Five Popular Posts Of The Month

Friday, January 26, 2018

What is the mission of education (as a human practice)?

What is the mission of education?



Education is an important human practice, and many books offer various views on the matter. The majority of those books, however, are written by scientists and for other scientists – so, thick, complex, too theoretical. Most of the parents, politicians, even teachers and school administrators do not need to have deep philosophical or scientific view on what education is for. A short, clear, operational definition is sufficient. Everyone who wants to develop a scientific view on education can begin from using a simple operational one, and then deepen it to extend which would feel satisfactory.
At least, that is my approach to teaching, which I, as a practicing educator (a.k.a. a practitioner) has been successfully using for many years (https://www.cognisity.how/2018/10/AtoZ.html).
Here it is, my take on the mission of education.
Education is not about knowledge, per se.
The mission (i.e. the reason for existence) of education 
as human practice is to ensure the progress of humanity.

The mission of education as social institution
is enabling people to succeed in life.

The goal of educational institutions 
is to equip people with relevant knowledge and skills.

The main function of educational institutions is Teaching: i.e. guiding students through an arrangement of learning experiences specifically designed for helping students with mastering subjects, acquiring relevant social skills, and feeling good about themselves.
Achieving a success requires doing something, and doing it right, acting, and directing actions toward specific goals; achieving those goals means succeeding. 
It also requires being able to control emotions, especially frustration of making a mistake. That is why "we have to make learning fun" is not the right way to teach.
A person who is capable of achieving various professional goals within a specific profession is called competent. And the set of abilities the competent person has is called professional competence.
No doubt, knowledge is an important part of a professional competence. But knowledge alone is not enough for achieving a professional success.
This understanding of education and its mission leads to a specific view on teaching practice.
Everything a teacher does has to be helping students to obtain abilities needed to succeed in life.
Actions which could impede future student success have to be eliminated from teaching practice.
Of course, the next step in the conversation would be describing various teaching activities and analyzing them in terms of their possible (positive or negative) effect on future success of students.
This conversation, in turn, could stir a discussion about a success, what does it mean, what is required for it, for are the components and indicators of a success.
The common sense, and my own experience, tells us that no single book or a conversation would be enough to cover all important aspects of such matters.
This is one of the reasons why a teacher should never stop learning.
Teacher professional development is a continuous and never-ending process.
Teachers who are consciously involved in a continuous process of professional development are called a “good teacher” (a.k.a. TeachSmith: http://www.cognisity.how/2017/12/TeachSmith.html).
Based on many years of my professional experience in the field of teacher professional development, I firmly believe that the quality of public education is directly proportional to the number of “good teachers”. Let’s say, a school district has 14 good teachers, and each good teacher teaches 68 students, in that case the maximum number of students who can count on having good education is 952.
Getting a diploma is just the first step in the long teacher career. Sustainable professional growth requires a systematic self-training. In order to be efficient, that training that needs to be “owned” by a teacher, i.e. the teacher needs to know exactly what he or she needs to get trained.
Currently, the system of teacher professional development for in-service teachers looks like a market place where various groups (providers, tech startups, publishers, etc.) show off their programs or gadgets and teachers choose which to try in order to gain the required amount of PDP. There is no direct correlation between the selected PDP provider and learning outcomes of students of the teachers participated in the professional development activities (PDA).
The absence of this correlation is due to the mostly passive position of teaches toward the PDA (“If I listen to this, I may hear something interesting. Will I use it in my classes? Who knows.”).
Professional development practice based on the Theory of Human Activity overcomes that deficiency. A specific approach called “Professional Designing” (http://www.cognisity.how/2016/10/facilitating.html) places at the core of the professional development specific goals of a teacher and builds the professional development process around those goals.
This approach guaranties not only formal professional development, but also advancement in results of teaching due to the achievement of specific (i.e. measurable) professional goals.
We can say, that the mission of a system of teacher professional development is enabling professional success of teachers, and “Professional Designing” is the most efficient approach which fulfills that mission.
If someone preaches “students need fun”, “problems must be world related” just ignore that person – he/she has no idea how learning (hence – teaching) works. Fun and practicality are useless if graduates will lack imagination, cognitive abilities and confidence in themselves. Learning (hence – teaching) has its strict laws, which have to be followed by a teacher who wants to fulfill the mission of K12 education.
The last note is on the subject of such important school subject as mathematics.
STEM education is a topic of many conversations and publications.
Physics, chemistry, biology, and other natural sciences are all bundled together in a single letter, S.
Mathematics has its own designated letter, M, because it is extremely important.
However, as we agreed before, knowledge alone is not enough; students need to be able to use the knowledge they learned. That includes mathematical knowledge.
However, many people do not realize that in order to learn how to use mathematics, students have to step outside of mathematics.
Long story short:
To know mathematics students need to learn mathematics.
To be able to use mathematics students have to learn physics (for starters)!
That is why I have been advocating for teaching physics to all high school students (at least): http://www.cognisity.how/2016/12/learnphy.html.
Every road has its beginning.
Every evolution has stages and phases.
The birth of a knowledgeable and skillful human follows specific laws, in the same manner like the birth of a human.
Skipping the stages is just impossible.
Alternating the stages will lead to “birth defects”.
For STEM, Computer and Data sciences the road, the evolution, the birth begins with PHYSICS!
Before physics, reading, writing, math, general science leads to a person to be ready to start to study physics.
Then study physics leads to the advanced development of other abilities require to succeed in science.
Why?
Because physics is the only science suited as the bridge between abstract matters (math) and real world.
BTW: That is why the NSF needs to have a project with the goal to allow ALL school students to study physics (like it does for computer and data sciences and cyber thinking).
Physics Is the Door into STEM education!
Everyone who pushes for cyber education needs to know, that it only can happen on the top a solid basic education (as described in: http://www.cognisity.how/2017/12/cyber.html).
Now I need to disclose a correction.
Every time when I was writing word “education”, I meant K-12 education levels (I did not want to specify this at the time; that could deflect the conversation).
Colleges and universities have a very different mission.
The mission of a higher education is filtering students according to their abilities.
Education is being used as a tool for making that filtering (we may not like it, or even deny it, but that is the truth, that is how it has been designed and is functioning).
This is one of the reasons the spending millions of dollars on “research in higher education”, when the basic public education requires significant reformation, is just not wise (http://www.cognisity.how/2017/07/Lie.html).
K-12 education requires intensified research on effective learning and teaching practices, but this research needs to follow a new format (an actual scientific research needs to be separated from programs of social support for students and teachers: http://www.cognisity.how/2016/12/NSF.html).

Appendix (added on Feb 10th)
Very often one can read or hear in the media something like this:
“The first job of a teacher is to make students to fall in love with the subject”
“Students have to have fun when learning math”
Etc.
Those and similar approaches are based on the idea that in order to learn people have to feel good about what they learn.
Those and similar approaches are wrong and basically just primitive.
The mission of a schooling is to help student to succeed in their future life.
Thinking that success does not require struggles, no need to forcing ourselves into doing something we don’t like, that the road to success is always fun and that people only do what they love is – at the least – misleading.
The #1 ability one needs to have in order to succeed in life is ability to propel himself or herself to the goal one wants to achieve. The #1 trait, attribute, “feeling” one needs to have to be able to do that is believing in his or her abilities, or, simple, believing in himself or herself.
Helping students to believe in themselves – this is the #1 job of an actual teacher (or better say, a TeachSmith).
How to do that is also not a mystery – not at all – one can start from following a set of clear and “simple” rules (Laws of TeachOlogy: http://www.cognisity.how/2016/12/handbook.html).

Thank you for visiting,
Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
Education Advancement Professionals
To learn more about my professional experience:
Essentials of Teaching Science

The mission (i.e. the reason for existence) of education 
as a human practice is to ensure the progress of humanity.

The mission of education as a social institution
is enabling people to succeed in life.

The goal of educational institutions
is to equip people with relevant knowledge and skills.


The mission (i.e. the reason for existence) of science as a human practice is understanding the world in its entirety (outside and inside human subjects); i.e. developing exact description of the world’s structure and evolution.

The function of a specific science is making reliable predictions in a specific scientific field.

The mission of a scientist as an agent of that practice is discovering truth and presenting it in a testable form.

The mission of a teacher is fostering in students his/her love for learning.

The mission of a science teacher is sharing with students the feeling of pleasure from thinking.

The mission of a mentor is sharing with students the feeling of pleasure from doing the right thing.

The mission of a parent is making children feeling safe, loved, and confident.

The mission of humanity is making world a better place.

 

P.S. I always include this slide in my first lecture. I believe that students should know the broader vision of what education is about.



Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Bridge International Academies, Blockchain Education, and the Future of Public Education.


Bridge International Academies, Blockchain Teaching, and the Future of Public Education.

Bridge International Academies, Blockchain Teaching, and the Future of Public Education.

I am not a gambler.
That is why I don’t play the bitcoin game.
First and foremost, it is not a coin, and it is not money.
Someone very smart coined a name "cryptocurrency", i.e. named the new artificial digital entity a "currency", and now everyone thinks of it as it is money. But, it is not.

We all know, that not every shiny thing is made of gold.
Not everyone named Einstein is a genius.
Cryptocurrency is a currency only by a name.
The fact that people may use it to exchange for goods does not make it an actual currency.
In the case of a food shortage, food becomes a “currency”.
In the case of a cigarette shortage, cigarettes become “a currency” (and not only for smokers).
Postal stamps can become a “currency”.
Anything what has value for some people can become a “currency” under certain circumstances - for those people, and within those circumstances.

Currently any “cryptocurrency” is a just gambling token.
BTW: not the first in the history. For example, once Russians almost switched to a new “currency” called “MMM notes” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company).
Those notes were made of paper. Bitcoin is made of digits. But essentials are the same. Both are a gambling tool for building a financial pyramid (making profit of the money brought by new participants). I wouldn't be surprised if we’ll learn that the Bitcoin was created by Sergei Mavrodi himself (he was a mathematician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mavrodi).

What fascinates me is the technological idea on which all “cryptocurrencies” are built, i.e. blockchain.
When a new technology sees the light, my first instinct is to try to find the use for that technology in education.
I am not an expert in informatics or computer programming.
Reading about the fundamentals of the blockchain mechanics took some effort.

The "breakthrough" happened on the flight from New-York to Moscow, which takes nine hours, so, plenty of time to think without any distractions.
In the end, I wrote my take on “cryptocurrency” (you just have read it), and then switched my thoughts to a merger between blockchain and education.
The idea should be NOT about teaching blockchain, but about blockchain teaching; i.e. not about how blockchain technology can be used in education, but about how the teaching and learning processes in education can be structured using principles of the blockchian building.
The main feature of blockchain (to my best understanding) is the existence of many identical copies of the same piece of information (a block) distributed across many independent sites (nodes, hosts). When created, each block cannot be changed anymore, it cannot be modified; instead only a new block can be created and located as the next element in the chain of blocks. The new block will have all the information about the old block, and about the difference between the old and the new blocks.
When you think about individual blocks of information, such that the content of each block (the same for each block) should be “imprinted” in many hosts, you see that this is how- ideally - an efficient learning process should be functioning. When a student absorbs one block of information, for example the Newton's second law, another student across the country (or anywhere in the world) should be able to absorb the exactly same block of information. If that is not happening, a teacher creates a new block. The new block does not replace the old one, but is placed in the chain with all other blocks. Each block needs to have the information about a student (which can be enhanced in future blocks), as well as the information about the learning achieved by a student. If a new block is created to amend the old one, it has to have information about the reason for creating the new block. Blocks need to be searchable. Based on information stored in blocks every instructor can select or develop a specific “chain" tailored for a specific student.

Well, of course, that is just the main idea, which needs much more detailization. The optimal structure of the blocks should be developed via a set of continuous iterations, starting from initial set created by a group of educators, and amended via mutual teaching practice of participating instructors.

It took about three more weeks before I returned to the topic and wrote this post.
I stumbled into an article about an educational startup.
Very soon it has become clear to me that the startup was trying to realize the idea of blockchain education, even without calling it that name.

“The controversial Silicon Valley-funded quest to educate the world’s poorest kids”
(https://qz.com/1179738/bridge-school/) is about Bridge International Academies, founded by Shannon May and Jay Kimmelman. In schools managed by Bridge, quote: “During the day, in any given country, teachers in the same grade are delivering the same lesson. Bridge collects data that allows it to compare the efficiency of teachers in one school to another, or measure the performance of students across different classes, schools, and countries.”

See? Blockchain!

Naturally, there is a strong opposition to the Bridge’s approach. Quote: “The science of learning suggests that, in order for students to maximize their potential, schools not only need to provide kids with key foundations in math and literacy, but to foster motivation, agency, and critical thinking skills.”

First to mention is that there is no such thing as a “science of learning”. There is a professional field where people conduct various scientific activities with the goal of getting better understanding of the patterns governing various learning and teaching process. But that professional field has not reached yet the status of a full science. For once, the mission of a science is to be able to make measurable predictions (https://teachologyforall.blogspot.com/2017/12/scvrel.html), but no teacher can predict the final grade of a student who just begins taking his or her course.

BTW: there is nothing wrong in the fact that the “science of learning” does note exist – yet. According to the General Theory of Human Activity, science is just one of many important human practices. As a human practice it evolves, has phases and stages, and levels. The direction of the evolution of a science does not depend on the actual scientific field. There is a stage when people in the field do not have yet commonly accepted definitions and laws, rely mostly on heuristics, cannot make reliable prediction and mostly explain the events which have already happened. Education is currently in such a state (http://www.teachology.xyz/np.htm). What people in the field call “science of learning” currently is no more than a set of common sense rules (“do not harm”, practice makes perfect”, etc. http://www.teachology.xyz/6LT.html), however wrapped up in much more scientifically sound statements.

Much more important is to understand that calls “to foster motivation”, or “critical thinking skills” (a) at least 30 years old (and still just are calls); (b) have no methodological foundation (no one knows how to teach it, at least en masse; for some insights on the matter - https://teachologyforall.blogspot.com/2017/12/aidef.html); and (c) the development of critical thinking heavily depends on the quality of “ basic thinking”, i.e. basic education (reading, writing, math).

If students had no teachers, but now have a teacher who can give them basic education, this is progress, this is a huge step ahead. If on the top of it, someone will succeed in fostering motivation and advancing critical thinking skills, the progress will be stronger, the step will be larger. But criticizing people who give basic education for the absence of “critical thinking” is just counterproductive (in my experience, this type of critique often comes from people who cannot teach). Believing that development of critical thinking can happen without solid basic education is like believing that people can start running without learning how to walk (one can find this type of belief in many publications on “cyber thinking”: https://teachologyforall.blogspot.com/2017/12/cyber.html).

It has become very fashionable to point at technological innovations as the source for a soon-to-be leapfrog in education (e.g. https://www.brookings.edu/research/can-we-leapfrog-the-potential-of-education-innovations-to-rapidly-accelerate-progress/).

In reality, the outcomes of such innovations are greatly overstated. The problem is not that inventors and startups do not produce enough innovative techniques, devices, approaches. The problem is that inventors and startups produce too manyinnovative techniques, devices, approaches which are absolutely incoherent with each other and with the actual teaching and learning processes. The transition from a horse-drawn carriage to a motorized car would be an example of a leapfrog. If someone would offer teachers a fully assembled “car” (the complete and fully resourcefully bootstrapped teaching process), that would lead to a leapfrog. But what teachers have to deal with is the shower of different “parts” (“wheels”, “wipers”, …), which don’t even fit each other (http://GoMars.xyz/3r.htm#two).

What Bridge International Academies is to demonstrate is that even partially realized blockchain approach to organizing education is more efficient than a chaotic combination of various innovative tricks.

By 1919, in the middle of the civil war (which followed the revolution of 1917), only about 30 to 40 % of Russians could read, write, and count. In 1920 Russian government created the "Urgent Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy" (shortly “Liq-Ill”). It took an enormous coordinated effort and resources, and about 30 years, to achieve almost 100 % literacy of about 180 million people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez). Expecting that introducing to teachers several new gadgets would lead to qualitative changes in mass education is no different from believing in miracles. Qualitative changes in mass education can be only the result of systematic and systemic, on a large scale coordinated approach.

The blockchain methodology provides the platform for that approach.

Quote: “Bridge will need to keep expanding if it wants to become a sustainable business; it is currently losing about $12 million a year.”

The problem of Bridge is that it has limited itself by servicing students only in the poorest countries. However, even developed countries have millions of students who are not taught by highly qualified teachers (due to many reasons). Those schools represent a potential market for Bridge, or another blockchain-organized education structure.

The only difference is that this market may need the development of a different chains of blocks.

Thank you for visiting,
Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
Education Advancement Professionals
GoMars.xyz


To learn more about my professional experience:
The voices of my students 
"The Backpack Full of Cahs": pointing at a problem, not offering a solution
Essentials of Teaching Science

Dear Visitor, please, feel free to use the buttons below to share your feelings (ANY!) about this post to your Twitter of Facebook followers.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

What does a Teacher need to know about a Brain?



Part 1 (2014) This part had been written in early 2014 after reading the following passage 
or an enlarged version of the it
(The full flier is at : http://teachology.xyz/brain.html).
It seems that nowadays in community of educators it has become fashionable to mention the latest research on the brain.
What this research tells us, however, can be formulated in three common sense statements (obvious for every experienced educator):
1. a brain exists
2. a brain changes due to natural age development
3. a brain also changes due to physical and mental exercises (similar to what any body-muscle does), in particular, a certain mental exercise affects certain regions in a brain (although, no one knows yet for sure which affects which).
There is a name for this phenomenon, namely neuroplasticity (giving a phenomenon a name brings it into the field of science).
There are services attracting people who want to develop their brain, like lumosity. For relatively young people, using lumosity is a sign of laziness; study a new language, or learning how to play a piano, or taking a physics course would bring a much stronger effect (assuming having a good teacher), PLUS (a big plus) a useful skill.
However, there is a value in proving the fact that if you train a brain it is actually getting trained, and if you do not train the brain, it is not getting trained – exactly like having a gym membership and using or not using it: see http://cdn-hcp.lumosity.com/uploads/completed_research_post/original_paper_file/3/Ng-2012-ESCoNS.pdf.
“If ten hours of cognitive training can significantly improve students’ cognitive performance, then it is possible that these improvements will carry over to other measures of academic performance.”
A true statement.
It also means that if the way students are taught reading, math, etc. would resemble cognitive training, we would not have a need in any additional cognitive intervention (assuming having a good teacher for every student).

Part 2 (Dec 30, 2015)
This part had been written after reading
 Let’s use the ability other animals except us, humans, do not have – imagination.
Imagine that a teacher is starting a new topic; after ten minutes into the lesson the teacher looks at a large screen that glows presenting live images of the brain activities of each student. A teacher thinks: “Hmm, their prefrontal cortex does not show much of activities, but everyone has the amygdala overly excited; I need to do something about it; maybe I should try singing?”
Of course, the situation described above is fictional (for now).
Maybe in thirty or forty years new technologies (and their price) will allow teachers to observe live brain activities of students to adjust their teaching.
But until then - theses days - almost nothing we learn from neurology about a brain is of any practical use for a teacher.
All a teacher needs to know is relatively obvious.
Like any organ in a body (e.g. a muscle):
1. A brain exists.
2. A brain changes/develops in time AND when being used/exercised.
That’s it. That’s sufficient for all teaching activates.
A simple illustration shows the correlation between brain development and learning abilities.
Let us assume that for the number of years students have been doing only one type of physical exercises - squats. Then in the end of their schooling they can make squats many times without any difficulties. All the muscles involved in making squats will be developed. However, all other muscles, which have not been involved in the exercise, would be underdeveloped or not developed at all. Students simply would not be able to do other lids of exercises. A brain – as a “muscle, or a collection of muscles” - works in the similar way. If for years the majority of lessons were based on memorizing and reproduction, other kinds of intellectual activities would be difficult for students to produce (this example was originally posted in “Laws of TeachOlogy).
The picture in the top left corner illustrates this law (other pictures are related to the discussion about the evolution of knowledge).
It is obvious that there is a strong connection between a structure of a brain and the intelligence level of a person.
Any school subject is usually considered as a “knowledge-building” tool, but also can (and should) be seen as a “brain-building” tool. We all know very well that brain activities manifest themselves via human behavior. Now we also know that human activities affect the structure of a brain (due to the phenomenon called neuroplasticity).
The concrete structure of the relationship between a brain and human activities currently is not very well know. But a teacher does not need to know that concrete relationship, because a teacher does not need to base his or her practice on the particular knowledge about a particular brain.
So, why do we see so many papers which are trying to excite teachers about the science of brain?
I leave the answer to this question to others (there are many, e.g. to excite teachers about using their subjects as a brain-building tool).
My job as a consultant is to equip teachers with concrete tools they can use in their everyday practice. That is why I advise: when reading something like “Six Tips for Brain-Based Learning”, keep in mind that the parts about a brain are interesting but not really important, however the practical tips on teaching may be useful (but usually not very unusual).
One might ask, if the tips are not based on our knowledge of how a brain functions, how can we trust the tips?
Well, most of the tips in the quoted or similar publications had been known for decades (even when neurology was in its infancy), extracted from the experience of numerous successful teachers, supported by the results of numerous psychological studies, and rooted into such well-known wisdoms as “Practice makes perfect”, “People grow through experience”, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play”, and many others (for example, check “Laws of TeachOlogy at
 www.GoMars.xyz/6LT.html).
Maybe a decade or two from now a brain-based learning will become relevant to teaching practice, but nowadays it is just a myth (i.e. something we might dream about).


Thank you for visiting,
Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
Education Advancement Professionals
GoMars.xyz


To learn more about my professional experience:
The voices of my students 
"The Backpack Full of Cahs": pointing at a problem, not offering a solution
Essentials of Teaching Science

Dear Visitor, please, feel free to use the buttons below to share your feelings (ANY!) about this post to your Twitter of Facebook followers.