What are we to do in education?
by Walter Smith
In the recent Conference Board of Canada report on education and skills, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador all earn “D’s” overall, while P.E.I. earns a “D–,” scoring worse than the lowest-ranked international peer country. British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta are the top performers among all the provinces, earning “B” grades on the Education and Skills report card. The largest provincial differences occur on student reading, science, and math skills—with provinces earning anywhere from an “A+” to a “D–” grade. The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) Scores produced by OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) rates Canada as #2 in achievement among the 15 countries tested, second only to Finland. We are graduating almost everybody, but many are not learning. In fact if we go back 30 years, the CBC reports were similar. The only difference then was that there were a lot less high school graduates.
There are many who believe that the problem lies in the behavior of the students. Student who do not conform to the system fail because they are not behaving appropriately. They link a lack of progress in school to the behavior of the student. But is this a legitimate rationalization?
Behavior problems are actually a symptom of the real problem in education. The only factor that legitimately contributes to a lack of progress in learning is the quality of the learning experience. Poor qualitylearning is caused by poor quality learning experiences.
Schools, colleges and universities are mills that are largely run on the fuel of psychology. Granted teachers are well qualified in their specialties, but they are not well qualified in learning. Psychology is used to rationalize the incompetence of the mill. It is a force to rationalize negativity. Traditional education is forced, it’s mundane, it’s constantly tested, and it’s boring. When students resist this unnatural environment, we blame them. We are conditioned to believe that education is supposed to be difficult. We have made ourselves believe that if we make it interesting and engaging we won’t learn anything valuable. If you make it easy, it is not learning. But if you stop and think about the subjects that we liked and our children like, they are the ones that the teacher made easy for us to learn. Those teachers go outside the scope of operating the mill, and they do it on their own initiative, always working above and beyond what is required. Those are the good teachers. They see psychology as a positive force. They are the ones who show us how to be confident and to know that we are worth something.
Read this article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd
In the late 1960s, Dr John Evans, chair of the new medical school of Macmaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, inspired an innovation that has revolutionized medical education in Canada. He was concerned about the deterioration of student interest after the first year of study. They became bored with the endless rote memorization which was characteristic of the traditional approach to medical training. Under his direction, the curriculum of the school was restructured from a passive information base to an active experiential base. Problem solving based on real medical cases was used to focus learning experiences and information was introduced in relation to those problems. There was tremendous scepticism in the medical community in regard to those new ideas because it was felt that students would not have the knowledge required to be effective practitioners. In fact, it soon became evident that the exact opposite was true. The first students who graduated in 1972 were as good as any of their colleagues in Canada as far as knowledge was concerned, and many exceeded their colleagues in practical ability. Since 1972, all of Canada's medical schools as well as medical schools around the world have successfully adopted this approach to the most vital training in our society.
An interesting footnote to Dr Evans's experiment concerns educational prerequisites. He conducted a study where half the students admitted to the medical program in a particular year had the traditional 95% academic standing, and the other half were selected through interviews. He found that when the experiential learning approach was used, academic prerequisites have no significant effect on the number of student graduates in either group.
http://cdnmedhall.org/dr-john-evans
There are thousands of examples like the Macmaster experiment in every profession, occupation and discipline. Maybe they are not all so dramatic, but they are all significant.
The Bridging the Gap projects carried out by the Clarenville Regional Development Association were designed to integrate ABE skills into project-based workplace learning and were directed at people who hadn’t completed high school and who had an employment opportunity in a local industry which included training.
14 projects were carried out between 1999 and 2010 in various communities in Newfoundland and Labrador. The projects were unique because they integrated education, training and work. Students worked as they trained and brought their education skills up to meet the needs of the workplace. And they got paid. The projects were all done in rural communities were unemployment was low. Many of the companies and businesses were start-up or expansion and wanted a stable dependable workforce. Bridging the Gap is significant because it is an idealistic model that shows that we can successfully integrate education, training and work and do it to a very high standard.
So why haven’t we adopted a positive psychological approach to all education. I think the obvious answer is that it will disrupt academia. The experiential approach will bring real accountability to everyone in education. But who in the establishment wants to change the utopia of unaccountable education where we can fight over it, play politics with it, belittle the real solutions, apply “band aids” (the educational “band aid” industry is big), and make ourselves believe we are actually doing something?
Academic education is built on knowledge real estate. But the Internet has neutralized the value of knowledge and made most of it free and available on the terms of the user. As the real estate value of knowledge diminishes so goes the prestige associated with it. The new focus is on using knowledge and the prestige is moving to those who can manage knowledge most effectively.
We can choose to be part of the transition or to be part of the resistance. But efforts to protect knowledge real estate are not very successful any more. The media is the new message. Transparency is credibility. We don’t want to be told by others that they know what is best for us. We want to know why and make up our own minds.
What action do we need to move to a positive psychological approach in education? We have to get past blaming the victims and rationalizing it by calling people smart and stupid. Everyone can learn if the learning experience is rich and engaging. We need to create frameworks that give teachers the autonomy to do their jobs. We need to build high quality learning experiences through strategically designed projects. We need an organizational system which allows us to build complete project-based curriculums. We need to build on what already exists. There are lots of experiential learning projects going on in schools and colleges and universities and outside the schools. Examples are everywhere. We need to identify them, enhance them and classify them and make them a legitimate alternative to traditional test-oriented education. We need to bring all curriculums on stream. Everyone will benefit, even the ones who currently excel in the current system. We need some advocates to bring it about. And we need some politicians who are willing to do what needs to be done to make it work.
Can we get accountability in education? Can we improve the statistics? Yes we can, and we can do it dramatically.
https://affectivelearningwiki.atlassian.net/wiki/x/V4Aw
You can reach Walter Smith directly at walter.smith@nf.sympatico.ca
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