It was good to see colleagues from other schools whom I get to see only too rarely these days. It was also interesting to hear so many of my basic principles of teaching from the last many years affirmed by people with national reputations: student-centric learning, helping students take more responsibility for themselves, trying to find ways to engage them as much as possible while “telling” them as little as possible, and so on.
No-one used the GAG acronym (“Go Against the Grain”), but the basic idea was there in a number of contexts nonetheless. It was also very cool to hear so much mention that teachers need to be learners and that collaboration in many ways is important.
Not surprising, perhaps, since the talks were so general, but there was an occasional disconnect between the ideal we were being shown and how to make it work out in the high-school classroom. For instance, in talking about the professional school that graded students half on “the elegance of the team’s solution” and half on what your teammates said about how much you contributed, there was no mention of how that idea has to be translated to be effective in a high-school where the students are friends, in classes together, play sports together, and in many cases have grown up together.
When I’ve had students critique their teammates’ work, the critiques often reflect more how much they like the person or want to avoid hurting feelings than anything else. Perhaps like most things, one would get better results with training the students in the art of giving such assessments. Indeed, on my students’ blogs, I’ve sent each a sample I dashed off quickly for them to critique and get my feedback on their critique before they critique their peers’ work…
I liked Pat Bassett’s comment that the colleges might be more responsive to innovation than we might think. Heidi Jacobs had some interesting examples of the points I liked in her book “Curriculum 21,” and I will start checking out her website as well as some others that were mentioned.
In many of Jacobs’ examples of how we need to start using “new technologies” and new methods of creating content, I was reminded again how critical assessment is and how much harder it is to do some of these things effectively at the high-school level.
I am looking forward to tomorrow, especially to David Eagleman since I always enjoy his talks and have just given a talk myself on his book “Incognito.”
(In between sessions and beforehand, I was rereading Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and Social Hope,” perhaps the best book I’ve read in a very long time.)