STSD Curriculum & Technology Update

Regular updates and musings on curriculum and technology in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, PA.

Mastering Low-Level Content

How do we balance the political needs of NCLB with the needs of 21st century learning? Feel free to comment with your thoughts after watching this brief video.

Mastering Low-Level Content from Scott McLeod on Vimeo.

Comments

This brief video reminds me of playing with my own children when they were 1-5 years old.  There was a Tupperware toy, a shape-sorter, that resembled a sphere with about 12 different shape openings around the surface of the sphere.  The sphere could be pulled apart at the center to let all the various shapes fall out.  The object of the game was to place the shapes inside the sphere which required matching the appropriate shape and opening.  It dawned on me, as I viewed Scott McLeod’s video, that my children started interacting with this toy at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.  The kids were analyzing and evaluating the shapes and the openings as they were interacting with the toy. (Neither the kids nor I were thinking about Bloom at the time.) The task required my children to analyze and evaluate in order to complete the task (probably not a task that NCLB would test).  The task had nothing to do with knowing the names of the shapes (probably a task that NCLB would test).  The play was so engaging that my kids played it over and over again....and as they played at analyzing and evaluating their choices, they easily learned the names of the shapes, and they began to spot those shapes in the world around them (transferring their knowledge to real world situations).  Okay, maybe this is a simple example of the challenges in front of us, but it makes me think that if we start at the upper levels of the taxonomy, the lower level skills and knowledge will be naturally integrated into learning.  If we focus on starting at the lower thinking levels of the taxonomy, we may never get to the top levels.  You can’t focus on the top levels of thinking without bringing in the lower levels, but you can avoid the upper levels of thinking if you start or stay focused on the lower levels.

Well, this is the age-old special education dilemma.  At what point should you scrap teaching a student the low-level skills (multiplication tables for example) and teach them how to use a calculator and function in real-life application based problems? 

While I think it is inherently more engaging to teach with creation and analysis, it is thought provoking to wonder if students would inherently “get” skills if we didn’t at some points teach the remembering and understanding phases.  But doesn’t creation and analysis involve understanding?  Yes!  remembering..yes Applying...a big yes!

Dr. Kyle Peck who is a focal leader with the Educational Designs Project through Pennsylvania State University, shares, “Our schools are better than they have ever been, and our teachers are caring, dedicated professionals, but both students and teachers are working against the odds in a system that is in need of transformation.”

The ESD Project’s mission is to design a new educational system:

based on our new understanding of how people learn
designed to produce the skills and attributes required for success in modern life
taking advantage of powerful and rapidly evolving learning technologies
designed to meet the diverse needs of individual learners.

In reference to PSSA testing I do recall hearing Dr. Peck speaking at a technology presentation where he mentioned that the results of PSSA only supports a small component of what our students can accomplish.

We are in an era of changes! Michael Fullan, leading expert in change states “The main problem is not the absence of innovation in schools, but rather the presence of too many disconnected, episodic, fragmented, superficially adorned projects.” We have a huge responsibility at us for not only students, but educators as well. We need to embrace our professional development, take risks, and ask questions. “Effect the change!”

To read more about the Educational Designs Project, go to http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/p/1/p16/esdproject/

I know this was sent to us quite a while ago, but this is the first opportunity I have had to look at the video.  I was so hopeful that this video would offer something new and/or actually give some concrete ways of integrating the creating, evaluating, analyzing, and applying levels with the absolute answer type questions that are asked by PSSA questions. 

Even though many of the questions asked at the 11th grade level are higher level questions, they are still questions that have only one right answer and require the students to recall and/or use one definite theorem, algorithm, rule or definition. 

Therefore even if a student can in general analyze a circle or other geometric shape, or combination of shapes in various ways and tell me or another teacher all that they know about the shape and make up problems or find real life applications of the shape, if they have forgotten on that one particular day the only property, definition, etc that the state deems necessary that year, they get no credit for knowing 10 other useful things about that figure including how it might apply to their future interests.

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