I recently re-watched a program on The Agenda about high school education and what needs to be done to make it better. The broadcast was from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and it featured the results of a conference on learning called the "Equinox Summit" organized by the Waterloo Global Science Initiative in collaboration with the Perimeter Institute. You can watch the final episode of the TV show at: The Agenda: What's Necessary? What's Possible?.
If you are interested in this subject, as I am, you should watch this show since it gives you a good perspective on what the "best minds" are thinking. You can make up your own mind about whether this is encouraging or not.
Here's a short video on the summit ...
The communique from Equinox Summit: Learning 2030 isn't very long so you can read it quickly. Here are the goals that this group decided on.
In order for high school graduates to reach their full potential in life, they need to be:
lifelong learners who can identify and synthesize the right knowledge to address a wide range of challenges in a complex, uncertain world
literate, numerate, and articulate
creative, critical thinkers
able to collaborate effectively with others, especially those of different abilities and backgrounds
open to failure as an essential part of progress
adaptable and resilient in the face of adversity
aware of the society they live in and able to understand the different perspectives of others
self-aware and cognizant of their own strengths and limitations
entrepreneurial, self-motivated, and eager to tackle the challenges and opportunities of their world
To achieve these goals, we require a radically di fferent structure for learning in 2030, one in which traditional concepts of classes, courses, timetables, and grades are replaced by more flexible, creative and student-directed forms of learning. This develops deep conceptual understanding, which can then be applied in other contexts.
There's nothing radical about these goals. They're pretty much the same goals that any conference in the 1960s would have come up with. The only really new buzzword is "entrepreneurial"—that's borrowed from business and it wouldn't have been popular in the 1960s. Today every high school student has to be an entrepreneur because by 2030 nobody will be working for anyone else. They'll all be running their own businesses.1
I've been trying to teach creative and critical thinking for a long time and I haven't come up with any really good ideas. It's probably because I'm too old. You should watch the Agenda show to see how young people are going to solve these problems.
But here's a question that occurs to me as I'm thinking critically about this problem. Let's assume that we can achieve all those goals. Let's assume that in order to graduate from high school you have to have learned how to think critically; be literate, numerate, and articulate; be able to collaborate, be entrepreneurial, be adaptable, etc.
They are laudable goals that I support, but what percentage of students entering high school can achieve them? I'm thinking that, with lots of resources and excellent teachers, it might be possible for about 50% of high school students to reach these lofty goals. The rest are going to achieve the goals of learning to be "open to failure as an essential part of progress" and how to be "adaptable and resilient in the face of adversity."
I think we might have trouble convincing most societies, and most governments, that a 50% graduation rate from high school is the price of higher standards.
I'm not even sure that all of the students graduating from the University of Toronto are literate, numerate, articulate, critical thinkers.
1. This will save enormous amounts of tax dollars because nobody will be working for the government.
Today's version of the Toronto Star has several articles on kindness and empathy. The feature article appears on the front page of the "Insight" section. The title of the print version is "Kindness: A fledgling movement aims to instil empathy and make us a kinder, gentler, society." The online version is How to fight meanness? Try a bit of kind.1
The article is written by education reporter Louise Brown. The gist of the article is that we need to teach empathy and kindness2 and perhaps the schools should be involved. But the main teachers should be parents. Read more »
Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to "disrupt" higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses. So what went wrong?
After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. The "godfather of free online education" says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU [San Jose State University], "were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit." It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.
Thrun's goal was to market lectures by "elite" professors at places like Sanford1. His new company, Udacity, was going to make tons of money by selling lists of successful students to private companies who are looking for talent. Guess what? It turns out that there are lots of disadvantaged students in introductory courses at SJSU who don't learn from lectures given by elite Stanford professors. Who would have guessed?
In case you've forgotten the hype that Sebastian Thrun created when he formed Udacity, read: Sebastian Thrun Will Change Education. And watch the video.
1. My position on this is that the professors at Harvard and Stanford are not necessarily the best teachers. In my field of biochemistry, for example, we have direct evidence that professors at MIT do a horrible job of teaching biochemistry [Where Are the Best University Teachers?]. In my experience, the best biochemistry teachers are often located at small colleges where they pay attention to the latest pedagogical literature and actually read the textbooks they use in class.
Yesterday I attended a meeting organized by the Ontario Ministry of Education. The theme was From Great to Excellent: The Next Phase in Ontario's Education Strategy. The idea was to promote widespread consultation before the Ontario government releases its new plan for education reform next year.
I was attending on behalf of my friend Chris DiCarlo who had to be out of town. He (and I) are promoting the concept of critical thinking; specifically, the idea that it needs to be explicitly taught in a high school philosophy course.
The Minister of Education (Liz Sandals) and several of the senior members of her ministry were there. They told us that today's students are facing unprecedented changes and that the Ontario education system has to change in order to cope. They were mostly thinking about technological change and the possibility that today's students would have new types of jobs and careers.
I'm certain that we can improve our education system but I'm not sure it's helpful, or even correct, to focus on the idea that the next generation will have to cope with situations we never faced in the past. If we could show that our existing education system did a pretty good job of preparing students for change then maybe we should turn our attention to problems other than job training and technological innovation?
Another journalist has written about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This one is in The New York Times: Two Cheers for Web U!.
Most of these articles about MOOCs are not very good but this one is different. The author expresses some skepticism and hit the nail on the head when he says ...
But the first thing I learned? When it comes to Massive Open Online Courses, like those offered by Coursera, Udacity and edX, you can forget about the Socratic method.
The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.
But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to discuss the quality of these courses and how you might go about judging whether they are truly teaching the subject correctly.
Here's the problem. Too many people, like A. J. Jacobs, the author of today's article, assume that because the lecturer is famous or from a "top" school, the material must be accurate and up-to-date. As A. J. Jacobs puts it ...
On the other hand, how can I really complain? I’m getting Ivy League (or Ivy League equivalent) wisdom free....
With the exception of a couple of clunkers — my plodding nutrition professor might want to drink more organic coffee before class — most of my MOOC teachers were impressive: knowledgeable, organized and well respected in their field.
Students are not in a position to judge whether a professor is "knowledgeable" about the material being covered in a course. In the case of MOOCs, many students just assume that because the professor is from an Ivy League school then he/she knows how to teach an introductory course properly.
That's a very bad assumption as I've shown when I examined the biochemistry material being taught in the MIT courses Where Are the Best University Teachers?. Same is true for the courses at the Khan Academy.
I'm currently in Boston at EB2013 where I'm hanging out with biochemistry and molecular biology teachers and textbook authors. Many of these experts are not household names but they are the experts in their field, which is teaching. If you really want accurate information about the fundamental principles and concepts in biochemistry and molecular biology then you should take the courses they teach. You'll get a far better education than if you listen to professors from big-name research intensive-universities.
The recent ENCODE publicity disaster is just one example of the fact that top-notch researchers don't necessarily understand the fundamentals of subjects that are just outside of their own area of expertise.
Let's try and put a stop to this myth that the best teachers are professors from Ivy League schools. There's very little evidence to support that myth, especially in fields that I'm familiar with: evolution, biochemistry, and molecular biology,
Thomas L. Friedman is the Op-ed columnist for foreign affairs at the New York Times. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes (1983, 1988, 2002).
According to Wikipedia, Friedman has an undergraduate degree from Brandeis University (Boston, USA) and a Master's degree from Oxford (UK). He taught a class at Brandeis in 2006 but as far as I can tell that's his only experience with university outside of being a student. He does not appear to be an educator and he doesn't appear to have any expertise in pedagogy.
That hasn't prevented him from writing three opinion pieces on the imminent demise of universities and the glorious future of online courses—especially MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).
Recent secular victories in Chilliwack are at risk.
On November 13th, the Board of the Chilliwack School District deleted Regulation 518 that stated, "The Board approves the distribution of Gideon Youth Testaments to Grade 5 pupils with parental consent." At the same meeting, the Board agreed to draft a new policy to permit the "distribution of materials" by March 2013.
This new policy represents an attempt to use public schools for religious proselytizing in BC public schools.
Superintendent Evelyn Novak intends to gather feedback through February to draft the new policy. While this feedback may not be open to the public, secular voices will be heard.
Please sign the petition below to send the message to the Chilliwack School Districts that BC schools should remain secular.
Sign the Petition. You will have to identify yourself but that shouldn't be a problem if you really believe in a secular school system.
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