Why course books?

I probably shouldn't ask this question since I've just been hired to write one...
However, the question does get asked by students a lot: "WHY do we have to do this?  Can't we do something interesting for a change?"

It gets worse with exam-prep books which are exactly what they sound like: you have to do the book so you can pass the exam which proves that you know what was in the book.  It's a bit of a stupid circle, isn't it?

So the first thing we need to face is the idea that a coursebook isn't there to help the student learn, it's there to support the teacher.  It helps the teacher know what to teach next and it helps her to support the assumption that "they know this material", whatever that means. 

It also helps to standardize the course to the extent that a teacher can tell her boss "we've completed 3 units so far".  In this vast system that we call education, I suppose there is some comfort in the idea that all children of a given age are turning pages at exactly the same pace all over the country.  It's comforting if your aim is conformity, as opposed to, say, actual learning.

It seems, then, that we won't be getting away from coursebooks for a while.  So how can we take them and make them more educational in the sense of wringing more real learning from them?

First, we can make it more interactive.  From jigsaw readings to whistle-gap dictations, we can have the students working together by re-envisioning the basic exercises as pair-work puzzles.

Second, we can actually analyse and recreate the tasks.  It isn't easy to write a good gap-fill or multiple choice, and seeing why that is makes for a far deeper level of understanding.  Plus it's fun to make questions to see if your classmates, or the class next door, can actually answer them.  It's even nicer to create workbooks for underpriviledged kids.

Third, we can break out of the workbook-test cycle completely by designing projects based on the coursebook material that are relevant in real life.  This is where social media can be used to showcase the work beyond the classroom. 


 

Prospero's game

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, we see Europe on the cusp of a new era: the shift from the dark Ages and its attendant belief in magic and the supernatural to the Enlightenment, a period that saw the rise of scientific growth. 

We meet Prospero the magician at just such a stage in his life.  We see him about to perform one final act of magic before giving it up forever. But why does Prospero give up magic?  And what makes it so difficult?

Prospero is a man with enemies.  He is also a man with a beautiful young daughter.  The temptation to dispatch the former with well-chosen curses and to protect the latter with arcane incantations must be overwhelming.
But...he knows that magic isn't real.  You cannot really curse your enemies, and as much as any father would have it otherwise, you cannot truly protect your daughter.

And so we see him both wanting to face reality and scientific truth, and not wanting to give up the illusion magic has to offer.

The game:
Each player has the following cards describing powers:
 

You are immortal

You command the spirit world

You have the ability to fly and defy gravity

You have a deep knowledge of magic

You have the ability to cast spells to help and to curse

They describe to each other what they would do with these powers. 
Then the players begin to lose their powers one by one. 
Each player must draw a card from the following deck (shuffled and placed face-down before them):

You are mortal

You are alone

You must obey the laws of physics and the natural world

You have a deep understanding of scientific truths

You have the ability to set a good example for others

When they draw a card, they must discard the corresponding card in their hand.  With each draw, their magical powers diminish.  Each player then tries to force the other to admit he is no longer truly a magician.  The loser is whomever admits defeat first.

In this game, the players experience what it feels like, not only to lose one's magical powers, but also the desperation with which Prospero wanted to hold onto them.

"Star Trek: the next generation" has an episode called Hide and Q in which one of the characters is offered omnipotence.  He attempts to use his powers to give his friends what he believes they want: for the android to become human, for the boy to become a man, for the blind man to see.  But they refuse, because they know these not to be real.  "This above all else: to thine own self be true" says the android, quoting Shakespeare.

And so the parallel can be made between a magician giving up his powers and a teenager giving up the perceived powers of adolescence for the more mundane, yet infinitely more satifying life of the adult.  The game is similar with the "adolescent" cards being:

You believe death happens to other people, mostly the old and the stupid

You are popular and have a big group of friends

You live for speed, excitement and danger

All the  information  you need is contained in your cellphone  so you don’t need school

You rebel and “fight the system”

and the "adult" cards being:

You have faced your own mortality

You have your family

You carefully weigh the risks and benefits of each action

You understand that knowledge, experience and wisdom, which cannot be “googled” is trae power

You recognise your rights and responsabilities

  

Action research

At one point it seemed that the tendency in education was to subdivide fields into ever narrower subjects.  They actually did it Ecuador in some schools with EFL, so the kids had a course called "Reading & Writing" which would be separate from another course on "Grammar" taught by a completely different teacher with different books.

Coursebooks used to be written with very little unity as well.  The unit would very often have a title such as  "Around the World" but the reading and listening texts would only tangentially touch the theme while the grammar exercises would ignore it completely.

Currently it seems that some people are trying to steer the trend in the opposite direction.  Now the idea of cross-curricular unity, and the idea of having a learning axis is coming back into fashion (at least here).

It is said that there is no unemployment in Azeroth (the fictional world of World of Warcraft) and this is because the player always has clear goals to work towards.  In its simplest form, the idea resembles Super Mario Bros, where the aim is to keep Mario moving to the right in order to eventually arrive at the castle.

The idea of the Missions and Quests that were are designing for the EFL classes at UDLH is to use the Missions as a goal using all of the knowledge and skills acquired in the Quests.  We are a long way from doing it perfectly, but in my humble opinon, we are getting better with each passing term.  We are trying to make the "quests" in the form of readings, videos, essays, grammar points and vocabulary all lead to information that will help the student finally complete the mission.

The most challenging issue

TeachThoughts's blogging question for today is "what do you think is the most challenging issue in education today?"

Sounds like a simple enough question...but it ain't.

First there's the in-and-out of education:
1.  How can we improve the way the information goes in?  Clearly the I-talk-you-shut-up method isn't working so well.  We need to look for alternate methods: multiple intelligences, project-based learning, game-based learning etc. 
2. How can we improve the way we measure what comes out?  Pencil-and-paper standardized tests can really only go so far in telling us what we really need to know about what our kids are learning.

Then of course there's the curriculum itself:
1. How did the stuff on the curriculum get on there?  Who decided?  On what basis?
2. What else could, or should, be on there?  What could, or should, be removed? 

The fact is when my grandmother sent my mother to school, she could guess pretty much what future her daughter would have.  When my mother sent me to school, she could pretty much guess what future I would have.  But what does the future hold for my daughter?  What skills will she need in a world where she will have the sum total of the world's information at her fingertips?

How the hell do we design for a future that is so radically different from our past? 

Tests as research questions

The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is 42.  The answer doesn't make sense because the question was poorly posed.

Most tests are answers to a poorly posed question which is usually a variant on "how much have my students understood about X?"  The problem is the word "understood" which isn't clearly defined.
Therefore a test needs to be specific in its scope.  The question "can students read?"is meaningless because if a student gets all the answers right, it's entirely possible he still can't read, depending on what reading means in that specific context.  A six year-old may be able to identify letters while a 22 year-old may be able to read a medical journal.

Of course I will never know if she can read and understand ALL medical journals, so here's  the challenge: to create a test that isn't too long (so it's humanly possible to concentrate that long) yet comprehensive enough to give me an idea of what she can do. So what's MY research question? Can this student read scientific articles in medicine well enough to understand what the hypothesis was, what the results were and whether the methodology was sound.  Now that I can prepare a test for.

superpower

If I could have a superpower as a teacher, it would be to give my students superpowers to learn, do and achieve anything they want.

Mesopotamia

On the show 2 1/2 Men, the early seasons involved Alan Harper trying to convince his son to study. 
Alan: Now, what year did Magellan circumnavigate the globe?
Jake: It's not gonna be on the test.
Alan: Maybe not, but it wouldn't hurt for you to know it anyway.
Jake: Why would I want to know something I don't have to?
Alan: Because maybe you'll need to know it in the future.
Jake: Well, then that's when I'll learn it!
Alan: Why can't you just learn it now?
Jake: 'Cause there's only so much space in my brain that if you put Magellan in there, I might forget my locker combination
http://www.tvfanatic.com/quotes/characters/alan-harper/page-54.html

How do you convince a 12 year-old that they ned to learn ancient history?  Obviously Alan's arguments above failed to have an impact.

The solution is to create what Salen calls a "need-to-know", or "just-in-time learning". 

I was asked to give a demo lesson on Mesopotamia.  I loosely based my activity on http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/quest-curriculum/mission-pack-i-spy-greece/

The resulting task: Alexander the Great wants to make Mesopotamia part of the Greek Empire.  You are his advisers and you need to find answers to his 2 questions:
1. What elements of Mesopotamian culture should we assimilate?
2. What elements of Mesopotamian culture should we eliminate and how can we do so without inciting the people to riot?

It turned out surprisingly that women's rights, which under the early Mesopotamian Empire included owning property and businesses were to be curtailed, while the practice of slavery was to be kept and expanded.  So how did we get from there to where we are today?