Posted by Toni

From "Can We Afford Theories of Learning" by Ray McDermott, Stanford University in T. Koschmann (ed.), Theories of Learning and Research on Instructional Practice (pp. 403-415), 2011

"If American culture were an Internet, the domain name 'learning' would be owned outright by the testing services that use it to feed the yearnings of parents and their schoolchildren. The bell curve of learning guides and legitimizes the differential distribution of resources and opportunities across generations. From yearning to learning to earning, selection has become less about the best person for the right job, and more about the most credentialed person for the highest paying job. Given current alignments among the social classes, the institution called “learning” competes with banks, health care and pension bene?ts as candidate domain names for injustice. Schools and testing services claim ownership of learning in the name of the upper classes that pay tuition and tutoring fees for system deliverables one ?lled-in bubble at a time."

The full chapter is available free, no registration required, here

http://www.scribd.com/doc/105660454/Can-We-Afford-Theories-of-Learning

Posted by Toni

My cell phone contract is up, and shopping around for a new phone and data plan has me reconsidering smartphones as a learning tool rather than contraband.  The potential for learning with smartphones is so much greater than for laptops or even tablets, if only because they're like kids-relatively small and resilient.  Also, even very young students already know how to use them, often with greater facility than adults. The folks at Pew Research even point to smartphones as the technology that is most rapidly closing the "digital divide."

So what if we liberated cell phones from prohibited status and instead of taking notes, your young person takes a picture of the teacher's white board and focusses more on the class discussion?  or the teacher texts or e-mails a picture of the white board to an absent student?  How about reinforcing classroom learning at home, not with worksheet homework, but by taking pictures of triangles found in your neighborhood? 

I'm not living on another planet-I know there are plenty of reasons not to hand over an expensive piece of equipment to a child, even if it didn't have Internet access.  (I am a member of the Buy Three Inexpensive Winter Jackets at a Time Club-so we always have the one we're wearing, the one to wear to school when that one goes missing, and the back up one that is dry and relatively clean).  But, think of the power of that learning everywhere, all the time, tool.  Nothing gets me more excited than seeing an adult and child holding a smartphone between them as they ask a question, and find the answer together.

What do you think?  

Posted by Toni

It was a busy day today at Family School, but I didn't want to leave without sharing a free resource for the budding game designer, artist, musician, story teller or student in your house.  It's an exciting computer programming tool called Scratch, available here  http://scratch.mit.edu/  

Scratch provides a platform for kids to share their work and collaborate with others to reach greater levels of complexity and programming expertise.  In the process they pick up a lot of skills in the way of persistence and synthesizing information.  I'm wondering how much deeper my elementary school understanding of photosynthesis would have been if I'd designed a game about it for my classmates to play.  

Posted by Toni

Stocking up for one last weekend of summer reading I discovered that Lisa Delpit, one of my all time favorite Education authors, has finally published a follow-up to her 1995 classic Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.  Twenty pages into  her "Multiplication is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children she reframes one of the most persistent concerns in schools today.  Delpit writes,  "... the achievement gap should not be considered the gap between black children's performance and white children's performance...but rather between black children's performance and these same children's exponentially greater potential."  How would teaching change if we all saw it that way?

She explains the origin of her title, and a bit about her research here:

(Put this up on Facebook last night, but didn't have my login info at home to post to the blog.)

For the last couple weeks I've been introduced to quite a few folks as "the new Eliza."  Boy, that's setting expectations awfully high for an incoming Executive Director.  I am excited about taking on the challenges Southside Family School faces from the strong foundation  Eliza, and Flo before her, built for us.

A few weeks ago I promised to share a bit more about me, so here goes:

•  I grew up mostly in the Tidewater area of Virginia, but have also lived in Japan and Korea.  
• My husband John and I have filled our household with cats since son JR and daughter Crystal are grown and have families of their own.
•  September will be the 39th month in a row that I have run a 5k, or longer, race for charity.  (I am still a very slow runner.)
• I accepted the position at Southside for the same reasons our families choose the school-dedication to Social Justice, small class sizes in a small school, and the family feel.

From a more professional perspective, I have a Masters in Education with a focus on Middle School Curriculum Development and completed more than 30 hours towards a doctorate in Educational Leadership.  As valuable as that schooling was, it didn't teach me nearly as much as the students I learned from while teaching everything from third to twelfth grade in a variety of alternative schools.  I've also served four years as a small town mayor, and have experience in manufacturing management and financial services.

I look forward to learning more about each of our families, friends, supporters and alumni.  If I don't touch base with you first, please feel free to drop by my office.---Toni

Tech Tuesday

I am a digital immigrant-that is a fairly fluent user of computer applications, and too often player of silly Facebook games-but I will never be a digital native like today's young people.  This divide between adults/children and teachers/students intrigues me because it mirrors the chasm between second language learners and native speakers.   We may use the same devices, but our cultural understanding is quite different.

Watching this video challenged some of my assumptions about computers as neutral, or even negative, tools in building relationships among learners in the same classroom.  Take a look and let me know what you think.---Toni

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html