Bring out your sheep bladders the “key competencies” have arrived.

Reports of “Alleged Terror Cells drawn from the Medical World”  mean that I am thinking today about the learning communities that develop such social cohesion, purposefulness and behavioural changes within their membership that after learning together, individual members are prepared to kill themselves and any number of unknown others.

Doctors have been in the news in New Zealand this week for different reasons – The “Keep Smokers and Fatties out – Doctors”  article in the NZ Herald saw doctors railing against the cost of treating preventable diseases – those caused by predictable and what should be avoidable human behaviours, that are clogging up the health system.

The NZ Herald headline was provocative.  And the response in letters to the editor was mixed.  Not many endorsed an international airport customs hall scenario where specially trained dogs sniffed out the nicotine addicted, before rows of disembarking scales culled those with an unacceptable body mass index    

The cost of treating preventable disease has always been with us – it’s a bit like the unresolved "litter problem" in the playground, and the permanence of the “discontented by school” students in our classrooms.  What should be easily preventable proves surprisingly enduring – seemingly resistant to all interventions designed to change the human behaviours that contribute to the problem. 

It seems that in the health system a relatively small percentage of the population eats up the vast majority of the budget.  And this small percentage front up with predictable and largely behavioural diseases. Admissions related to how we choose to live our lives are far more significant than admissions for genetic or environmental factors.

Of even greater interest to anyone looking at “changing attitudes and behaviours” is finding out that how we choose to live our lives is largely unaffected by the experience of being saved. Even after life rescuing medical interventions the majority find it impossible to change the behaviours that led to their admission.

"If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller

The question that interested me was - so when does change in lifestyle happen? The article suggests that a change in lifestyle occurs when medical interventions look at the socio emotional needs of the whole person rather than at a personalised data profile that reduces the complexity of what it is to be a social human being to a series of statistical data profiles, spread-sheets and graphs.

I suspect that this is why so many of our well meaning initiatives to change behaviours, attitudes and skills in schools (where the consequences of change fall far short of life and death), remain both “well meaning” and “initiatives”.  And makes me wonder how  future educationalists will view learning interventions like AsTTle and the Key Competencies?

All this new thinking is making me look again at how the Magnet and I help schools integrate the Key Competencies with respect to our SOLO coded learning experiences HOT planning template  … and in my idle moments I have been amusing myself by imagining a mashup between NZCER’s Dr Rosemary Hipkins wildly euphoric Key Competencies video presentation –

“… they are something akin to an earthquake that potentially will create all sorts of upheavals and really revolutionalise learning in New Zealand through the curriculum project.”

And Monty Python’s Holy Grail conversation,

Sir Bedevere: ...and that, my liege is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.
King Arthur: This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes. Monty Python and the Holy Grail 

I want to insert the sheep bladders just at that moment where Hipkins cuts loose into a stream of hyperbole that conflates the Draft Curriculum Key Competencies with earth quiver and insurgency.   

I just cannot imagine what precipitated this recklessness in KC conversation, Hipkins is usually more measured in her analysis.  The idea that integrating the five key competencies in The draft New Zealand curriculum, [managing self/ relating to others/ participating and contributing/ thinking and using language, symbols, and text],   into student’s learning experience , will create “upheavals” and “revolution” sounds more like the outcomes desired by the “Alleged terror cell drawn from medical world” than anything coming from the MoE.  But I guess if the KCs reliably and validly represent the cluster of competencies required for people to know themselves as learners then they deserve a closer look.

Nassim Taleb helps me here – he has a fascinating piece in The Edge - “Learning to expect the unexpected” There is a heap of good thinking in his piece.  One paragraph in particular clarifies how we might introduce unwarranted assumptions when we accept the Key Competencies as necessary (and sufficient) for students learning to be better learners. 

“There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.”

In a similar argument, I can think of plenty of my colleagues who manage themselves, relate well to others, participate and contribute, think, and use language, symbols, and text but could never be held up to others as examples of the MoE’s  life long learners.

Indeed simple behavioural observation reveals that like me, most of my colleagues are “lifelong deluders” trapped in ground hog day like activities where we continue to make the “same old same old” mistakes throughout our professional and private lives.  Like the coronary-artery bypass patients who stubbornly refuse to learn from experience and modify their behaviours our vices (and our virtues) remain deliciously intact. 

Hijacking Taleb’s interpretation it seems entirely plausible that that the few “life long learners” amongst us are mostly a product of happenstance, of luck and nothing to do with the key competencies.

Even if we could exclude observational bias and prove a statistically confident correlation between adoption of the key competencies and "learning to learn" like behaviours, to claim that adopting the Key competencies will create “earth shiver and insurgency” in New Zealand schools seems just a little OTT. 

It ignores the reality that creating attitudinal change in humans is complex and unlikely to happen when meeting the needs of the 21st Century learner sees us increasingly fragment, isolate and personalise approaches to learners, learning and learning environments.

The sheep can rest easy for a while yet. 

Comments

[lucychili]

I have a friend(Joan Russell) who is inspiring who has an ethic:
I am responsible for myself, for my impact on others, I do useful things. I try and keep these things in mind for myself(patchy results). The beginnings of the competencies felt like those thoughts rewangled.
Perhaps the competencies are the beginnings of an awareness that we need new skills in pluralist social spaces where we can all hear so far and so need to be able to listen gently and to moderate our voices for invisible audiences, ie we cant tell who is out there and that there is more learning in being able to come to a solution which fits a mixed audience than in having right of way. Life beyond the correct answer?
These ideas are from danah boyd. She is interested in social skills as a way to make online spaces safer as an alt strategy to content blocking. http://media.educationau.edu.au/pre-danah-1.mp3
Peter Ruwoldt has also blogged on this kind of choice.
http://waraku.blogspot.com/search?q=trust
He also posted a post about entering a class with a smile in the expectation that you and the students will have a good experience - the trust that you will all enjoy this - and that content blocking is not based on this assumption. Can't find it atm, but the blog has some great thoughts. =)

[Simon]

These Key Competencies are a really interesting lots- All have value and merit.

Currently my school is grappling (sp.?) with incorporating them into Intergrated Units. Are we supposed to teach directly to each one in turn and ensure we have 'covered' them in any and every academic year? or are they to be the foundation of our teaching, each of them permeating all curriculum areas at all levels, teachers picking and choosing from amongst them to teach directly to as the need or desire or moment presents itself?

[Artichoke]

I do like “grappling” with ideas Simon. And as you can tell from this blog sometimes ideas like to "grapple" with me.

Your questions reminded me of the ones teachers debated when we first started looking at introducing “process” - the "thinking curriculum"

How we “discover and explore, activate and engage, integrate and sustain, assess and report on” the key competencies is creating a lot of “noise” in New Zealand schools. And schools who have grappled with this thinking through Art Costa and Bena Kallick’s Habits of Mind books seem to be further ahead on ways of doing this.

The teachers we work with want to grapple with - How can we teach for the understanding of the key competencies rather than the knowing of the key competencies?

It sometimes helps to think about it as
1. Acculturation of the key competencies, through learning experiences designed to force a student to adopt the norms of managing self/ relating to others/ participating and contributing/ thinking and using language, symbols, and text
2. Enculturation of the key competencies where students are encouraged to form and negotiate the norms and meanings of the key competencies in a learning community
My thinking is that when an instructional approach framed upon “acculturation” of attitudes and values is favoured, few students will become strategic or reflective users of the key competencies.

There is evidence from the teaching of thinking to suggest that explicit instruction in the key competencies in isolation will be a limiting pedagogical approach.

Reckon there is no “holy grail” of implementation. Some of the schools we work with on this are attempting enculturation by enhancing classroom environments and planning learning experiences that encourage the key competencies of managing self, participating and contributing, etc etc others are looking at the KC through the dispositions of intellectual risk taking, sustained intellectual curiosity, clarity, strategic planning, intellectual rigour, metacognitive reflection, and valuing the student question, (Key Competencies (2006), Paul and Elder 2002, p19, Claxton and Lucas 2004 p24, Costa and Kallick 2000, p.8, and Marzano 1992, pp.131).

You can look at one of the approaches we use to help teachers think about this when they are planning integrated units - the HOT planning template at the inquire2learn wikispace allows teachers to acknowledge the contribution of all KC’s in their integrated inquiry unit and also identify any specific target foci.

I think the challenge with learning through enculturation is ensuring that these “moulding” environments allow the free establishment of the key competencies rather than the imposition of their values and disposition. The dodgy bit is avoiding charges of indoctrination - the antithesis of learning how to learn.

Even if we embrace the idea of key competencies in our schools the question remains - How do we know if what we are doing is making a jot of difference to a student’s ability to know themselves as a learner? This is pretty fraught territory - Waikato University's Deborah Fraser (2004) has expressed similar concerns over the teaching of values education programmes claiming, the “long term benefits of such programmes are not conclusive and the short term gains are equally elusive/unclear.”

[Luke]

well well well. this one caught me at a good time.
this is one of the best rants and raves ive heard in a long time.. fukin brilliant!
i'm ringing Peter Leitch i reckon our old mate could help us out

[Artichoke]

Thanks for the links Janet – and allowing for “patchy results” captures me – is worthy of its own blog post - “pedagogies of patchiness” has much appeal – it reminds me of the “raw and flawed ict_pd conferences” we hold for cluster teachers each year – conferences to celebrate everything that is unpolished and incomplete and didn’t quite work out as we had hoped – they catalyse some powerful learning conversations

I suspect “moderating our voices for invisible audiences” will prove too daunting for me – in focusing on invisible audiences I reckon I would forget/neglect to focus on the ideas – in trying not to offend everyone who is connected I would become mute - and in my muteness I would offend myself.

I like disagreement over ideas – and believe that dialogue that leads to new learning is all about these undermining exchanges. I reckon it is this culture of niceness in education that cripples any real change. Alton Lee talks about this in the BES. In a culture where feedback is immediately personalised it complicates things - it becomes neither safe nor smart to critique in public.

And the call to make online spaces safer reminds me of Camille Paglia’s take on date rape. To paraphrase Paglia “Well meaning attempts to protect people online are in fact infantilizing them” I’d rather take responsibility for my own conduct – to allow free thought and free speech than rely upon an imposed code of conduct. And this fits better with Joan Russells “I am responsible for myself and my impact on others” … which I quite like

[Artichoke]

Luke sometimes you are very frightening ... I am off to find myself a sheep's bladder

[lucychili]

yep understand re the audiences. danah talks about it in terms of social space that kids are navigating, identity and privacy in an unknown audience. i agree about disagreement being useful but there is signal to noise and if i am going to disagree with someone in a forum i will try and say it once specifically and as clearly as i can and leave it at that. i think its about flame wars and diminishing returns. the perspective is useful to have as a mix of flavours but for big groups or open spaces to work there needs to be some way to get from those points to mixes of outcomes. Not needing right of way is a part of that?
http://eduspaces.net/janeth/weblog/
This was me having a go at those ideas.

[Artichoke]

Re: I also think skills in making and reconciling plural truths are important and being able to negotiate situations where more than one person has a valid truth. We need to learn both what it means to speak in a context where others will also need room to have a different opinion for us all to have freedom. We also need to be able to listen gently – As if we live in a small apartment with paper walls. The internet is like mechanical esp. We can hear each other very well now and as with copyright the new proximity of the social space is something we will need to be careful with to enable us to be sociable diverse and free.

I liked the new thinking in this post Janet - And I think your sense of “to be sociable” is key here. The way we value others, experience conviviality with friends needs to be transferred to online spaces. I just don’t know that we need a list of competencies to achieve this.

Without the filter of sociability it is too easy to see this as a call for “having the prudence never to practice” stuff
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to never practice either of them. - - - Mark Twain (about America)

My own measure of value in conversation is a comment/ statement that contributes a different perspective or thought from that already offered – I am happy to argue for ideas I don’t agree with (and often do) to see if in shaking them I can better understand my own position. I am not interested in Monty Python like argument clinic exchanges, sycophantic blogger frottage or even flame wars – as you suggest these are wearisome and can only lead to diminishing returns

As for “if i am going to disagree with someone in a forum i will try and say it once specifically and as clearly as i can and leave it at that”

Suspect that you will have to break with your usual practice with me … As the Magnet and other colleagues will confirm I am doggedly obdurate and unyielding and will need repeated clarification of the scrambled nature of my argument before I will concede or accommodate

[lucychili]

i agree competencies try and make tidy things out of messy things.
often tidying loses the niceness or subtlety which makes the mess work.
language is a way of tidying so it gets hard i think in text to understand good mess =)
http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/search/label/Big%20Skills
was interesting

[lucychili]

i think the trouble is that trying to make a model of something is fraught
im thinking about games and simulations and would like to be able to explore social economics and business models in an unpack them and see how they tick and make new ones kind of way. trouble is the assumptions to make a viable game have to be so tidy they will say something which means more about the choices in the abstraction than the starting point.

i think for me the idea of the game as a participative development thing is probably going to come closer to the core because people have to look at the mess, well at least the participants do.

im not sure how easy it will be to shift from supplied learning objects to participative discussion designing code and content when it is still pretty abstracting trying to make something
http://www.granths.com.au/edwiki/index.php?title=Programming_Camp_08

work in progress.

[Artichoke]

Will admit that I am always seeking order in chaos, and when something gives the appearance of being ordered I like to mess with it a bit to make it chaotic. I prefer paradox and uncertainty over conviction – and reckon that trembling with new thinking trumps tidiness of thought - and knowing the answer - any day. Except on the days when I am preparing my GST receipts - then I am in thrall to the mistress of the database, the template temptress, and painting accurate and entirely predictable Excel spreadsheets records of our monthly adventures.

I like Clark Aldrich's attempts to clarify stuff through the Big Skills – and got some great new thinking from “Learning by Doing” - reckon his Kurt Potter example in the link you shared well captures the tension between knowing and not knowing in many different contexts.

Kurt Potter, the world famous analyst, tells that IT departments go through a perpetual financial loop.

1. The IT departments start with charging the corporation some sort of broad tax.
2. Then, to be more fair, they begin charging more to departments that use more computer and other IT services.
3. To get even fairer, they get more and more specific in their charge-back strategy.
4. Finally, they get buried in paperwork, and to simplify and cut costs, they go back to 1.

Applying the right model is a Big Skill.

The challenge you identify in game design “….they will say something which means more about the choices in the abstraction than the starting point.” reminds me of the struggle to communicate understandings in science where the analogies we use to simplify the ideas oftentimes betray them.

I have been trying to read Jasper Juul all this year – the idea behind the book Half-Real captured my attention even before it was released but I will admit to having made slow progress – dipping in an out rather than really engaging with the ideas. Have you seen it? I figure that you would make better use of his thinking than I have managed to do so far.

The Half-Real of the title refers to the fact that video games are two rather different things at the same time: video games are real in that they are made of real rules that players actually interact with; that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon, but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world and a video game is a set of rules as well a fictional world.

[lucychili]

beaut thanks

[ailsa]

"Real" is a magical word to the Velveteen Rabbit -- he doesn't know quite what it means.
Many deeply philosophical issues here :rules are 'real', winning and losing are 'real' but not the (other) stuff i imagine like dragons.
And then there's the mine field of how I might best look after my human condition (body), and how others should also. Those sheep and their bladders should get very afraid. Sheep get athersclerosis and they eat no fat whatsoever...

[Artichoke]

I had to look it up in wikipedia Ailsa - there is so much nuance in sheep that I know nothing about and i expect in those "fat and bunchy" Velveteen Rabbits -

When I turn up at customs with all my whiskers worn off, the pink lining to my ears turned grey, and all my brown spots faded I completely anticipate that my personalised data profile will see me incinerated as an unacceptable health risk/ read cost to the tax payer,

And I don't care how good the book is - no amount of life ever after in children's imagination is going to make me feel OK about this

[ailsa]

Wow, wikipedia takes the trouble to make a short children's picture book even shorter. Suffers alot being lost in translation. However, a longer version would exemplify how being real hurts. Suffering leads to good stuff, you get to go to bunny heaven.