I've already posted very briefly about Ben Zander, and the 'Art of Possibility' here. However, here's a copy of the post I made on the education discussion site Huddlemind. Most of it is new, some is a repeat. But right now I would rather spend time with Nellie than spend another half hour editing this to remove the repeated stuff, so I'm afraid you're just going to have to trawl on through!
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I can't believe it's already been a week since I went to a Ben Zander seminar here in Cape Town. I'd already seen him on video, so I was disappointed by him in real life. I guess I hadn't anticipated just how many of his lines are standard things he does in every seminar... like his one-buttock playing. I guess I was hoping for something fresh and new.
I was also frustrated by the fact that the event was a mixed audience, because I'd been under the impression that it was just going to be educators present. I was really looking forward to hearing him speak into how we can, in a SA school education context, really do the things he says we should. So I left feeling disempowered, rather than empowered, because he was not able to speak into that context given the audience before him.
One of my questions, for example, is how we can give everyone an 'A' while working within a system that requires us to mark and submit CASS work. How can we require learners to write an exam at the end of the year and at the same time give them an 'A'? How do we work the system while working within the system?
Another question is how you give everyone an 'A' when, quite clearly, people are not all at the same level. I think I prefer our system of giving a 1-5 rating. 5 means 'You've got it', 1 means 'you haven't got it at all', and 2,3 and 4 are varying degrees of success. I agree with Ben that marks are all made up anyway. Likewise, I agree that marks engender a culture of comparison, which in turn can lead to very critical self-talk. It doesn't have to be that way, and I guess his philosophy is one way of addressing this issue.
I'm not sure that it works in SA, or in a school where learners have to take a certain number of subjects, irrespective of whether they want to, or are able to cope with those subjects. And I'm not sure that giving everyone an 'A' is any less dangerous than giving a mark.
I think we need to create a culture in which possibility is everything, but I think we need to do that in a manner that teaches kids skills to cope with the world around them, rather than wrapping them in cotton wool and saying - 'you're brilliant', even if they're not. Kids can smell truth and falsehood a mile off.
While I did walk away from the seminar frustrated and disappointed, that doesn't mean to say that I'm going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What will I take away, then, from Ben's seminar and attempt to implement in my lessons on Monday? (We've been on Cross-curricular Week this past week, so I haven't been in a normal class environment for a whole week - it's been great, but exhausting!)
Firstly, that I need to watch the verbal and non-verbal language I use in the presence of the kids I teach. When I hand back tests (as I will be doing), do I focus on the negative, or the positive? Do I create a culture of real learning from mistakes (as Ben would say - "Fabulous!"), or do I create a culture that says making mistakes is anathema and that if you do you're stupid? Do I blame the kids, or do I take some blame myself for possibly not preparing them adequately for the task? Do I create negative spirals, or possibility circles?
Permit me a digression here... My Grade 9's have just completed two practicals for Natural Science. Before that, they completed a Science Fair project. At the end of the first practical, I was aghast at how few of them had bothered to write a proper scientific report, despite being given the rubric on how they would be assessed. So, I spent time creating a model answer for them, which I gave back to them at the same time that I returned their reports. I then instructed them to compare the two, and see where they went wrong. They sat in silence for 10 minutes or so, doing this activity.
Then, at the start of this past week the kids handed in their second report. While most of them had made some improvement, I was stunned at how few of them made the sort of improvement I had been expecting. When I discussed this with one of my colleagues, I was stunned to realise that not even this particular, experienced educator fully understood the difference between the hypothesis and prediction! Maybe it was that the rubric and the instruction sheet were not properly crafted, creating an ambiguous activity - in fact, I'm sure that was part of the problem.
I spent some time on Friday afternoon investigating this further, and found some really interesting research that says that 60% of science teachers do not really understand the difference between hypothesis and prediction. That really scared me. How can we expect our learners to complete a task when we educators (as a group) don't really understand the task either? Needless to say, I created a summary sheet for the kids, which the departmental staff will also get, of the differences. That will be handed out along with copies of a model answer for the current report activity.
Tomorrow's lesson will be similar to the one when I returned the first report, with one major difference - this time, it will not be an exclusively silent activity. I will get the kids to look at their own reports and analyse them, yes, but then I will also do a group activity where, as a class, we will look at one model example of a 'poor' report, and WHY it's a poor report.
Through these two tasks, I've realised just how right the new curriculum is in trying to get us to do more skills based work with the kids. In Science that means actually letting the kids do more practicals (not just doing demos). To those of you in the US, or the UK, I know that sounds so obvious. Here in SA though, one major obstacle to this is the lack of equipment. We simply don't have enough Bunsen burners for the kids to work in groups any smaller than 5 or 6. We don't have enough glassware for the kids to work in groups smaller than 8-10. Even these pracs, the kids did in groups of 8. Large groups are better than none, but it does mean that many of the kids are sitting around doing nothing, instead of being involved, and so there is potentially a real behaviour management issue with doing pracs.
While there's a lot about the version of OBE education we are aiming at in SA that I think is a waste of time, I think that in this particular area OBE education has a lot in common with Ben's philosophy. So - I will need to watch my language. I will need to try to create an environment where honest analysis is not about how wrong a child is, but about the possibility for growth through this experience.
The second thing I will take from Ben's philosophy is that a once-off activity is not going to fix it - as Ben says, it's an 'ART'. It's something I need to practice and practice and practice. And maybe I won't get it right with this class, this year. But maybe I will. And that's what I'm going to aim for.
The third thing I will try to implement is Rule #6. Stop taking it (myself, the subject, the system) all so seriously - let's have some fun!!! Learning is fun, so the learning environment should be fun.
There are a few other things, but I think that's quite enough to start with.
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