I visited a workshop led by Rüdiger Iwan the day before yesterday. What I took away from that workshop was a re-examination of several key issues in school education: the role of homework, the nature of correction of pupil’s work and the link between the concept of portfolio and apprenticeship.
Homework
I think that homework can successfully fulfil its purpose only if the following criteria are met:
- the day in school (including travelling time) is short enough for the pupil to have a healthy balance of exercise, rest and fun as well as doing the homework
- the homework has a clearly defined purpose perhaps initiated by the teacher but negotiated with the pupil – that is to say the pupil ‘owns’ the reason for that homework
- it clearly advances the preparation for what is coming or rounds up what has been a successful learning experience thus far
- it reflects or extends an interest base the pupil already ‘owns’
Teacher’s correction of pupils’ work
There is little to be gained from correcting all of the errors in a long text written by a pupil. Far better to focus on one, two or three specific errors and agree in a dialogue with the pupil a path towards eradicating those errors. There needs to be a path forward linked to a sense of achievement for the pupil. The nature of the correction is important too. I favour marking the language errors with text marker and allowing the pupil to reflect on what is wrong. First of all alone, then, as one of a pair or a small group. In my experience 90% of errors can be corrected in this way in EFL work.
Pupils’ correction of their own work
When pupils have written a text which has been corrected by whatever means then the rewriting of that text is a cause for satisfaction and achievement because it mirrors the creation proves itself in which amendment follows amendment until satisfaction is achieved. It is the iterative process of the creative artist.
Portfolio
If the pupil maintains a portfolio of his/her quality work then this is a powerful card to play in succeeding at interview. A much more powerful card than any piece of paper containing exam results. It demonstrates clearly, visibly and powerfully what a person can do. The exam results open the door and get you an interview; the quality portfolio clinches the job as artists have always known.

We started off with seventy different themes posted on a display board. They were what we considered to be our first thoughts about necessary prerequisite skills for effective autonomous learning. Our goal over the coming weeks is to group them effectively, decide when they should be taught (and later reinforced) and by whom in which area of the curriculum. After brainstorming the categories were as follows:Personal Management, Work Organization, Learning Techniques, Presentation Skills, Learning Types, The Role of Reflection in the Learning Process and Balanced, Healthy Learning.

We assigned these as preparation tasks to individuals (or pairs) to present. Our overall aim is to assure the quality of the learning skills which the pupils are taught, embed them transparently in the curriculum and use the whole as a refreshment learning workshop for our staff.

Having worked hard to ensure that we have popular functioning libraries and a computer room in our school (6-19 years) comprehensive, the next stage is to ensure that the students are properly equipped to make the most of their learning activities. Re-focusing on the topic of learning skills particularly those related to autonomous learning I realised that there is a wealth of information available. The most useful for my purposes are Hacking Knowledge in the online database library and Study Guides and Strategies from Joe Landsberger. So I had better get on and prepare our autonomous learning workshop for our staff for next Thursday.

Yesterday I took the opportunity to chat to four digital natives of differing ages at my home. They were Anna (school), Patrick final year university), Yvette (university student) and Carl (last year at school). Anna (17) multi-tasks regularly: listening to music, texting or mailing, doing homework etc and finds it normal and unproblematic. Carl (18) definitely prefers to do one thing at a time so that his concentration is fully on what he is doing. Patrick and Yvette both say multi-tasking is fine and normal when all of the activities are revision or routine. When they want to learn something new they need quiet (with maybe instrumental music but not singing). They may even leave home and go somewhere to concentrate because there are too many distractions at home.

There we have it: four natives of different ages covering the whole spectrum of techniques – very unscientific fact-finding but the whole appeared to me to have more to do with personality types than being ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’.

An elegantly simple slide show by leisa reichelt which underlines the interactive, re-iterative, co-operative nature of the design process skillfully using post-it notes.

Returning to the theme of digital natives and digital immigrants, I notice that Owen writing in futurelab casts doubts in four areas – citing reputable sources as he does so:

- 20-35 year olds are more into game playing than any other group
- adults phone but teenagers use SMS’ because they are cheaper
- ICT is most used by professionals
- 34-44 year-olds use the Internet most at home in the US

Further food for thought!

I work in a Waldorf school and think that the community atmosphere there is extraordinarily good compared with many other education institutions where I have worked. I also sense and know that ex-pupils of our school have obtained through the efforts of all of the people who comprise that school community an exceptional start in life fitting them to adjust to anything that life may place in their path.
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However especially highly successful ventures must adapt to change and move forward. This was the point of the revolutionary thinker Rudolf Steiner who founded, amongst many other initiatives, the first Waldorf school. He founded that school to change the education he found in the historical, physical, political and social society of his day. The challenge which Waldorf communities must face up to is to accommodate his principles grounded in a non-digital world to the digital world of today. In that his principles are often diametrically opposed to today’s world that is an enormous challenge for pupils, parents, teachers and friends. After all when Steiner’s first wooden Goetheanum was burnt down on completion he rebuilt it in concrete. Thus:’problems are merely opportunities in disguise’…

Today I made several discoveries one after the other. Very good for one morning! I set out to find information about digital natives and after using my favourite Copernic metasearch engine I found Apple Learning Interchange. Within that I found Ian Juke’s podcast called Learning Environments for Digital Kids in their distinguished educators’ podcasts series. During the podcast I found my third important link of the day to the committed sardine site and the Info Savy Group.
Near the end of the podcast Jukes asks his audience to say to those around them three things that they learned. Well, amongst many other things I learnt that digital natives are kids born into today’s digital world and that digital immigrants are people like me born into a pencil and paper world. I learned that we tend to process (and teach) in a linear non-visual way and that they learn in a multi-tasking hypertext way. I learnt that chalk and talk lectures might have appealled to my generation but that the more multimedia stimuli the better for them. Two things I would tell others are that Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning is useful and that teachers and parents need to be up to date on the neuorinformatics Brain Project. One thing that will change for me is that I will no longer allow myself to be dragged back into the past in my teaching methods by educational Luddites.

Of course a spelling test or a grammar exercise is relatively easy to correct. The problem comes when the piece of writing is longer. It could be a piece of creative writing, a summary, expressing an opinion, a script, a portfolio submission or a test for example. The problem isn’t about correcting the mistakes although they need to be corrected with sensitivity. A page of red corrections isn’t inspiring and is de-motivating in my opinion. I correct in green because it is perceived as a friendlier colour than red. I also believe in focusing on one specific error with the hope of eradicating it by carefully selected and directed exercises starting with what amounts to a drill of some kind and leading up to open-ended use of the problem expression; working from convergent correction towards divergent use. Of course in the case of very able students or minor mistakes it is an option to focus on more than one point. The point to be borne in mind always has to be an answer to the questions: “What will the effect be on this student? What effect will my programme of correction have? Where do we go from here? What is the appropriate follow up?

I find all of the above difficult to envisage as forming part of a complete picture without detailed record cards. These need not be a chore as they can be completed quite naturally by the student in the classroom after the corrections have been successfully done. Each point needs to have a date, a title to describe the point corrected, a stage indication like gap exercise, repetition practice or free use and an indication of the degree of success – the last point being completed by the tutor as s/he checks the entry.

Another technique which works well is using a text marker to mark every error in a paragraph and leave the pupils to correct the errors themselves or in pairs using the teacher as a referee. It is amazing how many errors can be corrected in this way without teacher direction. In my experience often as many as 80 – 90%.

This thought provoking piece which I first came across from Janice Szabos in Challenge Magazine should be in every teacher’s and parent’s consciousness in my opinion. It would be interesting to get the response of bright or gifted children (or their parents) to it:

A Bright Child:
Knows the answers
Is interested
Is attentive
Has good ideas
Works hard
Answers the questions
Top group
Listens with interest
Learns with ease
6-8 repetitions for mastery
Understands ideas
Enjoys peers
Grasps the meaning
Completes assignments
Is receptive
Copies accurately
Enjoys school
Absorbs information
Technician
Good memorizer
Enjoys straightforward sequential presentation
Is alert
Is pleased with own learning
A Gifted Learner
Asks the questions
Is highly curious
Is mentally and physically involved
Has wild, silly ideas
Plays around, yet tests well
Discusses in detail, elaborates
Beyond the group
Shows strong feeling and opinions
Already knows
1-2 repetitions for mastery
Constructs abstractions
Prefers adults
Draws inferences
Initiates projects
Is intense
Creates a new design
Enjoys learning
Manipulates information
Inventor
Good guesser
Thrives on complexity
Is keenly observant
Is highly self-critical

It feels right to me based on my experience of both; what do you think?

The only e-portfolios I was familiar with were those used as backup for the language passport and those I saw as a sample from Edinburgh’s MSc so I did some research today. I looked at the OSP opensource portfolio site and took the demo. I also visited the gallery of e-portfolios at Penn State which was striking and informative and best of all read an excellent article by David DiBiase about the rationale behind e-portfolios.

One of the most interesting parts of my MBA course all those years ago was SWOT analysis. For those who haven’t encountered it, SWOT analysis involves analyzing a business placement in the market place as a snapshot of its strengths, its weaknesses , the opportunities available and the threats facing it. Why it made such a great impression on me was not merely its application to market analysis but much more its flexibility as a tool for analyzing any learning (or even life) situation. I’ve used it often to great effect but one question still hangs over me. To what extent should one play to one strengths and develop them and to what extent should one try to ameliorate the weaknesses? When we deal with the gifted we react differently to the way we deal with children with learning difficulties. Is it right to foster the strengths of the very able but to try to alleviate the weaknesses of the less able? Does the way you are taught depend merely on your place on the ability ladder and which abilities are we looking at in that situation? Are they merely academic or are we considering the whole range of intelligences? Maybe I need to re-examine Gardner’s views on intelligence and see how they could be ’schooled’ more skillfully.

Learning theories have never really impressed me because I have always stood back, mused over them and thought that they were fine from one standpoint but they always appeared incomplete to me. They almost all seemed to be bound to one viewpoint. Like travelling on a train and seeing drab factory after factory until you look out of the other window across the river and splendid green fields.

A successful learning theory to satisfy me has to incorporate my favourite ‘tools’:

- the helicopter to hover above the idea
- the microscope to examine the detail
- the kaleidoscope to centrifuge the elements
- sleep to allow time for reflection and reforming ideas

Perhaps you can imagine how delighted I was therefore to happen across George Siemens’ theory of connectivism whilst kaleidoscoping the web. Suddenly there was a theory that instinctively rang bells about how I intuitively believe I think and about how the neurobiologist Manfred Spitzer and Vera F. Birkenbihl explain my neural network functions.

Then in that wonderful way that good news follows good news I found Siemens’ audio/slide lecture on the topic Connectivism and Web 2.0 at the University of Manitoba. I could even control it so that the first half could be played at the first sitting so that I didn’t lose the second half by reflecting on the first half. (If you don’t know what I mean then you may as well continue attending one hour lectures!) Why not try it and see if that reflects how you learn in this digital age?

I have just read the web article ‘Using the New Bloom’s Taxonomy to Design Meaningful Learning Assessments’ by Kevin Smythe & Jane Halonen and I am interested in the following diagram:

The diagram is based on: Clark, B. (2002). Growing up gifted: Developing the potential of children at home and at school. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.

It explains to me why our Waldorf pupils who operate regularly at the evaluation level have such problems with German external exams which mostly test only up to the lower order analytic skill. Maybe the persistence of this type of examination goes some way to explaining Germany’s relatively poor PISA performances? The type of comment frequently heard from our students when we explain what is required is “Oh is that all! They don’t really want us to reflect then, do they?”

Basically this is an excellent idea. The European Union’s aim seems to be that everyone who participates can have a language passport showing their level of proficiency in the basic skills areas. This can be backed up by a biography showing how they arrived at these skill levels and by a portfolio (possibly multimedia) to demonstrate to any employer or place of further study that it really is true and can be proven.

The one weakness that I sense in the scheme is the confusion between ‘expert’ assessment and self certification. Of course I believe that self certification has a role to play in negotiating a language level but is a self certificate really worth having when not backed by the opinions of qualified experts?