Reflection as a Way of Life

As my final blog entry in PME 811, I have a few thoughts about what has struck me the greatest from the course. When thinking about the concept of innovation I have seen lots of literature on what makes good innovation, what may look like innovation and is not, and what bad innovations may look like. My last thoughts are this: Innovation can come from a vast variety of sources. Top down, bottoms up, one never knows what may catch on, not just in education but in the world. As per my one article mentioned in a previous post, the Americans do a wonderful job of coming up with innovative ideas in the world of education but do a horrible job of implementing them. They pay a lot of lip service to the idea of innovation and being an innovative country, but when it comes down to it they fail in a lot of ways in actually following through large scale with innovations. Other countries have proven that American innovations are sound and worth using. Finland, Canada, parts of Asia and South America have all benefited educationally from the American models. So why haven’t the domestic systems seen such successes? This is a curious question. I don’t have an answer for it (if I did I might get rich selling it to the Americans) but what I do see is that currently in the United States, they don’t feel a real need as of yet for these new ideas. They haven’t gotten desperate enough yet. They are comfortable and content to be where they are. Necessity is the breeder of invention. If you don’t feel it necessary the greatest innovations in the world will fall on deaf ears. However,…. I see the future for the globe as one that most countries will be forced to take a good hard look at where they are headed educationally, costs sky rocket and results do not. The world is changing so rapidly that our old tried and true may not work for much longer. In some cases it doesn’t work any longer. Countries like the United States will have to be honest at some point and make big changes. But I see a positive in that. They have the creators, the innovators, they just need the right audience to value what is already being produced in order for it to take off. Other countries know this and appreciate it. America just needs to do the same. For global prosperity we need collective intelligence that spans national boundaries. No country left behind. And with that, I have enjoyed my time blogging for this course. It is a new medium for me to use but this may not be the last you hear from me.

As one of my last musings for this course, I have happened back upon this topic that we seem to have as our innovation goddess. I can think of many times through the years that some new technology was promised to be the next greatest thing in advancing the field of education and learning. In and around 1984, the Apple IIe came out and I spent hours in class learning how to make a turtle move around the screen. Floppy discs became 3.5 floppies and pong became the Atari game Pitfall. And yet…. this time spent manipulating that damned tiny turtle did not give me a more efficient path through learning how to hand write, learning how to spell, or learning how to do math facts. As time went on more and more technologies came into my life as a student and then as a teacher. University was the heady days of email and networked computer rooms. Students would gather in these rooms to work on all sorts of assignments. Personal computers got cheaper and cheaper as time progressed as well, the computer rooms gave way to home computing. Email became more user friendly and pretty to work within. As I started my career as a teacher we had so many different choices of marks programs, editing software, and presentation types. Moodles, Wikis, Smart Classroom, Bright links, to name some of the many options. Now we blog and tweet and like and share. We teach the kids to do these things too and they love to spend their time on these things. However… has it made teaching easier? I would have to say no. In fact, these innovations have made the job of the classroom harder. Attention spans have gone away. Student’s English writing skills are worse than ever, slang, acronyms, and jargon have replaced good formal writing. When I think of technology now in my classroom I do not see it as a key to the success of my teaching. It plays a very small role, if we spend much time with tech. it is because I have to discipline for overuse of smart devices. Do I think tech should be banned from classrooms? No, it will not ever be banned from our daily lives so we need to learn to cope with it. It has its uses, once a week I find it handy to have students on devices to further learning but… could I do the same learning without it? Has it made learning more efficient and easier for students? My answer to that is no. So, so called “smart” technology to me has not been a great innovation in education. And in fact that phrase could be seen as ironic.

So why does educational innovation take so long to proceed? This is an age old question. Just the other day we were discussing in a staff meeting the concept of outcomes based reporting, noncummulative reporting, absence of percentages on middle school report cards, going paperless with report cards and so on. These ideas or concepts have met resistance within the schools and from without as well. For educational innovation to work it needs to include all stakeholders. Not just teachers and administrators, but parents, community members, government officials, post secondary institutions all need to have an investment in the innovation. If any of these groups fail to jump on board the innovation will be doomed to either failure or a very slow uptake by the people it is intended for. Many educators now a days adopt a wait and see stance to new initiatives. There is fatigue in the profession. This is possibly due to the fact that so many initiatives have come and gone. We are a society of innovation and creation (at least we believe so) but there is not a stamina and staying power within education. Something new comes along quickly and messes with the progress of an innovation. We chase the next shiny fishhook at times. For true educational innovation to occur, we need buy in from everyone top to bottom and coming in from the sides.

While reading an article for my PME class, I was struck by an interesting part. The author of the article was lamenting the fact that even though his country comes up with lots of great innovations in the educational field, it does a really poor job of implementation. The amount of resources poured into innovation has not had the desired effect on the domestic student body. However, the author is fascinated by the fact that other nations have been able to grab onto the innovations and use them to revolutionize their own educational systems. Is it because the ideas are homegrown that they do not receive due consideration? I see that quite often here in Canada. We regularly look to the United States for ideas about innovation. We read authors, bring in speakers across the border to help us delve into innovative techniques, and even pay for programs developed in the United States. But…. when we look at international rankings and standards we perform ahead of the Americans on many measures. It seems counter-intuitive to look to a lower ranked nation for our ideas on innovation. Or is it? If we can take another nations innovation and make it work in our context then what does it matter if the host nation has failed in implementation. Globalization of innovation then may also mean that the relationship can be reciprocal and perhaps some of our less accepted innovations in Canada can be a bolt of lightening in another nation.

In the past week I have had to self-evaluate my progress in the PME course. I often make my students self-evaluate. And the results are often unpredictable and sometimes amusing. Self-Evaluation is fascinating, for people who enjoy talking about themselves and have a strong sense of confidence in their abilities it is easy to evaluate. When I evaluate skills that I am really good at, I evaluate myself very high. I know I am good at what I do. But then, I get asked to evaluate my skills in areas that I am just learning about and reflecting about. This is a much tougher process. Self evaluation is difficult when what you are trying to gauge is your abilities in new materials. On the one side, I think I am awesome, that I am getting a really good grip on what I am learning. But then I remember…. when I first learned to do things, I thought I was awesome as well. Turning 16 and learning to drive….. thought I was awesome, I reflect years later and I know that I was not. When I was a student in High School, I thought I was a fantastic student, reflecting back now as a teacher….. I was not the best that I could be. So now with evaluating myself as an older more practical educator….. I evaluate simply. I am not an expert, I am not proficient, I am emerging. Emerging into the knowledge of innovation, creation, teaching, and learning. I am on the tail end of my teaching career, I am middle aged, and I am still able to put myself into positions that are new and I am enjoying learning about. This to me is the spice of life!

Whenever I teach about gender issues, First Nations issues, colonial issues amongst the many other that we teach about I find it difficult at times. The reason for this is that I do not have the experiences of any of these groups that were oppressed or minimized with their dealings with the Anglo-Saxon male. Historically my group has not had to deal with any of the issues from a minority perspective. I am part of the majority. White, professional male who has reaped the benefits of my birth. I have gained a level of understanding and empathy for the different minorities that have been negatively effected by my nation of white men. But I can never truly understand what is like, what it is like to be female or of a visible minority trying to get by in the Eurocentric world. What it must be like to be First Nations and having had to survive in a world after Residential Schools did their damage to the family relationships within that culture. At best I can bring an awareness to the struggles and issues but my level of understanding is from the side of the dominant culture. Something as simple as being alone at night taking public transit does not concern me. I do not worry about the potential threats that a group of young white males may be. I am not female nor of ethnic diversity so I have never felt the potential fear of interactions with these groups. Being part of that group however has made me conscious and careful with my interactions with strangers that are not white male. Often however, I don’t even bother to try to engage people in friendly conversation for fear that I may be seen as a threat. I smile, I am polite, and I leave people alone. Is this a sad commentary on our world today?

A thought occurred to me while writing my last post. The teaching profession like so many others loves looking for and implementing the next great thing. In my 20 years of teaching and learning, and my 18 years of learning prior to that (and no it didn’t take me that long to finish high school….) I have seen many examples of this. New curriculum has come and gone, classroom management strategies, professional development opportunities, inclusive education, pull outs, streaming of students, initiatives to increase student learning, whole language learning, social emotional training, outcomes based assessing, project based learning, moodling, googling, smart technologies, instructional leadership, site based management, professional learning communities, numeracy and literacy initiatives, and a host of other ideas that I have forgotten over the years but one thing has stood out. Great teachers have been doing what they do for generations and through all of these changes and chases they have continued to be great teachers, why is that? The answer is simple and I connected to it while I have been sitting here. Great teachers are innovators in the true sense of the word. When we consider the definition of innovation next week it relates not just to the business world but to education as well. Creating and innovating are two different things you can be creative and not innovative but you can not go the other way around. Great teachers are mindful of the “shiny fish hooks” that float around in our school division central offices and they ask themselves a simple question when deciding whether to buy in or not. That question relates to the definition of innovation. These new ideas and ways of doing things have to be better than what was done before and they have to be desired by our students. If we are trying to force innovation on them in our classrooms with no concern for what they actually want or need then the process is doomed to failure. A great teacher understands this. Go into any long term great teacher and you will see that innovation has been a part of their journey as teachers. Always getting better at educating because they respond to the needs of their consumers, I mean pupils.

In preparation for the Module 2 assignment defining the terms innovation, creativity, teaching, and learning I have been wandering the internet, reading articles, and watching Youtube clips on various topics. After emerging from an off topic tangent inside Youtube (which happens often, given the amount of fun content on the internet these days), it made me ponder something. The world of teaching and learning has become a much more complex one. When I think about the access to information we now currently have, and the task we have to keep the attention of the students in our classrooms, we need to think about our teaching practices and how we provide information to students. When I was researching the definition of teaching it made me reflect on what teaching looked like for a very long time and how it has had to become more student centered. Some teachers pine for the good old days when students were a passive audience that were given chunks of information to memorize and reproduce on exams. That same teacher laments the loss of parent support for them and their jobs, a lack of respect for the teaching profession and a litany of other issues. When the social studies curriculum in Alberta changed in 2006 this change was evident. Gone were knowledge questions from the diploma exam, changed out with a new style of questioning. This new style demanded the analysis and synthesis of information. Remembering dates for your exam became a thing of the past. As a teacher during the change over I remember my dissatisfaction with the new curriculum. But now almost 14 years later writing about innovation and learning, I am reminded as to why that change had to occur. And I have to say the journey was at times difficult as a teacher to change with the times but as I currently sit here reflecting on this topic, I can not help but think that these are exciting days. The rate of change in the world around us is exponential at times. The creation and more importantly the innovation (more on this in the next module) of these new ideas is giving us limitless possibilities for teaching and learning. Governments and administrations are willing to explore new creative ways to teach and learn. High School Redesign is an example of this potential and I am excited to be a part of it and see where we go next.

For the past 20 years I have watched the shape of education in Alberta go through various changes. This evolution of education philosophy has at times been interesting and fun and at other times has been nerve wracking and stressful. I have always considered myself a life long learner, and I have always enjoyed looking at new potentials in teaching as necessary to keep teachers working towards our common goal of how to create the citizens and leaders of tomorrow. Very often in education people use certain styles and philosophies for no other reason than that is the way they were taught, or this is the material they borrowed from another teacher when they first got started as a teacher, or my personal favourite, “Its just the way I have always done it!” Our communities have changed, technologies have raced ahead faster than ever before and our students are being exposed to an ever widening world. Education needs to grow and evolve. Yes, we still need to teach the basics but that is not enough. No longer does the traditional one size fits all classroom get to be the mainstay of our school systems. With inclusive education and policies that want to focus on high school and beyond we as educators have to get out of our comfort zones and think outside the box. I am proud to say that in my province that process took another step forward a few years ago with the introduction of High School Redesign. High School Redesign has afforded teachers the opportunity to collaborate and innovate within their schools. We no longer have to be nailed down to a rigid set of education standards. Teachers are being tasked with coming up with new ideas to help solve age old problems like student engagement, graduation rates, and post-secondary success rates. With themes like flexible learning time and students taking ownership of learning we can hopefully see that the students graduating in the 21st century leave with more tools that better prepare them for the real world. Literacy is being challenged in our ever changing technological world. We need to be able to use these tools in order to help our students. Embracing technology and entwining it in our classrooms helps these students familiarize themselves with proper use of these tools. In order for teachers to do this the teachers must themselves not be afraid of change and innovation. Otherwise the world may just pass them by. Instagram and Snapchat do not have to be dirty words in the high school classroom. And to deny their importance and impact on the students of today is a missed opportunity I think for educators.

Hello, my name is Ryan Johannson, I am a high school teacher in Central Alberta. Social Studies and the Industrial Arts are the areas of specialty I currently work in. I have been teaching for 19 years in the same school division that I myself was educated in. I live out in the country on my family farm with my family and cows. Being a part of this division since 1980 as a student and teacher I have seen many changes. Education has entered an interesting period in my opinion. The world is ever opening up to us and our students. The availability of information and news comes at us faster then ever before. We certainly can no longer complain about a lack of information on any topic we desire to research. Innovation has become a key to education I believe due to the fact that without it our teachers would be horribly behind the demands from society on our schools.