Digital Helicoptering

I recently participated in a panel on digital literacy, as part of the “Understanding Media Now” conference, hosted by the Association for Media Literacy. As part of my reading for this event, I came across the following description of what parent engagement might look like in the era of digital education:

[Child's mother] is able to find a moment almost every day to check in on class websites of both her children. Here she can see the homework that was assigned. She can click on her son’s name (Tommy) or her daughter’s name (Emily) and access a special parent portal where she inputs her unique password. It gives her a timeline for outstanding homework and future homework. She can also log in to classroom instruction to understand exactly what has been taught so that she can better support her children’s learning from home. She can access a log of marks to date and see for herself how each of her children is doing. The assessment plan is available so she knows each of the assessments completed and/or planned and also their relative importance. This helps her to focus her kids toward aligning their time commitments appropriately. She can also access their class schedules online with test dates included which helps her to make sure that she steers clear of important school dates when booking orthodontic appointments for the kids. There is even a place for two- way communication with the teacher so that if an issue comes up the teacher can let her know and vice versa. She can also access Tommy’s IEP online and make notes to herself about possible input she would like to provide at the next teacher conference.*

To which my response is WHAT?! So plain old analogue helicoptering is a very bad thing that will come between a kid and her grit, but digital helicoptering—courtesy of “Big Mamma” in this scenario—is A-ok? With advocates for digital technology like this, who needs detractors?



*“What if: Technology in the 21st Century Classroom,” Ontario's Public School Board's Association, p. 21.

Life in 21st-Century Classrooms: the Agenda

I recently read a remarkable book entitled Life in Classrooms, first published in 1968, and reissued by Teachers College Press in 1990. Its author, Philip Jackson, was one of the first educational researchers to apply an ethnographic approach—borrowed from anthropology and popularized through prominent studies of primates—to the phenomena of schools and classrooms. The book is a methodological mishmash, but at its core are Jackson's reports on "field visits" he conducted over a period of two years to several elementary school classrooms in the University of Chicago Laboratory School.The book is full of astute observations about classroom life, most of which still apply today. I was struck, for instance, by an analogy that Jackson draws in the first chapter:

There is an important fact about a student's life that teachers and parents often prefer not to talk about . . . . This is the fact that young people have to be in school, whether they want to be or not. In this regard students have something in common with the members of two other of our social institutions that have involuntary attendance: prisons and mental hospitals. 

Elaborating, Jackson writes:

[T]he school child, like the incarcerated adult, is, in a sense a prisoner. He too must come to grips with the inevitability of his experience. He too must develop strategies for dealing with the conflict that frequently arises between his natural desires and interests on the one hand and institutional expectations on the other.

Jackson proceeds to discuss in some detail both the institutional exigencies of school, and the strategies that children come up with to cope with them. In his observations and interpretations of what he sees—especially his reflections on classroom management, children's and teachers' attitudes towards school, and the power relations operating at the micro level in schools—he anticipates Foucauldian studies of institutional life that began to emerge in humanities disciplines in the late seventies and early eighties.

For this reason—or simply for the rich, troubling portrait of classroom life that Jackson offers—I believe the book should be required reading for teachers' college students. But for the present purpose, what interests me is an image Jackson introduces in the first chapter and which he discusses in the introduction to the 1990 reissue of the book:

I noted . . .how students propped their arms in the air by placing their left hands just above their right elbows when signaling the teacher's attention and I realized that that familiar posture was caused by the fact that the arm usually had to be held high for several seconds before the teacher noticed it . . . . Being heavy, the raised arm required support. The propped arm . . . was a reasonable response to the crowded conditions of classroom life. To my newly awakened interest in such matters, it stood as a symbol of those conditions.

 What's interesting about this passage, and the symbol of the propped arm, is how relevant it still is. In 1968, funding levels for education in both the US and Canada were much higher than they are today, yet large class sizes were the norm. Despite attempts by some provincial governments (Ontario, for example) to set caps on class size in primary grades, "crowded conditions" still obtain in most schools. My daughters' grade 7 class has 32 kids: arms are still being propped.

I would argue, however, that overcrowding is not the most significant issue facing our schools today. It is now known, for instance, that small class size does not guarantee better outcomes for individual students. But the image of the propped arm got me thinking: what is its modern-day equivalent? What action or object epitomizes "life in classrooms" in the 21st century? When I thought about this question, one object immediately sprung to mind: the school agenda.

My daughters were issued their first agendas in Grade 2. The primary grade agendas, which cost five dollars a piece, were colourful weekly school calendars in ringed notebook format, containing all manner of information and trivia, as well as space for jotting down daily homework, an area for "parent-teacher" communication, and the all-important parent initial box. At first glance they looked fairly innocuous, and the girls were happy to have them. But my husband and I were surprised that our local school board, which issued the agendas, felt that seven-year-olds would need them. How much homework, how many deadlines or appointments, we wondered, would seven-year-olds have to keep track of? What issues would arise in Grade 2 that would require daily monitoring by parents (and thus daily initialing) or regular parent-teacher communication?

The reality, of course, is that second-graders do not need agendas. Neither do seventh-graders or even twelfth-graders. After all, most people over the age of 30 managed to get through their school years without them. Looked at another way, however, one could say that if today's school children require agendas, it is because the need for them has been created by the conditions of modern schooling and by the assumptions that underlie and give rise to these conditions. What are some of these assumptions? One is that children require and benefit from homework from early grades through high school, and that when it comes to schoolwork, quantity is more important than quality. (The abundance of evidence to the contrary has done little to shake this particular assumption.) Another is that children must be taught "time management" skills, the deeper assumption here being a blurring of the once distinct concepts of "education" and "training," and the consequent belief that education should concern itself with preparing children to function in the corporate world from which such phrases such as "time management" hail. A third preconception driving the "need" for agendas is that constant monitoring and surveillance of the school-aged child's performance, by both parent and teacher, is necessary and desirable.

Taken together, these assumptions give rise to the conditions that are symbolized by the agenda: not overcrowded classrooms, but overcrowded, over-scheduled, over-burdened young lives. The kids leading these lives are viewed  less as children than as pre-adults who must be moulded into full-fledged adults capable of functioning in the "real" (read corporate) world.

It may seem as if I am (once again!) engaging in theoretical overreaching, but incidents that have occurred during the current school year—my daughters' first in middle school—lead me to think otherwise. For instance: the girls' math teacher told the kids on the first day of class that forgetting to bring their agendas to class was a detentionable offense, as significant as not completing homework. The message this warning was intended to send is that the para-curriculum or what Jackson calls the "hidden curriculum" (though these days it is not particularly well hidden)—in other words behavioural or character lessons regarding organization, time-management, etc.—are as important as the actual lessons being taught, in this case lessons about math.

Another incident involved an "agenda check" by the girls' homeroom teacher. Since parents are no longer required to initial agendas daily, this teacher decided that she would take a look at the kids' agendas to see if they were copying down homework reliably and legibly, as well as noting future assignments, important dates, etc. While flipping through J's agenda, the teacher noticed many doodles. She chided J for doodling in her agenda and told her to stop. J was mildly upset by this, as she is unused to being reprimanded by a teacher. (A year ago she would have been very upset, but middle school is teaching her to grow a thicker skin.) But more than anything, she was puzzled. "Why can't I doodle in my agenda?" she asked. "Who owns my agenda?"

The question of who owns the school-aged child's "agenda" is, I believe, worthy of further reflection by parents and educators alike.

Letter to a science teacher

If I haven't blogged for a while, it's because my husband and I and the twins have recently taken two trips: one pleasurable, to Quebec for March break, and the other an all too familiar (figurative) journey to school-project-hell and back. I've written about how and why I dislike school projects previously on this blog, so I won't repeat my arguments here. What I do want to do is share a letter I wrote earlier in the school year (November 2010) to my daughters' science teacher, outlining my concerns about a project he assigned. I was worried that this was to be the first of many unreasonable, pedagogically questionable projects, and after last year's experience with project overload, I decided to see if I could nip the problem in the bud by detailing my concerns to the teacher. This is the letter (with minor deletions and changes to protect the innocent)I wrote:

Dear Mr. X:

We are the parents of J and E in your Grade 6 science class. J and E are enjoying science so far, but we do have a few concerns about the previous project and the one new one that has recently been assigned. While the girls were working on the habitat project, a number of issues and problems arose that we would like to share with you in the hope that these problems can be addressed, and possibly resolved in time to make a difference for the second project.

The scope of the habitat project: We found that the scope of the habitat project was a little too broad. We believe that 11-year-olds do not possess the developmental tools to take a large subject and circumscribe it so that it becomes a workable, doable project. Since our daughters seemed initially to be at a loss regarding how to limit their topic, we directed them to ask you for more details regarding what was expected. They told us that your response to this, and to most questions, was: “what do you think?” While we understand the pedagogical goal inherent in this type of response, it was not particularly helpful to our daughters, since what they were looking for was specific guidance on the amount and type of work expected. Like many of the students in your grade six class, our daughters are hard-working, high-achieving kids who have been taught to strive to meet expectations. When the expectations are not clear (and unfortunately, the Rubrics section for this assignment on your blog was blank), they feel disoriented. Since no specific guidance on the number of plants and animals to be covered was provided, we took the liberty of giving our daughters some suggestions. Both girls chose to cover more than 15 animals, and since they also felt (although, again, they were not sure) that they should write several sentences about each animal (along with the required classification), the project took them a very long time to complete at home. The girls spent the better part of two consecutive weekends and multiple evenings working on this project. This made it a very stressful endeavour both for them, and for all of us as a family, as very little non-project activities could be planned for those weekends/evenings.

Time in class: We do realize that you gave the class . . . time at the computers to work on this project, and we are thankful for that. However, you may not realize that many of your students—our girls included—are not proficient on computers, as they do not use them regularly, either at home or anywhere else. So, for instance, when they research topics at school, they know how to save the information, but they do not know how to print it, at least not in the manner you suggested: i.e., by first copying the information into a Word document. They would need step-by-step guidance on how to do this, in order to learn to do it efficiently, or at all, and they have not received such guidance.

There are two other reasons why the time given to work on the project in class was not particularly productive for J and E: they cannot type with any degree of speed or fluidity, and they have not been taught how to transfer their work to a memory stick, so that they can bring it home for final formatting, etc. So any actual written work done on the computers at school had to be repeated at home, which was not a productive use of time, and greatly added to the hours required to complete this project.

Bibliography: We believe that the requirement of a bibliography at this grade or age, should be accompanied not simply by a reference to [board] guidelines (which are clearly geared towards high school students, and are confusing and out of date, to boot), but by detailed instruction on why one includes a bibliography, how to put together a bibliography, where to find copyright information in a book, or an encyclopedia, etc. The [board] guide, for instance, does not include a single sample entry for a Wikipedia article, despite the fact that Wikipedia is the source children use most frequently for research projects. The girls told us that you commented that students should include authors in their bibliographies. Given this requirement, perhaps during the research phase, you could direct the children, not only to the computer, but also to books, where they will indeed find actual authors, and where the copyright information is more straightforward. In any case, we believe that, since classifications were requested for every plant and animal mentioned in this project, the required bibliography was beyond the ability of most 11-year-old children to complete independently.

I should add, that J and E enjoyed working on their projects, and they both learned a lot. They are also excited about the topics they have chosen for their next project, In general, they are enthusiastic about science class, and we don't want that enthusiasm to dampen because of problems they encountered while working on the first project. That is why we have decided—respectfully, and in the spirit of constructive dialogue—to bring these concerns to your attention.

We are available to discuss these issues further, either in person, via email or by telephone.

Sincerely,

J and E's parents

I delivered this letter (not without some trepidation) to Mr X's mailbox, and a few days later he called me. I was nervous about speaking to him because on past occasions, teachers with whom I've raised concerns or to whom I have written notes such as this one, have sometimes become defensive, which leads to an unproductive exchange. (I should note that I accept my share of responsibility for failed communications; it is quite possible that the way I spoke or worded my written messages rubbed the teachers the wrong way. This is something I'm continually working on.) But I needn't have been nervous. Mr. X was extremely gracious and receptive to my concerns. He tried to address them all individually, noting, for example, that he thought my daughters' class had been taught how to create proper bibliographies in grades 4 and 5 (which was not the case). He also admitted that he'd made some assumptions about the kids' knowledge of computers and research that he should probably not have made. We ended the conversation amicably, with him assuring me that he would try to do things differently for future projects.

The good news is, he did change things—a lot! Since I wrote that letter, for instance, there have been no more take-home projects. All work in science is now done in class, and it includes a balance of research and group experiments, such as designing a small electric car! Since I did not want to overload Mr X, I had not even mentioned in my letter another of my concerns: namely, the lack of experiments in what was, after all, a science class. But the letter seemed to propel him to re-think everything, and now the class is completely different. At the beginning of the year, the girls were complaining that in science class, they were either plopped in front of the computer (researching) or watching boring movies. They actually disliked the class intensely and, in fact, instructed me to change the second sentence of my letter from "J and E are enjoying science class so far" to "J and E are enjoying science so far." Now it is, hands-down, their favourite class. They especially enjoy the experiments, and one of them has even expressed a new interest in becoming a scientist or at least in continuing to find out "how things work."

And the bad news? Mr. X only teaches the girls science. Their core teacher, Mr. Y., is the one who assigned the social studies project that resulted in our recent journey to homework hell. The project displayed all of the problems I detailed in my letter to Mr. X, and then some (for instance, a completely useless "artistic" component). So what to do? Do I write a similar letter to the core teacher? Ask to meet with him? It's tricky because he is my daughters' main teacher, and I've already had to approach him concerning several other, non-project related issues (such as incompressible math questions!). I do not want to alienate him or stress him out, but I also do not want him to assign another project such as the one we just suffered through. The girls learned next to nothing from it, which is perhaps the most important reason I object to context-less, single-focus research projects for 11-yr-olds (and is itself the topic for another post!). Any ideas regarding what my next steps, should be would be greatly appreciated.