Harvard Graduate School of Education - Leadership: an Evolving Vision 2007

Roland Barth presented the final session of our Leadership Institute and I thought he managed to tie up many threads in his inspired presentation.

In the course of a three hour session he managed to elicit responses from the audience which enabled him to identify the most positive conditions under which we learn.  I’ll try to post later about the variety of presentation styles used in the course of the last ten days but Roland’s was a masterful display of someone who knows his business and knows how to engage an audience.

He started off by asking us to think of a time in our lives when we learned best.

The overwhelming features of our collective experiences were that we learn best:

1. when we take a risk; and
2. when there is a safety strap

Barth suggest that schools don’t take this approach - they play SAFE!!!

He argued that schools are information rich - but - experience poor.

He contrasted this with John Dewey’s assertion that:

We learn from our experience —if we reflect on our experience.

By collating all of the audiences reflctions upon situations when they learned best he separated them into idiosyncratic and generic conditions for learning.

The generic conditions for learning identified from the 150 people on our course were:

• Learn from mistakes
• Risk taking
• Urgency
• Self-reflction
• New experiences
• Emotional investment
• Support
• Fun/humour
• Curiosity
• Challenge
• Feeling respected
• Going into the unknown
• Given a reason for learning

He then asked us to think about how many of these conditions we meet in our schools - the answer was predictably few.

He summarised this by suggesting that learning in school can be:

Informative - (information)

or

Tranformative (changes you for ever)

He encouraged us to go for the GOLD standard which was -of course - the Transformative.

He slipped one little nugget in which I really liked but wonder how well it might go down in Scotland:

One district in the USA issued cards to all teachers and pupils which he described as a Permission to Learn card.

The card read as follows:

On one side : - this card entitles the holder to take one risk in their own learning

On the other side: - Today I took a risk - it didn’t go as well as I had planned but I learned that …………….?

The card does not give the holder the permission to place themselves or others at risk or danger.

Would it work in  Scotland?????

 

We were privileged to spend an hour with Kurt Fischer Ph. D. who is Charles Bigelow Professor of Human Development & Psychology and Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Professor Fischer is exploring the inter-relationships between:

 Education—-Neuroscience—–Cognitive Science

He started out be exploding some of the myths which have built up around Neuroscience and learning.

“There is no such thing as someone who has a dominant side of their brain”

I was amazed to see people who had had one of the brain’s hemisphere’s removed by surgery and that contrary to all predictions for a “left brain” child he had become skilled at drawing.

Professor Fischer’s goal is to put cognitive science, biology and education together to enable optimal learning to take place.

The following video extracts show Prof. Fischer explaining this in more detail: (you will need to download Real Player to access all the videos)

Here Prof. Fischer provides an overview of this work, describing growth spurts in brain and cognitive development that occur within the same age periods during the school years.

Here he elaborates on measuring the growth in brain activity from childhood through early adulthood. He describes how EEG (electroencephalogram) techniques can be used to detect developmental patterns in brain connections.

In this clip, Kurt Fischer uses the example of children’s social role understanding to illustrate how simple representations are reorganized into more complex representations and then into abstract concepts. These new skills that emerge in children’s best performance are closely associated with growth spurts of brain activity. (view text)

Fischer’s point is that we suffer from a pervasive mataphor in our culture for learning and teaching which sees knowledge and ideas as objects  which can be exchanged, “I gave the idea to Sally” and the brain as a container “I can’t get this idea out of my mind”

Professor Fischer’s point is that we need active involvement for learning to take place.

He referred to the PLASTICITY of the brain - “it changes based on active experience” - see this clip where he explores how people are more than just their brains.

“There’s a misconception that we have to get rid of, a prevalent misconception in the English language and culture in general, that we are brains – that we learn with our brains as opposed to being people who have brains that help us learn.  We are not brains disembodied in the bucket sitting in the corner. And likewise, we don’t learn by having information stuck into our brains.

So by one image, I have a port up here on my brain – see that little mark right here on my forehead – and that’s where I plug in every morning, and the computer tells me the knowledge for today.

Well, it doesn’t work that way. We have to learn more actively than that.
So it is not true that you can plug the world into the brain and thereby know everything. Instead, knowledge has to built.”

Kurt Fischer

For me this linked very well with what Richard Elmore had been syaing about the importance of the “instructional task” which must challenge and involve the learner.

This will be a key area of research for me over the coming months - see -http://www.imbes.org/ - for more information

 

 

 

 

One of the things whch struck me in Professor Richard Elmore’s presentation today was his recurring use of the term “instructional practice”.

I know teachers in Scotland would be horrified by such a term - “we are not technicians” would be their immediate response. The other difficulty in the term is its association with the verb to “instruct “- to tell/direct, which for many teacher smacks of didactic and authoritarian methodologies.- “instructions are something that you get when you board a plane”

Yet one of the themes which have jumped out for me over the duration of the course has been the need to separate the classroom practice from the person if we are going to be able to have a true dialogue about the quality of that practice.

The problem with the word teaching is that is is associated with the noun - teacher, i.e. if you comment on my “teaching” you are commenting upon me as a person.

If we take heed of Elmore’s words there is an undeniable need to clarify a body of knowledge and skills associated with teaching - perhaps by using the concept of instructional practice it might be possible to step back from evaluation of the person - to an evaluation of the practice -which is surely where we want to be?