A teacher’s story: Why the DC Impact system Bloomberg wants NYC schools to emulate caused me to leave teaching

Original post by Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D.  at http://wp.me/pKlio-cq

Due to Khan Academy’s popularity, the idea of the flipped classroom has gained press and credibility within education circles. Briefly, the Flipped Classroom as described by Jonathan Martin is:

Flip your instruction so that students watch and listen to your lectures… for homework, and then use your precious class-time for what previously, often, was done in homework: tackling difficult problems, working in groups, researching, collaborating, crafting and creating. Classrooms become laboratories or studios, and yet content delivery is preserved. Flip your instruction so that students watch and listen to your lectures… for homework, and then use your precious class-time for what previously, often, was done in homework: tackling difficult problems, working in groups, researching, collaborating, crafting and creating. Classrooms become laboratories or studios, and yet content delivery is preserved (http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/3367).

A compiled resource page of the Flipped Classroom (with videos and links) can be found at http://teachingwithted.pbworks.com/w/page/37315118/Flipping-the-Classroom

The advantage of the flipped classroom is that the content, often the theoretical/lecture-based component of the lesson, becomes more easily accessed and controlled by the learner. Cisco in a recent white paper, Video: How Interactivity and Rich Media Change Teaching and Learning, presents the benefits of video in the classroom:

• Establishes dialogue and idea exchange between students, educators, and subject matter experts regardless of locations.
• Lectures become homework and class time is used for collaborative student work, experiential exercises, debate, and lab work.
• Extends access to scarce resources, such as specialized teachers and courses, to more students, allowing them to learn from the best sources and maintain access to challenging curriculum.
• Enables students to access courses at higher-level institutions, allowing them to progress at their own pace.
• Prepares students for a future as global citizens. Allows them to meet students and teachers from around the world to experience their culture, language, ideas, and shared experiences.
• Allows students with multiple learning styles and abilities to learn at their own pace and through traditional models.

One of the major, evidenced-based advantages of the use of video is that learners have control over the media with the ability to review parts that are misunderstood, which need further reinforcement, and/or those parts that are of particular interest.  (Using technology to give students “control of their interactions” has a positive effect on student learning,)

It is important, though, not to be seduced by the messenger.  Sal Khan is very charismatic and has produced good videos to explain some complex mathematical concepts.  With the growth of open education resources via Youtube and Creative Commons, it is important to note that excellent video lectures have been and are freely/easily available.  The Flipped Classroom concept, though, was not developed and articulated by Khan but by teachers such as Karl Fisch and Jon Bergman/Aaron Sams.

The problem is that educators, as a group, know how to do and use the lecture.  When educators are asked to replace their in-class lectures with videotaped ones (either their own or others) that learners watch at home, educators may not know what to do with this now void in-class time.  Those who advocate for the flipped classroom state that class time can then be used for discourse and for providing hands-on, authentic learning experiences.   In a recent interview Khan stated. “If I was a teacher, this is exactly the type of class I’d want to teach, I don’t have to prepare in a traditional sense. But I do have to prepare for projects and all that, so I have to prepare for creative things” (Meet Sal Khan).  As Frank Noschese notes:

Sal Khan is not showing any examples about what students and teachers are doing beyond Khan Academy. The news stories are not showing the open-ended problems the kids should be engaging with after mastering the basics — instead they show kids sitting in front of laptops working drills and watching videos. The focus is on the wrong things. Khan Academy is just one tool in a teacher’s arsenal. (If it’s the only tool, that is a HUGE problem.) http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/khan-academy-my-final-remarks/

In other words, the message being given is that teachers can do what they want to during class time. Now educators have time for engagement and interaction with the learners (#EdCampChicago presentation).

A major roadblock or barrier to the implementation of this model is that many educators do not know what to do within the classroom, what to do with that “whatever they want to do” time.  For educators, who are used to and use the didactic model, a framework is needed to assist them with the implementation of the Flipped Classroom.  In other words, the message to teachers to do what they want during classroom is not enough to make this transition.

In order to minimize the flavor of the month syndrome (recall character education, phonics movements, multicultural education, Reading First, powerpoints in the classroom), the use of video lectures needs to fall within a larger framework of learning activities – within more establish models of learning, providing a larger context for educator implementation.

What follows is an explanation of the Flipped Classroom Model, a model where the video lectures and vodcasts fall within a larger framework of learning activities. (Note: I am titling it the Flipped Classroom Model to get folks’ attention given the Flipped Classroom popularity right now.  It really is a cycle of learning model.)  It provides a sequence of learning activities based on the learning theories and instructional models of Experiential Learning Cycles – http://reviewing.co.uk/research/learning.cycles.htm and Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT Cycle of Instruction- http://www.aboutlearning.com/what-is-4mat/what-is-4mat.

The Flipped Classroom Model

Experiential Engagement: The Activity

The cycle often begins with an experiential exercise.  This is an authentic, often hands-on learning activity that fully engages the student.   It is a concrete experience that calls for attention by most, if not all, the senses.  According to McCarthy, learning activities are designed that are immersive.  Learners “experience the now.”  They become hooked through personal connection to the experience and desire to create meaning for and about that experience (ala constructivist learning).

Students become interested in the topic because of the experience.  They have a desire to learn more.  This is in line with John Dewey’s thinking regarding experience and education. The nature of experiences is of fundamental importance and concern in education and training.  People learn experientially.  It is the teacher’s responsibility to structure and organize a series of experiences which positively influence each individual’s potential future experiences (http://wilderdom.com/experiential/elc/ExperientialLearningCycle.htm).

Examples of Experiential Engagement include Experiential Learning Activities, Science Experiments, Simulations, Games and use of the Arts.

Setting:  These activities are designed for in-class time and often occur in a group setting.  In a blended course, these are synchronous activities conducted during face-to-face instructional time.  In online course, students could be asked to go to a community event, museum, . .  or the creative educator could provide some type of hands-on activity or simulation for students to complete during a real-time synchronous webinar session via Adobe Connect, Elluminate or through a 3D Learning experience such as Quest Atlantis. 

Conceptual Connections: The What

Learners are exposed to and learn concepts touched upon during Experiential Engagement.  They explore what the experts have to say about the topic.  Information is presented via video lecture, content-rich websites and simulations like PHET and/or online text/readings.  In the case of the flipped classroom as it is being currently discussed, this is the time in the learning cycle when the learners view content-rich videos.  This is where and when videos such as those archived by Khan Academy, Neo K-12, Teacher Tube, or other video services are used to help students learn the abstract concepts related to the topic being covered.

McCarthy reinforces that concepts should be presented in accessible form.  By providing learners with online resources and downloadable media, learners can control when and how the media is used.  This is the major value of flipping the classroom . . . content-based presentations are controlled by the learner as opposed to the lecturer as would be the case in a live, synchronous, didactic-driven environment.

In a user-generated learning environment, students could be asked to locate the videos, podcasts, and websites that support the content-focus of the lesson.  These media can then be shared with other students.

Part of this phase includes an online chat for asking and addressing questions about the content presented via the videos, podcasts, websites.  Through a “chat” area such as Etherpad or Google Docs, learners can ask questions with responses provided by co-learners and educators.  Videos could even be embedded into a Voicethread so students can post comments/reactions to the content.   Obviously, in a face-to-face setting, students can bring their questions into the real time environment.

Setting:  These materials are used by the learners in their own setting on their own time.  In other words, students have the opportunity to access and interact with these materials in a personalized manner.  They can view them in a learning setting that works for them (music, lighting, furniture, time of day) and can view/review information that they find particularly interesting or do not understand.   It is asynchronous learning and as such permits the learner to differentiate learning for him/herself. 

Meaning Making: The So What

Learners reflect on their understanding of what was discovered during the previous phases.  It is a phase of deep reflection on what was experienced during the first phase and what was learned via the experts during the second phase.

Learners can articulate and construct their understanding of the content or topic being covered through written blogs or verbal-based audio or video recordings.  Within the standard school system, this would be the phase when students are tested about their understanding of the content.  If this is the case, it is recommended that the tests target higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy – evaluation, applying, synthesizing.

Setting:  If possible, learners should be given the opportunity to reflect upon and make meaning of the content-related concepts within their own time schedule . . . both at a time when they feel ready to do so and taking the time they personally need for producing self-satisfactory work.

Demonstration and Application: The Now What

During this phase, learners get to demonstrate what they learned and apply the material in a way that makes sense to them. This goes beyond reflection and personal understanding in that learners have to create something that is individualized and extends beyond the lesson with applicability to the learners’ everyday lives.  This is in line with the highest level of learning within Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Learning – Creating - whereby the learner creates a new product or point of view. In essence, they become the storytellers of their learning (See Narratives in the 21st Century: Narratives in Search of Contexts).  A list of technology-enhanced ideas/options for the celebration of learning can be found at: http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/a-technology-enhanced-celebration-of-learning/

Setting:  This phase of the cycle is best when it occurs in a  a face-to-face, group setting within the classroom.  The reasons for recommending this type of synchronous learning are (1) the educator can guide the learner to the types of projects and tools best suited for him/her, and (2) an audience of peers and mentors increases motivation and provides opportunities for feedback.  Obviously, in an online course, students can work on their projects and present them to peers/educators during a synchronous, interactive online forum.

5 Reasons Why Public School Teachers are Occupying Wall Street

The classroom and the boardroom are often seen as dissimilar spaces. In classrooms, there are students and teachers; two groups of people that have the most insight on the current debate about what to do with the broken education system, but whom have rarely been invited to engage in the discussion. Students are often framed as empty vessels that have no say on how to improve schools, and teachers are viewed as low-level workers whose sole responsibilities are to ensure that tests are being passed and order is kept.

In boardrooms however, the businessmen in the room are viewed as experts; their opinions are valued, and together they make policy decisions that affect the institution in which they work. These differences set the stage for a battle of sorts between educators and policymakers.

As I watch the Occupy Wall Street protest grow from a few isolated voices into a national movement, from a media side-story into politicians’ central talking points, the number of public school teachers that are occupying Wall Street have increased exponentially. The silenced voices within the classrooms are pushing to have their voices heard by those boardroom decision makers.

The search for a voice is one of the powerful themes of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but beyond that, there are 5 specific reasons why such a large number of public school teachers have joined. Understanding these reasons can help us all improve public education in America and support our teachers.

1. Teachers are fearful about the futures of their students

One of the chief goals of teaching is to open students’ eyes to the possibilities that there is a more beautiful and equitable future than the present. For urban school teachers who work with students that are socioeconomically deprived, and the victims of many societal ills, teachers tell them every day that working hard in school, getting a good job, and being able to provide for themselves and their families is the natural order of things. Unfortunately, many of these teachers realize that this is far from the truth. As teachers struggle to pay off student loans and live from check to check, they realize that the stories that they were told about hard work and determination do not always pan out. Teachers are well aware that if things remain as they are, they would be lying to students when they tell them to work hard, graduate and they will be successful. These teachers occupy Wall Street to ensure that the messages they bestow on their students can someday become a reality.

1. Teachers are taking a stand against irresponsible investments and the closing of public schools

In the aftermath of the public forums spurred on by Waiting for Superman, and the many public conversations about how terrible public schools are, teachers have come to realize that marketing and public opinion can shift money and attention from supporting public schools to untested, and oftentimes, ineffective investments. Teachers see that decisions that are being made about schools are focused less on the needs of their students and more on measures that do not produce a substantial outcome. Teachers see investors “getting in on the education market” because they want to make money, and fear that they are doing so, at the expense of the public schools. They recognize this threat to public education, and are fighting against it.

1. Teachers want the world to see the hidden problems that challenge urban public schools.

Many urban public school teachers realize certain issues that make teaching and learning challenging happen outside of the school’s walls. As they spend hours writing lesson plans, developing innovative ideas, and teaching with passion, they realize that poverty, challenging living circumstances, and an unjust criminal justice system go unaddressed. They occupy Wall Street to bring attention to these issues and to push the wealthiest people in the world to realize that also important factors that affect the ability of students to learn.

1. Teachers want to show their connection to other pressing social issues

Many teachers realize that others are facing the similar struggles and want them to join forces. They see college students as their students in a few years, college graduates without jobs as the outcome of an education that does not have much value, and exploited civil servants in fields other than education as their allies. Teachers who are occupying Wall Street want these people to understand their struggles, and want them to be able to see how their experiences in schools have ushered them into the places they are today.

1. Teachers see Occupy Wall Street as a teaching opportunity

As American youth deals with the effects of poverty and inequity, they become disenfranchised within society, and start questioning the power of democracy. Teachers feel like it is their responsibility to let the youth know that the democratic process is alive and well. By occupying Wall Street they are teaching students to be civically engaged, showing them how to protest non-violently, how to fight for what they believe in, and they are doing what they have the responsibility to do… TEACH.

Photos courtesy of Sam Seidel.

The biggest mistake many teachers make is to assume that students think the same way they do.

As once said by the brilliant Bob Samples author of one of my favourite books ‘Open Mind, Whole Mind ‘

If I force the child to see the world in the narrow patterns of my history and myperspectives. I lose the opportunity to be a true teacher.

This was the original rationale I employed back in the late 1980′s/early 90′s to expand the journey into the human mind, and particularly children’s minds, to see how they learn.

For those not familiar with Bob’s work, Bob + Howard Gardner = Jerome Brumer.

Samples delved into human sensory systems, validated around 23 rather than the traditional 5 that most people at the time believe we have,  and the impact they have on learning. Gardner went into looking at Intelligences.

This article published in 1988 is as relevant today as it was then – if not moreso. Transcript at the bottom of the page.

Open Systems, Open Minds

Reflections on consciousness and education

by Bob Samples

One of the articles in Transforming Education (IC#18)

http://dailypapert.com/?p=637

“After World War I Piaget moved to Zurich to attend Carl Jung’s lectures on experimental psychology, and then to Paris to study logic and abnormal psychology. Working with Théodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their reasoning processes, he began to see how the key to human knowledge might be discovered by observing how the child’s mind develops.

Back in Switzerland, the young scientist began watching children play, scrupulously recording their words and actions as their minds raced to find reasons for why things are the way they are. In one of his most famous experiments, Piaget asked children, “What makes the wind?” What follows is a typical Piagetian dialogue:

Piaget: What makes the wind?

Julia (age 5): The trees.

Piaget: How do you know?

Julia: I saw them waving their arms.

Piaget: How does that make the wind?

Julia: Like this (waving her hand in front of Piaget’s face). Only they are bigger. And there are lots of trees.

Piaget: What makes the wind on the ocean?

Julia: It blows there from the land. No, it’s the waves.

Piaget recognized that Julia’s answers, while not correct by any adult criterion, are not “incorrect” either. They are entirely sensible and coherent within the framework of the child’s way of knowing. Classifying them as “true or false” misses the point and shows a lack of respect for the child. What Piaget was after was a theory that could find in the wind dialogue coherence, ingenuity and the practice of a kind of explanatory principle (in this case, by referring to body actions, in other cases much harder to state) that stands young children in very good stead when they don’t yet know enough or have enough skill to handle the kind of explanation grown-ups prefer.”

Papert, S. (1999) “Papert on Piaget.” Time magazine’s special issue on “The Century’s Greatest Minds,” page 105, March 29, 1999.

Open Systems, Open Minds

Reflections on consciousness and education

by Bob Samples

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC18/Samples.htm

One of the articles in Transforming Education (IC#18)
Winter 1988, Page 19
Copyright (c)1988, 1997 by Context Institute | To order this issue …

Bob Samples is an author and scholar who has been in the forefront of exploring the implications for education of basic research on the human system. The following article draws on material from his most recent book, Open Mind, Whole Mind, (Rolling Hills Estates, CA: Jalmar Press, 1987, $14.95) and from an address given at Windstar’s “Choices For the Future” Conference, in June, 1987.

- Robert Gilman

Looking at the world as a pattern of systems has become increasingly popular in recent years. One of the distinctions this allows is between open and closed systems and the attitudes that go with these. Buckminster Fuller described it this way to me: “If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what’s inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective.”

Open systems interact with what is around them and can be understood only by including an understanding of their relationship to everything else, which means that – in a closed-system sense – they can never be fully understood.

Each human being is an open system, and with the help of the research of the past few decades, we are coming to understand that the human mind is the ultimate open system. The significance of all this to parenting and teaching is that our current perspective of how the mind works differs greatly from that of the past.

We once felt that the brain was like a mental file cabinet where order and structure prevailed. We determined it would best be served by orderly and structured experiences. Parenting and schooling were designed to provide specific closed-system training. Routine and discipline were seen as virtues rather than conveniences. Children came to be judged by how well they conformed to closed-system rules. They quickly learned to play the game to win. It was seldom their prerogative to learn how to write new rules and thus open up their own systems of thought. Pitiably, growing up meant fitting in – conforming to the rules which, once written, were seldom questioned.

With television, visual and auditory media and computer access, today’s children can simply by-pass such attempts to limit their experience. The so-called “shallow” TV situation comedies and even the Saturday morning cartoons address issues that are years away from textbook and standard school curriculum coverage. Racism, sexism and other bigotries are exposed through entertainment. The values and customs of contemporary life are held up to question each evening. New broadcasts usher into the child’s consciousness clandestine war, Apartheid, injustice and hypocrisy.

As parents, we are being asked far more difficult questions than ever before. Fathers and mothers are yearning for “the old days” when the most-feared responsibility of parenting was to disclose the “facts of life.” Now the questions center around unwanted pregnancy, homosexuality, AIDS and herpes. Divorce affects every family – either directly or indirectly through friends. At the same time, questions emerge about world hunger, the arms race and global peace. The lyrics of popular music contain topics central to the lives of the twenty-first-century child – drugs, relationships and thermonuclear war. Try as we may, we cannot enforce a closed-system life for our children. We cannot go “back to basics” and the fantasy of the values expressed in the 1950s films. Today, in our homes, schools, churches and workplaces, we are required to instill an ethic evolving from open-system possibility, not closed-system repression.

What, then, is our choice? I suggest it is as simple as honoring the reality of experience in our world. It requires that we accede to what is known about the design of the brain-mind system, that we embrace the fullness of our consciousness. This may involve possibly painful re-examinations of our own attitudes and beliefs about learning, decision-making, living. Our egos may suffer as we falter and stumble through this deliberate renaissance. But the rewards are worth the effort, for we will acquire for our children and ourselves the skills of survival. All the tomorrows are tentative. We need courage to greet the tentative.

COMPREHENSION AND APPREHENSION

Developing that courage can be helped by using and embracing all the capabilities that our consciousness has to offer.

The noted neuroscientist Karl Pribram once said, “consciousness is what you pay attention to.” No better definition exists. With exquisite economy, Pribram binds consciousness with choice – “paying attention” is the choice, the intentional focusing of the senses on experience.

Focusing attention involves both apprehending and comprehending, for the mind pays attention in two major ways. By sensing or apprehending, the human mind recognizes the emergence of the act of paying attention. This happens without cognitive understanding and is commonly called a “gut” feeling or an involvement of a “sixth sense.”

The second and more conventional way of paying attention is through comprehending or understanding. Comprehending results from having new experience that may be understood in relationship to previous experience. Sometimes the experience refers to previous personal involvement or it may be bonded to cultural norms and collective knowledge.

Apprehending focuses attention but may not “make sense.” Comprehension focuses attention and does make sense. Our human capacities for reason, logic, deduction and the search for meaning are well-recognized and honored. For more than eight thousand years the development of these qualities has marked a series of noble steps in the history of civilization. These ways of knowing are the foundation for comprehension.

Less understood are the workings of apprehension. When we apprehend something we are immersed in the domain of pre-understanding – our senses are involved in configuring something without personal or cultural reference. Instead of experiencing bonds to reason and logic which characterize comprehension, the apprehending mind is bathed in emotion and tentativeness. There is often a strange mix of excitement and fear – a blend of wanting to continue into the unknown and a reflex to retreat to the safety of that which is already understood. Apprehension is the training ground for both fear and courage in the human mind. It is also the doorway to discovery.

Both are part of the natural design of the human brain-mind system. Both are the product of the sweep of human evolution and both represent clear cut advantages for survival in our species. But unfortunately, they are not both equally honored. Historically, Western civilization has forced a choice between them, and comprehension wins, hands down. Comprehension has status; apprehension does not. The tragedy of this is that it blocks us from fully using most of what nature has provided in our mental capacity.

BRAIN-MIND DESIGN

For the past fifty years, there has been a large scale exploration of the form and function of the human brain-mind system. This exploration has uncovered, among others things, the complementary ways of processing experience found in the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The left processes experience in accordance with cultural schemes of logic, sequential order and reductive analysis. The right exhibits dominant activity when thinking requires metaphoric, analogical, visual-spatial and proliferative operations. The left is more closely connected with comprehending and the right with apprehending.

Educators committed a grave error early on in popularizing this research when they assumed that certain subjects in school were either “right” or “left” brained in content and that certain students were right or left brained. The error was one of misinterpretation. The brain lateralizes the way it processes experience; the brain does not lateralize content. All curriculum is basically whole brained and all students are whole brained, but many subjects may be taught in ways that favor left or right processing. Schools clearly favor left brain processing (logical, sequential, analytical and reductive). In education we can create more holism and more complete brain-mind function simply by changing the way we currently teach what is already offered in existing curricula. Massive curriculum revision is not the issue, rather the issue is massive revision of teaching methodology.

Other insights into the core of the educational process are contained in the triune brain model of Dr. Paul MacLean. The triune brain represents both an evolutionary and a developmental model. The three basic parts from earliest to latest are: the brain stem, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex. Researchers often refer to the brain stem as the reptilian brain, the limbic system as the mammalian brain and the cortex as the neo-mammalian brain.

In terms of evolutionary development the earliest part, the brain stem, governed species survival capacities. These included 1) fighting and territorial defense, 2) fleeing and escape, 3) food, shelter and water access, and 4) reproduction of the species. It is unfortunate that in the history of brain research these functions, because they were so “basic,” became seen as being of “lower” status and called by some, “animalistic”. In contemporary times each of these so called “animalistic” needs have been elevated to art forms of human involvement. Athletics, dance, gourmet dining, architecture, and physical expressions of love are examples of the more aesthetic expressions of brainstem function.

One of the major weaknesses of developmental approaches is that either physical or psychological changes are seen as sequential. Sequencing results in the perception that there are lower and higher qualities of development. Anatomical structures and psychological abilities are seen to be separate from each other rather than as the continuous unfolding of capacities designed into the organism. In the human brain-mind system for example, developmentalists see the central nervous system and brainstem as more “primitive” than the limbic system and the limbic is seen as more “primitive” than the cortex.

While this perception may seem useful, it actually creates an erroneous portrait of the human mind. ALL the parts of the human brain-mind are simultaneously present and thus their interactions are synergic. Animals that have only a brainstem cannot be compared with humans which have a brain stem AND a limbic system AND a cortex. In education we have a profound responsibility to honor the specific functions of the brainstem (security, safety, nutrition, understanding of intimacy etc.). Beyond that, we can interface the processing functions of the brainstem with other brain systems to create a maturity which insures that the “art form” attributes of this part of the brain are honored as well as the “basic needs” functions.

The limbic system is a complex of eight different parts. When taken together, its functions seem to govern emotions, feelings and tacit forms of knowing. In educational terms the limbic is the body’s organ of the affective domain (feelings and emotions). Many studies indicate that the right cerebral cortex is also related to the affective domain. Some researchers report a larger physical connection between the limbic system and the right cortex than is found in the connections to the left cortex. It is likely that the limbic system apprehends the context or pattern of experience and depends upon the right cortex to prepare neural information for the left brain to put into conventional languages for reading, writing, ciphering and reasoning.

Much of what educators have traditionally called the affective domain originates in the central nervous system, the brainstem, the limbic system and the right cortex. It is through these components of the brain-mind system that experience and information is prepared for human action. Until recently, this preparation function was largely ignored because it is fundamentally without standard language and vocabulary to describe it. Instead psychological research has dominantly focused on what can be explained through language. Learning theories are powerfully biased toward cognitive functions. The affective, when dealt with at all, is often limited to that which lends itself to verbal expression via cognitive language. When Michael Polanyi said “We know more than we can say,” he was describing the yawning chasm between the realities of apprehension and the reporting capabilities of language and cognition. Values clarification techniques have in the past been the most common technology of affective education in North America. In reality, values clarification is little more than a cognitive processing of a small part of what can be said about the vast nonverbal synthesis of the apprehending mind.

Thus more of the human brain-mind system is devoted to the apprehending functions than to comprehending functions. The brainstem creates an affective ecology in which children experience a sense of safety and physical well-being. The limbic system attends to emotions, feelings and tacit forms of knowing. The limbic system treats these attributes in two ways; 1) direct experiencing of emotions, feelings and tacit knowing and 2) pre-conscious “understanding” of the role these play in the culture at large. The right cortex builds the base for metaphoric and intuitive knowing. The left hemisphere creates the formal link between the child and the culture at large.

This brings us full circle back to the issue of open and closed systems, for it is through apprehending that our minds stay open, open to that which has not yet been integrated into some system of comprehension. If we are to fulfill our birthright as creative and explorative beings with the help of education, then our educational system will need to function in ways that give equal honor to all the brain/mind’s capacities.

Guatemalan Schools Built from Bottles, Not Bricks

Zak Stone

http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/cartoons

We knew. We may not have wished to know, and perhaps it was easier to push away that sense of impending sadness, the awareness that time was short, but we knew what was coming. After August, after the resignation, we knew. And yet, it’s still shocking. It still hurts.

Steve Jobs was a father and a husband, and the loss for his family — having suffered with him through the acute, chronic and finally terminal phases of his illness — is simply unfathomable. For those of use who have seen a family member or loved one taken away decades too soon by this loathsome disease, who know intimately the costs of cancer and its consequences, this is far too familiar. We feel the bereft emptiness they feel now as an echo of our own pain, a sharp pull on the cord of sorrow that connects us to our own absences of the heart.

As for the rest of us: perhaps we had briefly encountered Steve at Macworld in years past, or been privileged to see him deliver one of his legendary keynote addresses in person. Perhaps we got a terse reply to an email about a problem, or heard from an Apple support team member that Steve had personally escalated an issue on our behalf. Perhaps the connection was entirely one-way, and our perception of Steve was delivered at a distance. It does not matter. For all of us who were touched by his life’s work, we feel an emptiness that is surprising in its intensity.

Part of that feeling is anger. Fifty-six. Fifty-six years young and you imagine, you try and simply fail to imagine what could have emerged from a full lifespan, from that kind of creative force. The world is poorer for the lack of another twenty years of Steve Jobs’s brain, his energy, his judgement, his almost uncanny power to force reality to conform to his expectations rather than the other way around. Selfishly and callously we are angry, for what was taken from us, but that is part of grief too; part of knowing that you had something wonderful that you never properly appreciated until, suddenly, it was gone. Imagine how difficult it was for Tim Cook to introduce the iPhone 4S on Tuesday when he almost certainly knew that his own iPhone would be ringing soon with such horrible news. We are glad Tim is there, but we are still very, very angry Steve is gone.

Another part is awe. How many second acts in business lead to the kind of success that Apple has found over the past decade? One, really; what Steve did in returning to Apple is unique. After wandering in the wilderness, fired from the company he created with Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak in that legendary garage, Steve did astonishing things again and again.

Pixar, created from the unsuccessful Lucasfilm computer animation group, set free the astonishing creativity of John Lasseter and his band of perfectionist maniacs as they became the heir to Walt Disney’s legacy — and eventually, the artistic core of Disney’s animation division, in the process making Jobs the entertainment megacorp’s largest individual shareholder.

NeXT, built around the idea of a desktop computing experience without compromises in performance or ease of use, may not have taken over the world with hardware sales: the machines themselves were perhaps too good for the market, too expensive for business or home users while gaining popularity in academic and scientific settings like CERN (where a NeXT workstation responded to the first http:// prompt) and Wolfram Research (where the flagship product, Mathematica, named by Steve himself, was bundled with the NeXT computer). The NeXTStep OS, however, built atop Avie Tevanian’s Mach microkernel and with a GUI powered by Adobe’s Display PostScript, begat the modern Mac OS X and the now-ubiquitous iOS. Lots of ‘failed technology companies’ would be thrilled with that kind of legacy.

Finally, there is appreciation, there is gratitude. For all his notable faults, his temper, his intolerance for half-baked efforts, for all the people who both loved and hated working with and for Steve, we still cannot cherish and thank him enough. How many of us owe our livelihoods to the ecosystems and industries he helped create? How many of us spend our days intimately connected with the products he envisioned and shepherded to the market? Today you can walk into hundreds of Apple stores and thousands of other outlets around the world and walk out with a chunk of the future that fits in your pocket. The teams that build the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are legion, their numbers in the tens of thousands. If not for the vision of one man — one man who simply refused to accept that good enough was good enough, and who made whole industries over to be right by his exacting standards — where would we be now?

It is perhaps not all that remarkable that America’s president delivered a statement on the passing of Steve Jobs, as the former CEO of the country’s (and the world’s) most valuable business. It is remarkable, however, to note that the emotional impact of Jobs’s death is the same for Barack Obama as it is for all of us. The two men shared eerily parallel origins; both children of foreign fathers and young American mothers, both raised outside their birth families (Obama by his grandparents, Jobs by his adoptive family), both somehow marked by heritage and circumstance to be destined for the history books and to do things that had never been done before. Now one of them is gone, but just as the world cannot be the same after the election of America’s first biracial president, the world cannot be the same as it was before Steve Jobs.

Namaste, Steve. We remember you with fondness and delight. We wish for your colleagues and for Tim Cook the wisdom and energy to lead Apple the way Steve would have continued to lead it for many years, if not for the harsh unfairness of cancer and the inevitable tick of life’s clock. And we hope and pray that your wife and children may find a tiny seed of solace in the knowledge that their beloved was our beloved too.

Wise words: Steve Jobs in quotes

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-06/steve-jobs-in-quotes/3318558

Photo: Flowers and a photograph of Steve Jobs are placed against the window outside the Apple store in Boston. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)

Photo: Steve Jobs stands beneath a photograph of him and Apple-co founder Steve Wozniak in 2010. (Reuters: Kimberly White)

Photo: Steve Jobs introduces new iPod Nanos in San Francisco, 2006. (Reuters: Dino Vournas)

Photo: Steve Jobs, centre, unveils Apple Computer Corporation’s new Macintosh in 1984. (Getty Images: Cindy Charles/Liaison, file photo)

Photo: Steve Jobs poses with an iPhone during a press conference in Berlin in 2007. (AFP: John MacDougall)

Photo: Steve Jobs at Stanford University’s 114th Commencement in 2005. (www.news.stanford.edu/)

Photo: Steve Jobs listens to the company’s application partners speak after announcing the new iPhone 3G in 2008. (AFP: Ryan Anson)

Photo: Steve Jobs poses with the company’s iBook portable computer in 1999. (Reuters: Peter Morgan)

Photo: A tribute message to the late Steve Jobs written in lipstick is seen on the window of the Apple Store in Santa Monica. (Reuters: Lucy Nicholson)

Apple rivals, partners & press pay tribute to Steve Jobs

By Neil Hughes http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/06/apple_rivals_partnerspress_pay_tribute_to_steve_jobs.html

For the first time in at least 30 years, Time magazine stopped its presses when news of Steve Jobs’s death broke. The publication’s latest issue with Jobs on the cover will hit newsstands Friday, and will join numerous other tributes to the late Apple co-founder.

This week’s Time cover features a portrait of Jobs, taken by Norman Seeff, in which he is holding the original Macintosh. It originally ran in a story in Rolling Stone in 1984.

The magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengle, made the decision to stop the presses just after his staff had finished work on the issue. An emergency editorial meeting was then held, and a new issue was created in just over three hours, an unprecedented turn of events for the nearly 90-year-old publication.

The magazine noted that in the process of redoing its entire issue, many of the employees worked on the very Apple devices that Jobs helped to invent. It will be the eighth time Jobs graces the cover of Time, the last coinciding with the launch of the iPad in 2010.

Bloomberg Businessweek also announced that it will have a special issue of its magazine devoted to Jobs on newsstands Friday. The 64-page, ad-free tribute issue will also be available digitally on Apple’s iPad.

It will feature pieces by Steve Jurvetson, John Sculley, Sean Wisely and William Gibson. The cover of the magazine features Apple-like simplicity, with a black-and-white, up close photo of Jobs and his years of birth and death.

Both magazines will join many other tributes that have begun to take shape since Jobs passed away on Wednesday. Some of Apple’s partners, and even some of the company’s fiercest rivals, have showed their appreciation for the contributions Jobs made to the technology industry and the world.

The homepages of both Google and Amazon featured tributes to Jobs with links to Apple’s website. Even Adobe, a company with which Jobs had very publicized differences, paid respects to Jobs on its website, displaying a photo of him with Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock on its front page.

The news of Jobs’ death dominated headlines across the Web and in newspapers on Wednesday and Thursday. It was such a major mainstream story that even the homepage of sports network ESPN featured two headlines to inform readers of Jobs’s passing.

Below is a collection of Web tributes and other acknowledgements of Jobs in the wake of his death. The memorials are joined by numerous comments shared by contemporaries like Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Michael Dell, as well as U.S. President Barack Obama.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/oct/03/teaching-poll-behaviour

Badly behaved pupils and parents put teachers off

Survey by Guardian Teacher Network shows more than half of teachers have considered quitting profession

Jessica Shepherd, education correspondent
guardian.co.uk,

Stressed teacher
Is it worth it? Many teachers are thinking of quitting. Photograph: Gabe Palmer/Alamy

British parents are increasingly badly behaved and neglectful, a poll of teachers has found.

Some 1,922 teachers responded to a survey conducted by the Guardian Teacher Network. More than half – 52% – admitted they had considered quitting the profession. Of these, 30% said the worsening behaviour of their pupils’ parents had been a major reason for this.

Some 59% of the teachers said pupils are naughtier now than when they started their careers.

Most – 81% – of these teachers said parents’ failure to perform their role adequately and the break-up of the nuclear family were to blame. Three-quarters of the teachers who believe pupil behaviour is getting worse attribute this to the influence of unsuitable role models.

Almost half – 49% – of the teachers polled said parents are less supportive of teachers now than when they had started their careers. A further 44% said the level of support had stayed the same.

Some 59% of those who believe parents are less supportive than in the past put this down to the growing number of parents who work long, unsociable hours and rising unemployment; while 79% attribute the change to a decline in parenting skills.

Of those who had considered leaving the profession, 62% said excessive interference from government threatened to drive them out, while 50% named poor pupil behaviour as the main reason. Just 22% said they had wanted to leave to earn more money.

One former solicitor who had retrained as a teacher said she had found a “profound lack of respect by senior staff and parents for the quality and quantity of work undertaken by teachers”.

“I have never before worked in a workplace where I have not been treated as a professional,” she said. “My every move is monitored and I am not trusted to do the job I have trained and gained qualifications to do.

“It has had a great impact on my self-confidence … As a solicitor I was trusted to do my job once I had the necessary qualifications and experience.”

Another teacher said the government assumed the profession was “reactionary, insular and stuck in our ways, incapable of the sort of reflective thinking and concern for kids that spurs us on to do the necessary for our kids to excel”.

The vast majority – 90% – said bullying went on in schools. For 53% of these teachers, parents were among the bullies.

Despite this, 71% said they still enjoyed their job.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the poll showed teaching was “a highly stressful profession” and that “an excessive workload and endless government-imposed initiatives make the job decidedly harder”.

She added: “The lesson to governent has to be trust teachers more but ensure that support services to scools and society do not suffer cuts.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said responsibility for a child’s behaviour at school was initially down to their parents.

“If unruly behaviour is not policed with proper boundaries and a culture of respect for authority at home, teachers cannot effectively implement discipline in the classroom.

“But we know that it is disruptive children whose behaviour is unchecked who miss out the most on their education. That’s why we want to make sure that teachers have more freedom to clamp down on persistently bad behaviour without being hampered by bureaucracy, so that teaching time is not lost because of poor behaviour.”

The teachers polled worked in state and private nurseries, primary and secondary schools and colleges. They completed the survey in August and September this year.

Winter 2001-02

September 11

By Alfie Kohn

Some events seem momentous when they occur but gradually fade from consciousness, overtaken by fresh headlines and the distractions of daily life.  Only once in a great while does something happen that will be taught by future historians.   Just such an incident occurred on September 11.  The deadly attacks on New York and Washington have left us groping for support, for words, for a way to make meaning and recover our balance.

Almost 30 years ago, my father suffered a serious heart attack at the age of 42.  I remember how he smiled up at me weakly from his hospital bed and made a joke that wasn’t a joke.  “I guess I’m not as immortal as I thought I was,” he murmured.   This fall we have all suffered an attack that has stolen from us, individually and collectively, our sense of invincibility.  Our airplanes can be turned into missiles.  Our skyline can be altered.  We can’t be sure that our children are safe.

It is unimaginable to me that people could patiently plan such carnage, could wake up each morning, eat breakfast, and spend the day preparing to destroy thousands of innocent lives along with their own.   But while the particulars seem unfathomable, the attack itself had a context and perhaps a motive that are perfectly comprehensible – and especially important for educators to grasp.

The historical record suggests that the United States has no problem with terrorism as long as its victims don’t live here or look like most of us.  In the last couple of decades alone, we have bombed Libya, invaded Grenada, attacked Panama, and shelled Lebanon – killing civilians in each instance. We created and funded an army of terrorists to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua, and when the World Court ruled that we must stop, we simply rejected the court’s authority. We engineered coups in Iran, Zaire, Guatemala, and Chile (the last of which coincidentally also took place on September 11).

In 1991, we killed more than 100,000 men, women, and children in Iraq, deliberately wiping out electricity and water supplies with the result that tens of thousands of civilians died from malnutrition and disease. We continue to vigorously defend (and subsidize) Israel‘s brutal treatment of Palestinians, which has been condemned by human rights organizations and virtually every other nation on the planet. We have aided vile tyrants, including some who later turned against us: Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and, yes, Osama bin Laden (when his opposition to the Soviets served our purposes). We are not the only nation that has done such things, but we are the most powerful and therefore arguably the most dangerous.

To be sure, these are delicate issues to raise at such a time, yet it is vital that we summon the courage to face them – if only to understand how our country is seen by others and to be prepared for questions that our students may ask.  Some people remember all too clearly how many innocents we killed in Iraq; some see all too vividly how much suffering takes place in Israel’s occupied territory.  The prospect of further bloodshed, as grief turns to cries for vengeance, demands that we look hard at reality, no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient.

Does that reality justify an act of terrorism against us?  No.  Our history may help to explain, but decidedly does not excuse, the taking of innocent lives.  Nothing could.  By the same token, though, the September attack does not justify a retaliatory war launched by our government that takes innocent lives abroad.  Early polls showed overwhelming American support for revenge, even for killing civilians in Muslim countries.  If this seems understandable given what has just happened, then the same must be said about the animosity of our attackers, some of whom may have suffered personally from U.S.-sponsored violence.  Understandable in both cases – and excusable in neither.

And so we come to our role as educators.  There are excellent resources for helping students to reflect deeply about these specific issues, such as the website  www.teachingforchange.org/Sept11.htm.  But our broader obligation is to address what the writer Martin Amis recently described as Americans’ chronic “deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away.”  Schools should help children locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond country, to all humanity.

Likewise, education must be about developing the skills and disposition to question the official story, to view with skepticism the stark us-against-them (or us good, them bad) portrait of the world and the accompanying dehumanization of others that helps to explain that empathy deficit.  Students should also be able to recognize dark historical parallels in the President’s rhetoric, and to notice what is not being said or shown on the news.

One detail of the tragedy carries a striking pedagogical relevance.  Official announcements in the south tower of the World Trade Center repeatedly instructed everyone in the building to stay put, which posed an agonizing choice:  follow the official directive or disobey and evacuate.  Here we find a fresh reason to ask whether we are teaching students to think for themselves or simply to do what they’re told.

Ultimately, though, the standard by which to measure our schools is the extent to which the next generation comes to understand – and fully embrace – this simple truth:  The life of someone who lives in Kabul or Baghdad is worth no less than the life of someone in New York or from our neighborhood.

Copyright © 2001 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author’s name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.

Article from the UK Guardian discusses the abrupt departure of the New York schools chancellor is only a temporary setback for the corporate ‘reform’ of public schools. Former Hearst executive Cathleen Black who has just resigned from her post as <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/07/schools-school-funding“>New York City schools chancellor after a controversy-filled three months in the role. Photograph: Felix Clay for Media Guardian. Cathleen Black, the multimillionaire publishing executive with absolutely no background in education, has resigned as New York City schools chancellor. Her departure is a rare setback for a corporate-funded education reform movement that lauds standardised tests, non-union teachers and private management as the solution to the problems of public education.

Click here to read the entire article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/07/schools-school-funding

See: A love of teaching, but fear for the future: Fight over collective bargaining leaves one teacher uncertain about career choice http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42306729/ns/business-us_business

The Centre for Marketing Schools was commissioned to survey staff satisfaction levels of 850 teachers in government and non-government schools in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

Centre for Marketing Schools director Dr Linda Vining said the survey confirmed the “deeper issues” of concern to teachers.

They included a lack of communication between staff and principals, and feeling undervalued and not being consulted.

“Teachers are feeling steamrollered . . . they are feeling that things are happening too quickly,” Dr Vining said.

“Through my research comes a sense they feel they are not valued members of the team – they are simply there to work and for many of them that’s not fulfilling.”

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/why-our-teachers-want-to-leave/story-e6frfkvr-1226033697211#ixzz1IaqZH5Zt

http://bit.ly/e68IHZ

It has been my contention for the past few years that many teachers are unclear about the purpose of education. It appears that we have no clear public purpose for education these days, if we ever did have one, and my contention is that, as a result, many people are confused about what we are actually meant to achieve- other than some ethereal ‘make the future better, and get your my school results up.’

If we are to ‘fix’ our education systems we need to have politicians who are prepared to state clear educational and societal purposes for education, not just pragmatic political fixes.

WE need to understand that as educators and a society we have already moved through a number of ‘educational eras’ where the unstated purpose has changed. What we now need to do is to become clear about what future we want for our students, our countries and our planet. We must build a view of sustainability which includes environmental, social, intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual health.

Purpose of Public Schooling

AGRICULTURAL ERA
Purpose: To promote common culture and citizenship
Metaphor: Community Centre serving political and civic needs
View of students: Neophytes- needing to be socialized
View of teachers: Sacred profession- called to service

INDUSTRIAL ERA
Purpose: To ‘Australianise’ the immigrant and prepare workers for industrial society
Metaphor: A factory- serving economic needs, assembly line production
View of students: Raw materials- products to be standardized, inspected and controlled
View of teachers: Supervisors, administrators and managers

SOCIAL ERA
Purpose: Social reform to meet the needs of all kids
Metaphor: Hospital- for victims of social injustice, meeting cultural and social needs
View of students: Vulnerable- to be protected
View of teachers: Caretakers. District staff diagnose and prescribe. Administrators as chiefs
of staff

LIFELONG LEARNING ERA
Purpose: To teach people how to learn and to love learning lifelong
Metaphor: Collaborative learning community engaged with the larger world
View of students: Learners and leaders, creators and problem-solvers
View of teachers: Teachers as facilitators and coaches. Administrators as resource brokers
and links to community.

ELECTRONIC/DIGITAL ERA
Purpose: Networks-Interconnected and Embedded and Consistent
Metaphor: Spider web
Students: Explorers and constructors of knowledge, both producers and consumers
Teachers: Learners, Coaches and Guides

SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS ERA
Purpose: Macro and micro-system stewardship of living systems
Metaphor: Natural Gardens, communities.
Students: Leaders responsible for social, ecological, economic and natural capital
Teachers: Multi-locational learning guides, opportunity facilitators, co-learners
(C) Julie Boyd 2000

In a time of accelerated and massive change, when conventional resources are quickly being depleted, cooperative effort is needed to navigate the “rapids of change.”

ABSTRACT

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation. Bertrand Russell

Cooperative Learning is one of the best researched fields of classroom based practice in the world. Teachers and researchers across several continents know it works, when used well. However, Cooperative Learning has always been about far more than a set of classroom strategies. The principles inherent in the field are the very ones needed for humankind to adapt and survive into the future. As practitioners, we are not necessarily teaching students the broader implications, and implementation of these principles and practices. My contention is that many aspects of our culture are still heavily dependent on adversarial and competitive paradigms of operation. This is not only challenging for those who have learned, and lived, using cooperative learning strategies, but it also an ongoing detriment to our societal health. This discussion paper takes lessons learned about cooperation, collaboration and competition, beyond the classroom, into higher education, corporate and community fields, and explores how to integrate them at a systems level. As cooperative learning practitioners we need to accept we have a responsibility which extends well beyond the classroom, and to ask ourselves some deep questions about our collective educational purpose.

———————————————

INTRODUCTION

What would the world look like if cooperation was the primary societal driver? This is the question that we, as practitioners, need to ask ourselves every day. In Australia just recently, we have experienced an outpouring of cooperation on a scale previously unseen, where tens of thousands of people took it upon themselves to simply turn up and work together collaboratively with perfect strangers, to clean up the mess left by the devastating floods in Queensland. The ‘mud army’ made news around the world, for a short time, until the media cycles moved on. In Victoria, similarly, the ‘sandbag army’ is (at the time of writing) following a relentless, massive ‘moving inland sea’, cooperating unstintingly to protect the homes of strangers against nature’s wrath. Stories of personal heroism and altruism are shared daily by those touched by Australia’s 2011 disaster which has deluged an area equivalent to France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined.

” A good community will not be invented, discovered or “just grow.” It must be forged from the purpose and quality of the lives of the people living in it.” Arthur Morgan

The first question is why did they do it? Because cooperation is a natural instinct, integral to the human condition. Micro-organisms flourished initially because of their capacity to cooperate. Cooperation has formed the basis of indigenous societies for thousands of years. Their very survival depended on it, as has the survival of the people devastated by the floods.

The community also acted because interdependence, connectedness and cooperation are key elements of natural systems. These people collaborated in highly creative ways, using a combination of face-to-face interaction and technology-based social networking, in an environment of trust and innovation, to achieve some semblance of ‘normality,’ or homeostasis, for those who had lost everything. They did so because psychologically they knew it was the ‘right’ thing to do, and it formed the basis of their behavioural values. People needed help, they responded. Some used their own resources to drive and fly thousands of kilometres to assist, bringing everything from buckets, brooms and gumboots, to truckloads of food, to give away. The collaborative approach to using technology cooperatively, and for altruistic purposes, also saw lost families found, lost pets reunited with their families and resources made instantly available immediately the request was put out. This technology also provided for coordination of the thousands of volunteers who made themselves available to help.

They also did it because they were asked to. The Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh showed remarkable leadership in encouraging people to work together to help each other, and in choosing to not publicise any anti-social behaviour. Bligh’s behaviour demonstrated clearly the importance of effective leadership in promoting cooperation and its ability to empower similar values in others. Abraham Maslow once stated that ‘people live in a very structured world and adapt themselves to the structure’. In this instance, the structure that was provided through the coordinated and collaborative endeavours of government, defence forces, business and community ensured that the intent of positive collaboration was maintained, and the initial chaos was quickly organised into cooperative endeavour.

Finally, they also did it because of that elusive character trait referred to as the ‘Aussie mateship spirit’, a peculiar trait of Australian society which appears in abundance during crises and is best characterised as ‘working together to help neighbours and strangers out of a big problem that is not of their making.’ It is possible that at some time in the future a genetic basis may be found for promoting cooperative or competitive behaviour. Research currently being undertaken by organisations such as the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, in collaboration with the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, are seeking explanations for the divergence in behaviour between Bonobos (collaborative, attentive, sensitive) and Chimpanzees (aggressive, competitive, violent) which may have possible repercussions for future investigations into human genetics.

A second, and more vexing question is why are many people so good in a crisis, yet our society reverts to more selfish and competitive pursuits as soon as the news cycles move on. Do we forget? Do we need constant reminding? Does consumerism foster competition rather than cooperation? Do people need a reason to do good work, and a focus for their energies which builds positive social capital, rather than anti-social behaviour? Do we need leadership which encourages people to make discerning decisions about when it appropriate to be cooperative, competitive and individualistic? Do we understand the evolutionary, psychological and physiological bases of cooperation and competition? How does all of this impact on how we teach and learn? Are we even asking the right questions?

These are issues which were first raised for me back in the early 1980’s, when I first discovered Cooperative Learning as a field of research that supported my own views of teaching and learning. Prior to that, my classroom pedagogy did not have a label. Such questions have subsequently led to a professional career which has sought to explore the interfaces with other areas, in a constant search to expand the concepts of Cooperative Learning to their outer limits.

WHY COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Cooperative learning is one of three forms of learning – individual, competitive and cooperative, which we each try to balance as teachers. For many years the argument has been that intra-personal competition provides challenges for students to achieve their personal best, while inter-personal competition leads to aggression and negativity.

My contention is that, instead of looking at the question of balance, we need to reframe the question to ask ourselves how cooperative learning and competitive learning impact on an individual’s development, their ability to build community, and their capacity to make pro-social future decisions. We need to understand why some purportedly cooperative people are so competitive, and why some competitive people are so aggressive. We also need to invite and encourage researchers to delve deeper into where the bases of cooperation and competition come from and how they have evolved over human history, and what this means for the future of humankind.

Dr Perry W. Buffington, Ph.D wrote in his 1986 thesis Competition vs. Cooperation that ‘scientists have repeatedly verified (that cooperation is more effective than competition) in hundreds of studies since the late 1800s.  Yet big business, the educational system, the health-care community, and most parents continue to encourage competition, almost totally neglecting the power of cooperation.  None of these groups realizes that unabated competition may be costing billions of dollars in sales and overall decreases in human achievement.  Furthermore, researchers have shown that too much competition may cause poor health.  Yet we continue to hold the cherished belief that competition (not cooperation), to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, “is the royal road to success.” If in fact competition brings out the “beast” in us, then research demonstrates that cooperation surely brings out the “best” in us.  This finding has been held in virtually every occupation, skill, or behavior tested.  For instance, scientists who consider themselves cooperative tend to have more published articles than their competitive colleagues.  Cooperative businesspeople have higher salaries.  From elementary grades to college, cooperative students have higher grade point averages. Personnel directors who work together have fewer job vacancies to fill.  And, not surprisingly, cooperation increases creativity.’

Dr. David W. Johnson and Dr. Roger T. Johnson, professors at the University of Minnesota and co-directors of the Cooperative Learning Center, collected in excess of 500 research papers, on which Buffington’s paper was based, add that education and psychology had been at odds on the issue for years.  Roger Johnson explains, “If we are to teach people to be cooperative, then education and psychology must work together.  You see, a typical classroom teacher is taught to keep students quiet and apart, indirectly fostering competition.  Yet … people learn best when they work cooperatively with each other.  Children who experience this type of learning at an early age carry it with them as they mature.” David Johnson adds, “More students feel good about themselves as learners when they cooperate.  Their self-esteem goes up, they have a better sense of community, belonging, and acceptance.  One can also extrapolate this finding to any setting.” The work of the Johnson’s was expanded and progressed by a plethora of researchers including Robert Slavin, Neil Davidson, Shlomo Sharan, Yael Sharan, Celeste Brody, and many others who have each added particular perspectives to the field too numerous to expound in this brief paper.

If we are to propose, and indeed claim, that cooperation is the basis of a healthy society, we need to understand that there are a range of interpretations of the word ‘cooperation’ which may lead to differences in the implementation. We also need to further explore how Cooperative Learning integrates with other fields of research and interest to form a comprehensive pedagogy, and a way to influence systemic change.

COOPERATION AND COMPETITION

If co-operation is the practice of individuals or larger societal entities working in common, with mutually agreed-upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition, and in which the success of one is dependent and contingent upon the success of another, then a further exploration of the meaning of cooperation is needed.

While cooperation is the antithesis of competition, the need or desire to compete with others is a common impetus that motivates individuals to organize into a group and cooperate with each other in order to form a stronger competitive force.

In his blog Fightclub: Cooperation vs Competition – Round 1, 07/14/08, businessperson  Paul Taylor writes ‘justifications aside, there are plenty of reasons competition can be damaging, as well as many situations where cooperation is just a waste of time. Poorly managed / unfocused meetings, groupwork masquerading as teamwork are a perfect example of cooperation gone wrong.’ He asks the questions: ‘What is healthy competition? What is healthy cooperation? If these are being asked in the workforce, which they increasingly are, we, in schools need to pay closer attention as to how we expand student’s views of the positive power of cooperation, and how it can be used effectively to counteract the effects of aggressive competition’.

In his blog and keynote presentation to the International Congress and Convention Association on Information Technology, 26th Aug’08, PrasantSaha, MD, CIM, India offers the following:

‘Competition (leads to) less creativity, poorer performance, and reduced satisfaction

Competition (is an) aggressive tool to achieve market power. It means survival of the fittest and (only provides) cost effective solutions to the client. Competition is short-lived, (and provides immediate outcomes).

Cooperation means embracing competitors in partnership to the benefit of all. It is a management instrument for defensive positioning against competition (and corruption).Collaboration across the supply chain has become a crucial element in the creation of business value in today’s complex environment to means the whole world is our market place. Saha goes further in proposing that: ‘To succeed – we need Co-opetition in order to ‘Be Industry speakers and Catalysts of Change’.’

Saha, at this conference, was discussing the future of the Information Technology industry. His comments, while not based on education theory, provide a window into the types of discussions occurring in many businesses and industries across the world where statements to the effect that cooperation is a more effective modus operandi than competition, are now commonplace. For example there are claims that In July 06 the CEO of Pepsi called the CEO of Coca Cola to inform him that someone was trying to sell them the secret ‘Coke’ formula, showing that these fierce global rivals have a healthy respect for one another. The problem, however, is that they do not have the skills to either teach people to be cooperative, or to reignite the sense of community that comes from cooperation.

We also need to bear in mind that co-operation may be coerced (forced) or voluntary (freely chosen), and consequently individuals and groups might co-operate even although they have almost nothing in common with respect to interests or goals. Examples of that can be found in market trade, military wars, families, workplaces, schools and prisons, and more generally any institution or organization of which individuals are part (out of their own choice, by law, or forced). Cooperation in many areas such as farming and housing may be in the form of a cooperative or, alternately, in the form of a conventional business, however certain forms of cooperation are illegal in some jurisdictions because they alter the nature of access by others to economic or other resources. Thus, cooperation in the form of cartels or price-fixing may be illegal.

In ‘The Design of Design’, Brooks (2010) puts forth two simple rules for cooperation and competition:

*    If the objectives and constraints are well known, then competition will typically yield the best results.

*    If the objectives and constraints are ambiguous, then cooperation is the preferred approach.

The challenge for us, as teachers, is how to assist our students to develop levels of discernment around these concepts. To do so, we may need to look more closely at how the concept of cooperation interacts as an integral base for other fields of research.

THE INTERACTION OF COOPERATION WITH OTHER FIELDS OF RESEARCH

(1) Resiliency is a highly documented field which integrates seamlessly with cooperative learning to encourage the development to highly resilient and productive students. The research of Bonnie Bernard, Glenn Richardson, Tim Burns and Jeanne Gibbs built on the seminal work of Margaret Mead and Professor Emmy Werner, to build our understanding of the key importance of psychology in building a healthy sense of self-worth in individuals, and their capacity to interact cooperatively and productively with those around them. The definition of self-worth developed by the Californian Task Force in 1990 was ‘Appreciating my own worth and importance and having the character to be accountable for myself and to act responsibly toward others.’ An adaptation of  Bernard’s work reminds us that the elements of resiliency include:

-          Creating conditions for healthy development

-          Enabling students to develop possible selves and envisage preferred futures

-          Build self worth,    through

-          Opportunities for cooperation and collaboration

-          High, and realistic expectations of behaviour and learning

-          Providing caring and supportive adults

(2) The importance of cooperation as the basis for building community is also well documented.

Dr M Scott Peck (1981) built on the work of Rogers, Tao and Maslow and created a model of community building with four elements. He believed that building community is a collective responsibility which requires genuine and not pseudo-cooperation.

In the Peck model of community development there are four primary stages which have been paralleled with Tuckman’s Team building, and Blanchard’s leadership. This has been further adapted by Boyd (2000) to reflect cooperative developmental levels.

This concept of developing stages of community has been further translated, by Boyd (2000) into building individual capacity through the adaptation of Arthur Costa’s work on the professional maturation of teachers. This was included as an integral part of a core document written for the Victorian Department of Education to launch their statewide coaching initiative.

Julie Boyd: Coaching in Context. Victorian Department of Education 2009

(3) In order to determine the role of Cooperative Learning in building societal change, as practitioners we also need to recognise and address the following issues and explore in detail how each is impacting, and/or could impact, on our education systems:

FORCES DRIVING EDUCATIONAL CHANGE

1.  Changing World

2.  Changing Work

3.  Resiliency/Prevention

4.  Intelligence/Body and Brain-based/Constructivist and Developmental Learning/Cooperative Learning

5.  Results/Outcomes-Oriented Learning

6.  Systems Thinking

7. Expanded Learning Environments and School-work-Higher Learning

8. Communication

9. Technology

10. Environmental Consciousness

11. Useful Assessments and Accountability

12. Increased urbanisation                               (C) Julie Boyd 2000

(3) Ecology: All members of an ecosystem are engaged in a subtle interplay of competition and cooperation, involving countless forms of partnership. Similarly, all members of learning communities are engaged in continuously balancing appropriate uses of cooperation and competition. The work of Dr Fritjof Capra identified the key principles of living systems to include:

Partnership/Networks/Community

Connectivity/Interdependence

Diversity

Permeable Boundaries/Structure/Pattern

It is the application of these into education at a systems level through the extension of cooperative learning and learning community building that will enable an evolutionary systems regeneration based on learning and human needs leading to a sustainable society.

(4) A plethora of other fields of research are currently available to inform education to assist sophisticated educators in their search for a way to address the wave of testing based accountability which is currently sweeping across western nations as they compete to have the ‘most students to finish college’ (Obama 2011, State of the Union address) and hold teachers accountable for their student’s results, rather than their learning. The following is a brief and non-exhaustive list developed by Boyd in her work to assist architects in the design of new schools which are being designed, and built, with a thirty year shelf-life. Each of these listed areas was developed collaboratively using a single criterion ‘how do we build a school which will foster cooperation and accommodate developmental levels in each of these fields?’

It is the integration of key elements of these fields into a cohesive whole which will provide the basis for the systemic development of the following elements of building community capital, and the rethinking and future development of curriculum.

Considerations for BUILDING COMMUNITY CAPITAL

Social

Environmental

Intellectual

Health

Economic

Cultural

Intercultural

Creative

Governance

Technological

COOPERATION- A DEVELOPING PEDAGOGY and SYSTEM DRIVER

Cooperative Learning has never been about a set of classroom strategies. It is a way of being, an attitude toward self and others, and a basic value which drives natural systems. An integral perspective of cooperative learning as a pedagogical basis has been developed through a series of frameworks created by Julie Boyd et al. including the following which assume that cooperative learning forms a key component of the classroom environment:

Collaborative Approaches to Professional Learning and Reflection, Boyd, Cooper 1995

Building on these frameworks which were utilised to develop curriculum in several Australian states during the 1990’s, Boyd articulates, in a paper written for the South Australia Department of Education, the following pedagogical drivers to embed cooperative learning as a basis for education, that learning needs to be:

Rigorous

Relevant

Resourceful

Relational

Responsive

Reflective                     ‘Pedagogy: Beyond E-Learning’ South Australian Department of Education 2009

PURPOSE OF EDUCATION

Finally, if we are to accept the proposition that Cooperative Learning has a far broader intention than simply a set of strategies to use in a classroom, we need to examine the public purpose of education, and to muster research and argument as to how this needs to be articulated in future.

The DeLors Report commissioned by UNESCO (1990), determined the following as the five bases of schooling to be implemented internationally.

Learn to know

Learn to do

Learn to be

Learn to live together

Learn to live sustainably

Cooperative Learning, used well, addresses each of these elements.

John Goodlad, in the 1997 book ‘The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling’ proposed ‘an expanded mission for education that both identifies schooling as a moral and civic endeavour offers a framework for leading the charge for meaningful school reforms.’ Goodlad further identified that ‘We do not want to confuse education and schooling. Education is a deeper, more profound, undertaking than we hope, in the political entities that are schools serving a purpose in a democratic society.’

The challenge offered by Goodlad and his colleagues, including Linda Darling-Hammond, Theodore Sizer and Roger Soder continues to provide increasing meaning in today’s educational environment across first world, capitalist societies such as America, England and Australia, where increasing pressure for assessment conformity and improved test scores as measures of a teachers worth, clash at a base values level with what highly effective teachers know about good teaching and learning. The statement of Goodlad et al that ‘Every member of this panel is critically concerned about what appears to be the lack or disappearance of public purpose in our schools,’ is as contemporary now as when it was first made.

A Brief History of the Purpose of Public Schooling

AGRICULTURAL ERA

Purpose:                          To promote common culture and citizenship

Metaphor:                                      Community Centre serving political and civic needs

View of students:                          Neophytes- needing to be socialized

View of teachers:                          Sacred profession- called to service

INDUSTRIAL ERA

Purpose:                                          To ‘Australianise’ the immigrant and prepare workers for industrial society

Metaphor:                                      A factory- serving economic needs, assembly line production

View of students:                          Raw materials- products to be standardised, and controlled

View of teachers:                          Supervisors, administrators and managers

SOCIAL ERA

Purpose:                          Social reform to meet the needs of all kids

Metaphor:                     Hospital- for victims of social injustice, meeting cultural and social needs

View of students:                         Vulnerable- to be protected

View of teachers:                          Caretakers. District staff diagnose and prescribe.

Administrators as chiefs of staff

LIFELONG LEARNING ERA

Purpose:                          To teach people how to learn and to love learning lifelong

Metaphor:                     Collaborative learning community engaged with the larger world

View of students:                         Learners and leaders, creators and problem-solvers

View of teachers:                          Teachers as facilitators and coaches. Administrators as resource brokers

and links to community.

ELECTRONIC/DIGITAL ERA

Purpose:                                          Networks-Interconnected and Embedded and Consistent

Metaphor:                                      Spider web

Students:                                         Explorers and constructors of knowledge, both producers and consumers

Teachers:                                        Learners, Coaches and Guides

SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS ERA

Purpose:                                          Macro and micro-system stewardship of living systems

Metaphor:                                      Natural Gardens, communities.

Students:                                         Cooperative leaders responsible for social, ecological, economic and

natural capital

Teachers:                                        Multi-locational learning guides, opportunity facilitators, co-learners

© Julie Boyd 2000

Professor Alan Reid, in his 2003 discussion paper to the Australian Deans of Education, argues for Public Education as an ‘Education Commons’. He quotes Proposition 7 of New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education (ACDE, 2001) which boldly asserts that in the new century ‘the place of the “public” and the “private” in (school) education will be redefined’ (p. 121)’, and proceeds to quote ‘the operative concepts (should be) not around market choice, but around community autonomy, responsibility, self-governance

and diversity….(W)ith an approach to learning which stresses collaboration

over competition, it may be possible to mix and match resources and even

programs between public and community-based schools (ACDE, 2001, p. 124).

He further states  that his paper is based on a commitment to the public and democratic purposes of education, and  argues that ‘in the current environment the pursuit of these purposes calls for a reassessment of established arguments’ and the development of strategies that recognize and directly respond to the factors that are shaping contemporary education policy.

Val Klenowski, in her paper Public Education Matters: Reclaiming Public

Education for the Common Good in a Global Era, concurs, offering the argument that public education needs to be reclaimed to fulfill its role as a“democratising force” to address social and economic inequality and to respect and recognise diversity and difference.

Alan Walker, in his paper The Value of Public Education , adds his view.  “The common spaces we call public schools should be places characterised by plurality and diversity because it is here that we can teach that a respect for difference is precisely what binds our society together. Such lessons are not possible when our schooling system is organised to separate out, rather than to mix young people from a variety of backgrounds.

It is within these public spaces that students can serve an apprenticeship in democracy. The knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to function as effective and participating citizens are not things people are born with, they need to be taught systematically.’

To achieve these outcomes, Val Klenowski, Queensland University of Technology believes that universities have a key role to play. ‘Rather than be content with the frivolous,scholarly lax forms of teacher education and weak teaching prevailing in the world today, we should work towards education that truly takes the unattained potential of human beings as its starting point’.

This is not an easy challenge. As Clay Shirky(2008) points out “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

However another writer, Clay Christensen demonstrates in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, how disruptive technologies almost always arise from the margins of an industry, where they start out as insignificant solutions, which then become accepted and finally institutionalised. If Cooperative Learning is to become truly institutionalised we, as educators, need to take a much broader view of the concept.

CONCLUSION

For Cooperative Learning to be seen as a ‘public purpose’ for education, leading to societal sustainability, requires that influential educators lay out an argument, firstly as to why; secondly–how Cooperative Learning interfaces with other key research fields to provide a coherent pedagogy, thirdly- when it is appropriate to promote cooperation over competition, and also how such a challenge might manifest across each level of education systems and society.

If we are to mature into a truly interdependent community, or series of communities, then as researchers we need to be marshalling further evidence as to the importance of cooperation, and as practitioners we need to be raising our personal and systemic expectations to provide a vision for our own preferred future of a cooperative society.

———————————

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. Charles Darwin

REFERENCES

•         Benard, B. (1991). Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community. Portland, OR: Western Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities

•         Benard, B. (1989). Working Together: Principles of Effective Collaboration, Portland OR: Prevention Resource Center,

•         Boyd, J. (2009). Active Learning: Building Learning Communities, Julie Boyd and Associates

•         Boyd, Julie. (2008). Coaching In Context: Victorian Department of Education.

•         Boyd, Julie. (2000). Collaborative Approaches to Professional Learning and Reflection, www.julieboyd.com.au, Hastings Point, Australia

•         Boyd, J. (2011) Education for Building A Sustainable Society (in publication) Julie Boyd and Associates. www.julieboyd.com.au, Hastings Point, Australia

•         Boyd, J. (2009). Handbook for Partnership Coaches: South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services, Literacy and Numeracy National Partnership

•         Boyd, J. (2009). School Based Reflective Practice, Collegial Learning and Coaching Julie Boyd and Associates, ), www.julieboyd.com.au, Hastings Point, Australia

•         Boyd, J. (2010). Integral Curriculum for Relevant Learning, Julie Boyd and Associates ), www.julieboyd.com.au, Hastings Point, Australia

•         Boyd, J. (2010). Learning Together, Julie Boyd and Associates www.julieboyd.com.au, Hastings Point, Australia

•         Boyd, J and Cooper, C. Creating Sustained Growth through Collaborative Reflection, in Professional Development for Cooperative Learning: Issues and Approaches (ed) Celeste Brody and Neil Davidson, State University of New York Press 1998

•         Boyd, J.and Whitecross,C. (2011) Sustainable Model for Building an Ethical Community: A Leadership Guide (in publication) Julie Boyd and Associates (in publication), Australia

•         Costa, Art and Garmston, Robert.  (1994). Cognitive Coaching: A Foundation for Renaissance Schools. Norwood, MA.: Christopher Gordon Publishers.

•         Brooks, F. (2010). The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, USA: Penguin

•         Buck, S. (1998) The Global Commons: An Introduction, Washington, DC: Island Press.

•         Caldwell, B. &Roskam, J. (2002) Australia’s Education Choices. Sydney: The Menzies Research Centre.

•         Carlson, D. (1996) ‘Economic metaphors and the remaking of public education’ in Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, Vol. 18. No. 1, pp. 39-49.

•         Christensen, C. (2003). The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business, Collins Business Essentials.

•         Dalton, Joan and Boyd, Julie. (1992). I Teach: A Guide to Inspiring Classroom Leadership. Melbourne, Australia: Eleanor Curtain Publishing.

•         Delors, J. (1996) Learning the Treasure Within: UNESCO

•         Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., &Krotee, M.L. The relation between social interdependence and psychological health on the 1980 U.S. Olympic ice hockey team. (May, 1986). Journal of Psychology, 120, 279-291.
•         Kohn, A. How to succeed without even vying. (September, 1986)  Psychology Today, 20.22-28.

•         Kincheloe, Joe L.  Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: Springer Science + Business Media B.V.

•         Klenowski, V(2009) Public Education Matters: Reclaiming Public Education for the Common Good in a Global Era, Australian Educational Researcher,Volume 36, Number 1,April 2009

•         Lessig, L. (2001) The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, NewYork: Random House.

•         Lieberman, Ann, ed.  (1990).  Collaborative Cultures: Creating the Future Now.Philadelphia, PA.:  Falmer Press.

•         Reid, A. (2003) Public Education as an Education Commons, September, RMIT University

•         Reid, A & Thomson, P. ( 2003) ( Eds) Rethinking public education: Towards a public

•         curriculum. Australian Curriculum Studies Association.

•         Scott Peck,M.D. The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace

•         Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. USA: Penguin Press

•         Sergiovanni, T. (1993). Building Community in Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

•         Werner, E.E. and Smith, R.S. Overcoming the odds: High risk children from birth to adulthood. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 1992 (paperback 1994)

•         Werner, E. and Smith, R. (1982, 1989). Vulnerable but Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of Resilient Children and Youth. New York: Adams, Bannister, and Cox.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JULIE BOYD is a national and international educational consultant, community advocate and professional counsellor. Julie was recently appointed Educational Advisor to a consortium to build a number of next generation schools. Julie has worked across all three systems of education in every state and territory in Australia since 1990. Her school regeneration frameworks provided the initial platform for several statewide projects at state and National levels and her curriculum development model and digital curriculum assisted development of curriculum frameworks in four states. Julie is also an author, individual, group and organisational counsellor, curriculum developer, publisher and parent. Julie’s work with schools, teachers, education departments (state and national) and in the corporate field has seen an integration at micro- and macro- levels of effective behaviour and organisational change.

Julie is a published multimedia author and has written extensive digital curriculum for use with the Australian National Curriculum and International Baccalaureate. Julie has also received awards for her contributions including Telstra Entrepreneur of the Year, Australian Businesswomen’s Hall of Fame inductee, and other National Awards for Innovation.

Hub Website : www.julieboyd.com.au Email: info @julieboyd.com.au

For full article go to

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/teachers_democracy_sudan/

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”
– James Madison, 1788

This month’s historic referendum will determine southern Sudan’s future, either as an independent country of part of a unified Sudan. Voting ends on Saturday, January 15, and enormous efforts have been launched by U.S., Sudanese, and international agencies to support a credible process — that voters know how and where to vote, that the Sudanese referendum commission is equipped to carry out referendum logistics, that sufficient ballots and voting materials are available, and that poll workers and election observers are properly trained.

At the same time, the United States has continued to provide development assistance that strengthens democracy as well as demonstrates the benefits of peace. These efforts include improving health care and access to clean water, building roads and transportation infrastructure, providing microcredit loans to spur economic growth, and — of particular importance — increasing access to and the quality of education.

Formal education is not a prerequisite for wisdom, but it is a critical part of active participation in the democratic process. Literacy is crucial for making informed voting decisions and lobbying representatives for change. The public’s ability to effectively organize and work in groups provides protection against political abuses and dictatorships. Research supports the intuition that investments in education pay returns in peace and democracy. (See a related interactive graph.)

In 2005, when Sudan ended its 22-year civil war, only 37% of southern Sudanese men and 12% of women were literate. Primary school enrollment was low, and girls in particular faced many obstacles to attending school. These obstacles included high direct and indirect costs, discriminatory attitudes and school policies, and poor access to feminine hygiene products and lack of sanitation facilities.

Note: This entry first appeared on USAID’s Impact Blog. You can learn more about the Granville-Abbas School and view two videos about the school’s opening here on the Impact Blog.

My Note: The title of this blog is unfortunate. Although I agree with the sentiments, it’s another overt message that the only path to education is through textbooks. That is absolutely NOT the case. Real education means people being able to make discerning choices about their own future and that of their community and country.

Gizmodo is suggesting that the following technologies are on the verge of distinction

1) Pre-recorded Physical Media

2) Stereoscopic (with glasses) 3D TVs

3) eBook Readers

4) Consumer-Level Hard Drives.

5) Keys

6) Handheld Gaming consoles

Those that will SURVIVE

1) Digital music/media players

2) Landline phones

3) Internal combustion engines

4)5)6) The PC, Computer Keyboard and Mouse

http://www.nmsa.org/Publications/MiddleGround/Articles/August2008/Article1/tabid/1704/Default.aspx

http://thechrisvossshow.com/the-tablet-generation-no-im-not-talking-about-the-60s-the-future/

Question – is this ‘responsible use of technology?’ Just askin!

How is technology impacting brain development , free play and social development of children? Questions we need to answer as a society

From: http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2011/01/gates-value-added-study-is-full-of.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/01/gates-foundation-cooks-data-for-media.html

Comments from Blog ‘for the love of learning’

http://www.joebower.org/2011/01/our-system-tests-and-grades-young.html

“It’s impossible to discuss education without being hit upside the head umpteen times by the word accountability. At the root of this word is a demonizing fear that there is this horde of pension-sucking, union-loving teachers who are laughing their lazy asses to the bank.

This kind of fear-based accountability has spawned a test and punish bureaucracy that is making victims of us all.

School has been bastardized so badly that it is less about learning and more about gaming the system.

Assessment is no longer about helping kids – it’s about catching kids. Heck, it’s even become about catching teachers. I find it incredibly disheartening that anyone would make assessment more about blaming than learning.

If we really cared about real accountability, we would first ask if kids like school, and then we would have to care how they answer. Until then, kids will continue to be victims of a system that cares more about sustaining its current self than serving students.”

While you read this… watch the world change.

Afoot in America is an astonishing sense of imperious entitlement. People are told they can have it all — heck, that they deserve it all — and to hell with anyone who raises an objection. Rugged individualism is not enough; roughshod individualism is the new American ethos.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-astore/wikileaks-and-our-boorish_b_791969.html

Excellent account of personal experience which highlight the impact of rude, inconsiderate behaviour. This is far from just an American experience, and is certainly something experienced daily in Australia these days.

The question for Australian’s is where did this come from? Our historical ‘mateship’ culture has all but disappeared with the rise of selfish individualim.

1.            To develop: Breadth and Depth of Repertoire of Strategies

2.            To create: Capacity to align strategies / learning environments / curriculum / assessment

3.            To build: Sophistication of personal teaching frameworks and ensure fit with broader society

4.            To maintain: Interest in / Commitment to Learning

5.            To extend: Understanding of own field and how it integrates with others

6.            To understand: Appropriate (age, developmental, type) use of technology

7.            To effectively use: Simultaneous technology / Educational conversion of curriculum

8.            To ensure: Personal and Professional wellness. To lead towards Societal Wellness

9.            To self monitor: Personal / Professional Development and Assessment

10.          To build a Personal / Professional Cartography of Education

(C) Julie Boyd 2004    www.julieboyd.com.au

Facebook is for friends that are now strangers. Twitter is for strangers that should be your friends.

The sad reality just through on Twitter!

I wish i was friends with the people I follow on twitter on(sic) facebook  8 minutes ago via Twitter’’

Many other great people, transplanted into contemporary society, would also probably have ended up in remedial or learning disability classes, including Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Ford, William Butler Yeats, Agatha Christie, and Hans Christian Andersen.

Each of these talented people possessed an ability–scientific, artistic, musical, political, entrepreneurial, literary— that was irrelevant or even bothersome in a school setting but vital to the betterment and development of civilization.

Alexander McQueen- designer

Francois-Henri Pinault, head of the French luxury group PPR which controls McQueen’s companies, spoke of his friend, calling him a “genius,” a “friend” and a “poet” who was “hurt and lost in a world whose superficiality and lack of ideals he couldn’t accept.”

A prediction, based on more than 20 research fields, 35 years nationally and internationally of experience across education, business, community advocacy and politics, and what I have been teaching for more than 20 years is that we are now in the ‘Sustainable Systems’ Era whereby we rediscover a personal purpose and individual accountability contribute to community social, economic and ecological wellness. Recent moves at a national level in Australia by your government appear to support this view.

Purpose of Public Schooling

AGRICULTURAL ERA

Purpose:                                  To promote common culture and citizenship

Metaphor:                                Community Centre serving political and civic needs

View of students:                   Neophytes- needing to be socialized

View of teachers:                    Sacred profession- called to service

INDUSTRIAL ERA

Purpose:                                  To ‘Australianise’ the immigrant and prepare workers for industrial society

Metaphor:                                A factory- serving economic needs, assembly line production

View of students:                   Raw materials- products to be standardized, inspected and controlled

View of teachers:                    Supervisors, administrators and managers

SOCIAL ERA

Purpose:                                  Social reform to meet the needs of all kids

Metaphor:                                Hospital- for victims of social injustice, meeting cultural and social needs

View of students:                   Vulnerable- to be protected

View of teachers:                    Caretakers. District staff diagnose and prescribe. Administrators as chiefs of staff

LIFELONG LEARNING ERA

Purpose:                                  To teach people how to learn and to love learning lifelong

Metaphor:                                Collaborative learning community engaged with the larger world

View of students:                   Learners and leaders, creators and problem-solvers

View of teachers:                    Teachers as facilitators and coaches. Administrators as resource brokers and links to community.

ELECTRONIC/DIGITAL ERA

Purpose:                                  Networks-Interconnected and Embedded and Consistent

Metaphor:                                Spider web

Students:                                 Explorers and constructors of knowledge, both producers and consumers

Teachers:                                 Learners, Coaches and Guides

SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS ERA

Purpose:                                  Macro and micro-system stewardship of living systems

Metaphor:                                Natural Gardens, communities.

Students:                                 Leaders responsible for social, ecological, economic and natural capital

Teachers:                                 Multi-locational learning guides, opportunity facilitators, co-learners

(C) Julie Boyd 2000

Tiny Estonia leads internet revolution

Among the former communist countries set to join the European Union on 1 May, 2004 Estonia is the smallest, but the most technologically advanced.

Estonia’s children become computer-literate very early
The former Soviet republic, where parliament has declared internet access a basic human right, is ahead of EU countries like France and Italy when it comes to the use of mobile phones and internet connections.

Thirteen years ago, when Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union, only half of the country’s 1.4 million people even had a telephone line.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3603943.stm Excellent article
By Oana Lungescu
BBC, Estonia

Education needs to prepare leaders of the future, not of the past.

Politicians must make a stand in stating that one of the key purposes of education now is sustainability . UNESCO did it in 1996 when it identified the5 bases of schooling. These HAVE NOT CHANGED!

UNESCO 1996: 5 Bases of Schooling

Learn to know

Learn to do

Learn to be

Learn to live together

Learn to live sustainably