Category: Educational Standards

Yet Another Case of a Dog Coming to the Rescue

13/2/2019

A few years ago, I was at the top of the Union Creek chair lift on Copper Mountain in Colorado where I saw two dogs, heads lowered, running up and down the steep hill facing the the top of the lift. Dogs are a rarity on ski mountains. They got my attention. Suddenly one of them stopped, barked, and started digging. Slowly a skier emerged, smiling, from the hole in the snow. It was a training session for avalanche dogs. The happiness of the dog was also evident. The buried human had been discovered within minutes of the trainers releasing the dogs with the command, "Search!"

Here is yet another example of dogs that can rescue us, this time from the disaster of collapsing and moving mountain snow-- the avalanche. How do dogs learn to find and save lives in record times after such an event? iNK author, Elizabeth Rusch, describes the process in Avalanche Dog Heroes: Piper and Friends Learn to Search the Snow. It's no walk in the park and not every dog has what it takes. As Rusch describes them:

"Avalanche rescue dogs must be smart, agile, athletic, and eager to please. They need thick pads on their paws and dense hair to protect them from the cold. It also helps if they are small and light enough to be carried."

Dogs already live in a world of smell-- they have a finely tuned sense that can detect the source of a smell. After weeks of bonding with a handler, becoming acclimatized to ski lifts, skiers and all kinds of weather, they learn to respond to more than 80 cues that are printed on the front end paper of this book.

Elizabeth Rusch introduces us to Piper, a three-year-old border collie, who enters the training program or "school" with Sara, her handler, who will prepare Piper for a for a final examination. It shows readers that a high bar that must be set for avalanche rescue dogs if it will be able do its job when it counts. By the time we get to Piper's certification test, the reader is totally hooked. Piper will have to find two people and two of three scented sweaters buried in a snow field in about 15 minutes. Will she succeed? Game on!

I'm always looking for the added value a book has for students. In this case, Rusch has provided many suggestions for group discussions and independent activities at the back of the book.

I also loved this book because I'm a skier. The brilliant photography in the book by Dylan Cembalski brought back so many memories. Avalanches are a real and present danger. (I've never been involved in one, although I've been at ski resorts when they've happened. ) Avalanche Dog Heroes is a different take on the pleasures and dangers of this exhilarating sport. Thank you, Elizabeth Rusch, for this excellent story about four-legged ski patrollers who can unbury lives.

Taking Note of Note-Taking

15/10/2018

The Sumerians were perhaps the first people to use "wedge-shaped" writing tool on flat mud to keep track of projects. This tablet dates from 3200 BCE.

Ever notice people who scribble constantly while attending a talk? I do because I don’t take notes well. In fact I hardly take notes at all. I find note-taking gets in the way of attentive listening. I’m afraid I’ll miss something if I divert my attention to writing something down. Note-taking is a different activity than actively listening. So when I interview an expert to learn about his/her field for a project I’m working on, I bring along a tape recorder. The only notes I take are about specifics—the spelling of a name, or a particular recommended reading, or a website I should visit. Later, when I am synthesizing material in my own writing, I can always double check my memory about what I heard with the tape recorder. I have come to understand that my memory is quite good. And, as a result, I’ve come to rely on it. If I’m worried about forgetting some of the details after listening all day, I write my notes in the evening.

It seems that Socrates also noticed this. He worried about the technology of his day, the stylus, which allowed people to write in clay. He was afraid that “[Writing] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of…work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.” In other words, if you could easily make notes (now carved in clay), you no longer had to remember what you wrote down and so you could now forget it. Listening and writing are two different and, perhaps, competing verbal activities. Modern research into multitasking indicates that we really don’t do two or more things at once, but simply shift attention back and forth from different tasks. But in college, we were all encouraged to take notes, not only from lectures but from our readings as well.

For my first term paper when I was in college, I learned from a graduate student that 3”x 5” note cards about the research were the order of the day and I diligently wrote them. But, today, when I’m reading to learn, I find it disruptive to write notes. When I’m trying to grasp concepts the best way for me to learn is to read several different sources on the same subject. It is only when you can articulate a concept in your own words that you truly “own” it. So I only make a note when something jumps out at me and I know that I’ll want to revisit it.

But doesn’t the act of writing also strengthen memory? The many times I forget to bring along the grocery list I had recently created makes no difference at all in collecting every item on that list into my shopping basket. We authors are verbally articulate about the material in our books because we’ve thought about it and written about it and, as a result, remember it better. The many pundits who speak so well on news talk shows are all excellent writers. Good speaking comes from having written and practicing by engaging in substantive conversations.

The Common Core State Standards “…..require that students systematically acquire knowledge in literature and other disciplines through reading, writing, speaking, and listening.” To become an articulate, educated person requires interaction of all four of these activities, which I’ve put in red in this post. I’m not sure where note-taking fits into this process. I have a hunch that it’s one of those highly individualized, personal quirks that everyone has to discover independently. In other words, we each have to figure out what works best in our personal acquisition of knowledge. This could be a sub-text of the CCSS—although becoming educated involves all four activities, how you make it work for yourself can be discovered only empirically. There is no one right way, one size fits all. It is this process of self-discovery that needs to be communicated to teachers and students.

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

30/7/2018

The “School Reform” movement is characterized by a top-down, disruptive administrative process bent on privatizing public education. It includes charter schools (start-up schools using public funds with little or no financial oversight thus becoming ripe for corruption and other forms of failure) and voucher programs (where public funding is siphoned off so that students can go to private schools). It has had a great deal of criticism from Diane Ravitch, who aggregates reports of successes and failures in support of public education, a necessary institution for our democracy.

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by November Learning (BLC2018) which is focused on children and how to help them learn effectively. Jonathan P. Raymond was one of the speakers. His new book Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America got my attention. As an author, I don’t know much about school administration. Raymond followed Rudy Crew as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in August of 2009 to December of 2013 with 46,000 students of which 75% had family incomes below the federal poverty line and spoke more than forty different languages. It was also the period where the State of California was in its sixth straight year of budget cuts to school districts.

Raymond moved to Sacramento with his family and entered his three children in the public schools. Then he spent the first hundred days visiting every school in his district, sometimes as many as three a day. He came armed with a vision of educating the Whole Child— “head, heart, and hands”—a philosophy that looks at children as individuals and addresses issues of readiness to learn (like good nutrition), and reaches out to the parents and community as partners in this vision. He identified the six worst schools and decided to make them a priority. He hired insiders, with proven value, to become part of his team. He is anti-standardized testing and is profoundly influenced by John Dewey and the contemporary formidable educator Linda Darling-Hammond. All of these things made me sympathetic to his journey.

There was one aspect of Jonathan P. Raymond’s preparation for this job, however, that gave me pause. Raymond briefly summed up his early career as a lawyer and politician who became a Broad Fellow at the Broad Academy for ten months in preparation for an administrative job in education. Diane Ravitch offers this post on some of what the Broad Academy has done and what it stands for. His belief in educating the Whole Child and his experience of the Waldorf school progressive education overrides some of what he learned from Broad. Here’s what Raymond says about “school reform” and teachers:

“It’s no secret that some people in the so-called “school reform” movement are at war with teachers’ unions, and whether they intend it or not, are perceived as being at war with teachers themselves. What I learned in Sacramento and keep learning as I move forward personally and professionally, is that no effort to transform a school or a district can succeed without recognizing the dignity and worth of teachers [italics, his] through appropriate compensation, opportunities for professional development and positive collaborative working conditions.”

He also said:

“The Broad Academy did me no favors with it came to union relations. ‘People who come from outside education are more used to working in performance culture versus entitlement culture,’ Broad’s director told The Sacramento Bee when my appointment was first announced. Disparaging hard-working educators by calling them ‘entitled’ is not how I would have set the table. “

His last chapter, “Solutions: Five Keys to Reimagine Schools,” puts leadership in the center with input from students, teachers, and community resulting in compromise in which all factions have buy-in. He is at odds with the entrenched top-down organization that is a tradition in most districts.

Jonathan P. Raymond’s title Wildflowers is a metaphor for the potential of all children to find a way to bloom when they encounter the proper nurturing environment for the special idiosyncratic germ within them. This is a passionate, thoughtful book that can bring vision and hope to our public schools.

The Joy of Learning and “Education”

28/6/2018

In 2010, I saw an amazing film called “Babies,” which documented the first year of life of four infants born in Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo. The transformation from tiny, dependent newborns to little persons is extraordinary in two ways. First, the pattern of development for each baby is predictable and universal; they are each doing the same thing at about the same time. And second, the cultural differences seem to have little influence on this development. What we are watching is learning that comes from total immersion in the environment created by place, parents, and siblings. This movie is an exemplar of what behaviorists call “contingency-shaped” learning. Humans are born to learn. It is an emotional, engaging process with both triumph and tragedy, albeit on a very small scale.

Let’s say that one of these babies (me) became a teenager and wanted to learn how to speak another language. I started to learn French my freshman year of high school. I was given a book that started with simple sentences and rules of syntax and grammar. As the course progressed the sentences became more challenging; we learned about tenses, and questions, and other complexities of language. Behaviorists call this “rule-shaped” learning. The purpose of rule-shaped learning is to fast-forward the student to a point where contingencies can take over. I studied French for six years and had to pass an exit exam in my college which demonstrated that I could read and write French. When I went to France, and started to speak it, others assumed I was fluent from my few initial words which evoked a conversational barrage that was incomprehensible to me. Sadly, I was never immersed in a French-speaking place long enough to become fluent. Fluency means that all the rules fade away and language is a skill to express oneself. Rules are training wheels for beginning learners but hamper practice after a certain level of achievement has been reached.

Education today is flooded with rules, called standards, and assessments, which proclaim to measure how well students are learning the rules. Teaching is complex professional behavior, comparable to lawyering and doctoring. Becoming a teacher takes training, evaluation, constant learning, and experience. Teachers can live with standards but need the autonomy reach their own successful differentiated methods and styles. Constant measurement and assessment distorts their ability to teach effectively. Teachers learn from the total immersion of themselves in their jobs. They learn from administrators who are experienced in what makes an effective classroom. They learn from their colleagues. Training rules are not laws; useful if they help and discarded if they impede.

Today’s teachers have their wings clipped by rules. Some are so indoctrinated that they fear to stray from the rules and trust their own judgement and ingenuity. They are losing their freedom as our schools become more autocratic, mirroring what is happening to our country. It feels safer to “go by the book.”

Critical thinking, buzz-words for education, means to reexamine what is before us and make new kinds of decisions. We need to reevaluate some of the rules that are imprisoning us, especially since today’s education has been mandated to produce students with high-level skills, creativity and ingenuity. When you look at the engagement of babies in their first year of life, the joy of learning is palpable. How much engagement visible in today’s K-12 classrooms?

Artists, entrepreneurs, high achievers in every field know how to think “outside the box,” a value esteemed by the marketplace, where rules don’t apply. These folks are in total immersion with some aspect of our world. Yet we have drained our schools of the joy of learning that is our birthright.

Yet Another Case of a Dog Coming to the Rescue

Taking Note of Note-Taking

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

The Joy of Learning and “Education”

Vicki Cobb

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Yet Another Case of a Dog Coming to the Rescue

Taking Note of Note-Taking

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

The Joy of Learning and “Education”

Vicki Cobb

​Archives

Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives