Adam Seldis

For my course four final project I wanted to expand on one of the course’s weekly themes: the use of games in teaching. As I wrote here, I am big advocate of the use of games in my classes. Whereas there are some issues we discuss in Coetail that I struggle to see how I can implement it in the teaching of my subjects (Economics, History, Business & ToK), the use of games in teaching is almost made for economics and business, and vice versa.

At this time of the year for the 11th graders, we’re just coming to the end of learning about the economy, in particular what governments wants to achieve (sustainable economic growth, low inflation, low unemployment, stable balance of payments and equitable distribution of income) and what tools they have at their disposal to do so (fiscal, monetary and supply-side policies). It’s one thing being able to understand the component parts, but where the higher level thinking comes in (thanks Bloom) is in seeing the bigger picture of how it all fits together. In particular the concept of trade-offs – were the government to, say, change monetary policy to lower unemployment it could well lead to higher inflation. Thus the government might have to choose one as more important than the other. I want my students to be thinking evaluatively about these things, but many struggle because they can’t see the bigger picture.

My proposed set of lessons (UbD here) allow the students to devise a computer model that shows a simple economy with the main economic objectives and main government policy tools and how they are all interdependent with each other. The policies would be the variables, so the model should be able to show what would happen should the government decide to change its policy. I’ve used computer models before to demonstrate certain economic concepts, but they have been so pathetically simplistic that I haven’t used any of them for many years. Below is a picture of one of the more advanced models. I consider it advanced because it was made using Excel 1997-2004 rather than the previous version.

Economic modelling - how it used to be

The idea is that the students, in groups, devise computer models which the will then demonstrate the concept to their peers whilst allowing others to have a play. I would keep the best ones to use with future cohorts, either instead of this task or as an exemple of what I am after.

What I do know is that I would need some help from our tech team to advise the students on what are the best software and apps to use. I’m sure there are good ones out there – I just don’t know about them. That said, I’m probably not even going to have time to do these series of lessons this academic year – I took quite a bit of class time before Easter doing the World President Task (course three final project). This experiment might have to wait until next year…

The summer term (as us Brits like to optimistically call it) is by nature a good time for reflection. I think this is especially true for high school teachers who tend to be afforded a little more time in the last few weeks of the academic year, mostly thanks to exam leave, to do the things we didn’t have time to do during the rest of the year. Filing being one. Reflection being another. 2011-12 was a year of big changes in the teaching and learning within my classroom, some of which I have discussed in previous posts. But virtually all those changes were either the direct or indirect result of YIS going 1:1 at the start of the year. All the students arrived in August, were given MacBook Pros and expected to bring them to every lesson.

As the year comes to a close, now seems as good a time as any to reflect on the impacts of 1:1 and how successfully I adapted my teaching to make the most effective use of the new tool. In true Coetail fashion, it looks like I’ll be doing my reflecting out in the public. So what follows are some reflections. These are not in any particular order or groups, nor are they really designed to serve any purpose. Instead they are merely some reflections that, in some regards, I wish I’d known before we started the 1:1 journey in August. I should also put in here the caveat that these are just my experiences with my high school students and that the list is not exclusive, but merely what has come to mind at this time.

• Students will find the software that’s best for them. In economics we use a lot of diagrams and this time last year I spent many fruitless hours trying to find the best programme (ideally free) for the students to use for those who wanted to do their diagrams digitally. I was keen to have something installed on all their computers, but didn’t find anything appropriate in time. I needn’t have bothered. By the end of August students had discovered an array of sites and software that did what they wanted them to do in their style.
• Most students still love pen and paper. I would estimate that 60% of my students continue to write class-notes by hand in a traditional notebook, with a minority using their computers. This still takes me by surprise, as I thought that ratio would be the reverse in the very least. It could be that for HS student, with 1:1 new to them, they are used to pen and paper from their formative years. Interestingly, the grades 9 and 10 students are much more hesitant to use their computers in class than the grades 11 and 12, although I suspect that is anomalous.
• Students love the collaborative but hate the public capabilities of computers. Students are very good at, almost instinctively, sorting out roles when it comes to collaborative work. It must be because they do so much, each student has a reputation for what they are good and less good at. Students seem to genuinely enjoy collaborative work and it is a great learning experience, but when it comes to making their work public, they really balk. Ask them to put anything on their blog and you get a look in return similar to had you asked them to eat a lemon. I think part of it is that students like the circle of trust between themselves and their teachers – that they could get something horribly wrong and we wouldn’t hold it against them – but, they feel no such circle exists when their work is out in public. I have some empathy with them, as I am still uncomfortable when writing posts.
• Students will be distracted by their computers. It’s going to happen, but I take a fairly relaxed view on this. At the end of the day, it’s not like if the computer wasn’t there I would have their total concentration 100% of the time. After-all, my lessons are 90 minutes long. It doesn’t matter how riveting they are – and trust me, they are – no-one can concentrate for that long. There are always distractions for the students, be it what’s around them or what’s in their head. I don’t find that going 1:1 has added to those distractions, but merely replaced them. Instead of the student staring out of the window for a few minutes to refresh their brains, they now just go on Facebook for a few minutes. I think it helps that I allow mini-breaks in the lesson, such as what is written about in these Good Education and Psychology Today articles.
• Laptops are a fantastic ESL tool, and far better than anything I could ever provide. Economics has a language all of its own, which can be difficult to grasp even with a full command of the English language. There is an array of tools out there for ESL students, but if nothing else they can quickly type in words they don’t understand and get an instant translation and/or a deeper definition. They often do it. Again, they find the sites that work best for them so it’s not even something that needs to be set up. The result is I find I don’t spend as much time going over definitions again as the students already know them from their own research.
• 1:1 eliminates plagiarism, which I appreciate sounds counter-intuitive. Every year of my teaching career I’ve had to deal with a number of plagiarism issues. Every year except this year. It could be just coincidence and it could be because the students have become really good at it. I believe the students realise that if you live by the sword you can die by the sword and with laptops now constantly in all our lives we can discover plagiarism as easily as they can copy and paste.

There is no doubt that the teaching and learning in my classroom has improved this year as a result of 1:1. The range of my assessment tools is much larger if nothing else – now including movies, blog posts, reports made public and presentations, as well as the traditional essays. The most exciting aspect is that I know I’m really not that close to fully utilising the wonderful tools that are MacBook Pros. I want to and will get better. Coetail has certainly given me plenty of ideas of how to incorporate technology to a much greater extent. Some will work, some wont – but I’ll keep on trying.

Like everyone in this profession, I often get asked why I want to be a teacher. My answer is because I love being a student. I love learning and evolving. Going 1:1 has aided that evolution, and I’m a better teacher because of the experience.

Incorporating the new with the old

On numerous occasions in the recent past I have read posts that declare that the classroom is dead, that schools should be shut-down and that lessons should become entirely virtual, like the Massive Open Online Course movement. I refer to them as Edu-techno-istas. The crux of their argument is that the current education system (and more often than not they are referring specifically to the American system) is no longer fit for purpose – that classrooms as we know them are incapable of delivering the skills needed for the 21st century workplace. The usual starting point is that classrooms were designed for the industrial revolution age in order to teach low-level skills to the masses and are responsible for the recent economic woes and the general decline of the American economy. I find myself applauding their call to arms, but I’m frustrated that they are making the wrong arguments.

There are more than a few flaws in what the Edu-techno-istas have to say. First is that the traditional classroom was established long before the industrial revolution and that the industrial revolution, arguably the biggest outpouring of human ingenuity in history, was the result of the education system and not the creator of it.  A vaste majority of the greatest and most avant garde minds of the last  millenium were products of the very system they criticise so much. Second, blaming America’s economic woes on its education system is absurd. The causes of America’s economic problems are complex and varied, even when not taking into account that history shows us time and again that global superpowers rise and fall. The education system is only a tiny part of the picture. Finally, the nations the Edu-techno-istas would presumably point to as examples of having a dynamic workforce that is well skilled for the 21st century – Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany – are the very countries whose education system is far more classroom driven than anything found in America.

Instead I believe that their arguments need revising. That the education system in most western countries is need of change is not in question. However, it is what is taking place within the classroom that needs addressing, not the existence of the classroom itself. In some regards the whole “education is broken” thinking reminds me of a very funny interview Conan O’Brian did with Louis CK in which Louis CK states that the world is amazing and noone is happy. It’s at the bottom of this post. Innovation is occurring around the planet at a staggering rate – as Moore’s Law testifies. Whether it is in spite or because of the education system is almost a moot point – it is happening. So something must be working, and we just need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The classroom needs evolving, not dismantling.

I very much enjoyed reading Rakash Nair’s post on this issue, he looks at the problem more from a physical capital perspective. But where I see the really exciting development is in the Flat Classroom movement, which involves the use of technology to allow classrooms around the world to collaborate with each other in a very student-centric and inquiry-based learning environment. Rebekah Madrid, our Coetail course 4 co-leader, is very much at the cutting edge of this at YIS and was able to take some of our students across to India for a Flat Classroom conference earlier this year. It is this concept of an open classroom that I see as the future of education, more than any radical changes to the education system itself. The classroom works, we just need to allow technology to make it a better place for teaching and learning.

As a teacher of economics and business, games are an invaluable learning experience, and not just for the reasons put forward in this Carleton College post. Games are vital in these subjects as they act as a half-way house between theory and reality. Both economics and business are theory heavy and, in the absence of the life experiences that we cannot reasonably expect 16 year old students to have had, games help the students ground the theory in experiences as close to reality as they can get.

I have lost track of the number of different games I have tried in the classroom –  probably in excess of 30. Some have been dreadful and ended up being little more than a fun way to spend an hour. A few haven’t even been that. Of course sometimes there’s a place for a game that is played for the sake of being fun (last day before summer or Christmas holidays spring to mind – better than the ubiquitous video). But to truly justify using a game, the learning opportunities gained have to outweigh the time lost in playing the games, which can sometimes be significant. This is especially the case when teaching externally set subject guides, such as AP, IBDP, A-levels and IGCSEs, when there is scant time to complete the course as it is.

Over the years I’ve whittled down the games to seven or eight that I use and adapt every year. How I decide which games make the cut depends on the criteria below, many of which are highlighted in this futurelab.org.uk report on a teaching with games project.

1. The game must be good. That sounds obvious, but the priority for the game should be its use as a learning tool rather than its enjoyment. If you can find a game that is both enjoyable and provides many learning opportunities, you’re onto a winner. The point is, some games are fun but don’t allow much learning opportunity. Monopoly, for example, is a great game but it can takes a long time to complete and it gleans little in terms of relevant learning opportunities. Internet sites where students are given a fictitious $100 to trade stocks and shares is also fun but limited in what it teaches the students.
2. Games need to be short as if they are played over a number of lessons, students forget the learning points in-between. This is especially a problem at high school where there can be days or even weeks between lessons. I look for games that last less than an hour, including discussions.
3. I prefer games that are in sections, so they can easily be replayed. This means you can play one round and have a discussion about the process and results before moving on to round two, and so forth. Students can get frustrated by stopping and starting, but I find it is better in getting home the learning points.
4. There has to be some review at the end. In my formative teaching years I just assumed the students would get the teaching points, which of course many didn’t. Without a review at the end, playing the game looses much of its function. Increasingly I get students to reflect on their learning using blogs.
5. I steer clear of games using IT. I appreciate this is going to put me out of the running for the Coetail Student of the Month award, but it is true. One of the reasons, certainly in economics, is that there aren’t any appropriate games out there – or certainly that I can find (there might well be something excellent in MinecraftEdu that I haven’t seen). Another is that it can be difficult to change the focus of games that are bought off the shelf – you have to change the learning points to fit the game rather than vice versa. I also like the use of social interaction as it is where most of the learning is done – computer games can be too solitary. As the KQED blog says, it’s about interaction not isolation.

To overcome the last point, for my end of course four project I am planning a series of lessons in which students will create a digital and interactive economy to show how it works. How this will work and what it will look like I don’t know at this stage, but I know I can learn much from this Judy Willis’ post. However, I can’t help but feel that students devising a game presents a much better learning opportunity than just playing one. Also, if good enough, I could add it to my core of games for future students to use. Soon I’ll get them teaching each other the whole subject guide and I can just go home.

I would be a brave person to argue against project-based or challenge-based learning from a pedagogical perspective. With buzzwords like ‘trans-disciplinary’, ‘exploratory’, ‘student-centered’ and ‘collaboration’ oozing through every definition to be found (PBL CBL), what is there not to like? It seems almost perfect. Report after report, such as Pepert’s, New Media Consortium’s and Buck’s detail staggering successes using both PBL and CBL in a variety of settings. From inmates in juvenile correction facilities to high-flying students in some of America’s best schools, the results seem to be unanimously favourable.

CBL and PBL, which are two sides of the same coin, seem to share a lot of similarities with the IB’s Middle Years Programme. Comparing the framework for PBL/CBL and MYP below, the structure and keywords share a lot in common. All have the backbone of key ideas, essential and guiding questions, skill acquisition and assessment. Both allow extended use of IT. And whilst the teacher may play a larger role than the student in the development of the key ideas, essential and guiding questions in the MYP, they share a similar education philosophy.

CBL by the New Media Consortium

MYP plan by Frank Curkovic

The MYP is a programme I am getting to know well. In light of the similarities between MYP and CPL/PBL, it stands to reason that they must also share the same concerns. The first is the how easy it is for students to arrive mid-year or even mid-course. My understanding is that in CBL in particular, a challenge can take months or even years to complete. How do students who arrive in the school at unusual times fit in? Second is the issue of comparability. By no means the most important purpose of a school, but certainly a notable purpose, is providing students with the necessary tools to get into tertiary education. Without nationally recognised standardised testing, such as the AP, IBDP or A-levels, are students not being disadvantaged? PBL/CBL enables students to achieve a depth of knowledge, whereas many of the standardised tests reward a breadth of knowledge. I’m curious how the schools that fully employ CBL or PBL overcome this contradiction.

Beyond those concerns, both CBL and PBL seem like fantastic methods of learning. What does come across in the literature is that to be successful, the entire school has to change its ethos to dovetail with CBL and PBL. To be a single CBL teacher in a traditional school setting will not work. Schools like the High Tech High group can be successful because they go all-in. I would love to visit a CBL school to see how it all works. It’s a fascinating development in education.

FDR was a pretty clever guy. He was, and will always remain, the longest serving president in US history, and during his tenure he managed to drag the country out of the Great Depression and then lead them through the Second World War. He was also the first president to really understand the power of mass-media, in particular the importance of making quotes and soundbites. My personal favorite is: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. YIS Middle School students have put thier own slant on FDR’s quote with the now ubiquitous phrase “YOLO” (you only live once) – a shout of encouragement when something goes wrong. The purpose of this seemingly rambling segue is to discuss the prevalence of fear in teaching, in particular the role of risk-taking.

Risk-taking is an attribute we push our students to attain. The IB has it as one of its goals on the learner profile and most schools will have it, or a variation on its theme, in their mission statement. YIS does, albeit by stating an adherence to the IB learner profile. If only they’d thought of YOLO first. Yet I’m curious the extent to which schools value risk-taking in their staff.

In my experience teachers are, by nature, risk adverse. It’s not that they want to always retain the status quo, but we are creatures of habit and like being in our comfort zone. I am no exception. We have the intellectual and sometimes physical lives of the children of others in our hands, so the stakes are high. Of course there are many truely innovative teachers out there who are constantly pushing the boundaries in a safe manner. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with just some of them. They are helping take education in a new direction, with the help of technological advances. Project-based and challenge-based learning, and organisations like High Tech High and P21 are just some examples of the potential paradigm shifts taking place. But as anyone connected with any of those movements will testify, technology can only be successfully implemented if teachers are willing to take a chance and risk change. Otherwise, using the SAMR model, technology will only ever really bring about enhancement rather than transformation.

Yet rather than blame teachers for this, the spotlight could be reversed and administrators questioned about the extent to which they foster a culture where it is acceptable, even encouraged, to be a risk-taker. As the ever wonderful Adam Clark pointed out in conversation, a common question in interviews is “what has been your biggest failure as a teacher?”, but it is the teachers who in should reply with “how would you react if I failed?”. I am fortunate to work in a school where risk-taking in the classroom is encouraged, albeit perhaps not that overtly. I have also worked in other organisations – both within and outside education – where risk-taking is frowned upon. In most cases the leaders pay lip-service to risk-taking, but will not accept failure. With the fear of failure, risk-taking cannot exist. This is where administrators and leaders need to take the lead – allowing failure to be an essential learning tool both for pupils and teachers. With that culture in place, teachers can be truly innovative and everyone benefits. An example of this is the video below about Honda that was shown during yesterday’s Coetail meeting. Coetail – a room full of the YOLO spirit if ever I’ve seen one.

At last week’s Tuesday Coetail meeting there was an interesting two-faceted discussion taking place about the teaching of ICT standards within schools.

The first part of the conversation focused on whether standards were the same as curriculum and therefore something that needed explicit teaching. The loose consensus was that they are quite different – a point of view with which I disagree. Standards and curriculum are two sides of the same coin, and in that respect I agree with the views put forward in Patrick Riccards’ blog. Standards are descriptions of the minimum skills and knowledge students should attain within a certain time-frame. Curricula are the road-map needed to meet those standards. In the business world it’s the difference between an objective and a strategy. A curriculum (strategy) without any standards (objectives) is meaningless. Likewise setting standards without a curriculum is pointless. Technology teaching within schools needs both standards, be they NETs, AASL or others, as well as a curriculum.

The second discussion was around the premise that if computers are merely tools for learning, does that warrant requiring a curriculum in order to teach their effective use – on the basis that skills need a curriculum, not tools. Again it was a point with which I disagreed. Computers are a tool. Yet so is the brain and no one is suggesting we don’t need a curriculum to develop that. Books are also tools, but we need a curriculum to teach students how to understand and use them. Certainly computers are just tools, but the skill comes in using them effectively for teaching and learning, as identified in developments such as Route 21. It’s the difference between using a book as a book-end or a source and guardian of knowledge.

What I’m trying to say is that I believe strongly that technology needs not only a widely agreed upon set of standards but also a horizontally and vertically integrated curriculum unique to the circumstances of each school. There are just far too many important educational aspects to technology to not to have a formal structure for its teaching in place. It is not just students needing to learn how to use various key software (which will almost certainly not be in existence in 20 years but whose successor will be built on what we know today), but also research and presentation skills, digital citizenship, copyright/plagiarism avoidance and healthy digital footprint strategies, to name but a few.

To accomplish this I believe each school should have a Head of Technology Learning – or some such title – whose role it is to develop a scope and sequence for technology learning, in conjunction with department and section heads, from Pre-Kindergarten to grade 12. Incidentally, like ‘curriculum’, ‘scope and sequence’ seems to be getting the unwarranted tag as a dirty words in education. I wish someone would create a blog telling which words to use and which to avoid – it would certainly make life easier. But I digress. A properly crafted and implemented curriculum would make redundant the need for students to have technology lessons within their timetable, which, in my experience, are too short and irregular to be of much use in any regards. This time could, for example, be used for positive psychology lessons – happiness or well-being lessons if you like – which I think is irresponsibly overlooked by many schools. But I digress once more. With a well-delivered curriculum, in which teachers of certain subjects teach certain technology skills at certain times, with the aid of technology teachers, everyone would have the same expectations and understandings of exactly what the students already knew and what they needed to learn. In short, it’s all of our responsibility to teach technology, not just the technology teachers, but to do so there needs to be an effective and efficient curriculum in place.