Across the Pond

I've been meaning to share a few things which stood out during my visit to Overlake this winter.

Thing One: Like Northwest students, students at Overlake keep portfolios of written work. These are stored in the classroom and periodically, time is made for students to review the feedback they've received on written work: how do thesis statements from September compare with those written later in the year? What kinds of mechanical errors are no longer showing up in papers?

Thing Two: Standard Operating Procedure is to return written work with comments but no grades. Students have a chance to respond to teacher feedback in writing; only then does the student receive a grade. The English Department Head emphasized the value of this opportunity for students to process feedback separately from grades. Students can defend their choices, make adjustments or make adjustments and explain the thinking behind their original choices. As at Northwest, students are free to fully revise written work. In our department, conferences create an opportunity for students to process feedback with their teachers, but it was interesting to see that Overlake has also built in this kind of intentional dialogue.

Thing Three: I was impressed by the systematic use Overlake makes of Diane Hacker's Pocket Manual for Writers. Many Overlake teachers grade papers using a rubric which references page numbers in the Hacker text. The teacher checks "Run-On" on the rubric; the rubric refers students to the run-on section of Hacker's text. If additional work is needed, Hacker's web-site offers an extensive menu of supplementary explanations and exercises. How efficient is that? Do we still use Hacker? Are we missing an opportunity to tap into some free stuff?

Education for the Future

Howard Gardner was the keynote speaker at TESOL this year. His talk addressed the impact technology has had on education and the workplace; specifically, he has been thinking about how technology has changed our role as educators.

Gardner has identified four areas in which he believes students will need strong preparation in order to succeed in the world of the future: strength in a discipline, the ability to synthesize, creativity and ethics.

The first point concerns mastery of a discipline. Gardner feels that the acquisition of information used to be a legitimate goal of education, but that technology has changed this. Many students now have extremely efficient "personal assistants" (computers) which can look stuff up and do basic calculations. To succeed in an environment where general information is widely available, Gardner thinks expertise will become a priority-- not just knowing stuff, but mastery of a certain kind of thinking: "What does it mean to think like a historian?" "How would a scientist approach this question?" He encourages teachers to provide these kinds of opportunities for their students.

The second point was about synthesizing information. Again, Gardner seemed to be responding to the flood of undigested information that is available on the web. To take advantage of this resource, it is important that students have the skills to distinguish the useful from the useless and to discern what (if anything) all the data adds up to: students need to be able to determine significance in a sea of information.

Gardner's third point concerned deepening students' capacity for creativity. He made an interesting little jab here about genuine creativity being a challenge in "rule-and-tradition bound" institutions like schools. However, he thinks that succeeding in the 21st century will require personalities that are willing to stretch, break rules and even risk failure. Teachers should be thinking about ways we can develop these capacities in our students.

Finally, he spoke about ethics. Gardner reported that as he travels around the world these days talking to people in education, research, publishing and business, he meets young people who feel pressured by the pace of opportunity. They sometimes say that they can't afford to worry about ethics right now. First they need to "make it," then they can focus on doing the right thing. Gardner feels that whenever possible teachers should share stories of people who faced challenging situations and made ethical choices. He also recommends cautionary tales about people who failed to do the right thing and the costs of that failure.

Gardner has launched a project called Good Work. The mission of Good Work is "to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work: work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society."

Second Thoughts from a Luddite

I know most of the department is way ahead of me in the use of technology...but just in case, I'll share what I noticed on Thursday at Overlake School.

Every classroom in the Humanities building has a Smartboard, so I got to see lots of different uses of this technology. Everyone seems to take attendance with it: the MyBackpack class roster is displayed on the Smartboard at the beginning of every class. Student names are set to a default PRESENT, so teachers just tap the names of the one or two students who are missing and hit submit.

From there, approaches varied.

In some classes, the board just went dark and the teacher carried on as if this expensive equipment had never been installed. However, if a question arose in class, the Smartboard was there and answers to factual questions were immediately available.

Some teachers used the Smartboard to access their files. Rather than distributing 18 little half-sheets of paper, one teacher displayed a new assignment on the Smartboard. The same approach was used while discussing poetry. The three lines of In a Station of the Metro were displayed on the Smartboard, instead of being handed out on paper. After the students had articulated their own response to the poem, the teacher showed them a passage from a letter which Pound had written about this poem and a picture of the Paris metro.

Students seemed to know their way around the Smartboard too. I saw a couple of them give presentations on the first world war, combining power-point slides with You Tube. A cool feature is that if the Smartboard is displaying a map of troop movements on the Passchendaele front, you can draw all over the slide with luridly colored Smartboard pens. When you advance to the next slide, the board is miraculously clean.

The last nifty Smartboard Thing I saw was a presentation in a Comparative Religions class. The teacher in this class had prepared a few pages of a Notebook file for the Smartboard. On the first page, he had typed two words: GOD and HISTORY, which he used to elicit student reactions. He jotted down student suggestions under these headings, just like you'd do with a whiteboard. However, the Smartboard enabled him to slide a nifty virtual screen/shade over the surface of the board to conceal/reveal these lists. After he'd taken down student reactions to these two words, the instructor was able to transition to a page with some definitions he'd typed up in advance. The touch of a button had the effect of neatly organizing all the messy ideas the teacher had just elicited from his students.

Some of this isn't too different from what you can do with an old-fashioned overhead...but I'm thinking that next time I find myself in a room with a Smartboard, I'm going to turn it on.