A Teacher’s Thoughts

When I wrote about what someone might see when walking through a technology integrated classroom, my goal was to provide a quick view for a group of administrators and school board members in my district. The list was clearly missing something. Jeff Utecht’s Post on evaluating technology use in the classroom goes this next step giving observers a way to assess the level of technology use in that room. Combine this with the recent post by Kim Cofino on moving teachers into the 21st century and an administrator might have a good framework for creating change.

Following the previous post, it is time to look to the future. Which way to go? Here are some ideas:

Tackle some questions regarding climate change using wikis perhaps. I have done units like this before using a socratic seminar. I saw an interesting post on Julie Lindsay’s blog about the fishbowl technique used by Karl Fisch and some students in Colorado. Amazing. I think I might want to try this.

Our local school to career organization is sponsoring a science and technology fair. This could make a good jumping off point for some independent learning. We have been waiting to launch students with their own blogs this year (really we shouldn’t have waited but here we are mid-year already!) and these could serve as a great place to record their ideas and thoughts as they research. After reading some posts coming from the Science Bloggers Conference in North Carolina over the weekend I only feel more strongly about moving this idea forward.

Water resources
Hard not to want to take advantage of the great local resources for studying water resources. While I would want to focus on current issues and future problems, this will also allow for some good historical geology to meet some state standards.

Spend some more time with those folks at the ISS07 project. Basically, I need to build this into the schedule. I will ask the kids how to make this work since they are interested.

And the big question. How to tie together climate, climate change, water resources and water ecology and our local community? Oh, and finish it before school ends.

As the end of the semester draws near I thought it a good time to reflect on the gains made in class. Its amazing how curriculum and learning can snowball so quickly as the year goes on. One thing leads to another, blending in to what came before. At times it feels like really little progress is being made at all, at least when measured in big terms. Yet on the day to day activity of my room, nothing is more evident than the self-directed learning my students have been able to conduct lately. When I returned to a full time presence in all of my classes, I reminded my students that I expected them to be independent and motivated learners. I reminded them that solving the problem was their job (and of course asking me for help could be a part of the process, but only a part). As it turns out, I was wasting my breath. Not because it went in one ear and out the other but because, it did not need to be said, for the most part they were there. Well, most of them. I have a few left, those who have had their hands held on all occasions, who still have not gained the confidence, despite success. With these students I need to focus, yet without too much intervention. I need to let them know that I care, yet at the same time, leave them to solve their problems with tools other than me. I need to recognize too, though that sometimes it isn’t a lack of confidence, lack of helpful classmates, or lack of skills that keeps a few students from reaching the independence I want for them. Perhaps some of these students can do what I ask, and know it but simply want that connection, with a supportive adult, that they may not get when they leave school each day. Finding that balance is an art.

So where have we been?
• Density review (includes mass, volume, area, and length)
• Density and buoyancy review
• Applying density and buoyancy concepts to gases (previous knowledge was regarding liquids and solids)
• Laboratory techniques review and extension-working with gases requires a far more precise technique of measurement than previously used by these students
• Blog Commenting
• Using News Aggregators
• Using Google Docs for collaboration
• Dealing with minor networking problems
• Internet safety
• Student investigations of space related topics (particular to the ISS07 project)
• Online data collection
• graphing
• correlation
• drawing conclusions from data
• supporting ideas with evidence
• pressure and movement of fluids
• properties of fluids
• relationships between pressure and density
• functional design and design process
• seasonal climate variations
• effects of sun angle and position on earth in climate

Skim over any state’s science standards and you are likely to see a long list of topics you may recall from various science classes in your past, from the elementary grades through college. Here in New Hampshire the list is much the same. Learning targets are set for different blocks of grade level spans. And at each grade span there are topics from life science, physical science, and earth science. So at first glance it would appear that science standards do emphasize science. In fact, with a recent rewrite of the New Hampshire Frameworks for Science Literacy, many of the standards span many grade levels with student proficiencies being set based on developmental milestones.

While the changes in these standards with the recent revision are good, they do not go nearly far enough. Science is still portrayed as a body of knowledge to be learned and known. The process of science is reduced to the scientific method, a central idea, but in reality a generalization that does not do just service to the efforts of achieving understanding and knowledge in science.

I have written before on the needs of 21st century science learners. The ideas I discussed are related tightly to ideas about 21st century literacy skills in general. The process of dealing with information and creating knowledge in science are similar. Curriculum focus needs to recognize that content outside of a context of process is just as meaningless as process without content. Standards need to emphasize active doing, kids collecting data (and there are ample sources online and through lab experiments), open ended investigations, questioning skills and creativity.

Influence “It gives kids different lenses on the world”

When my wife and I first looked into a Waldorf school for our son I came home thinking, “ah, no.” Everything seemed fine really. The staff were very caring, the facility adequate, the other children, some of whom we knew were happy and prospering. So what was the turn off? Well, there were some pedagogical things that didn’t seat quite right, but when they said, no technology, not until high school, well that was that.

So why is it that now, just over four months after my son starting pre-school am I so happy with the decision to go to Waldorf at this time? Surprisingly my approval of the methods I have learned about stems directly from my observations of technology in the classroom, and the changes in society brought about by the read/write web. This isn’t a negative rant against the social networking youth but a realization that the skills built by a Waldorf education are among those that are fueling the changing nature of society.

As the web expands to house a greater and greater market share of the worlds media, the importance of visual representation in ballooning. I don’t know that the days of the logical/sequential learner are over, but certainly the future will value these visual thinkers to a high degree. And I don’t think it will be just the marketing world that will be after these visual thinkers, the fields of science, engineering and medicine will create many opportunities to put visual skills to use. Waldorf spends a great deal of time cultivating the visual artist, interweaving visual thought into all subjects. Impressive is the degree of mathematical reasoning demonstrated by these visual thinkers.

Networks of people are forming at unprecedented rates. In fact, I just joined another new one today. Social networks, blogging, forums, live streaming, video sharing, podcasts, all of these are social tools currently being leveraged or at least explored by educators. There is a call for collaborative skills to be developed in today’s students, for a global perspective to be developed in students. While there are definitely skills that apply to interacting effectively with others online, the root skills are the skills we learn as children, interacting with others at school, the playground, home and in other social arenas. School is largely an asocial atmosphere where students are often working in isolation. Teachers too work isolated, so clearly there is little modeling going on. There is a focus on the development of the inter and intra-personal skills necessary to develop true collaborative skills in Waldorf. Waldorf strips the environment of much of the trappings of our modern society. In so doing much of the play that is the work of a Waldorf student must come from the individual kid. This brings the focus to the interaction between kids, without it they would just be sitting there.

The combination of the approach to socialization and artistic expression really drives a great deal of creativity, a resource often undeveloped in many public schools. The ability to be able to create will be a significant skill for todays young students.

I read somewhere recently a prediction that the current generation going through school now will be the one to change the way everything is done, through the connections of technology and that the next generation will then seek the balance of life that will often be lost on their predecessors. Through the close attention to development of children Waldorf seems to have this covered as well. Balance is always emphasized, balance in the day, in activities and in life. And aside from the benefits to ones health as a result of being happy, well balanced individuals just seem more interesting. This can only help them in a networked world where rapid change is the only constant.

So for now, for preschool, I am enjoying the ideas I am hearing from the Waldorf teachers. I don’t buy everything, at least not in the way I hear it explained, but there is definitely something to much of what they are doing. To my eyes, they already have in place many of the prerequisites batted about amongst many in the edublogosphere.