Synergistic Thinking

I have been involved in an interesting conversation on PYP Threads about whether or not we should display central ideas for each Unit of Inquiry to our students. I find it an interesting thought and something that I had never really considered before. I've generally gone through a fairly standard format at the start of each UOI, unpacking the central idea with the students and discussing what each element means. For those who are not familiar with the PYP, a central idea is an overarching 'big understanding' statement that guides the inquiry and encourages students to explore and question whether or not they agree with it. It is made up of two or more concepts in relationship with each other. For example, our current central idea is "Beliefs influence people's live's" with the two linked concepts being beliefs and influence.

Referring back to the discussion about displaying central ideas, the question was posed that asked if we should display central ideas. The rationale for the question was that if we give the students the answer at the start of the unit, are we robbing them the chance of learning through inquiry - instead transmitting knowledge to them?

The discussion on the ning centered around a belief from an educational psychologist named David Ausubel. His theory describes that by providing and scaffolding enough information in advance, students are able to focus on a big understanding and this helps them to learn. By having central ideas displayed to students, they are having their attention focused on the concepts at hand.

The argument put forward in the discussion states that if we are showing the central idea to the students, and therefore focussing their attention, are we robbing them of the chance to inquire into it themselves? Considering the PYP is based on an inquiry approach to learning, I think this discussion has some merit. I'm not sure that by displaying the central idea we are providing students with any answers, as such, as we can't be sure of their level of understanding. But I have been thinking a lot about the aspects of inquiry learning lately and thought that this may be a useful technique to try out in the classroom to help encourage deeper levels of thinking among my students.

Concept based curriculum allows us to spiral the students' thinking as they go through the grades and develop deep understandings. However, it can often be difficult to assess whether or not the students have truly grasped the conceptual knowledge within the lens that they have been working. This brings me to synergistic thinking.

I first heard this term used by the first-lady of concept-based curriculum, Lynn Erickson. She recently presented a keynote speech at the IB conference in The Hague. I have attached a link for this speech here, unfortunately I wasn't able to embed it. The slideshow that she refers to during the speech is this one:

Erickson states that curriculum & instruction must create a synergy between the factual and the conceptual levels of thinking. This sort of thinking enables students to be comfortable working at both the factual and conceptual level. An example, highlighted in the video, is of a student being able to provide two factual examples that could support her conceptual 'big idea'. Another way to create this sort of thinking would be to address things between two conceptual lenses (the example in the video uses the lenses of perspective and behaviour) and ask the students to think about the relationship between the two.

By not displaying the central idea at the start of our Unit of Inquiry I am hoping to encourage synergistic thinking. The students and I have discussed the organising theme for the unit and also talked through the lines of inquiry. I have challenged them to try and create their own central idea for the unit and already I have had a couple of suggestions. They haven't quite hit the mark yet but have lead to some questions that we can explore throughout the unit. I am hoping that by encouraging the students to consider the concepts that could be connected to make the central idea they will be thinking about their conceptual understanding. By challenging them to provide examples of proof for their central ideas they will need to connect factual knowledge to a conceptual lens and this will hopefully lead to them achieving deeper understanding.

Graph of the Day

I thought I would share an on-going data handling activity that has been working quite well in my classroom. It's called Graph of The Day and was introduced to me by Christine Orkisz Lang at ECIS 2010 last November. It's premise is fairly simple however if it is done well the effect can make quite a difference - as I have discovered.

The activity is completed daily and can range from 5mins to 30mins discussion time - depending on how much you have. I start off by drawing a commonly used graph - bar, line, pie - and representing some data on it. I try to link the data authentically to my students' learning wherever possible. For example, this week I created a graph the described the favourite simple machines in Grade One as we are coming towards the end of our unit of inquiry on forces and machines.

As the students arrive each morning they know that they have to examine my graph and see what it is about. They then have to take a post-it note, write their name on it and describe something about my data or graph. Once everyone has arrived and we're beginning the day I take some time to go through some of the observations with the whole class and we discuss the elements of the graph and what it is describing. This is also an opportunity for me to ask questions for specific students, or the whole class, to take the learning further. Eventually I will hand over the reigns to the students and they will each be in charge of creating Graph of The Day on a rotational basis. I think the responsibility of creating their own work for the class to look will produce some interesting graphs.

I keep all of the graphs folded over on a bulletin board so we can use them again and again. By having the students post their notes I have ready-made formative assessment data that I can use to plan future learning engagements and I can also offer feedback directly to specific comments and students, or as a collective if there is something that the whole class requires. I can also choose how much to scaffold the graph by removing elements (to ask more of the students' interpretive skills) or adding elements (to model certain types of graphs).

So far it's been successful and is something that I can carry on throughout the year. Here's a few examples from this week:

A brief history of education - the academic illusion.

I have recently finished reading 'Out Of Our Minds - Learning To Be Creative' - by Ken Robinson. It is a very thought provoking book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I found the arguments he makes regarding the current practices of education and how it should be reformed for the future to be very interesting. Sir Ken's discussions are based heavily on the types of intelligences we traditionally value and judge our students on, specifically those stemming from the rationalist approach to thinking - the sciences. This has lead to particular types of education systems and I found it interesting to read through the history of how education has developed (in the western world).

The Kings School in Canterbury claims to be the oldest grammar school in England, stating that it's origins have been traced back to AD 597, although these sorts of institutions may have originated up to 1000 years prior to that. Grammar schools were founded by religious bodies and thus their purpose was to educate children (boys only in those years) for the church - the pathway to all professions such as law, politics or the civil service. This meant learning Greek and Latin literature (as Latin was the international language of the church). During the 15th and 16th centuries many non-religious organisations identified their own needs and established schools in order to meet them.

The 19th century impacted education specifically in the sense that during that time period there were significant advances in science and technology and it was also the time in which the Industrial revolution was taking place. This meant that there was a gradual movement away from a classical education (grammar; rhetoric; dialectic; arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy) and more towards an education structure that is more familiar to us today. This generally involves a hierarchy of subjects - languages, mathematics, science and technology at the top and the arts and humanities at the bottom.

In 1870 the British Government passed an Act of Parliament to develop provision for primary schools. This extended to secondary education in 1902. In 1944 an act was passed which would enable the provision of free education for all. The purpose of this act was to develop a society of workers that would meet the needs of the post-war industrial economy which required a better educated workforce. It provided an opportunity for millions of people who had previously been denied education. Two types of schools emerged: grammar schools - to educate the top 20 percent of people, such as doctors, teachers, lawyers and accountants. Then came secondary modern schools - which were associated with vocational education and aimed to produce blue collar and manual labour workers. Despite all best efforts, because of the ways that these schools evolved there continues to be a higher status attributed to 'academic' programs.

Robinson refers to this as the 'academic illusion'. He argues that too narrow a view continues to be applied to academic intelligence and that teachers and parents must 'see through the academic illusion to their students' real abilities'. With the ever evolving knowledge of the human brain and the different ways that students learn, it is vitally important that teachers create environments where students can demonstrate their intelligence in the ways best suited to them.

Analysing Inquiry

The PYP is based on an inquiry approach to teaching and learning. Kathy Short, a leading expert on inquiry learning, defines the term as 'a collaborative process of connecting to and reaching beyond current understandings to explore tensions significant to learners'. She identifies five key principles of inquiry learning: (i) Inquiry is natural to learning (ii) Inquiry is based in connection (iii) Inquiry is conceptual (iv) Inquiry is problem-posing and problem-solving (v) Inquiry is collaborative. As I was reading through these I reflected on how I manage these in my own class and how I encourage my grade level team to promote these as well.

Inquiry is natural to learning: This principle relates to the idea that inquiry is the natural way that people learn inside and outside of school contexts. It refers to the individual engaging with what his happening in their life around them until something catches their attention and piques their curiosity or challenges their thinking. I think, as a grade, we do a good job of encouraging our students to combine both the knowledge that they use in their everyday lives with the knowledge that they learn in school. This is important for inquiry learning as it promotes a natural way of learning.

Inquiry is based in connection: This principle is based on the premise that learning needs to have significant points of connection otherwise it can be difficult and tends to be easily forgotten. Connecting students with experiences from their own lives encourages inquiry and allows teachers to observe current understandings. I think we do this quite well. We certainly strive to scaffold learning engagements that allow our students to connect the key concepts with their own experiences. This is commonly done at the beginning stages of a unit of inquiry as it helps the students 'tune in' with the type of learning that will be taking place. I wonder if we could try harder to revisit these sorts of connections more periodically throughout each unit though. This may help to re-focus the students and help them reflect on their learning. There is, however, a level of caution to be considered here as we don't want to over-guide the inquiry and the students do need to have the opportunity to explore their own learning independently.

Inquiry is conceptual: This principle refers to the ability of teachers to place the major emphasis of their teaching on the big ideas that lie behind topics. This will in turn lead to deeper understandings that are transferrable across different contexts. This type of learning is more important now that ever before. The world has moved from an 'Information Age' that relied on knowledge workers and analytical thinkers, to a 'Conceptual Age' that asks for the ability to think collaboratively and combine creative thinking with analysis. The PYP has five essential elements, one of which are the key concepts. All of our units of inquiry are based around these and their associated concepts so we are driving conceptual learning from the start. In this sense, I feel that we do a good job. The challenge that sometimes arises is maintaining this conceptual learning. Sometimes we get caught up with focussing on an interesting topic, theme or activity that may have a conceptual link, but is still being explored in a more factual way.

Inquiry is problem-posing and problem-solving: Problem solving in a typical inquiry situation often looks like students engaging in a designed task, being encouraged to ask questions about that problem and to research those questions. Problem-posing develops once a person has acquired a wealth of knowledge about a topic or issue. Time needs to be spent exploring and immersing students in these and eventually tensions will arise that allow them to problem-pose. I think a lot of the time I consider the questions that my students ask during problem-solving engagements as problem-posing questions when they're not. If I am the one setting the engagement then I am the problem-poser, not my students. They are simply asking questions (still a valuable skill - don't get me wrong!) about my problem. My realisation about this principle is that I have been focussing too much on guided inquiry. My goal is to make my units focus more on collaborative inquiry, where the students have greater freedom to pose and investigate problems that they find interesting within that unit.

Inquiry is collaborative: Collaboration differs from co-operation in that it is not just about working together, but also about thinking through dialogue about ideas. Effective learning occurs when participants work together towards understanding - they learn in an experience, not just from an experience. In other words, learners gain understanding by being part of something, not just learning about it. I think this element is the one that we are probably strongest at. Collaboration is high among the students in each class, between the classes in the grade and also with classes in other grades in the school. Additionally, we use technology to enhance the collaborative experience and allow the students to connect to minds in other parts of the world, of different ages and backgrounds. These collaborative experiences allow for effective inquiry learning to take place.

Overall, I think we do a pretty good job of fostering a positive inquiry-based learning approach in our grade. There are certainly things that we can improve on but we're on the right track. It will be interesting to discuss these elements in greater personal detail with my team members as we reflect on our current unit of inquiry.

The Education Miracle

This morning I read a very interesting newspaper article about educational performance of different nations. Its focus was on the recent high performance of Asian nations - namely Korea, Singapore and China and looks at their rise to the top of the international student rankings. It states, however, that this rise hasn't come without a cost.

These three nations, among others, have regularly topped these sorts of ranking tables in recent years. As a result, education reformers in search of similar results look to these countries' curricula for inspiration on how to enhance their own programs. However, according to Dr. Yong Zhao, from the University of Oregon, more attention needs to be paid to the other results that these systems yield.

The article highlights three key educational points:

(i) The development of the whole child - Dr. Zhao highlights the existence, in these systems, of high levels of psychological stress, the strong directional focus from the teacher to the student, and a lack of social experiences, which can lead to poor emotional development in a child. He also mentions the children's lack of confidence, for example, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit and imagination. To claim that an over-reliance on purely an academic focus - however that may be defined - is detrimental to a student's development is not ground breaking news. However, what still astounds me is some people's (and I include teachers, parents, students and policy makers in this group) fascination with academic scores and results. People talk about the importance of developing the 'whole child' but I sometimes get the impression that few truly believe it and even less actually act on it.

(ii) The over-reliance on standardised testing results - Dr. Zhao states that standardised test scores are ''easily manipulated if you pay for college prep schools''. Long used to measure student achievement or academic ability (and more recently for other means), there is regular discussion about the methods and uses of standardised testing in many different settings. The use of standardised testing results to allocate funding, student class or level placement, and teacher performance has wreaked havoc among several countries with one of the most notable examples being the No Child Left Behind Act in the United States. Despite all this, Government representatives still seem to view this as the most effective way of evaluating many parts of a school's teaching and learning. And to be perfectly honest, it's hard to blame them. Many elementary school teachers advocate the end of standardised testing, citing student rates of development, over-reliance on factual knowledge over deeper understanding, and multiple intelligences as key arguments against the use of these assessment methods. But many Universities still base their student admission criteria on these sorts of tests. So, inevitably, as the student progresses through their schooling years, they need to learn how to perform on such assessments. It pleased me to read the section in the article that mentioned how some Universities are changing their selection process and criteria to not only rely on academic performance. They are doing this because students are performing well on standardised tests to enter their universities, only to find themselves being 'dragged back into the pack' once they're in. It is a small start, but these realisations need to come from the top (ie. universities and colleges) in order for the changes to fully filter through the complete educational life of a child.

(iii) The importance of collaborative working skills - The article also states that many of the students that enter 'top' universities are leaving without jobs in any of the Fortune 500 companies that they expect to gain. 'People talk about how they lack confidence, how they lack entrepreneurial skills, how they lack the ability to work with a group'. These skills need to be fostered and a focus on 'skill and drill' style learning experiences does little to enhance them. This loops back to the first point of developing the whole child but highlights that fact that it doesn't simply stop after elementary school. These skills need to be developed throughout a child's entire education.

It is sometimes difficult to have the vision and courage to change the ways of the past, especially when they are still used in many circumstances or if the reasons for the change are not completely understood. Fast disappearing are the days where mastering one discipline in one way would be enough to guarantee the successful completion of a task - or even a career. Today's workforce favours employees who boast a skill set consisting of creative thinking, the ability to collaborate, and the capacity to synthesise and transfer knowledge to new and related fields. It is the students that possess these skills that are the real miracles of education.