John Connell: The Blog

There is a con­spic­u­ous and abid­ing fal­lacy resid­ing at the heart of for­mal edu­ca­tion, namely that what is taught is what is learned, that what the teacher teaches is what the stu­dent learns. Edu­ca­tion sys­tems, schools, col­lege and uni­ver­si­ties around the world today rest, as they have done for much of their exis­tences, on an illu­sory foun­da­tion, and I believe that much of what is wrong with for­mal edu­ca­tion today arises from this endur­ing and mis­taken belief.

When we come to the full real­i­sa­tion of the actual rela­tion­ship between teach­ing and learn­ing, we begin to dis­cern the sheer point­less­ness of so much of what passes for edu­ca­tional pol­icy and strat­egy in today’s world. We know that human beings learn through inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, with ideas, with infor­ma­tion, with the world at large, but that ulti­mately they cre­ate and shape their own learn­ing. The inter­ven­tion of the teacher in this process is impor­tant and valu­able, but at no point in the inter­ac­tion of teacher and stu­dent, other than by occa­sional happy acci­dent, does the learner ‘learn’ what the teacher ‘teaches’.

An appre­ci­a­tion of this, the true nature of learn­ing, means that the com­plex edi­fices of cur­ric­ula, ped­a­gogy, assess­ment, accred­i­ta­tion, teacher edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, as well as the over­bear­ing struc­tures of insti­tu­tional man­age­ment and edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tion, start to crum­ble to dust before our eyes.

Hajera Blagg points up a log­i­cal link between the gath­er­ing momen­tum behind the MOOC and the notion of rad­i­cal social entre­pre­neur­ship. In a post enti­tled: ‘A class­room of thou­sands’: Dis­rupt­ing entre­pre­neur­ial edu­ca­tion with Mas­sive Open Online Courses she writes:

If MOOCs become a more com­mon way of learn­ing, then MOOC stu­dents who have under­stood the learn­ing process to be dynamic and col­lab­o­ra­tive will bring this mind­set to their own projects. Learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties (and sub-communities) emerge nat­u­rally from the MOOC process. These endeav­ors are likely to be more inclu­sive and socially-oriented, with the goal being advance­ment in the name of the com­mon good.

By treat­ing edu­ca­tion as a mas­sively open, col­lab­o­ra­tive process, MOOCs have the poten­tial to spread a dis­rup­tive entre­pre­neur­ial phi­los­o­phy through their class­rooms of thousands.

There are MOOCs and MOOCs (see, for instance, Tony Bates on Coursera-type MOOCs, or Stephen Downes’ dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between what he terms xMOOCs and cMOOCs) but Hajera clearly under­stands that it is the learn­ers them­selves who will deter­mine what they are able to take away from their par­tic­i­pa­tion in a MOOC.

There’s a risk of a cir­cu­lar argu­ment here: those who go into a MOOC with an open and col­lab­o­ra­tive approach will be more likely to appre­ci­ate the ‘dis­rup­tive entre­pre­neur­ial phi­los­o­phy’ that can come out of the expe­ri­ence. But I would hope that some peo­ple who go into MOOCs car­ry­ing tra­di­tional bag­gage, expect­ing a top-down model, or look­ing for tra­di­tional cre­den­tial­ing, for exam­ple, might come to realise that their bag­gage is redun­dant, at which point they could well begin to under­stand the full power of the MOOC.

There’s an info­graphic on the MOOC appended to the post too.

Our approach to for­mal assess­ment seems to be so out­dated that even pub quizzes are show­ing it up. The irony of a team of teach­ers win­ning a pub quiz by access­ing the answers on their smart phones shouldn’t be lost on us. The kids I teach can access every­thing which is blocked to them in the class­room by step­ping out­side into the cor­ri­dor to use their phones. They can access Face­book and Youtube and Twit­ter and pos­si­bly the answer to every ques­tion we are cur­rently ask­ing in school.

Even in the pub, after his cus­tom­ary half-pint of gui­ness, Kenny Pieper can see how out­moded our sys­tems of for­mal assess­ment are.

Closed ques­tions, closed books and devices switched off are all signs of a mode of assess­ment that, while they might offer results that can pop­u­late league tables, really offer lit­tle else of value today.

Our rela­tion­ship to infor­ma­tion has changed, but the processes that test that rela­tion­ship have not.

A cou­ple of inter­est­ing posts on Glow recently have pointed up the fact that there is not just one Glow cov­er­ing Scot­land, but 32 Glows, one for each local author­ity. The whole ser­vice is deliv­ered from the sin­gle national data cen­ter in Edin­burgh, but how Glow is man­aged and phased is quite dif­fer­ent from author­ity to author­ity. The nature of the devel­op­ment process for SSDN, as it was known orig­i­nally, ensured that each local author­ity in Scot­land would be able to shape Glow to suit its own local cir­cum­stances, dove­tail­ing the roll-out of the ser­vice with all the myr­iad other devel­op­ments hap­pen­ing across the country’s schools.

The care that was taken to ensure that local con­trol over Glow would be max­imised was, of course, a pos­i­tive aspect of the pro­gramme, and cer­tainly gives the lie to those who, with no knowl­edge of the project what­so­ever, tried to demonise it as “.…the com­put­ers of 800,000 Scot­tish teach­ers and pupils.…wired to a cen­trally con­trolled national intranet.…”. The idea of Glow as a large-scale, unwieldy, unre­spon­sive man­aged ser­vice in the tra­di­tional top-down sense was pre­cisely what the plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion of the ser­vice were designed to avoid. I believe we suc­ceeded in that regard by the sim­ple expe­di­ent of lis­ten­ing and respond­ing to the con­cerns of those who man­age ICT in our schools, the local authorities.

But, this multi-speed Glow, in which each author­ity is able to under­take its own plan­ning and project man­age­ment of the roll-out of the ser­vice, with the help of the national Glow teams based in Learn­ing and Teach­ing Scot­land, does bring cer­tain pres­sures with it. One of those is that, as teach­ers in those author­i­ties that have decided to take longer to imple­ment Glow see col­leagues in faster-moving author­i­ties using the tools and appli­ca­tions in their teach­ing, they will begin to ask ques­tions of their admin­is­tra­tion. Doug Semple’s post on Approaches to Glow points this up, I believe, by ask­ing why the train­ing in Glow appears to be inad­e­quate. This might be because the local author­ity in ques­tion has planned for this to take place fur­ther down the line. Those who are man­ag­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of Glow in each author­ity are only too well aware of the weight of train­ing require­ments for teach­ers cov­er­ing the Cur­ricu­lum for Excel­lence, Assess­ment is for Learn­ing, and many other vital devel­op­ments. Glow train­ing has to be fit­ted in to the already-heavy schedule.

Nonethe­less, the mes­sage in Doug’s post is one that we might see repeated else­where over the next cou­ple of years as teach­ers’ desire to make use of Glow runs ahead of their authority’s (or their school’s) phas­ing of the train­ing required. We need to be real­is­tic, basi­cally, about Glow’s place within the wider frame­work of devel­op­ments hap­pen­ing in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion cur­rently, but author­i­ties also need to be aware of the grow­ing impulse of teach­ers to get their teeth into Glow sooner rather than later.

And not only teach­ers.….…, par­ents too are get­ting in on the act!

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