning. I knew from these reports and my interactions with the students what they did and didn't understand and could revise my teaching accordingly.

Although pretests can be paper-based, posting them online increases student access and once again decreases teacher workload: no more standing in line at the photocopier and, depending on the type of question, no marking! Just make sure your online testing application is able to generate mastery reports for the students.

So what's the downside? It's time consuming to organize your test banks into valid questions grouped by learning outcome. However, whether you're pretesting or not, this level of organization helps you to create good tests quickly. And the opportunity to create and/or reorganize a test bank in such a way is a good collaborative activity for teachers in the same subject area. In order to create online pretests you need a sophisticated testing application. The one that I am most familiar with is LXR-Test. Although powerful, LXR is Windows only, not very user-friendly and expensive. Additionally, if you want online tests scored automatically, a feature that benefits students by providing instantaneous results, you are limited to multiple choice, matching and short answer questions. Although you may create and incorporate "essay" questions, they must be marked by hand and don't provide the instant results that are so beneficial to students.

I believe that pretesting students and providing them with mastery reports by learning outcome is a beneficial, practical, and efficient strategy that not only increases their achievement, but also helps them learn about learning. In addition the mastery reports also help teachers focus instructional time on the concepts that students need the most help with.

21st Century Science Instruction in 1997

A few evenings ago, I had the opportunity to join some of my vice-principal colleagues for a book club dinner. I value their friendship, camaraderie, support and humour. Our conversation eventually turned to 21st century learning (not surprising as that was the title of the book we were discussing). As we were dissecting changes, or lack thereof, to pedagogy, I commented: "I should show you the old video of my biology class someday." Based on my age, this sparked some hilarious comments, such as "Is it a filmstrip?" See above comment re: valuing humour.

So, after a bit of digging and reformatting here is the link to the video. This excerpt is from the Linton Professional Development title "The Technology-Infused Classroom" and is used with their permission.
 Link to video
Wish I still had that much hair. :)