For Robin Wheeler: Viva! Auto-Didacts; They deserve more respect, recognition

This week the community where I and my family live is mourning the loss of a vital woman, Robin Wheeler, who died recently from cancer. 

Inspiring mentor, dear friend and author (two books, New Society Publishers), Robin sparked at least six projects in the past dozen years that turned into major works of creation on our Sunshine Coast from launching a 'sustainable arts' school to 'Seedy Saturday' to a farmer's market. Each one touched dozens of others and fired countless mini-projects, including in our household.

She was a pioneer herself who turned an unimpressive swatch of raw land into a model, working garden, driven by a 'can-do' attitude and sprite-ful spirit. 

And Robin was something else, too, that I noticed: she was an 'auto-didact'. She taught herself everything she wanted or needed to know. Oh, she had lots of helpful guidance from others on many things from building construction to home repair to speaking to groups. But she never let the thought that she lacked formal education certification in anything stop her from dreaming big and launching projects. 

It's a model for learning and leading a prosperous life that deserves more respect and recognition. 

It was one more gift from an inspiring fellow traveler, and one that I promise to you, Robin, I will pass on.

For information on my new book: Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now and to order a copy, go here.  

Standardized testing at great odds with neuroscience advances

In early January I began the first of 4 "Brain School" courses led by psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Siegel of the Mindsight Institute of UCLA. It's actually a "Mindsight - Foundations" course, but it's linked to leading-edge research by Dr. Siegel and colleagues combining neuroscience, psychology and epistemology. 

So far, I've found the course to be mind-bogglingly intense, interesting, exciting. That doesn't surprise me and it wouldn't surprise anyone who's kept up with Dr. Siegel's prolific outpouring of books and articles in the past 10 years into what he has coined as "Interpersonal Neurobiology". Dr. Siegel would never let it be said he's inventing this field; he gives ample credit to colleagues and predecessors who have helped him shape a new domain of knowledge. Yet the truth to share here is that the neurobiology and cognitive science insights of the last 15-20 years leave no doubt that earlier notions of human learning and intelligence were extremely simplified if not entirely inaccurate.

Coincidentally, this month I also began my 7th year of administering the standardized grade 4 and 7-level tests known in British Columbia as the Foundation Skills Assessment, or FSA, tests. The tests consist of roughly 2-3 hour-long blocks of questions and activities combined in a paper and online fahion by the Ministry of Education. 

Just as they have been previously, the tests are conceived to alledgedly test literacy, reading comprehension and numeracy. My overall impression of these tests remains the same as 7 years ago - that they are poorly conceived, and in only isolated examples, might provide an accurate profile of the skills they purportedly test (I've written on this previously in this blog). 

This week I also proctored a grade 10-level science test teed up as a BC provincial exam. It consisted entirely of multiple choice questions that were completed over 2.5 hours. When the test was completed and submitted I told the student, a remarkable young woman for whom this was her very first major test, to accept my apology on behalf of educators who considered such a test as an unacceptable way to measure authentic subject knowledge and merely a contrivance for expedient slotting and processing according to an absurd criteria.

Both testing experiences highlight a gulf that is widening between scientific research into learning and intelligence and an educational system that ignores such research, yet continues slotting and processing students no matter how absurd, inaccurate or harmful the process. 

If the Ministry of Education is truly committed to "Personalized Learning", as it exhorts in its new Education Plan, this approach to testing must change. And if the teachers union (BCTF) is truly committed to supporting individualized learning, as it, too, shouts out in its public relations war with the Ministry, then its members must stop perpertrating the outmoded notions of learning and intelligence that unfortunately remain synonymous with schooling and evidenced by factory-oriented testing. 

And ditto for post-secondary systems of learning, too.

For information on my new book: Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now and to order a copy, go here.

From Piaget to ... Sea Turtles

In the last couple of weeks I've caught up on some reading that can only happen when I take to the bath as part of a much-needed break.

My first soak included a fascinating article in the December issue of Outdoor magazine that profiled how biologist Wallace Nichols is enlisting cognitive neuroscience in his advocacy on behalf of marine conservation. His thesis: Our neurology (not just confined to our brains) responds very positively to interactions with and imagery of various ocean-centred activities, so marine-conversation efforts, including saving sea turtles, should invoke this positive-affect response as much as possible. It's good for us and marine conservation and sea turtles.

In my next soak I chose a musty book, "Piaget for Teachers", written in 1970 by an American education professor. The book had langushed on my shelf since I retrieved it from the discard table in the education library at the University of British Columbia (where I once found a treasure-trove of rare books from the 50s and 60s advocating individualized learning). In scanning this book I concluded that, while Piaget's conclusions on development were significant, they were over-simplified in many ways and rife with issues of credibility. But I don't fault him; he was a pioneer and worked without the benefit of modern diagnostic technologies (FMRIs, CATs, etc.). 

What leaves me shaking my head is how Piaget's conclusions became so foundational to educational theory and remain so dominating despite the many remarkable developments that modern neurology has brought us since Piaget's death in 1980. In light of these developments, including how our neurology is positively influenced by such seemingly exotic phenomena as sea turtles, and many other recent insights into learning and development, educational theory needs a make-over. IMO, such a make-over would be based on adapting recent information and synthesizing a new model about learning, just as our brains assimilate new information to existing knowledge and arrive at a new destiny ("Ah-hah!"). I think the resulting model would be universally applicable and profound. The question is, are education's self-proclaimed leaders willing to do this?

For information on my new book: Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now and to order a copy, go here.  

Re-conceptualizing the classroom

Just wanted to point readers toward an essay of mine in today's Vancouver Sun newspaper, Op-Ed page. Read it here.


The full title is Re-conceptualizing the classroom; New approaches to learning aided by technology will change how we deliver education. 


Basically, in the essay I profile the recently-launched 'BC's Education Plan', the reaction from the BCTF, support from others, and a sense of deja-vu in comparing the BCEP and the Year 2000 plan of a generation ago.

Here's an excerpt:
The genesis for BC's Education Plan appears to have arisen from education's main clients: students. Based on a report to emerge last spring from a representative gathering known as the "BC Student Voice," their opinions are consistent and clear.
In Learning in the 21st Century, students wrote that they favoured expanding the role of technology as "a seamless extension of what they are already doing," and "education individually catered to each person."
Overall, they seem comfortable about a significantly modified version of schooling, reporting a "need for education to be less rigid," and that "the concept of students as a homogeneous group sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher present material is outdated."


For information on my new book: Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now and to order a copy, go here.  

What's important for our future education system?

Below is the response I provided to a survey question posted by the BC Ministry of Education in concert with it's new initiative, the "BC Education Plan".  

What do you think is important for our education system in the future?

As a 24-year innovative educator and administrator, I agree much of our present system of conventional schooling remains mired in outmoded practices. These practices themselves are grounded in previously held assumptions about learning and human development. In light of a veritable explosion in the past 15-20 years of new knowledge about human learning and development from neurobiology, cognitive sciences, positive psychology, multiple intelligences, holistic learning and other domains, it's crystal clear these previous assumptions no longer serve progressive educational goals, like those minted in the new BCEP. 

So, for any future-oriented, progressive education program (on any scale) to have a snowball's chance of succeeding, it's vital that the key agents of learning - kids, parents, teachers, mentors and administrators - have a thorough grounding in these new assumptions. Without such an orientation on the part of the latter four agents I list, future learning will just continue to mirror the past. In other words you can't get "there" from "here". And this is not theoretical posturing; today, professional therapists and coaches, to cite two examples, are years ahead of conventional schooling, in practice, based on new knowledge they have incorporated. And their results are significantly different. 

Of the agents I list above, teachers and administrators will need the most support to help make such change possible. And this will need to be a coordinated effort that doesn't make the same mis-steps as the rollout for the much-vaunted and then-maligned Year 2000 Plan, from the early 1990s! Yes, those mis-steps should be re-visited, because the goals of the BCEP bear much resemblance to the goals of the Y2K plan unveiled by the Socred government of the day, on the recommendations of BC's last Royal Commission on Education in 1987. In 1994 the Y2K was defeated politically and scrapped, with most eulogizing suggesting the Y2K plan was ill-conceived and unnecessary. 

That was then. Now is 17 years later and conventional education - today needing to serve learners of all ages - simply must adapt or risk becoming totally obsolete and an irrelevant experience for those it purports to serve. 

In closing, I find much to like in the newly-minted 'BCEP' as I admired the Y2K plan. For the BCEP to succeed, however, requires we collaborate in creating a much different outcome than the last time we went through this. 

- Michael Maser; SelfDesign Learning (BC Independent School) 

If you want to know more about the BCEP, head over BC Education Plan - home. 

For information on my new book: Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now and to order a copy, go here.