Sharing the Excitement: Knowledge Building Innovations Around the World
New Presenting – New Linking – New Thinking: Pedagogic Innovation Beyond Learning Niall MacKinnon Highland Council, Scotland, UK. Knowledge Building Summer Institute Innovation and Digital Technology: Between Continuity and Change Trieste, Italy September 2015
Abstract Over a decade a Scottish rural primary school incorporated the use of new media within its wider curriculum. Alongside, the school’s national education system introduced a new learning framework centred on children’s potential as four capacities of confidence, contribution, responsibility and learning. These were to be equally addressed. New approaches to assessment moved away from summative test-based approaches and grade-levelled attainment. This school linked these aspects through action research implementation, some from externally funded projects. This paper focuses on one project – a four-school four-country virtual learning community utilising the Thinkquest virtual learning environment of the Oracle Education Foundation. It ran for separate periods in this time. The paper places the innovations within the wider context of the curricular approaches developed and deployed. These led the author as principal and teacher towards a conceptually informed approach, away from learnification and performativity and towards knowledge building and intrinsic meaning in learning. Practice development was informed by both educator and pupil insights, which fed into each other, creating a school-based adaptive approach to curriculum development within the context of a larger scale reform. It was not just content that changed. Crucially, a changing notion of curriculum itself emerged from this process.
Acknowledgements With thanks to partner colleagues and organisations: Peter Heaney, Steelstown Primary School, Northern Ireland Sarah Neild, Birchley St Mary's Primary School, England Maria Pecican, Twardogora Primary School, Poland Polly MacInnes and Lorraine Smith, Plockton Primary School, Scotland Associated colleagues in the above schools Gratefully acknowledging financial support and encouragement from: The Oracle Education Foundation Highland Council: 'Determined to Succeed' Enterprise in Education initiative
Introduction Over the course of a school session four schools worked closely together using the virtual learning environment (VLE) of Oracle Thinkquest to create an ongoing learning community. Three of the schools are in different countries of the United Kingdom. The fourth is in Poland. The school linking work continued periodically in subsequent years.
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The principal aim of the project was to foster communication and collaboration using the rapid recent developments in information technology to enable effective multi-media communication. Joint project activities were conducted in each of the four schools which were constructed to give a shared purpose of curriculum activity. The activities were curriculum-linked involving Information Communications Technology, language, geography, history, technology and citizenship. Each pupil conducted the same activities which they interpreted and implemented in their own manner and style. We focused on exploring features of our communities and their differences, using these to inspire language work and poetry and sharing images. The four communities are considerably diverse in their characteristics which made comparative interactive work very interesting for the pupils. The pupils are not from a nearby cultural realm. The objective was to create a new kind of community. Thinkquest was one of the fairly recent new webbased publishing media available to schools. It has been recently discontinued. It had several thousand schools all of whom could access each others websites and emails. However the participant teachers and pupils here set about using the potentiality of the new media to create something which forms a substantial innovation and which to our knowledge was unique when we adopted it. We set out to create a joint community and to use this to bridge difference and distance. We created a joint web site with a joint purpose which was created dynamically as a teaching medium during the process of its construction. The construction and hence the learning was the main objective rather than the final product. On Oracle Thinkquest the schools and pupils taking part had their own publishing areas in the form of mini-sites. However within the Thinklinks project we created a joint publishing area and organised this with dynamic linkage to the participants’ sites. We then used this as a publishing forum to which all had access. The Thinkquest program has well designed features to enable communication and response such as quiz boards, voting boards and message boards. We built this into the online joint area so that children could add messages and responses to an activity as it was developing. In addition the children built up their own websites and could add links from the joint area to their own individual pages. This innovation fostered a very high degree of interaction online. The activities proceeded at roughly the rate of one every three weeks and each activity was accompanied by a video-conference between the pupils. Here they could discuss the development of the activity, respond verbally as a group to the work as it developed and they could also discuss developments and new directions. This was also an important form of presentation in its own right. In this way activities became extended and new ones developed out of the old. There was a strong link to offline activity in the schools, and home and community links. The project started off with an overall theme to create ‘A Perfect Place’. The idea was to look at our communities, our schools and ourselves and to think what it was that we liked and to then let our imaginations roll. The project unfolded with a series of joint activities to which each school and pupil contributed. We aimed to cover all areas of the curriculum. The activities were designed specifically to present our own communities to each other and to express this in different ways – through poetry, drawings, creating tourist information posters, photographic elements and writing, in various forms. As well as presenting our own locales we conducted interactive activities for each school and between them. We used display boards on the site as focuses for discussion and questioning. We moved this on to collaborative story writing at a distance and to local history research through dynamic presentation. Project Identification – needs and objectives The opportunity arose through the teachers concerned meeting at an IT seminar at which innovative ways of working were discussed. Through informal discussion this idea arose and there was a commitment of the teachers involved to set about creating a new form of community. The Thinklinks project, through its joint website, became a community in its own right. As well as four schools, a major success was the creation of six ‘houses’ within the site. Pupils in each school were allocated to the houses across the
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schools and thus within the project a new form of intra-project identity emerged quite separate to the school identity. The houses were given specific tasks. For instance each house was asked to brainstorm a separate perfect theme: perfect day out, perfect pop star, perfect meal, perfect holiday and so on. At Christmas time a mystery Christmas message was created with clues given to the houses separately. Each house had to collaborate online and through video-conferencing to put the message together. From this school’s point of view the project was designed to match the new national curriculum approach and its realisation and support within the local education authority. Pupils became ‘successful learners’ by identifying a real context for learning with real responsibilities to deliver work on time and to their real specific audience. In this way they specifically developed the other Scottish curriculum capacities of ‘effective contributors’, ‘responsible citizens’ and ‘confident individuals’, being the four central ‘capacities’ of the new curriculum approach. For instance pupils told other schools’ participants about this school and we asked about their communities, which caused us to draw up very specific information requests. These included photographs which could be published to the site. A critical success factor was delivery and pace of activity. The remote audience promoted responsibility and enthusiasm. The success of the project was due to the fostering of a sense of genuine commitment and community to the project itself. The immediacy of the website and the video-conferences that were dynamically linked to them created very close bonds. In fact this has become an effective ‘associate school group’ although very remote in distance. We were even working in very different national curriculum frameworks. The ‘Perfect Place’ theme moved on in the subsequent year to a ‘Sharing our lives’ project. In particular pupils were finding out for themselves how in many ways each community shares many aspects in common and yet how in many others the communities are so different. Methodology – approach used and implementation At the core of the project was collaboration and communication. This became in essence formative assessment. The pupils were assessing the value and use of the information presented and from these assessments placed requests to the pupils in the partner schools. A particular feature which emerged was the development of audience sensibility. Each school at the outset knew very little about each others. Pupils could presume nothing and they at times were not aware of this. They came to realise that they needed to spell out this contextual information. However pupils were comparing a real place to a perfect one and in so doing finding out all the different elements of our own places which we really appreciate. The really crucial element was that they were learning about another community through the eyes of real children that they had come to know. Comparing very different environments does feature on curricula but it does not normally involve talking to them regularly and sharing schoolwork, images, questions, debates, questions and quizzes about the other distant localities and their population. The pupils developed a bond through the video-conferences. The ease of publishing to the VLE was of crucial importance. Thinkquest is very well designed. This was crucial to the success of the project. At the heart of the project was the core publishing area of the joint project. The pupils’ own work was simultaneously published to their sites with finished products going to the joint area. However the joint areas were also functioning as a working area so that the children had access to a range of images and descriptions of each community. The pupils’ own information-gathering results were published in this way. This creation of a single joint area and single joint community is the central innovation of this project. We were not just talking to another school or set of partner schools. The Thinklinks project became a community in its own right, dealing with and through the Knowledge Building principles (Scardamalia 2002) of real ideas and authentic problems, idea diversity and community knowledge. The ‘canals’ house, the ‘rivers’ house being the geographical names we called each group of pupils, became functioning communities in their own right, which then interlinked. They transcended the schools' categorisations and membership. Each
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house presented a perfect theme to the other house. In the subsequent year we gave names associated with time e.g. pendulums, hourglasses. Measurement – monitoring, review and evaluation The project came to encompass art, ICT, language – writing, reading and talking and listening – social social and personal education, technology history and geography. As it moved between its different phases different balances came into play. It did take a considerable allocation of class time. By coincidence this was just at the same time in Scotland that Scottish schools were being asked to pilot the approaches of Scotland’s new curriculum approach of ‘The Four Capacities’. It contains some radical ideas which schools were being invited and encouraged to develop such as the dropping of the rigid and separated curriculum area time balances, moving to holistic thematic work, incorporating curriculum elements with an over-riding emphasis on contextual relevance of curriculum material, and planning for breadth and depth via rounded outcomes and experiences. The curriculum programme development board also asked Scottish schools to pilot some innovatory and holistic planning formats. We used this project as an exemplar, trying out some of the models the programme board suggested in linked assessment developments which formed formal funded bid-for projects. We found the innovations were highly successful, particularly in regard of forward planning, which could become freed from a rigid attainment target framework but nevertheless incorporating subject content and enabling more inclusion of formative elements. This shows features of curriculum development itself in design mode, in terms of a Knowledge Building conceptualisation. The project embraced this approach very successfully and it did significantly help being able to run with elements as they developed and not have to force them into rigid subject-led percentage-timed compartmentalisations. The curriculum project described here was a joint initiative of the four schools concerned, created by them, then supported by our local authorities, and receiving support and practical assistance from the Oracle Education Foundation itself, and of which a case study brochure was produced. Management information was shared relating the objectives of the project against four separate curriculum criteria from each of the four countries involved, each of which have very separate curriculum organisation and planning structures. This did not hinder the project and in fact helped creative aspects in its management as different focuses from each national perspective had to be incorporated. This was quite an interesting aspect of the project from the teachers’ point of view since the curriculum organisation elements in each country were quite distinct. Each teacher from their own curriculum and system context managed the project. The pupils themselves also brainstormed and put suggestions forward as part of the project work. Through this project each school and community has reached out across a significant physical, professional and cultural distance. Results The results are more positive than we could have imagined at the outset. There is the work itself. Each project activity became a main focus of curricular work in each school. Its final publication became a great source of excitement. Thus there are excellent examples of work presented in digital format but it is the question boards, debates, discussion boards and video-conferences which really made it work. The creation of communities transcending the school identity is perhaps the main innovation of the project. The Thinklinks project became a separate community. It became an entity beyond four schools communicating. Thinkquest is particularly active as is evidenced by the number of schools who used it. We feel we have managed to successfully innovate towards using the virtual learning environment to create a joint community by the use of a joint website in combination with individual pupil and school ones. Each of
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these elements combined and worked together. The virtual publishing and the video-conferencing enabled us to bridge distance but it was the linkage of these elements of pupil site, school site, project ‘house’ and joint project which created a dynamic working entity. Essentially it was a conceptual entity rather than an assemblage of procedures. It embodied a culture which required it to be 'owned' in order for it to exist. We have used this project directly in curriculum activity, planning learning outcomes within the project themes. We have used the four communities as the context and as we got to know each other the project moved gently in new emerging directions. We have forged bonds across our schools and across the localities and communities in which we are located. Our pupils for instance have a feel and understanding of the Irish famine and the more recent Irish troubles but have a feel too for a more recent, vibrant and modern Derry viewed through the eyes of real Derry, Twardogora and St Helens children in the project activities in our ‘window views’ ‘attitude poems’, ‘perfect places’, tourist posters and pupil visit during the year. The four schools involved formed a close bond. Although located so far apart geographically, staff and pupils developed real, immediate and personal links. This short report and small excerpts of the project only give a small feel of the project. The site itself is dynamically linked which is how the material is designed to be viewed and used. The pupils in the four schools have very enthusiastically taken to this new publishing medium. It has allowed us to bridge distance and to foster a new form of community. One feature for us has been to keep the organisation tight. We have maintained these four schools and the house groups within them as active communities. In the appendix I give an example of some of the work of ‘virtual grandparents’ local history research, our 'classroom window views' work and a presentation for an inter-school video conference..
Conclusion The medium changes the message. We interact with new media in very different ways to old media, whether for better or worse. The media relate to real life, but also form real life, which is true of all epochs. New media alter culture. We use language to communicate but it forms cultural artefacts, some of our most prized, whether works of literature, songs, recitations or modern forms such as stand up comedy or TV shows. New media are utilised in the same way, forming new potentials of communication and new artefacts. Thus a website or an internet Virtual Learning Environment forum are media to be utilised but also repositories, and they become an artefact. That is why even now there are websites storing the web at different times, to make a living record of a new form of cultural history. Schools have to fit into all this. Thus the types and forms of school-based learning are currently undergoing rapid changes. Consciousness and thereby the inherent potential of learning itself is also undergoing a fundamental transformation as our forms of social interactivity, interaction with knowledge, skill sets and social processes are all shifting. Teaching is not about delivery, it is about realising potential and purpose, motivation and goal. It encapsulates in wholes, as a pupil seeks to do something, make something, achieve something – for itself, not a label as in a test mark. My role as teacher is then to assist them in garnering the wherewithal to achieve that, which includes knowledge and skills. But these are not essentially framed as learning targets. They do not constitute outputs, to be calibrated as 'performance'. Certainly within those arenas of sense more formally understood learning may occur, but the overall task being related to wholes becomes collaborative, related to purpose. Once pupils and students frame learning themselves in accordance with real purposes, beyond accreditation, targetising and the paraphernalia of education bureaucracy, then all participants enter into the zone of true learning. Learning is then about learning. That is my goal and desire as an educator, including being a participant in an education system which functions in this way itself, in awareness, intent and function.
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Necessary accreditation and diagnostics can act as an underlay, but not as the goal or worse the purpose of education. I am repelled by transmissivist (Priestley 2012) approaches to pedagogy which are essentially individualist and controlling. This has been operationalised in corporate terms by Biesta (2009) as ‘learnification’, where the nature of school education comes to be reduced to disembodied learning targets and the batch processing of ‘learners’. Such tendencies have led to an obsession with individual targetised approaches and measuring 'performance', subsumed under an overall ethic of performativity (Ball 2003). Education then functions as an input-output model, about calibration but not learning. Current social changes and technological forms operating in tandem are disposing to interactive and collaborative learning activity. New literacies are causing information to be stored and processed in new ways via new media. Accessibility is changing the nature of human memory and information processing. This causes shifts in the nature of knowledge itself. What is known and how it comes to be known transcend the individual. Who we are more than what we know, and the development of our potential is framed in how we come to know, and how we come to develop the capacities of what makes us a social being and not an automaton. That is a social process of construction not mechanistic delivery. Social change, technological change, and pedagogic change have been recently so rapid that the ways and means of organising school education practice could not keep up – that is management, evaluation, assessment, accountability and the conceptual tools which bind these altogether. Hannon (2009) considers these to have become “disconnects” wherein “the release of collective creativity – which increasingly characterise successful 21st Century workplaces and enterprises – are, for the most part, absent from school environments.” Knowledge Building as a concept, and set of practices is quite the reverse. It is why I am attracted to it, and I came to it through a route wherein I embraced purpose, as I, with colleagues, near and far, sought to reach out to the potential of children’s capacities. That requires that I get to know them, and their individual dispositions, but also their collective dispositions, and mine, and ours, for I am part of the school community, and the wider community of which this school is a part. I am not a node of an attainment target delivery machine. The project I outline here grew organically, as much from pupil input and response as from teacher collaboration. It came from no recipe or mandated set of instructions. Yet its content relates to traditional curricula in that ‘coverage’ is still enabled, but to very different ends. As Scardamalia and Bereiter (2014) put it, "The basic premise of the knowledge building approach is that, although achievements may differ, the process of knowledge building is essentially the same across the trajectory running from early childhood to the most advanced levels of theorizing, invention, and design, and across the spectrum of knowledge creating organizations, within and beyond school. If learners are engaged in processes only suitable for school, then they are not engaged in knowledge building.” I would contend that the processes, purposes and potentials realised across the four schools in the Thinklinks project transcended school learning. The pupils engaged in tasks and modes of awareness and function which went beyond school. These pertained to the principles of Knowledge Building as constructed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (2002), in particular Symmetric knowledge advancement where a goal for Knowledge building communities is to have individuals and organizations actively working to provide a reciprocal advance of their knowledge. All of us involved in this project did that, in/at very different ways and levels, and in a way through which we came to transform ourselves. An educator has to be learning and be doing so as part of a community of learners in order to foster the same disposition for pupils and students to learn within the social construct that we call school. Therein learning can transcend school. Learning is not delivered. We construct learning as individuals within communities, which are not bounded by any one location or institution. Learning is a participative process wherein we construct identity, motive and meaning. Those derive from purpose, which is also socially constructed. Putting these together we may then seek means to transform learning into a rounded whole of myriad attributes, which is essentially life itself.
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References Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 18, No. 2, 215-228 Biesta, G. (2009). Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability (2009) 21:33-46. Hannon, Valerie (2009) ‘Only Connect’!: A new paradigm for learning innovation in the 21st century, Occasional Paper: Centre for Strategic Education, East Melbourne VIC 3002. http://www.innovationunit.org/sites/default/files/Only%20connect%20%20a%20new%20paradigm%20for%20learning%20innovation%20in%20the%2021st%20century.pdf Oracle Education Foundation (2009). The Power of Project Learning with Thinkquest, prepared by SRI International http://www.ciosummits.com/media/pdf/2009_11/Oracle_Power_Project_Learning.pdf Priestley, M. (2012). Progressive pedagogy: lessons from the Eight Year Study, http://mrpriestley.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/progressive-pedagogy-lessons-from-the-eight-yearstudy/ Scardamalia, M. (2002). "Collective Cognitive Responsibility for the Advancement of Knowledge". In: B. Smith (ed.), Liberal Education in a Knowledge Society. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 67–98 http://ikit.org/fulltext/2002CollectiveCog.pdf Scardamalia, M. and Bereiter C. (2014) Knowledge Building, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. http://learnteachlead.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/KnowledgeBuilding_Scardamalia-Bereiter1.pdf Appendix – Principles of Knowledge building (Scardamalia 2002)
1. Real ideas and authentic problems. In the classroom as a Knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding, based on their real problems in the real world. 2. Improvable ideas. Students' ideas are regarded as improvable objects. 3. Idea diversity. In the classroom, the diversity of ideas raised by students is necessary. 4. Rise above. Through a sustained improvement of ideas and understanding, students create higher level concepts. 5. Epistemic agency. Students themselves find their way in order to advance. 6. Community knowledge, collective responsibility. Students' contribution to improving their collective knowledge in the classroom is the primary purpose of the Knowledge building classroom. 7. Democratizing knowledge. All individuals are invited to contribute to the knowledge advancement in the classroom. 8. Symmetric knowledge advancement. A goal for Knowledge building communities is to have individuals and organizations actively working to provide a reciprocal advance of their knowledge. 9. Pervasive Knowledge building. Students contribute to collective Knowledge building. 10. Constructive uses of authoritative sources. All members, including the teacher, sustain inquiry as a natural approach to support their understanding. 11. Knowledge building discourse. Students are engaged in discourse to share with each other, and to improve the knowledge advancement in the classroom. 12. Concurrent, embedded, and transformative assessment. Students take a global view of their understanding, then decide how to approach their assessments. They create and engage in assessments in a variety of ways. 7
Appendix – excerpts of exemplification
Some of the children ‘in character’ ready for a videoconference between schools
Steelstown Primary School pupils. This author wrote: Hi Peter & Sarah, Our grannies are up, with question boards. One idea from the grannies - what about if the children then put themselves up as a granny from the point of view of 60 years time, with a picture of themselves, their life story and the things which have changed in the world around them. See what they come up with? How's it going? Best wishes Niall
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Online interactions across schools related to pupils interviewing grandparents and collating their research:
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Typed up notes of a group based on pupil fieldwork: First Name: (none given – obviously just nana!) Maiden name: McLarty Born: Greenock 18.05.1923 First job: Trained as a nurse War years: Bombed out of Greenock and went to Dundee where I did my nurses training. Rationing came into force, no oranges or bananas and only one egg a month, 2oz sweets a month, no chocolate, no red meat, horse meat only. All foods were rationed, no white bread. Clothing coupons were issued. It was very hard for parents trying to eke out the rations. Rationing lasted until 1952. No street lighting during the war. Life changes: It has become faster and with more home facilities Amazing changes: Air travel, home entertainment, computer technology Self-portrait: Active, independent octogenarian Biggest event: Wartime Blitz Schooling: No school dinners. Ink wells, pens with nibs, slates and crayons were used Work: People took jobs near home. Public transport was used, there were very few cars Holidays: Most people had ‘stay at home’ holidays. Clothing: Heavy clothing, no artificial fibres. In some cases coats supplied by local authority. Meals: Porridge for breakfast. Mince and potatoes for dinner. Christmas: No Christmas trees or lights, a plain home-baked cake. An apple and an orange in a sock. All in all, life was simple, hard and lacked luxury
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Raw field notes of pupil interviewing her granny:
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A clarsach is a Celtic harp.
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