Challenge-Based Learning Reflection

Challenge-based learning is taking what we consider "traditional" education and schooling and kicking its butt. It seems that the most popular forming of teaching today is rote: lecturing and regurgitation without useful application. Challenge-based learning is anything but that. In the few videos we watched in class about challenge-based learning we saw students realizing that they can making a difference, even in a short period of time with seemingly small activities. I think challenge-based learning has the potential to change the U.S.'s education crisis and maybe even the world.


First of all, the education crisis in the United States: too much importance is placed on test scores that have to applicable meaning to functioning in society or developing important life skills, and not enough importance is placed on finding individual meaning in everything a student learns. As a public school student myself, I can attest to this. Even though I attended school in a well-off suburban district, there were not many instances where I can honestly say challenge-based learning was implemented. Because there is so much importance placed on test scores, teachers often can't find time to fit in anything but lecturing on the curriculum for the standardized tests. I'm not sure where the change should begin because it seems difficult at both ends, but eventually the governmental requirements for testing need to be relaxed, school curricula need to be reworked to be student centered, and teachers need to shift their focus to the more student-beneficial paradigm of teaching and learning.


Second, I think that challenge-based learning has the potential to empower generations of school children. With challenge-based learning, it makes it clear that EVERYONE can do SOMETHING to make a difference in their community or the world. By giving students a way to start small (like recycling or making another person laugh everyday), they can build on their small successes, and eventually grow up to be a great innovator or leader in their adulthood. It seems to me that challenge-based learning is really emphasizing one point: student empowerment. If we empower school-aged kids now, we can set in motion a very positive force for change.

Podcast Reflection #12: K12 Online 2008 - Leading the Change: Overcoming Entropy

Wesley Fryer discusses how to continue innovating and change the course of education through making the momentum of change overcome entropy. "Reflection of lessons learned in creating change has brought to light successful and unsuccessful ways to balance energy and entropy as well as several barriers and thoughts that should be considered."

Entropy by definition is chaos: a move from an organized pattern do a disorganized one. We can relate entropy to the current state of the American education system and 21st century learning as such: the loss of energy and the chaos of ideas. With educational change innovators and early adopters have a large amount of energy and information: entropy is low and energy is high. Things slip from exciting to routine, and ideas get lost in the exchange. Entropy, however, creates opportunity for change. When we try to get people to buy in to new ideas, we generally get "why?" as a response. It is very important that everyone understands the purpose of the change and in what ways it is advantageous to change; it is human nature to seek out the purpose of something.  

To decrease entropy and increase information, people need to become part of the change. This process is a great outline and procedure for initiating change. It is not everything you'll need to inspire change, but it is a good place to start.

• Tell a story
• Look at others' perspectives
• Look for leverage points
• Seek out their vision
• Lead by example
• Create order with energy
• Be a coach
• Listen
• Empower and build ownership
• Remove Barriers
• Ripples of energy remove entropy
• Embrace quantum leaps
• Communicate

The education system we are dealing with compared to the vast number of resources and technologies we have access to creates a difficult situation. We have so many incredible resources, yet so many restrictions and rules with which we must comply that it is easy to become quickly bewildered. We must remember that we do have the capacity to change the status quo and set in motion a revolution in education. This presentation had a TON of information on just that, but it went by really fast and was hard to get all the good stuff (which was everything that was said). Visit the website and watch it for yourself to learn more.

Podcast Reflection #11: K12 Online Conference 2010 - Shh!! The Students Are Learning: Being an Effective Classroom Faciliator

Dr. Clif Mims discusses how to "be a facilitator of learning rather than a deliverer of information."

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=728

He said that this idea really dawned on him when he visited a classroom one time, and all the students got quiet because he was a new person in the classroom; they were "on their best behavior," so to speak. Clif said that it should really be the other way around: students' learning should never be shushed, rather the teacher sometimes needs to be shushed in order to let their students' learning and thinking go uninterrupted as often as possible. 

Over time, Clif has asked a lot of people what they want from teachers and other professionals like them; he made a Wordle from all the responses he got, and by far patient and caring came up the most. 

He gives a few tips from an instructional design point of view:

• develop a driving question or scenario that will engage your students
• understand that the students are going to need alternative resources
• as we move toward being the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage, this kind of information is going to become more and more important
• try to predict what your students might need and have those things readily available in your classroom
• you'll probably need to do mini-lessons
• this will happen if you realize individual students or groups are operating under a misconception
• avoid being the sage on the stage and remember that you're still a facilitator
• it doesn't have to be taught all at one time, it can be done in chunks
• prepare to do conferencing with your students
• talk with your students in small groups or one-on-one
• Does everyone understand the content?
• Is everyone committed to the process and providing assistance?
• How is the process going?
• Is it clear what you're supposed to be achieving and producing?
• think about including organizers
• graphic organizers
• study maps
• outlines
• things that provide support that doesn't necessarily come straight from you
• guide students through questioning
• let students know ahead of time what kind of things they should be aware of and looking for before they jump into the information
• reading strategies
• questioning techniques
• teach them how to guide themselves through the process

Practical tips for teachers: things that will better help you as you go about facilitating learning

• think like a coach
• you want to be on the side, get them prepared, practice with them, but you cannot do the heavy lifting for them. They must do the competing; they must be the ones putting the effort in.
• the same is true of learning
• we must resist the temptation to come in to the rescue and make everyone feel good regardless of the situation
• you REALLY learn when you have to struggle a little bit, and there's gratification at the end when you know you've accomplished something on your own
• bring earplugs
• as a teacher, you may not be comfortable being in a loud classroom, but often it's okay because students are still on task
• ease your way into more facilitative lessons
• it can be hard to develop these lessons, and it can be hard to get used to these types of lesson in action
• you need to become comfortable with these types of lessons and you need to find success so that you're more likely to replicate it and continue to use these kinds of lessons
• a great starting point is one or two of these kinds of lessons a semester
• get some help
• take advantage of online PLNs - blogs, Twitter, podcasts, etc.
• a lot of schools have help in the building or in the district
• technology integration specialists
• literacy coaches
• other facilitators
• often these resources could even let you take the side while they teach the information on which they are experts
• you are learning, too!
• if a student asks you something and you don't know the answer, don't be afraid to say you don't know! Make a teachable moment out of if and model how research and learn more about the topic.

For more information on Clif's profession development ideas, visit the professional development page on his blog: http://clifmims.com/site/consulting/professional-development

Podcast Reflection #10: Seedlings at Bit by Bit Podcast

SEED - Spreading Educator to Educator Development (A Group of Educators in Maine) - the source of the "Seedlings" name. 

The guest speaker, Stephanie, in this podcast got her degree in Instructional Design at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. She recently go a job developing learning initiatives and developing online courses and programs at the University of New Hampshire. Previously she was the technology coordinator at a school district in Maine, which is how she got into SEED. Instructional designers serve a lot of different purposes in different schools; at Wentworth, she was basically a curriculum coach, an assessment analyst, and tech help person. Also at this school, it was a laptop school, which created an understanding among students and teachers how to handle and deal with laptop schools and curricula. Stephanie said that while she was at Wentworth, a new provost came in and was somewhat appalled that this "institute of technology" had no online courses, so the provost turn to Stephanie and others like her to develop these online courses. They partnered with the professors and successfully developed a lot of hybrid/online courses. They were successful because they considered not what makes a good online/hybrid course, but what make any course a good course. This experience at Wentworth inspired her to get things going at UNH.

A few things they found about online classes and programs is that students are much more likely to present their true opinions and thoughts on an online discussion board than in regular class discussion; also it gives them more time to think out an intelligent way to convey what they really think. Stephanie said that all the teachers who head the online classes have said the discussion board is THE MOST important part of the online class. She also said that some students don't really have a frame of reference for online classes and don't know how to deal with it, but I don't think this will be any big issue in the future, since technology constantly growing as a player in learning and social networking. Stephanie also discussed how these online classes are truly different than physical classes, or the same depending on how you think about it. You don't show up to online discussion with a Power Point presentation, because it's about collaboration and real discussions, not lecturing. This is another area where people's views of education and class discussion are changing for the better. 

Podcast Reflection #9: Salman Khan: Lets Use Video to Reinvent Education

When Salman first started making his videos, he was an analyst for a hedge fund and was tutoring his cousins in Louisiana and made videos to do so. By using the “automated version” of him, they said that they didn’t feel like they’re wasting his time, they could rewind and fast forward, and they could go back and review after a long period of time. As people stumbled on his tutoring videos on YouTube, he got some really good feedback from people around the world. A lot of people thought what he did was a REALLY good idea. Parents of an autistic child had their kid watch his videos and it got through, after many other methods had failed him. It started to occur to Salman that if these videos could stay around, they could also help people in the future.

He also got feedback from teachers say that they were using his videos in class to teach. They said that “what used to be homework is now what the students do in class." It doesn’t take 15 times to reexplain information and teach by rote; students get it the first time and work on it in class. The teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. This seemingly inhuman bit of technology has created a much more people-oriented classroom. The Khan Academy videos fundamentally different from traditional classrooms because you don’t advance until mastery has been achieved, and there is no penalization for trying something that fails. In traditional schools, you advance to other topics whether or not you master the preceding skill. Khan equated this method to teaching someone how to ride a bike, then making them try to ride a unicycle when they are still unsuccessful at riding the bike. The Khan Academy also analyzes each student's progress and where they are in the lessons. There is a knowledge map, which visually displays where you are topic-wise in a web graphic organizer.Research was done at Los Altos school (2 grade school classes participated) on the Khan Academy.

• There is a teacher, but every kid works at their own pace.
• There is a grid that tells where each student is on each concept. Green is proficient, blue is in progress, and red is stuck. This is where the teachers come in to help with those red areas or bring in the proficient students to help.
• Data on videos – looks at what parts of the videos classes stop on the most, what activities classes participate in the most, etc.
• There is also tracking for each individual student. It shows how students may take longer to master some skills, but after they do they often race ahead through the next skill sets. In regular classrooms, these students would most likely be labeled as slow before they ever got the chance to master the skill and race ahead.

The Khan Academy wants to globalize and humanize education. The following are areas that are vital to this transformation: improvement in student to valuable human time ratios (rather than just student to teacher ratios; other students can act as effective peer mentors); adult learners who are embarrassed to go back to school and catch up or relearn what they didn't exactly get back when they were in school; kids who must learn on their own because they have to work (instead of go to school) to help support the family; and a peer-to-peer tutoring network, where anyone who wants to mentor/tutor can and anyone who needs help can access it easily. A global, one-world classroom is the Khan Academy's ultimate goal.