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Creativity
Posted by Philip Skolmoski on 10/11/2010
In Reply To:Creativity Posted by Sharon Villines on 10/11/2010
I have been reading this conversation and though I rarely make comments on such a discussion, I have decided to make some here. I am an engineer. I spent thirty years working on the cutting edge, some of those who looked at what we did said “the bloody edge”, of technology. Twenty-seven of those years with a company that was accepted for many years as the most innovative computer graphics company in the world. I have patents, publications, and in the last ten years I spent at the company I had younger engineers in my department write up patent applications to help them enhance their careers. The last few years I was working as an engineer I attended a local university studying Education and Educational Psychology. I have a Masters of Philosophy in Educational Psychology. (Why that isn’t a PhD is another discussion, other than to say that I decided to leave the program.) The last seven years I have spent teaching mathematics in a middle school.
I would like to briefly share some of my thoughts and observations about the current state of education. I will probably step on some people’s toes so I ask forgiveness even before I say anything more.
1- Deportment in our schools is deplorable. There is little respect for anyone, including students for students. Parents are generally unwilling to accept responsibility for how their children behave in school. It has become acceptable to blame the school or the teacher. If my teacher called my home because of a discipline problem I was not only in trouble at school I was in BIG trouble at home. My parents respected my teachers and their judgment.
2- The state of mathematics curriculum, as an example and as others have expressed to me, is that each year we are expected to teach something that is a mile wide and only a few inches deep. In other words we try to include too much.
3- The people who are teaching in most of the schools have never done anything other than attend school and then teach school.
4- The people who “manage” the educational systems have never done anything other than…been involved with school.
5- Textbook manufacturers have systematically made textbooks contain too much, be too glitzy, tried to make them “teacher proof”, and in general do anything possible to make the book inaccessible to students.
6- One of the things that the production world has taught us is that quality is built in not tested in.
7- The world of innovation has taught us that the “garage shop”, were the rules required for production are suspended in an effort to allow experimentation, is very important to innovation.
8- Students are not taught to try on their own, make mistakes, analyze their mistakes, and consult with others (peers, teachers, appropriate reference books, and other means) in an effort to understand how improve their attempts.
9- Only in school is the idea of collaboration outlawed. (I never had a project where it was against the rules to consult with anyone or anything I wanted to.)
I will stop there for now. Numbers 1-4 do not need much of a comment other than to say that practitioners of a subject develop an different perspective for the material. Number 5, an algebra book, for example, should at most be about 150 to 200 pages and be limited to about 25 cm tall and perhaps 12 cm wide, something that a student would carry with them. It should be written more as a reference book that succinctly covers the material with a good index that lets the student access the information they need when they need it. Homework problems should be contained in another book or even better on a CDROM that teachers and access to create assignments for the student to practice the processes and procedures required to solve particular types of problems. An accompanying teacher guide or CDROM should contain information about the history, along with how, and why certain topics came about. This would allow teachers to frame material as questions for the students to research etc.
The very notion that teaching effectiveness can be measured is, well I will give you an example from my own career. I saw a problem with the way that equipment was being tested. It was not that the tests were bad or wrong, they just had a great deal of redundancy built into them. As I thought about it a small detail from a computer science course many years before came to me. That detail was not in and of itself the solution but the way of thinking was. It started me thinking about the redundancy in the testing and about ways of reducing the redundancy. It was possible to test only a little over 14% of the possible solutions that were currently being tested and still cover all possible combination that were desired. The point that I am trying to make is that if someone had measured the teaching effectiveness at the end of the computer science course I was taken they would have entirely missed what happened years later. You may be asking, “How many times did this happen?” which is a very good question. It happened many, many times, but that is not the point. The point I am trying to make is that if you try to measure teaching effectiveness by standardized tests you force people to teach their students to the test. When we designed equipment we generally knew what the system performance tests were going to be. Too many times what could have been a very good innovation to improve performance or capability was passed over in favor of the performance test. (Of course there is the old adage that there comes a point at which you should kill off the engineers to that you can ship the system.)
To summarize the previous statements about testing, how can anyone presume to know what students are going to need to know. The best thing we can teach is how to learn. How to learn can be expanded further to include how to ask question, how to look for information, how to consult with others, how to critique your solution, how to listen to and accept the critique of others, and how to make perform a reality check about your solution. The next paragraph explores this further.
Point number 7 through 9 go together. There is a great quote, that I cannot place appropriate attribution to, that says in essence that rules are the enemy of experimentation. As nice as the scientific method is Isaac Azimov has a great observation "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) But 'That's funny...'". This phrase expresses what education and innovation is about, but it is, unfortunately, missing in most school settings.
I will stop now and think more. Hopefully I have contributed some thoughts of worth to this discussion. I look forward to your comments, questions, and criticisms about what I have put forward. Only a collaborative effort will help us to articulate an argument worthy of advancing onto a larger and more formal stage.
An appropriate question for you to ask is: “How am I doing as a teacher?” I teach to the “No Child Left Behind” mandate in my classes, but after school and during the summer I teach students how to explore ideas, and to be honest every now and then in class I emphasize the “That’s funny…” concept. Oh, by the way I also allow my students to collaborate on everything except during testing. It is too bad that they have not be taught to be well enough self disciplined to make good use of their collaboration time.
Phil Skolmoski
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