For my Education 530 class I read an article examining the major criteria that Google uses when evaluating potential employees. I feel that a major take away from this article actually comes right at the end where the author points out that "The world only cares about -- and pays off on -- what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it)."
In a lot of my education classes this idea has been brought up since it gets to some of the core issues with education in the 21st century and under common core. Students have a wealth of knowledge and skills available to them through the internet that we as educators are failing to leverage properly during their education. I have seen students working on personal projects that are more involved and technical than the work they are covering in their core courses because they have identified a personal passion project and they are taking personal time to try and master something they feel has value. This article points out that Google wants these types of students as employees. They want people who understand how to self learn and utilize the resources available to them in new ways to identify and solve problems. They want people who have struggled and overcome and worked through issues while solving problems that they believe in. As educators we need to start creating learning environments that foster this type of thinking and mindset so that are students are truly prepared for the world as it exists today. Any job that requires the kind of route work we expected out of students in a traditional classroom is better left to a machine. We need to help students learn to think and create original and creative solutions to problems they are given, and to identify problems that need a solution that the world hasn't even noticed yet. For his article Grant Wiggins spent two days shadowing students at his school to experience school from their persective. He shares his thoughts on how students experience education and highlights what educators can do to improve their instruction to better engage students.
A major concern that Wiggins voices during the article was the problem of student engagement. In the article he points out multiple situations that occur throughout the normal school day of a student that lead to a passive learning state for students and an overall decrease in desire to engage with the material. Students are expected to quietly sit most of the day and absorb the information presented to them with little opportunity given to using or discussing the material being covered. Students are introduced to complex ideas and not given time or opportunity to explore and examine the material. They are lectured at for half of the period and then expected to quietly complete assignments based on the work that was covered. These are the types of lessons that destroy the desire for students to learn and expand their knowledge. It teaches students that learning is more of a chore than a pleasure and that it has to be suffered through. This style of instruction also leads teachers to thinking that students are unmotivated and have no desire to learn. However a simple examination of the work students are doing in their free time will show that students are actively engaged in finding information and learning about subjects that they feel have value. Students are actively researching personal projects that require higher critical thinking and problem solving than many of their classes for pleasure. As educators we need to find ways to create these same levels of excitement and desire in our own subjects. Students need to be given work that engages their creativity and passions and can draw them into the lesson. Students need to also feel that they are having a noticeable impact on the class they are in. Wiggins points out that students who are passively engaged in education feel that they have no stake in the class and that their participation or presence has no direct impact on the class. The lessons we teach students need to give students a sense of voice. For my second blog post on rethinking education I have selected two videos from the TEDx series that focus on non-standard ways to think about. As I pointed out in my last blog post there is a need for educators to start implementing lessons and instructional plans that have a more open nature to their questions and allows for greater student creativity in finding solutions. We can't expect students to become engaged with the material we are currently giving them that has effectively already been solved and only needs them to finish the calculations. Students understand that they would have calculators available to them when solving problems in everyday life and being asked to perform routine calculations is unnecessary work. In the first video Patrick Honner, a teacher from NYC, shows examples from his classroom where students are working with spheres and construction paper to better understand surface area and volume. He explains how having open problems can lead students to finding creative solutions that are unexpected and highlight their thought process and views. He also points out issues that can occur during these types of lessons and explains where instructors will need to assist and direct students to keep them on task and moving towards a viable solution. He highlights how group work isn't like the traditional busy work given to students currently. The teacher facilitating engaging group work needs to be actively walking around the classroom and assessing the students work and process to given them informed and constructive feedback. The second video discusses different types of mathematics and how critical thinking is an important skill in understanding and decoding problems that occur in the real world. Students need to understand that mathematics is also a language of patterns and relationships and that it can be used for more than solving for x. I feel that he shares some interesting ideas in this video for areas that we can explore in our mathematics classes to increase student engagement. Showing students different uses for math and how its applied can help students to understand the value and purpose of the information we are having them work through.
The first video is a classic for most new math teachers as it has Dan Meyer pointing out some of the obvious issues that many new teachers experience. As student teachers we are regularly asked to give students problem sets and assignments that are effectively busy work. All of the critical thinking has been stripped out of the assignments and we are left asking the students to perform the rudimentary calculations at the end. The true meat of the problem was in decoding the problem. Recognizing what elements we can identify and creating a mathematical model that simulates the problem. When college professors complain about students showing up to first year programs and not having a fundamental understanding of how and why systems work, it is because of practices like these. Dan Meyer is pushing a philosophy that we need to start giving students work that is worthy and requires thought. We need to start asking students to solve problems and find solutions, not solve for x. I feel that the major issue with creating a sea change towards this type of instruction is mostly focused on precedent. Teachers already have books and exams that they are comfortable using and are easy to grade and this shift requires actual work from a lot of them. They need to critically examine the work of students to see if they were on the right track and give them good advise on where they should focus. This requires greater effort than simply checking off an answer key and giving a stock lesson from the book. The second video deals with these same issues looking at how the pressures of instruction have crippled some instruction. When teachers are gauged by their ability to get students to pass a standardized exam it leads to a lessening of creativity and exploration in their work. Having their job security dependent on their ability to get students to memorize a specific list of skills has had an evolutionary effect on teaching. We have selectively focused on and created an educational system that is designed to punish instruction that can not be explicitly quantified as meeting standards listed in a passing guide. Both of these videos do a good job of highlighting what good instruction should look like and how creative and open ended questions can engage students at a more fundamental level. We need to change education to better meet the needs of students and these videos give some excellent examples of where we can start.
Considering Prof. Heil's email I have complied a list of the criteria for my 20% Project.
For my 20% Project I'm going to be learning to write code in Mathematica to find solutions for the problems posted on Project Euler. 1. What are you going to learn (what is your "learning target")? For my 20% Project I'm going to be expanding my knowledge of coding by learning to write code for Mathematica. As a student at CSUSM I currently have access to Mathematica through cougarapps and I feel that I would be remiss to not give it a try while I still can. I also think that Mathematica might be a better fit for some of the mathematical problems that are in the Project Euler database. 2. How are you planning on learning it? (part of this learning must take place online) I plan to learn this through online video instructions, tutorials, and the documentation provided inside of Mathematica. 3. List your 10 authentic questions for inquiry. . .you only need the questions. The answers will come at the end of the project)
4. What will a successful outcome look like (what is your "success criteria")? I would consider success for this project to be the completion of at least the first 50 problems on the site. 5. (Most importantly) Is there an aspect of play and/or making in your project. Is there an opportunity for failure? It is important that you avoid pure knowledge pursuits for this project. I enjoy completing logic puzzles like Sudoku and I have previously been working on some of these problems on this site for fun in my spare time. So I think that this project has an element of play for me. I get satisfaction out of solving problems that are difficult, also I like reading over the different methods used by other people after I have completed a problem. I'm not sure how much opportunity for failure is presented by this project. I know that even if I don't finish 50 problems by the end of this course I will eventually finish them. However I would like to reach this goal if I could, even if it's just as a personal pride thing. 6. Which tool are you going to be using for research? (I know there was a request for more clarification on tools. We can do this Monday) I'm going to be using the internet for most of my research on this project. While I know some Professors and Computer Science majors at the University who I could talk to about coding these types of problems, I'm rarely on campus this semester so it would be difficult to stop by and ask them for assistance. For my 20% Project I am thinking about expanding my coding skills. I took a basic computer programming class with C+ during my degree and I want to expand that knowledge.
I've been able to solve around 10 of the problems on Project Euler using the coding I already know and some Combinatoric tricks. However I have come to recognize that to move any farther I am going to need to learn how to actually write complex computer code utilizing arrays. I haven't settled on a specific language to learn for this project, however I would like to finish the first 100 problems on the site by the end of the semester. I find that many of the problems I have already solved have a range of solutions going from blunt brute force to elegant mathematics. I feel that going through these problems will give me a greater appreciation for the methods that students use in my class. Understanding that a problem can have more than one valid solution and being able to articulate how different solution methods can arrive at the same answer is an important skill that we need as teachers. Hopefully this project will assist me in recognizing and articulating that to students. In this video Dr. Wesch discusses one of the key issues in education today.
How do we get students to ask intelligent questions? How do we teach students to search out their own solutions to problem? How do we teach students to leverage technology? Currently students have access to greater stores of knowledge and computational power than at any other time in history. However educators are still asking students to perform routine computational tasks and to recall book facts in classrooms everyday. Educators need to shift their lessons to meet the needs of students today. A student today can quickly find any fact present in a book and can calculate any mathematical problem given internet access. The ability to store facts and mathematical procedures in your head has been devaluated in our modern internet accessible world. Currently students need to know how to simplify and structure a problem so that it can be answered. Educators need to teach students how to find and evaluate problems, how to deconstruct larger problems into smaller problems that can be solved. One method for achieving these goals is to start giving students problems that they view as having value. If students are given problems that are worth their time and that have multiple solutions that they can argue and become invested in they are more likely to maintain the knowledge and skills covered in the lesson past the exam. Once students have contextualized lessons they will be better prepared to modify and adapt ideas and knowledge to solve new problems. In the past we have given students that are like screws and nails. When they see a nail problem they use a hammer method to solve it, when they see a screw they use a screwdriver method. If students actually understand why they are using a method to solve a problem and have contextualized for themselves why the screwdriver is the better way to solve a class of problems they will be better prepared to identify problems that can be solved using that tool. Schools need to teach students to become invested in their education and ideas. If a student believes that they know how to solve a problem they will be more willing to step up and suggest ideas for possible solutions. In the above video Dr. White does an excellent job of describing the differences between internet Visitors and Residents. He discusses how the internet usages of these two different groups differ and what overlaps exist. His video highlights how these two different groups perceive of privacy in our new social media age and how the general purpose of the internet and social media is viewed by each group.
Personally I have always been more aligned with the visitor mentality when considering my own internet usage. While I have made posts to the stackexchange, physicsforums, and quora in the past I never dove into their communities entirely. I step into these sites when I need advise from professionals in the field and then step out, I usually observe their conversations unless I have something specific to add. I use the web as a tool for finding information or entertainment, not as a means of projecting an online identity. Creating a persistent online persona to interact with the world through social media does not come intuitively to me. The observer mentality is rather set after years of practice. However my EDSS 530 class has given me some new insights into the uses for social media and why educators should be taking part in these communities. Educators need to create a professional presences online since the act of creating and maintaining an online presence invests them into the discussions concerning education that are occurring online all the time. Educators can no longer sit idly by on the sidelines and observe the changes and discussions happening with the educational system. Education has had too many teachers who are only minimally invested in the ideals of education, the system needs more teachers who are truly engaged with the movement towards positive change in our educational system. Creating and maintaining a professional online presence shows that a teacher is actively searching for improved methods of instructing students. Teaching can no longer be a solitary task completed by teachers in locked rooms with no collaboration. Educators need to work together to create new lessons and instructional practices that are better than the education they received in school. Settling for the same education we have been giving students for the last century needs to end. Brooks "Why School?" by Will Richardson is an insightful look at how technology is changing the position and place of education in the lives of students. In my Math Methods course last year we covered many topics that were of a similar vein, however I think that the greatest take away can be had by examining whether a question or activity has actual worth.
In his chapter on rethinking assessment Mr. Richardson discusses problems that are easily Googleable. I found that in my first semester of clinical practice I was giving students worksheet full of problems that I would personally solve with a calculator or wolframalpha. While I can solve a long division problem by hand, I would never bother to if I could use a tool to do the job. The high students in my class could do rout calculations easily and the lower students had issue with the calculations, but truthfully few of them had any deep understanding of the logic and two weeks later only a couple of them could remember how to perform the operation again. At this time I really started to consider whether it was truly in the best interest of the students to actually practice the calculations. While I never implemented it I wonder if I would have had more long term success with those students if I had focused on the Algebra and using a calculator to solve problems. As a life skill, knowing how to correctly set up an equation and input it into a calculator is worth more than being able to perform the actual calculation on paper. Understanding how to set up the and look at a problem would have also lead to the students having many less obvious mistakes. If the students had a decent grasp of what they were doing and why from an Algebraic perspective they would have been better prepared to spot problems when their equations were wrong. They would have been less likely to accept an answer of a 1'000 lbs instead of 10 lbs on a word problem problem if they were thinking about the problem and not just the formula. I think that we as educators would be preparing our students for the future much more thoroughly if we started focusing on students understanding why they are performing actions instead of testing them on their ability to perform mechanical tasks that became human obsolete years ago. Brooks |
Mr. BrooksI am currently a Teacher Candidate at San Dieguito Academy. I completed my BS in Mathematics at CSUSM in May of 2014. Archives
May 2015
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