Archive Page 5 of 8

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Calculated Risks

Published by Samantha on January 24, 2008 in Learning. 29 Comments

I see it around me every day, and it kills me; the averted eyes and hesitant words create awkward silences, and it becomes obvious that almost every student in that math class wants to disappear. It kills me because I’m not like that . . . anymore. I can tell you when it all changed for me, too.

All my life, I always wanted to know why I needed math, and when no one answered it to my satisfaction year after year, I gave up wanting one. I gave up wanting to know at all. I gave up my sense of curiosity and settled for crunching numbers. This is a story that most students share.

We are taught the “Print and Puke” method of education, and we perform outstandingly. Teachers hand out the sheets and grade on the curve, assuring that most squeak by, and come time for the test, students puke up all the cut-and-paste puzzle pieces they were force-fed in previous weeks, and arrange it neatly for a passing grade. Most go on to do well enough, but some end up feeling cheated out of something, like I did.

As a student, you are expected to pass a test more important than the final, but most find out too late. Standardized Tests have been taught as how to pass the test itself rather than learning the material expected. It took me a long time to realize that “Print and Puke” wasn’t going to work with these. I had been rendered helpless. Communication skills and analytical thinking are the only skills that standardized tests look at, disguised as English and math. No one was really testing my grammar usage, or my ability to convert fractions, and this went against everything I had been taught. The only option was to be re-taught.

Soon after, a whole new world opened up. Math isn’t about the numbers at all, and that is the hardest idea I’ve ever had to accept. Once I began to ignore the numbers, I saw the concepts behind them. I have learned to appreciate the creativity required to perform certain processes. I feel the need to say this again; math isn’t about the numbers. It promotes the wonderful skill called analytical thinking: the process of drawing conclusions from information given. (Is that not the simplest way to summarize mathematics?) Don’t hate math because it makes you think about your world, that is the only way you’ll find something you really love. Finding that makes all the sweat you put into it worthwhile.

When teachers say that we will use this skill every day, most shrug it off, reading “skill” as “numbers”. They sleep through the lesson and miss the most important part. I hate to say it, but those teachers are right. We must think. Whether reading a book, following politics, doing research or running a company, you have to think for yourself. Don’t just look at the world. Instead, understand it and use that to your advantage. “Print and Puke” may get you the A, but it cannot compare to the experience of learning a new concept, and genuinely wanting to know more.

Students and Educators, the best you can do to get that WOW moment is to entertain your whims. Passion breeds passion! Find someone who loves something you want to learn to love. Go up to a stranger and ask “Why is this so cool to you?” Better yet, be that someone. The quest for knowledge never ends, it just changes direction. Be fearless with your education.

  1. Photo by sadaiche on Flickr

21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively

Published by Anthony Chivetta on January 22, 2008 in Teaching. 73 Comments

This was originally written for publication for my school’s newsletter’s edition on “21st century learning”. I present it to you here not as an attempt to present any new ideas, but in the hope that it might help to pull together many of the ideas that are floating around in online education discussions. Those familiar with Dan Pink might see some of his influence here. Enjoy.

Twenty-first century education won’t be defined by any new technology. It won’t be defined by 1:1 laptop programs or tech-intensive projects. Twenty-first century education will, however, be defined by a fundamental shift in what we are teaching—a shift towards learner-centered education and creating creative thinkers. Today’s world is no longer content with students who can simply apply the knowledge they learned in school: our generation will be asked to think and operate in ways that traditional education has not, and can not, prepare us for.

Education has long tried to produce students who can think (and at times, think critically) and it has, for the most part, succeeded. As we move into a world where outsourcing, automation, and the ability to produce a product, physical or intellectual, at the cheapest cost, become the cornerstones of our rapidly evolving global economy, the ability to think critically is no longer enough. The need to know the capital of Florida died when my phone learned the answer. Rather, the students of tomorrow need to be able to think creatively: they will need to learn on their own, adapt to new challenges and innovate on-the-fly. As the realm of intellectual accessibility expands at amazing rates (due to greater global collaboration and access to information), students of tomorrow will need to be their own guides as they explore the body of information that is at their fingertips. My generation will be required to learn information quickly, use that information to solve new and novel problems, and then present those solutions in creative and effective ways. The effective students of tomorrow’s world will be independent learners, strong problem solvers and effective designers.

If we accept the above to be true, I would argue that there are two types of education that will prepare students for the world of tomorrow: experiential learning and project-based learning.

Physics Lab

Experiential learning can be best seen in extracurriculars and in some schools, senior projects. These experiences give students the opportunity to face first-hand the challenges that arise when applying the theoretical knowledge provided by traditional classroom learning to real-world challenges. Light designing for MICDS Theatre has taught me how to take my technical knowledge of lighting and apply it to a creative and artistic end. As issues arise, I must problem-solve within the constraints provided by my technical knowledge and my creative vision—I must think creatively.

Project-based learning is the in-class complement of experiential learning. The concept behind project-based learning is simple: give students the basic tools, then ask them to go above and beyond on their own projects, exploring the information in their own way, and on their own terms. The effect can be awe-inspiring. Our students are diving deeper into subject matter than ever before, and doing so on their own terms in ways that they enjoy. Whether it is through producing a movie on burlesque dance or deriving Kepler’s laws using calculus, students are not only learning, but they are learning how to learn.

Traditional-rote learning has its place too, as a jumping-off point for our intellectual endeavors. We are, however, crippling our students if we don’t give them the tools necessary to be life-long learners.

Update: A recent post on the Generation YES Blog talks about a Lemelson-MIT study showing that students are interested in having the tools to (in my language) think creatively.

Average Just Doesn’t Cut it Anymore

Published by Stacy on January 12, 2008 in Learning. 36 Comments

To a perfect stranger, I am an overachiever.

I’m taking three AP classes (after dropping AP Stats because math and I are not a good combination) and two semester electives as my senior course-load. I’m president of my school’s Asian-American Club. I am also involved in my creative writing’s class literary magazine, National Honor Society, AP Student Tutoring, Link Crew, and African-Latino Club. I volunteer at the library on Sundays, I sang in the school chorus from 6th grade to 11th, and I played piano like every Asian kid in the U.S. (the ones who weren’t already saddled with violin).

Through the eyes of my parents, I’m the epitome of an ABC failure. I don’t practice piano anymore, I don’t play a sport (trust me—I’m doing it for the team, I cannot walk in a straight line without tripping), and I don’t have a 4.0 GPA.

Or maybe I should rephrase my first statement. To the perfect adult stranger—one who might not be up to date with today’s ever-inflating standards of students—I may seem like an overachiever when in fact, I’m not.

Not compared to my friends and classmates.

Sit at my lunch table and you’ll find a talented mix of students from all different kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities: two National Merit Semifinalists, one secretary of the National Honor Society, three all-state musicians, two star leads in our previous school productions, an editor of the school newspaper as well as director of a local amateur teenage-run theater group, and a partridge in a freaking pear tree.

Everyone at my table is taking three AP classes, if not more. Almost all participate in Link Crew or National Honor Society.

(Disclaimer: this might be a biased/limited overview since I’m basing this on personal experience and I take mostly honors/AP classes. Additionally, a number of the students in my classes are children of Cornell or Ithaca College professors/staff.)

The truth is that being an average student doesn’t really cut it anymore. It used to be that if you get A’s and B’s, you can probably get into a decent school. Or that if you’re valedictorian, you can pretty much write yourself a ticket to any school.

Nowadays, it’s not enough just to get good grades. You have to play an instrument and two sports, volunteer, get straight A’s, attain a 1850+ SAT score, and hold some office in student council or club to even be considered many colleges—whether college admission officers would like to admit it or not. With more and more students applying to college each year, you have Cornell turning away 3 out of 4 valedictorians.

With the rise of their increasing expectations, there will also be the rise of students who will try to meet them. Just from a casual Google search of “Student overachievers” will result in a number of articles about the rise of overachieving students—students who feel like they need to be “well-rounded” in order to get accepted to a good college in order to be successful in life, as Lindsea has also covered in her post “One Sweet Dream”.

While being ambitious and responsible is great, I can’t help but feel bad for students like the ones depicted in Alexandra Robbin’s The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. Thankfully, while my school is pretty competitive for a public school, it’s nowhere near as insane.

Although everyone I know is applying to at least one or two Ivy or Public Ivy league schools, many are also submitting applications to state colleges. Community colleges, however, are still looked down upon—just the mention of our local community college will be met with ridicule, even though it is one of the top community colleges in the country. We’re accustomed to high standards, although I sometimes wonder if we’re able to keep up with the ever increasing standards placed upon us by Above.

I’m currently happy and busy with all my extracurriculars. I participate in them because my friends are members and I sincerely enjoy those activities. I do them for myself, not because I’m trying to impress a Dean of Admissions. Too many of my peers join clubs (National Honor Society being a common culprit) only to have something to jot down on their college application.

Would you rather do something you enjoy or something that would impress others? Have you ever committed yourself to something simply to boost your resume?

  1. Photo by Aaron Michael Brown on Flickr
  2. Photo by Alexandra Lee on Flickr

Teaching the Process of Design (or, making student videos interesting)

Published by Anthony Chivetta on January 7, 2008 in Teaching. 43 Comments

As I watch students (myself included, as always) work on video projects for their foreign language, English, or other classes, I see a striking similarity between those videos and my family’s home movies. Just like home movies, most of these student videos are lacking a thesis and a design to support them. As technology allows us to integrate creative projects further into our curriculum, we need to give students the tools to funnel their creative efforts into an effective and cohesive whole.

The need to teach students how to design is not a new idea. Dan Meyer has been posting wonderful lessons from his class on Information Design. Scott S. Floyd in his year-end photo post writes:

While we focus on design being important in educating our youth (or their learning), I have begun to pay particular attention in how things look around me. I think that giving our students the opportunity to understand and appreciate the elements of design will allow them to create better finished products to display their learning.

There are many ways that one can approach design. Practitioners of the visual arts might look at it in terms of the principles of design. My background, however, is in theatre and video production. I will also add that my teacher/mentor Mr. Patrick Huber gets full credit for instilling this process in me.

Rendering from light design

If you asked a director of a theatrical or video production for the thesis of their production, you would surely get a cogent statement of purpose. It might be as simple as “My production is ‘historically accurate’” or a more grandiose theory about the world we inhabit: “by allowing ones’ ambition, not rationality, to take control of the choices we make, we lead ourselves into our failure” (That Scottish Play) or “our perception of our environment is a function of the people in it and our relationships with them” (The Zoo Story). Once a thesis is decided on, a concept for the production is formed that expresses the thesis and every design decision made during the production serves the thesis. This gives directors (or designers, or actors) a basic structure on which to base their production. Used correctly, a thesis can be the most powerful tool in a designer’s arsenal.

I would argue that the reason watching student videos can at times be excruciatingly painful is that they lack a cohesive design. Often, they represent a hodgepodge of ideas strewn together with very little thought to creating a unified whole. However, when students begin with picking a thesis, and then work from that thesis, a pattern, a design, begins to emerge. When the question for every single decision is “what supports my thesis?” those awkward transitions, strange cuts, and random effects begin to make sense.

Let us take, as an example, foreign language video projects. In my school, it is not uncommon for a foreign language student to be producing a short three- or five-minute video to demonstrate their mastery of the curriculum. Normally, the first “production meeting” starts with the question: “What can our video be about that makes it easy for us to use the required tenses and vocabulary?” And so, a script is written and design decisions are made with one goal in mind: satisfying the requirements. The problem is two-fold: While the video satisfies the requirements, it does so only minimally, and while the students are using the class’s language, they may not be fully expressing an idea with the language.

Photo from light design

Rather than simply asking our students to combine video technology with their foreign language, we need to be asking them to use both their foreign language and video technology to express an idea. Asking students to reach beyond the requirements is where the real gold lies: it is when we really start to see how well students can use the tools given to them.

This isn’t, of course, limited to foreign language videos. I would classify student video productions into two categories: (1) videos demonstrating mastery of material (such as the above foreign language example), and (2) videos demonstrating the material (such as a video one might produce for a history class explaining some historical event). In this second case, the purpose of a thesis is simple: to make the video interesting. If students are trying to convey information in a video, they need to hold their audience’s attention. Structuring their video and design decisions around a thesis is a powerful tool for creating a cohesive and powerful piece.

I leave you with a series of questions: How and when do you teach students design skills at your school? What types of design skills do you teach them? Do they have the design skills to effectively utilize the creative mediums you provide them? What attributes have you found make student designs particularly effective?

Edit: Changed the title, and corrected some small errors. ~AJC (2008-01-07)

Learning Through Tests

Published by Anthony Chivetta on January 5, 2008 in Asides. 2 Comments

Cognitive Daily has a summary of a study (PDF) on the connection between different types of practice tests and performance on a final test. The conclusion (as reported by Cognitive Daily) shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to seasoned teachers:

more elaborate retrieval processes during practice tests lead to better results on final tests

While the researchers looked at a much simpler form of learning (memorization of lists of words) than we strive for in our classrooms, the applicability of their results is easy to see: make students think. The study would seem to support the idea that when we force students to use their knowledge in elaborate ways, such as class discussions, presenting projects, or defending a thesis in an essay, they will be able to better recall the information in the final test—whether it be an exam, or life.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported