Islay Education 2020 Unconference
It’s just over a fortnight since the unconference but it has
given me time for some reflection and to put it into context. Andy Wallis and Ian Stewart of Islay High School made
a magnificent job of the organisation; it is not every conference that has a help
yourself bar with malt whisky. The
barbecue to accompany the evening session and the tour of Bowmore distillery
and not least the beauty of Islay the island made for a memorable stay.
So what of the unconference itself? Islay High School is a very appropriate venue
for a look into the future. They are
already heading that way with an
innovative curriculum and timetable and very good use of ICT. The S3-S6 timetable is a pick and mix of
academic and vocational courses designed to give pupils a real choice, even to
including some Open University courses.
The vocational courses provide realistic experiences through the Social
Enterprise firms such as the Catering which tenders for outside contracts. Then
there is the Samsung Q1 UMPC for every pupil loaded with one of the best
Microsoft programs, namely OneNote.
Combine this with tablet PCs for teachers linked to wireless projectors
in the classrooms and wireless printers and there is a flexibility and freedom
from hardware constraints which shows the way it should be with present
technologies.
2020 is not that far away and the world of education and
technology is changing so fast that there will barely be time to plan for
it. So did the unconference point the
way? Expectations for this gathering ran
exceedingly high beforehand and it is fair to say that when that happens the
reality of outcomes will often disappoint.
If we could arrive at a blueprint in the course of an evening, even with
the huge talent and enthusiasm from a considerable cross-section of informed
educators present, we could all perhaps have stayed at home and sent in our
answers. We are talking about a hugely
complicated subject which affects the whole population and there is probably no
single solution to satisfy everyone.
This is not to be deplored as a sense of dissatisfaction can help
innovation.
An unconference is a democratic being and the delegates at
this one chose the topics we would discuss – Assessment, Learning Spaces and
Relevance of Skills. By the time we got
to this last one, the word relevance was not thoroughly addressed and we tended
just to catalogue our favourites.
However, I would suggest that the most relevant skills were certainly
mentioned and are perhaps the building blocks for more specialised skills. Literacy and numeracy are fundamental. We should today define literacy as an ability
to interpret whatever is presented to us, so text, music or sound, audio and
visual in all its forms must be included.
Interpret is not perhaps the best word as I see it as both active and
passive, e.g. writing and reading. Numeracy
is almost a sub-division if we call it the interpretation and manipulation of
numbers and mathematical concepts. These
skills are relevant in that we cannot make any progress without them. That is not to say that the whole population
is equalled adept at the whole range or that uniformity is even desirable. Because uniformity too often in practice
means dumbing down. If Mozart had been
reduced to my level of musical literacy the world would be a dreadfully
cacophonous place. I think I might
define a skill as something to be acquired by practice. It is not something to be arrived at by
independent thought or logic. One learns
the rules of arithmetic rather than trying to re-invent them. Alphabets are a set of rules as words are a
set of definitions.
Assessment proved to be as expected a contentious subject
and I think we did well to highlight the ends of the spectrum, external
summative tests of knowledge and internal unmoderated judgements of teachers. Assessment, evaluation, validation were all
bandied about. We reached no conclusions
but did spotlight the mountains to be climbed to reach a new consensus. Neither extreme is wholly right but all have
elements of value. The extreme of summative
tests of knowledge are frankly unreasonable when one percentage mark can change
a grade and therefore a person’s future.
On the other hand the nice young lady who works hard and writes neatly
is bound to have an advantage over the ill-mannered lout without a pen in at
least some teachers’ subconscious. Of
course it could be argued that an assessment of the whole person should include
manners but should not perhaps determine a pass or fail in Mathematics. If this
same discussion were to take place when more of the Curriculum for Excellence
is in place, there would almost certainly be major revisions of opinion.
Learning Spaces produced some interesting points of view as John Connell has already
drawn attention to. There were valiant
contributions making the point that a learning space is no longer a clean dry
school building with superior toilets.
Bearing in mind the state of the nation’s economy, the provision of
large numbers of new schools may become an ever more distant prospect over the
next few years and the idea of “the world is my oyster” through the medium of
the internet may take on more significance.
The world of the imagination is also a relatively inexpensive learning
space. While the unconference was at
times a bit chaotic there were many salient points made by a wide range of
contributors which showed that there is change in the air and a significant
minority who are going for it.
One unconference is like a swallow; it is not in itself a
summer. However this unconference did
make it clear to me that there is a movement or groundswell which is
questioning orthodoxy, pushing for debate and ready to embrace new methods and
experiment with alternatives to our somewhat tired teaching customs.
Quite apart from the intensity of debate is was good to meet
existing friends and put faces to cyber colleagues. Anybody who thinks that social networks in
cyberspace reduce real life relations should bear in mind that for many of us
the outcome of virtual meetings is real life friendships with people from
distant places who we would never otherwise meet and who enrich our lives as we
hope to impact on theirs. I mention but
a few, Ollie, Tessa, Theo, Alan, Andrew, David, Jaye, Katie, Stephanie, Stuart, Alan and a good many others.
website http://robthill.wordpress.com
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