Ok, I’m outraged. No kids in our elementary school have qualified for GATE (Gifted & Talented), including my own.   That’s surprising, since we’ve some extremely smart kids.   There are several in each classroom who are selected for special recognition at the end of the year and everything.   The evaluation for GATE is the Otis-Lennon test, a reasonably well-regarded assessment of abstract thinking and reasoning ability.

So what do I find out?   That we’re not teaching the skills that are evaluated by this test!   We’re teaching a bunch of rote things, and not the skills that will be the differentiators in the coming years.   Thanks, NCLU   (No Child Left Untested).

Now, I realize that schools are hurting for money, and it’s a dire mess, politically and practically.   The responsibility goes right on up to the decision makers in DC.   So the school district is forced into playing funny games; apparently, the GATE money is going to teacher training, with the belief that this will help them inculcate these skills in the children.   However, that’s not working.

I don’t know how close my son came (my daughter was only tested yesterday for the first time), as they oddly don’t let us know the results (except not/qualify).   However, teachers are not able to take the time for teaching these skills, and they ought to be. Yes, kids need to learn to read and write and do mathematical reasoning, but they’re only getting science since a group duns money from the parents to add it in, and they’re not getting the early exposure to the reasoning skills in a systematic way.

I’m afraid to think that the school district doesn’t want any kids to pass, because then they’d have to do things for them.   Our curriculum’s broken in serious ways, and our politicians aren’t making it better.   We need to be teaching reasoning skills and abstract problem-solving (even practice for these tests).   Now, I need an action plan.

I’ve gone off on learning styles before because there’s a lot of fluff and not much substance.   I’d been pointed to Dan Willingham‘s video on brain based learning, and in pointing it to someone else, found his one on learning styles. He’s a cognitive psychologist (my background, btw), and is putting out the research-based views on these topics.

My point has been that the learning styles instruments are broken, though the idea makes sense in that it helps teachers/instructors be sensitized to individual learner differences.   And I’ve argued that you use the right medium for the message, not try to re-represent.   Dan goes into more detail, and points out that people do learn certain things better, but that meaning is the core, and that you match the presentation to the nature of the knowledge.   He argues that learning styles shouldn’t make a difference to what you do (if you already use appropriate design).   I love his conclusion:   “good teaching is good teaching, and teachers don’t need to adjust their teaching to individual learning styles”. Hear, hear (and not “see see” or “feel feel” :).

He also goes on about brain-based learning, and talks about how most of it (95%) doesn’t make sense.   His point is that one level of research doesn’t necessarily translate to another.   His claim is that much of this stuff isn’t really brain-based research, and then a lot of it is just wrong(!).   He gets quite specific about what’s wrong with a couple of popular examples, and points to people who are doing it well.   At the end, he says if someone’s claiming “there’s all this new information about the brain…will revolutionize teaching”, you should stay away.

Highly recommended, if you care about learning or education.

I‘m working on a project that‘s creating a new and needed curriculum for a specific course and it got me thinking more broadly about what that might be in a broader sense.   I‘ve talked about the elements before, when I reacted to Stephen Downes‘ proposal.   But I tried to get more concrete about what might make a good undergraduate program that might be what I would want for my kids.

Now, back when I was teaching at UNSW, I had a role in forming a joint Computer Science/Psychology undergraduate program.   At the time (and it‘s not all that different now), technology was getting more capable, and the issues increasingly became how to design systems that meet real needs.   I believed then (and now) that an understanding of how people really think and learn, and how technology can be designed, would be a valuable combination.   The program (if I recall correctly) also covered a wee bit of how business worked.

I still think that model isn‘t far wrong.   Ok, it was pretty technical, teaching programming, and not sure I‘d focus on that instead of skills around designing technology capabilities (not implementing), and managing the process.   I‘d add a social component as well, but keeping cognition and technology.   I‘d elaborate the business side, and add some focus on about society and culture (and values; I haven‘t abandoned my concern with wisdom).

I think this might be the core of a general liberal arts program, so at one level this may be part of all degrees, but it certainly could be it‘s own unique focus with some depth in each of the areas. Cognition, sociology, technology design and management, etc.   And I like innovations like outcomes-based education, and service learning, but these aren’t mutually exclusive with the above.

Of course, right now my son wants to be an architect, but I‘ve no problem with that.   He‘ll need special skills, but still will need to know technology (can you say CAD?) and people (who occupies the buildings?).   He may change his focus (I was going to be in submarines at that age), but the core won‘t change.

Now, if only our schools had a focus on a reasonable curriculum (not ‘no child left untested‘), and were properly resourced so they could develop this for learners before they hit college (spiraling back around), and…

The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is about To-Learn lists: whether they make sense, how to implement them, etc.   Interesting question.   On the face of it, it seems useful: identifying and focusing on explicit and specific learning goals.   In practice, do they make sense? Do they even exist?

i would suggest that they do exist, and that every time a manager and employee agree on a development plan, there’s at least an implicit To-Learn list.   Obviously, a competency path in an LMS is similarly a formal TL list. And we have an implicit one when we sign up for a course, whether online or face-to-face, buy a book on a topic, or access an online tutorial, FAQ, help page, etc.

I do think that being explicit about learning is valuable, hence my focus on meta-learning, and having clear goals is a way to make them happen.   On the other hand, I think many of our learning goals are small and immediate (like my desire to figure out how to fix the CSS on my website and this blog).   Would it make sense to capture them in the context and generalize them to be thought of at other times?   Probably, and consequently another way we could use our mobile tools to make us more effective (I regularly capture ToDos in my mobile devices, which is why the iPhone is still making me crazy!). And there have been times I’ve put things to look up into my ToDo (though these days I often just look them up in the moment).

So, I think they’re a great idea, maybe not separate from ToDos in general, but worth thinking of as a sub-category, and worth taking the effort to make explicit.   Little bits of learning over the long haul: slow learning!