EDSS 531

Philosophy/Model Integration

Well, I have to say, it’s sort of obvious that I’ll choose Inductive Thinking and Scientific Inquiry as the educational models that fit my education philosophy which, you may recall, was perennialist as to content and existentialist as to process.  The reason I think it is obvious is that the most important skills of a Physicist are Inductive Thinking and Scientific Inquiry.  Discerning correlations and generalizing those correlations into causative hypotheses is the first job of the practicing Physicist.  And the second job is testing those hypotheses against reality and modifying them as necessary.  So, state standards notwithstanding, it is really those two models themselves that students of Physics most need to learn.  These two models need not be student-centered, which is to say existentialist, and both have been practiced in very teacher-centered educational environments in the past.  But both can be applied in student-centered ways and be very successful that way.  

We use Scientific Inquiry in the classroom whenever we have a discrepant event.  We ask the students to make a prediction based on their current understanding of nature, then test their prediction against reality and modify it accordingly.  The process is student-centered in that it is about their prediction, their experience and their conclusion, not that of the book or teacher.  Discrepant events are often billed as being just a way of generating cognitive dissonance for the purpose of highlighting a principle and making it more memorable, and they can have that effect.  But they are also valuable in developing the habit of open-mindedness; the ability to accept that one’s preconception may not be accurate.  So I see the Scientific Inquiry model as having the dual role of enhancing the acquisition of information-centered, perennially important knowledge as well as engendering in students certain thinking skills that will serve them later in life.

When you teach to the standard, except for those few points in the Investigation and Experimentation section, it’s mostly about understanding physical principles and applying them (and their appropriate formulas) to various problems or situations.  That’s largely a perennial approach.  It’s necessary to develop that skill, but it is not the same skill as that of recognizing relationships between isolated pieces of information or, more importantly, isolated principles.  I always come back to a lab commonly done in Physics 1.  It’s a reaffirmation of Newton’s second, not an inductive lab, but there is an anomaly that always appears as a result of friction.  As it happens, a graph that should go through zero has a finite y-intercept that exactly corresponds to the friction in the system and is easy to account for, if one notices it.  Very few students, however, notice it until and unless I point it out to them.  That, of course, is what I want to change.  I want my students to engage their own curiosity; to notice patterns, and exceptions to those patterns, for themselves, and to look for the meaning within them. 

In short, what I hope to be able to accomplish, at least a little, is for students to learn Physics the way Physicists practice physics:  Standing on the shoulders of giants, and imagining.

WHAT?

Last night in methods Barry mentioned that his CT had done the Pendulum lab as a discrepant event.  I was pleasantly surprised.   You wouldn’t think it would be surprising at all, really.  The pendulum lab is perfect for teaching scientific inquiry.  It requires almost no equipment – some string, some fishing weights, a cell phone and something to hang the string from.  A pendulum’s  period is simple to measure, depends linearly on one obvious and easily controllable variable (length), and does not depend at all on another obvious and easily controllable variable (mass).  So, like I say, it’s perfect.  Everybody should use it.

There’s more.  Simple Harmonic Motion is also one of the most basic and universal phenomena in Physics.  Firmly ensconced in classical mechanics it is easily derivable from Newton’s laws, but in its own right it is the foundation of wave mechanics, which in its turn is the foundation for acoustics, physical optics, all of AC electronics including microwave and communications technology and finally the vast majority of modern Physics, including quantum mechanics, atomic and molecular Physics, the standard model and pretty much all of the dozens of unified field theories out there.  Obviously then, Simple Harmonic Motion is an essential part of any Physics curriculum.  So why would I be pleasantly surprised to hear that Barry was teaching it?  Because it is not taught in any of the Physics 1 classes I’ve seen (My CT last semester did teach  it in AP).  And why would it not be part of the curriculum in those classes.  Because it’s not in the standard.  Nowhere. 

Speaking now not as a Teacher Candidate, but as  practicing Physicist and Engineering Manager, I have this to say to the California Department of Education:  “What in God’s name can you be thinking?”

On the advent of the three-legged fly swatter.

We saw a video of a lecture by Daniel Pink, related to his book on right-brainedness. In it he displayed a fly swatter that has three little legs protruding from the handle for it to stand on when not in use, and pointed out that this device commanded a wild price tag (I think it was $8 or $14), just because it had a cool designer look and feel. At least that’s how I interpreted it. Me, I think he was just a wee bit off the mark. The designer toilet brush he also displayed sold for only 3 bucks. So what’s so special about a three-legged fly swatter?

Anyone who has ever lived in close proximity to livestock knows that you want your fly swatter handy. Particularly in the kitchen, you want to be able to grab and swat in a matter of seconds. But one thing you definitely DON’T want is to lay the business end of the thing down on the kitchen counter. Hence the legs. Really, it’s a great design. And if it’s patented, which I’m sure it is, it can easily sell for 14 bucks. This is not to detract from the beauty of the design, but to point to its utility. “Form follows function” is, in my opinion, more than a principle taught at design school, it’s a law of nature; could even be considered to be a corollary to the law of natural selection. Really build a better fly swatter and, in time, you’ll drive all the other contenders out of the market. If that fly swatter is better because it has legs, then the fact that the legs give it a unique appearance is secondary to the increased utility of the design. This is also not to detract from the value of right-brained thinking, but to point to the overarching value of integrated thinking. Recognizing the need to have your fly swatter handy is a left-brained kind of a thing. Pulling together a wide range of disparate elements and seeing within them a creative solution to the problem is right-brained.

What, then does this have to do with education? Pinks thesis, as I read it, is that we as a society do not value right-brained-ness sufficiently and do not do enough to culture it in our educational system. Probably he’s right. And that, to me, is rather discouraging. My only real problem with his book and his seminars is that it seems to me yesterdays news. These ideas have been floating around the culture since at least the seventies. I point to that decade because that is when I first became aware of them, and did so only because that is when I first began to pay attention. Probably they have been extant throughout human history. Why then is the left-brained, linear, goal-oriented style of thinking so dominant. I haven’t an answer, but I think it may have something to do with fear. When we fear death or suffering, we rely on the most direct means of meeting our basic needs, be they real or imagined. That puts us in linear, short-term survival mode where the left-brain is most successful. Only when we have some time to relax can we open ourselves to the bigger, longer, holistic appreciation of life.


Anyway, there it is, and what I have to say is concluded, concerning the nature of the fly swatter.


Perhaps you’d enjoy an interlude of cross-brainedness.

On the integration of iPads at Oceanside High. 

First off, I was pretty amazed at the campus, the quality of students and the quality of the work they were doing.  I am new to this area, and the only impression I have of the area schools has come from my cohort, but I was under the impression that O-side had a not so great reputation.  But I would love to teach there. 

Anyway, on to the iPads.  Clearly they have not had time to really get full value from them, but for my money JUST being able to do assessment for learning is enough to warrant the expense.  I asked how that process could be achieved without those devices and the presenting teacher kind of danced around the question, but the true answer was ”It can’t”.  At least it can’t without some form of automated randomization of test questions and that requires at least computer access.  It’s also true that the type of testing they were doing is not a panacea.  Students could practice on a problem until they get it, yet not be able to apply the principle to a different set of circumstances. But it’s still a great tool and even that sort of second-tier rote learning is a better foundation for advanced study of Physics than most HS students get. 

The chem teacher is apparently also recording lectures or example for kids to work with individually.  He announced that he would be recording a vlog on some topic that evening.  So they are apparently doing at least some degree of flipped instruction.

I’m sure they’ll use the technology to greater and greater advantage  as time goes by – because they believe in it are committed getting the best out of it.  The main thing, though, is that they seem committed to student-centric education, and that’s where the action is.

EDSS 541

My thoughts and reactions to Disrupting Class, by Christensen, Horn & Johnson

It is not entirely clear to me why Christensen et. al. place so much initial importance on the terms ‘modular’ and ‘interdependent’, but there it is.   In an interdependent design, the interfaces between the different components of a system are unique to that system making it impossible to substitute components form a similar system from a different source.  In a modular system, interfaces are standardized such that components from different system may be interchanged without modification.  The authors point out that modularization generally happens only when a technology has become mature.  For example, the drive battery from a Honda hybrid vehicle cannot be replaced by one from a Toyota Prius whereas their 12-volt system batteries are pin compatible and could be swapped at will.  The electric drive system is a technology in its infancy while the system battery architecture has been unchanged for at least 50 years.

The authors argue that the American educational system has an interdependent architecture.  I’m not sure I agree.  As I sit in the RBV student library writing this, I see that it is indistinguishable from the VHS library nearby and from the Windsor High library 600 miles away.  Surely that is an example of modularization.  The standardized curriculum and assessments  mandated by the state of California, and soon to be mandated nationwide also strike me as sings of increasing modularization.  It is not so much that “you can’t study this in ninth grade if you didn’t cover that in seventh…” as “If you are in ninth grade, you did cover that in seventh”, so you could move from one school to another and never notice the difference.

What the book is primarily about is ‘disruptive innovation’.   Disruptive innovation occurs when a product or system, which has been designed to address an unmet need in a segment of the consuming population, unexpectedly overtakes and supplants existing products and systems.  An example is FedEx.  Designed to address the needs of those who just HAD to have their packages delivered overnight, whatever the cost, the more efficient delivery systems the company developed for that purpose are taking over the function of simply delivering packages and driving the USPS out of business.  A key component of disruptive innovation is the word “unexpected”.  Disruptive innovation is rarely if ever planned.  Those innovators see an underserved niche market in which their idea can flourish and the technology is found serendipitously to be applicable over a wide market.  MySpace, for example, was originally conceived as a means for musicians (only) to share their work.  By contrast, sustaining innovation has to do with improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of existing products and systems, and adapting them incrementally to meet the evolving needs of their consumers.

Considering the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovation, I would say that the American school system, in the face of the ever-changing demands made on it, is arguably the most successful sustaining innovator in history.  But there remain significant populations of children who are chronically underserved by it, populations which it was, perhaps, not originally intended to serve.  (The authors cite Thomas Jefferson as wanting education to be universal, “so that all citizens could participate in the democracy”.  Bear in mind, however, that to Jefferson, “citizens” meant white, male landowners.)   So this system of education is ripe for being taken down, so to speak, by a disruptive innovation in the generalized field of developing children into adults.

Christensen posits education as a value-added process.  Somewhat confusingly, he describes both the process of educating children and the business of providing instructional and curricular tools as value-added industries.  Certainly such commodities as textbooks are produced that way and the result is a one-size-fits-all kind of approach to learning.  But it is interesting to consider schools themselves as value-added enterprises.   Like a factory that takes in pieces of sheet metal and turns out auto bodies, the schools take in partially socialized children and turn out competent adults by way of implanting knowledge, habits and attitudes.  Many would argue that value is actually subtracted in that process, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that efficiency in a value added chain dictates uniformity of both process and product and makes individualized instruction difficult if not impossible.  Like chickens bred for uniformity of size so as to be easily processed by automatic machines, students are expected to fit a mold and if some part doesn’t fit, well that part gets squished, and the machine moves on.  This is the trap of monolithic education, for which he prescribes student-centric education as the cure. 

Student-centric education is not a new concept.  In past centuries, institutions of higher learning were for the elite (remember Jefferson’s white, male landowners) group instruction was in comparatively small groups and every student had a mentor.  In the trades, apprentices were individually instructed in the intricacies of their trade by journeymen, and journeymen by masters.  Today, the wealthy still have access to schools where individual mentoring is the norm and class sizes are in the single digits.  But, to be blunt, our desire to provide high level education to every member of our society has not been matched by our willingness to pay for it, so we have followed a path of increasing standardization of both product and process.  That path, as we’ve heard, makes educational institutions ripe for disruption.

Our authors seem to believe they have identified the disruptor in the form of computers, but I think it is more likely that the real disruptor is student-centric education, which may or may not turn out to be accomplished by way of the cloud.  In any case, they are correct to state that attempts to exploit disruptive innovation through existing monolithic systems geared toward sustaining innovation are likely to fail.  They call that cramming, and point out that simply equipping classrooms with computers has not, and will not, automatically lead to student-centered education.

I think it comes down to this.  If information technology is able to lower the cost of student centered education to the point that it is available to (almost) everyone, then (almost) everyone will take advantage of it and we will see a real transformation of our school systems.  If market or political or other forces prevent the necessary level of cost reduction and individual adoption oon the part of students, then internet-based education will turn out to be just another technology that was never able to climb the S-curve.

reflection on a twitter chat

My first real experience of twitter was an #edchat (is # a vowel or a consonant?) a week or two ago.  Topic:  How do we know when our students are engaged.  What was it like?  It was like a cocktail party.  Every comment short and maybe sweet.  It takes a little work to condense a thought into 140 characters.  With #edchat the action is fast and furious. If it takes a few minutes to compose a retweet, decide what of the original to include, etc.  during that time you’ll have missed a lot.  I was totally lost – I couldn’t figure out whether to retweet, or reply, what hash tag(s) to put on it.  So I basically lurked after the first 15 minutes.  But I guess that’s the idea.  I guess it’s meant to be like a cocktail party.  Maybe participate in a few conversations, maybe learn a few things.

There’s one thing that really annoyed me – I started paying attention about a half hour before the session began, when there were not so many tweets coming through and I was able to follow a lot more.  The percentage of tweets that had a link to a blog site that required registration to read the entire post was high – and I know that on the internet e-mail addresses are like currency.  I also found at least one person who seemed to have an automated tweet with #edchat going on that led to a site hawking his products.  That kind of thing turns me off in a big way. 

Today I learned how to block and report spam, but am I willing to use that function?  Let’s see.  I looked in a little while ago and saw a very interesting tweet in #edcaht.  Followed the link to the ASCD website to read a blog post about “7 myths about rigor”.  At the end of the post I was directed to learn how to conquer those myths ------- by purchasing a book from their bookstore.  Blatant spam.  But no report from me.  Because, hey, they’ve got a .org domain.  That means it’s a non-profit, right?  They’re only trying to help, right?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  Does the end justify the means?