01.28.08

Educon Stream of Conciousness Recap

Posted in Learning at 11:40 am by Chris Champion

I wrote a letter to my principal and director who could not come to EduCon… its a bit “stream of consciousness” but I wanted to get it down now and formulate what I’m planning on doing about it later:

This weekend was really fantastic.  I am grateful for having the opportunity to spend the day in an inspired school on Friday – sitting in classes, talking to teachers and students.  I think that they and we have a lot in common – the students choose to come there and the teachers are all experts in their fields.  Of course, they can eject (return to home school) students for fighting or poor attendance and grades… why can’t we do that again?

Anyway, I’d like to just summarize some ideas/thoughts/things I learned from the weekend.  There were many principals and superintendents there to see how SLA does what they do to try to reproduce it somewhere else.

* When students say they’re bored – that means that the way the subject is being presented is boring.  Boredom is a feeling you can’t argue YES or NO with.  If you don’t want your students to be bored, you need to change the way you’re teaching…. not “admire the problem” by talking about why kids aren’t the same today.

* People commit to an idea better when they are the origin of it.  Asking students to be the origin of information rather than be pawns (deCharms) gives them ownership and investment in what they are learning.  Traditionally, the teacher is the origin, students the pawns.  We need to change that.

* Collaboration is key at SLA.  Students work in teams.  I asked one student:  what if one of your partners doesn’t want to do any more than 1/x of the work?  Answer: they kick the student out into his own group, with the permission of the teacher, and that student is told to do the entire assignment on his/her own.  It only happens a few times before that student realizes that he is creating more work.

* One of the sessions I was in talked about someone that did experiments with dogs.  They starved the dogs but put food on the other side of a fence.  after 5 days the fence was removed but the dogs continued to starve themselves because they no longer considered the food an acheiveable goal.  This parallel can be applied to school – if a student is allowed for years to do only what is expected and never pushed to do his best, he doesn’t even know that he can do better.

* Students don’t feel like their voice counts.  One 15-year old presenter, Arthus Erea (author of the blog “Newly Ancient”) said that the problem is that adults give students token voice or false voice, but no one really listens.  Another student there said it well:  “Students don’t need to be given voices, adults need to listen” when it came to how they learn best, how they want to approach the subject matter.  Arthus actually was a presenter – his topic was “Learn-Teach: We’re all the Student Teachers”.  His discussion was fantastic (the notes are at http://learn-teach.wikispaces.com/ ).

I’m not sure whether I can change the world… but I can change my classroom, and my students.  And maybe as I do that my colleagues will see something in what I’m doing and learning and try to listen, try to make learners instead of do’ers.

Today I gave my kids some options, I told them that I wanted to listen to them – after all, its their class.  I told them that I hate boring classes just as much as they do… call me on it if you think I’m getting boring.  If you want to steer the class in a direction and we can still learn the “content”, SPEAK UP.  From what I got at the end of class, some of my students are so used to hitting a “mark” halfway towards impossible that they don’t know that they can reach higher.  I did have some students that preferred to just do the exercises at the end of the chapter… but was it because they preferred it, or more likely that they just didn’t know how to find some more interesting way to get there?  I guess both the students and I need to figure out how we can change this classroom so it becomes collaborative, becomes engaging.   Because frankly, I thought the work they turned in was really boring.  And I don’t like that reflection on myself.

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01.04.08

The Airplane is Flat, Too

Posted in Learning at 11:36 am by Chris Champion

Perhaps you don’t know, but one of my “life list” dreams is to become a pilot. I’ve been spending “fun money” on plane rides and “introductory pilot lessons” since I was sixteen. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve laid it down: I want to be flying before my 40th birthday, a little more than a year away. So that makes me look not just at education blogs and trends, but also into aircraft. Without spending too much of your time, you might be interested in the fact that the FAA a few years ago opened up a new certification of aircraft that specify small, light, and potentially affordable airplanes. It’s called “Light Sport Aircraft”, and if you’re interested, click to check it all out. Namely, we’re talking about small (2 person), inexpensive airplanes that are safer than “ultralights”.

Now even if you don’t know about airplanes, I’m guessing that you know about Cessna. In non-airplane circles, the word “Cessna” is used as a descriptor for small airplanes like “Xerox” is used to describe the act of photocopying images to paper. Well Cessna has decided to re-energize their business by entering the Light Sport market – and has announced a plane, the Skycatcher, that costs around $100,000 – which by aviation standards is pretty darn cheap. Consider that many planes last 30 or more years and the cost of this airplane is very low.

Cessna is actually a pretty progressive company. The Skycatcher website is actually an RSS-fed Blog. This means that they can communicate with their user- and customer-base rapidly. But being “progressive” also means that they are globally competitive. You see… Cessna has decided that the only way to compete in today’s global aerospace industry is to outsource the production of the new aircraft. So that means that Cessna went out and asked various firms to bid on a serious (700+ aircraft per year) commitment, including a complete re-tooling of a factory. Who could do it to exacting standards AND be competitive? Why Shenyang Aircraft Company, of course. A Chinese aerospace firm with contracts with Boeing and Airbus to mention a few.

It may come as a surprise to some that the regular readers of Cessna’s blog completely FREAKED OUT. You can read Cessna’s blog entry, titled: Making the Case for Building the Skycatcher in China. The comments are overwhelmingly negative, “you’ve lost me as a customer”. As I’m reading all of these negative comments, I can’t help but question: where do these people buy their electronics? I haven’t seen a TV made in the US in a long time. How about their car? Even if it IS assembled in the US, how many of the parts weren’t?

Here’s the thing: Cessna hasn’t shipped skilled jobs overseas – they’re keeping the engineers and quality service people. They’re just sending laborer positions to China. In fact, Cessna employees will be moved to China to oversee the assembly. The skilled, CREATIVE jobs stay with US employees. The “part A goes in slot B” job goes to China. While my description might seem crass, it is not new – read The World is Flat or A Whole New Mind - we are living in a global economy – if we expect to compete, we can’t continue to teach our students to become assemblers.

Superintendents/Guidance Counselors/Curriculum Advisers: take note to what Cessna has done. Airplane design IS about Mathematics, but it is also about style, about form, and about design. What is content without creativity? 01101110011011110111010001101000011010010110111001100111

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