http://www.everythingpreschool.com/art/crafts.htm
First-SchoolPreschool Activities and Crafts
http://www.first-school.ws/
http://www.preschooleducation.com/ahalloween.shtml Gayle's Preschool Rainbow - Activity Central
http://www.preschoolrainbow.org/ http://www.preschoolexpress.com/
http://www.nec-childcare.co.uk/childcare/?usca_p=t the course information: Diploma in preschool practice
http://www.nec-childcare.co.uk/childcare/product?product_id=820&category_id=4660
http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/ you can make them as simple as you want. I cut and pasted them on a word document and then edited them. preschoolers -this might be a good one
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/index.htm
http://www.preschoolrainbow.org/index.htm the bones song
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/bones.htm have fun!!
Thursday, 26 July 2007
Thursday, 19 July 2007
Readings and Survey for seminar for 21st July by Dr Dilys Schoorman
The teacher as a reflective decision maker: Facilitating active and engaged classroom practice
A seminar led by:
Dr. Dilys Schoorman
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL, USA
E-mail: dschoorm@fau.edu
Survey of attendees
Version #1
What would you want to be remembered for as a teacher? (Provide at least three ideas.)
Why is this important?
How would your students describe you?
(Think of the average students, the best students, the worst students. Would there be a difference in what they say?)
Describe your favorite teacher. Describe your worst teacher. In each case focus on how s/he taught, the impact on your learning and address why you rank the person as most/least favorite.
Think of the best lesson you have taught recently. Describe why you think it was good. What are the indicators of a good lesson in this case?
Think of the worst lesson you have taught recently. Describe why you think it was bad. What are the indicators of a bad lesson?
What institutional and social support do you receive in order to be a good instructor?
What institutional and social support do you lack that prevents you from being a better instructor?
Critical reflection on workshops
For many teachers the first response to encountering a problem of practice is to look for a manual, workshop or person that can solve it. Students refusing to learn? Buy a book on dealing with resistance to learning. Classes full of students with different backgrounds, expectations, ability levels and experiences? Enroll in that institute on dealing with diversity. Running discussions that are dominated by a handful of confident, articulate students? Go and see how that colleague across campus that everyone raves about runs her discussions.
All these resources for dealing with problems are useful and necessary. I do want to point out, however, that while reading books, attending workshops and watching colleagues can give you some useful insights and techniques that will help you in dealing with your problem, it is wrong to assume that at some point in these activities you will inevitably stumble on the exact answer to the problem you are experiencing.
To think this way is to risk spending a great deal of energy castigating ourselves for our inability to make externally prescribed solutions fit the problems we are facing. It never occurs to us that what needs questioning is the assumption that neat answers to our problems are always waiting to be discovered outside our experience.
A critically reflective teacher has researched his/ her teaching and his/ her students enough to know that methods and practices imported from outside rarely fit snugly into the contours of his/ her classrooms.
What does it mean to be a reflective decision maker as a teacher?
Schoorman:
In typical/ traditional practice teachers are preoccupied with “delivering” the content to students. Satisfaction comes from having “covered” the syllabus, and evaluation processes typically focus on student achievement, rather than that of the teacher. The “effort” in teaching is typically forward looking as teachers attempt to prepare for their next class, instead of looking back at their previous class. A reflective approach to teaching highlights the need to re-examine current and past practice and use the conclusions drawn to shape future practice.
Very little happens in the classroom that is not the decision of the teacher. What to teach that day, how it will be taught, the work / homework that students will do and how they will be evaluated is often decided by the teacher. This is true even within the context of working with a government regulated syllabus and examination, though such external pressures impinge upon some decision making.
Schon:
Reflective decision-making is a proactive approach to practice. The increasing complexity and pace of change in society presents a challenge to educators to devise new ways to respond to the needs of the education system. Educators must learn not only to reflect, but to reflect and respond creatively, actively and effectively to unfamiliar situations and demands, while ensuring that educational excellence continues to be the major focus of their work. [Schön, 1984].
Brookfield:
We teach to change the world. The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act towards each other, and to their environment, with compassion, understanding and fairness. But our attempts to increase the amount of love and justice in the world are never simple, never ambiguous. What we think are democratic, respectful ways of treating people can be experienced by them as oppressive and constraining. One of the hardest things teachers learn is that the sincerity of their intentions does not guarantee the purity of their practice. The cultural, psychological and political complexities of learning, and the ways in which power complicates all human relationships (including those between students and teachers) means that teaching can never be innocent.
Teaching innocently means thinking that we're always understanding exactly what it is that we're doing and what effect we're having. Teaching innocently means assuming that the meanings and significance we place in our actions are the ones that students take from them. At best, teaching this way is naive. At worst, it induces pessimism, guilt and lethargy. Since we rarely have full awareness of what we're doing, and since we frequently misread how others perceive our actions, an uncritical stance towards our practice sets us up for a lifetime of frustration. Nothing seems to work out as it should. Our inability to control what looks like chaos becomes, to our eyes, evidence of our incompetence.
Breaking this vicious circle of innocence and blame is one reason why the habit of critical reflection is crucial for teachers' survival. [Brookfield, 1995]
Ferraro:
Reflective practice has also been defined in terms of action research. Action research, in turn, is defined as a tool of curriculum development consisting of continuous feedback that targets specific problems in a particular school setting (Hopkins & Antes, 1990). As such, it has become a standard concept in teacher education programs. The teacher educator as researcher and role model encourages students to put theories they've learned into practice in their classrooms. The students bring reports of their field experiences to class and analyze their teaching strategies with their mentors and colleagues. This collaborative model of reflective practice enriches students' personal reflections on their work and provides students with suggestions from peers on how to refine their teaching practices. …
Effective teacher professional development should involve more than occasional large-group sessions; it should include activities such as study teams and peer coaching in which teachers continuously examine their assumptions and practices. [Ferraro, 2000]
The nature of the educational process
From Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence -- but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:
* the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
* the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
* the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
* the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;
* the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
* the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
* the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
* the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
* the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
* the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. [Freire, 1976]
Reflective decision making in curriculum implementation
Instruction:
Schon:
The best teacher will be who he has at his tongue’s end the explanation of what it is that is bothering the pupil. These explanations give the teacher the knowledge of the greatest possible number of methods, the ability of inventing new methods and, above all, not a blind adherence to ONE method but the conviction that all methods are one-sided, and that the best method would be the one that would answer best to all the possible difficulties incurred by a pupil. That is, not a method, but an art and a talent. And this is teaching in the form of reflection-in-action. It involves a surprise, a response to surprise by thought turning back on itself, thinking what we’re doing as we do it, setting the problem of the situation anew, conducting an action experiment on the spot by which we seek to solve the new problems we’ve set, an experiment in which we test both our new way of seeing the situation, and also try to change that situation for the better. [Schon, 1987].
Kohn:
The problem is that raising standards has come to mean little more than higher scores on poorly designed standardized tests. The more schools commit themselves to improving performance on these tests, the more meaningful opportunities to learn are sacrificed. Every hour spent drilling students to ace these exams is an hour not spent helping them become creative, critical, curious learners. Thus, the drive for high scores is tantamount to lowering standards--a paradox rarely appreciated by those who make, or report on, educational policy.
This transformation is taking place across the country. One example can stand for thousands: A widely respected middle-school teacher in Wisconsin, famous for helping students create their own innovative learning projects, stood up at a community meeting one evening and announced that he "used to be" a good teacher. These days, he explained, he just handed out textbooks and quizzed his students on what they had memorized. He had changed his teaching approach because he was increasingly being held accountable for test scores. The kind of wide-ranging and enthusiastic exploration of ideas that once characterized his classroom could not survive when the emphasis was on preparing students to take a standardized test.
Traditionalists typically believe we can make students learn by the sheer force of didactic instruction, by having the teacher stand at the front of the room, perhaps writing on the blackboard while disgorging information that everyone else in the room is supposed to lap up and copy down. The teacher tells; the students listen. And when they aren't listening, they're reading textbooks to absorb information. Then come the quizzes, compulsory recitations, and other ways of proving that they remember what they were told or what they read.
Here, education is conceived as transferring or transmitting facts, pouring knowledge into empty vessels. This transmission model is found both in first-grade classrooms devoted to the explicit teaching of phonics and in high school honors classes, where teachers slap transparencies on the overhead projector and lecture endlessly about Romantic poets or genetic codes. As a rule, the more that standardized tests are used (and their results emphasized), the more we would expect schools to adopt this approach to teaching students of all ages.
But cognitive scientists tell us that we're not passive receptacles, and that learning isn't just a matter of heaping new information on top of the knowledge we already have. It's a matter of coming across something unexpected, something that can't easily be explained by the informal theories we have already developed. To resolve that conflict, we have to reorganize our way of understanding so we can accommodate the new reality we've just encountered.
[Kohn, 2000].
Brooks & Brooks:
We must rethink the very foundations of schooling if we are to base our practice on our understandings of learners' needs.
One such foundational notion is that students will learn on demand. This bedrock belief is manifested in the traditional scope and sequence of a typical course of study and, more recently, in the new educational standards and assessments. This approach to schooling is grounded in the conviction that all students can and will learn the same material at the same time. For some students, this approach does indeed lead to the construction of knowledge. For others, however, it does not.
The people working directly with students are the ones who must adapt and adjust lessons on the basis of evolving needs. Constructivist educational practice cannot be realized without the classroom teacher's autonomous, ongoing, professional judgment. State education departments could and should support good educational practice. But too often they do not.
The people working directly with students are the ones who must adapt and adjust lessons on the basis of evolving needs. Constructivist educational practice cannot be realized without the classroom teacher's autonomous, ongoing, professional judgment. …
Opportunities for constructing meaning
Recently, we visited a classroom in which a teacher asked 7th graders to reflect on a poem. The teacher began the lesson by asking the students to interpret the first two lines. One student volunteered that the lines evoked an image of a dream. "No," he was told, "that's not what the author meant." Another student said that the poem reminded her of a voyage at sea. The teacher reminded the student that she was supposed to be thinking about the first two lines of the poem, not the whole poem, and then told her that the poem was not about the sea. Looking out at the class, the teacher asked, "Anyone else?" No other student raised a hand.
In another classroom, a teacher asked 9th graders to ponder the effect of temperature on muscle movement. Students had ice, buckets of water, gauges for measuring finger-grip strength, and other items to help them consider the relationship. The teacher asked a few framing questions, stated rules for handling materials safely, and then gave the students time to design their experiments. He posed different questions to different groups of students, depending on their activities and the conclusions that they seemed to be drawing. He continually asked students to elaborate or posed contradictions to their responses, even when they were correct.
As the end of the period neared, the students shared initial findings about their investigations and offered working hypotheses about the relationship between muscle movement and temperature. Several students asked to return later that day to continue working on their experiments.
Let's consider these two lessons. In one case, the lesson was not conducive to students' constructing deeper meaning. In the other case, it was. The 7th grade teacher communicated to her students that there is one interpretation of the poem's meaning, that she knew it, and that only that interpretation was an acceptable response. The students' primary quest, then, was to figure out what the teacher thought of the poem.
The teacher spoke to her students in respectful tones, acknowledging each one by name and encouraging their responses. However, she politely and calmly rejected their ideas when they failed to conform to her views. She rejected one student's response as a misinterpretation. She dismissed another student's response because of a procedural error: The response focused on the whole poem, not on just the designated two lines.
After the teacher told these two students that they were wrong, none of the other students volunteered interpretations, even though the teacher encouraged more responses. The teacher then proceeded with the lesson by telling the students what the poet really meant. Because only two students offered comments during the lesson, the teacher told us that a separate test would inform her whether the other students understood the poem.
In the second lesson, the teacher withheld his thoughts intentionally to challenge students to develop their own hypotheses. Even when students' initial responses were correct, the teacher challenged their thinking, causing many students to question the correctness of their initial responses and to investigate the issue more deeply.
Very few students had awakened that morning thinking about the relationship between muscle movement and temperature. But, as the teacher helped students focus their emerging, somewhat disjointed musings into a structured investigation, their engagement grew. The teacher provoked the students to search for relevance in a relationship they hadn't yet considered by framing the investigation around one big concept, providing appropriate materials and general questions, and helping the students think through their own questions. Moreover, the teacher sought and valued his students' points of view and used their comments to assess their learning. No separate testing event was required.
Students must be permitted the freedom to think, to question, to reflect, and to interact with ideas, objects, and others--in other words, to construct meaning. In school, being wrong has always carried negative consequences for students. Sadly, in this climate of increasing accountability, being wrong carries even more severe consequences. But being wrong is often the first step on the path to greater understanding. [Brooks & Brooks, 1999]
Evaluation
Brooks & Brooks:
When tests constrict learning
Learning is a complex process through which learners constantly change their internally constructed understandings of how their worlds function. New information either transforms their current beliefs--or doesn't. The efficacy of the learning environment is a function of many complex factors, including curriculum, instructional methodology, student motivation, and student developmental readiness. Trying to capture this complexity on paper-and-pencil assessments severely limits knowledge and expression.
Inevitably, schools reduce the curriculum to only that which is covered on tests, and this constriction limits student learning. So, too, does the undeviating, one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and assessment in many states that have crowned accountability king. Requiring all students to take the same courses and pass the same tests may hold political capital for legislators and state-level educational policymakers, but it contravenes what years of painstaking research tells us about student learning.
Classroom practices designed to prepare students for tests clearly do not foster deep learning that students apply to new situations. Instead, these practices train students to mimic learning on tests.
Constructivist teachers assess student learning in the context of daily classroom investigations, not as separate events. Students demonstrate their knowledge every day in a variety of ways. Defining understanding as only that which is capable of being measured by paper-and-pencil assessments administered under strict security perpetuates false and counterproductive myths about academia, intelligence, creativity, accountability, and knowledge.
We counsel advocacy for children. And vision. And courage.
Focus on student learning. When we design instructional practices to help students construct knowledge, students learn. This is our calling as educators.
Keep the curriculum conceptual. Narrowing curriculum to match what is covered on state assessments results in an overemphasis on the rote memorization of discrete bits of information and pushes aside big ideas and intellectual curiosity. Keep essential principles and recurring concepts at the center.
Assess student learning within the context of daily instruction. Use students' daily work, points of view, suppositions, projects, and demonstrations to assess what they know and don't know, and use these assessments to guide teaching.
Initiate discussions among administrators, teachers, parents, school boards, and students about the relationship among the state's standards, the state's assessments, and your district's mission. Ask questions about what the assessments actually assess, the instructional practices advocated by your district, and the ways to teach a conceptual curriculum while preparing students for the assessments. These are discussions worth having. [Brooks & Brooks, 1999]
Jackson:
The difference between a diploma and doomsday cannot possibly come down to a Byzantine trivial pursuit. That is, unless you can make the implausible case that six or seven years from now, when these students are trembling job applicants, their bosses will look them dead in the eye and actually ask:
"Hmmm, your resume looks interesting, but to get this job you must tell me why King Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, the purpose of the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the function of the lord of the estate in medieval Europe."
Those are real - or surreal - requests of students from last month's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) 10th-gradehistory and social sciences test. Some educators let me read the full test last week.
Many parents, educators, and business leaders are already concerned about the more subjective aspects of the MCAS. Some have called for any high-stakes testing for graduation in 2003 to be limited to basic literacy and math.
The 10th-grade history test should call into question the political intentions of the entire test. At best, it is silly. At worst, it is racist.
The test, which focuses on "world" history, has 57 items. There are 12 slightly different forms of the test. Of the 57 items, about 40 refer to Europe, from the Byzantine Empire to the Cold War. Five are questions about capitalism. Only 12 are about the rest of the world.
For Europe, students needed specifics on wars, innovations, cities, and individual writers, economists, and artists. They had to know, "In 1429, which military commander led a French army that defeated the English at Orleans? A. Joan of Arc; B. Catherine the Great;C. Napoleon Bonaparte; D. Charlemagne."
In fact, the MCAS really should be renamed the Mutual Charlemagne Admiration Society. The founder of the first empire in western Europe after the fall of Rome was also in this question: "Many separate groups attacked Charlemagne's empire. The fiercest of these groups came from the north and was known as the A. Magyars; B. Visigoths; C. Huns; D. Vikings."
Students were given detailed maps of Eurasia and asked if the dotted routes represent the Crusades or the spice trade. About all students got for Africa was a bare outline of the continent and asked to point out the desert - where there are no people to have a history. Asians are reduced to shoguns, samurais, and the split between China and Taiwan. Latin America is but a colonial appendage of Europe, and women, other than Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great, are almost invisible. [Jackson, 2000]
Bibliography
Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Brooks, M. G. & Brooks, J. G. (1999). The courage to be constructivist. Educational Leadership, 57, (3), 18-24.
Ferraro, Joan M. (2000). Reflective Practice and Professional Development. ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education Washington DC. ED449120
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New revised 20th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum.
Kohn, A. (2000). Unlearning How We Learn. Principal (Reston, Va.) 79, (4), 26-29, 31-32.
Jackson, D. (2000). At best, silly, at worst, racist: The Massachusetts 10th-grade world history test is a Eurocentric exercise in travel pursuit. Boston Globe, June 9, 2000.
Schön, D. (1984). Leadership as reflection in action, in T. J. Sergiovanni and J. E. Corbally (Eds.), Leadership and organizational culture, 64-72. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Schön, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Presentation at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.
A seminar led by:
Dr. Dilys Schoorman
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL, USA
E-mail: dschoorm@fau.edu
Survey of attendees
Version #1
What would you want to be remembered for as a teacher? (Provide at least three ideas.)
Why is this important?
How would your students describe you?
(Think of the average students, the best students, the worst students. Would there be a difference in what they say?)
Describe your favorite teacher. Describe your worst teacher. In each case focus on how s/he taught, the impact on your learning and address why you rank the person as most/least favorite.
Think of the best lesson you have taught recently. Describe why you think it was good. What are the indicators of a good lesson in this case?
Think of the worst lesson you have taught recently. Describe why you think it was bad. What are the indicators of a bad lesson?
What institutional and social support do you receive in order to be a good instructor?
What institutional and social support do you lack that prevents you from being a better instructor?
Critical reflection on workshops
For many teachers the first response to encountering a problem of practice is to look for a manual, workshop or person that can solve it. Students refusing to learn? Buy a book on dealing with resistance to learning. Classes full of students with different backgrounds, expectations, ability levels and experiences? Enroll in that institute on dealing with diversity. Running discussions that are dominated by a handful of confident, articulate students? Go and see how that colleague across campus that everyone raves about runs her discussions.
All these resources for dealing with problems are useful and necessary. I do want to point out, however, that while reading books, attending workshops and watching colleagues can give you some useful insights and techniques that will help you in dealing with your problem, it is wrong to assume that at some point in these activities you will inevitably stumble on the exact answer to the problem you are experiencing.
To think this way is to risk spending a great deal of energy castigating ourselves for our inability to make externally prescribed solutions fit the problems we are facing. It never occurs to us that what needs questioning is the assumption that neat answers to our problems are always waiting to be discovered outside our experience.
A critically reflective teacher has researched his/ her teaching and his/ her students enough to know that methods and practices imported from outside rarely fit snugly into the contours of his/ her classrooms.
What does it mean to be a reflective decision maker as a teacher?
Schoorman:
In typical/ traditional practice teachers are preoccupied with “delivering” the content to students. Satisfaction comes from having “covered” the syllabus, and evaluation processes typically focus on student achievement, rather than that of the teacher. The “effort” in teaching is typically forward looking as teachers attempt to prepare for their next class, instead of looking back at their previous class. A reflective approach to teaching highlights the need to re-examine current and past practice and use the conclusions drawn to shape future practice.
Very little happens in the classroom that is not the decision of the teacher. What to teach that day, how it will be taught, the work / homework that students will do and how they will be evaluated is often decided by the teacher. This is true even within the context of working with a government regulated syllabus and examination, though such external pressures impinge upon some decision making.
Schon:
Reflective decision-making is a proactive approach to practice. The increasing complexity and pace of change in society presents a challenge to educators to devise new ways to respond to the needs of the education system. Educators must learn not only to reflect, but to reflect and respond creatively, actively and effectively to unfamiliar situations and demands, while ensuring that educational excellence continues to be the major focus of their work. [Schön, 1984].
Brookfield:
We teach to change the world. The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act towards each other, and to their environment, with compassion, understanding and fairness. But our attempts to increase the amount of love and justice in the world are never simple, never ambiguous. What we think are democratic, respectful ways of treating people can be experienced by them as oppressive and constraining. One of the hardest things teachers learn is that the sincerity of their intentions does not guarantee the purity of their practice. The cultural, psychological and political complexities of learning, and the ways in which power complicates all human relationships (including those between students and teachers) means that teaching can never be innocent.
Teaching innocently means thinking that we're always understanding exactly what it is that we're doing and what effect we're having. Teaching innocently means assuming that the meanings and significance we place in our actions are the ones that students take from them. At best, teaching this way is naive. At worst, it induces pessimism, guilt and lethargy. Since we rarely have full awareness of what we're doing, and since we frequently misread how others perceive our actions, an uncritical stance towards our practice sets us up for a lifetime of frustration. Nothing seems to work out as it should. Our inability to control what looks like chaos becomes, to our eyes, evidence of our incompetence.
Breaking this vicious circle of innocence and blame is one reason why the habit of critical reflection is crucial for teachers' survival. [Brookfield, 1995]
Ferraro:
Reflective practice has also been defined in terms of action research. Action research, in turn, is defined as a tool of curriculum development consisting of continuous feedback that targets specific problems in a particular school setting (Hopkins & Antes, 1990). As such, it has become a standard concept in teacher education programs. The teacher educator as researcher and role model encourages students to put theories they've learned into practice in their classrooms. The students bring reports of their field experiences to class and analyze their teaching strategies with their mentors and colleagues. This collaborative model of reflective practice enriches students' personal reflections on their work and provides students with suggestions from peers on how to refine their teaching practices. …
Effective teacher professional development should involve more than occasional large-group sessions; it should include activities such as study teams and peer coaching in which teachers continuously examine their assumptions and practices. [Ferraro, 2000]
The nature of the educational process
From Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence -- but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:
* the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
* the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
* the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
* the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;
* the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
* the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
* the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
* the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
* the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
* the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. [Freire, 1976]
Reflective decision making in curriculum implementation
Instruction:
Schon:
The best teacher will be who he has at his tongue’s end the explanation of what it is that is bothering the pupil. These explanations give the teacher the knowledge of the greatest possible number of methods, the ability of inventing new methods and, above all, not a blind adherence to ONE method but the conviction that all methods are one-sided, and that the best method would be the one that would answer best to all the possible difficulties incurred by a pupil. That is, not a method, but an art and a talent. And this is teaching in the form of reflection-in-action. It involves a surprise, a response to surprise by thought turning back on itself, thinking what we’re doing as we do it, setting the problem of the situation anew, conducting an action experiment on the spot by which we seek to solve the new problems we’ve set, an experiment in which we test both our new way of seeing the situation, and also try to change that situation for the better. [Schon, 1987].
Kohn:
The problem is that raising standards has come to mean little more than higher scores on poorly designed standardized tests. The more schools commit themselves to improving performance on these tests, the more meaningful opportunities to learn are sacrificed. Every hour spent drilling students to ace these exams is an hour not spent helping them become creative, critical, curious learners. Thus, the drive for high scores is tantamount to lowering standards--a paradox rarely appreciated by those who make, or report on, educational policy.
This transformation is taking place across the country. One example can stand for thousands: A widely respected middle-school teacher in Wisconsin, famous for helping students create their own innovative learning projects, stood up at a community meeting one evening and announced that he "used to be" a good teacher. These days, he explained, he just handed out textbooks and quizzed his students on what they had memorized. He had changed his teaching approach because he was increasingly being held accountable for test scores. The kind of wide-ranging and enthusiastic exploration of ideas that once characterized his classroom could not survive when the emphasis was on preparing students to take a standardized test.
Traditionalists typically believe we can make students learn by the sheer force of didactic instruction, by having the teacher stand at the front of the room, perhaps writing on the blackboard while disgorging information that everyone else in the room is supposed to lap up and copy down. The teacher tells; the students listen. And when they aren't listening, they're reading textbooks to absorb information. Then come the quizzes, compulsory recitations, and other ways of proving that they remember what they were told or what they read.
Here, education is conceived as transferring or transmitting facts, pouring knowledge into empty vessels. This transmission model is found both in first-grade classrooms devoted to the explicit teaching of phonics and in high school honors classes, where teachers slap transparencies on the overhead projector and lecture endlessly about Romantic poets or genetic codes. As a rule, the more that standardized tests are used (and their results emphasized), the more we would expect schools to adopt this approach to teaching students of all ages.
But cognitive scientists tell us that we're not passive receptacles, and that learning isn't just a matter of heaping new information on top of the knowledge we already have. It's a matter of coming across something unexpected, something that can't easily be explained by the informal theories we have already developed. To resolve that conflict, we have to reorganize our way of understanding so we can accommodate the new reality we've just encountered.
[Kohn, 2000].
Brooks & Brooks:
We must rethink the very foundations of schooling if we are to base our practice on our understandings of learners' needs.
One such foundational notion is that students will learn on demand. This bedrock belief is manifested in the traditional scope and sequence of a typical course of study and, more recently, in the new educational standards and assessments. This approach to schooling is grounded in the conviction that all students can and will learn the same material at the same time. For some students, this approach does indeed lead to the construction of knowledge. For others, however, it does not.
The people working directly with students are the ones who must adapt and adjust lessons on the basis of evolving needs. Constructivist educational practice cannot be realized without the classroom teacher's autonomous, ongoing, professional judgment. State education departments could and should support good educational practice. But too often they do not.
The people working directly with students are the ones who must adapt and adjust lessons on the basis of evolving needs. Constructivist educational practice cannot be realized without the classroom teacher's autonomous, ongoing, professional judgment. …
Opportunities for constructing meaning
Recently, we visited a classroom in which a teacher asked 7th graders to reflect on a poem. The teacher began the lesson by asking the students to interpret the first two lines. One student volunteered that the lines evoked an image of a dream. "No," he was told, "that's not what the author meant." Another student said that the poem reminded her of a voyage at sea. The teacher reminded the student that she was supposed to be thinking about the first two lines of the poem, not the whole poem, and then told her that the poem was not about the sea. Looking out at the class, the teacher asked, "Anyone else?" No other student raised a hand.
In another classroom, a teacher asked 9th graders to ponder the effect of temperature on muscle movement. Students had ice, buckets of water, gauges for measuring finger-grip strength, and other items to help them consider the relationship. The teacher asked a few framing questions, stated rules for handling materials safely, and then gave the students time to design their experiments. He posed different questions to different groups of students, depending on their activities and the conclusions that they seemed to be drawing. He continually asked students to elaborate or posed contradictions to their responses, even when they were correct.
As the end of the period neared, the students shared initial findings about their investigations and offered working hypotheses about the relationship between muscle movement and temperature. Several students asked to return later that day to continue working on their experiments.
Let's consider these two lessons. In one case, the lesson was not conducive to students' constructing deeper meaning. In the other case, it was. The 7th grade teacher communicated to her students that there is one interpretation of the poem's meaning, that she knew it, and that only that interpretation was an acceptable response. The students' primary quest, then, was to figure out what the teacher thought of the poem.
The teacher spoke to her students in respectful tones, acknowledging each one by name and encouraging their responses. However, she politely and calmly rejected their ideas when they failed to conform to her views. She rejected one student's response as a misinterpretation. She dismissed another student's response because of a procedural error: The response focused on the whole poem, not on just the designated two lines.
After the teacher told these two students that they were wrong, none of the other students volunteered interpretations, even though the teacher encouraged more responses. The teacher then proceeded with the lesson by telling the students what the poet really meant. Because only two students offered comments during the lesson, the teacher told us that a separate test would inform her whether the other students understood the poem.
In the second lesson, the teacher withheld his thoughts intentionally to challenge students to develop their own hypotheses. Even when students' initial responses were correct, the teacher challenged their thinking, causing many students to question the correctness of their initial responses and to investigate the issue more deeply.
Very few students had awakened that morning thinking about the relationship between muscle movement and temperature. But, as the teacher helped students focus their emerging, somewhat disjointed musings into a structured investigation, their engagement grew. The teacher provoked the students to search for relevance in a relationship they hadn't yet considered by framing the investigation around one big concept, providing appropriate materials and general questions, and helping the students think through their own questions. Moreover, the teacher sought and valued his students' points of view and used their comments to assess their learning. No separate testing event was required.
Students must be permitted the freedom to think, to question, to reflect, and to interact with ideas, objects, and others--in other words, to construct meaning. In school, being wrong has always carried negative consequences for students. Sadly, in this climate of increasing accountability, being wrong carries even more severe consequences. But being wrong is often the first step on the path to greater understanding. [Brooks & Brooks, 1999]
Evaluation
Brooks & Brooks:
When tests constrict learning
Learning is a complex process through which learners constantly change their internally constructed understandings of how their worlds function. New information either transforms their current beliefs--or doesn't. The efficacy of the learning environment is a function of many complex factors, including curriculum, instructional methodology, student motivation, and student developmental readiness. Trying to capture this complexity on paper-and-pencil assessments severely limits knowledge and expression.
Inevitably, schools reduce the curriculum to only that which is covered on tests, and this constriction limits student learning. So, too, does the undeviating, one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and assessment in many states that have crowned accountability king. Requiring all students to take the same courses and pass the same tests may hold political capital for legislators and state-level educational policymakers, but it contravenes what years of painstaking research tells us about student learning.
Classroom practices designed to prepare students for tests clearly do not foster deep learning that students apply to new situations. Instead, these practices train students to mimic learning on tests.
Constructivist teachers assess student learning in the context of daily classroom investigations, not as separate events. Students demonstrate their knowledge every day in a variety of ways. Defining understanding as only that which is capable of being measured by paper-and-pencil assessments administered under strict security perpetuates false and counterproductive myths about academia, intelligence, creativity, accountability, and knowledge.
We counsel advocacy for children. And vision. And courage.
Focus on student learning. When we design instructional practices to help students construct knowledge, students learn. This is our calling as educators.
Keep the curriculum conceptual. Narrowing curriculum to match what is covered on state assessments results in an overemphasis on the rote memorization of discrete bits of information and pushes aside big ideas and intellectual curiosity. Keep essential principles and recurring concepts at the center.
Assess student learning within the context of daily instruction. Use students' daily work, points of view, suppositions, projects, and demonstrations to assess what they know and don't know, and use these assessments to guide teaching.
Initiate discussions among administrators, teachers, parents, school boards, and students about the relationship among the state's standards, the state's assessments, and your district's mission. Ask questions about what the assessments actually assess, the instructional practices advocated by your district, and the ways to teach a conceptual curriculum while preparing students for the assessments. These are discussions worth having. [Brooks & Brooks, 1999]
Jackson:
The difference between a diploma and doomsday cannot possibly come down to a Byzantine trivial pursuit. That is, unless you can make the implausible case that six or seven years from now, when these students are trembling job applicants, their bosses will look them dead in the eye and actually ask:
"Hmmm, your resume looks interesting, but to get this job you must tell me why King Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, the purpose of the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the function of the lord of the estate in medieval Europe."
Those are real - or surreal - requests of students from last month's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) 10th-gradehistory and social sciences test. Some educators let me read the full test last week.
Many parents, educators, and business leaders are already concerned about the more subjective aspects of the MCAS. Some have called for any high-stakes testing for graduation in 2003 to be limited to basic literacy and math.
The 10th-grade history test should call into question the political intentions of the entire test. At best, it is silly. At worst, it is racist.
The test, which focuses on "world" history, has 57 items. There are 12 slightly different forms of the test. Of the 57 items, about 40 refer to Europe, from the Byzantine Empire to the Cold War. Five are questions about capitalism. Only 12 are about the rest of the world.
For Europe, students needed specifics on wars, innovations, cities, and individual writers, economists, and artists. They had to know, "In 1429, which military commander led a French army that defeated the English at Orleans? A. Joan of Arc; B. Catherine the Great;C. Napoleon Bonaparte; D. Charlemagne."
In fact, the MCAS really should be renamed the Mutual Charlemagne Admiration Society. The founder of the first empire in western Europe after the fall of Rome was also in this question: "Many separate groups attacked Charlemagne's empire. The fiercest of these groups came from the north and was known as the A. Magyars; B. Visigoths; C. Huns; D. Vikings."
Students were given detailed maps of Eurasia and asked if the dotted routes represent the Crusades or the spice trade. About all students got for Africa was a bare outline of the continent and asked to point out the desert - where there are no people to have a history. Asians are reduced to shoguns, samurais, and the split between China and Taiwan. Latin America is but a colonial appendage of Europe, and women, other than Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great, are almost invisible. [Jackson, 2000]
Bibliography
Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Brooks, M. G. & Brooks, J. G. (1999). The courage to be constructivist. Educational Leadership, 57, (3), 18-24.
Ferraro, Joan M. (2000). Reflective Practice and Professional Development. ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education Washington DC. ED449120
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New revised 20th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum.
Kohn, A. (2000). Unlearning How We Learn. Principal (Reston, Va.) 79, (4), 26-29, 31-32.
Jackson, D. (2000). At best, silly, at worst, racist: The Massachusetts 10th-grade world history test is a Eurocentric exercise in travel pursuit. Boston Globe, June 9, 2000.
Schön, D. (1984). Leadership as reflection in action, in T. J. Sergiovanni and J. E. Corbally (Eds.), Leadership and organizational culture, 64-72. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Schön, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Presentation at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.
Friday, 13 July 2007
Ted Power on testing objectives
From Mishthi
http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/esl0704.html
Please see section on Testing Objectives - as Mishthi comments it should be useful for the Assessment component especially for us who teach adult learners
http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/esl0704.html
Please see section on Testing Objectives - as Mishthi comments it should be useful for the Assessment component especially for us who teach adult learners
Sunday, 17 June 2007
Education in Crisis?
Sri Lanka::
* Sri Lanka's teachers take leave while students fail examinations Sunday, May 20, 2007, 14:34 GMT, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
May 20, Colombo: Sri Lanka's Minister of Education Susil Premajayantha says that out of the country's 200,000 government teachers, 40,000, or 20%, take leave on any given day.
Addressing a prize giving ceremony for a Colombo school, the Minister further said a recent study has revealed that 18% of students cannot read or write when they reach the sixth grade.
Meanwhile, 51% of candidates in the 2006 December GCE Ordinary Level Examination were unable to pass, Department of Examination statistics revealed. Out of the 525,000 candidates, 21,813 failed all ten subjects. In nine schools in Colombo and in 38 schools and 40 monks’ schools islandwide, not a single student qualified for GCE Advanced Level study.
Over 57% failed in mathematics; over 51% failed in science and over 63% failed in English. Ninety percent answered the compulsory geometry problems incorrectly in the mathematics paper.
The chairman of the Ceylon Teachers’ Union, Joseph Stalin Fernando, meanwhile rejected the Ministry of Education’s attempt to put the responsibility on the teachers. He asked what the thousands of administrators including the recent Ministers of Education had done with all the perks and benefits provided to them.
Education: Quality and quantity a sad mismatch!
By Deepal Warnakulasuriya
Only half the G.C.E. Ordinary Level students who sat for the last year examination had qualified for the G.C.E. Advanced Level. Nearly 524,000 candidates sat for the examination at 3,946 examination centres islandwide. out of them, 377,000 were school candidates while 146,000 were private students. According to the latest data of the Department of Examinations, from 1998 there has been a steady decline in the pass rate.
Every year the results were analysed by the Department but was not disclosed to the general public. But the National Symposium of Education which was held on May 12 under the directive of the Education Minister Susil Prema Jayantha made a platform to table their findings.
Commissioner General of Examinations Anura Edirisinghe while studying the gradual decrease in the number of candidates who sit for the examination from 1998 to 2006, noted that was a marked increase in the numbers that qualify for G.C.E. A/L.
Only 48.7 percent have passed their examinations, while 51.3 percent failed to qualify for their next target. As the Department of Examinations says 21,813 candidates had failed to secure even a single pass. It was shocking to note that 4,128 were from the Colombo district. And 3,564 from the Central Province, 3,404 from Southern Province, 2,668 from Sabaragamuwa Province, 2,277 from the Uva Province, 2,056 from the North Central Province, 2,039 from the North Western Province, 773 from the Eastern Province and 704 from the Northern Province.
These are not just statistics. But we are compelled to see the education level of our next generation. The policies which change whenever a new regime takes over are not the remedy for this. Instead we should have a national policy which guides students on various job oriented paths after the O/Level Examination without leaving almost 50 percent as failures.
According to the Department's analysis 258,975 candidates had sat for the English Language paper but the percentage who passed the subject was 36.82.
As the Commissioner General believes in that is also using the 'tak tik tuk' theory and they are competent on writing. Anyway, Over 63 percent has failed the subject. When we go on to Mathematics paper out of 259,263 only 42.63 percent had passed the subject. In the science subject the percentage of failed students is 51.65. Furthermore there are over 20 percent of students who were unable to get a simple pass in the mother tongue, the Sinhala language.
In this situation who should be blamed? Anyway it says that the country's education system does not meet the ultimate needs of the present society. It would be difficult to slip away from the responsibility, just putting the blame on the politicians who make instructions to change the syllabus, structure or text books.
But lack of qualified teachers is a major reason for this. In that case, politicians should stop recruiting incompetency teachers to satisfy them by just giving jobs. The teachers who teach the "theory of memorising" and reproducing at the exam are also responsible for this pathetic situation. The officers who 'nod' their heads silently to say 'yes' for any wrong by the higher level officials also cannot escape from this blame.
Setting the question papers is another issue which should be spoken. The question papers should be easily understood by the student as the question paper means only to test what the candidates know and not what he/she doesn't know. The paper marking procedure is also another topic should be considered in this subject.
Tuition culture which had been introduced in the country had to be controlled. Instead of giving a sound education, this kind of education centres have become the places where the young show-off in fashionable attire and just meeting places.
If the authorities can make a reward system for teachers, it would work in two ways. They would be compelled to do their jobs to meet the targets and at the same time the teachers who conduct private tuition will be prioritising teaching in schools.
In addition to the Commissioner General's revelation, National Education Commission (NEC) in a survey conducted with the participation of 4054 students from 70 schools representing all provinces (except North and East) found that the 18 per cent of grade six students could not write at all. Twenty Eight per cent of grade 10 students could not write legibly and only 35 per cent of them could take down a dictated passage. Anura Edirisinghe's analysis also revealed that the Pirivena institutes which gifted intellectuals to the society in the history have failed in their attempts with forty pirivena institutes which not a single student passed the exam.
The gravity of the problem, none of the students were qualified for the G.C.E. A/Level in nine schools in the Colombo district. But the country's each province has an Education Minister with several Parliament level Education Ministers. Anyway Minister Susil Prem Jayantha being there, we still breathe a sigh of relief. He has vowed to change the situation within three years. At the same time, he had also said that he would step down from this portfolio, if he fails to do that.
We have seen politicians who had kept their words for the betterment of people at least in other countries like Bolivian President Evo Morales, we believe in Minister Prem Jayantha's words. President Morales and his law makers accepted pay cuts as they wanted to "share the country's situation."
But, the Minister's directive to the Zonal Educational Directors telling them to decrease the failing percentage by 5 per cent is not enough. How can it be done? Just giving the candidates extra marks to reach the government's targets? Anyway, what we see is changing the present education system making the way to improve the quality of the education a must.
Have we ever thought of adopting or changing the English education system which we grabbed several decades ago?.
But what about providing jobs for students who perform well subject wise at the O/Level examination instead of giving them only a dream of further free education at a government university. These things should be taken seriously by policy makers, educationalists and relevant authorities.
Before conclusion, it is important to go through a quotation from the
Hindustan Times, "Sri Lanka has the highest level of literacy (91%) in the Asian region.
An overwhelming majority of its school going population (4 million) enjoys free education from kindergarten to the university undergraduate level.
But the quality of the education does not match the quantitative achievements."
* Sri Lanka's teachers take leave while students fail examinations Sunday, May 20, 2007, 14:34 GMT, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
May 20, Colombo: Sri Lanka's Minister of Education Susil Premajayantha says that out of the country's 200,000 government teachers, 40,000, or 20%, take leave on any given day.
Addressing a prize giving ceremony for a Colombo school, the Minister further said a recent study has revealed that 18% of students cannot read or write when they reach the sixth grade.
Meanwhile, 51% of candidates in the 2006 December GCE Ordinary Level Examination were unable to pass, Department of Examination statistics revealed. Out of the 525,000 candidates, 21,813 failed all ten subjects. In nine schools in Colombo and in 38 schools and 40 monks’ schools islandwide, not a single student qualified for GCE Advanced Level study.
Over 57% failed in mathematics; over 51% failed in science and over 63% failed in English. Ninety percent answered the compulsory geometry problems incorrectly in the mathematics paper.
The chairman of the Ceylon Teachers’ Union, Joseph Stalin Fernando, meanwhile rejected the Ministry of Education’s attempt to put the responsibility on the teachers. He asked what the thousands of administrators including the recent Ministers of Education had done with all the perks and benefits provided to them.
Education: Quality and quantity a sad mismatch!
By Deepal Warnakulasuriya
Only half the G.C.E. Ordinary Level students who sat for the last year examination had qualified for the G.C.E. Advanced Level. Nearly 524,000 candidates sat for the examination at 3,946 examination centres islandwide. out of them, 377,000 were school candidates while 146,000 were private students. According to the latest data of the Department of Examinations, from 1998 there has been a steady decline in the pass rate.
Every year the results were analysed by the Department but was not disclosed to the general public. But the National Symposium of Education which was held on May 12 under the directive of the Education Minister Susil Prema Jayantha made a platform to table their findings.
Commissioner General of Examinations Anura Edirisinghe while studying the gradual decrease in the number of candidates who sit for the examination from 1998 to 2006, noted that was a marked increase in the numbers that qualify for G.C.E. A/L.
Only 48.7 percent have passed their examinations, while 51.3 percent failed to qualify for their next target. As the Department of Examinations says 21,813 candidates had failed to secure even a single pass. It was shocking to note that 4,128 were from the Colombo district. And 3,564 from the Central Province, 3,404 from Southern Province, 2,668 from Sabaragamuwa Province, 2,277 from the Uva Province, 2,056 from the North Central Province, 2,039 from the North Western Province, 773 from the Eastern Province and 704 from the Northern Province.
These are not just statistics. But we are compelled to see the education level of our next generation. The policies which change whenever a new regime takes over are not the remedy for this. Instead we should have a national policy which guides students on various job oriented paths after the O/Level Examination without leaving almost 50 percent as failures.
According to the Department's analysis 258,975 candidates had sat for the English Language paper but the percentage who passed the subject was 36.82.
As the Commissioner General believes in that is also using the 'tak tik tuk' theory and they are competent on writing. Anyway, Over 63 percent has failed the subject. When we go on to Mathematics paper out of 259,263 only 42.63 percent had passed the subject. In the science subject the percentage of failed students is 51.65. Furthermore there are over 20 percent of students who were unable to get a simple pass in the mother tongue, the Sinhala language.
In this situation who should be blamed? Anyway it says that the country's education system does not meet the ultimate needs of the present society. It would be difficult to slip away from the responsibility, just putting the blame on the politicians who make instructions to change the syllabus, structure or text books.
But lack of qualified teachers is a major reason for this. In that case, politicians should stop recruiting incompetency teachers to satisfy them by just giving jobs. The teachers who teach the "theory of memorising" and reproducing at the exam are also responsible for this pathetic situation. The officers who 'nod' their heads silently to say 'yes' for any wrong by the higher level officials also cannot escape from this blame.
Setting the question papers is another issue which should be spoken. The question papers should be easily understood by the student as the question paper means only to test what the candidates know and not what he/she doesn't know. The paper marking procedure is also another topic should be considered in this subject.
Tuition culture which had been introduced in the country had to be controlled. Instead of giving a sound education, this kind of education centres have become the places where the young show-off in fashionable attire and just meeting places.
If the authorities can make a reward system for teachers, it would work in two ways. They would be compelled to do their jobs to meet the targets and at the same time the teachers who conduct private tuition will be prioritising teaching in schools.
In addition to the Commissioner General's revelation, National Education Commission (NEC) in a survey conducted with the participation of 4054 students from 70 schools representing all provinces (except North and East) found that the 18 per cent of grade six students could not write at all. Twenty Eight per cent of grade 10 students could not write legibly and only 35 per cent of them could take down a dictated passage. Anura Edirisinghe's analysis also revealed that the Pirivena institutes which gifted intellectuals to the society in the history have failed in their attempts with forty pirivena institutes which not a single student passed the exam.
The gravity of the problem, none of the students were qualified for the G.C.E. A/Level in nine schools in the Colombo district. But the country's each province has an Education Minister with several Parliament level Education Ministers. Anyway Minister Susil Prem Jayantha being there, we still breathe a sigh of relief. He has vowed to change the situation within three years. At the same time, he had also said that he would step down from this portfolio, if he fails to do that.
We have seen politicians who had kept their words for the betterment of people at least in other countries like Bolivian President Evo Morales, we believe in Minister Prem Jayantha's words. President Morales and his law makers accepted pay cuts as they wanted to "share the country's situation."
But, the Minister's directive to the Zonal Educational Directors telling them to decrease the failing percentage by 5 per cent is not enough. How can it be done? Just giving the candidates extra marks to reach the government's targets? Anyway, what we see is changing the present education system making the way to improve the quality of the education a must.
Have we ever thought of adopting or changing the English education system which we grabbed several decades ago?.
But what about providing jobs for students who perform well subject wise at the O/Level examination instead of giving them only a dream of further free education at a government university. These things should be taken seriously by policy makers, educationalists and relevant authorities.
Before conclusion, it is important to go through a quotation from the
Hindustan Times, "Sri Lanka has the highest level of literacy (91%) in the Asian region.
An overwhelming majority of its school going population (4 million) enjoys free education from kindergarten to the university undergraduate level.
But the quality of the education does not match the quantitative achievements."
Monday, 4 June 2007
Change Management
Individual Change Management
An early model of change developed by Kurt Lewin described change as a three-stage process. The first stage he called "unfreezing". It involved overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing "mind set". Defense mechanisms have to be bypassed. In the second stage the change occurs. This is typically a period of confusion and transition. We are aware that the old ways are being challenged but we do not have a clear picture to replace them with yet. The third and final stage he called "refreezing". The new mindset is crystallizing and one's comfort level is returning to previous levels.
Some change theories are based on derivatives of the Kübler-Ross model from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's book, "On Death and Dying." The stages of Kubler-Ross's model describe the personal and emotional states that a person typically encounters when dealing with loss of a loved one. Derivatives of her model applied in other settings such as the workplace show that similar emotional states are encountered as individuals are confronted with change.
A Formula for Change was developed by Richard Beckhard and David Gleicher and is sometimes referred to as Gleicher's Formula. The Formula illustrates that the combination of organisational dissatisfaction, vision for the future and the possibility of immediate, tactical action must be stronger than the resistance within the organisation in order for meaningful changes to occur.
The ADKAR model for individual change management was developed by ProSci with input from more than 1000 organizations from 59 countries. This model describes five required building blocks for change to be realized successfully on an individual level. The building blocks of the ADKAR Model include:
Awareness – of why the change is needed
Desire – to support and participate in the change
Knowledge – of how to change
Ability – to implement new skills and behaviors
Reinforcement – to sustain the change
Organizational Change Management
Organizational change management includes processes and tools for managing the people side of the change at an organizational level. These tools include a structured approach that can be used to effectively transition groups or organizations through change. When combined with an understanding of individual change management, these tools provide a framework for managing the people side of change.
The role of the management
Management's first responsibility (and that of administration in case of political changes) is to detect trends in the macroenvironment as well as in the microenvironment so as to be able to identify changes and initiate programs. It is also important to estimate what impact a change will likely have on employee behaviour patterns, work processes, technological requirements, and motivation. Management must assess what employee reactions will be and craft a change program that will provide support as workers go through the process of accepting change. The program must then be implemented, disseminated throughout the organization, monitored for effectiveness, and adjusted where necessary.
Gabrielle O'Donovan has designed a strategic implementation plan for a culture transformation programme which is largely based on primary research. The first phase 'strategic planning and design' includes a series of steps; back to the drawing board to revisit the company purpose, form the strategic management team to oversee implementation, create programme vision and define strategy, organize the workforce and design the core programme and cultural embedding mechanisms that will support it. The second phase 'strategy implementation' includes these steps; communicate vision and roll-out, manage the human landscape plus maintain momentum and solidify ground made. The final phase 'evaluation and readjustment' focuses on the measuring of results and also planning for the future.
Working with assumptions
Process Oriented Psychology by Arnold Mindell talks about the field in which each human relationship exists. Its application field, Worldwork, intends to transform systems by shifting roles that people unconsciously hold in a system.
Dialogue (by David Bohm) is a new form of communication in large groups that is based on the suspension of assumptions, thus letting the common knowledge of a group emerge.
Appreciative Inquiry, one of the most frequently applied approaches to organizational change, is partly based on the assumption that change in a system is instantaneous ('Change at the Speed of Imagination')
Theory U of Otto Scharmer who describes a process in which change strategies are based on the emerging future rather than on lesson from the past.
The constructionist principle
The map is not the territory: The map/territory relation is proven by neuroscience and is used to signify that individual people do not have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. It has been coined into a model by Chris Argyris called the Ladder of Inference. As a consequence, communication in change processes needs make sure that information about change and its consequences is presented in such a way that people with different belief systems can access this information. Methods that are based on the Map/Territory Relation help people to:
become more aware of their own thinking and reasoning (reflection),
make their thinking and reasoning more visible to others (advocacy), and
inquire into others' thinking and reasoning (inquiry).
Some methodological frameworks that are based on this principle are:
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), an eclectic school of psychotherapy developed by Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Robert Dilts, and others;
Circular Questioning and other techniques basically developed in Systemic Family Therapy;.
Gestalt Psychology, a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies;
The concept of the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge and other management thinkers
Scenario Thinking, a method that helps people to create stories about the future
Change management in industrial plants
Since complex processes can be very sensitive to even small changes, proper management of change to industrial facilities and processes is recognized as critical to safety. In the US, OSHA has regulations that govern how changes are to be made and documented. The main requirement is that a thorough review of a proposed change be performed by a multi-disciplinary team to ensure that as many possible viewpoints are used as possible to minimize the chances of missing a hazard. In this context, change management is known as Management of Change, or MOC. It is just one of many components of Process Safety Management, section 1910.119(l).1
Reference
^ Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row.
^ Senge, Peter; C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers (March 2004). Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Society for Organizational Learning. ISBN 0974239011.
^ Argyris, Chris (Autumn 1982). "[1]" (PDF). Organizational Dynamics,. Retrieved on 2006-12-29.
^ Tucker, Kate. "The Milan Approach To Family Therapy: A Critique". Retrieved on 2006-12-29.
Worren, N. A. M.; Ruddle, K.; and K. Moore. 1999. "From Organizational Development to Change Management: The Emergence of a New Profession," The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. 35 (3): 273-286.
Beckhard, R. 1969. Organization Development: Strategies and Models, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Hiatt, J. 2006. ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and the Community, Learnng Center Publications, Loveland, CO.
Kubler-Ross, E. 1970. On Death and Dying, Macmillan Company, England
An early model of change developed by Kurt Lewin described change as a three-stage process. The first stage he called "unfreezing". It involved overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing "mind set". Defense mechanisms have to be bypassed. In the second stage the change occurs. This is typically a period of confusion and transition. We are aware that the old ways are being challenged but we do not have a clear picture to replace them with yet. The third and final stage he called "refreezing". The new mindset is crystallizing and one's comfort level is returning to previous levels.
Some change theories are based on derivatives of the Kübler-Ross model from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's book, "On Death and Dying." The stages of Kubler-Ross's model describe the personal and emotional states that a person typically encounters when dealing with loss of a loved one. Derivatives of her model applied in other settings such as the workplace show that similar emotional states are encountered as individuals are confronted with change.
A Formula for Change was developed by Richard Beckhard and David Gleicher and is sometimes referred to as Gleicher's Formula. The Formula illustrates that the combination of organisational dissatisfaction, vision for the future and the possibility of immediate, tactical action must be stronger than the resistance within the organisation in order for meaningful changes to occur.
The ADKAR model for individual change management was developed by ProSci with input from more than 1000 organizations from 59 countries. This model describes five required building blocks for change to be realized successfully on an individual level. The building blocks of the ADKAR Model include:
Awareness – of why the change is needed
Desire – to support and participate in the change
Knowledge – of how to change
Ability – to implement new skills and behaviors
Reinforcement – to sustain the change
Organizational Change Management
Organizational change management includes processes and tools for managing the people side of the change at an organizational level. These tools include a structured approach that can be used to effectively transition groups or organizations through change. When combined with an understanding of individual change management, these tools provide a framework for managing the people side of change.
The role of the management
Management's first responsibility (and that of administration in case of political changes) is to detect trends in the macroenvironment as well as in the microenvironment so as to be able to identify changes and initiate programs. It is also important to estimate what impact a change will likely have on employee behaviour patterns, work processes, technological requirements, and motivation. Management must assess what employee reactions will be and craft a change program that will provide support as workers go through the process of accepting change. The program must then be implemented, disseminated throughout the organization, monitored for effectiveness, and adjusted where necessary.
Gabrielle O'Donovan has designed a strategic implementation plan for a culture transformation programme which is largely based on primary research. The first phase 'strategic planning and design' includes a series of steps; back to the drawing board to revisit the company purpose, form the strategic management team to oversee implementation, create programme vision and define strategy, organize the workforce and design the core programme and cultural embedding mechanisms that will support it. The second phase 'strategy implementation' includes these steps; communicate vision and roll-out, manage the human landscape plus maintain momentum and solidify ground made. The final phase 'evaluation and readjustment' focuses on the measuring of results and also planning for the future.
Working with assumptions
Process Oriented Psychology by Arnold Mindell talks about the field in which each human relationship exists. Its application field, Worldwork, intends to transform systems by shifting roles that people unconsciously hold in a system.
Dialogue (by David Bohm) is a new form of communication in large groups that is based on the suspension of assumptions, thus letting the common knowledge of a group emerge.
Appreciative Inquiry, one of the most frequently applied approaches to organizational change, is partly based on the assumption that change in a system is instantaneous ('Change at the Speed of Imagination')
Theory U of Otto Scharmer who describes a process in which change strategies are based on the emerging future rather than on lesson from the past.
The constructionist principle
The map is not the territory: The map/territory relation is proven by neuroscience and is used to signify that individual people do not have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. It has been coined into a model by Chris Argyris called the Ladder of Inference. As a consequence, communication in change processes needs make sure that information about change and its consequences is presented in such a way that people with different belief systems can access this information. Methods that are based on the Map/Territory Relation help people to:
become more aware of their own thinking and reasoning (reflection),
make their thinking and reasoning more visible to others (advocacy), and
inquire into others' thinking and reasoning (inquiry).
Some methodological frameworks that are based on this principle are:
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), an eclectic school of psychotherapy developed by Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Robert Dilts, and others;
Circular Questioning and other techniques basically developed in Systemic Family Therapy;.
Gestalt Psychology, a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies;
The concept of the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge and other management thinkers
Scenario Thinking, a method that helps people to create stories about the future
Change management in industrial plants
Since complex processes can be very sensitive to even small changes, proper management of change to industrial facilities and processes is recognized as critical to safety. In the US, OSHA has regulations that govern how changes are to be made and documented. The main requirement is that a thorough review of a proposed change be performed by a multi-disciplinary team to ensure that as many possible viewpoints are used as possible to minimize the chances of missing a hazard. In this context, change management is known as Management of Change, or MOC. It is just one of many components of Process Safety Management, section 1910.119(l).1
Reference
^ Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row.
^ Senge, Peter; C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers (March 2004). Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Society for Organizational Learning. ISBN 0974239011.
^ Argyris, Chris (Autumn 1982). "[1]" (PDF). Organizational Dynamics,. Retrieved on 2006-12-29.
^ Tucker, Kate. "The Milan Approach To Family Therapy: A Critique". Retrieved on 2006-12-29.
Worren, N. A. M.; Ruddle, K.; and K. Moore. 1999. "From Organizational Development to Change Management: The Emergence of a New Profession," The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. 35 (3): 273-286.
Beckhard, R. 1969. Organization Development: Strategies and Models, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Hiatt, J. 2006. ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and the Community, Learnng Center Publications, Loveland, CO.
Kubler-Ross, E. 1970. On Death and Dying, Macmillan Company, England
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
Library in trouble spot
Sighthill Library saw off competition from 130 other projects to win one of four top prizes in the Scottish Executive's Standing Up To Antisocial Behaviour scheme.
Two years ago, the library was plagued by a host of problems, including gang fights, under-age drinking and vandalism, both inside and outside the building.
The library staff were nominated for the award by the police after lifting a ban on youngsters involved in the trouble and instead urging them to use the library's computers and other facilities.
The staff also helped set up a local youth football team, a graffiti arts project and drama group.
Since then, trouble in the area has dropped dramatically.
Andrew McTaggart, one of the library workers involved in the projects for youngsters aged between five and 19, said: "There was basically mayhem in the library a couple of years ago, with large groups coming in and causing disruption, pulling over shelves, and drinking.
"They were getting themselves banned, but we felt that was just not working and it was becoming a real stand-off situation, as the library is a focal point in the area.
"The projects have definitely made a real difference here. There are a lot less problems and the library is now used as a real community centre for these kids."
The library created a dedicated area for youngsters, where they were able to set up their own "Sighthill Computer Crazies" website, learn how to create computer games and compile CVs for the first time.
The project is currently giving local youngsters the chance to produce their own "video diaries" about life in and around Sighthill.
Sergeant Colin Gagen, of the Lothian and Borders Police safer communities unit at Sighthill, said: "The staff at the library found that banning the kids from going in was basically causing them more hassle.
"They have met the kids half way and it has been made clear to them that if they do cause trouble then we will get involved, but generally things have gone very well.
"The library was very important in helping reduce the number of complaints about young people in the area by almost a third in the 12 months from April 2004 to April 2005."
Donald Urquhart, head of the council's antisocial behaviour division, said: "This award reinforces the fact that dealing with antisocial behaviour is about much more than using enforcement powers. Preventing anti- social behaviour before it has a chance to develop is key to solving the problem."
Sighthill Library won the award in the community projects category.
Two years ago, the library was plagued by a host of problems, including gang fights, under-age drinking and vandalism, both inside and outside the building.
The library staff were nominated for the award by the police after lifting a ban on youngsters involved in the trouble and instead urging them to use the library's computers and other facilities.
The staff also helped set up a local youth football team, a graffiti arts project and drama group.
Since then, trouble in the area has dropped dramatically.
Andrew McTaggart, one of the library workers involved in the projects for youngsters aged between five and 19, said: "There was basically mayhem in the library a couple of years ago, with large groups coming in and causing disruption, pulling over shelves, and drinking.
"They were getting themselves banned, but we felt that was just not working and it was becoming a real stand-off situation, as the library is a focal point in the area.
"The projects have definitely made a real difference here. There are a lot less problems and the library is now used as a real community centre for these kids."
The library created a dedicated area for youngsters, where they were able to set up their own "Sighthill Computer Crazies" website, learn how to create computer games and compile CVs for the first time.
The project is currently giving local youngsters the chance to produce their own "video diaries" about life in and around Sighthill.
Sergeant Colin Gagen, of the Lothian and Borders Police safer communities unit at Sighthill, said: "The staff at the library found that banning the kids from going in was basically causing them more hassle.
"They have met the kids half way and it has been made clear to them that if they do cause trouble then we will get involved, but generally things have gone very well.
"The library was very important in helping reduce the number of complaints about young people in the area by almost a third in the 12 months from April 2004 to April 2005."
Donald Urquhart, head of the council's antisocial behaviour division, said: "This award reinforces the fact that dealing with antisocial behaviour is about much more than using enforcement powers. Preventing anti- social behaviour before it has a chance to develop is key to solving the problem."
Sighthill Library won the award in the community projects category.
Monday, 14 May 2007
Monday, 30 April 2007
Thursday, 19 April 2007
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