Transforming teacher education

Reading and listening to Sir Ken Robinson talk about education struck a chord with me, especially when he speaks about the way today's educational institution is designed like a factory.

"We have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it. […] Schools are still pretty much organized along factory lines; ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It's like the most important thing about them is their date on manufacture."

Looking back on some twenty years' experience teaching in the French national education system, I couldn't agree more. We're educating kids for the 19^th century, not the 21^st. The most important quality a student has, apparently, is that he should be seen and not heard. At end of trimester meetings, I hear colleagues bemoaning the fact that some students won't sit still, keep quiet and copy their lessons off the board like docile automatons. Rarely do any of them talk about working outside the "programme" – the officially mandated curriculum for their discipline.

Yet this is exactly what we need to do. For example, as an English teacher, my "programme" consists in long lists of grammar points, and more or less utopian targets of the proficiency levels all students should reach by the time they leave school. It's a mandate for standardization and conformity. While we have been fortunate that the official instructions for foreign language teachers mention more and more often elements of 21^st century learning – task-based and project-based learning, international communication and collaboration projects like eTwinning and Comenius – so few teachers really take those innovations to heart. In my region (Région Centre, Académie Orléans-Tours) I often feel like I am the only one carrying the torch of 21^st century learning practices. Certainly, none of my fellow teacher trainers seem to be operating on this wavelength.

Indeed, teacher training is in crisis here in France. The institutions responsible for teacher training, the IUFMs, were first gutted and then abolished by the Sarkozy administration, with very little actual teacher training of any sort taking their place. The budgets for in-service teacher training have been shrinking every year, and there seems to be little or no support for innovation and the four C's of 21^st century learning - Creativity, Critical thinking, Collaboration and Communication. What would really help is a concerted effort from the new Hollande government, and whoever he eventually selects as Education Minister, to revitalize both initial and in-service teacher training. If there were a network of teacher trainers bringing this message out from the Ministry to the Académies to schools and to individual teachers, we might see real qualitative changes to the school-as-factory paradigm that has inflicted so much damage on the educational potential of young people today.

Teacher training for the 21st century

I'm just emerging from 3 months of intensive teacher training sessions - in addition to my regular classload - and reconnecting to 21st century learning networks. Wow! is the only word to really describe it. Reading and viewing the work of innovators like Sir Ken Robinson and Will Richardson fills me with wonder... but also with some measure of frustration. It's all well and good to preach against broadcast-based teaching, against the school-as-factory model and against standardized testing, but as a classroom teacher I only really have control over what takes place in my own classroom. Even as a teacher trainer, what I do with other colleagues boils down to giving advice and sharing ideas about what a given classroom teacher can do during the couple hours a week they have with a class of students.

Passivity and broadcasting(from Sir Ken Robinson's RSA talk)

Robinson argues convincingly for profound changes in learning practices from the top down, at the level of the national education system. And yet, all the innovators I know say they are swimming against the tide. Profound changes like curriculum and class scheduling aren't within the grasp of a classroom teacher. The best they can do is adapt what happens within the walls of their own classroom to 21st century learning practices. "For the most part," Robinson notes, "these innovations are happening not because of the dominant cultures of education but in spite of them."

Even within these constraints, there are many things the classroom teacher can do. Simple software, like Audacity and Photostory, can free students from the broadcast mode of teaching, allowing them to spend an entire class period speaking in their target language, instead of the few minutes each will get out of a class of thirty students interacting individually with their teacher. Tools like interactive whiteboards can help focus students' attention on content, while providing opportunities for interaction that simple videoprojection can't provide. Moreover, the single most important innovation doesn't involve technology at all, but a specific attitude towards what constitutes teaching and learning. Project-based learning, where students make significant decisions in the process through which they acquire learning, is a huge step forward over traditional broadcast-based teaching. I first began promoting project-based learning some twelve years ago when I discovered the WebQuest concept pioneered by innovators like Bernie Dodge and Tom March. At the time, most web-based activities simply asked students to find specific pieces of information from their online research; students were still only consuming information, albeit in a more autonomous and self-directed way than in the traditional classroom. But the WebQuest concept goes way beyond the "treasure hunt" by giving students a concrete goal, a real-life role that they can adopt in seeking their goal, and a step-by-step process that helps keep them on task over the course of their work.

What I realized over the years, during teacher training sessions where I helped colleagues to develop WebQuests to use with their students in a computer lab, was that this task-based approach doesn't necessarily need to take place using web-based research. It works just as well with students in a classroom, working alone, in pairs or in small groups, trying to achieve concrete goals and use their target language along the way, rather than having them passively absorb the knowledge broadcast by their teacher.

Changing the classroom from the bottom up is an incremental proposition. I have changed my own classroom, and exposed some hundred or so colleagues every year to elements of that change. Other innovators are on similar quests, and yet, statistically, only a very small percentage of teachers within the French national education institution have begun the shift towards a new teaching paradigm. Perhaps with the arrival of a new government in the next few days there will be a new chance for bringing this paradigm shift to the very top of the institution.

What is 21st-century Learning?

Cartoon by Bill Browning, from his webpage:
http://www.mnispi.org/cartoon/2001/index.htm

How do our students learn, anyway? And how should we adapt our teaching practices to accomodate the way or ways that students learn?

The hard science of the brain behind any claims of a scientific foundation for one teaching approach or another are surprisingly vague. There have been so many fads in educational research over the years, and so many problematical notions have passed into popular culture that we really have to look askance at this sort of thing, whether it be based on the supposed opposition between right brain and left brain functions or something as abstruse and variously defined as learning styles.


Molecular biologist John Medina summed it up well in his book "Brain Rules." Talking about the many studies in neurology and brain science, he asks:

"What do these studies show, viewed as a whole? Mostly this: if you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear both down and start over."

Working as a change agent in education is all about starting over - in whatever small or incremental ways you can. I don't mean that in a perjorative way, though. Classroom teachers are often limited in what they can realistically hope to change. If I see a given class of twenty-two 16-year-olds for two hours a week, Mondays from ten to eleven and Fridays from nine to ten, then that is my margin for change - unless I can actually get my school principal and the other 80-odd teachers on board with my change agenda.

I also have to keep reminding myself that changing the learning environment isn't just a question of technology. Regardless of the tech tools we have at our disposal, both hardware tools like videoprojectors, computers, media players and interactive whiteboards, and software tools of dizzying variety and complexity, there are questions about teaching and learning practices that need answers before we even think about the place and role of technology.

One of the first items on my agenda as a change agent is the classroom itself. What does your classroom look like? And where are you, the teacher, in this classroom? Clichéd as it is, I still have to ask whether you are "the sage on the stage, or the guide on the side"? The classrooms in my school, regardless of the subject taught, look pretty much like this one: students sit in orderly, well-aligned rows, eight across and five deep, with as many as 38 students in a classroom that can just barely contain them. Teachers, by and large, stand at the front, talk a lot and write a lot on the whiteboard, while students listen, copy things down in their notebooks and occasionally raise their hands to ask questions.

Sound familiar? Does this look like 21st-century learning? No, I didn't think so. More like 19th-century teaching, where teaching is defined as the transmission of information from the teacher who knows things to students whose main goal is memorizing knowledge. I am reminded of one of Edward de Bono's favorite neologisms: "Ebne."  Excellent, but not good enough. Especially given the changes we see every day in the student body: shortened attention spans, reliance on (or even addiction to) cellphones, video games and so on, and the ever-present spectre of boredom and disaffection with anything that even remotely resembles real work.

Our classrooms need to change. The way we teach needs to change. And this change needs to be deep and far-reaching, not something as cosmetically superficial as "flipping" the classroom. In my next blog post, I hope to pull some good ideas out of John Medina's "Brain Rules" and see how I can adapt my own classroom. 21st century learning requires us to re-think so many aspects of our work as teachers. How far can we go?

Collaboration for the 21st century

Attending the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum last month, I was struck by how far we've come in the twenty-five years I've been teaching. On the agenda for 21st century skills, we find not only creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration, but also knowledge building, ICT skills and digital citizenship.

How far we've come! And yet, so much remains to be done! It's hard not to feel deep disappointment, and even disillusionment with the very profession of teaching, when I see how entrenched the traditional classroom is - you all know what I'm talking about, the classroom where the students sit in orderly rows, quietly taking notes on the Knowledge broadcast by the teacher standing at the board, front and center.

William Richardson's keynote was inspiring. "The world is changing. The role of the teacher is changing." How can this be at once so transparently obvious and so blindingly difficult to understand? At the Global Forum this new role leaped out of every corner, with some 150 innovative classroom projects on display.

Let me take just one example: Kelli Etheredge's "Count of Monte Christo" project She not only found a clever, innovative approach to studying this novel as an English teacher using MS OneNote, she guided her students towards real-life skills writing, researching and speaking in a simulated courtroom to debate the Count's guilt. The kind of motivation and student-initiated learning that went on in this project is staggering. And it was just one of over 150 projects competing for the top global prizes.

I had the pleasure of participating in the Global Forum as a sort of "collaboration coach". Our group of 30 coaches had a number of workshops with Sonja Delafosse and David Walddon on what constitutes collaboration, knowledge building and ICT use. Each of us then went on to coach a group of six educators who were at the conference to present their projects. My team members included Kelli Etheredge from Alabama, Sanjeev Taneja from India, Yogesh Sundoo from Mauritius, David Mercado from Argentina and Wen-Ching Yang from Taiwan, and I accompanied them to the Stanford Environmental Research Center (SERC) where we found great resources for a project we've been putting together, called "Crisis in the Watershed".

The thing I appreciated most at the conference was that we didn't simply spend our time talking about collaboration, we rolled up our sleeves and did it. Collaborating with the other coaches and then with my group of innovative educators was a highly enriching experience, and one that I hope we will be able to continue over the coming months. "Crisis in the Watershed" will involve students from all our classrooms, defining problems with water usage and treatment, then looking for solutions to the diverse problems of the local situations in each site. I'm really looking forward to bringing this international experience to my students, and moving outside the European sphere that most of my past projects have focused on to embrace truly global issues.

But the biggest challenge for me will be finding a way to bring all the motivation and synergy I picked up at the Global Forum to the teacher training circuit here in France. Here, as in the US, truly innovative educators are thin on the ground. Far too many teachers are still stuck in 19th century educational practices, and getting more of them to move past that into the realm of 21st century learning for 21st century skills is a tall order. I'm excited about it though. Nothing in my career has been as rewarding as working as a change agent in education.