ELPC G2 Entry #3

Introduction

So here I sit on yet another Sunday morning, putting my thoughts in order. Again a lot has happened during the week: this week I became a different (hopefully better) facilitator of maths understanding to adults (note: I've chosen my words very carefully there; it's not just a case of intentional prolixity) because of the influence of my STS (Science) lecturer/tutor and Strand 1 of ELPC G2.

Puposefully, I had one of my adults students read a sentence from our prescribed text (I didn't prescribe the text; personally I think it is one of the worst maths texts on the face of the planet; only fear of litigation prevents me from naming and shaming it; the fact that we still use it is tesimony to the extreme inertia of large organisations) and then asked "What does that mean?" There was no problem with the reading of the sentence, but in terms of meaning, well, let's just say "not a lot."

Whose "fault" is this? The writer of the textbook? The language training the students had received prior to their appearance in my classroom? "Who owns the problem?" is a for more germane question, one which gets to the heart of Strand 1 of ELPC G2: Literacy across the curriculum. We all do. Literacy (in, as I've said before, the very small-c catholic sense of the word) is the domain of every teacher.

As usual I have cut-and-pasted my individual responses from throughout the week. Let's have a look at them:

The Textbook (Tovani) Chapter 4

Apologies in advance for what I suspect is going to be a somewhat rambling and stream-of-consciouness response (actually while it may be the former, it is definitely not the latter; I've just written a substantial synopsis of the chapter, which I will try to flesh out as I work through it).

In the first paragraph Tovani makes a comment to the effect of "too much content and not enough time". This is a statement I have heard, and continue to hear at CIT, BSSS, and High-School levels. I don't hear it at Primary School; the complaint there is usually "too much planning is required". This is a curriculum issue, which is then ultimately a political issue. There are a bunch of people working at the curriculum level who are being squeezed from above by Government and bashed from below by teachers. I know this. I've been in the middle. The content/time issue is not going to go away while education is a political football. Unfortunately, in this age of creeping credentialism (or educational inflation) where higher and higher levels of formal education are required in order to be eligible to do the same task (ie be employed) education is never going to be divorced from overt political influence. I don't know what the answer is, but I do recall a book about teaching and subversion which may hold some clues....

Who's driving the curriculum, and the textbooks being used? In my experience it is often the teachers and non-teachers sitting on curriculum panels. It is my impression that they end up choosing a textbook that they themselves would like to use. They seem to forget that they themselves are trained learners who are not seeing this material for the first time.

I concur with the Richard Strong quote, but perhaps for different reasons. Whereas I think he sees the presence of the textbook from a rather pragmatic or even defeatist position, the simple biological fact is that we get most of the information about our world through our eyes. The notion of "multi-sensory learning experiences" is a bit of a nonsense really, for how often do we (and did we) ever learn apart from through our eyes. I guess I'm saying that the textbook, and reading, are with us for the long haul. Hence the importance of getting it right.

"Teachers are frustrated because students don't remember information from previous chapters, so they constantly feel as though they have to back up and reteach material." I think this is another symptom of time pressure. What if the explicit expectation was that students actually require a certain degree of recapping? Many good/effective teachers begin the next lesson by going back to halfway through the previous lesson.

So, what is accessible text? Tovani says "interesting, well written, and appropriately matched". The final aspect could possibly be teased out via authentic assessment, but the first two points make me ask "as measured by whom?" Ultimately teachers do the measuring, and to do so accurately they must attempt to walk in their students' shoes.

"Rigour" is an interesting term. Epistemologically, rigour must be measured against whatever gold-standard of knowledge already exists. Pragmatically, rigour is perhaps that level of precision with which the student is ready to receive new knowledge. We have to walk a fine line between what may not be strictly speaking correct, but "true enough" for the time being in the current context. To determine the appropriateness of a text (and by extension the rigour with which the topic will be dealt) Tovani says "I must consider how much reading they have done in the past, and how well they read now." I love this; to me it says "look at at where they've come from and where they are now, then we'll worry about where they want to go". This is completely at odds with most post-primary education and training models in the Western world. The TAFE system in Australia is not at all formally interested in where you come from. It's all about where you want to go; we'll get you up and running (but we won't see if you can walk first).

Accessible text should "challenge the student". Again, I don't think enough teachers put themselves in the students shoes; they end up choosing something that challenges them (and frustrates and humiliates the student).

Text sets: Tovani wonders "why middle and high school teachers couldn't use the notion and adapt it a little". I too wonder why. I think the reason it doesn't happen (generally speaking) is that the wheels of large organisations, large systems, move very slowly. There is a huge amount of historical inertia behind our education system. But things can and do change, and we can contribute to that change. Next year many of us will be out in schools, some casually, other permanently. We will all enter a system that has not been living and breathing the cutting-edge research that has been our air for the last few months. There will be a temptation and/or a pressure upon you to conform to the existing paradigm. "Subvert it", I say to you. If you believe in the things we are learning at uni then stick to your guns. Eventually YOU will be representative of the dominant paradigm within the school, and new teachers will emulate YOU. Now how cool could that be?

Putting my Derrida glasses on for a moment and reading between the lines, it appears to me that either (a) Tovani is not at all a maths person, or (b) she has encountered the same difficulties with maths folk as I have, namely extreme resistance to change. Her suggestions for maths text sets are simplistic and limited. Maths people, put your thinking hats on and imagine a maths class that worked around concepts (which is what a text set will emphasise) rather than content. That is my dream.



This post did not generate any written replies or comments. I hope it was read, for I do think I have something to offer preservice teachers, namely teaching experience and a considered point a view which is by no means the norm (thus, I think, making it good Devil's Advocate material) out there in school land.



The Tutorial (Week 3)

I felt a great range of emotions during and after the tutorial. I saw evidence of students who were clearly there only because they had to be (a graduation requirement in Tovani's words) through to people who enjoyed being exposed to new ideas, ideas which upset their own world views, and caused them to reassess their values and beliefs.

There is not enough "meta" going on. I would like to see students stepping back from time to time and asking themselves, or the class as a whole, "what's the big picture here". Mmmm.... I don't think I'm being very lucid and coherent right now, and my tone is certainly not that of a member of the class. I guess for me the idea of rubrics is not new, and I feel a little hamstrung by a conversation which, for me, occurred many years ago and led to a quite traumatic outcome. Maybe I should abstain from this particular discussion?

There were so many subtle lessons being provided by Dr Shann. His presentation was a performance designed to illicit an a responce. We had to assess someone, using a device with which many were not familiar. It makes me feel that there is an important subject missing from the Grad Dip Ed program: "What is Assessment?" We are all going to be doing it, and our decisions will affect people's lives, but do we know what we're doing and why?

Why use a rubric? Why not just give it a mark out of ten? Should we feel happy when the class average is nice and high (yes in high school, no in college; a high class average seriously disadvantages the top students)?

My apologies for perhaps sounding pompous and all-knowing, but on Wednesday I felt I was in a place through which I had already travelled. In hindsight I can say that the hostility of the room was non-existent compared to the hostility I have encountered in staffroom, and which some, if not all, will encounter in staff rooms on the matter of assessment and rubrics.



Further commentary

This weeks tutorials led to a robust exchange about assessment, rubrics, and the epistemological issues surrounding testimony. In response to another student's strong feeling about the nature of the assessment process being applied to our work I replied as follows:

Just being the Devil's Advocate, define "interesting", "good", "clear", "novel", "appropriate level", "relevant", just to pick a few.

No matter how much we may wish to the contrary, language defines everything, and with language comes interpretation and subjectivity. Whether one goes with the "gut feeling" (and for many the "gut feeling" will be surprising "accurate" once one has been teaching/assessing the same material for a while) or the atomised-to-death (marks for ticks) approach, at the end of the day someone's value and belief system is imposed.

There is no teacher-proof nor student-proof assessment. And that's OK. It's just how it is.

The original poster replied as follows (I have made a couple of edits to preserve as best I could the anonimity of the participants):

This was written by my students. I agree that "interesting" is subjective, but I think "clear", "novel" and "relevant" are reasonably objective. I am not putting this forward as a suggested rubric or set of criteria, as I said in my post I was offering it as an example of something different. It's not quite what I would have written, but it's close, the students were happy with it and they used it.

Gut feeling is one thing, and when I use a set of criteria the mark generated usually agrees with my gut feeling, but gut feeling alone does not give acceptable transparency, and gives no useful feedback to the student. How would you feel about being given a mark with the feedback "it sort of felt like a 75 in my large intestine"?

If a rubric is going to be of value as a learning tool to the students, the rubric has to be meaningful, and it has to applied, and their mark according to it reported to them. That's an aspect that hasn't been discussed yet - assessing for learning.

I've never been offered a bribe, but I know lecturers who have been. Hang around academia long enough and you see and hear all sorts of things. Transparency is important. The perception/visibility of fairness and honesty is important as well as the fact of it.

My response to what is, I feel, a perfectly valid, but unsound, position:

"Clear": to whom?

"Novel": as judged by whom?

"Relevant": as above.

"The students were happy with it and they used it": Of course they were happy with it. It is a mirror of the beliefs and expectations about "science" and "assessment" they brought with them, beliefs and expectations forged by the community and the school system.

Right now a whole bunch of people are having their own belief system challenged. That's one of the central tenets of teacher education. It's not comfortable. It creates doubt. To relieve doubt one can fight harder to preserve the entrenched position, or as John Yossarian (the protagonist of Heller's "Catch 22") does, one can "flee forward" into the unknown.

Science/Maths (particularly Maths) folk are, by and large, locked into a right/wrong mentality, and highly resistant to fleeing forward. I know this because I managed to unlock myself from it, but not without enlightening and aggravating more than a few people in that ACT system.

At the end of the day a human being is going to make a value judgement about the performance of another human being's work. To get really specific we're dealing with the epistemological issues associated with "testimony", so my comfort or otherwise depends on whose large intestine the 75 is coming from.

My true and sincere apologies if this is coming across as hostile. It's not my intention, but until one's own values are subjected to intense scrutiny that person will, as a teacher, do little more than perpetuate the current learning culture that pervades our world. Personally I think that is a sad thing, for, especially in maths, the dominant culture is one of fatalism and mediocrity.

I guess I'm all for the post-modern reassessment of current practices.

Re-reading my last post, I find myself unmoved from my position. The human aspect of any transactional process (eg asessment as a part of the learning process) cannot be removed, and limiting it in the name of "transparency" and "accountabilty" (important words without a doubt, but words which carry an insidious undertone when applied to mass education, words which have infiltrated education along with standardised testing and reducing a student's worth to a single number) is to reduce the richness of education that can occur when minds meet rather than collide.

Andrew Trost