[Localization] [Educators] Empowering teachers

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Yama Ploskonka <yama at netoso.com> wrote:
> traditional
>
> Ministry of Education
> |         |         |
> |         |         |
> |         |         |
> v         v         v
> teacher   teacher   teacher
> |   |   | |   |   | |   |   |
> |   |   | |   |   | |   |   |
> v   v   v v   v   v v   v   v
>   kids      kids      kids
>
>
> OLPC current model
>
>         OLPC Boston <-.-.-- ._-> OLPC
>          |||                    Community
>          ||L-----------------\     |
>          vvv                  |    .
> Ministry of Education and/or  | .. +
> deployment-specific agency    |   .
> |         |         |         |    .
> |         |         |         |    .
> |         |         |         |   .
> v         v         v         |    .
> teacher  teacher   teacher  . |.. .
> |   |   | |   |   | |   |     |   .
> v   v   v v   v   v v   v     |     .
> kids < ? > kids < ? > kids <--/ .  .
>
>
>
> proposed model for OLPC
>
> OLPC Boston <===> OLPC community <---\
>           ||  ?  /\              \--\|
>           \/  |  ||                 ||
>  Min  Educ  <===> local community <-++
>           ||  |  /\            \\   ++
>           \/  ?  ||            //__/ |
> teacher<=>teacher<=>teacher<+-<------/
> |   |   | |   |   | |   |   |\  \\  /
> v   v   v v   v   v v   v   v|  // /
> |<=>|<=>| |<=>|<=>| |<=>|<=>|+-<--/
>   kids      kids      kids
>
>
> It is my opinion that the third party Bastien mentions might have to do
> with implementing policies that stress two-way communication, both
> to-from OLPC and end users, and also transversal communication among
> stakeholders including solidly engineered features that *encourage*
> feedback *by default*.

This is the declared mission of Earth Treasury. We want to get whole
schools linked together around the world, child to child, teacher to
teacher, parent to parent, and all of the other possibilities. There
are many education opportunities there, because people in other
countries have different knowledge, different culture, different
resources to share. Discussing how education does and should work is
an important part of the process.

Eventually we want to help children in different countries to create
sustainable international businesses together. There are opportunities
in e-commerce, regular trade, IT outsourcing, and much more. I am in
contact with two coffee-growing communities on mountains in Africa who
want help with processing, marketing, and the rest, so that they can
get a decent share of the final price. Green coffee beans go for
something like $2/lb, and processed coffee for $15 or so for the best
varieties.

Would anybody care to join in and make more of this happen?

> Sorry, but I am totally convinced that is the only way something like
> Constructivism and this whole project has any chance.  I see the current
> OLPC deployment model as being almost sort-of-OK as long as we use
> Instructivist approaches (one-way, no discussion required, thank you,
> keep moving), but not if we want to go further.

The teachers in Peru have been taught some Constructionism, and we
hear they are using some of it.

> Brilliant hardware like the XO, even with Sugar, will not make things
> *happen* if the enforced policies are not actually designed to encourage
> things to happen.

Yes, OLPC won't do it, but we have to go to the Ministries of
Education with research and content in hand and talk about redesigning
textbooks and reorganizing curricula, now that we know how to teach
many subjects at a much earlier age than previously thought. Alan Kay
did a very good demo of the concepts at the last Country Workshop.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Presentations/May_2008_Country_Workshop
5:00 	Beyond the Printing Press: Computers as Learning Environments
for All Children
Alan Kay, President, Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc.

Video:
SWF, http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080520-country-wkshp/Video/2008-05-20/13-Beyond-Printing%20(small).html
Ogg, http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080520-country-wkshp/Video/2008-05-20/13-Beyond-Printing%20(medium).ogg

> *Current*
> Someone from OLPC Boston trains trainers within the Min of Ed, those
> then train teachers (often in a classroom setting, using training
> techniques hundreds of years old), teachers keep using the same old
> approach, "everybody in the class do the same thing" activities, using
> XOs instead of pen and paper.  (Then they find - with surprise - that
> the mesh doesn't work for that).

Fortunately that is not the current model. What do you think is your
source for your version? My sources are reports from Peru (Ivan
Krstić, Ministry officals) and Nepal (Bryan Berry et al.)

> No one in this lot is enabled / enabling to conduct transversal
> communication (oh, it is much talked about, how important it is, Web
> 2.0, and all the rest).
> The OLPC community is somewhere in the shadows, feeling quite unwelcome
> and useless, and getting smaller by the minute.
> Also, this justifies OLPC-Boston in refusing to allow small deployments,
> "because they cost too much".  And it "proves" that the community cannot
> be trusted.

This is not the Yamacandu that I know. Where did this sarcastic,
suspicious Yamacantdu come from?

We have seen reports from Peru of major changes in child behavior due
to sharing of software and communications at school and at home. This
has led to greater openness to strangers, and increased sharing of
physical items among the children.

http://radian.org/notebook/page/9 Astounded in Arahuay

As there are few roads in and around Arahuay, the children don't
communicate much outside of school — with anyone. The teachers started
independently pointing out to Mr. Navarro that this was changing once
the laptops arrived: kids started talking to each other outside of
school hours over the mesh, and working together more while in school.
They started talking a lot more with each other in person, and
conquered their previously paralyzing fear of strangers.

The second thing, Mrs. Cornejo jumped in, is that the kids used to be
pretty selfish, an unsurprising consequence of the abject poverty in
much of Peru. It's not that the kids are starving, it's just that they
don't have very much; what they do have, they're reluctant to share.
With the laptops, the kids had to turn to each other to learn how to
use them. Then they realized it was easy to send each other pictures
and things they've written — and it became commonplace. The sharing,
asserts Mrs. Cornejo, extended into the physical world, where once
jealously-guarded personal items increasingly started being passed
around between the kids, if somewhat nervously.
...
"Children's fathers used to seethe with fury when the laptops were
passed out, because the kids no longer wanted to help work in the
field all day," he continued.
...
"I didn't know how we'd stop the fathers from revolting and making the
kids return their XOs," [Mr. Navarro] says, shaking his head slightly.
"The kids solved the dilemma for me: they taught their fathers how to
use the Internet and a search engine."

"Then they started showing them the work they were doing for school.
The reports they wrote, the pictures they took, the notes they
compiled. And the fathers had actual proof that their kids were
learning," he concluded.

> *Proposed*
> Teachers are trained using tools downloaded into the XOs they have been
> handed (the medium is the message) and hopefully connected to a server
> with training materials (Moodle, for example).

Moodle isn't a training system. It is for administering training
system content, schedules, forums, and a Wiki. It can be used for
instruction or for project-based learning, as I experienced it at
Presidio School of Management.

> While (paid and volunteer) mentors are available, their main role is to
> encourage teachers to submit any doubt or query using interactive tools
> (feedback windows in a Moodle training  (?)).
> Only when that is not giving a prompt solution do the mentors give an
> answer, but avoid it if at all possible (the fact they are not highly
> trained - on purpose - should help here).

This is the same argument as "security through obscurity" rather than
knowing what you are doing. It fails dismally.

On the contrary, mentors need very specific training in facilitation
as opposed to giving instruction, and they should be well-versed in
Constructionism, including how to help teachers discover it for
themselves as much as possible.

> Again, the point is, we are enabling the teachers (the medium is the
> message) to use the XO as a *tool for learning*.
> They do it at their own pace, with some supervision merely to keep them
> motivated and focused,

This is an insult to the profession. We can do much better than this.
The key point is to share, and to have experts on call to guide the
explorations.

> but they can learn from different training modules.
> Fringe benefits:  as the training tool is improved by this sort of
> feedback, very soon we have optimal training tools,

Not in your lifetime. Education is far less susceptible of completion
than, say, math or physics. There are always cranks proclaiming the
end of one or another, but the amount yet to be discovered is far
greater than the amount we know, and the amount that will never be
discovered in any finite human future is far greater still.

> that can be scaled
> up or down, at no additional expense.
>
> Future cost in training materials to train one more teacher or to train
> 10.000 is nearly zero.
>
> Also, teachers learn that there is a different way of doing things in a
> One Laptop Per Person environment:  not everyone needs to be doing the
> same exact thing, friends can band together in a circumstantial group,
> even collaborate using the machine, among themselves, and with others
> connected to the network, in the same school or thousands of miles away.
>
> This gets them to *work together*, maybe for the first time in their
> lives,

Exactly as Ivan says they are doing.

> and is not at all contrary to working together also with Ministry
> people, and OLPC Boston, and the OLPC community, and the local
> community, and, especially, *working together with the kids*, which is
> the ultimate success in re-addressing the school education model toward
> a more fertile approach of the teacher-student interaction.
>
> OLPC Boston and the OLPC community collaborate to prepare these
> materials initially, and lurk and contribute to the feedback process, to
> polish the materials further.

And Sugar Labs, and Earth Treasury, and a whole lot of specialist
societies, and...You?

> Volunteers feel needed, loved, and then maybe there's more of them...
> Being enabled to contribute is the raison d'être of volunteers.
> The local community also comes into the picture, because the model is
> encouraging it to.
>
> Since now we have teachers who *know for a fact* that the XO actually
> works as a learning tool, they have incredible buy-in and encouragement
> to help their kids discover and explore those same possibilities, with a
> different approach as to how a class is conducted, away from the "one
> size fits all" mentality.  Even those teachers who had some difficulties
> "getting it" are much more aware of what's what, than by just being *told*.
>
> Now, that is the way I see what was meant to happen(?), and what
> *should* happen.  There is a disconnect in the present tense, at several
> levels (Bastien mentions a couple), but getting to those is beyond this
> post, that is way too long already.
>
> So, let's establish those policies and framework that actually enable
> using the XOs the way they are meant to be used.
>
> Let's play on "the medium is the message".
>
> Let's work on interactive models for teacher training, that encourage
> teacher-to-teacher collaboration, that encourage teachers exploring and
> discovering, that enable teachers to contribute to other teachers learning.

Let's work on interactions with the children in which the children
design their own educations, with support from any grown-ups who can
remember being a child. The others can help, too, but only if they
promise to listen and not talk.

> Guess what?  Those teachers might then be prepared to pass on those same
> skills and mindset to the kids, painlessly, because they have learned
> *it works*!
>
> Yama

Oh, OK, there he is!

> Bastien wrote:
>> Yama Ploskonka <yama at netoso.com> writes:
>>
>>> Thoughts on this subject, on _how_ to make it happen?
>>
>> I agree that empowering teachers is key.  This happens when teachers
>> work *together*.  And they better work together when they do not only
>> depend on the local Ministry of Education.  Having a third part in the
>> loop certainly helps in making them understand that teaching is about
>> children, not just about "be a teacher in some educational system".
>>
>> XO is the door.  But someone *else* (than the traditional institutional
>> interlocutor) has to enter so that teachers might want to breeze a new
>> air, and get motivated for experimenting new things.
>>
>> As a day-to-day rule: do not only stand by the Ministry of Education,
>> do not only stand by the teachers (because you'll get trapped into their
>> natural hate toward the institution), do not only stand by the children
>> (that's kind of the easy-and-fake solution) -- just bring something new
>> in the middle!
>>
>> PS: sorry I read other contribs on this _after_ I wrote my own rant!
>>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay