“How to change others”

“So were you changed as a result of yesterday’s workshop on “Change’?”
“No, but I have lots of ideas on how to change others”
                                       Over coffee conversation at the ICTPD National Workshops.

Education is full of people who have lots of ideas on how to change others. 

Leunig’s “how to relax”, “how to get to sleep”, “how to be a man”, “how to see what’s in front of you”, “how to succeed in life”, “how you ended up in hell.” poem aptly captures the perils of relying too heavily on the “self- help” “quick fix” change advice of others.

But a 3 Quarks post has a deliciously different look at learning how to control our trajectory through life’s turbulence and precarious balances.  Photographer Denis Darzacq’s “perilous shots” show  a gravitational exercise of learning how to bounce when the social elevator is broken.  Something I could have used yesterday when socializing with Zsa Zsa Gabor and a group of principals on a penthouse balcony after school.  Living at altitude requires quite a different social skill set.  Should our classroom learning include the "Discipline of the bounce" required when “the turbulences of a life places us in a precarious balance”?

“In the rough manner of architecture, he opposes the elasticity between his body and his desires. This gravitation exercise requires Discipline, even if it's not the one we've learned in classrooms.”

Darzacq’s photos reminded me of what was missing from the response of the Inquiry workshop participants when we were asked to undertake a “placemat activity” [yeah I know the rhetoric of the middle classes pervades educational workshops – next thing you know we will calling activities after that cognitive tool for middleclass preschoolers – the jigsaw]. We were asked to

Think of a person who was an effective teacher for you, not someone you just liked but someone who was an effective teacher for you.( not necessarily a formal teacher) What was it about that teacher which made him/her an effective teacher for you?

The teacher "group think" that resulted from this challenge was expected and disappointing.  The characteristics of the “effective teacher” as remembered by teachers were no different from those that might have arisen if another group had talked about the characteristics of the perfect parent. 

Nobody talked about the teacher as a "catalyst for turbulence", a teacher encouraging "the precarious balance", a teacher responsible for great mind shifts in learning outcomes.  The importance of “the gift of disappointment", cognitive conflict, challenge and confrontation of existing thinking and or the undermining so necessary for learning to occur never came up.  It was all - they liked me, valued me, believed in me, kind of stuff.

[As an aside I always wonder when we do these kind of teacher group think things and then build from the feedback - how the results would differ if we captured a group of punters at the local Thirsty Whale, or the Business Roundtable and asked them the same kind of stuff.  Do these activities, when we attempt to determine what is valuable in a teacher from a group who obviously liked school so much they chose to go back and work there when they grew up, simply reinforce prejudices of the teacher cult?.] -

The unchallenged assumption in the inquiry workshop activities was that teachers with a pedagogical approach closer to the student centered end of the continuum are better teachers than those who ride the continuum at the direct instruction end.

Does our current fervour for inquiry learning in New Zealand schools mean we deny that powerful student learning outcomes can ever result from direct teaching.  Has the “Sage on the stage” become a pejorative pedagogical metaphor?

I reckon schools go through stages when adopting constructivist pedagogies like inquiry learning.

Stage 1:
In the beginning, they focus on issues related to their school identity – they focus on their school model.  It is an exercise of branding– capturing a point of difference in the educational marketspace.  Their websites and conference presentations make much of “our inquiry model”.

It is a little bit like a beginning teacher who frets over their clothes, whether the kids will be compliant, and how they will get on with their team leader. 

Stage 2:
After the initial excitement from the conference junkets and visitors from other schools begin to pall they start to worry about/ think about how to teach the process of inquiry.  We see much energy put into creating inquiry skill “tool boxes” filled with questioning frameworks, SCAMPER, de Bono’s CoRT etc.  The irony being that its OK to “direct teach” process skills of questioning, searching for information, creating and reflection – when its not OK to “direct teach” content - and this doesn’t seem to trouble anyone.

This is a little like the second year teacher who seeks extra professional learning on how best to teach literacy or numeracy.

And how to assess the learning outcomes (both content and process) – well learning outcomes remain in the “too hard basket” in stage 2.  Even experienced teachers will boldly claim - as they did at the workshop - that because the kids are all going on their own “learning pathways” it is impossible to assess content learning outcomes in inquiry.

Stage 3:
In the later stages of adopting inquiry learning, schools start wondering if what they are doing has made a jot of difference to the learning outcomes of their students.  They stop proclaiming loudly to all and sundry “we are an inquiry school” and start to worry that “letting the kids find out stuff for themselves” is not professionally ethical/ suitable for all content learning experiences in school. 

Staff start looking for critiques and reviews that talk about student learning outcomes from inquiry in classrooms.  Words like reliable and valid research surface in conversation.  Teachers re-focus on what the kids are getting out of the inquiry learning time.  They develop and adopt formative and summative assessment rubrics based on well researched student learning outcomes taxonomies like SOLO taxonomy.  They use these rubrics for student self assessment and teacher assessment – also measuring the tightness of the alignment so they can indicate student progress in self assessment.

They are readying themselves for the turbulence and precarious balance of stage 4.

Stage 4:
The final stage is all about recognising "turbulence" and "precarious balance". In the final stage schools realize that:

• meaningful learning outcomes come from both ends of the continuum - direct teaching AND inquiry learning,
• neglecting different teaching approaches is pedagogically perilous, and
• what is to be learned should determine the approach used.

Ton de Jong expressed this well at the ICCE 2006 conference we attended in Beijing last year.

Inquiry learning may be more effective in acquiring intuitive, deep, conceptual knowledge; direct instruction and practice can be used for more factual and procedural knowledge. Ultimately, we want students to gain a well-organized knowledge base that allows them to reason and solve problems in the workplace and in academic settings. Finding the right balance between inquiry learning and direct instruction, therefore, is a major challenge.
Ton de Jong - Technological Advances in Inquiry Learning SCIENCE VOL 312 28 APRIL 2006