Interesting ideas from Linda Darling-Hammond

It was great to be in the audience for Linda Darling-Hammond’s presentation at the University of Sydney last Monday. I have frequently come across her research in my personal learning quest so it was with alacrity that I accepted the invitation to hear her speak. Much of Professor Darling-Hammond’s lecture that evening encouraged us to keep working towards a new way of teaching and learning via a review of current effective teaching across the globe.

There were three substantial points which I will endeavour to incorporate into my own practice.

The first idea came from Darling-Hammond’s explanation of what some of the new Charter Schools are doing. I was quite interested in the planning and meeting time allocated to teachers during the school day. I had an idea that teachers in core subjects, which are often graded, could meet across the grade levels. For example, the English, Maths and Science teachers who have the lower ability class could meet once or twice a term to discuss the students’ strengths and weakness, as well as strategies for effective teaching. This currently occurs in a more ad hoc fashion, depending on the special needs students but it would be great to have time allocated for this. I could imagine that this could evolve into a research project for the core subject teachers and they could report on their experience to the remaining staff.

The second concept is to incorporate revising and editing time into all tasks. Linda Darling-Hammond’s research shows that effective teachers provide students with clear standards and opportunities for revising which ties in with my earlier blog post on Tinkering for the 21^st century learner. I encourage students to continuously adapt their work and see drafting and editing as part of the process and have had significant success thus far with my classes. Occasionally this process encounters some opposition from students, particularly as they get older. Some students develop work patterns which suggest they think that tasks, once done, are shelved and never revisited. This pattern favours the completion of tasks over the quality of tasks. In this mindset, teacher feedback is viewed as less important than the grade/mark. I really want students to see teacher feedback as a variety of strategies for improvement and this will only happen when students view their day to day learning as a work-in-progress. I’ll definitely give this more thought this year and consider how to address this further with seniors.  

The final idea for discussion today is one that I’m sure many teachers would agree with: the notion that we could reduce the number of topics we teach but deal with them in a more complex way. The Singaporean Ministry of Education homepage says it well: Teach Less, Learn More. How many times have we all heard, “But I’ve got to get through the mandatory content…”? I remember one of my own Year 11 Modern History teachers handing us a sheaf of typed notes on Russia (which she’d had for years, I’m sure) and telling us to learn the notes thoroughly without spending any class time on it. The notes were on a period of History on which we were not actually going to be examined , but needed to know so that we could understand the period that we were examined on. I’m hoping that she simply did not have the time to teach us this material. And to this day I cannot remember any of it. Very much filling up the receptacles again. Oh well, it was a long time ago.  

Active Learning

I was surprised by the point of view in Louise Williams’ article in Saturday’s SMH, The slow collapse of the ivory tower (16/4/11). She argues that recent developments in technology, such as the accessibility of information and the multitude of online lectures, are ‘challenging centuries old academic structures’, and that by default, universities are losing their primacy as the ‘ultimate arbiters and repositories of knowledge’.

I challenge this argument because at its centre is the idea that learning is the equivalent of reading or listening. This argument suggests that learning is merely ingesting content and that students are receptacles waiting to be filled with relevant content. Since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, content/knowledge became available the world over, and the ‘repositories of knowledge’ were libraries where books were stored. Now, with the advent of the internet, content is ubiquitous. However, we have always known that accessing information is not equivalent to learning. If that were the case, then all we would have to do is read as many books as we can and we would have learnt everything the books had to tell us. The writer’s argument seems to rest on the concept that learning is just like her description of the 20^th century model of education, ‘a largely one-way transmission of facts, theories and ideas’.

If only learning was that simple.

All educators know that learning occurs when the student changes. This change takes place in the student’s knowledge, in attitude, in skill, in perspective, in behaviour. All educators, from early childhood to post-graduate level, design thinking and learning activities so that the new content (knowledge, skills, values or processes) doesn’t just pass through the brain but is learnt. Educators provide opportunities for students to discover new knowledge themselves, to test it, to share it and then even to question it. Educators offer students opportunities to contextualise and personalise the new knowledge, to process it. Educators provide the means by which students activate their new knowledge, apply it to situations, consider how best to use their new knowledge, and consider its value, if any.

Educators open the dialogue which is learning. Education is not, nor has it really ever been, ‘a largely one-way transmission of facts, theories and ideas’, as Louise Williams describes. Learning is not just reading or listening to a lecture. Students are not receptacles waiting to be filled with knowledge. They are human beings who think and feel and engage with the world individually. Thus, students will always need educators, whether in schools or universities, to help them learn. 

The Reading Revolution 2

I haven't time to write a full post today but I had to make a quick comment about Malcolm Knox's essay in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald. It was called Driven by Distraction and its core argument echoed some points I made in my previous post.  He uses evidence from the work of Nicolas Carr and Susan Greenfield to argue that the decline in book sales is a result of people no longer being interested in deep reading, thanks to the changes in our brains as a result of the reading and viewing practices that the internet encourages . It is an excellent read for those who might have missed it. 


For those with more time on their hands I highly recommend the interview with Nicholas Carr about his book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember. I have put in my Book Depository order for this one!