LEARNING A LIVING - Michael Maser's Blog

Standardized testing at great odds with neuroscience advances

2012-01-29T11:36:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-30T13:00:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-11-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

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.

Steve Jobs legacy as innovator has much educational merit

2011-10-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

This week the world woke to the sad news that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple computers and visionary behind personal computers, iTunes, Iphones, Ipod and Ipads, has died at cancer at the age of 56.

To me, Steve Jobs' story reflects the path of a lifelong, enthusiastic "SelfDesigner" - that is, one who lives life according to his/her own dreams and ambitions and makes their life journeying one of important self-discovery.

Arising from the numerous stories about Jobs is also consistent recognition and value for the innovations he pursued with impassioned determination and uncanny savvy. The "Thomas Edison of his time" is a common refrain of many eulogies I heard this week by commentators and peers leaving no doubt that Jobs was a remarkable innovator who changed the world.
Yet once mainstream media got its eulogizing out of the way in the next breath it fell into predictable opining about whether Apple can maintain its polish and edge in the permanent absence of Jobs.
The story overlooked in the rush to this vacuous speculating is an education one, and of much significance IMO: How can the llfe-story and legacy of Steve Jobs be highlighted for his exemplary pursuit of innovation and ultimate triumph.
He was a college dropout who found more value in working with others of his 'tribe', honing ideas and cobbling ideas together fueled by little funding and big dreams.
Luck, money and success arrived later but Jobs' initial formula - mirroring that of many successful entrepreneurs - was a simple one that we educators and educational leaders would do well to pay attention to, and emulate.

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" (Steve Jobs, 1955-2011)

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

Back to School = Back to Stress?!

2011-09-26T23:18:00.000-07:00

This past month, mainstream media has cranked up its 'Back to School' reporting, as per usual, concentrating for the most part on trite issues promoting consumerism. This is mainly a vehicle to sell advertising for B2S features. I suppose this exercise makes media editors and producers feel they are providing meaningful content but I think we are very poorly served by such superficial treatment of this event.
As part of this year's treatment of B2S in mainstream media, something I found most objectionable were several articles in which health-care professionals were urging readers (in this case, parents) to discount stress that kids may be feeling about returning to school and over-ride it with other guidance. In one case, it was basically advised that parents just need to ensure that kids go to school no matter what; in the other a doctor opined that such stress was normal.

"One of the most helpful things you can do is reassure your children what they're feeling is normal." a doctor is quoted as saying in another one.
I'm sorry, these are incredibly facile responses and doubly questionable to come from alleged health-care practitioners.
As a parent and career-educator I trust kids, and especially my own, around their sensibilities about schooling. To some, schooling is indeed a delight and a helpful oasis; to others, it is justifiably the opposite: punitive, mind and body-numbing, and potentially traumatizing. For kids for whom school is the latter, to suggest to them that this is "normal" is tantamount to doubling the fear and ill-health that may arise of long or short-term immersion in a harmful environment.

Accordingly, my advice to parents about this would be to carefully observe your children leading up to 'first day back', and while participating in school throughout September, and the year for that matter. If they are reflecting back to you that school is neither a satisfying nor a healthy place for them, then get them the heck out of there. There's nothing to be gained, and possibly much to lose, by coercing your kids into such a situation.
Indeed you may have to re-jig your life a little, you may have to advocate for more home-learning options, and you may have to do some research about this, but these options are viable. I know, I've been working on the front lines of home-oriented learning for 20 years. And I remember what that stress felt like.

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

Book's arrived!

2011-08-30T13:03:00.000-07:00

Hi, My book Learn Your Way! has just arrived and it looks great. Please visit my book site to learn more about it and order a copy:

www.learnyourway.ca

See you there! (I'll still be adding some things in here, with a focus on education, from time to time)

- Michael

"Learn Your Way" - coming out this summer!

2011-07-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

Hi, in a few weeks time, my book, "Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now" is coming out, being published by SelfDesign Learning Systems Inc.

The primary audience for the book is youth 15-25 years, though I would suggest additional audiences include parents, fellow educators and counselors.

I am dedicating LYW to my 17-year old daughter and her peer group who have recently graduated from highschool.

The book represents a culmination in many ways for me - It's chock full of ideas I've stored and stashed and worked up that I wanted to share with young people, and have to some extent in courses and programs I have lead in the past. Much of this material was very well received which inspired me to ... put my butt in the chair and get to it.

Wow, it's been a lot of work - two+ years in the making. Now I'm excited about releasing it and getting out in front of promoting it.

To see the website on Learn Your Way, go to: www.learnyourway.ca

Below is a small excerpt from the Introduction.

Cheers. - Michael Maser

Learn Your Way! SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now

Introduction (excerpt)

"The world is changing faster than ever in our history. Our best hope for the future is to . . . evolve a new appreciation of the importance of nurturing human talent." - Sir Ken Robinson, 'The Element'

Are you living the kind of life you really want to live, right now? Do you feel that your life is meaningful, that you are connected to a source of energy that thrills and excites you and sometimes keeps you up all night dreaming big, powerful ideas?

Or are you maybe a little stuck, feeling challenged or conflicted about how to enliven your dreams? Maybe you're stuck even deeper in a kind of sadness or despair about something happening in your life or around you?

"Wherever" you're at, this book has something for you. It includes insights and strategies to help you if you are feeling stuck or, if you are feeling on a positive roll, to give you a little extra momentum. I also think it's a good fit for these current times, which I feel are characterized by some beguiling challenges and a previously-unimagined array of tools to tame our dragons and truly ride the wind.

Your life is important. Whatever you are doing or thinking about or planning, right now, matters. Yet, I know that young people - young adults - can, and do, feel pushed to the side at times by other adults and social systems that can be very insensitive to where you're at in your life and what you're thinking and feeling.

I know about this. I remember feeling pretty bruised sometimes, as a young adult, by challenges coming my way. At the time, however, there didn't seem to be many places where I could find help. Now, as an educator for 24 years, I have gotten to know many young people who have found themselves in this place, too. My deepest hope is that this book will be a helpful companion for you on your journey. It's the kind of book that I wish had been available to me when I was your age.

Tacit, Constructivist, Mobile Learning - More, Please!

2011-04-13T08:56:00.000-07:00

I'm just finishing an exciting book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (2011) by Douglas Thomas and John Brown, in which the authors say pithy things like:

"In our view the kind of learning that will define the twenty-first century is not taking place in a classroom - at least not in today's classroom. Rather, it's happening all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful ... and grounded in a very simple question: What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?"

This new type of learning ... " looks so different from the kinds of learning described by most educational theorists that it is essentially invisible. ... It takes place without books, without teachers and without classrooms, and it requires environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries. This familiar dynamic, in fact, structures all our contemporary notions of play, games, and imagination.

"... We believe that this new culture of learning can augment learning in nearly every facet of education and every stage of life. It is a core part what we think of as 'arc of life' learning, which comprises the activities in our daily lives that keep us learning, growing and exploring. ... Play, questioning, and - perhaps most important - imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning."

This notion of tacit, constructivist, mobile learning IS exciting. I see it in practice in our SelfDesign programs and also much assisted by the emergence of anytime-anywhere learning that is being facilitated by so many excellent educational apps.

Such concepts and developments continue to prepare the ground for the wider, irrepressible evolution of conventional schooling and the colonial model of learning that, unfortunately, continues to dominate most K-university education systems.

Beyond 21st Century Skills

2011-03-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

You can't have a conversation these days about education without encountering some buzz about 21st Century Skills. It girds any discussion about technology, graduation, career planning and teacher training and educational design.

In a nutshell 21CS focus on Information and Media Literacy, Critical and Creative Thinking, Collaboration and Technology Skills (as profiled at www.p21.org ).

While the 21CS framework-parade is reasonably benign, I hardly think it merits the kind of near-religious beatification it is receiving from educators and administrators.

To my perception, the 21CS framework as commonly conceived isn't nearly as compelling as it might be; rather, I think it remains a gussied-up container for more schooling, still bound to the unspoken notions that children and youth don't already have very adequate competence in these skills or that they won't learn unless we (educators) teach them. It remains patriarchal and colonizing in character.

To paraphrase comments I posted on another blog extolling the virtues of 21CS, I think the framework would greatly benefit by educators

- honouring their learners' natural (multiple) intelligences and encouraging their natural learning proclivities, reflecting the power of "enthusiasm-based learning", and

- infusing any approach to dealing with learners and their families with the most recent insights from Neurobiology, Positive Psychology, Holistic Learning and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

I think these points help identify a suite of learning strategies which are hallmarks of a new learning paradigm that engage reasonably well with emerging technologies but also reach beyond the seduction of the latest staff room chatter about 21CS.

- Michael Maser

Back in the Saddle - Book Finished!

2011-01-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

Hello! It's been a while since I posted here though I haven't exactly been lying in the sun.

I've been very busy in SelfDesign - which has continued with steady growth to now include a substantial special needs program, several new SD learning centres scattered throughout the province and 'SelfDesign High', with which I am quite involved as a council member and instructor/mentor for 'Planning 10' (AKA "Learning Your Way").

Most importantly, I've finished the manuscript for my book, "Learn Your Way: SelfDesigning the Life You Really Want, Starting Now," aimed at 16 - 25 year olds.

Whew, it's been a lot of work! I am now on final approach for publication and will share a few excerpts here, for sure. The overall effort was certainly worthwhile as it helped me consolidate my thoughts, ideas and work in new, exciting ways.

Best wishes in 2011. - cheers, Michael

Bookin' the hammock ...

2009-08-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

Hello, I have a couple of things to report at this time:

i. I'm writing a book, 'Learning Your Way: A Guide for Teens to Living a Meaningful Life', and that's where much of my writing and researching time is going these days. I'm very excited about it, and am making good progress now on completing a sound proposal before I begin seeking the right publisher. Essentially, I'm including a lot of research insights from the cutting edge of brain-based learning, multiple intelligences and learning strategies, as well as including important insights on things like 'mythology', all written with intelligent teens in mind.

I've read many, many books targeted at teens and while I think some of them offer some valuable insights and strategies, I think way too many punches are pulled for this audience, and the authors are too often serving a hidden agenda (such as religious ideals). I think teenagers are worthy of the finest efforts we can muster for them and so ... that's what I'm working towards accomplishing with my efforts. I'm also including many of the learning strategy resources I have worked up in 'SelfDesign Learning Community' and in the courses I've lead in SDLC and 'SelfDesign-ISK High School'.

ii. I just finished a therapeutic week of camping, swimming and canoeing nearby to where I live on the British Columbia coast, and during this time I finished a marvelous book, 'The Element', written by Sir Ken Robinson. SKR is well-known for the TED Talk-lecture of his on Creativity and Education, and for his other efforts supporting education transformation.

It's a poignant, significant book and I highly recommend it. Here's a stirring excerpt from the Introduction:

"The world is changing faster than ever in our history. Our best hope for the future is to develop a new paradigm of human capacity to meet a new era of human existence. We need to evolve a new appreciation of the importance of nurturing human talent along with an understanding of how talent expresses itself differently in every individually."

Complemented nicely by this quote from the book's last page:

"To make the best of our time together on this small and crowded planet, we have to develop - consciously and rigorously - our powers of imagination and creativity within a different framework of human purpose."

I now have a ticket to spend a day with Sir Ken, as well as the Dalai Lama and others, at Vancouver's Orpheum theatre on September 29, for a day-long seminar, 'Educating the Heart'. You can learn more about this event, which is part of the 'Vancouver Peace Summit 2009', at:
http://dalailamacenter.org/conference/vancouver-peace-summit-2009

Hope to see you there! - Michael Maser

Graduation 2009: from, to where?

2009-06-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

The return of late-night drag-racing on my street and broken alcohol bottles on beaches tells me it’s that time of year again: graduation. Another orbit of the sun, another group of kids spilling out of local schools, many near-delirious with their new-found freedom and a view of the open-road called summer or life, with nary a teacher or assignment in sight.

My teen-age daughter and many friends are among those bolting from a local high school and steering straight-on to sweet summer. She and her peer group achieved top grades but I am left to wonder - what does her graduation from grade 10 signify? Has her time and effort resulted in her being 'much better educated’ than, say, last September.

From my perspective as an observing (and little-interfering) parent my answer is no, I sure don’t think so. Though I do know my daughter to be intelligent and clever, for the most part, her schooling experiences since last September have been characterized by tedium and mediocre teaching and generally banal leadership that I trace to the school district office.

Part of my conclusion arises by noting what was excluded from my daughter’s education this past 9 and a half months:

- she had a total of one teacher using internet-asssisted technology, albeit very simplistically, to assist course delivery. This is not unique to her school, in fact, it’s quite clear that many (most?) teachers continue to eschew technology to assist in their respective teaching responsibilities. What world are they living in?

- by and large course delivery relied on ‘traditional’ teaching methodologies; if this ‘horse and buggy’ method of teaching were so effective I wouldn’t criticize it, but it’s not. It defaults to a methodology driven by ponderous text-books, rote memorization, a skewed emphasis favouring linguistic, rational and mathematical intelligence, and is capped by simplistic, time-wasting multiple choice exams. This did NOT prepare my daughter to be a more effective, mindful and flexible self-directed learner, where, according to author and “e-learning” guru Jay Cross, the future of effective human learning begins and ends.

- this was an extraordinary year of political activity in this region, featuring 3 elections and the historic US election last fall; almost no mention was made of any of these experiences in her classes, by her teachers or school leaders. Is it any wonder young people feel disenfranchised from civic and larger political processes? Not to me. This is where the pump is primed or the well runs dry.

As when I was a student and observed when working as a conventional school teacher, the educational environment as determined by individual teachers was of paramount importance in the overall result for my daughter this past year. She says there were times when her teachers created the environment in which much inspired learning resulted for her and her friends. But tedium definitely beat out ‘Ah-Hah!’ by a long shot.

This needs to change.

Educating for Social Responsibility

2009-05-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

• Below is my post to Educational Leadership journal in response to three questions posed about 'Educating for Social Responsibility', the theme of its May issue. - MM

Educational Leadership journal

EL: What role should schools play in helping students develop a sense of social responsibility?

My response: Schools, and teachers in particular, need to disavow themselves from the notion that Social Responsibility (SR) is somehow 'teachable'. It is not, and it should not be considered as such, IMO. However, people of all ages learn SR throughout their/our lives, and, in my experience, they are most likely to experiment with new forms of SR in their lives when it has been modeled for them, or when they have been exposed to a new form of SR and its intrinsic value is axiomatic. Ergo, Schools and all other learning organizations, from daycares to 12-step programs to seniors centers, should strive to expose people to opportunities to see new models and forms of SR, which will provide their own unique insights and learning for any observer with a pulse.

How can educators fulfill this role while also helping students meet curricular requirements?

Me: By guiding educators to model SR and expose students/learners/members to new examples of it in action, and NOT dictating that SR is to be 'taught' with the aid of lesson plans, overheads and assignments. That notion is offensive to the human psyche, no matter how young and crudely formed, and it will succeed mainly in alienating students/learners/members from ever engaging in their own form of SR. SR is, of course, a kind of morality that is influenced by a constellation of factors; encouraging it requires sensitivity and, above all, skillful artistry. Accordingly, assigning grades and homework in SR will inversely affect the outcome: the more you impose this as a hard-coded learning objective the less likely an educational institution or teacher will actually foster SR.

Describe your experiences in inculcating SR as a teacher

Me: I am a 20+year K-12 innovative educator in British Columbia Canada; I don't refer to myself as a teacher because I generally do very little teaching. I prefer, instead, to be considered as a learning consultant or learning coach because that is what I deliberately spend most of my time doing, when working. It is challenging, joyful and ever-engaging, and I consistently expose my learners and parents to instances of Social Responsibility, and I strive to model it myself in my own life, and share that with them. Engaging in acts of SR in one's own life brings rewards far greater than school grades, gold stars or financial, and I truly believe that learners young and old understand this best when it is NOT taught but absorbed. I find abundant examples of SR in my community, online and from the learners with whom I engage.
- Sincerely, Michael Maser

Society communicates poorly on educational values

2009-04-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

I listened raptly to CBC’s ‘Cross Country Checkup’ yesterday afternoon, a 2-hour phone-in show discussing a report released last week in Ontario in which University and College faculty opine that a majority of first-year students are poorly prepared. Specifically, the students are thought to be showing (widespread) declining writing, researching and numeracy skills, and generally lacking in the sensibility to ‘knuckle down’ and embrace the rigors of coursework. Much reference was made to students’ “increasing sense of entitlement” and their eager, hyper-active proclivity to flit from distraction to distraction, from ipod to Facebook to 'Survivor Man' re-runs, sometimes in the course of a single class lecture. Evidently, particularly grating is the widespread use of, and citation of Wikipedia as a research ‘source’.

I thought the show was riveting with much interesting and probing commentary from guests and callers, which included a number of students phoning in their opinions. (I recommend listening to it if you’re inclined, and it can be found here: www.cbc.ca/checkup in the archives, when it’s posted.)

FYI, here is the letter I have written to Rex Murphy in response to the show:

Dear Rex, I listened to the show today that reflected the report showing declining skills and dispositions among first year college and university students. While I valued the wide-ranging commentary, I thought one important perspective was omitted. This is a perspective I have honed over my 20+ year career as an (award-winning and innovative) educator, and it is as follows: Our society, and governments in general, does a lousy job at communicating to young people clear beliefs and values about learning and education (which, by the way, are most certainly NOT the same thing).

For example, if you were to pose a simple survey to Canadians of all ages, and ask them to identify Don Cherry vs, say, Michael Ignatieff or Roberta Bondar, you and I know that Don Cherry would win hands down. This reflects cross-generational, cultural messaging that is very effectively transmitted and absorbed. Popular, sustained messages are that all sports and entertainment celebrities (and their hyper-inflated salaries) are more important than any other professional or trades-person, and that winning a lottery will surely free one of any need to toil or endure life’s vicissitudes; it can all be bought and paid for.

These sensibilities are not new but, for crying out loud, why can’t we as a society (and in this case led by government or university faculties) create an effective social messaging campaign focused on amplifying those ‘things’ in our society that we really, really value and wish to conserve. This would illuminate both the stories of people who have done remarkable things (always characterized by sacrifice and diligence IMO), and and sensibilities like integrity, flexibility, creativity and compassion.

I think younger generations would value such messaging and we would see its positive effects as these young people merge into adulthood and choose their differing paths, whether that be post-secondary learning or something else. Like nature, our laissez-faire society abhors a vacuum. If we don’t like what’s rushed in in the edu-tainment age, then we CAN do something about it besides whine.

- Sincerely, Michael Maser

FSA Testing Round-Up - improvements still in order!

2009-03-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

Whew! For the 4th year in a row I have administered and ‘marked’ FSA tests* for grade 4 and 7-level learners in our SelfDesign program. Given all the kerfuffle by the public and the BCTF before this year’s February testing, our experiences in SelfDesign were generally positive but this reflects our unique approach which downplays test results and concentrates on the testing process. After this year’s experience I am more convinced than ever that the opposing positions staked out by the Ministry and the BCTF wrt FSA testing amount to a shell game in which the better learning interests of the test’s main participants: i.e. 10 and 13-year old students, are regrettably overlooked and manipulated. (*FSA tests are standardized tests in the province of British Columbia, mandatory for any government-funded school).

With the continuing growth of SelfDesign - a unique, innovative program supporting kids designing and completing their own learning plans from their own homes - we have more learners eligible for FSA testing than ever, and so our administration has likewise grown. This year, more than 100 SelfDesign learners completed the testing which consisted of an online portion and a mail-in written portion. Here’s my round-up about this year’s testing:

- Our process began in early January when we first encouraged ‘test-eligible’ learners and their parents to consider the testing as an “opportunity” to learn about and experience ‘school-based testing’ (many have not done so before, and many also profess to having negative feelings about such testing). We encourage learners to try a practice test, and I also provide modules to help learners optimally prepare for, sit and analyze test results. We also begin supporting exemptions from the testing, based on the testimonies of parents, who we recognize as the most important judges of their child(ren)’s emotional ‘readiness’ to participate in such testing.

As chief bottle-washer overseeing the tests I encourage learners to recognize that the marks or evaluation of this testing is inconsequential to them, and therefore they can just concentrate on the experience itself. I urge them to relax and even devise an experiment around the testing - for example, seeing how different kinds of background music affect their concentration - and I encourage them to take the time they need to answer the questions to their satisfaction.

Overall, the feedback I received this year about the testing by our learners reflects a generally positive experience. In marking the tests I can clearly see that our learners put a lot of thought and care into answering questions that at times are painfully tedious and occasionally, as in the case of the Grade 7 Numeracy questions (paper-based), dreadfully written and confusing. On the creative writing question (included in both levels of testing) every single paper I reviewed proved up as an imaginative and sound story, and I know that in almost all cases these stories would not have been completed to this level in a conventional school class sitting for testing that is cut off at an arbitrary time limit.

And that continues to be the overall problem with this testing, especially true in conventional school settings: It is not designed with learners’ multiple intelligences and aptitudes foremost in mind; rather, it defaults to a bureaucratic and impersonal process that grinds away at the sensibilities of its participants.

Last fall, I wrote the Minister of Education, urging her to re-think this testing experience and broaden its scope of meaning and "opportunity" for the benefit of students and our society in general. I never received a response.

Global mess offers us a choice

2009-03-02T23:13:00.000-08:00

A question: Is the (westernized) human race most akin to:

a. boiling frogs unable to detect rising temperatures, and escape certain peril?
b. a herd of deer transfixed in headlights of onrushing traffic and paralyzed in place?
c. a drunk who thinks it best to stay intoxicated to avoid the discomfort of non-intoxicated reality?
d. all three???

After consuming months of dribbling commentary on the collective global economic mess - which is less defined by economics than it is by the converging issues of economic malpractice, widespread greed (‘avarice’ is too kind) and ... a gelid despotism that has come to inhabit most of our bureaucracies now influenced by too many neo-conservative think-tanks, I’m thinking d. is most likely the correct answer.

That’s a mouthful for sure, but I’m sick of hearing of glib governmental measures to address the most pressing cyanotic economic-social-environmental AND EDUCATIONAL issues of our time. In too many instances we’re the frog, the deer and the drunk dodging calamities and stumbling along on the backs of a 2-5 year plans that capitalize on political expediency and shortchange human capital.

I think we have a choice: we can keep reveling in the carcinogenic, soul-numbing tailgate party and choke down fistfuls of hangover-relieving meds afterwards, lying about the good time we didn’t have and denying that we-in-the-western-world need to grow up, or we can alter course and co-inspire a pan-cultural, sumptuous and soul-satisfying (renewable) feast that keeps getting richer, more nutritious with passing seasons.

My reality-of-choice is the latter, in which we recognize what is good and wise and true in all people, starting with our children, and we continually nourish each other and then share in the rewards of the harvest. In this reality there's no educational hamster-wheel forcing children and young people to cycle through pointless standardized tests or mind-numbing curricula divorced from reality, no counselors spinning whoppers about how the only way to a prosperous and satisfying life is through school grades. It's a place where educators are knowledgeable about, and support research insights from Multiple Intelligences, Holistic Learning, Brain-Based learning and Positive Psychology. This reality encourages children and young people to engage and actively participate in the affairs of their own communities and, finally, it's a place where REAL educational leadership is shown by elected officials, and school or university board members in promoting "deep learning about the most pressing issues facing us".

I don’t think anything else is worth the effort.

Education = Ecstasy? A worthy equation!

2009-01-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! When I wasn’t shoveling snow during the recent silly season I had a chance to read a book that I’d been hoping to read for a long time. Published in 1968, George B. Leonard’s ‘Education and Ecstasy’ is a tidy little book of under 250 pages, probably consigned to be shelved with the ‘radical’ literature of the ’60s.

I found it to be a delightful read, a page-turner of remarkable relevance and much more accessible than ’60s ed-lit by Ivan Illich or Neil Postman. Below I share some excerpts. Radical? You be the judge.

“Our expectation of what the human animal can learn, can do, can be remains remarkably low and timorous. Our definition of education’s root purpose remains shortsightedly utilitarian. ...Conventional schooling ... is still a place where people are trained to split their world into separate symbolic systems, the better to cope with and manipulate it.”

Dated? Not at all. Verifiably accurate.

“Grades, tests, prizes, honors have proven woefully inadequate as motivators for learning, even at the height of the Civilized Epoch. ... When learning becomes truly rewarding for its own sake - and this goal has been given up for centuries - then narrow competition will be seen for what it is: irrelevant to the learning process and damaging to the development of free-ranging, lifelong learners.”

Wrapping up eight years of the dismal drudgery of ‘No Child Left Behind’ underscores the veracity and relevance of this statement. It’s long past time for competition and it’s accomplices - gold stars, standardized testing and absurdist grading - to take a back seat to collaborative, constructivist, holistic learning.

“If education in the coming age is to be, not just a part of life, but the main purpose of life, then education’s purpose will, at last, be viewed as central. What, then, is the purpose, the goal of education? A large part of the answer may well be what men (sic) of this civilization have longest feared and most desired: the achievement of moments of ecstasy, ananda, the ultimate delight.”

Why, that could’ve come right out of the mouth of my favourite new-age psycho-mechanic Deepak Chopra! And I totally agree.

Here’s where George had his only significant hiccup, IMO:

“I am convinced that U.S. education is nearing a time of dramatic change.”

Yikes! Well, George, this didn’t come to pass as you predicted, but it hasn’t been for a lack of effort on the part of a legion of alternative education champions like John Holt, Pat Montgomery, John Gatto and my colleague and mentor Brent Cameron. Fear and power-mongering, for the most part, has been at work by vested interests to smother education as an ecstatic activity. But I can assure you that many thousands of educators, parents, kids and even a few bureaucrats remain committed to this goal.

My conclusion? You were just a little ahead of your time.

Thanks for brightening my holiday George, and re-stating what remains so important to remember. Education is important, and it has almost nothing to do with what most people think it does.

I recommend the book most heartily, and you’ll have most luck finding it in a used-book store, is my bet. That’s where I got mine.

Nurturing Self-Responsible learning - Obviously Important

2008-12-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

Under the theme ’Giving Students Ownership of Learning’ the November issue of ‘Educational Leadership’, a leading journal for educators and school administrators, serves up many profiles of innovative programs and approaches to nurturing self-responsible learning.

Self-responsible learning, according to the lead editorial, is one of the golden keys - post-high school - to college, citizenship and employment, i.e. future prosperity.

It’s clear that a lot of sweat and ink is being expended helping kids get a better grip on their own learning steering wheels and I commend the efforts going into this. But I found myself frequently putting the articles aside to ponder how we got to a place in this enterprise of schooling where kids - many of them older teens - have such little sense of self-responsibility that, for all intents and purposes, schools now need to offer remedial training in it.

It’s a regrettable situation that has arisen, IMO, because of practices that have effectively disenfranchised children and young people and stripped them of almost any sense of self-empowerment and autonomy in their learning/schooling lives. What makes this situation even more (sadly) ironic is that it has worsened during an era when the mantra of "child-centered learning" is recited by educators and administrators as often as attendance is taken. Evidently, talking about child-centered learning certainly hasn't produced the result.

Rather, this situation is the result of years of programing kids in schools, for example, to raise a hand and ask a (strange) adult for permission to attend to personal body functions (“May I go to the bathroom?”), of imposing and prioritizing pre-packaged curricula divorced from any kind of authentic meaning for learners.

It doesn't end there. Teachers and counselors also tell teens ad infinitum they are becoming adults and must soon face the music but then school strictures and authorities constantly deny teens opportunities to meaningfully share in the development and running of schools. Sorry, Johnny, that job’s for ‘real’ adults.

Talk about mixed messages. Is it any wonder young people are lacking in the skills of self-resonsibility when they have been programmed to shun self-responsibility for 12 years? Or that they develop a sense of deep frustration and paranoia about who they 'really' are in this world?

If we truly wish to inculcate self-responsibility in young people then we must begin providing children with opportunities for authentic self-responsibility, opportunities that continue and are strengthened each year hence. This will include allowing young people to choose their own learning paths and, with our assistance, explore the things they are most interested in learning about, be it gaming, history, sports, cooking, biology (of self, especially), and myriad other subjects happening now - today - in their families, communities and the world.

Let's give young people every opportunity (and many more opportunities!) to prepare for and experience life and the full breadth of its challenges, on their terms. The young person emerging from this experience will face new learning challenges knowledgeably, he will know how to slant off in new directions with confidence when that is appropriate to do, and she will not be inclined to wait around for some external authority to monitor and permit their every step.

In young adults these outcomes represent full blossoming of the same “creative competence” that author Joseph Chilton Pearce ascribes to children who develop mastery of their environments through active, imaginative play (that is neither graded nor pre-determined).

Isnt' that what we, as parents and educators, want for our children and future generations? I do.

Troubling political alien-nation, and what to do about it

2008-10-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

I'm going to diverge from my usual subjects, and illuminate something I feel is VERY important to grok, and that is the near-absence of young people (that is, under-30) participating in our recent federal election.

I was very involved in a local campaign from start to finish, I attended debates and meetings, canvassed neighbourhoods and reviewed election results, and I can confirm the absence of young people in almost any way from this election. Evidently, fewer than 30% of eligible voters under 30 years of age across Canada actually voted in this election.

If that's not sobering enough I can further confirm that in the past 12 years or so in which I have participated in several other municipal, provincial and federal elections and many other regional-political events, I have noted a near-absence of participation by young people.

Declining participation in voting, of course, is symptomatic of a larger trend on the part of young people of tuning out political messaging of any kind. This is NOT good news and portends very poorly for future civic participation and the vitality of our democracy.

Many reasons are being punted around for declining interest in political participation, and young people themselves are candid about the most obvious turnoffs: negative attack advertising, a perceived lack of relevance to issues most salient to young people, or that voting for things that matter most to them (i.e. environmental protection, student-related issues) doesn’t matter, so why bother, and a perception that politics is mainly tedious (i.e. boring).

Whatever one may think about these reasons, I think a more obvious reason is and has been a near-total abdication of responsibility on the part of educational leaders and bureaucracies from encouraging (non-partisan) participation of young people (in K-12 education programs and colleges and universities) in our political processes pertaining to all levels and kinds of government.

I’m not talking about teachers churning out more lesson plans forcing students to learn the minutiae of the British Parliamentary system - that kind of response is part of the problem! No, I’m talking about encouraging front-line participation, as much as possible, of kids in political processes relevant to their lives. That includes community processes such as demonstrations and special-issue debates, encouraging candidates to attend school and class-based discussions and forums, and encouraging young people to understand the mechanics of different approaches to democracy, such as consensus, and the first-past-the-post and proportional representation systems of voting.

In the high school my daughter attends, the political up-take by staff and administration to my perception is and has been pathetic. In the past 10 years there have been numerous political events there that I have attended and I have never counted more than a hand’s worth of young people in attendance. That’s disgraceful, but even the leaders here need to hear from the big-wigs thatimproving student participation in democracy is important and should be supported. Until that happens, the turn-off will likely continue, and our society will be the poorer for it.

In coming weeks I’m going to write to the educational leaders I know to encourage them to do their part in turning this trend around. If they can do it for the three Rs, they can do it for the big-D. Please join me in addressing this.

'Learning' AWOL in schooling discussions

2008-09-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

Well it’s Labour Day weekend, and many neurons and conversations are focused on Tuesday’s return to school for many millions of kids across North America. For some kids, tomorrow can’t come soon enough - they enjoy schooling and thrive in its environment. I’m delighted for them. For many more though tomorrow is not a joyful date but marks a return to a kind of imprisonment where they may be deeply bored, bullied, or witnesses to social behaviours they find contemptible. For too many kids, schooling, and its bias on logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligence will prevent them from developing the full range of their intelligence-potential, a situation that I find contemptible.

Mediated (online) conversations I’ve perused this weekend about schooling reflect concerns about busing, school fashion, bullying, teacher indifference and school board choices. Remarkably, almost no one is commenting on LEARNING - and the characteristics of learning that pertain to discussions of schooling. This, to me, is a sign of a society hypnotized into believing that schooling = the best learning opps for kids and young people. That never was true and it’s certainly not true today.

Here are comments I posted into a CBC discussion thread:

Your education series, well-intentioned though it may be, is myopic in scope, ignoring what I assert is the pre-eminent (and self-evident) topic that should be informing and guiding discussions on education; namely, what is the nature of learning, and what are ways to optimally support learning in children, youth, teen, adults and people with special learning orientations?

The last 15-20 years have provided researchers with astounding tools and insights into learning. For example, with the assistance of brain-scanning technologies, neuro-biologists are able to map the characteristics of learning under various conditions, and for various ages. What is emerging is new understanding about learning that is profound and should be informing education, but it's largely being ignored. Ditto for Multiple Intelligences, a discipline of learning psychology minted by Harvard prof Dr. Howard Gardner 25-year years ago.

The upshot for me, a 20+year educator, is that conventional schooling (K-12 & college-university) and its extremely narrow focus on logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences is starkly out of touch with new research insights. In the (online) school I helped to found in 2002 - SelfDesign Learning Community, based in BC but now going global - we recognize and validate at least 8 kinds of Intelligence, and identify with a world of learning that goes far beyond conventional schooling.

To its credit the BC Ministry of Education has probably the widest bandwidth on the continent for recognizing and supporting online learning opps, including SelfDesign (we are a certified 'school' and receive funding) but it still defaults to a retrograde model of schooling for grades 10-12, just when the neurobiology of teens is expanding and ready for much more sophisticated expressions of learning. Please go to work and explore these topics!

- Michael Maser, SelfDesign Learning Community; www.selfdesign.org

'Garbage Warrior' thesis applicable to Education

2008-07-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

The most compelling documentary I have viewed this year by a long shot is ‘Garbage Warrior’, profiling the remarkable career of maverick architect Michael Reynolds. Reynolds has long staked out a niche creating architectural designs incorporating various things the rest of the western world considers disposable, like tires, aluminum cans and discarded glassware. Living atop the high plateau near to Taos, New Mexico, Reynolds has not only built homes and offices based on his ‘earthship’ design (featuring banks of discarded tires packed with compacted dirt), he has also built and established an entire community of people sharing his interests in sustainable living.

Reynolds’ vision, which emerged as the thesis of the documentary, reached beyond his own sustainable housing business, to a perceived need to broaden legislation in the state of New Mexico that would enable architects and builders to innovate beyond conventional constraints presently enshrined in building-code legislation. An ability to innovate, Reynolds asserted, was/is vital to builders and designers wishing to experiment with new, more sustainable building designs and materials because of problems arising from global climate change and a need to embrace more environmentally sustainable building forms.

(Michael Reynolds next to one of his buildings)

In his quest as a sustainable building advocate in New Mexico, Reynolds faces as many barriers as any mythological knight-errant. The poignancy of his quest is profoundly demonstrated when he and his work-crew travel to an Indian-Ocean island community devastated by the 2004 tsunami and volunteer their time to create a demonstration building of much more sustainable design than conventional stick-and-frame, to the delight of locals and bureaucrats who welcomed the innovation, albeit in the aftermath of massive tragedy.

The upshot from Michael Reynolds: Humanity is facing a crisis that compels us to seek new ways to adapt to new circumstances or to help circumvent tragedy. Innovating is necessary so that builders and designers can experiment, make mistakes and eventually create breakthroughs that pose new, important solutions to the crisis.

To me, Reynolds’ message is a universal one, and especially pertinent to education. We presently face an enormous crisis rooted in how we approach the activity of nurturing learning in our children and youth and throughout adulthood. Conventional education, and its handmaiden curriculum-driven, coercive schooling, is based on assumptions about human learning that exceeded their expiry date many years ago (if they were ever valid, and many were not) and an over-arching value system that continues to leave most of its constituents - students - poorly prepared for the rapidly-changing world into which they are merging.

Education desperately needs to innovate but few bureaucrats or bureaucracies yet perceive this. I encourage them to watch ‘Garbage Warrior’ and connect the dots.

* Reference links: Garbage Warrior: www.garbagewarrior.com

Make lemonade with FSA Lemons

2008-05-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

(Vancouver Sun; published May 20th)

I agree with many of the criticisms of FSA testing made by BCTF president Irene Lanzinger. I am an experienced (Independent school) administrator of the tests and I concur that the style and substance of these tests is highly flawed. Accordingly, drawing conclusions about a child's intelligence let alone a school's performance based on FSA test results is suspect.

Where I part company with Ms Lanzinger is in her zealous insistence on scrapping of the tests. I think that if the Ministry truly wanted to do students a service it would support the FSA experience as an opportunity for all students to learn various test-taking skills, to analyze test results, to sit tests until they were satisfied with their results, and to recognize how they could improve testing performance the next time they faced them. Tests are a fact of life. Why not seize this opportunity to provide students with something of lifelong value instead of a two-week migraine.

- Michael Maser
Director, SelfDesign Learning Community

High School (unfortunately) remains tedious exercise

2008-05-18T17:27:00.000-07:00

Prior to this year my daughter Robin, 14, attended conventional school for one year when she 10 (grade 5). Subsequent and prior to that year, which she didn’t consider very valuable, she fit the bill as a ‘free-range’ homelearner. Her learning world during this time reflected back to her her keenest interests and she excelled in literacy (reading and writing, especially), music, mastering various textile-oriented skills, imaginative play, and LOTS of other things that we participated in as a learning family, or that emerged as an opportunity.

This past year Robin wished to enlarge her social sphere (there are few homelearning kids her age where we live) and access some other things she hadn’t been exposed to, at a local school. So with the support of my wife and I, Robin enrolled in, and has attended the local secondary school for grade 9.

With her school year winding down, I think it’s a good time to muse on the fruits of her decision, and here’s how I would characterize it:

- Robin has indeed enlarged her social pool to her satisfaction and especially enjoyed amenities available through her band, woodshop, textiles, cooking and PE classes.
- She has excelled in every class, including all core subjects (in math, I expected she would require some remediation or tutoring considering she had only been exposed to formal math when she completed grade 5, but she didn’t need a minute of tutoring en route to top grades).
- The curriculum for her core subjects remains just as banal, obtuse, questionable and disconnected from the real world in which we live as when I experienced my forced march through high school.
- Her core subject teachers, for the most part, seem stuck in a rut delivering questionable curricula, and stuck in a time warp sending home excessive, marginally-valuable homework and crafting lesson plans devoid of any sense of multiple intelligences or holistic learning.

Overall, I would rate Robin’s year at school as a mediocre learning experience and a positive social experience. If it were a flavour, vanilla comes to mind; if it were a colour, I land on beige.

How many ways are kids smart? - Take a few tips from Howard Gardner ...

2008-04-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

If educators read but one book this year, I’ve got a recommendation: ‘Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons’ by Dr. Howard Gardner (Basic Books, 2007).

Believe it or not, it has been 25 years since Dr. Gardner penned ‘Frames of Mind’, and (tentatively) circumscribed a theory of Multiple Intelligences. It was a seminal moment that galvanized educators, psychologists and parents, worldwide. Like Galileo describing to colleagues the reality of a sun-centred cosmos (opposed to an earth-centred one), Gardner’s work illuminated a new cosmos of human intelligence the scope of which made traditional models of intelligence look trifling in comparison.

According to Gardner, since 1983, MI (as the field has come to be known) has spawned a vast domain of its own. Hundreds of books and articles have been written, hundreds of conferences and workshops have been convened and thousands of educators have validated the existence of at least 8 intelligences (those identified by Gardner include Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalist, Spatial) and posited several others.

Gardner confidently predicts that in another 25 years additional intelligences will have been validated.

BUT, and this is a show-stopper, IMO, the findings and insights of MI have gone almost totally unnoticed by education bureaucrats who continue to stoke an anachronistic model of education that presumes the preeminence of Linguistic and Logical-Mathematical intelligence. Witness the juggernaut that presently exists behind standardized testing, 'No Child Left Behind', and conventional curricula. How long can these bureau-saurs hold out, continuing to ignore the world of MI and the potential that MI represents wrt ‘authentic’ learning? Well, Galileo was imprisoned for his radical ideas but they eventually came to be accepted as a scientific reality. Let’s work towards making the acceptance of MI much quicker.

Below are a few choice excerpts from ‘Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons”. Fill yer’ boots!

“It is of the utmost importance that we recognize and nurture all of the varied human intelligences and all of the combinations of intelligences. We are all so different largely because we have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with the many problems that we face in the world.”

“Assessment programs that fail to take into account the vast differences among individuals, developmental levels, and varieties are increasingly anachronistic.”

“There is ... an enormous desire to make education uniform, to treat all students in the same way, and to apply the same kinds of one-dimensional metrics to all. This trend is inappropriate on scientific grounds and distasteful on ethical grounds.”

“We need to broaden our notion of what can considered intelligence in terms of both individual and cultural components. Along with new attitudes about intelligence, new forms of schooling and assessment are needed to foster the competences of the majority.”

- end

Wireless Technology and Children's Health

2008-02-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

The increasing use of wireless technologies for accessing the internet seems to have happened in the blink of an eye, and it has become near-pervasive. Last fall, I wished to become better informed about any health concerns related to the use of wireless routers and computing transmitters WR-CT) in homes for two reasons: I use WR-CTs in my home (along with my wife and teenage daughter), and I wanted to be able to pass along pertinent information to homelearning families in our SelfDesign program about this issue. (FYI, ‘Wi-fi’ communication works through the transmission of [non-ionising] radio waves between a wireless router connected to a telephone line and a small transmitter in a computer. This kind of electromagnetic radiation is considered much less intense [but more constant] than the radiation emitted from a typical cordless or cell phone).

Two months along in my research, which included contacting the BC Ministry of Education with a request for guidance on this issue as well as online research and a phone interview with a leading researcher, and I am discovering that a number of health agencies, professional scientists and professional scientific organizations worldwide, as well as governments are (increasingly) expressing concerns about possible health effects on children and adults from exposure to electronic fields produced by wireless routers. The organizations include the 'Bioinitiative Working Group' (www.bioinitiative.org), the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme (UK), the Austrian Medical Association, The International Commission for Electromagnetic Safety (ICEMS), and others. Countries that are acting in support of the Precautionary Principal with respect to the use of WR-CT devices include Germany, France and Austria (which are either removing existing WR-CT networks from schools or not deploying them in new schools).

With respect to use of WR-CT devices or networks, researchers and organizations listed above generally believe the following:

- that not enough research has been done to properly assess potential health effects arising from their use on children and adults,

- that present guidelines or existing public safety limits (provided by manufacturers and/or governments) need to be reviewed in light of new scientific research, as well the Precautionary Principle, and that NEW LOWER THRESHOLDS OF EXPOSURE NEED TO BE ESTABLISHED to better safeguard human health,

While broad-based health issues have not been identified and linked to use and exposure to wireless routers and transmitters (especially in the home), they suggest that some people (including children) may indeed exhibit a ‘hyper-sensitivity’ to exposure, for which symptoms might include headaches, general nausea and sleep disruption.

As for guidelines, the most pertinent ones I learned about (especially relevant to children and teens) include the following:

• do not sit with a laptop computer receiving a wireless transmission directly in your lap; ensure there is at least 20 cms between the computer and body,
• limit exposure to wireless frequencies in your home to no more than a few hours each day; unplug routers when not in use and especially at night

In summary, it appears clear to me that this is an emerging issue relevant to our homes, communities, schools and working environments. Evidently, negative health effects are much more closely linked to cell-phone use, proximity to high-voltage electronic fields, ‘clustering’ of wireless devices (as might occur in a classroom or office environment).

nb - I talked personally with Cindy Sage of Sage EMF Design Consultants, who coordinated the 'Bioinitiative Working Group' report released last August on EMF issues, and she directed me to a recent YouTube interview with her about the BI report. This interview (38 min.) may be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tZDor-_co0
(If you are interested in this topic, Cindy's interview is a must-watch!

Oh, yes, the BC Ministry of Education did respond to my request for guidance by pointing me to some of the reports from which I gleaned the information above; on the other hand, to my inquiry about specific government policy wrt use of wireless technologies, I was told that government was not planning any changes to its present policy. Hmmm and hmmm again.

FSA Testing Kerfuffle - Part II

2008-01-27T23:42:00.000-08:00

It’s exactly one week to go to the start of this year’s Foundational Skills Assessment (FSA) testing in British Columbia, in which upwards of seventy thousand Grade 4 and 7-level students will spend a total of 4.5 hours completing standardized tests in the areas of Reading Comprehension, Writing and Numeracy over the course of two weeks.

According to the the Ministry of Education, “The main purpose of the assessment is to help the province, school districts, schools and school planning councils evaluate how well students are achieving basic skills, and make plans to improve student achievement.”

While this Ministry bumpf makes this now-annualized event sound innocuous enough, if you listen closely you can hear a province-wide gnashing of teeth coming from the BCTF and it’s devotees, parents, students and many public and independent school administrators.

Why all the fuss? Well, there are lots of opinions weighing in but I think it’s fair to start with the Ministry itself where, for this, the 8th year for the testing, it seems to my perception (and this is the 3rd year that I have been involved in administering the tests) that it has finally listened to some of the widening and intensifying criticisms of the testing, and it has introduced the following changes:

- this year, the testing is happening in February instead of May, so that the results may be known before the end of the present school year,

- this year, test papers will be evaluated by schools and school districts and then returned to students who had, until this year, been left in the dark about test results except for the remote possibility of being tracked down 5-6 months later (in the next school year) to be told they had received one of the following insipid evaluations for their efforts the previous May: “Not Meeting (grade level) Expectations”, “Meeting Expectations”, or “Exceeding Expectations”. And nothing more. No test paper to re-examine, no individualized suggestions about where or how they might correct their assessment, ‘er, test answers.

Now, before I move on, I want to commend the Ministry for introducing these changes this year. They are the right thing to do, and I’d even go so far to advocate that it is the right of every child participating in this, or any testing, to have their test paper(s) returned to them - in an appropriate time frame - so that they might review the test again, and their answers, so that they might learn something of value from this experience.

But speaking of learning, it remains bedrock clear that the FSA testing process itself and the tests themselves, as devised by the Ministry, fall well short of being anything but an intimidating or dubious experience for most test-takers, educators, parents and administrators.

To state the obvious: the tests are tedious, standardized fare, created to scratch the weakest itch of personalized interest on behalf of the test-takers through references to pizza, ice cream, school fairs, etc. but little else. They are designed, I surmise, with the intention of providing results of value to schools, but what results they provide that even semi-conscious educators or parents don’t already know remains a mystery.

As an experienced educator, I regard individualized assessment and personalized feedback to children on their basic literacy skills, and scholastic testing competency, as important but the FSA testing and the tests is so limited in its overall value as to be cliched at best.

I am convinced it doesn't have to be this way, that the the Ministry of Education could use this annualized event as an opportunity to empower students young and old with skills they would value lifelong and from which our society would benefit. This would require stepping beyond the educational dogma of the 1950s in testing for mythical powers of linguistic and mathematical “intelligence”, that were improperly and narrowly conceived in the first place, to embrace Multiple Intelligences, holistic learning and the tenets of modern psychology that have taken root in every sociological domain in the past 40 years excepting formal education.

Here’s what I propose: Use the ‘FSA testing window’ to advance the following skills and competencies in all students:

- note-taking, mind-mapping
- focusing
- meta-thinking
- improving personal resourcefulness
- improving communication skills
- understanding holistic learning (i.e. 'brain-based' or neurobiological learning, somatic learning [brain-body integration] and biological-based learning [studying the roles of nutrition, oxygen, sleep, etc. and learning])
- examining information-cognitive processing and helping young people improve their information-cognitive processing skills
- preparing for, sitting and analyzing testing
- optimizing mentoring/instructing situations
- modeling
- mentoring others

Such strategies are, unfortunately, rarely overtly discussed in senior grades or university, let alone grade 4 or 7, where but in the past two years I have introduced modules covering much of this territory to learners preparing to write FSA (and their parents) with much success (and gratitude).

I think that if government and our dominant learning institutions really cared about kids learning and overcoming learning challenges and acquiring lifelong learning skills they would spend the time (and taxpayers money) helping our children improve these skills instead of continuing to focus on an extremely narrow intelligence range and academic content before 'testing' for failure, disability and weakness.

The legacy of this bureaucratic failing is successive generations of kids of all ages with a general and completely understandable fear or indifference toward testing, something I think is truly lamentable and unnecessary.

As for standardized testing, I’ll leave the final word about it, and its levy on students of any age, to Harvard professor Dr. Howard Gardner, who first conceived the theory of Multiple Intelligences 20 years ago:

“An hour-long standardized test may at certain points in history have served as a reasonable way of indicating who should be performing better at school or who is capable of military service or of performing at officer rank. But as we come to understand the variety of roles and the variety of ways in which scholastic or military accomplishments can come about, we need far more differentiated and far more sensitive ways of assessing what individuals are capable of accomplishing. In place of standardized tests, I hope that we can develop environments (or even societies) in which individuals’ natural and acquired strengths would become manifest - environments in which their daily solutions of problems or fashioning of products would indicate clearly which vocational and avocational roles most suit them.”

- Dr. Howard Gardner, ‘Multiple Intelligences’; revised, 2006; Basic Books

And as for the teeth-gnashing over FSA testing, it isn’t going to go away. The Ministry should do itself, the students it represents, and our society a favour in broadening the testing scope.

- End

2007-12-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

Chimpanzees, Multiple Intelligences, China

This week the world has been jarred by the news that chimpanzees are able to outperform college students on some pattern recognition/memory tasks, according to renowned primate researcher, Tetsuro Matsuzawa. While this news inevitably leads to all kinds of giggles about college students and fears of a run on bananas at exam time, it strikes me as excellent fodder to reflect more deeply on human intelligence.

With no intent to slight my hirsute and more stooped simian relations, I would like to point out an obvious scientific fact: our brains and cognitive skills, while sharing common traits, are different. Evolution has enabled human development in ways that primates can only dream of (?), including the advanced development of various intelligences which guide us in the creation of music, architecture, refined athletic skills, etc.

Of course it shouldn’t surprise us that chimps can outperform us in some cognitive ways, as Matsuzawa has discovered, we share common ancestry with them. Chimps are also devoted parents, yet they are better at climbing trees and more acutely attuned to approaching dangers, like hungry lions and pythons. If we were still jungle-bound then I’d wish I had more chimp-like traits, however, as they say, we moved on. We have developed and refined other important intelligences.

Tutor for hire, will work for mushy fruit.

Science has confirmed this evolutionary advance, now it’s time for the educational world to catch up. Especially, it’s time for educational leaders and governments influencing educational direction to acknowledge and embrace our Multiple Intelligences and shape our education systems to reflect this reality. To stop designing standardized tests as if we were all chimps eagerly awaiting the next banana, and relying on the results of such tests to issue pronouncements on the intelligence of those tested.

“... where is it written that intelligence needs to be determined on the basis of tests? Were we incapable of making judgments about intellect before Alfred Binet and Francis Galton cobbled together the first set of psychometric items a century ago? If the dozens of IQ tests in use around the world were suddenly to disappear, would we no longer be able to make assessments of intellect?”
- Dr. Howard Gardner, ‘A Multiplicity of Intelligences’; 2004, Scientific American

It’s been 25 years since Harvard’s Dr. Howard Gardner posited his Theory of Multiple Intelligences, and well past the time for conventional schooling to adopt its well-accepted tenets - namely that each of us, young and old, not only possesses a minimum of 8 intelligences but also that we invoke them in unique ways, sometimes with one providing us with near-gifted powers, sometimes with one or more intelligence deeply trailing the others.

This is our birthright, yet pretending that answering multiple choice or short-answer questions provides a reliable glimpse into our innate or potential intelligence is folly of the highest order.

Who’s figured this out? China has. It has embraced Howard Gardner and his Theory of MI with much enthusiasm, and adopted the foundations of his work to their nationwide education reforms.

Think I’ll peel a banana or two and ponder the implications of this.

2007-10-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Of note: Two New Books

by Michael Maser, October 9, 2007

Comments below on:

i. 'Informal Learning, Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance;' by Jay Cross, Pfeiffer, 2007 (www.jaycross.com)

ii. 'Honouring the Child; Changing Ways of Teaching'; by Pamela Proctor (www.honouringthechild.com/ )

i. 'Informal Learning, Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance,'

“It is no longer useful to define learning as what someone is able to do all on his or her lonesome. This is not Survivor. Knowledge workers of the future will have instant, ubiquitous access to the Net. The measure of their learning is an open-book exam. “What can you do?” has been replaced with “What can you and your network connections do?” Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his/her contacts.” - Informal Learning

I read widely in education and learning and each year I find one or two books, rarely more, that I find compelling enough to pump my arm in the air and shout, “yes! YES!” Fairly recent examples for me in this category were 'Unlock the Genius Within,” by Dr. Daniel Janik (2006), and “Smart Moves, Why learning isn't all in your head,” by Carla Hannaford (2005).

I haven't even finished 'Informal Learning' by Jay Cross but I've been waving my hands emphatically since I started reading it several weeks ago. Gleaned from his work as a corporate consultant (HR, corporate training, recruitment) Cross stacks profile on profile of the very rapidly changing world of workplace learning.

Whereas corporate learning used to emerge via intimidating binders, weekend retreats and, more recently, tedious PowerPoint presentations, Cross points out that a new day has dawned for corporate learning, yielding much higher participant satisfaction and productivity. This new corporate learning scape is enhanced through conversation, visualization, online collaboration, complemented by formal training but not driven by it.

I highly recommend this book to any person hoping to stoke the fires of learning in an organizational setting. And in case you're wondering what Cross has to say about schooling, well, to no surprise, his comments aren't flattering:

“Today's free-range learners are knowledge workers. They expect the freedom to connect the dots themselves. Imagine the difference between a free-range (informal) learner and (formal) high school student The high school student is not allowed to take notes, books, or a cell phone into the room for the final exam. Happily for us all, life is unlike high school.”

ii. 'Honouring the Child; Changing Ways of Teaching'; by Pamela Proctor

A couple of weekends back I had the honour to help preside over an event in Gibsons and introduce Pam Proctor and her new book, 'Honouring the Child, Changing Ways of Teaching.'

Pam, now in her seventies, graduated from UBC Faculty of Education the year I was born (1957!). In 1971 she co-founded a remarkable open-concept schooling project in Vancouver: the 'Charles Dickens Annex' program, after having traveled to England to learn about holistic learning and open schooling. For the next 16 years she worked in the CD Annex program, where children's happiness remained a defining characteristic, kids could remain with siblings for several years, they were able to choose their study subjects, and on and on ...

Pam's book is about her study time in England (including visiting the famed 'Summerhill' and interviewing its founder AS Neill) and her years in the CDA program. She was eventually transfered out of CDA, and the program has been steadily standardized to this day. I think the book is a wonderful read and a compelling testimony to a time when our public system embraced innovation, holistic learning and open-concept schooling. At the book launch on Saturday were a number of Pam's teaching colleagues as well as several former students of the program, all of whom were confirming in their praise of the program and this unfortunately bygone era.

2007-09-23T23:40:00.000-07:00

More intelligent solution called for in Minister's waistline war

(this essay published on www.selfdesign.org in early September 2007)

This month, close to half a million kids returned to BC schools, ushered along with news from the Ministry of Education that all students are to participate in a 'rap-attack' plan against their bulging waistlines.

Described by Minister of Education Shirley Bond as bold and aggressive, the new plan, she says, will help "create a culture of health in our schools and for our children,” through reducing junk food in schools and increasing physical activity for students.

On the surface this seems a pretty safe initiative to rally around and I commend government for doing what it has to turf junk food from schools, an initiative first proposed by the Green Party. But, personally, I think that prodding students to take phys-ed more seriously isn't really going to do much to shift this situation and I think there's a shortsightedness here that undermines this intention and reflects a much larger pothole in the Ministry's game plan.

"Physical aptitude," otherwise known as kinesthetic intelligence is a characteristic of professional athletes, olympian hopefuls, dancers, gymnasts, and others, too, like surgeons, landscapers, and tradespeople like welders and framers. Even plumbers require heightened physical skills (the good ones, anyways!).

We value these people in our society ergo we value physical intelligence. We also value musical intelligence, spatial intelligence (central to architecture and engineering) and a host of other intelligences (somewhere between 8 and 20 according to intelligence researchers).

What we need to do, and the Ministry of Education especially, is come out of the forest and acknowledge the existence of these various intelligences. Researchers have been verifying these intelligences under the guise of 'Multiple Intelligences' for more than 25 years but you'd never know it from tracking conventional schooling.

Why is this? Well, for starters, supporting MI in schools - equally for all students and without showing bias toward any particular intelligence - just doesn't match the agenda behind conventional schooling, which continues to be dominated by Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. The 3 Rs roughly correspond to "Verbal/Linguistic" and "Logical/Mathematical" intelligence, which are swell intelligences on their own, but, to state the obvious, they only represent a fraction of the intelligences that are our birthright, and the birthright of our children.

A corollary to this is that there are many vested interests keen to sustain the prevailing practice of using schooling to sort for the intelligences that characterize the 3 Rs, and ignore or diminish any other track that supports other intelligences. Vested interest parties include science and technology industry representatives, university and college departments and vendors who prefer things just as they are.

In the end this adds up to a con job, with our children and our society the poorer for it. And returning to school this week, far too many students will be unfortunate participants in this game that will stretch over the next 10 months and attempt to convince them, directly and more subtly, that the 3 Rs are more important than other intelligences. It's not true, they aren't more important, though students aren't likely to hear this from their core subject teachers, or even school administrators.

It's time for schools to acknowledge the existence of many more intelligences than is presently the case, and to widely nurture the predilections for one or more intelligences (other than the 3Rs) that some students naturally favour, instead of ignoring them, or worse.

And to better support "healthier schools", why can't the Minister of Education come out and say something like this: "In the interests of supporting Multiple Intelligences and improved physical health, our government is taking steps to ensure that all students have improved opportunities to improve their physical and kinesthetic intelligence. To help achieve this, we are encouraging all schools to improve opportunities for students to enjoy biking, dancing, sports, noon-hour activities like frisbee and hackey-sac, gardening and other activities, in addition to physical education."

Wouldn't this go more toward creating a "culture of health" than attempting to enforce mandatory dodge ball or extra laps around a track in the rain?

- Michael Maser

2007-09-23T23:37:00.000-07:00

Lessons of Open Source revolution lost on education bureaucracies

(this essay originally published on www.selfdesign.org in July 2007)

I remember the night a friend first told me about Open Source computing. It was a gorgeous summer night in 1999, and I listened, rapt, as he extolled its virtues and asserted it would be the Next Big Thing emerging in computers.

Programmers everywhere, he said, would contribute their ideas to product and software development without fear of proprietary backlash.

And so it has come to pass. Open Source programming has dramatically shifted the world of computing from a world of digital piracy to one where innovators worldwide contribute synergistically and share in the benefits. Sort of like a silicon tea party hosted by Deepak Chopra.

The biggest winners appear to be companies like Linux and Apache, but almost the entire computing world is benefitting from the Open Source evolution. Our society is also a big winner since the Open Source entry on the scene, not just for the unique products that that could be considered as Open Source 'babies' (Wikipedia comes to mind as do myriad other soaftware apps) but because OS has also highlighted the value of ‘thinking outside the box’, innovating and the attributes of organic development.

You’d think the virtues of the Open Source revolution would have created an important ripple in the field of education, and especially influenced the thinking of ministries and departments of education.

Guess again. By increments, education ministries and departments across the continent are more forsworn than ever to top-down schooling characterized by rigid and prescribed learning outcomes and standardized testing. The result is a one-size-fits-all system that marginalizes innovative educators and penalizes students whose natural intelligences stray beyond the three Rs.

In BC, the present government, continuing the work of its predecessor, has thrown off any vestiges of the long-abandoned ‘Year 2000’ program (remember the bold, new direction sculpted by the Sullivan Commission that was to precipitate a shift to a ‘learning society’ and reflected the majority interests of citizens) to impose its own narrowly-defined education prescription. The goal? Improve graduation rates from secondary school, period.

Multiple Intelligences? Holistic Learning? Google that thought, dude. This ain’t the eighties!

What a lost opportunity.

- Michael Maser

2007-09-23T23:19:00.000-07:00

Need to foster Innovating - Part II

(this essay previously posted June 27, 2007; on www.selfdesign.org)

Adding fuel to my previous posting on the need to foster innovation as an embedded aspect of a Canadian learning society - especially among children and youth - comes a blazing report from the Conference Board of Canada, assessing Canada a grade of 'D' in ... wait for it ... innovation.

'How Canada Performs', released earlier this month, assigns Canada this failing grade for lagging in investment in R&D, producing a lower share of graduates in science, engineering and the trades, and for falling behind in the creation and commercialization of knowledge.

"Innovation", the report authors say, "is an essential component of a high-performing economy; it is also critical to environmental protection, to a high-performing education system, to a well-functioning system of health promotion, disease prevention and health care, and to an inclusive society."

Yet, in comparison to 16 other industrialized countries, Canadian performance in innovation is "stunningly poor," with the highest four rankings in innovation assigned to Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and the US (Canada is ranked 14th out of 17 countries, or fourth from the bottom-most ranking).

What's behind the ranking and assignment?

According to the authors, our laggardly ways can be attributed to a shortage of skilled researchers essential for fueling innovation, we are miserly when it comes to investing in innovation, and anecdotal evidence suggests that Canadians are complacent and generally unwilling to take risks.

Our culture "is unwilling to accept the failures that are built into an environment that genuinely supports risk taking. Nor are we wholly comfortable with differentiation, success and excellence."

This attitude, the report asserts, is holding Canada back in entrepreneurial and technological innovation, in developing new approaches and new technologies to protect the environment, in innovating in our health-care system, in experimenting in our educational system, and in social innovation. "

It is this culture that "must change and change quickly," say the report authors, who conclude the chapter on innovation with an appeal "to develop a national strategy to focus on specific paths to Canadian innovation and excellence."

Yes, yes and yes!

How to change this is, of course, the question on which to ruminate.

The Conference Board has created a Leaders’ Panel on Innovation-Based Commerce (LPIC) to propose national paths and priorities for the investments of businesses, governments and academic institutions in innovation.

Now Canada needs similar kinds of strategies to foster the disposition to innovate and support innovating throughout the education enterprise that (especially) awaits young children and teenage youth, the age groups that are most creative and innovative by nature.

Unfortunately, conventional schooling in Canada for this age group is being driven by an agenda emphasizing prescriptive curricula, rote learning, testing and grading. This formula, first devised in the Victorian age to train servile factory workers, does almost nothing to foment innovative thinking.

Ironically, in the chapter of its report focusing on education, the Conference Board assigns a grade of 'A' to Canada for producing large numbers of graduates. However, the report also says the Canadian education system does "not work well for the highly educated and innovative people".

It appears the Conference Board is unwittingly validating a system that is responsible for the foremost problem it identifies in this report - namely our "stunningly poor" record on innovation. Yet we hope the Conference Board is ready to recognize what research has also made abundantly clear: that all humans - Canadians or otherwise - emerge into this world as creative, discovery-oriented and innovative learning organisms. To remain so, we need only nurture our natural disposition and discontinue the practice of forcing learning through a system that stifles our innate inclination to innovate.

Hold the donuts and beer, we'd like to help out.

- Michael Maser

('How Canada Performs' is available from the Conference Board of Canada, and may be downloaded for free from the website: www.conferenceboard.ca/)

2007-09-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

If we want to innovate, we need to foster innovating

(this essay originally posted in www.selfdesign.org in May 2007)

"What kind of trouble is our civilization likely to encounter ahead? How can we cope, and how might we take advantage of opportunities that arise for civilization’s renewal?" - 'The Upside of Down', Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006)

“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover”. - Henri Poincaré, award-winning mathematician and mentor to Albert Einstein

Worldwide media recently announced a most unusual challenge from British billionaire Richard Branson: A US$25-million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming. The stated goal of the competition is "to spur innovative and creative thought to save mankind from self-destruction."

While we might be tempted to leave this competition solely to the inventors, technologists and tinkerers among us, that would miss a larger, equally vital opportunity. The higher ground to aim for is to embrace and integrate innovating itself as a valued, common practice across our society. To bring the habit of innovating and fostering creativity into our lives and especially the learning lives of children.

The practice of tinkering and innovating is as old as human culture itself, dating back to when somebody first learned how to willfully generate fire and bring light and heat into our cold, dark existence. We can assume our predecessors valued this discovery, and we've had good reason to value innovating since then. More recently, creative tinkering ushered in the industrial, electrical and digital ages.

What are the characteristics that set apart inventors from the rest of the herd? According to Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, a Michigan biochemist and author of several books and papers on scientific discovery, inventors among us consistently favour strategies like abstract thinking, intuition, play and fantasy.

This has been borne out by scientists such as Alexander Graham Bell, who traced his invention of the telephone to a childhood fascination of studying nature, and especially bone structure, with daydreaming. Likewise, Albert Einstein credited some of his most productive early thinking to a back seat in his high school math class where he ignored his lessons but fantasized about riding on a light beam.

Root-Bernstein says the historical record is clear that logic and rational reasoning is insufficient to spur innovation and discovery. Rather, the praxis of discovery reflects and is motivated by "the subjective, emotional, intuitive, synthetic, sensual aspects that make up the private human face of all creative inquiry."

This line of inquiry leads us to reflect on the K - University educational system, presently and generally swept up in wave of standardization emphasizing testing, rote memorization, grading, prescribed curricula and specialization from one lobe of the continent to another. Is this a helpful or appropriate way of nurturing innovation and creative thinking among children and young people? Not according to Root-Bernstein.

"Our education system generally ignores the emotional and subjective aspects of creativity," he wrote in a recent paper on the art of innovation.

"Only when mind and body, synthesis and analysis, personal thought and public communication skills are all part and parcel of cognitive studies and educational practice will an enhanced capacity for innovation become available to everyone."

Root-Bernstein's assertion is corroborated by researchers from Israel where nurturing creative thinking has been adopted as a national policy to aid in the country's survival and resiliency. There, while it is recognized that some people naturally have higher creative abilities than others, activities that stimulate curiosity, fantasy, imagery and problem solving, are encouraged in school and out to contribute to an Israeli creativity quotient.

Two important findings of Israeli researchers are noteworthy. The first, the result of an 18-year study first published in 1997, was that the best single predictor of success in any field was neither high IQ, standardized test scores, nor high school grades but, rather, the participation of children in self-chosen activities such as music, painting, chess, electronic and computer tinkering and creative writing.

The second finding, mirroring the first and published in 2005 by Dr. Roberta Milgram, a Tel Aviv University professor who has staked most of her 40-year career studying creativity, is that the individualization of learning at home and at school would greatly increase the likelihood of creative thinking in children and adolescents.

Authors like Homer-Dixon have made very compelling cases for societal 'renewal', for the need to innovate and improve our capacity for resilience in the face of a growing number of challenges. And entrepreneur Richard Branson has done his part.

Now we need politicians and educational leaders to step up and help improve our capacity to become an 'innovating society'. Part of this capacity-building involves moving beyond the over-prescribed, test-driven treadmill approach that continues to define most conventional schooling.

- end

2007-09-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

RE - FSA Testing Kerfuffle

(this essay originally published on www.selfdesign.org in May 2007)

Well, it's day one of the 2007 FSA testing period. I happen to be administering these tests on behalf of grade 4 and grade 7-level learners in SelfDesign (an un-graded program), for the second year in a row.

For the second consecutive year I'm also following the dust-up between the BCTF and the Ministry of Education about these tests, being played out district by district, largely through the media and a campaign by the BCTF urging parents to boycott the tests.

For its part the BCTF raises some valid points about these tests, pointing out the very limited value of them for the effort expended to administer them.

For its part the MinEd feels the tests provide a snapshot of student literacy levels and that they hold schools to some measure of accountability for all that money schools and districts receive.

If it were only that simple, I would describe myself as holding an opinion somewhere in the middle of these two positions.

Alas, I'm not that naive. There is so much acrimony and distrust between these two groups that I'm not certain that either position doesn't truly reflect a long-held grudge against the other. In other words, I don't trust either of the official opinions being trumpeted here.

What I am much more certain of, however, is that there is an opportunity here to make this kind of test-taking much more meaningful than it is now configured. Presently, the Ministry has decreed that the testing is mandatory and that the results are to reflect back on schools and school districts themselves. Further, the test results are to be scrutinized and evaluated in some measure by the Fraser Institute.

These are all loss-leading positions. Number one, making this testing mandatory provokes reaction, alienation and monkey-wrenching at many, many levels. As pointed out in the March issue of 'Educational Leadership' (magazine), mandatory school testing through the Bush Administration's 'No Child Left Behind' program has many significant problems associated with it and very few attributes.

Number two, in making the results reflect on schools and school districts, the test-taker, AKA the 'child', has been rendered invisible, and thereby assigned an obscure, supporting role in a bureaucratic melodrama dragged out over a week of each child's life. Children and parents rightfully resent this. For the Ministry to go to this much trouble to evaluate test results, they should go the distance and make this a meaningful experience for all test-takers. We do this in SelfDesign by focusing on helping kids have a positive and valuable test-taking experience, leading them through a process of test-preparation, test-taking and test result analysis, so they can improve their testing results over time. Academic tests are a fact of life, so isn't it incumbent on educators to ensure that kids have all the skills they require to do as well as they can on tests? According to the Ministry, this is not a priority, yet it should be.

And, finally, why on earth should a non-elected partisan organization like the Fraser Insititute have anything to do with evaluating FSA test results? They shouldn't is the answer. This is undemocratic and smacks of political manipulation.

- cheers, Michael Maser

2007-09-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Campus 2020: Thinking Ahead Report - Vision? What Vision?!

(this essay originally published on www.selfdesign.org in May, 2007)

"April 23 - Murray Coell, Minister of Advanced Education and Minister responsible for Research and Technology was joined by special advisor Geoff Plant, to release the Campus 2020: Thinking Ahead report,. The report makes 52 recommendations to government on how to build on the strengths of British Columbia’s post-secondary education system and create a plan for the future."

It was with some measure of anticipation that I looked forward to reading this 100+ page report last week - I assumed that such a report from a Ministry that boasted Moura Quayle as its Deputy Minister would aim to shake up the status quo with some truly broad-band, substantive goals. Moura, for those who don't know, is a former Landscape Architect and former Dean of UBC's Faculty of Agriculture. It was while she was at UBC in the last 10 years ago that she oversaw and lead the remarkable transformation of 'Moo U' to the 'Faculty of Land and Food Systems', an event that was as gutsy as it was visionary.

Alas, there is a distinct lack of substance in the Campus 2020 report beyond the axiomatic and mundane. Most apparent is its reflective quality, in this case, reflecting on every page an ideology that prioritizes economic rationalization over, well, everything else but especially social awareness.

Two main points come to mind to support this: One, the last 30 years of research into human learning confirm the primacy of Multiple Intelligences, Neurobiological (AKA 'Brain Based') learning, Constructivist learning and other theories, that add up to profoundly different idea of how humans actually learn, than earlier theories that preceded these. Think of the shift from kerosene lamps or candles to electric lighting as an analogy. The most important place for these theories to gain traction, I would think, is within organizations and bureaucracies that make human learning their order of business. Incredibly, acknowledgement of this paradigmatic leap in understanding of human learning is worthy of two sentences of lip service in 2020.

Neither is there a glimmer of recognition for the most profound problem of our time: dealing with climate change and a need to shift away from our overly-consumptive lifestyle. Not a word. Ni una palabra. This is an astounding abdication of responsibility from a bureaucracy that we presume would address such matters of societal learning. No wonder people are cynical about government and mistrust its claims of leadership.

If there is one area where this report and Ministry addresses social issues appropriately it is in recognizing the unique challenges faced by Aboriginal communities and learners, and positing substantive initiatives to address these challenges.

Overall, however, I consider 2020 Campus a very disappointing sleeper, cover to cover. At least I read the electronic version and didn't waste any trees printing it out.

- Michael Maser

Hello and welcome to my Blog!

2007-09-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

Hello!

This blog is meant as a place to express and share BIG opinions on learning and education.

What can you expect to read about here? Well, I have been working on the pioneering fringes of innovative, enthusiasm-based learning for many years, I've recently won a major award - a '2006 Prime Ministers Award for Educational Excellence' - and to tell the truth: I didn't win this award by accident! I won it because I am an innovative educator and willing to think and act way outside the conventions of schooling. I also support kids learning passionately about just about anything under the sun.

This is going to be fun!

AND ... If you object to a comment on this Blog, or wish to forward a comment, then post away. I ask only that you keep it respectful and I'll do the same.

And please note: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS BLOG SHOULD BE CONSIDERED AS MY PERSONAL OPINIONS AND NOT REFLECTIVE OF THE OPINIONS OF THE WONDERTREE OR SELFDESIGN ORGANIZATIONAL TEAM, WITH WHOM I WORK CLOSELY.

- cheers, Michael Maser
Co-founder & Director, SelfDesign Learning Community
www.selfdesign.org