Education Policy Outlook 2020: What’s Happened over the Past Decade?

“All that glitters is not gold” is a famous proverb plucked from William Shakespeare‘s play The Merchant of Venice that may well apply to recent international appraisals of K-12 education in Canada. Such rosy assessments tend to put a shiny lustre on what is essentially a sound and ‘pretty good’ school system that has lost ground to competing nations over the past decade.

Five years ago, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD) produced a rather rosy Education Policy Outlook for Canada as part of a series of reports offering comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across the world’s developed countries. Canada’s overall performance, aggregated from widely varied provincial assessment data, looked good, in comparison with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Most significantly, the OECD assessors brushed aside concerns about “plateaued student achievement” on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) tests and the decline in the proportion of top performing students.

Emerging concerns were most clearly expressed in Dr. Paul Cappon’s final 2010 report for the Canadian Council on Learning. Student scores on the 2009 PISA test had revealed that Canadian 15-year-olds demonstrated relatively strong sets of skills in reading, math and science, but they were already slipping relative to high performing Asian countries and in some cases in absolute terms. “What I’m hoping,” Cappon said at the outset of his final cross-Canada tour, “is that when people realize that Canada is slipping down the international learning curve we’re not going to be able to compete in the future unless we get our act together.”

OECD Education Policy Outlook assessments and Country reports are based upon templates that tend to favour diverse and well-funded school systems like that of Canada. The six identified policy levers in 2015 were: 1) equity and quality of education; 2) preparing students for the future; 3) school improvement; 4) evaluation and assessment; 5) governance; and 6) funding.  Such public policy forecasts, based upon conventional criteria and historic trends, also tend to demonstrate “path dependency” which limits the capacity to capture radical shifts in context or dynamic changes in educational direction.

Fifteen-year-old students in Canada, based upon triennial PISA tests from 2000 to 2018, continue to perform above the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science. Our most economically and socially disadvantaged students, in aggregate, do relatively better than those in competing countries, demonstrating more equity than in most other countries.  A considerably higher proportion of Canadian K-12 students proceed to post-secondary education in universities and colleges. That much has not changed across time.

Three significant changes can be identified from the accumulating OECD student assessment and survey data and they deserve far more critical scrutiny:

Downward Trend in Student Performance:  The performance trends for Canadian fifteen-year-olds are consistently downward from 2000 to 2018 in READING,  from 2003 to 2018 in MATHEMATICS, and from 2006 to 2018 in SCIENCE.  While the OECD average scores are also in decline as more countries are included in PISA, the descent is more pronounced among students from Canada. Students in Canada’s top performing provinces of Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec (Mathematics) tend to buoy-up the lagging results produced by students from New Brunswick, Newfoundland/Labrador, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

Deteriorating Classroom Disciplinary Climate:

The 2015 Education Policy Outlook for Canada flagged one measure, based upon student survey responses, where Canada simply met the OECD standard – the index of classrooms conducive to learning (Figure 5, OECD Canada, 2015).  That largely undiagnosed problem has worsened over the past three years.  Canada ranked 60th out of 77 participating nations and educational districts in the OECD’s 2018 index of disciplinary climate, released on December 4, 2019.  According to a global student survey conducted in the spring of 2018, one in five students, 15 years-of-age, report that learning time is lost to noise, distractions, and disorder, so much so that it detracts from learning in class. A relatively high proportion of Canadian students say the teacher is not listened to and it takes a long time for the class to settle down. In addition, students regularly skip school and report late to class.

High Incidence of Fear of Failure:

Personal anxieties may also run higher among Canadian students when they confront writing standardized tests and experience a fear of failing the test. In Canada, the OECD 2019 Education GPS report states, “15-year-old students have a strong fear of failure”ranking 6th among 77 national student groups participating in the survey.  Fear of failure runs highest among students in Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Macau, Japan, and Germany, but is less pronounced in high performing countries such as Korea. Estonia, and Finland.  Such fears are present to the same degree among students in the United Kingdom, but less so in the United States.  No analysis whatsoever is offered to explain why fears run so comparatively high among teens in Canada.

The initial report on the Canadian Results of the OECD PISA 2018 Study, released by the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) in early December 2019, are of little help in evaluating these rather striking trends.  Like previous reports in the CMEC series, the report puts a positive spin on the aggregate results by casting them within a broad, global context, lumping together countries with radically different commitments to education in terms of spending and resources. It is possible to ferret out anomalies and to conduct province-by-province comparisons, but only with time, effort, and attention to detail. That is sufficient to keep it either buried or accessible only to education assessment specialists.

Does the Canadian Education Policy Outlook ventured in 2015 stand up under close analysis. five years on?  What’s missing from the OECD and CMEC assessment reports for Canada over the past decade?  Should the Canadian public be concerned about the downward trend in the demonstration of core skills in reading, mathematics and science?  Is disciplinary climate now a real concern in Canadian classrooms? And why are Canadian students so afraid of failing in our schools when grade promotion and graduation rates are at record levels?

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Educational Future Shock: Is it Wise to Pursue Marc Prensky’s Vision of Our Digital Future?

One of the world’s most infamous digital visionaries, Marc Prensky, specializes in spreading educational future shock.  Fresh off the plane from California, the education technology guru who coined the phrase “digital natives” did it again in Fredericton, the quiet provincial capital of New Brunswick.  Two hundred delegates attending the N.B. Education Summit (October 16-18, 2019) were visibly stunned by his latest presentation which dropped what he described as a series of “bombs” in what has become his ongoing campaign of creative disruption.

His introductory talk, “From giving kids content to kids fixing real world problems,” featured a series of real zingers. “The goal of education,” Prensky proclaimed, “is not to learn, it is to accomplish things.” “Doing something at the margins will not work” because we have to “leapfrog over the present to reach the future.” “When you look out at a classroom, you see networked kids.” Instead of teaching something or developing work-ready skills, we should be preparing students to become “symbiotic human hybrids” in a near future world.

Having spent two breakfasts, totaling more than two hours, face-to-face with Marc Prensky, a few things became crystal clear. The wild success of his obscure 2001 article in On the Horizon on “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” totally surprised him. He is undaunted by the tenacious critics of the research-basis of his claims, and he’s perfectly comfortable in his role as education’s agent provocateur.

Prensky burst on the education scene nearly twenty years ago. His seminal article was discovered by an Australian Gifted Education association in Tasmania, and it exploded from there. Seven books followed, including Digital Game-Based Learning (2001), From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom (2012), and Education to Better Their World (2016).

While riding the wave, he founded his Global Future Foundation based in Palo Alto, California, not far from the home of TED Talks guru Sir Ken Robinson. He is now full-time on the speaking circuit and freely admits that he seeks to “drop a few bombs” in his talks before education audiences. Even though he writes books for a living, he confessed to me that he hasn’t “used a library in years.”

Assembled delegates at the recent Summit were zapped by Prensky in a session designed as a wake-up call for educators. About one-third of the delegates were classroom teachers and they, in particular, greeted his somewhat outlandish claims with barely-concealed skepticism.

Listening to students is good practice, but idealizing today’s kids doesn’t wash with most front-line practitioners.  How should we prepare the next generation? “We treat our kids like PETS (capitalized). Go here, do that… We don’t have to train them to follow us. Let’s treat them as CAPABLE PEOPLE (capitalized).” Making such assumptions about what’s happening in classrooms don’t go over with professionals who, day-in-day-out, model student-focused learning and respect students so much that they would never act that way. Especially so, with teachers struggling to reach students in today’s complex and demanding classroom environments.

Striving for higher student performance standards is not on Prensky’s radar. “Academics have hijacked K-12 education,” he stated. Nor is improving provincial test scores. “We’re not looking to raise PISA scores. That test was designed by engineers – for engineers.” There’s no need to teach content when information is a Google click away, in Prensky’s view.  “All the old stuff is online, so the goal of education is now to equip kids with the power to affect their world.” 

Prensky has survived waves of criticism over the years and remains undaunted by the periodic salvos.  Since inventing the term “digital natives” and becoming their champion, six points of criticism have been raised about his evolving theory of preparing kids for future education:

1. The Generational Divide: The generational differences between “digital natives” and pre-iPod “digital immigrants” are greatly exaggerated because digital access and fluency are more heavily influenced by factors of gender, race and socio-economic status. Millennials may use ‘social media’ technology without mastering the intricacies of digital learning and utilizing its full potential (Reeves 2008, Helsper and Enyon 2009,  Frawley 2017)).
2.  Video-Game Based Learning:  Unbridled advocacy of video-game based learning tends to ignore its negative impacts upon teens, including the glorification of violence, video game addiction, and the prevalence of “digital deprivation” as teens retreat into their private worlds (Alliance for Childhood 2004).
3. Brain Change Theory: Claims that “digital natives” think and process information differently are based upon flimsy evidence, and trace back to work by Dr. Bruce Perry, a Senior Fellow at the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, TX. It actually relates more to how fear and trauma affect the brain. This is often cited as an example of “arcade scholarship” or cherry-picking evidence and applying it to support your own contentions (Mackenzie 2007).
4. Stereotyping of Generations: Young people do not fit neatly into his stereotype of “digital natives” because the younger generation (youth 8-18) is far more complex in its acceptance and use of technology, ranging from light to heavy users of digital technology. Boys who play video games are not representative of the whole generation. (Kaiser Family Foundation 2005, Helsper and Enyon 2009)).
5. Disempowering of Teachers: Changing methodology and curriculum to please children may help to advance student engagement, but it denigrates “legacy learning” and reduces teachers to mere facilitators of technology programs and applications. Dismissing “content knowledge” is unwise, especially when the proposed alternative is process learning and so vacuous (Mackenzie 2007)
6. Digital Deprivation:  Expanded and excessive use of video games and digital toys can foster isolation rather than social connection which can be harmful to children and teens. Some prime examples of those adverse effects are exposure to violence, warped social values, and ethical/moral miseducation  (Turkle 1984, Alliance for Childhood 2004))

Most critical assessments of Marc Pensky’s case for pursuing “digital wisdom” call into question its efficacy and even its existence. “Digital technology can be used to make us not just wiser but smarter” is his more recent contention. Knowing how to make things is “know how” but it is only one type of knowledge and hardly a complete picture of what constitutes human wisdom.

Combining technology with human judgement has advanced through AI (artificial intelligence), but it’s probably foolhardy to call it “digital wisdom.” It implies, to be frank, that only things that can be qualified and turned into algorithms have value and denigrates the wisdom of the ages.  Championing the inventive mind is fine, but that can also lead to blind acceptance of the calculating, self-interested, and socially-unconscious mind. Where humanity perishes, so do the foundations of civilizations.

Why does digital evangelist Marc Prensky stirr up such controversy in the education world?  Where’s the evidence to support his case for the existence of “digital nativism”? Does “digital wisdom” exist or is it just a new term for useful knowledge or “know how”? Should teaching knowledge to students be completely abandoned in the digital education future?  

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Teaching: Will the Next Gen Robots Eventually Replace Teachers?

A recent headline in the New Scientist caught the eye of University College London Professor Rose Luckin, widely regarded as the “Dr. Who of AI in Education.” It read: “AI achieves its best mark ever on a set of English exam questions.” The machine was well on its way to mastering knowledge-based curriculum tested on examinations. What was thrilling to Dr. Luckin, might well be a wake-up call for teachers and educators everywhere.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now driving automation in the workplace and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is dawning. How AI will impact and possibly transform education is now emerging as a major concern for front-line teachers, technology skeptics, and informed parents. A recent Public Lecture by Rose Luckin, based upon her new book Machine Learning and Intelligence, provided  not only a cutting-edge summary of recent developments, but a chilling reminder of the potential unintended consequences for teachers.

AI refers to “technology that is capable of actions and behaviours that require intelligence when done by humans.” It is no longer the stuff of science fiction and popping up everywhere from voice-activated digital assistants in telephones to automatic passport gates in airports to navigation apps to guide us driving our cars. It’s creeping into our lives in subtle and virtually undetectable ways.

AI has not been an overnight success. It originated in September 1956, some 63 years ago, in a Dartmouth College NH lab as a summer project undertaken by ten ambitious scientists.  The initial project was focused on AI and its educational potential. The pioneers worked from this premise: “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”  Flash forward to today — and it’s closer to actual realization.

Dr. Luckin has taken up that challenge and has been working for two decades to develop “Colin,” a robot teaching assistant to help lighten teachers’ workloads. Her creation is software-based and assists teachers with organizing starter activities, collating daily student performance records, assessing the mental state of students, and assessing how well a learner is engaging with lessons.

Scary scenarios are emerging fueled by a few leading thinkers and technology skeptics.  Tesla CEO Elon Musk once warned that AI posed an “existential threat” to humanity and that humans may need to merge with machines to avoid becoming “house cats” to artificially intelligent robots.  Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has forecast that AI will “either be the best thing or the worst thing for humanity.” There’s no need for immediate panic: Current AI technology is still quite limited and remains mechanically algorithmic and programmed to act upon pattern recognition.

One very astute analyst for buZZrobot, Jay Lynch, has identified the potential dangers in the educational domain:

Measuring the Wrong Things

Gathering data that is easiest to collect rather than educationally meaningful. In the absence of directly measured student leaning, AI relies upon proxies for learning such as student test scores, school grades, or self-reported learning gains. This exemplifies the problem of “garbage in, garbage out.”

Perpetuating Bad Ways to Teach

Many AIfE algorithms are based upon data from large scale learning assessments and lack an appreciation of, and input from, actual teachers and learning scientists with a grounding in learning theory. AI development teams tend to lack relevant knowledge in the science of learning and instruction. One glaring example was IBM’s Watson Element for Educators, which was based entirely upon now discredited “learning styles” theory and gave skewed advice for improving instruction.

Giving Priority to Adaptability rather that Quality

Personalizing learning is the prevailing ideology in the IT sector and it is most evident in AI software and hardware. Meeting the needs of each learner is the priority and the technology is designed to deliver the ‘right’ content at the ‘right’ time.  It’s a false assumption that the quality of that content is fine and, in fact, much of it is awful. Quality of content deserves to  be prioritized and that requires more direct teacher input and a better grasp of the science of learning.

Replacing Humans with Intelligent Agents

The primary impact of AI is to remove teachers from the learning process — substituting “intelligent agents” for actual human beings. Defenders claim that the goal is not to supplant teachers but rather to “automate routine tasks” and to generate insights to enable teachers to adapt their teaching to make lessons more effective.  AI’s purveyors seem blind to the fact that teaching is a “caring profession,” particularly in the early grades.

American education technology critic Audrey Watters is one of the most influential skeptics and she has expressed alarm over the potential unintended consequences. ” We should ask what happens when we remove care from education – this is a question about labor and learning. What happens to thinking and writing when robots grade students’ essays, for example. What happens when testing is standardized, automated? What happens when the whole educational process is offloaded to the machines – to “intelligent tutoring systems,” “adaptive learning systems,” or whatever the latest description may be? What sorts of signals are we sending students?”  The implicit and disturbing answer – teachers as professionals are virtually interchangeable with robots.

Will teachers and robots come to cohabit tomorrow’s classrooms? How will teaching be impacted by the capabilities of future AI technologies? Without human contact and feedback, will student motivation become a problem in education?  Will AI ever be able to engage students in critical thinking or explore the socio-emotional domain of learning? Who will be there in the classroom to encourage and emotionally support students confronted with challenging academic tasks?

 

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Pearson’s 2025 Plan to Transform Teaching : What’s the Education International Critique Missing?

The new world of Artificial Intelligence is upon us and teaching may never be the same.  That’s the upshot of a new report by Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan for Education International focusing on Pearson’s Plan for 2025 and its implications for teachers everywhere.  The two researchers see dangers ahead with the introduction of AI into the teaching domain and warn of the further expansion of private interests, while embracing the need for technology-enhanced learning and implicitly accepting 21st century student-centred teaching pedagogies. 

The world’s largest learning corporation, Pearson International, is pursuing a visionary plan to advance the “next generation ” of teaching and learning by developing cutting-edge digital learning platforms, including Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd).  It is now piloting new AI technologies that will, in time, enable “virtual tutors’ to provide “personalized learning” to students, much like Siri or Alexa. The Pearson Plan for 2025 calls for this technology to be integrated into a single platform — Pearson Realize — that has been integrated into Google Classroom. The ultimate goal is to forge direct and lifelong relationships with Pearson product educational users to whom it will provide virtual schooling, professional certifications, assessments, and other services.

Pearson’s Plan for 2025 does raise alarm bells for teachers. The corporate strategy is premised upon causing “educational disruptions” with respect to 1) the teaching profession, 2) the delivery of curriculum and assessment, and 3) the function of schools, particularly those in the public sector.  Such changes are unsettling for Sellar and Hogan, but they still laud the potential benefits of technology enhancements and their “combination with new kinds of teacher professionalism’

The underlying philosophy was expressed in a December 2014 Pearson policy paper prepared by Peter Hill and Michael Barber with a grandiose title, “Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment.”  While Pearson marketing is decidedly teacher-friendly, the Hill and Barber paper belies that image, making a strong case for improving “teacher quality” as a pre-condition for “transforming teaching”  and achieving better student outcomes.  Here is how they described the desired transformation:

from a largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionised, bureaucratically controlled semi-profession into a true profession with a distinctive knowledge base, a framework for teaching, well defined common terms for describing and analysing teaching at a level of specificity and strict control by the profession itself, on entry into the profession (Hill and Barber, 2014, 20). 

Teaching, according to Hill and Barber, is also bedeviled by classroom practitioners who guard their autonomy.  The problem was that teaching was an “imprecise and idiosyncratic process  that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers” (Hill and Barber, 38). That implied that most teachers cannot be trusted, despite their university education, professional registration, teaching certification, continuous professional learning, and professional standards of practice.

Teachers, it seems, were “the problem” in the eyes of Pearson education experts Hill and Barber.   Transforming teaching for 21st century learning, it followed, required the “overthrowing” and “repudiating” of the “classroom teacher as the imparter of knowledge” and replacing them with “increasing reliance on sophisticated tutor/online instruction.’ ( Hill and Barber, 23). Computerized “personalized learning,” in their view, was the answer and the way of the future.

The Pearson Plan for 2025 does not, as the Education International researchers repeatedly point out, call for “replacing teachers.” They do recognize that the introduction of new technologies does carry certain risks such as the “routinisation of teaching tasks,” but also seem to accept the benefits of the new technologies for developing complementary skills. What is flagged is the dangers posed by the routinisation of teaching by Pearson and its subsidiaries in “low fee” private schools in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and parts of South-East Asia.

The Education International critique, oddly enough, gives the philosophy, program and assessment dimension of 21st century learning a free pass.  “Many have called for the reform of schooling,” they note, ” to modernize this nineteenth century institution, particularly in regards to the provision of homogeneous curriculum, age-based learning, and traditional models of teacher-led instruction.” Such changes are fine with them unless they lead to the automation of teaching and the replacement of teachers with robots or virtual tutors.

Much of the rest of the Sellar and Hogan critique of Pearson 2025 is predictable and essentially well-founded.  Technology-enhanced teaching and learning is part of the emerging “infrastructure of modernity” and, as such, needs to be confronted and tamed.  While there is a place for Global Education Industry(GEI) giants like Pearson and Google, we do need to guard against potential problems and encroachments that further erode teaching as a profession. Their critique would have been considerably strengthened by citing the critical research of Ben Williamson, author of Big Data in Education, and a leading expert on the OECD’s plan to introduce “stealth assessment.”

Technology-driven education can lead to greater social inequalities, creeping privatization, displacement of teachers, spread of routinized teaching models, the illicit corporate collection of data, and the  degradation of teaching into a personalized experience focused almost entirely on individual knowledge and skills.

International education researchers such as Sellar and Hogan still seem mesmerized by the allure of the “21st century learning” panacea, the new pedagogy of deep learning, and technological enhancements in the class room. There is still no real recognition that the purveyors of learning technology actually stand in the way of “future-proofing” the next generation.

What’s the real agenda of Pearson International’s global education plan for 2025?  Where do classroom teachers fit in the “next generation” of teaching and learning?  To what extent will teachers be displaced by robots in the friendly guise of “virtual tutors”?  Should teachers put their faith in Pearson Education experts who are out to reduce the influence of “idiosyncratic” classroom practitioners and particularly those who favour explicit instruction and a “knowledge-rich curriculum”? 

 

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High Security Schools: Should Schools Install Spy Cameras to Monitor Students?

Schools around the globe are entering a new era of electronic surveillance.  Heightened security threats, high tech innovation and personal data profiling are making for a dangerous combination when it comes to civil rights. One American school system, the Lockport City School District near Buffalo, NY, is trumpeting its plan to spend $2.7 million to install high-tech surveillance cameras in its public schools.  Over in China, Hangzhou No. 11 High School, has just attracted world-wide attention for installing cameras to take attendance and track every activity of students, including reading, writing or listening. High tech, it seems, has a solution for most of today’s school problems and challenges.

School shootings are an all-too frequent and tragic phenomenon in American schools.  The Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, claimed the lives of 20 children and 6 teachers. One American gun safety organization, Everytown Research, has identified at least 315 incidents of gunfire on U.S. school grounds since 2013. When it comes to how American children are exposed to gun violence, gunfire at schools is just the tip of the iceberg–every year, over 2,700 children and teens are shot and killed and nearly 14,500 more are shot and injured.  An estimated 3 million U.S. children are exposed to shootings per year.

School security is definitely a growth industry, right across the United States and increasingly in Canadian urban school districts. In the wake of the recent rash of shootings, educators are asking what more can be done to safeguard students, leading to some rather radical proposals from arming teachers to essentially security-proofing schools.

Shortly after Sandy Hook, Tony Olivo of Corporate Screening and Investigative Group, was invited to Lockport City School District and began conducting school security assessments in the spring of 2013. He and his team sold Superintendent Michelle Bradley on the latest technological solution — SN Tech’s facial recognition software, known as Aegis. The technology was actually developed by SN Tech based in Gananoque, Ontario. In 2016, the company held demonstrations at facilities, including Erie 1- BOCES, in Western New York and those sessions were attended by representatives from some 40 school districts. Lockport City School District became the first to adopt the software and to incorporate it into the district’s $3.8 million security enhancement project.  It is also a real pioneer, since most other Niagara County districts have chosen to invest more in classroom technology than in school surveillance.

SN Tech’s Aegis software for schools provides heavy duty surveillance, similar to that found in casinos and high security facilities. It includes a facial recognition tool called “Sentry,” a shape recognition tool called “Protector, ” and a forensic search engine called “Mercury.” The Gananoque company claims that “Sentry” can alert school officials if suspended students, fired employees, known sex offenders or gang members  enter a school. “The Protector” is designed to recognize any of “the top ten guns used in school shootings,” including AR-15-style rifles.

While utilizing similar high tech software, the Chinese school is turning it to different purposes. Facial recognition software is used in its cafeteria and library, supposedly for the convenience of students. Several classrooms have been equipped with cameras that can recognize the emotions of students, tapping into artificial intelligence (AI) but raising plenty of concerns about monitoring students for purposes of behavioural compliance. Installed in March of 2018, the Chinese system provides real-time data on students’ outward expressions. tracking whether they look happy, scared, surprised, angry, disgusted, or neutral (disengaged). The whole project is touted as a leading-edge way of ensuring that students are attentive and happy, learning quickly and being prepared well for tests.

Both high tech initiatives raise fundamental issues and deserve to be challenged by educators, parents, and concerned citizens. In China, the Hangzhou High School system has drawn fire from brave citizens and Chinese expatriates. One 23-year-old photographer went online with his critique. “This technology is so twisted, it’s anti-human,” he wrote, likening the students to robots. A Chinese-born Harvard researcher, Jiang Xueqin, saw it as an example of using education as a means of social control. He predicted that it would lead to further “mass experiments” in how to predict and to channel student behaviours.

Installing cameras in Upstate New York schools has not gone unchallenged.  One Niagara County parent and activist, Jim Shultz, put the concerns of many citizens into words.  In April of 2018, he spoke out publicly against the Lockport City School District plan. “The Lockport district,” he wrote in the Lockport Journal, is “making a big mistake” in spending “a huge amount of money” that “could be far better spent on our children’s education and on much wiser security measures at well.”

Three fundamental problems have been raised with the district’s plan.  First, the claim that it is a huge waste of taxpayer’s money that will not necessarily make the schools safer. It was estimated to cost $500 per student and had not been used successfully anywhere else because of glitches.  Second, the project represented an unprecedented invasion of both student and teacher privacy. It could easily be used by administration to conduct investigations for other purposes, including student and staff discipline. Finally, the community of Lockport was never properly consulted about the use of “spy cameras’ until after the initiative was well underway had been made and only a few weeks before the board’s final decision on approving a budget allocation.

Installing cameras and facial recognition software in schools does raise broader concerns. Does the security threat warrant such radical technological  interventions? Should schools use such high tech innovations to monitor and track the activities, movements and expressions of all students and staff in public schools? In establishing limits on electronic surveillance, where might schools draw the line?  At what point do schools begin to resemble high security zones and/or custodial institutions like detention centres? 

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Edutopian Visions: Will Any of the Forecasted “Disruptions” Actually Happen?

American education professor Peter W. Cookson, Jr., currently President of Ideas without Borders, recently set the education world atwitter with a futuristic October 10, 2017 Education Week commentary.  Under the eye-catching title, “Ten Disruptions That Will Revolutionize Education,“ Dr. Cookson proclaimed with declaratory certainty that “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology will prove significant for education” in the not-too-distant future.

His Education Week commentary provides a fine example of what Canadian journalist and author Dan Gardner has aptly termed “Future Babble.”  In his 2011 book of the same name, he demonstrated that “experts” in any given field were just slightly better at making predictions than a dart-throwing chimp. In addition, the more certain an expert was of a predicted outcome, and the bigger their media profile, and the less accurate the prediction was likely to be.

Reading Dr. Cookson’s rather ‘edutopian’ musings and mindful of the past record of modern day soothsayers, it’s fair to ask whether any of the ten “disruptions” will ever “revolutionize education.”

Let’s start by summarizing his hypothesis and reviewing his list of “creative disruptions” forecasted to “revolutionize” schooling. The advance of machines, according to Peter Cookson, was to be embraced rather than resisted like the plague. “The development of advanced artificial intelligence, or super-intelligence,” he contended,”opens up doors to discoveries never before imagined. While opinions vary about the speed with which superintelligence will develop, there is little doubt that within the next decade, the cognitive landscape will be very different than it is today.”

Here is the full list of purportedly positive “disruptions”:

1. Digital learners will rebel against intellectual conformity.

2. Learning avatars will become commonplace.

3. Participatory-learning hubs will replace isolated classrooms.

4. Inquiry skills will drive learning.

5. Capacities will matter more than grades.

6. Teachers will become inventors.

7. School leaders will give up their desks.

8. Students and families will become co-learners and co-creators.

9. Formal credentials will no longer be the Holy Grail.

10. Policymakers will form communities of continuous improvement.

His summation amounts to a declaration of faith in the new gospel of “21st century learning.” “If education stays stuck in the past, generations of students will be miseducated,” Cookson claims. “They (students) won’t be equipped to thrive in a world of new ideas and technologies. The current task of educators should be to embrace these changes with an open mind and consider how new disruptions can aid, rather than hinder, learning for all students.”

Cookson’s vision of a digital learning future proved tantalizing to leading education education observers and, whether intended or not, was seen as a provocation.  University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham responded tersely on Twitter: “My bold prediction: none of these 10 will disrupt education. None.”

All but one of the 16 comments on the post on the Education Week website dismissed Cookson’s forecast as either sheer nonsense or a threatening forecast of a dystopian future where teachers were supplanted by robots.  Most of the teacher respondents considered the commentary the hallucinations of a “21st century education” futurist.  Canadian education blogger and Math/Technology teacher David Wees rejected Cookson’s forecast entirely and provided a ‘reality check’ list of his own, pointing out the real obstacles to American educational advance, including the status and salaries accorded to teachers, inequitable funding and resources, and the stark inequalities facing students from marginalized communities.

Cookson’s forecast is so problematic that it is hard to decide where to start and whether there is enough space in a short blog commentary to take issue with each of his prognostications.  Since Cookson provides no research evidence to support his claims, you are expected to accept them as unassailable truths. If one thing is abundantly clear, Cookson exhibits a significant blind spot in his total neglect of the “knowledge domain” in his brief in support of embracing technology-driven. “21st century learning.”

Dr. Willingham is essentially correct in his critique of the education futurists. Since 2008, he has been sounding the alarm that the pursuit of “21st century skills” will prove unwise because the acquisition and application of knowledge still matters and will continue to matter in the future.  Without sound background knowledge, students have more difficulty mastering reading and are susceptible to online hoaxes such as the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus activity. He goes further in pointing out that mathematics, science, reading, civics, and history are more critical in K-12 education than what are termed “21st century skills.”

Being attuned and open to new research and pedagogical advances is desirable and but so is applying a skeptical eye when confronted with unproven theories. Willingham, for example, is not opposed, per se, to developing critical capacities in students, particularly in new media literacy.  Yet, he and other prominent edutopia skeptics, still worry that futurists are leading us astray and they certainly have past experience on their side.

Where are North American edutopian educators like Peter W. Cookson, Jr. leading us?  Where did he come up with the purported “creative disruptions”?  Is there any evidence, that such changes will improve student achievement or produce better informed, more productive citizens? Without radical changes in the socio-economic conditions of, and schooling provision for, marginalized students, can we expect much of an improvement?  And finally, is it sound thinking to put so much faith in the transformative powers of technology? 

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Building on Illusions: Should Schools Prepare Students for Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet?

Making space for creativity in the classroom sounds like common sense. Few educators today would dispute the wisdom of challenging students to think critically and to solve problems in creative ways. When it is elevated to the primary goal of elementary schools, displacing the acquisition of foundational knowledge and skills, it’s time to ask deeper and more fundamental questions.

Teacher Aaron Warner, initiator of the Google-inspired “Genius Hour” at Regina’s Douglas Park Elementary School, is definitely a true believer in teaching creativity.  Justifying his two hour-a-week program in a new book, Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and Nancy Steinhauer’s Pushing the Limits (2017), Warner provides this declaratory statement: “Sixty per cent of the jobs of the future haven’t been invented yet.”  That “insight”, we are told, echoes Sir Ken Robinson’s contention in “Do Schools Kill Creativity?,” the most watched TED Talk of all time.  It is Robinson, of course, who uttered what became that simple, unassailable, unverifiable educational truth that “creativity” is central in developing education that will “take us to a future we can’t grasp.”

What’s the problem with repeating Robinson’s claim and citing a statistic to support that hypothesis? It’s a classic example of transforming education or “building the future schoolhouse,” on what Hack Education commentator Audrey Watters has termed “theory of mythical proportions”  instead of evidence-based policy-making. Citing the statistic that  “60% (or 65%) of future jobs have not been invented yet,” is doubly problematic because no one can authenticate the research behind that oft-repeated statistic.

Two enterprising British teacher-researchers, Daisy Christodoulou and Andrew Old, recently tracked the origin  of that statistic and found it essentially without substance. On the BCC World News Service program, More or Less, aired May 29, 2017, they identified how that statistic originated and got parroted around the globe.  Most fascinating of all, one of the researchers who popularized the claim, Dr. Cathy Davidson, of The Graduate Center CUNY, has now reached similar conclusions and ceased repeating the “65% statistic.”

“I haven’t used that figure since about 2012,” Davidson said, in response to the BBC News investigation.  Her explanation of how the statistic disappeared is revealing about the sorry state of educational policy discourse, not only in Canada but across the world.

The disputed statistic was promulgated in Davidson’s 2011 book, Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.  The figure, she says, didn’t originate with her.  She first encountered it in futurist Jim Carroll’s book, Ready, Set, Done (2007). and it has been tracked down to an Australian website where the “65%” figure was quoted with some visuals and categories of new jobs that hadn’t existed before. After Now You See It  appeared, that 65% figure kept being quoted so Davidson attempted to contact the authors of the study to be able to learn more about their findings but with no luck.  By then, the site was down and even the Innovation Council of Australia had been closed by a new government.

Since the reputed source of the statistical claim had disappeared, Davidson began issuing a disclaimer and stopped repeating the figure. She also embraced “Big Data” and started to deconstruct what the category of “job” really means. Much to the surprise of the British researchers, Davidson welcomed the probing questions and agreed that educators need to be far more careful about their use of statistical claims, and, most significantly, the wisdom of “using statistics like that at all.”

Why is 65% so problematic?  The BBC researchers, Christodoulou and Old, also did rough calculations by looking at jobs that exist now and jobs that existed in the past and compared job titles.   They found that maybe 1/3 of all jobs today are actually “new,” even by the most generous count.  That’s 33% not 65% and hardly justification for turning the entire school system upside down.

No one has yet challenged one of Daisy Christodoulou’s key points in the BBC News broadcast. When asked whether “21st century skills” would last, she responded that, in her judgement, “the alphabet (language) and numbers (numerology)” would outlive us all. Surely that claim deserves a much wider public discussion.

Davidson has abandoned that unverified statistic and changed her rationale for system-wide change in the direction of “21st century learning.” Her brand new book, The New Education: How To Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (2017), carefully avoids recycling the statistic and, instead, claims with “intuition” rather than “data” that “closer to 100 per cent of jobs have changed in some way” in recent decades.

The American promulgator of the “65% statistic” has definitely backtracked on one of her best known claims. The whole episode has real implications for Canadian education policy discourse. Indeed, it raises serious questions about a whole set of related claims made in Pushing the Limits that schools have to be “transformed to prepare kids for jobs that don’t exist.”

What is the research base for the popular claim that schools should be transformed to “prepare students for jobs not invented yet”? Should we base system-wide reform on unassailable, unverified claims in Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talks?  Is the spread of the “65% statistic” another example of “bias confirmation’?  Are promoters of “creativity in schools” expanding the space for creativity or looking to displace foundational skills?  Most significantly, how do we dispel claims made using questionable research data? 

 

 

 

 

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Technology, E-Learning and Teachers: Why Do Most ‘Digital Age’ Ed-Tech Initiatives Run Aground ?

Why do so many “Digital Age” Ed-Tech initiatives run aground in the classroom? That was the critical question that I tackled on September 10, 2016, at the researchED 2016 National Conference in London, UK.  My short presentation set out to confront the significant challenges posed for classroom teachers by initiatives attempting to usher in what is now termed the “Brave New World” of 21st century learning. It also attempted to pick-up and further develop insights gleaned from Tom Bennett’s thought-provoking 2013 book, Teacher Proof, an indispensable little handbook for every teacher who’s been introduced to an ‘innovative’ teaching strategy or ‘new’ curriculum and been told that it is “based upon the research.”

The current 21st Century Learning mantra likely found its origins in a very influential November 2000 OECD Schooling for Tomorrow address by Sir Michael Barber, British PM Tony Blair’s chief education advisor. In his sppech, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Re-conceptualizing Public Education,” he provided the essential narrative, replicated in most of the derivative education initiatives:

“The explosion of knowledge about the brain and the nature of learning, combined with the growing power of technology, creates the potential to transform even the most fundamental unit of education: the interaction of the teacher and the learner. Moreover, huge social changes, such as growing diversity and population mobility, present educators with new and constantly changing circumstances. As a result, the characteristics which defined the successful education systems of, say, 1975, are unlikely to be those which will define success in the future.”

Barber and his disciples unleashed what I term “Big Idea mimmickry” that popped up in a whole series of top-down education policy spin-offs ranging from the infamous June 2009 UK “Your Child, Your Schools,Our Future” declaration to New Brunswick’s short-lived 2010 “21st Century Learning” initiative (NB3-21C) with its bizarre CRT2 formula, with C standing for “Creativity,” R representing “Relevance,” the first T signifying “Time” and the second one “Technology.” In the case of New Brunswick, it provided a convenient new pedagogy to accompany the mass distribution of laptops to all of the province’s teachers. While the NB plan fizzled and died, its initiator, Deputy Minister John D. Kershaw, resurrected it and took it nation-wide rebranded as C21 Canada: Canadians for 21st Century Learning and Innovation, championed by the Council of Ministers of Education and bankrolled by Canadian branches of the world’s leading learning corporations.

Most “Digital Age Revolution” plans, like the September 2015 North Carolina version, promote “binary thinking” pitting the “old” against the “new,” analogue vs. digital, and traditional vs digital age/progressive.  It all rests upon the purely theoretical assumption that constructivist learning is better than explicit instruction, and proceeds to perpetuate such false dichotomies. The latest iteration, Michael Fullan’s “New Pedagogies of Deeper Learning,” hatched with Barber and Pearson Education, is the most recent example of Digital Age pedagogical theory rooted in such fallacious thinking.

Twenty first century learning advocates set out to “Shift Minds” utilizing You Tube videos mimicking Colorado IT teacher Karl Fisch’s 2006 smash hit, Shift Happens.  Riding that 21st century bicycle has proven difficult, facing an uphill climb against stiff headwinds emanating from resistant classroom teachers and legions of concerned elementary school parents.

Three dominant ideologies have recently arisen to propel the latest phase of high-tech education: personalization, robotization, and Goolization. Mass introduction of ICT is now packaged as a way of “personalizing” education for today’s students, allowing them to work more independently and to proceed at their own pace.  Preparing pupils for a life “dancing with robots” is now accepted uncritically as a necessity in the 21st century workplace.  School districts once cautious about technology integration are turning to Google for single-source agreements to get free or heavily discounted access to Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Few  education bureaucrats seem to question these priorities or the implications of such technological initiatives.

Education policy analysts like Stanford Education professor Larry Cuban and Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters have issued periodic warnings about the impact of “machines” on teachers in the classroom. In Teachers and Machines, Cuban examined previous cycles of classroom technology from film strip projectors to calculators. Every new innovation, he shows, has followed the same pattern in the classroom: adoption by teachers, inflated claims by enthusiasts, deflated expectations, then followed by a new technological panacea.

So far, ed-tech has not transformed how teachers teach in the classroom. That’s the firm assessment of Larry Cuban in a June 2015 piece posted on the Education Week Digital Learning Blog. It also prompted me to dig a little deeper to find our why there is such teacher resistance to initiatives seeking to introduce widespread e-learning in K-12 schools.

Based upon my own recent research, conducted for an upcoming chapter in the Springer Guide to Digital Learning in K-12 Schools (September 2016), the explanation is deceptively simple. Top-down initiatives branded with “21st Century Learning” labels tend to falter and rarely succeed in winning over regular teachers or in penetrating the so-called ‘black box’ of the school classroom. The potential of e-learning will only be realized when initiatives enjoy the support of regular classroom teachers and engage those teachers from the school-level up.

Top-down initiatives simply do not work in education, and a succession of struggling high-tech education initiatives are proving this every school day in classrooms world-wide. Four critical factors come into play in undoing such initiatives: great teaching still matters most, “sheep dip” tech-ed training does not last, new pedagogies are merely ‘warmed-over’ constructivist ventures, and teachers integrate IT only when it demonstrably improves their teaching effectiveness.

All is not lost when it comes to introducing technology and e-learning in the classroom, if the hard lessons are absorbed by wise education policy makers and head teachers, capable of tuning out 21c learning missionaries and IT zealots. It will take what I describe as a “flexible, agile, responsive approach” starting with teachers themselves.

To that end, at researchEd 2016 in London, I proposed four strategies with a better chance of succeeding in winning over today’s teachers.

1: Support Early Adopters committed to Technology Integration and initiating Blended Learning Programs

2: Strengthen and expand Existing and ‘Seed’ New Self-Directed Online Learning Programs

3: Focus on building the A La Carte  Model of Blended Learning Programs in Junior and Senior High Schools

4: Build School Leadership capacity in E-Learning, Change Management, and Disruptive Innovation

5: Develop and test (before proceeding large-scale) more reliable measures of the effectiveness of E-Learning Program innovations.

What is really needed is a much more strategic, longer-term Technology Integration plan in our school systems. Teachers must be in full control of the technology— to produce true deeper knowledge of much greater benefit to students.  Students and teachers are yearning for more stimulating and engaging classroom instruction, tapping into the potential of e-learning. We deserve much more from our schools.  My presentation was intended, in a small way, to demystify e-learning in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Why do high-sounding 21st century learning initiatives fail to gain traction among classroom teachers?  When will high-tech education advocates begin to demonstrate that their have absorbed the hard lessons?  Is my modest set of proposals worth pursuing?  Would it work – where it counts – with teachers and students in the classroom? 

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Back to School Euphoria: What’s New about the “New Pedagogies of Deep Learning”?

Grade 1 teacher Tammy Doyle is positively euphoric about the return of school.  After 25 years in the elementary classroom, the Ottawa Catholic School Board teacher featured in a recent Canadian Press story no longer considers herself a “teacher” of children. She now calls herself a “learning partner.”

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Play learning is making a comeback in the Digital Age. “We want to stop having education delivered and make (the children) creators of their education,” Doyle says of the efforts to “build a more collaborative classroom” with the help of technology. “I think it’s incredible if we can empower our kids for tomorrow– not looking back to yesterday or even today…That’s the definition of empowerment and innovation and it begins with that simple shifting mindset. ”

What has come over Tammy and some of her elementary school confreres?  It’s called “New Pedagogies for Deep Learning” or NPDL for short, the latest innovation concocted by Dr. Michael Fullan, Canada’s globally-renowned school change theorist.  The Three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are passe to Fullan and his new disciples because Deep Learning seeks to develop what are termed Fullan’s Six Cs: character education, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. 

The Ottawa Catholic Board is one of 15 school districts in Ontario and Manitoba working to implement  and “disseminate” these ideas in practice. It’s all being done in advance of developing instruments to assess and support the new outcomes.  Creating “digital ecosystems” in the classroom is, all of a sudden, more important than teaching effectiveness, mastering the fundamentals, and improving student math outcomes.

The latest iteration of 21st Century Digital Learning has just sprung out of a project, spearheaded by Sir Michael Barber and Pearson Education, involving some 100 school districts in 10 countries as part of a global push to reshape education for the Digital Age. While Barber has conceded that, so far, educational technology’s impact on “learner outcomes” has been “disappointing,” the technological revolution, in his words, “does not allow us to abandon our ambition to use technology in classrooms.” That’s why he commissioned Fullan, his Chief Research Officer Maria Langworthy and other “leading education thinkers” to reinvent teaching pedagogy to deploy technology in ways that will “transform learner outcomes.”

FullansSixCs

In his Foreward to to the January 2014 White Paper, A Rich Seam, Sir Michael Barber lauds Fullan and Langworthy for conceiving of the “new pedagogy” based upon “a learning partnership” between and among students and teachers. In one memorable passage, he also concedes that “much of what Fullan and Langworthy describe is not new at all,” but building upon the so-called “Progressive” tradition going back through to Piaget, Vygotsky and other key theorists.”

If so, why do it all again? For two reasons: First, the “new pedagogy” was emerging — he claimed– “not in laboratories or universities, but at the frontline, in classrooms” across the globe in response to “the crisis of boredom and frustration among students and career disillusionment among teachers.”  And secondly, educators had little choice, fully immersed in digital ubiquity and struggling to stay Alive in the Swamp, but to integrate technology into their classroom practice.

All of this demonstrates that what British teacher Tom Bennett termed the “Cult of Shift Happens” has now surfaced in Canada (Ontario), the United States (California), the United Kingdom, and four other countries. in a new guise. The familiar Shift Happens mindset, sparked by Barber in his 2000 OECD Rotterdam Address, and immortalized in Colorado teacher Karl Fisch’s viral futuristic Did You Know? YouTube video, is back in a peculiar fusion of old, unproven, pseudo-scientific innovations, borrowing heavily from Project-Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, and Change Leadership, now from the Middle (LftM) rather than the Top or Bottom of school systems.

Some current advocates of NPDL like Richard Messina, Principal of the OISE’s Institute of Child Study Laboratory School, favour Inquiry-Based Learning, a pedagogical model with proven benefits for academically-able students. Such innovative approaches work better in “hot house” elementary education environments than in what Barber describes as the “ordinary schools.”  In Messina’s Toronto private school, it’s easy to imagine Grade 4 students creating their own science experiments, generating their own curriculum, and utilizing technology programs such as Knowledge Forum to assist with research. So far, it hasn’t worked notably well in mainstream classrooms.

“New Pedagogy” zealots such as Tammy Doyle and her Director of Education Denise Andre sound born again in espousing the latest educational fad springing from the still fertile mind of  Michael Fullan and his coterie.  While Doyle sees “a bit of chaos” as up to 80 six-year-olds wander in and out of their four Grade 1 classrooms, she’s all revved-up about their excitement.  “It’s unlike education that we have ever had and experienced,” she says, because “the kids are going home excited and talking about it.” Then comes the ever-popular 21st Century Learning mantra: “We’re preparing kids for jobs we don’t know are going to exist in the future.”

What’s so new about integrating technology into the learning process?  How many of the “new pedagogies” accept the critical need for explicit instruction, particularly in certain cumulative subjects?  Is the Deeper Learning movement really a venture aimed at undercutting and eventually eliminating provincial core subject assessments?  How wise is it to implement Michael Fullan’s Six Cs when we have no reliable, research-based way of assessing such competencies? 

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Coding Curriculum Initiatives: Where Does Coding with ‘Beebots’ Lead Our Kids?

Among the Canadian provinces Nova Scotia was an “early adopter” of incorporating coding into its Kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum. Basic coding was introduced in September 2015 to all students from kindergarten to Grade 3 and Education Minister Karen Casey has been boasting that Nova Scotia is already “a national leader” in teaching computer coding to elementary school kids.  That’s a bit of political puffery because, in doing so, the province is actually following a few other educational jurisdictions, including Great Britain (2014-15) and the State of Arkansas, and only slightly ahead of British Columbia and Finland.

In announcing $1-million more in 2016-17 funding for the Coding for Kids project, the Nova Scotia Department trotted out a pair of Grade 6 students to demonstrate how to program “beebots” — small, yellow-and-black robot toys shaped like bumble bees. A cleverly titled Canadian Press story on the photo op by Keith Doucette captured the moment with an ironic twist: “‘Beebots’ to teach coding in Nova Scotia classrooms.” A recent series of CBC Radio interviews featuring Ryerson Communications Technology professor Ramona Pringle merely confirmed the impression that coding was being promoted as another vehicle to advance “play learning” rather than introductory computer programming.

Teaching “coding” to young children is the latest exemplar of so-called “21st century learning” and it amounts to introducing basic “programming” in the early years, instead of waiting to offer “computer science” in the junior and senior high schools, as was the case from the 1960s to the early 1980s.  That early curriculum essentially withered and died with the arrival of mass word processing and the spread of computer applications courses.

While teaching coding is heavily promoted by the global high tech industry and local off-shoots like Code Kids.com and Brilliant Labs, the emerging coding curriculum philosophy and activities stem from other sources.  Leading advocates such as best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff, former UK coding champion Lottie Dexter, and  CBC Tech columnist Pringle see coding as a “new literacy” symbolically described as “the Three Rs plus C.”

In a summary of his 2011 book, Program or Be Programmed, Rushkoff put it succinctly: “As we come to experience more and more of our world and one another through our digital interfaces, programming amounts to basic literacy…. Once people come to see the way their technologies are programmed, they start to recognize the programs at play everywhere else – from the economy and education to politics and government.”

Introducing coding has generated a robust and enlightening debate seemingly everywhere but in Canada. The Year of Code initiative launched in 2014 in the United Kingdom drew plenty of critical fire and actually claimed a victim, its chief promoter Lottie Dexter.  After flaming-out on the British TV show Newsnight, her rather giddy performance was became fodder for skeptics who saw the coding curriculum initiative as an “elaborate publicity stunt designed to falsely inflate the UK’s tech credentials.”

Critics of the British coding initiative focus on the wisdom of latching onto the “latest language” and introducing it to very young students.  “Coding is seen as the new Latin,” claimed Donald Clark, the former CEO of the firm Epic Group and a self-described technology in education evangelist.  ” (Coding) is a rather stupid obsession where politicians and PR people, none of whom can code, latch onto ‘reports’ by people who have no business sense or worse, a regressive agenda.” One British technology expert, Emannuel Straschnov, goes further, claiming that today’s  coding and programming languages will likely become obsolete in the future.

Coding skeptics are clear on one key point of criticism. The early adopter educational jurisdictions suck as the U.K., Nova Scotia and Arkansas, lack enough teachers with the coding experience and relevant computer science knowledge to effectively introduce the new programs of study, across the board,  from kindergarten to high school. A frontline teacher in Bristol, England, spoke for most when he decried the “lack of support” and distinct feeling that “it wasn’t clear what was going on” with the initiative until far too late in the implementation.

Software engineer Tristan Irwin of Sioux City, Iowa, sees a deeper problem stemming from the confusion over what we are actually teaching in the schools. On an April 2011 Quora discussion thread, he drew a sharp distinction between the “programmer” and the “coder,” noting that the former was a creator, while the latter was essentially “an assembly line worker.”  As Software Engineering has become more commodified, he added, there’s less demand for programmers and more demand for coders.  His analysis strongly suggested that teaching coding may only succeed in producing a whole generation of “code grinders” in the workplace.

Prominent Mathematics educators like Barry Garelick are sharply critical of the new coding curriculum and its associated pedagogy.  In August 2016, Garelick took direct aim at the Nova Scotia initiative. He’s particularly concerned about its dumbing-down of “coding” into “pictoral symbols for commands” and the total absence of explicit instruction in the recommended teaching strategies.  Most Math teachers fear that “coding” will further erode classroom time for Math and do little or nothing to prepare students for true computer programming, AP-level Computer Science, or a STEM career.

The Nova Scotia coding curriculum, outlined in the August 2015 NS Information and Communication P-6 Guidelines, are surprisingly skimpy, especially given the dollars now allocated for “innovation and exploration kits” and tech toys for every elementary school. For P to 3, for example, the ICT guideline identifies nine “essential learning outcomes,” only two of which relate to technology productivity and operations.  The clear priority is on teaching “digital citizenship” and “computer applications” rather than on basic coding.

Making coding mandatory from K to 9 is not proving to be the preferred implementation model.  In the case of British Columbia, coding will only be compulsory from Grades 6 to 9 and supported by $4-million in teacher training and equipment/resources funds.  It is integrated into a much broader #BCTECH Strategy and will not be rolled-out until September 2018.  In Canada’s largest school district, Toronto District School Board (TDSB), coding is not a stand-alone initiative but rather an integral part of the system’s K-12 STEM Strategy designed to foster collaboration, creativity and innovation.

Why the rush to introduce coding in the early grades — and what will it supplant in the crowded curriculum?  Is the current version of coding just another example of teaching “discovery learning” with simplified coding and high tech toys? Where are the teachers coming from to deliver the more challenging Mathematics-based aspects of computer science?  How much sense does it make to introduce elementary level coding without a broader commitment to preparing students for careers in STEM or related technical fields?

 

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