Education

[Placid Dingo]

In which discussion of education is free to roam, instead of spagging up tfy,s.

Just because I'm cleaning my computer about found some old uni work on Education.

First; I use articles to examine three case studies of Alternative Schools.

This article seeks to explore educational issues raised in articles which explore alternative pedagogies as seen in a series of case studies. The articles include A Preventive Intervention Program for Urban African American Youth Attending an Alternative Education Program: Background, Implementation, and Feasibility which focuses on the implementation of an alternative intervention program called 'the Village Model of Care, in an American school; Something more than a grade book: The EAU Claire community learning center 1971-1974-A free school which focuses on the Free Schooling pedagogy as applied in a short lived American school, and 'I have big things planned for my future': the limits and possibilities of transformative agency in Zambian schools which explores the concept of social reconstruction through a school acting as a 'transformative agency' in Zambia. This seeks to examine the learning issues raised in these articles.

A Preventive Intervention Program for Urban African American Youth Attending an Alternative Education Program: Background, Implementation, and Feasibility explores a process of intervention in an American school, base on a system called the village model of care.
The program targeted at-risk youth, most of whom had already experienced legal trouble. They developed study and social skills with the help of staff, parents and community workers in after-school sessions.
The model combined structured group mentoring, parental support services and community outreach services. Structured group mentoring sessions included personal, study skills and lesson content. Student to teacher ratios were smaller, and the teachers were specially trained to deal with at-risk students (including behavioral control and crisis management). Learners benefit from closely working with teachers more able to deal with their specific needs.
Parental Support Services were difficult to organises, with many care-givers being resistant to developing dialog. Ultimately over half the care-givers would regularly attend group sessions where they would network with each other, school administration and teachers.
Community outreach services assisted both students and care-givers, advising on various issues, including financial and medical help. In this way the program sought to assist learners by dealing with the fundamental personal problems which may prevent learning.
Difficulties did arise. Sessions occurred after school, at a distant location. Early winter sunsets forced a reduction in the length of classes. These issues noticeably affected the students' motivation, with reluctance to participate in programs. Motivation was increased by feeding hard-working students, and allowing collaboration with friends of equal ability.
Despite successes, over one third of participants left before the conclusion, many excluded for aggressive behaviour. While, impressively two thirds of the most high-risk students completed the program, it may be suggested that, considering students' histories, that some such program based on the fundamental principals of the Village Model of Care may have been of more value as a part of early intervention, or a program integrated more significantly into every day schooling.

Something more than a grade book: The Eau Claire community learning center 1971-1974-A free school explored the history of the short lived Eau Claire Community centre. The Eau Claire Community learning centre followed the basic practices of a free school, where students were permitted to learn at their own pace in the absence of a prescriptive curriculum. The Free school ideology is based around the concept that children are naturally curious, and given the opportunity to grow and explore organically and freely will develop a love and habit of learning, guided by their own interests. The school in question also aimed to, as author Ray Schofield suggested, 'dissolve red ink communication', instead attempting to develop relationships with students based on mutual respect and exploration. The effect of this was that the young students were observed to be enjoying themselves in a way that promoted learning, and fostered positive relationships with adults and each other.
While some number of free schools have been ultimately successful (England's Summerhill school being the most notable example), the Eau Claire Community Centre began early on to develop problems that lead to its demise. The administration of the school was insufficient – the school as not able to keep the same location, or staff (as the payment of work was also ultimately inconsistent) for any long period of time. As such the inconsistency of circumstance led to learners who were unable to find long term focus. Of greater concern were the behaviours of older students who would smoke (on occasion, illegal substances, it is indicated), and treat the school as a time to relax, without contributing to their learning. The rift that developed around the outrage (or lack thereof) that came about with a ten year old child smoking a cigar on school grounds was a defining moment in the collapse of the school. Again, despite the successes of other free schools, it is apparent that the approach of developing this system was largely based on idealism over pragmatism, by groups with more enthusiasm than experience or practical knowledge. It is arguable that the application of the alternative pedagogy was mishandled to practically undo any of the positivity inherent in the ideology itself, the result being young learners whose learning was interrupted, and older students who 'played the system'.

'I have big things planned for my future': the limits and possibilities of transformative agency in Zambian schools explores the pedagogies of Umutende School; a Zambian alternative school designed to develop 'transformative agency' by imbuing students with a critical conscience.
The school is run carefully, in ways designed to prevent corruption in teaching staff (a large problem in Zambia), such as group interviews of potential students, and requirements for teachers to resign if involved in the lives of coming students.
Students at the school are placed in an environment that promotes a positive sense of self, along with an accompanying sense of optimism. Students are encouraged to develop a sense of pride in their own culture, wearing African style chitenge and opening classes by singing songs in the local Bemba language. Students also have their role as future leaders emphasised with phrases such as 'when you are President...' used commonly. This may help learners to develop an authentic context and focus for their learning.
The curriculum also included a focus on issues such on finance, careers, values and HIV, in order to engage students in issues that are authentic and relevant to their lives, as well as conducive to critical conscience.
The results of the student learners have been well documented. Students' diaries indicate they are more optimistic about the future than their peers. As adults they are often more likely to find disillusionment, but are equally likely to rise above these obstacles.

A number of recurring learning issues are raised in these three articles. It seems apparent that one of the strengths of alternative pedagogies is their ability to engage specifically and profoundly in order to meet modern social challenges. Zambia's social inequity and widespread HIV infection, America's restrictive school systems and the plight of at risk social groups have all prompted reactions within education to redress these issues.
Another issue is of pragmatism. Especially in alternative schooling which is, in many ways, experimental by design, systems and structures are needed to maintain and ensure the success of the school. The comparative success of the poorly organised Eau Claire Learning centre to the organised, yet at times inconsistent approach of the Village Model of Care Program, and the strictly organised Umutende School speak to this.
Through differentiation, and the flexibility to develop a genuinely child-centred approach, the comparison of these three articles may help to define the elements that may develop or hinder the processes of alternative pedagogy.

Text licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike Non-Commercial License.

The articles; Articles; A Preventive Intervention Program for Urban African American Youth Attending an Alternative Education Program: Background, Implementation, and Feasibility: Steven B. Carswell, Thomas E. Hanlon, Kevin E. O'Grady, Amy M. Watts, Pattarapan Pothong. (http://muse.uq.edu.au/login?uri=/journals/education_and_treatment_of_children/v032/32.3.carswell.html)

Something more than a grade book: The EAU Claire community learning center 1971-1974-A free school. Olejniczak, Caitlin. (http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/28721)

'I have big things planned for my future': the limits and possibilities of transformative agency in Zambian schools. Monisha Bajaj. (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a791491325~db=all~jumptype=rss)


SECOND, I look at two schools who are currently doing things that I find exciting.

School: High Tech High

Governance
High Tech High began in 2000, and was produced by a coalition of business and education leaders. In an interview with Qualcomm owner Irwin Jacobs, the businessman explains the school came about as a response to the lack of trained individuals prepared with the skills required to be able to contribute to the company. In effect, he has said, it was an attempt to 'grow your own'.
It is publicly funded from several sources, including millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.


Parent involvement
Parental involvement in the school is considerably high, with parents regularly present at the school. Parents are also highly involved with communications on their students, with each student assigned a staff member who monitors the student's academic and personal development and serves as point of contact for the family.

Curriculum delivery
This is developed inside of a mature, adult culture, that has been achieved by eliminating adult or youth areas and replacing them with common areas. This, along with parental involvement, effectively contribute to a culture of maturity where the students are able to spend time with the adults they can envisage becoming.
While the content is high level, the students are not chosen for their skill, but from a random lottery designed to allow for equal male, female and students from different locations.
There is a strong focus on integrating technology into everyday practice, however the focus of technology is as a means to an ends. Typical projects involve the integration of the '3 rs' with technology and often some element of the arts.  Their projects are shown online and many are also displayed publicly - a project called Calculicious is presently on display at the San Diego airport.
Students work across the whole of the year, with a holiday of five or six weeks over the summer break.

The results are impressive; 100% of students are accepted into University, 75% achieve higher results than their counterparts.

Assessment processes
The school is built on a project based curriculum, with students of varying ability all working together towards large scale common goals. This helps to foster a positive environment, and puts students into groups where they can achieve without fear of being socially outcast. The way in which projects are utilized as learning experiences helps create experiences that are authentic, engaging and challenging for students. Each piece of work is placed on a digital portfolio that each student has publicly accessible on the schools main page

Student focus
Student reaction has been positive to the school. Most documented interviews use quotes from students that convey their energy and passion for their personal projects, but a number of interviews also comment in the school itself. One student states; "I thought it'd be for computer nerds and be really boring," says Philly freshman Clancy Davidson. "Now I think it'll be really interesting." 1.

Student Billy Miller stated that he "read five books a week," while trying to educate himself in the midst of traditional schooling. He is a first generation college students, and says of his mother; "She'd heard of Harvard and Stanford. I had to convince her MIT was just as good."

LINKS and RESOURCES
1. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.09/mustread_pr.html
http://www.wired.com/culture/education/magazine/17-09/st_essay
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june08/hightech_04-17.html
http://www.edutopia.org/collaboration-age-technology-high-tech#
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2004/1011/080.html?rl04


School: Max Rayne Hand in Hand Jerusalim.

Governance;
The school was founded in 1997 by Lee Gordon and Amin Khalaf. min and Sam Shube are the organization's co-directors, overseeing day to day operations. The Jerusalem school, as with the other Hand in hand schools, is run by two principals, one Arab and one Israeli. They are mostly financed by private and International donors, requiring around $2 million dollars a year.

Parent involvement;
The nature of the school means there is a considerable focus on building community in which parents are heavily involved. The community developed around parents is integral to the success of the school. The school aims to educate the whole community and offers parents and community access to programs promoting coexistence including lectures, films, Arabic language classes, dialogue groups, and seasonal and holiday events.

Curriculum delivery;
The school does not have a fundamentally different academic approach, however are interesting for a social reconstructavist angle. In a country divided politically, where 80% of citizens are Jewish, and 20% Arabs, where schooling is effectively segregated, Hand in Hand provide a bilingual environment where Arab and Israeli students learn together, taught by teacher from both communities. Teachers not only teach – by having an Israeli and Arab teacher in each class – one speaking and one translating at first, then later, either taking turns – they serve as social role models to their students. Students are expected to reply in the language spoken. The students ratio of Jewish to Arab students is kept at around 1 – 1. Of the Arab speaking students, one third are Christian and two thirds are Muslim.
The school's structure is built completely around the cultures of the students. Christian, Jewish and Muslim holidays are recognized and are days off. To deal with the loss of so many days, holidays are shortened.

Student focus;
One parent comments on their student; "He is fluent in Hebrew. When he speaks, no one can even tell that he's an Arab." Commenting on the political state of the area though, he adds. "He has no future here."
Student interviewed on CNN: Ersheid Muataz. "I am a swimmer so I swim with the Jewish people. There used to be with Jewish people only (sic). They didn't speak with Arabs at all before I came, so it was a little different for them. But we are like brothers now."
Jamie Einstein. "When I'm an adult I'll still have Arab friends, and maybe I'll try to change something. Maybe most of the schools can have Arabs in them... maybe all schools can have Arabs and Jews together.

Assessment processes;
The curriculum includes subjects such as Bible, Koran, and New Testament Studies, Ties and Relationships, Land, History, Identity, Human Rights and places of Worship. These curriculum elements are based around the development of understanding the interaction of various narratives.  One of the fundamental concepts of the school is that students do not need to agree with all views, but must respect all views. This is based on what is termed the A-B-C-D-E Educational Model: academics, bilingualism, civics, democracy, and education for the community.
Students are given content that focuses on the fundamental tenants of schooling, but other socially driven content such as the holy days of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is included in the curriculum.

LINKS and RESOURCES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seblkkKosXk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_in_Hand:_Center_for_Jewish_Arab_Education_in_Israel
http://www.slideshare.net/galilschoolparents/galil-english-presentation-short?src=apiembed
http://www.presentense.org/magazine/the-hand-in-hand-school-modeling-multiculturalism
http://handinhand12.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=content.display&pageID=2
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448510,00.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/peace-studies-children-of-israel-394977.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/902130.html

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) License.

[Requia ☣]

High Tech High began in 2000, and was produced by a coalition of business and education leaders. In an interview with Qualcomm owner Irwin Jacobs, the businessman explains the school came about as a response to the lack of trained individuals prepared with the skills required to be able to contribute to the company. In effect, he has said, it was an attempt to 'grow your own'.
It is publicly funded from several sources, including millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Is it safe to assume that public schools could never afford to actually do this on a widespread scale?

Edit: Apparently not, according to Wikipedia they needed private money to get the school going but now runs on government money at less than 6000 per student.

[Placid Dingo]

I guess it depends what you're trying to emulate too... one of the things with private/alternative schools is they do tend to have more students whose parents have taken an extremly active role in choosing their place of education, and there can sometimes be more parental support for the school to fall back on.

But I'm not super familiar with the American systems.

[Placid Dingo]

Recent article from  my blog.

I'm anything but a luddite; I'd happily see kids using their phones as calculators in maths class. However, I do want to address a few issues in the way we use technology in schools.

The kinds of arguments we seemed damned to repeat forever are that we either need more computers, or we need less. What we really need is a more efficient use. There are two main points I want to address; first of the problematic culture of 'find the answer' that is growing amongst students, and secondly of the idea of 'digital natives/immigrants' which tends to mislead our pedagogy.

There is an idea that seems to infect our students; that every question has a correct answer, and a student's role is to 'find it'. This isn't so bad (or so inaccurate) when the question is 56+32, 'who is PM of Australia', or 'what is the GDP of South Africa'. Generally though, we are attempting to engineer a movement away from these type of questions, moving towards more complex questions that encourage higher order thinking. 'Would it be wise to attack England of the Middle ages'? 'What is the most significant historical event of the last 100 years'? 'What are the most reliable kinds of primary sources?' These kinds of questions or tasks are designed to encourage students to develop their own views with the aid of relevant research.

However, there still seems to be, amongst students, very much a culture of 'finding' the answer. Just as 56 + 32 will always be 88, there is an assumption that even wider question have a correct answer, and the role of your assignment is to find the information. This then unintentionally becomes the role of our technology. The Internet becomes the field of a gigantic game of hide and seek. Students find the information, copy and paste, possibly rewording, then submitting. They do not understand much of what they have submitted. Ask a question; 'who was a famous French political figure' and they will tell you that Robespierre was a Jacobin who instigated the reign of terror, without knowing what either of those things are, or more concerning, without realising that this is a problem. However, technically, they are right; and this is what is valued.

The students most at risk of this attitude are easy to identify. They are generally, by their own estimate 'not smart.' They are used to getting things wrong, not knowing answers and generally receiving negative feedback on their work. They feel discouraged from attempting to answer questions in their own words because they regard their own words as insufficient. However, I have viewed even more capable students, when asked to consider the solution to a problem, searching 'what can solve X' in Google. Again, questions are viewed in terms of having one correct answer.

I would propose a few things to combat this attitude. Firstly is explicitly teaching efficient ways to use technology. An example lesson might require students to use the Internet to develop a set of dot point factoids, then use them to develop a logical argument in their books, without use of computers. This way we are teaching the use of the Internet to find clips of information, but in order to put in into our own words and arguments. Essentially most types of solutions will be built around strategically minimising technology time, and ensuring all use of technology, up to early years of high school at least, is structured towards an explicit goal and purpose.

We sometimes think we don't need to teach basic technology skills. We regard our students as digital natives, having grown up with computers. That may be so, but most university students have grown up with an oven. When we consider the epidemic of university students whose culinary resume does not extend past grilled cheese toast, we recognise the flaw in this attitude; to grow up using a device, does not guarantee an individual can use it well.

Here are a few things we often erroneously assume we do not need to teach explicitly; effective use of Powerpoint presentations, efficient search strategies, identification of reliable material, finding the meaning of complex sentences, translating from or to other languages and selecting the best result from a search.

We need our students to be able to make critical decisions about what sources to use. Often they reject Wikipedia because it isn't 'reliable', before assuming the first independent site they see is inherently trustworthy. Apparently those unreliable 'just-anybodies' editing Wikipedia are somehow prevented from running their own websites. This isn't critical thinking; this is Orwell's 'four legs good, two legs bad', applying simple rules to complex situations. Personally I encourage students to use Wikipedia, and check the validity of statements by comparing the facts to the given citation; a practice usually unavailable from most 'educational' websites.

We know students use computers all the time, and the temptation is (perhaps for them as well as us) to assume this means that they know what they are doing. However, they do not. They are grilling their cheese toast, and when we demand something more sophisticated, they are stumped.

Technology is important, but more important is ensuring students are effective in using it.