Alien Pedagogy

William and Ochan Powell’s presentation wasn’t the first time that I’ve studied differentiation, validity, understanding by design, or assessment for learning. Nevertheless, their delivery was by far the best I’ve encountered.

Order of Events:

The Powells began with paired discussion about assumptions we make about teaching, which was effective because few concepts are as poorly understood as differentiation. Moreover, many teachers seem even afraid to discuss it (other teachers are eager to brag about it, which actually isn’t productive in these sessions), so the one:one approach was effective (and in line with think, pair, share).

We made a list of assumptions with brief bursts of discussion. We concluded that there’s a difference of purpose between assessment and grades (Assessment is required for learning. Grading is not necessary for learning).

That grading is so often given priority over assessment / feedback indicates a significant problem in our educational system, it reveals that all stakeholders too often focus on rating rather than learning.

From here, they went on to give six recommendations via power point. You can download their recommendations here.

In Review:

• What stands out about this style of presenting is its non-confrontational approach. All too often, presentations begin by outlining what should NOT be done. The audience is invited to engage in two minutes hate. No one felt threatened during the Powell presentation and everyone left with an inspired determination to integrate their “recommendations” (rather than orders, which I thought was a very clever use of word choice).
• That the Powells have delivered this presentation more than once was apparent. However, rather than being impatient or tired, they consistently came across as professionals. I loved the way they looked after each other when teacher comments became a little stressed.
• Their advocacy of “professional judgment” was something I haven’t considered.
• The idea of reporting on “effort, timely completion of work, class participation, attendance, attitude, homework, behavior” without having these things affect the student’s grade was excellent. I also liked how they suggested that these things are more important for succeeding in life than grades but that they still had no business being on an academic rubric (they could be an a study skills rubric that would be listed on a report card without affecting student GPA).

Again, I have studied these concepts before but it’s very useful for all of us to re-attend sessions on these concepts. This style of teaching represents a sea change in our reporting systems and even purpose. It’s very easy to veer away from teaching that is in line with differentiation, validity, understanding by design, or assessment for learning.

I left feeling a sense of pedagogical oneness — a Jedi-like focus.

Back in Hong Kong after the EARCOS 09 conference in Malaysia. I return feeling refreshed and inspired to start teaching again, though I wish that I could take a day to digest all of the information I’ve taken in.

A few quick highlights:

• UBD and Grading with the Powells was an amazing session, perhaps the high light of the conference.
• I went to Dr. Josephine Kim’s session for something different, but it turned out to one of the greatest presentations of the conference.
• I met and talked with several bloggers I’ve followed for months: Kim Cofino, Jeff Utecht, and Keri Lee Beasely.
• Web tools including delicious, Twitter, and Tinychat all enhanced this presentation and allowed me to connect with people that I might otherwise have been too shy to talk to.
• I spent the conference reading Into the Wild (and listening to Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack for the film), which was a surprisingly motivating counter point to the presentations.
• Four of the teachers from my school ran in the charity race. What an amazing collection of people we have at our school!

It’s my intention to blog my notes of each of the presentations that I took in during the next week.

Stay tuned.

Given the research and development in assessment for learning, understanding by design, web 2.0, etc, you’d think that we’d hear the old guard complaining that things have changed. Things besides photocopiers.

But things haven’t changed at all — unless they’ve gotten worse. Every seminar on education opens with two minutes hate for sinful pedagogy — it still reigns today! The narrative arch of every session goes on to invite confession and absolution. If you paid the fee, you’re given an photocopied indulgence that will solve all your problems.

Hopefully your name is spelled correctly.

Surely I’m not the only person who can see the developments (sometimes small, sometimes significant) that are happening in education.

I just attended a six hour session on balanced literacy. A few things that left an impression on me:

• Should we test comprehension or should we teach it?
• Tovani’s I Read But I Don’t Get It remains important.
• It doesn’t matter what type of text students are reading, so long as they are reading.
• When teaching reading strategies, teach them one at a time.
• “I don’t call this a program, but when I go to see principals, I’ll call it a program because that’s what they want to hear. This is just good teaching of reading comprehension.”
• Round Robin Reading on Little Britain. –Johnny, please read the first paragraph. Now read it with a Scottish accent.
• If you want to teach children to read with fluency, read aloud to them. Always allow them to read a text before they have to read it aloud or analyze it. Reader’s theater.

Remember the Strategies:

Question. Infer. Make connections. Fluency. Summarize. Find the main idea. Visualize. Mark the text.

I enjoyed the chance to return to these ideas, but I’m confident that a teacher with a different philosophy of teaching would come away with a completely different set of highlights. If reading is important, can we afford to just assume that teachers have learned this and will implement it effectively?