My Story of Change in Education: Student Voice and Physical Space

This story was put together as part of the Canadian Education Association's "What Standing in the Way of Change in Education" Conference in Calgary, October 21 - 22, 2013.

I only remember a few specifics from my first few weeks in the classroom. I had big ideas but the execution was definitely messy. I remember trying to keep track of things that worked and didn’t in those first few months and the second category was certainly larger than the first. I remember the first time I gave the students a math problem that asked that they apply an understanding of place value. Within ten minutes, three children were crying because they didn’t understand and were afraid to get the wrong answer. Somehow I hadn’t anticipated that my fifty students from all over the city would have such varying experiences and attitudes towards learning.

Re-thinking inquiry-based practice in physical education

While conventional education is often criticized for either segmenting learning into smaller pieces without ever giving kids the whole picture, or for letting kids read all about something without ever having an opportunity to engage in the process or "play the whole game" as Harvard School of Education Professor writes in his book Making Learning Whole, physical education does not often suffer the same criticisms.  Kids play the whole game all the time - PE teachers might argue, whether it be basketball, volleyball, baseball, badminton or floor hockey.

My challenge to "traditional" PE programs however, would be that the games they are playing are the wrong ones. If the purpose of "playing the whole game" is that students are able to engage in real work

Outside the Lines: Student Perspectives on Inquiry Learning

Sometimes it gets to me that my classroom is noisier and that my students’ work is messier. Why am I in constant negotiation with nine and ten year olds over quality, clarity, detail, what’s worth the effort and when it’s reasonable to expect to move on? Wednesday morning as I sat at my desk feeling uncertain and frustrated at the messiness of not having everything nailed down, categorized and properly evaluated, I decided to have a conversation with the kids about learning. I have to hand it to inquiry, it has made them good conversationalists and I have yet to regret asking students for their perspective in solving problems. This particular conversation was no exception...

Conversation originally recorded/documented on the white board and transcribed below. 

iPads for Learning

At the start of our first year with a 1:1 iPad program in Grade 4, Jon Van de Raadt made a comment that resonated and has set the tone for our year. "I think you'll find that iPads are not a junior version of the MacBook and should not be used as such. The iPad is a significantly different tool, and if you are prepared to embrace it, you might even find it more useful than the laptop has been." Two thirds of the way through our grade four pilot year with iPad 3's, I can say with certainty that I agree wholeheartedly. iPads belong in the classroom. I cannot imagine a more useful tool for representing, consolidating, expanding or creating understanding on the fly. I have no doubt that the rapidity with which app and software developers react to user feedback and update accordingly makes it one of the few technological tools out there that can effectively react to the ever-changing needs of youth in education and the evolving 21st century classroom. 

What follows is by no means a comprehensive or complete overview of what the iPad might be used for in the grade four classroom, but just a few brief exemplars from some of the artifacts we have had students create and present with the use of their devices. All apps (with the exception of the iWork apps) were free purchases. All investigations were co-developed with Amy Park and have been posted and archived in Edmodo and Google Apps. 

Crowd Sourcing the Fourth Graders

I've got a novel on iPads in the grade four classroom waiting to be written. Lots of discoveries, ideas, struggles and triumphs. I just need to find the time to document it all properly. This brief gem, however, is too awesome not to share.

Earlier this year, our teaching team's excited discovery of the Edmodo app as an excellent resource for collecting and organizing student work digitally and providing an avenue for ongoing feedback was stinted by the limitation of only being able to upload images or links from the iPads. Our optimism was recently renewed by updates to the iWork apps which made it possible to upload pages, numbers and keynote documents directly to Edmodo. The latest struggle has been with how we might be able to have students download iWork templates we post to Edmodo and open them using the associated app. It seemed that the only way to open a doc from Edmodo was as a preview and frankly, I was beginning to think it wasn't possible any other way.

Nevertheless, while driving home from the mountains yesterday I posted a sample template for students to track their mousetrap car results to Edmodo via the numbers app with the comment "let me know if any of you figure out how to open this document as a numbers template!" Honestly, I didn't expect much. This morning I woke up to 17 replies...

Problem solved, instructions posted. Clearly I wasted way too much time trying to solve this problem myself. I should have asked the fourth graders in the first place.

I love my job.

Learning from 9 yr olds...

Deirdre Bailey

As we explore the value of collaboration and inquire into effective learning, the most valuable discovery that I have made this year is that children have a lot to share; the more I listen, the more I learn and - beautifully - the more they learn.

I started the year with the expectation that I would help them discover what it was that I wanted them to know; I expected that I would never lose sight of where we were going and my goal was to track their progress and ensure that their path was tracking in the right direction. I wrote a blog earlier in the year on how the process of inquiry was like climbing a mountain where the destination was the peak, identified by the 'teacher' but the path was freely chosen by the 'learner'. The first time the kids went up a mountain, the paths were varied and hesitant. By mid-January they were almost exclusively ploughing ahead without much need for re-direction. Most recently, I have been discovering that the peak is not where I thought it was, it reaches higher, to a destination originally obscured by the clouds of my own prior knowledge and prejudice. Nine-year-old students have been taking their learning beyond the ends I envisioned and they have been finding faster routes to the peak. It is to the point where when we ask a question, their thinking takes them places I never expected it could go.


A week ago we started a conversation about characteristics and terminology for 3D shapes drawing on their previous knowledge. We had managed to define a point as a location where 3 edges meet which led to a conversation about cones and how to explain the point on a cone as there are no clear edges. Based on previous conversations in class related to the concept of infinity, one of the students defined a cone as a 3D object with an infinite number of edges. Boom. Grade four.

A few days ago we had a conversation about the differences between 3D and 2D in which they were easily able to engage, in particular drawing from their experiences with 3D films and video games. Definitions ranged from descriptive and sensory to mathematical. One student defined 3D as a piece of paper and 2D as the writing on the paper which led to a counter-argument that writing exists on paper as a result of ink molecules which are 3D on a miniscule level but nevertheless 3D. The question was then raised whether anything not 3D could exist in the world. One student responded with: "Nothing in the world is 2D. 2D is just an image in your brain. 2D is a thought, not a thing." Boom. Nine years old.

Yesterday a student suggested at the end of a Math period that we refocus our discussions by defining as a class units of measurement for 1, 2 and 3 dimensional entities. Today a student suggested we use Google Sketchup to expand on our exploration of three-dimensional shapes. "I'm thinking you could challenge us to construct a building within some parameters, maybe we could only use certain types of 3D shapes..."  Another student had been researching 4th and 5th dimensions and wanted to talk about the ambiguity of chance. We are becoming accessories in their learning. It's beautiful.

I continue to understand the inquiry process through the mountain exploration metaphor where we do not drag students to the top or march them up the well-worn path as might typically have been done in a more traditional system. As the guide, not the prison guard, I have come to understand that we are constantly engaged in empowering students' own decision-making such that they discover the peak for themselves. Most recently, I have realized that the more we let them think, the more they think, the more they know, the more they understand and the more we learn together. I wish I could have explained multiplicative commutativity with their conviction when I was in elementary school. Maybe I could have if someone had given me time or permission to play with rotating arrays. Opportunity is everything: tell them that the sky is the limit, point them in that direction, and they will land on the moon. Cheesy. Cliche. Fact.

These kids get it

Deirdre Bailey

Today was amazing for a number of reasons. We finished our decomposition lab this morning. It had been an enlightening few weeks of learning what becomes of a perishable food, halved and left in the open for three weeks. Some awesome things happen to rotting fruit after it starts to smell, not least of which are fluid loss and bacteria growth. This morning, the tomato had given birth to a new family of fruit flies, all of whom remained happily trapped under the wrapping as our young scientists whooped victoriously while pressing their faces to the creeping mass of molding vegetable.

As today was the last day of our lab, we were burying our specimens in dirt with plans to test soil content and plant growth in the New Year. Most students were happy to put an end to an experiment that was becoming increasingly hard on the stomach, however one group in particular stood out as they proceeded solemnly to the dirt pile with their specimen, chanting the name "Alfred" in melancholic tones. "Aaaaalfreeed, life won't be the same without your stink... Aaaaalfreeeed, you taught us a lot about mould.... Aaaaalreed, we are going to bury you so you can grow a plant..." Alfred was their cucumber.

When I think back to the things I remember from Grade 4, I struggle to recall anything memorable outside of field experiences, Christmas holidays and family trips to Ireland. I imagine however, that if I had spent two weeks watching Alfred shrink, stink, and give birth to fruit flies, that I would remember Alfred. As adults, we seem to spend a tremendous amount of time discussing, warning and lecturing without experiencing and we forget so easily that our most powerful inspirations to date will have almost exclusively resulted from actual emotional experiences.

After lunch we had a presenter come and talk about endangered species in North America, specifically wolves. She asked the kids a number of questions which they were eager to answer, one of which was  about why maintaining the wolf population was of benefit to trees. Thirty plus hands went up.

"Because the nutrients in their poop help build rich soil for plant growth..." 

"Because they eat animals which would destroy the trees in larger quantities..."

"Because they sometimes eat plants and poop the seeds which helps distribute the growth..." 

Three months exploring the Weaselhead and connecting online in order to develop meaningful videos highlighting local natural waste and its place in our ecosystem had paid off. Natural organisms have a place in the wild, these kids had seen it.  "Wow, you guys really get it" was our presenter's response. "I have this conversation all the time with adults and it is hard for them to understand how wolves are connected to the trees."

"EVERYthing is connected to the trees!" was one indignant reply. Followed by: 

"..those adults, you have to explain a lot of things to them, there's so much they just don't understand..."

We learned a lot about native species in Alberta in 45 minutes. We learned a worrying amount about what our government says they're doing to protect them, as even to 9 year olds, many of their policies appear outdated and nonsensical. I gave the students sticky notes at the end of the presentation to jot ideas and questions about our current Endangered Species Act, what's working and what we should change. One student kept coming back for more notes... "Three's the limit right Mrs. Bailey? I can only have three ideas?" Who told this kid and at what point in his life that he could only have three ideas? He wants to write to the government on behalf of every one of the 13 male sage grouse left in our province. Then he wants to tell them that shooting wolves won't save cariboo, that Little Red Riding Hood was a liar, that wolves aren't the bad guys. He also wants to tell them to forget about the oil in the ground on the Blood Tribe land and just re-introduce the Swift Fox population the way they'd planned in 1973 and that they should be ashamed they've waited so long. He's got classmates on board.

Adults should remember that it's that simple. Kids are already curious and creative. They want to explore things and find out what's happening. Nothing about who they are is average, obedient or passive. All that is left to us, is to foster an awareness of the possibilities that surround them, to allow them to explore and then to get out of the way. Let them ask questions, make decisions, be different. There's more to their futures than resigned consumption and obedience.

Teaching Math: Knowing vs. Understanding

Deirdre Bailey

Each day in this process, I get a clearer idea of what powerful learning looks like. I have started to recognize what is becoming a blatant difference between kids who 'understand' and kids who 'know'. We have told them in class, we don't want 'parrots'. Parrots can recite anything we ask them to. It is not what we're looking for. Yesterday I observed a conversation in which teachers described their frustration with the time it was taking their students to 'uncover' mathematical solutions. They called it a road block and then admitted that to overcome the 'road block' they removed the problem and, 'gave them the answer', or in this case, the skills necessary to arrive at the solution.

What we, based on our prior experiences and education and even based on the way education is 'taught', assume, is that when somebody is told how to do something, they 'understand' how to do it. They don't. There are people all over the world that are capable of doing things without understanding how they're doing it, or why. As a simple analogy, how many skiers understand the physics involved in executing turns of a shorter radius than their ski? How many skiers understand that their skis have radius? As a more frightening example, how many first world home owners understand how their light switches work or understand the electrical circuits in their homes? How many adults have had mild shocks attempting to change a lightbulb because they were confused by these circuits. They can operate switches, but could they fix them? Could they pull them apart and put them back together?

Do we want schools to provide students with the necessary skills to survive or do we want schools to provide students with the ability to think, to create, to expand on what they know through critical consideration of what is possible? We believe the latter. Here is documentation of our first attempt to give power to students' own ideas instead of imparting our own.