Weighing the Pig

I'm sure you know this already, we are not doing that well in educating our young people. Well not compared with other countries that have running water and tarmac roads. The OECD makes sure that we know this by running their PISA tests globally and we don't make it into the top twenty for anything nowadays.

It gets worse. Having recently felt a little crushed by having to admit that our children were taught nothing more about computers than how to make slide shows and type essays we find that our performance in science has also dropped to similar lows... according to PISA.

Um, excuse me boys and girls in charge of education, were we not one of, if not the foremost nation in science and computing, or am I just imagining all those Nobel prizes of the 20th Century? What on earth have you done? However the arguments are spun quite simply we are not competing well with the world. But why not?

Here's a clue. In response to the depressing OECD news a well known Headteacher had no doubts. Johnny Foreigner clearly was cheating, or in modern education parlance was 'doing a GCSE' which translates in turn as 'teaching to the test'. His solution was that we should prepare our 15 year-olds specifically for the PISA tests in order to raise our place in the tables...Now if for more than one second this makes sense to you then you are part of the problem. You truly believe in testing, you don't know why, not really, but you know how important it is. If you are under 40 this is your world.

If  however something is making you uneasy about the above consider the proverb which says, " You don't fatten the pig by weighing it everyday". In the UK we love testing and hate teaching. Learning is OK... but only if it is for the test. Ironically unlike the pig, our children do grow fat, but that's due mostly to sloth and smoothies.

When I started teaching science and computers I taught science and computers. That which was taught was in line with a syllabus of course. It told me what sort of stuff should be included and eventually what scoped the final examination which would be at the end of two or three years work.

Steadily though, the syllabuses became more prescriptive and with the advent of league tables reduced teaching to the delivery of content matched to the published mark schemes. Progress could be tracked by dividing the content into modules and testing regularly, and if things did not go well re-testing. The examination boards which by now were private profit-driven companies did not object. At this point I left teaching.

Ten years later I have returned to try my hand at vocational science teaching. I find myself in a state-funded sixth form college which has a good record for passing tests. For me though the culture is a little shocking.
Testing, testing, testing is the key to success; no-one knows anything different. In science, even practical work becomes merely a way to illustrate the theory which is to be tested.

If I type the next paragraphs slowly maybe someone will get it. Excessive testing, creating a testing culture no-less, does not work. Oh, it appears to work all-right but only because it operates in a self referencing system. So a 'good at tests student' will become, with accurate preparation and motivation, a 'very good at tests student' and will get all the stroking and kudos a test-deliverer ( once called a teacher) can bestow.

For the rest, repeat testing is just a bore, maybe even humiliating; certainly the test-delivering-package ( once called a subject) is a bore. Don't expect hormone-fuelled adolescents to accept this status meekly. At best they will switch off and look at their phones, at worst they will take the place apart.

It will be a leap of faith too far for this generation of test-deliverers but if they returned to the notion of imparting to their pupils an appreciation and understanding of the subject they know and maybe once loved, free of neurotic OCD-testing all would be well.

And the most ironic of consequences would be that our PISA test results would improve.

Living in a shiny Chrome world.

As I mentioned in my last post my new edu-world is a Chromebook world.

To give you an idea of the scope of this world I should tell you that my Applied Science BTEC groups are completely paperless. All assignments, all administration, all resources are accessed through Chromebooks linked to the College's wireless infrastructure.

The College is defined by three software suites: Google Docs, Moodle and an in house MIS called Crystalweb.

My theme from last week was the end of ICT, where I looked back over eight years of blogging about schools.  The 'end' was defined by having nothing more to say, but I did not say exactly what it is I have nothing to say about. I pointed out what had not happened but here in Chrome world it is like a fairy read my blogs and waved her wand and told me to shut up.

See what I mean, blasts from the past:

I was appalled at the 200 watt plus power haul of school Desktops:  Chrome books sip 8 watts.

Schools wasted 5000 sheets of A4 paper per student:   my classes use almost none.

I railed against insane support army for Windows fat clients:   now we use netbook thin-clients.

I lost count of my Capita-SIMS rants:   sorry who are they?

I may have mentioned in the past the joys of slow boot up times with large classes, roaming profiles, getting lost in the P: drive's tree/branches/twiglets, Edugeek armies etc etc?  So, as I said earlier what is left to say? You are either entombed in a school/college frozen in 2002 or you live in a post MS paradigm... like I do now.

But is it paradise? Have we saved the planet?  Has it made us truly happy?

We do have some glitches, wireless bandwidth for one. The whole-scale embracing of all things wireless by an improbable number of devices shocked the IT folk who are busy, as I type, buying in more kit, conscious that poor performance may kill the goose.

We do have still have old fashioned computers running Windows 7 and specialised applications and this will continue for a while no doubt. Those who cling on without a good reason are mostly the elderly and can be easily spotted looking for their USB keys which 'they know they had with them' or claiming 'I know I saved it' or sending emails with ( gasp) attachments!

As the OECD pointed out this weekend just to rub in their October report. The UK is pretty much bottom of the developed world for science, maths and reading and has been in that position for more than five years now.  When you ask teachers  'what did you do so wrong to make us bottom of the heap?' they look at you slightly panicked..'we did it right they say'..hmm.

Maybe the paradigm shift I described above will 'background' computers and allow us to move on to reboot our teaching and learning without technical distractions.