What I learned in PD today

From a professional development day inspired by an ASCD presentation by Dr. Jan Jones called Building Millennial Minds: Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's World I learned that:

Change is exponential. Gates says technology capacity doubles every nine months. Photonics leads to unimaginable data transmission rates. Semantic Web will be our new global brain.

The world is changing four times faster than schools (Dr. Willard Daggett).* Actually, the doctor is a bit fuzzy with the number. The exact number is 4.2651.

[The vision I have is of a globe spinning so rapidly that it'll throw everyone into space, including educationists].

Kids are immersed in fancy new technology (digital natives).

People will not earn a living, they'll learn a living.

21th century skills redefine core skills. What are those new core skills? Deep conceptual knowledge, critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving, innovation, imagination.

[I am afraid the mindless repetition of the critical thinking mantra will dull the senses and stop all thinking in its track. What's needed is critical thinking about "critical thinking."]

What are the implications for teaching of all this? I quote: "Learning can no longer be full, frontal lecturing or recall of data/facts, content."

[This is a spectacular non sequitur. Doubling technology capacity (whatever that is), faster data transmission rates and kids running around with iPods have no bearing on what content should be learned and how it should be taught. If it isn't dizzying technological change but the call for "deep conceptual knowledge" that necessitates the abandonment of content recall, then there is trouble, too. How is one supposed to have "deep conceptual knowledge" without engagement with content, i.e. assimilating or learning the content? Recall is another way of saying that content has been learned. A conceptualization is an abstraction from facts, a way to bring order to otherwise disparate facts. Conceptual knowledge, deep or otherwise, is impossible without that basis. So once again, educationists are blowing smoke, apparently enamored of the high-falutin' sound of these phrases without applying some critical thinking.]

What takes its place:

Big ideas

21th century learnings [note the plural]

Melding disciplines

Unique connections

Meta-cognitive options

Focusing instruction on relevance (don't fixate on minutiae, high-stakes testing)

Digital age literacies, e.g. health & wellness literacy, visual/performing arts literacy, information literacy, multicultural literacy... [Another example of educationist corruption of a good word that is now rendered meaningless].

So just go ahead, do the critical thinking and creating. No need to know anything.

*The sound of "change" makes educationists delirious. It's as intoxicating as a bottle of vodka. The change that whips them into a frenzy is mostly of a superficial nature, like faster data transmission rates and higher flash card storage capacity, kids adept at playing with new electronic gadgets and so on. From this they draw illogical conclusions about what and how things should be taught.

To calm them down from this frenzy and to rehearse critical thinking skills, I recommend that educationists be required to write a rigorous, lenghty and critical essay before Ed. D.'s are handed out. This essay could be called Change and Continuity. The objective of this essay is to examine what changes are occurring, whether these changes are profound or superficial and what, if any, effect they should have on the academic curriculum.

Educationists should then compare and contrast these changes to what stays the same in the various subject areas, 21th century or not. Educationists could ask themselves a long list of questions pertaining to the various disciplines. For example, do faster data transmission rates and high-capacity flash cards alter the laws of gravity and motion, planetary orbits and atom bonding, or the electromagnetic spectrum and Fraunhofer lines? Do these technological changes impinge on photosynthesis and animal cell structure? Or refraction and the Doppler effect? Do they make 2 + 2 = 4 untrue? Is pi no longer the ratio of circumference to diameter because of dizzying 21th century changes and yet-unheard of electronic gadgets? Did Caesar suddenly not cross the Rubicon because Gates predicts a doubling of technological capacity every nine months?

Requiring educationists to pose and answer these questions could have a sobering effect. But I wouldn't count on it.

Critical thinking and creativity watch

It's been said that if fascism comes, it will come in the name of anti-fascism.

I am reminded of that aperçu every time an educationist, business-type or politician sings the praises of critical thinking, higher-order thinking skills, creativity and innovation.

These are all lofty aspirations. What bothers me is that the advocacy of these worthy goals is frequently accompanied by a disparagement of subject matter knowledge. These advocates seem to believe that these qualities can be taught in a vacuum. It's questionable whether they can be taught at all. More likely they develop incidentally through a struggle with subject matter. They are certainly not free-floating entities without moorings. So to get back to the fascism case, in edland anti-intellectualism comes in the name of "critical thinking" and "creativity".

I found new evidence for this phenomenon in a fight over educational legislation in Colorado as presented by the blog Mount Virtus:

On a party line vote today, the Senate Education Committee passed a bill sponsored by Senator Sue Windels (D-Arvada) to mandate standards on Colorado schools that teach sex education. Three committee members, all Democrats - Windels, Bob Bacon, and Ron Tupa - voted to support the House Bill 1292 mandate six weeks after voting against a mandate setting higher state graduation requirements for math and science (Senate Bill 131), and eight weeks after voting against a requirement that high school graduates have basic competency in English (Senate Bill 73). Suzanne Williams (D-Aurora) was the only committee member to cast votes for all three measures.

Last week the House Education Committee, chaired by Mike “Give ‘Em Hell” Merrifield, shot down the math and science requirements after hearing support from a Jefferson County teacher, a university president (could have been two if Merrifield hadn’t rescheduled the hearing at the last minute so CU’s Hank Brown couldn’t testify), and a Lockheed engineer. Said Merrifield:

And here is the kicker:

“My contention is by forcing every child into this narrow curriculum, we are not making them more innovative, we are not making them more creative,” the Colorado Springs Democrat said, citing a national report that calls a well-rounded education the “passport to a job in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life.”

The Witwer plan, Merrifield said, would make students “more regimented and more lock-step (with) less ability to think outside the box.”

(Hat tip to Myrtle Hocklemeier commenting at KTM II.)

The twisted thinking exhibited by this chairman of the House Education Committee (of all things!) frankly leaves me speechless. It's easy to utter a stupidity. It takes considerable effort to describe the nature of a stupidity. For example, would I have to brandish logical notions like denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent to tackle this inanity?

Another juicy example comes via D-EDRECKONING. Highly prolific blogger Ken deRosa cites a Daily Mail article in which some Association of Teachers and Lecturers suffers paroxysms of anti-intellectualism:

Schools should teach children the key skills they need for life - like walking and thinking - not set subjects such as history or French, teachers' leaders have said.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for the National Curriculum to be torn up and the testing system abolished.

The union said teachers in local schools should be able to adapt lessons to fit a new framework focusing on important skills for life, rather than academic subjects.

Martin Johnson, ATL's acting deputy general secretary, said prioritising academic education over other types of knowledge was "totalitarian".

"A curriculum is a selection from the total sum of knowledge, which is exploding," he said.

"For the state to suggest that some knowledge should be privileged over other knowledge is a bit totalitarian in a 21st century environment. We are arguing that knowledge which traditionally has high status should not be privileged over other kinds of knowledge.

Schools should teach children the key skills they need for life - like walking and thinking?

Walking?

Now I am waiting for an educationist to point out breathlessly that walking is an important 21th century skill.

UPDATE:
In the meantime, Rory has left a comment at D-ED RECKONING in which he reviews the massive amount of research confirming the importance of walking:

I am finally glad someone has finally decided to address the walking achievement gap.

Study after study has confirmed that the ability to walk is a critical aspect of employment.

Our new information based society heavily depends on consumption of coffee. A recent study by a leading University determined it is much more economical to provide centralized coffee pots in office environments. Without the ability to "walk" to these coffee pots, employees will soon suffer from coffee withdrawal causing severe detrimental effects on worker productivity.

L.B. Ral from Progressive University cautions against a biased approach to walking instruction though. He notes that different cultures have different styles of walking.

Meanwhile, disabled activists have called the new emphasis on walking instruction discriminatory. They point out that thousands of wheelchair bound people across the country are able to get around quite well without walking. They recommend "walking" classes be replaced with inclusive instruction on "moving".

Boxed-in creativity

When educationists don't want to impart knowledge (which they don't by definition), they mumble something about "critical thinking" and "creativity".

In the Comments section of Education Week and in response to an article in Education Week, writer SteveH argues persuasively that you cannot think outside the box if you don't know what's inside the box:

Creativity is even more poorly defined, but many toss it out like everyone knows what it means. What is creativity in math? It's something that is only possible when it is built on mastery of a whole lot of basic skills. It is not something learned top-down. You have to know what is inside the box before you can think outside of the box. There is nothing worse in the scientific world than a technical report whose authors do not cite (or even know about) other work in their field.

Here is a problem that I had to solve a number of years ago. Find, as fast as possible, the intersection line segment of two triangles. The triangles are each defined by three [X,Y,Z] points and you have to be able to eliminate triangles that are not close very quickly.

Employers do not want "creative" employees who want to rediscover the wheel. They want employees who know the literature and can look it up. When they have to look it up, they need to know where to go and they need to implicitly know the difference between a dot product and a cross product. They need to know what a box check is; not creatively discover it. Only after reviewing the literature and finding no solution that meets the need, do you begin to get creative. But creativity takes knowledge and mastery of the basics. Real creativity is only possible by standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before you. Creativity is not sheer dumb luck. Knowledge and mastery do not reduce creativity, they enhance it.

With a fine touch for the comical, Education Week encourages readers to comment on the effect of "school reform."

What do you think? Does the current approach to school reform favor the regurgitation of random facts over the development of critical and creative thinking?

It doesn't say which school reform but I am assuming Education Week is referring to NCLB's accountability schemes. If holding educationists accountable for educating kids is likely to result only in a "regurgitation of random facts," then the state of education is in even worse shape than I had previously assumed. The conclusion I reach is that educationists simply don't know how to educate, if holding them accountable for minimal standards results in a regurgitation of random facts. I suggest they vacate the field and leave education to others.