Once upon a time, when I was a graduate student at Boston College, I studied under a professor named Dr. Michael Schiro.  He had published a book called Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns.  In that book, he spells out four “conflicting” theories of curriculum. I won’t detail them here other than to say that each of the theories (or ideologies) is backed by psychological theories/principles.  For my final paper for his class (this was over a decade ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday), I challenged his whole premise and asserted that there were essentially only two schools of thought with respect to curriculum: one school based on principles of developmental psychology and the other based on behavioral psychology.

This wasn’t completely novel thinking, but for a masters level student, it was pretty heady stuff.  Years later, I read Kieran Egan’s article, “Why education is so difficult and contentious” wherein Egan asserts that “thinking about education during this century has almost entirely involved just three ideas -socialization, Plato’s academic idea, and Rousseau’s developmental idea.” Egan goes on to argue that “[a]ll educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.”  In other words, attending to academics, socialization and child development were each flawed goals for schooling and when pursued simultaneously, they conflict.

Leaving out the socialization piece, Egan’s thesis further strengthened my belief in the ultimate pitting of principles of development psychology and behavioral psychology in the enactment of schooling. Lately, I’ve been imagining this as more of a continuum than a dichotomy.  Interestingly, this new(er) thinking has been influenced by my observations around parenting as much as schooling.  I’m a father of two kids under 5 years old, and we interact with lots of parents of young kids.  What I have noticed is adults who tend to parent in ways that are heavily developmentally-focused, heavily behaviorally-focused, or some mix of the two.

These observations and ideas are not entirely original, but there’s another dimension to add that I think is equally important to my own (maybe original) developing theory of schooling and parenting.  This second dimension (or continuum) has to do with intentionality.  That is, adults interact with kids in ways that are more or less intentional.  Some things we do with kids are done with great intention, while other things are done without much thought at all (sometimes even by accident).

If we cross these two dimensions, we end up with something like this:

[how's that for advanced use of my tablet PC?]

So, the more deliberate/intentional/purposeful adults are in their interactions with children (as educators and/or parents), the further to the right of the graph they are.  The more developmentally-focused one’s actions are, the higher on the y-axis they fall (and the more behaviorally-focused one is, the lower on the y-axis they fall).  For instance, consider rewards systems for kids (e.g. “read 25 pages per night and earn 5 gold stars on the reading chart!” or “poop on the potty and earn 5 M&Ms!”). Those are interventions based on principles of behavioral psychology.  Thus, they’d be pretty far down on the y-axis.  Where that interaction would be plotted with respect to the x-axis depends on how purposeful the adult(s) was(were) in choosing that strategy. I submit that many educators and parents engage in such activities without much thought as to why they are doing it.

I try not to be judgmental about how people parent their kids. We all have unique needs and circumstances and have to make very personal parenting decisions.   My wife and I are very, very deliberate about our parenting. It is hard for me to imagine that anyone has read more books and thought more about parenting than my wife.  As a result, just about everything we do as parents would be plotted far to the right on the graph above.  We’re also very committed to a developmentally-focused orientation towards parenting called Attachment Parenting. So, we try to be as high and far as possible into the upper-right quadrant of the graph above.  That works for us.  It doesn’t work for most; I fully recognize that.  All I’ll say beyond that about parenting is that I am concerned that too many parents are not intentional enough about what they do.

In fact, I feel pretty strongly that all of our interactions with children should be as intentional as possible.  With respect to schooling, I strongly favor developmental approaches; I’m not shy about that bias.  However, if educators use behavior-based approaches, I can be more supportive if it is done so with great purpose/deliberation (e.g. “I know there are consequences, particularly with respect to motivation, to implementing a rewards program, but I believe the benefits outweigh the disadvantages…”). In most cases, though, behavioral approaches to teaching/learning are undertaken without much deliberation.  This default, behavior-based orientation to schooling troubles me immensely.  I have great fears about exposing my children to that form of schooling.

Some other thoughts about the graph:

• I believe that the majority of educators and parents engage kids in ways that would be plotted in the bottom half of the graph.
• In the world of schooling, I believe the majority of interactions between adults and children would be plotted in the lower-right quadrant.
• I believe very few interactions between adults and kids would be plotted in the upper-left quadrant.  Especially in the Western Hemisphere, the default parenting orientation tends toward behaviorism.

That’s all I’ll say for now. I hope to revisit these ideas on occasion.  I also hope you’ll help me think through them.

I’m teaching a course called The Politics of Education to an awesome group of our doctoral students this semester.

The wiki/syllabus (a living, breathing document) is located HERE.

You can participate and help my students’ (and my own) learning in a couple of ways.

First, tagging…anything that you think might be related to what the course is about (see e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/edpolitics/syllabus) can be tagged with “adms707“.  I know, just about everything education-related is also about the politics of education, but that’s OK. Tag away. We will all be feeding Google Reader with a subscription to the tag and we can filter out what’s useful or not.

Second, please consider subscribing to and/or reading the blogs my students are using as reflection spaces.  You can get to individual blog posts HERE.  Or, you can see the blog URLs HERE.  Of course, comments are helpful as I want this blogging endeavor to be meaningful in a connectivist sort of way.

Thanks for considering being a part of our learning experiences this semester!

photo credit: helgasms!

I am part of a team of professors facilitating the learning in an Ed.D. program for a group of sitting school administrators in a local school division.  I am currently leading a module on decision-making and resource allocation within the realm of educational technology.  This Saturday, I have a pretty unique opportunity (for me at least).  To better inform the larger conversations, I’m going to take our meeting time (3-4 hours) to try to “make a case.”  What case?

Well, good question; I’m glad I asked.  What I knew when I first began planning this module was that I wanted to spend some time with the students talking about all that I’ve been talking and thinking about over the last year or so within the ed. tech. community/network.  The problem is, I haven’t quite wrapped my head around what “it” is that I’ve been talking/writing/thinking about.  “It” is about learning, technology, reform, etc.

The beauty of this Saturday is that it has provided me an opportunity to synthesize and summarize my thinking and learning.  Here are the points that will comprise the logic of the argument (i.e. “the case”) I’ll be making on Saturday (in no particular order yet).  The students will have (hopefully) read the referenced articles ahead of time:

• connectivism as a new theory of learning (Siemens, 2005)
• ubiquitous computing affords ubiquitous learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2007)
• Rhizomatic education: advances in networking technologies render obsolete any theory of learning that involves the individual construction of knowledge and that bounds learning by place and/or time (Cormier, 2008).

With those foundational points in place, I will demonstrate a number of the technologies.  In other words, I will show the students how I “do” networked learning. I fully intend to overwhelm them.  I am, after all, trying to “make the case.”

[NOTE: I intend to "broadcast" the event via Wimba Live Classroom.  If you want to stop by (in the virtual sense), leave me a comment so I can send you the URL.]

photo credit: Ben+Sam

No point in re-creating the wheel, so I’ve copied the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues below (he only difference is that I embedded my teaser video into this post instead of just providing a link):

***

Dearest colleagues,
If I told you that there is an extraordinary educational conference that you can attend at no expense to your travel budget, (or to any other budget, for that matter) and that you could attend largely at your own convenience, you’d listen, right?

Well, beginning on October 13 and continuing through the end of the month, the K12 Online Conference 2008 will be taking place…well…everywhere and anywhere.  As it is written on the homepage of the conference:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

To learn more about the conference, I would suggest reading and clicking through this site. Basically, though, presentations are made via prerecorded videos and broadcast at specific times.  There are also opportunities to “meet” and “talk to” the presenters at a webinar called a Fireside Chat.

The schedule of events can be found here.  You will notice that yours truly is one of the select presenters and my presentation airs on Tuesday, October 21 at 12:00 p.m GMT (which, if I’m correct, is 8:00 EST). You can view a “teaser” of my presentation [below], and teasers for many of the other presentations are being added to the conference blog every day.

I can’t recommend this conference enough, and please pass along this information to your students.  This is a FREE conference FOR educators BY educators.  It is a 21st Century conference about 21st Century teaching and learning.

Thanks for considering this extraordinary learning opportunity and I hope to “see” you at the fireside chats!

Yours,
JB

If you’ve ever taken a college or graduate level course, surely you’ve completed some kind of summative evaluation form at the end of the semester.  At Hofstra University, where I worked for 5 years before this past academic year, we called them CTRs (Course and Teacher Ratings).  They consisted of a bunch of Likert scale items (strongly disagree to strongly agree) and a few open-ended questions.  For the most part, students hated doing them and faculty members hated having to use them.  I didn’t love the wording of many of the items, but I always asked my students to please take them seriously as an opportunity to let me know how I was doing.  I told them that I would receive an analysis of the data and their actual responses to the open-ended items.

As part of applying for tenure at VCU, I have to demonstrate growth as an instructor.  So, I plugged the CTR data from my 5 years at Hofstra into EXCEL and discovered some very interesting things.  The graph below represents the data from a scale (composed of 5 items) that purports to be an overall measure of the course and the instructor.  The x-axis represents the time points from Fall 2002 to Spring 2007.  The y-axis represents the range of scores (which can range from 1 to 5).  For this particular scale, the lower the number the better.  But, I flipped the y-axis so that it looks like “better is higher;” a more standard look for such a line graph.  The blue line represents my ratings; the red line represents the average score of the other faculty members (including adjuncts) within the program area.

[NOTE: click on image for larger view]

I entered the professoriate with NO teaching experience.  I guest lectured once while I was getting a masters degree, but that was it.  Hofstra took a bit of chance on me in that respect and I am eternally grateful to them for that.  But, the graph clearly shows that my ratings were not as good early in my teaching career as they were last year.

I should also add that in my first couple of years as a professor, i was asked to teach a few sections of an undergraduate foundations of education course.  I thought I would really enjoy working with undergraduates considering a future as an educator.  But, after teaching a few semesters, I began to really dislike it.  I had a hard time dealing with the students’ limited understanding of and experiences with education.  Seemingly simple concepts such as “charter schools” were completely foreign to them.  My ratings were not terrible for those course sections, but my department chair and my colleagues and I decided that my time and energy was better spent working with graduate students.

Overall though, I think the graph tells an accurate and interesting story.  Quite simply, I’ve improved significantly as an instructor.  The more comfortable I’ve become in my own skin and the more I’ve been able to find my own voice, the more I’ve been able to engage my students.  That’s my interpretation of the data.

Academics bemoan the use of “quantitative” ratings of their work as instructors.  But, I think it’s critically important that we ask our students to reflect on their experiences in our classes and to provide us with data about our work.  I wonder how many of my P-12 colleagues/readers have similar systems in place to collect and analyze summative or formative data about their performance directly from their students.  Do you?