Changing Education Paradigms

Recently the education board in Indonesia has been seriously talking about some mammoth changes for the 2013-2014 curriculum.

The changes are said to include removing English from the primary school curriculum. They say this is because they will replace it with a subject to improve attitude.

Now although I do not really know too much about the changes yet to comment on them here, the whole issue did get me thinking about a speech I heard from Sir Ken Robinson about Changing Education Paradigms. I feel the point of his speech can be summed up in a few words - we need to seriously question what we know about education itself, rather than making small changes to curriculum, standards and management we should be making big changes to our perceptions and pushing to make education what it truly should be. Those are my words, not his but a summary none the less.

His words are "we need to change the culture of our institutions, the habits of our institutions and the habitats they occupy".

So what should education be? I don't think we can fully answer that question before we take our first steps on our new journey, and to make a new journey in a better and more effective direction we need to first remove ourselves from our current path. But hasn't the path been working fine up until  now? I think we can all agree on the answer to that. This conversation about reforming education will never stop untill we first reform and refine our thinking on the matter.

Below is a RSAnimate video of the talk he gave in 2003 on Changing Education Paradigms. It is very easy to follow thanks to the illustrations even for a non-native English speaker.

It is well worth a watch! I've transcribed my notes below the video for those who prefer to read and for those who want to see my feelings on each issue. Enjoy! ^_^

Changing Education Paradigms

-A commentary of the speech made by Sir Ken Robinson

Any of my own feelings or opinions will be written in italic like this. The summary of the speech below is not quoted word by word but rephrased/written for easy reading. 

Around the world today there is a lot of talk about reforming education. According to Sir Robinson there are 2 reasons for this.

1. Economic: How do we educate our children to take part in the economies of the 21st century? Given that we can't anticipate what the economy will look like next week? As demonstrated by the recent economic turmoil.

2. Cultural: How do we give our children a sense of cultural identity while still teaching them how to thrive in the global village?

The problem is, schools and school boards are trying to meet the future by doing what they have done in the past and in the process they alienate millions of students.

In the past we were sold the notion that if we studied hard, did well and went to college we would get a good job. Our children don't believe that anymore and they are right not to. A college degree is good, but not a guarantee on a job anymore, especially if the route to it marginalizes most of the things you think are important.

Our education system now is still based on an enlightenment view on education and caters to the needs of the industrialization era.  This creates a certain perspective of education that although very useful in the past and a great step forward then, our perspectives need to be seriously revamped to keep up with the current era.

The prophet Muhammad SAW was said to of said "Teach people according to their era!"

There is an increase in Attention Deficit Problems with teens, mainly because of a lack of adaptability in the way we educate.

The arts are a victim of this mentality as they give an aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is when your senses are operating at their peak. When you are fully alive.

What we are prescribing for our children is an anesthetic experience. To hold their attention we are asking them to shut their senses off. What we should be doing is waking them up to what they have inside themselves.

We have a model of education based on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it (like a factory). Think about it!

• Schools still run with ringing bells
• Subjects are separated into different places and times
• We still educate children in batches, separating them into age groups (like the most important thing about them was their year of manufacture).

 There are many different children of the same age that learn in different ways. Some learn better in groups, some on their own, some in the morning, some in the afternoon.

It's all about 'conformity' and you can see this in the constant increase in standardized testing.

The above line is especially relevant in Indonesia!

Sir Ken Robinson suggests that we should go in the exact opposite direction. That's what he's talking about when he says ' a change in paradigms'.

Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creative thinking. Divergent thinking gets less with age and this surprisingly coincides with 'becoming more educated'.

This may be because amongst other things in school we are taught:

1. There is one right answer
2. It's in the back
3. Don't look or copy because that would be cheating (where outside school that's called collaboration) 

We have to think differently about human capacity. See that many of the concepts we have of education are myths (like the separation of academic and non-academic individuals). Realise that great learning happens in groups, collaboration is the stuff of growth.

If we atomize students and judge them separately we form a disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.

"We need to change the culture of our institutions, the habits of our institutions and the habitats they occupy."

To discuss this article and Sir Ken Robinson's ideas together please visit the CLT Facebook Page or leave a comment bellow!

Until next time, keep shining sharing and succeeding!

-Hugh

How Encouragement and Appreciation Makes All The Difference

Hi Guys,

Have you ever been in a job or situation where no body encourages you or appreciates you? Chances are you have probably experienced a situation like this at least once in your life. The reality I guess is we are wrong to expect appreciation or encouragement as in most cases it's not the norm. But it's just because of that, that is makes all the difference in the world.

I wanted to share this lesson that I gave my MCC (Motivational Conversation Class) last week because I think the message is particularly special.

 I remember when I was still studying to be a teacher I used to work mornings as a Postman.We didn't get great pay but one thing I did get was appreciation. Whenever I did extra work the manager always made sure to say thank you and appreciate me. When a new manager came to take over the delivery centre the previous manager made sure to tell him all about me "This is Hugh, one of our best workers, he's really bent over backwards for us!" he said. It was this appreciation that made me feel valued there, not the money that we got or the position I held. It's that appreciation that made all the difference.

The first thing that we looked at in the lesson was a video of the Puget Sound Community School in Seattle.

The students at the school start and end every day with words of appreciation. They are also given huge independence in their learning. The director of the school says he has found when the character of the students are strong their academic progress naturally follows. Watch the video for more insight into this fantastic program.

We tried this appreciation technique in my class to see how it felt. All of the teachers made a circle and took turns to give appreciation, it could be to somebody in the room or somebody not present, it could of even been to a few people or a group of people. The atmosphere of the room automatically changed and I feel this is an invaluable technique to use with our students in schools or language institutes.

The next thing we did was listen to a couple of inspiring stories. The first is of Antwone Fisher. He was born in a an Ohio correctional facility (a prison) while his mother was incarcerated. By then his father had already been dead for two months. As a result, he grew up a ward of the state in foster care. For longer than 13 years he lived with a couple who abused him horribly. Daily he was beaten down - physically, verbally and mentally. He never received a Christmas gift or a dime of allowance from his foster parents. For years he was a victim of sexual abuse. And he was often tied to a post in the basement and beaten. His foster mother used to brag that she had once beaten him until he was unconscious.

By the time Fisher entered the third grade, he had lost any natural love for learning. In addition, the constant admonition from his foster mother that he was the worst child in the world had convinced him that he couldn't learn and had no future. He failed fourth grade and was scheduled to repeat it. But then something wonderful happened. His foster family moved, which put him in a new school district. His new teacher was Mrs. Profit. "If there is such a thing as human beings who act as angels in our lives, Brenda Profit was that for me."

Under Brenda Profit's care, Fisher began to change his thinking about himself. He says, "If self-esteem was what you used to fill up like a take of gas, the Pickets {his foster family} had siphoned mine out to nothing. Mrs. Profit helped changed [sic] all that." Despite his gains, his academic progress was still meager by the end of the year. He was in danger of once again failing fourth grade. But then Fisher got another break. It was decided that Mrs. Profit would stay with her class of students and continue teaching then in fifth and sixth grades. Knowing that, she passed Fisher into the fifth grade. And it was then that an event occurred that would change his thinking forever.

It happened one day during reading Fisher, a terribly shy child who sometimes stuttered, was asked to read aloud, and instead of panicking, he read well, including successfully sounding out a difficult word. Then Mrs. Profit praised him, saying, "I'm proud of you. I want you to know that I really struggled over promoting you, and I'm glad that I did. You are doing very well this year." That's when something clicked in Fisher's head. He writes, "Her honest and, careful words are the equivalent of lightning bolts and thunder claps. Outside I shyly accept her praise, but inside I'm flying with the birth of a revelation. It's the first time I've ever realized that there is something I can do to make things different for myself. Not just me, but anyone ...This lesson is a piece of gold I'll keep tucked in my back pocket for the rest of my life."

In that moment, Fisher changed his thinking about himself - and it changed his life. He had plenty of ups and downs after that, but he knew he wasn't hopeless and a better future was possible for him. He didn't follow the path of his older foster brother and friends into a life of drugs and crime.

Today Antwone Fisher thinks for a living. He is a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. And he has become the kind of responsible citizen and family man he always desired to be, with a wife and daughter. When asked what message he wants his story to convey, his answer is, "That there is hope even when you have the hardest beginnings, and there are good people in the world." (Story taken from Today Matters By Antwone Fisher and revised by John C. Maxwell in his book Encouragement)

That shows what a difference a teacher or anyone can make when they simply take the time to appreciate and encourage somebody. They can really be the one who makes the difference, you can really be the one!

The next story we had a look at was of a young man in the early 19th century. He aspired to be a writer but everything seemed against him. He had never been able to attend school for more than four years. His father had been flung in jail because he couldn't pay his debts, and this young man often knew the pangs of hunger. Finally he got a job posting labels on bottles of blacking in a rat infested warehouse, and he slept at night in a dismal attic room with two other boys - guttersnipes from the slums of London. He had so little confidence in his ability to write that he sneaked out and mailed his first manuscript in the dead of night so that nobody would laugh at him. Story after story was refused. Finally the great day came when one was accepted. True, he wasn't paid a shilling for it, but one editor had praised him. One editor had given him recognition. He was so thrilled that he wandered aimlessly around the streets with tears rolling down his cheeks.
The praise, the recognition, that he received through getting one story in print, changed his whole life, for if it hadn't been for that encouragement, he might have spent his entire life working in rat-infested factories. You might have heard of that boy. His name was Charles Dickons. (Story taken from Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends & Influence People)

In both stories these men's lives were changed by the simple acts of encouragement and appreciation. It really makes all the difference, I can't say it enough. So the next time you see something you like or appreciate something somebody has done, speak up! It only takes a few seconds and is the easiest way to make somebody's day, maybe even change their life.

At the end of my lesson I got the teachers to all come up one by one and share how somebody's words of encouragement or appreciation changed their lives'.

Maybe you have a similar experience? Post it up to our Change Lives Together Facebook Group! And don't forget to subscribe to my blog if you've enjoyed reading.

Until next time, keep shining, sharing and succeeding!

-Hugh

The Origin and Current State of Active Learning

Hi Guys,
Today I decided to write up a little about Active Learning. My great claim here is that 'Active Learning' is probably the most overused and misused phrase amongst teachers here in Indonesia. It sounds shocking I know, which is my intention. Now that I've got your attention let's look a little further into this 'modern' concept of 'Active Learning', or is it?

Active Learning is often explained to parents here wanting to put their children into 'elite' schools as 'learning by doing' (unfortunately many teachers with degrees in a Subject rather than Education know AL only as that) this is fantastic, to 'learn by doing' instead of just being a passive recipient to information; but it is only a scrape off the surface of the Active Learning concept, a concept which I hope we can explore in a little more detail in this article.

Brain Based Learning:

Last century and especially in the last 25 years (thanks to modern scanning technology) we have learned a great deal about how the brain works. Around the middle of last century notions that learning was an active process where the learner had to be involved to succeed started flourishing in the west. These studies were not to be acted on at large until a few decades later,( now the norm in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Europe). Many developing countries are only starting to catch on to these movements now.

Where and when did it begin in the West exactly? Well, after the work of Jean Piaget who in 1936 explained 'how a child's thinking develops and matures in stages, as a result of natural curiosity to explore the environment.' in his book 'Origins of Intelligence in the Child' and the 1920s work of Lev Vygotsky was translated into English where he presented his theory that a child learns through experience. Nothing much happened in the classroom. This is of course with the exception of Dr. Maria Montessori who in 1906 had already begun to apply the 'learning by doing' aspect Active Learning without the need for intensive studies or theories on the matter because she knew it worked.

Why and how did she know it worked? Because she noticed that by giving disabled children more autonomy in how they learned they succeeded beyond expectations. She thought it only logical after studying Philosophy (much of which was what we call Psychology today) that the same should work for regular children. Maybe through her studies she got a taste of the knowledge of our forefathers and their 'learning by doing'. Yes! Our forefathers already knew about this, they just didn't formalize this knowledge as it was probably considered common sense.

Most of our forefathers lived in small village communities. Much of their life consisted not of theoretical activities but of practical applications. Thus the best way to learn how to milk a cow was to watch it get done, do it under supervision, then do it by themselves. This brings us to the next parts of active learning. Stepping away from 'Learning by Doing' there are three other aspects to Active Learning:

1. The Mind as a Processor

2. Meaningful Input

3. The Spiral Curriculum


Let's have a look at these three aspects in the context of our forefathers activities in their small communities and also my own learning experience in school.

The Mind as a Processor:

learning can be rephrased as the processing information because essentially to learn something and to commit it to long-term memory the information must go through a lengthy process in our brains it looks a little like this:

1. Information gets presented ---> 2. We choose to focus on it or not ----> 3. if we choose to focus on it our brains will then choose to store it as something real or forget it as something of no use ------>4. the information will then be criticized by our sub-conscious and our perception of the world around us-------> 5. The meaningfulness of the experience will determine whether it is to be remembered in long term or short term memory-----> 6. Long term memory puts information into groups and builds connections, the stronger the connection the stronger the memory.

I'm probably off by a couple of points but so far the research that I've seen shows a similar if not more complex process.

Meaningful input:

By understanding this process we can then realise not only that we should involve our students in the information delivery through experience (learning by doing) but we should also make sure it's meaningful, something which has been a little forgotten as teachers try to make all information meaningful, where clearly all information is not meaningful to everybody. An example of this is mathematics, I found out after year 7 or 8 that the maths I was being taught was not of any real use to me and my dreams and goals in life. No matter how much work the teacher put into making the subject fun and trying to link it with real life activities (trying to attach meaningfulness) my brain knew through my subconscious that it was all a waste of time. The mathematics I learned after year 7 and 8 was all forgotten as a consequence. Which is not a bad thing, it's just a proof that our brain is built to learn, and unless teachers (and more importantly education departments and schools) understand about that build they will continue to try and make things meaningful for everybody. Thus setting themselves and their students up for failure, wasted time and perhaps a loss for the natural love of learning and inquiry, inbuilt in every child.

The Spiral Curriculum:

Ahh I made a promise that I would use the example of our forefathers in their small communities, didn't I? Well in their small communities there was huge importance (thus meaning) to them in all the practical information they were learning. This is because it was all connected in relation to their lives and the lives of their family, friends and neighbors in there community. If the cow was milked they all had milk to enjoy, if they had milk to enjoy they could be strong to plow the fields well, then they had bread, bread gave them the power to build structures and fix roads, this made their life better. They saw the result of their labours in front of them and how everything was connected. This didn't need to be written about of theorised about as it simply was the way of life that they had been dealt by God.

The Spiral Curriculum developed by Jerome Bruner (one of the fathers of Active Learning) and published in 1960 in his book 'The Process of Education' consisted of three stages going outwards in a spike spiral:

Stage one: Ideas are presented in a simple and intuitive way (we could do this through learning by doing experiences)

Stage two: They are continuously revisited and reconstructed in and increasingly formal way.

Stage three: They are finally connected to other knowledge for comprehensive mastery of the subject.

So we see above that to be active in learning it is first and foremost a process and a process which requires meaning. It is not only about students being active in the delivery of new ideas/information but also about them being active in the review/reconstruction of those ideas/information and the connecting of other ideas/information to concrete meaning and give them a 'big picture' instead of a specialized scope which is probably to be forgotten (much can be done through Spider Webs/Mind Maps and an Integrated curriculum but these methods still have much room for improvement).

It is the room for improvement now that I'd like us to question ourselves about. Despite the knowledge and education of Active Learning in it's completeness across the globe it has still failed to actualize in it's complete form in millions of schools (despite it being on the tongues of teachers in those very schools). I think that may be because there are many other aspects and concepts that are now available to us that can inject meaningfulness into the process. Many of which have not been taught to teachers and by 'not been taught' I mean teachers have not been actively involved in the process of learning about them and if they have been then there often hasn't been enough follow up and then connections to other areas of knowledge to make Master Teachers.

This article cannot possibly achieve any of that but what I hope it does do is excite a desire to expand your quest for better ways to teach. Expand it outside the realm of Ambil Tiru Modifikasi (modeling, copying and modifying) with the teaching habits of Western schools. As we can see clearly above that in the West the knowledge of better ways to teach and it's widespread application in schools is often decades apart. If we are to be decades apart from the widespread application in the West, that puts us at close to half a century behind what we could be (theoretically speaking).

Jump then my friends on the Revolutionary Education bandwagon and try to apply things for your self in your classroom with your fellow teachers and push the envelope with new ideas in your school. Don't wait for it to be ordained by the Education Department or by the School's Management because they aren't on the ground, and until you see the need for change, they won't.

Don't let your students be 'half a century behind' in the way they learn. The internet is at your disposal and there are plenty of schools and teachers already taking the revolutionary path that you can take examples from.

I hope this article can promote some discussion and although I haven't got many followers and haven't promoted this site yet please don't hesitate to spread it around if you like what's being talked about here.

Until next time guys, keep thinking outside the box and let's change some lives!

-Hugh

P.S. Sorry i haven't included any pics today, I will try and update this article with some pics later.