After reading Clay Burrel’s post concerning ’schooliness’, speaking to numerous respected colleagues of mine and having listened to Clay’s response to my question during our skype conversation today I am still left with an unanswered question. Namely, can the use of web technology such as blogs, wikis, podcasts etc actually save time, as opposed to cost time, in terms of curriculum delivery?
I am very much a believer in the use of such technology as an aid to student understanding but at what cost?
It strikes me that there is often a failure to consider the time constraints placed on IB teachers (and students) to cover the curiculum in the (less than recommended) time when discussing the use of such technologies. Teachers often feel a huge pressure to ‘deliver the syllabus’ so as to avoid the dreaded scenario that their students will be forced to tackle an exam question that they did not adequately cover in class. It is all very well to talk about the benefits of student directed learning, collaboration etc as a means of developing real understanding but shouldn’t we also consider how such technologies might aid in the process of curriculum coverage. After all, teachers subject to the demands of external exams all feel this pressure. I would be most interested in anyone who can provide me with examples of situations in which web 2.0 tech enabled teachers to enhance student understanding and engagement whilst at the same time covering the required chunks of syllabus content.
For links to similar posts on this topic see…..
Mike’s post concerning the relevance of ‘throwing down words like it ain’t no thing’
A Nadine inspired comment thread that dicusses the demands of exams
and of course Clay’s posts on ‘Schooliness’ and many more
Hi Tom,
That student who took AP World the year after I had her? I never finished the story. She came to me during lunch and said the AP World History teacher lectured every class, and nobody was learning anything. (He told me he hated it, but he had to, because he had to cover everything for the AP Exam.) They wanted to come to me during lunch so they could understand it coherently – as narrative, cause/effect, the Great Story. It had little to do with technology. To me, it had more to do with active v. passive learning.
If a teacher “delivers” something to me, s/he did all the heavy lifting. All I did was sit there, possibly napping, and have it dropped in my lap. If the teacher lets me deliver, I have to do the lifting. I can’t fake that.
The students could have been giving the lectures instead of him. He could have quizzed them on the student lectures to keep the other students listening. It would have given variety to the class that the same teacher lecturing week in, week out can’t give.
Question: Do we have any evidence that teaching everything the course says to cover, even if it’s bloated beyond reason, leads to learning of everything that’s taught? Or to more correct answers on that test?
I don’t know, but I suspect that students who studied fewer chunks, in more depth, might remember more come test time. Because what they did cover, they were given time to learn.
Those who never learned due to the fast pace of the delivery? Don’t their test performances mostly rely on dead-week cram sessions of discrete facts – many of which they probably mis-remember on test day anyway? Again, I don’t know, but I suspect. And if that’s true, that’s tragically ironic: because the teacher’s desire to save time actually produced a colossal waste of learning for an entire course.
I’d love to see an experiment where students were given a week to cram with, say, an AP World History test-prep book – Barron’s or whatever, but never took the class. Reward: college credit for the course. Then compare their scores to those of students who sat through lectures for a year, and then crammed during dead week. I wonder how significant the difference in test scores would be?
A happy medium between full expulsion of some parts of the content and equal coverage of them all is to help students memorize the chronological time-line in its largest periodizations. That gives them better odds at acing a few more bubbles.
Philosophically, I’m attracted to an approach that says flatly: I’m not teaching you all the content so you can get a grade for your transcript. If I do that, I impoverish something more valuable than your GPA (if that’s the case), because you’ll remember a few things short-term, but learn next to nothing of value. (I do have evidence of that that I wrote about here, on how AP seniors knew shockingly little, and understood less, about history after 11 years of being A students in many history classrooms.) So you need to study some other things on your own.
Hm. Or better still: in this Moodle forum, or wiki, or whatever, with your friends.
To me, this isn’t a question about technology. I’d be tempted to make these choices in order to slow down with chalk, pencil, and paper just as much.
By: Clay Burell on February 24, 2009
at 10:30 pm
[...] On Coverage versus Depth [...]
By: On Coverage versus Depth :: Patrick Malley on February 25, 2009
at 3:26 am
Hi Clay
Thanks for your response. This is in fact the 4th time that I have sat down and attempted to reply to your comment, all others have been lost one way or another, and so my fingers are crossed that I will actually make it to the ‘Submit Reply’ button.
I will share a wee secret with you, I almost totally agree with your points. Having been an extremely disaffected high school student myself, I have great sympathy with students who are being subjected to, what you have termed, ’schooliness’. Surely education should be about learning something useful rather than reciting something pointless.
As for your analogy about active learning, again, I am with you there. Prior to becoming a school teacher I spent a few years working as a sailing instructor that taught me a thing or too about the importance of active learning.
A couple of the techniques we used to prepare students for their first taste of controlling the boat on the water were descriptions aided by simple diagrams and dry land drills. Students would listen to the instructor describing a ‘tack’ or ‘gybe’ whilst watching him relate the description to a diagram on the board. The instructor would then move on to allow the students to practice the mechanics of the turn using a couple of chairs, a stick and a bit of rope. Finally, having mastered the theory and the praticalities of what to do with their hands and feet, they would be cast adrift on the water to apply this learning in context.
In my experience of high school the first step was used in almost every lesson, the second step was rarely ever used and the last step never employed except on field trips.
More on field trips later.
As for the experiment you mentioned, have you ever seen this guys attempt to pass A level sociology with only 2 weeks studying. Not sure about the aim or relevance of his experiment but I guess it does demonstrate that some people are able to ‘learn’ large chunks of information quickly more easily than others.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/aug/16/schools.aslevels
But can you really decide not to bother with certain aspects of the syllabus?
What about our obligations to prepare students for exams?
What would students want us to do? (I asked some of mine today-no answers yet)
What about ambitious parents paying astronomical school fees in the hope of (exchange for) top grades and Harvard scholarships?
I feel I have a professional responsibility regardless of my personal philosophy.
It might be because I am a bit green when it comes to the high school teaching game but I would like to think that I can cover the content and also assist in students developing some useful understanding and skills. I hope that web 2.0 tech will help me on this quest. I will certainly try.
Hmmmm fieldtrips.
Now you would think that field trips would be a great way of developing understanding, making connections, demonstrating relevance or at least getting the students actively involved.
Well, my experience of trips recently has been that the students spend a day walking around under the sun getting lectured to. That to me is the very essence of schooliness
I will keep you posted about my attempts to do something useful on the field trip front
By: tommclean21 on February 26, 2009
at 4:52 pm
Hi Tom,
Here’s the same reply I put on change.org. Enjoying this, and hope you do keep me informed on any discoveries you make. I’ll be needing them when I’m back in the history classroom in August in Singapore.
Here it is:
Tom,
Great, great line: “Surely education should be about learning something useful rather than reciting something pointless.”
Loved the sailing class example, too.
And really loved the link. I followed it, and then found the second article, in which we learn that two weeks of cramming for an exam via a revision guide, instead of taking the actual sociology course, earned him a 97% (with intelligent caveats about the diffs btw sociology and other subjects). This line jumped out, for some reason:
“Traditional education is very good at teaching us the background to the second world war, and rightly so, but it is far less willing to provide us with the critical tools for living in the modern world.”
I already touched on this in my reply to Jean, above.
I’ve never taught an externally-assessed history course – AP, IB, whatever – and I suspect it’s more difficult to prep students for that than it is for the AP Literature courses I have taught. The Lit courses require only that students be able to read and analyze English from the 16th c. to the present, so I could teach representative texts from each period as I chose. It was manageable.
How to do that in a history course in which questions from any and all periods of, say, world history, could pop up is gnarlier by far. Especially if they focus on facts instead of analysis. Do they?
But I still think that an emphasis on “essential questions” – “How does power work? How and why do beliefs and societies change?” etc – that can be applied to all those periods are ways to make it “stick,” first, and to make unknown events easier to understand via the transferability of those essential questions. If I know about the Dynastic Cycle in China, I don’t need to know anything about some of the revolutions in order to be able to make a pretty educated guess concerning their chief factors, events, and players.
But as for your question about responsibility to parents? I think parents would be sympathetic to an explanation that some outside study of topics not covered in the syllabus (in depth, anyway) is an expectation. Teacher provides those topics, maybe quizzes on them, and hopefully sets up an online discussion forum for them to let students discuss them and teach each other – but otherwise, those topics are beyond the classroom focus.
That other suggestion: pure memorization of the major periods – timeline, major characters and events – can work. I’ve had students memorize history from the Trojan War to Renaissance that way through simple mnemonic tricks, and that at least assures they have their periods and dates in proper chronological order, and know the basic facts about them that may appear on those damn memory tests. I assigned that at the beginning of the year, and quizzed students on it monthly until the end of the year. The had the “big picture” by the end.
Arg. Too long, and probably too muddled. I’m tired.
What an interesting discussion, though.
Re: field trips? I hear you. I’m no fan. When the agenda is decided by the teachers, there’s little hope of buy-in from the students.
The grail is finding that opening in student defenses by asking that question that makes them curious, makes them not want to be ignorant. But that question has to be framed in a way that makes all of time relevant. I think it exists. I think that warmer quiz I popped in that link I shared with you – “Take this jumble of historical events and put it in chronological order” – comes close. It at least shows students how ignorant they are about the past, and teases them with the promise of being less ignorant while there’s still time.
Too long, too long.
By the way: To save losing comments, before you click “submit” _anywhere_, try this trick: ctrl + A (select all of comment), ctrl + C (copy comment to clipboard), _then_ submit. If it’s lost, just ctrl + v into the comment field again, and that pastes the lost comment. Voila.
I learned that trick far later than I should have.
One last thing: I didn’t link to your post because I feared I was setting you up as a straw man. I didn’t want others to see you as that, because I knew your point was more complex than my treatment of it. One of the hazards of blogging.
By: Clay Burell on February 27, 2009
at 3:27 am
One last link: This post is I think the best answer to the problem I’ve come up with.
Let me know what you think.
Clay
By: Clay Burell on February 27, 2009
at 3:34 am