Blog Posts

Head and Hands: Getting Meaning out of Experience

5/15/2018

There is probably no term more ill-used in education circles than "hands-on" learning. It has become a synonym for a wide variety of strategies such as: discovery learning; experiential learning; kinesthetic learning; learning by doing; constructivism; or exploratory learning - to name a few. The basic premise in many of these terms is that through exploration or discovery, a learner can engage in "problem solving situations where the learner draws on his or her own past experience and existing knowledge to discover facts and relationships and new truths to be learned". Or, as another school of thought states, "hands on learning is "gaining knowledge by actually doing something rather than learning about it from books, lectures, etc."

The implication in both these definitions is that modes of learning are an either one thing or the other. But the fact is, effective learning is always an "and" not an either/or. I think of it this way, the first time that I ever went to Paris, I had read about all of the highlights first and then experienced them in person. And, even as I was admiring Notre Dame, I still had my Michelin Guide clutched in my hand so that I could make sense of what I was seeing. That is the true value of experiential/hands-on learning, a delicate balance between knowledge and experience with the result being a far greater depth of understanding than either method could produce on its own.

Last week I had the pleasure of tagging along as our senior high school Science students traveled to spend four days at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, which is perched high above Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Reading over the itinerary in advance, I knew that there would be some great field experiences along the shore and out at sea in the Centre's research vessels. I noticed too, almost in passing, that sandwiched in between these excursions there were a number of labs scheduled as well. My first inclination was to conclude that the labs would be interesting "fillers" while we waited for the next on-site adventure. I couldn't have been more wrong. Rather than being diversions, these labs were an essential component of the learning process. For example, on the first day, students took part in both an invertebrate lab and a seaweed lab. In each case, through a combination of lecture/demonstration; the study of resource materials; and, practical hands-on experience, the students learned how to identify and classify different types of marine life found locally. Armed with this knowledge, the next morning found them out on the Sound in a research vessel dredging the ocean floor for specimens and the following day hiking to a nearby beach at low tide to look at life in the tidal pools first hand. At each stage, the students acquired, deepened and applied their knowledge and understanding of invertebrate life and the symbiotic relationship with aquatic plants and, eventually, plankton. This was experiential learning at its best. Solid preparation, acquiring key background knowledge, hands-on reinforcement in a laboratory setting and then practical, real world observation and application to gain a greater understanding of the local environment.

I have spent the last 10 years living near the ocean, walking the shoreline, gazing into tidal pools and picking up and discarding shells. But all this time, I had been the classic tourist without a guidebook. I saw but didn't understand in more than a cursory fashion the living world around me. Many of our students were the same, but now that has changed. Information can be found in books, or online, and experiences can wash over us like the incoming tide. But, until you put them together, real knowledge and understanding generally remain just out of reach.

Want to really learn something? Do your homework first, and then be prepared to get your hands dirty. It's an unbeatable combination!

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Self-inflicted Wounds

3/9/2018

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Last Sunday my Grade 6 son went with a friend's family to a Vancouver Whitecaps game. It was his first time at a professional soccer match. Before going, he asked if he could borrow one of our cellphones so that he could post game shots on Instagram. Pretty harmless entertainment and nice for him to be able to share a new experience with his friends in real time. He went, he clicked, he posted. In doing so he was part of an Instagram network of almost 700 million users who post almost 100 million photos a day. Having had a Blackberry for 20 years (which, until my new KeyOne, took the world's blurriest pictures) I never got into Instagram. My Twitter habits keep me quite busy enough and, besides, my life really isn't interesting enough to share globally! But for many of our students, Instagram is an on-going visual conversation through which they keep their friends constantly close at hand (or in their hip pockets!) Should we be concerned? Maybe.

Lost in all of the public conversation about cyber-bullying is the fact that people in general (students, parents and educators) do a generally lousy job of communicating electronically. Cyber-bullying is, in essence, an extreme form of our day to day, cyber-foolishness. Over the years I have arranged countless sessions for students centring on the very public nature of "private" communication on the internet. We explained to them just how exposed they really were in their emails, texting, tweets, and especially on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. What they were beginning to grasp was that the actual audience for their comments was far broader than their intended one. Instagrammers, for example, quite regularly cut and paste or forward personal images and comments to people who were never intended to see or read them. And, once they are hung out there on the line for everyone to see, it is virtually (and physically!) impossible to reel them back in. After much discussion and sharing of experiences, I had begun to feel like the kids were getting it, and in some small way maybe we were helping them to self-edit what they were willing to share with the world. Having said all of that, I feel now that I may have missed the mark and in fact, all of these years I have been directing my efforts at the wrong target (or rather at only one of our at-risk groups). And also, perhaps, misreading their motivation for sharing.

Last May, the U.K.-based Royal Society for Public Health recently named Instagram and snapchat the worst social media apps for mental health. Its study of almost 1,500 Britons ages 14 to 24 found that young people were most likely to associate Instagram with negative mental well-being and feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. The report observed:
"Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol and is now so entrenched in the lives of young people that it is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people's mental health issues."

The crux of the problem seems to be one of self-image. Instagram users are bombarded with images of people wearing the right clothes, travelling to exotic places, and taking part in cool events. Vicariously sharing the "great" lives that other people appear to be enjoying, children and young adults can often self-amplify their own feelings of inadequacy as they reflect on the boring or mundane nature of their day to day existence. While most of us can sit back and recognize the basic disconnect of what people are posting from "real" life, for others those lines are blurred or non-existent. A recent story in the New York Post highlighted the case of a young woman (26) who had run up debts of over $10,000 in order to create an online personna on Instagram. She bought high-end clothes she didn't need, took trips to exotic locales that she couldn't afford and tried to cultivate an image that she couldn't maintain. Now, six months later, she is broke, in debt, and somewhat wiser.
With a casual search I found a number of coaching sites that instruct neophyte users how to have the greatest impact and build their personal brand and "story". One even shared the optimum days and times to post to reach the widest audience (hint: more than half of the times are between 10 pm and 3 am - are you still wondering why your child is on their device late at night?)
A study published five years ago by the American Psychological Association concluded that millennials were almost twice as fixated on wealth and fame as baby boomers were a half a century ago. Online platforms have become the medium to generate celebrity and, for students in B.C., Instagram is the vehicle of choice.

At present, my son is far more interested in hockey and baseball than in Instagram and Snapchat and so now is probably the time to gently monitor his habits and become one of his Instagram followers. It's kind of for my own protection, because if in the future he begins to post about haute cuisine or high-end travel, he'll probably be using my credit card to pay for it!

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Using your RAM to avoid being rammed!

2/6/2018

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This morning, my son Morgan missed the bus for school. My previously calculated plan to see him off, stop at Starbucks, beat the traffic down the Cut and arrive at school were rearranged to include a ten minute drive in the wrong direction, drop him at school, adjust my route to avoid the now-jammed up Cut and arrive at KGMS a little later than I had planned.
Sound like a typical morning at your house? As parents we are often on "auto-pilot" as we manage the routines around work, school, activities and errands. This management skill is called executive functioning. It allows us to set goals, plan, initiate, monitor our progress, review our successes (or failures) and learn from our experiences. In short, executive function is the set of mental processes that helps connect past experience with present action. We use it to perform activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention to and remembering details, and managing time and space.

Needless to say, school success is highly dependent upon executive function. It enables students to regulate their behaviour and to perform those tasks that that facilitate learning. EF allows students to plan; keep track of time; multi-task; build on past experience; evaluate and reflect; make mid-course corrections; ask for help; and, exercise self-control.

However, unfortunately, many of our students have challenges that get in the way of their executive functioning skills. These problems manifest themselves in a number of different ways. Students who struggle with executive function have difficulties with initiating projects; predicting how much time a task will take; relating a story in a sequential fashion; planning and prioritizing; adapting to changing conditions; or retaining information from something that they have read while trying to answer questions about it.

Often when educators think about executive function, they focus on organizational skill development such as time management, developing organizational systems or planning and prioritizing. While this works for many students, there are clear barriers that prevent some children from easily mastering these skills. For them, this traditional approach does not work.

A key EF challenge can be a product of working memory, which is the ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks. It incorporates the ability to "draw on past learning or experience to apply to the situation at hand or to project it into the future". As an analogy, I recently heard on Quirks and Quarks that while the "hard drives" of long term memory in our brains can store an impressive 100 terabytes of information, our RAM - or working memory - holds very little but that limited data is critically important to the management of our moment to moment operations.

"It’s like mental juggling", says H. Lee Swanson, PhD, a professor of education with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. “As information comes in, you’re processing it at the same time as you store it,” he says. "A child uses this skill when doing math calculations or listening to a story, for example. She has to hold onto the numbers while working with them. Or, she needs to remember the sequence of events and also think of what the story is about" .

Other executive functioning skills include: response inhibition which is the ability to think before you act including the ability to resist the urge to say or do something before you take the time to evaluate what impact your behaviour might have on a given situation; emotional control, that is, the ability to manage emotions, controlling and directing your behaviour in order to achieve goals and complete tasks; and, sustained attention which is the capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue or boredom.

At our school, every class and tutoring session involves working on developing and enhancing executive functioning skills with our students. Our academic division core teachers work in partnership with our Social Emotional Learning counsellors to support all of our students in this process. It is all part of our universal design approach to learning. Looking around the school you will see all kinds of strategies in action such as:

Working memory supports including cognitive orthotic devices such as written agendas or organizational apps; posting daily schedules, weekly calendars, "to do" lists; giving directions that prompt reference to past experience; breaking tasks into manageable chunks; organizing student workspaces to minimize clutter (at home this could mean having dedicated spaces for certain tasks); and, making sequentially stepped process checklists ("first do this, next do this, etc.").

For response inhibition and emotional control issues we provide distractions; set time limits; model delayed gratification; reduce or eliminate triggers; remove the student from the situation; and, teach and rehearse coping strategies until she or he has internalized them.

To sustain attention we work on reducing distractions; modifying or limiting the time on task; using peer coaching; providing active exercise breaks; and, reinforcing successful focussing.

In the final analysis, success in school, like everyday life, demands that you not only effectively plan and implement tasks in a logical, sequential fashion but also learn how to self-regulate as well. After all, we all know drivers who have their destination, route, and timing all planned out in advance but cannot cope with any variation that might get in their way. So next time you see someone gripped by "road rage", you are undoubtedly witnessing a breakdown in their executive functioning. Probably a good idea to just get out of their way!

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Timing is everything!

1/20/2018

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I never miss an opportunity to read whatever Daniel Pink authors, or give up a chance to hear him speak on podcasts, or interviews, or in person. His books: A Whole New Mind; Drive; and, To Sell is Human are three of my favourites and rarely spend much time on my book shelf, as either I take one down to refresh my memory about an idea, or a staff member drops in to grab one of my copies.

Pink's latest work - When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing hit the bookstores last week and once again he doesn't disappoint. One of the central themes is his examination of the research studying the correlation between performance and time of day. Scientists have known for a long time that most living organisms have internal clocks or "circadian rhythms". Pink's research takes this one step further as he considers the impact of these rhythms on our day to day performance at work, school, or play.

“For most of us mood follows a common pattern: a peak, a trough, and a recovery.” Most of us seem to peak in the morning, trough at midday, and recover in the later afternoon. But, as he notes, even casual observation reveals that not all of us experience this pattern in the same way, in fact, we’re all different “chromotypes.” About a quarter of us are “larks” that excel in the morning; others are “owls” that hit their peak in the wee hours, and still others — between 60 to 80 per cent of us — are “third birds,” somewhere in between. Knowing your chromotype is critical to avoid making dangerous mistakes or becoming the victim of other people’s time-sensitive errors. Pink points out that although most of us fall into that middle group, this is not a consistent pattern throughout our lives. Young children tend to be "larks", up at 'em at the crack of dawn. After puberty there is a significant shift towards becoming an "owl". Research shows that for most teenagers, 6-7 a.m. is the physical equivalent of the middle of the night. And, anyone who has tried to dynamite a teenager out of bed in the morning, or watched adolescent zombies walk the halls of a high school before lunch will understand that completely. Eventually, most young adults tend to gravitate to the middle ground in their 20s but will eventually become more and more "larkish" in their 60s and beyond.

So, what impact does all of this have on schooling? To begin with, for elementary students, it is a reminder - which all teachers and tutors know from experience - that the most challenging academic tasks are best performed before the early afternoon. Pink identifies the trough period for most people as hitting between 2 and 4 p.m. but for younger "larks" in the early elementary it may come as early as 11 or so. High School students are more productive if, either their day starts a bit later, or begins with less academically demanding courses such as phys-ed or one on one direct instruction, where they can be individually coached and encouraged, scheduled at the beginning of the day.

Can you break this rhythm, or are we doomed to wallow in the afternoon trough with declining focus and productivity? Well, in this case, Pink gives us a little hope to counter our own circadian rhythms. He suggests that the mid-afternoon is a good time to focus on mundane, administrative tasks. If morning is our peak analytical time, and later in the day is our most creative, then the mid-point might just be a time to grind it out! He also points out that research shows that taking a break (not an extended siesta, but rather a deliberate active change of scene) can also be rejuvenating. I heard Pink speak about this on Quirks and Quarks last week. He recommends a brief - 10-15 minutes - brisk walk, outdoors, ideally in the company of a friend or colleague. This tends to clean out the cobwebs, improve mood, and get you back on track. For elementary students this might mean a "body break" on the playground. For high school kids, a 10 minute afternoon opportunity to walk to the corner and grab a snack. These "time wasters" are actually a great investment in productivity.

So next time you have trouble getting your kids up in the morning, or getting them to focus on homework in the evening. Don't blame them, blame it on their chromotype!

Timing is everything.

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From Angst to Thanks

12/19/2017

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There is no job that is more angst-ridden than being a parent. As much as you would like to cocoon your children from the hurts and disappointments and harsh realities of the world – it is simply not possible. Every day we are bombarded by the media with images that reflect all of our worst nightmares. Last week the internet was crowded with remembrances of that horrific day five years ago in Sandy Hook. There are no words that can express the sorrow and the outrage that consumes us all when we allow ourselves to reflect on this kind of violation of what should be one of the safest places on earth for our children.

It is often far too easy to dwell on the dark possibilities of life. But, as parents, we can not, and should not, go there. Quite the contrary, this time of year should be a time of giving thanks. Thanks for our children and all of the joy that they bring to our lives. Thanks too, to all of the amazing people in their lives who care for them and support them; the people who make sure that they don’t “fall between the cracks”.

Many years ago, one of my older sons declared in the middle of Grade 12 that “school is irrelevant” and stopped attending. No amount of begging, lecturing or threatening would make him budge, and if it hadn’t been for a cadre of teachers who were determined to make sure that he didn’t throw everything away in the last weeks of high school, the end of the story might have been quite different. As it was, he graduated, and then took two years off to work as a short-order cook. More angst! Eventually however, he met a girl. She was interested in school and driven to succeed. Fast forward twenty years and they are both university professors in Winnipeg with two lovely daughters and very successful and satisfying personal and professional lives. And his father? I still remain full of angst - transferred quite seamlessly to my two young sons (how will I ever get Morgan to sit down to his math homework rather than gravitating to his iPad? Or get Quinn to realize that there is more to life than watching hockey and baseball?) and to my grandchildren who are too far away for me to micro-manage in the way that I want to. That is the nature of parenthood. We want the best for our children and woe be to anything or anyone that gets in the way of it!

Sometimes however, we get so focused on the perceived barriers to our children’s future successes, that we forget to reflect and appreciate those circumstances and people who are not holding them back, but propelling them forward. As our children get older, and our direct influence wanes, those factors (the values, the work ethic, and strength of character that we have tried to instil in them) and those people (their teachers, coaches, friends and extended family members) play a greater and greater role in the path that they choose to follow.

As the term draws to a close, and we look forward to celebrating a holiday season that is more about family than about turkeys and presents, it is a great time to be thankful for all of those people who are helping our children along their way. No doubt, if we could be in a hundred places at once, we would try to do it all ourselves, but sometimes, we just have to let go, hope for the best, and trust that the foundation that we have built for our daughters and sons will carry them through just fine.

So, from me, this is a letter of thanks to my own children’s teachers, past and present, to their friends (and friends’ parents) and to the hosts of cousins, Aunts and Uncles, and Grandparents who have been such an important part of their lives. You don’t relieve my angst, but somehow you make it all come together for my kids.

Have a wonderful holiday!

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Visual Supports: UDL and the Path to Inclusion

12/3/2017

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Visitors to our school often comment on the number of graphic signs and posters that appear in classrooms and around the building. They tend to be colourful and engaging, and although they appear to be primarily decorative, in actual fact they are highly strategic. There is nothing more fundamental to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) than the provision of visual supports. Quietly present in both teaching and travelling areas around the school, they provide constant and consistent reminders and reinforcements of routines, expectations, and self-regulation strategies.

In KGMS/Maplewood we have a kaleidoscopic array of learning differences. Visual supports are of particular value to students with challenges in executive function; working memory, spatial memory or auditory processing. They are equally useful to those who have an identified strength in visual memory and processing. For everyone else, they provide a constant reinforcement of things that they have heard or have stored in their working memory.

It is a given in UDL that the learning environment needs to reflect the differences among learners. If the school does not respond to learner variability, then curriculum ceases to be accessible to each and every student. Learning is the dynamic interaction of the individual with the environment, and learner success is at the intersection of individual needs with the supports that their learning environment provides. Modifying and customizing visual supports is a critically important way of applying UDL principles to improve educational practice throughout the school, and even a casual stroll through our halls, and a visit to its classrooms, should provide you with ample evidence of both visual supports in place, and universal design for learning in action.

What might you see in one of our classrooms? You should look for a visual schedule with pictures and words that is referred to throughout the day; visual and obvious non-verbal prompts from the teachers (pointing, raised hand, gentle touch) to focus attention or encourage expected behaviours; visual cues or graphics depicting problem solving strategies, zones of regulation or work initiation procedures; visual timers; colour-coded timetables; etc. You should see active use of the SMART-board; instructional and calendar pop-ups on student laptops; and students consulting visual dictionaries and text simplification software to remove visual clutter from their screens.

What might you see in the hallway or other high traffic areas? Look for colour coded doorways; body break symbols; pictorial depictions of room names/functions (open book; saxophone; basketball; test tube; hammer/saw; and so on).
So, do all students need these visual cues? Of course not, but some do. Do all students (and adults) understand what they mean? Of course they do. Universal supports are necessary and essential for some students, and beneficial and informative for all.

So the next time you walk into a classroom make yourself a mental checklist to answer these five questions:

1. Is today's visual schedule posted and accessible to all students in the class?
2. Are there visual reminders for expected classroom norms in terms of how students/teachers act, speak, and interact with other members of the classroom community?
3. Do the adults in the room use consistent visual prompts to help students to keep focussed and on task?
4. Is there effective use of assistive technology (or signage or manual timers, etc.) to reinforce task and time management
expectations and to remind students about upcoming transitions?
5. Is there signage or are there other visual prompts to indicate differentiate parts of the classroom used for self-regulation or
quiet work and reflection?

If you can find most of them, then it is probably a pretty inviting and accessible classroom environment. If more than two are missing, then perhaps it is time for a little coaching about the role of universal design as a strategy for inclusion.
Visual supports are among the most effective strategies for universal access to learning. The bonus is that they are by far the easiest to implement and, for most of us, visual images tend to stick. Just ask anyone who has visited our library, what a dead dinosaur has to do with reading, and you will find out what I mean!

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How could I have forgotten that?

11/13/2017

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As anyone who is familiar with our school is aware, 100% of our K-8 students receive a block of one to one tutoring every day. We see it as part of our commitment to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and, intuitively, most people believe that daily individualized tutoring is like chicken soup - "it couldn't hurt!" Our gut tells us that it works for kids, and, for a change, research also tells us that we are right to feel that way!

This past weekend I had the privilege to speak in Toronto at the first ever researchED Conference to be held in Canada. My session was about the application of UDL research to the design of our programme at KGMS/Maplewood. The best part for me was having the opportunity to connect and discuss current research and trends with educators from across Canada, the UK, and the United States. In one such conversation we discussed Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve. Ironically, although Ebbinghaus's research was something that I had learned about as an education student in the 1970s, I had totally forgotten about it!

In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted research with respect the factors that could support the strengthening of memory for individuals and his results are widely accepted as a general theory for how we learn and retain information. Graphing his results, he developed a formula for how long items remain in our memory. Some people may remember better than others, but the general trend for how long we retain information is the same. (see chart above)

According to Ebbinghaus, the level at which we retain information depends on a couple of things:
1. The strength of your memory
2. The amount of time that has passed since learning

He went on to theorize that basic training in mnemonic techniques can help overcome those differences in part. He asserted that the best methods for increasing the strength of memory are:

better memory representation (e.g. with mnemonic techniques)
repetition based on active recall - especially spaced repetition

Sound familiar? Ebbinghaus's research was replicated in 2015 with similar results. Both studies agreed that each repetition in learning "increases the optimum interval before the next repetition is needed (for near-perfect retention, initial repetitions may need to be made within days, but later they can be made after years). Later research suggested that, other than the two factors Ebbinghaus proposed, higher original learning would also produce slower forgetting." Spending time each day to remember information, such as our tutors do with repeating and building upon phonemes, basic number facts, and mastered vocabulary, greatly decreases the effects of the forgetting curve. Reviewing material in the first 24 hours after learning information is the optimum time to reinforce memory and to reduce the amount of knowledge forgotten.

In our high school programme we provide time and support each day for students to do this repetition and reflection on their own so that they can individually master and internalize these strategies for information retention. Even for students (and adults) who do not have working memory issues, retention is strengthened and we tend to see students retain at least half of what they learned a month later. This compares to forgetting up to 90% of new material in the same period without systematic review and repetition.

Often repetition is not enough. If there is not a personal connection made with respect to the information that you are learning and its regular application to ongoing tasks or things that you have already learned, then your ability to remember it is bound to decline. It has to become part of your active knowledge base that you use every day. This is why learning to decode, read and comprehend has to be a continuous, systematic process that continually builds on what you already know and understand.

So, when the parents of prospective students tell me that their child is having OG tutoring after school a couple of days a week and ask me if that is "good enough". I tell them that it is "good" but not "enough". Regular repetition and reinforcement of learned information, as a cumulative and sustained process, is essential to cement those skills and knowledge into our students' permanent memories.

Just ask Ebbinghaus!

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Who will you remember on Remembrance Day?

11/4/2017

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No war has been fought in Canada in over 200 years. We have had our share of uprisings, and rebellions, and general strikes and even terrorist attacks but not since 1812 has the population had to rise up to resist a foreign invader. Our country has been a safe haven for centuries. In modern Canada we are surrounded by families who have escaped from brutal conflicts to come to our shores. Their stories have become our stories and are a graphic reminder of the peaceable kingdom that we all tend to take for granted. But it wasn't always that way. In my childhood, the memories of recent wars and the seemingly inevitable threat of nuclear annihilation kept the reality of global conflict in the front of our minds. But those days are long past. So, with Remembrance Day approaching, what do we remember?

Over the past couple of months our family lost both my Mom (she was 94) and my Uncle Dick (92). They had been my closest surviving connections to the World War II era, and their passing has left not only an emotional hole, but has also marked the end of an era for our family. My Uncle went to war as an 18 year old and ended up flying a Lancaster bomber in the Pacific Theatre. He, like my Dad (infantry) and my two other uncles - George (Army Corps of Engineers) and Nicky (a Spitfire pilot who was shot down over the Mediterranean and captured) were central figures in my childhood. But, although I will always think of my Dad and my Uncles who served in World War II, and of the military friends I made during my time posted with the Canadian Forces in West Germany in the 1970s and 80s, my thoughts this year go to my Grandfather who was a veteran of the First World War. His name was James Walter Sharpe.

Just over 100 years ago, on August 5, 1914 my Grandpa Sharpe, received a telegram. He was in Burk's Falls, Ontario visiting his Uncle James, who was his and my namesake. The telegram was short and to the point. I have it in a small frame at home, and it reads like this:

St. Catharines, Ont. AUG. 5/14
Mr. J.W. Sharpe
19th ordered to mobilize at 12 o'clock today. Hurry back.
R.N. Adie, Lieut.

The next day he hopped on the train, made his way home, and reported for duty. He was a corporal and eventually a sergeant in the 19th battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and after being formally mustered with the rest of the army at the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto, and trained in High Park, he left on May 12, 1915 to set sail for England. (That's him standing in the middle of the picture on his troop ship heading to war.) By September of that same year the 19th had been deployed in Boulogne in France to begin over four years service on the European continent. My grandfather only spoke sparingly to us about his wartime experiences, but places like Passchendaele and Ypres (or "Wipers" as he called it) became part of the family vocabulary. A century ago this month, he was injured in battle and eventually was sent home with shrapnel imbedded in his back that he would carry around for the rest of his life. He married, had children, had many wonderful years with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and finally died at the age of 96. Our family, unlike so many others, was one of the lucky ones.

But when I think back about the wise and wonderful man that I knew growing up, I try to imagine what it must have been like for him to get that telegram over a century ago. He was 25 years old, the same age as some of the young teachers and tutors in our school. Just a kid, heading off to one of the most brutal conflicts in history. He was a man of the 19th century and here in the 21st, I don’t know what he was thinking on that day, or how he felt during his years in the trenches, because in the 35 years that I knew him as a child and a young adult, he would never talk about it. It was just part of him.

We have been discussing, as a school community, both how to best honour the traditions of Remembrance Day and to keep it relevant and meaningful for our students. That balancing act will see us recognize and thank those who went before us to sacrifice their youth and, for many, their lives so that their families and descendants could live in peace. We will also celebrate and honour those members of our current society who continue to reach out to serve and support people in Canada and around the world who are in danger or great need. For the majority of our students, and even teachers and parents, Remembrance Day has become a little abstract, and is more about history, than personal stories. So I welcome the efforts by our staff to keep the importance of the day fresh and relevant.

As for me, I have lots to remember and a deep personal and family connection to a war that ended 99 years ago this Saturday. Appropriately, this week I ventured into one of our classrooms during a rainy lunch hour and the students were watching “The Book of Life”. The basic message of the film is that as long as we remember someone, they will live forever. So, for me on this Remembrance Day, I will remember my Grandfather and I will make it my job to remind my children and grandchildren about his story so that they will remember him too. It is the least that I can do, because anyone as brave and selfless as he was, deserves to live forever in all of our hearts.

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Universal Design: Mass Customization and Inclusion

10/22/2017

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One fall, before most of the adults in my school were born, I gave up on an undergraduate course in programming at the University of Toronto (involving key punch cards with lines of code and searching reams of paper for error messages). In its place, I transferred into a philosophy half-course taught by Marshall McLuhan. It was a rambling, eclectic mix of communication theory, the impact of hot and cool media, and a critique on how the industrial model of education was designed to stamp out differences in learners in order to make them into conforming members of society as a whole. For McLuhan, classrooms were like a typewritten page with the heading (teacher) at the top and straight lines of words (the students) laid out in neat rows below; schools themselves were little more than assembly lines producing standardized graduates in the same way Henry Ford had churned out Model T's in the 1920s.

More than forty years later, the analogy often still holds true in many of our schools and school systems. They are still primarily built on a mass production, standardization, model. They start with the proscribed curriculum and learners are asked to adapt to it as best they can. Students enter, are delivered a programme designed to meet the learning style of the mainstream, and then exit - more or less successfully - to move on to the next stage in their educational lives. It is an assembly line system, softened only by the professionalism of the people delivering it. Replicated in community after community, it is the McDonalds of education. Now, in fairness, not all schools or even school districts conform to this model. There are lighthouses where flexibility and individual student needs trump the constraints of textbooks and exams. But it takes vision and leadership to break these bonds in a culture that often demands a standardization of approach. These systemic expectations may be driven by rigidly constraining working conditions agreements (think "class size and composition"), by budget priorities, or by public perceptions and political expediencies that are driven by the results on high-stakes tests.

Whatever the reason, what should be a universal design for learning to meet the needs of all learners has been flipped on its head to mean "one size fits all" schooling and equity in educational opportunity, has been replaced by equal access to programmes, but not learning.

We are fortunate as a small, independent option to be free of many of these constraints. By contrast, what we try to offer is based on a mass customization model. This is the essence of creating a path to inclusion through applying the principles of Universal Design for Learning. Although the wide variety of structures, supports, teaching/learning approaches etc. are accessible to all learners, there is no question but that at the end of the day we are delivering individual programmes for each and every student. Our slogan could maybe be taken not from McDonalds, but from Burger King - you know - "Have it your way!" It is our on-going mission to differentiate the learning experience for each individual child and young adult and to help them to find their personal pathways to success.

Last Friday our staff spent the better part of the day working on IEPs. When you apply the principles and best practices of Universal Design to create a welcoming and varied learning environment for everyone, the fine tuning for each individual student becomes just that much easier!

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Are Deadlines Dead?

10/3/2017

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Last Spring, we were advertising for a job opening at the school. The week after the competition closed, a young woman arrived at my office with her resume. I explained to her that the application was too late for the current position (we had filled it that morning), but that I would keep her package on file should something else arise in the future. She was flabbergasted. "How could it be closed?", she demanded, "the deadline was only last Friday!"

When I was growing up, the fear of missing a “deadline” was all consuming. There were deadlines for assignments, deadlines for applications, deadlines for tax returns; you name it, and there was a deadline. Miss that key date and you were dead in the water!

But, to be honest, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have become a society of “fudgers”. Everything seems to be up for negotiation. Payment deadlines get routinely missed, airline check-in times are ignored, movies buffer their published start time with a raft of previews and ads; and even the concept of “last call” at the pub seems to have blurred. We are more than willing to pay a little extra, argue a little harder, or lie and obfuscate a little bit more if it means that we don’t have to be held to a hard and fast rule (that, needless to say, should still apply to everyone else!) We live in a society that feels that it always has the right to renegotiate. In fact, every day we are confronted in the media by the "renegotiator in chief" in Washington who proudly proclaims that there isn't a deal that he isn't willing to break!

Is it any wonder that our kids sometimes take the same attitude towards their bedtimes, their computer use, or their homework? At Kenneth Gordon, we work with many students who have challenges with their "executive function" (that is the ability to organize and execute a specific task in a time-effective way). We help them to develop organizational strategies and external, intermediate "deadlines" to pace themselves and to create short-term, attainable goals. It is hard work for them to rewire themselves to think in this fashion especially when all of the empirical evidence from the outside world would seem to indicate to them that it is not that important!

So, the question is, do deadlines really matter? Are we simply more enlightened about things than a generation ago, or have we slowly begun to miss the point?

In his book, Predictably Irrational MIT Prof. Dan Ariely tried an experiment with three classes of undergraduates taking the same course. In Class A he announced three assignments with due dates of: October 15th, November 15th, and December 15th with penalties for lateness. In Class B, he announced the same three assignments, and stated that they could be submitted anytime on or before December 15th. And, in Class C he gave the students a choice, they could opt for the same ground rules as Class A or the same open ended approach as Class B. Class C, split pretty much down the middle.

At the end of the term he had his TAs mark the papers (he was a university prof after all!) and found that the class with the deadlines — who were forced to be organized and systematic - scored the highest, the class with no deadlines (who could procrastinate and then rush at the end) scored the worst, and that the other class split the same way depending upon what option they chose.

So what does this mean for us and our kids? The research is consistent on this point. Deadlines and clear, well-defined goals do work (just ask anyone who has to report weekly to weight watchers!) Secondly, it is our responsibility as parents and educators not to just ensure that our children meet deadlines, but that they learn how to effectively set, and follow them as well. There will come a time when there won’t be a teacher or parent setting and enforcing the rules, and our students have to be prepared and supported, by us, to master that skill for themselves.

In the meantime, it is important that we adults strive to model the attitudes and behaviours that we want children to adopt. If they see that meeting goals and following timelines are important to us, then hopefully they will begin to internalize them as well.

So, don't put this off any longer! Don't you know that you are on a deadline?!

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