Student centered education

This week has been one of those when you really wonder WHAT the heck social studies is, and how on earth it is possible to teach it without a Masters degree in every social science discipline and a PhD specialising in about 5 areas of educational theory. The "Shifting the Focus - the consequences of now" topic has fallen by the wayside a bit. I couldn't help but feel that all the concerns and questions the students had given me were firstly, too many to form a coherent course of learning, and secondly, not all were very related to student's lives. Finally one student asked: "if New Zealand went to war, would we have to fight?". This was the first question that really seemed to have some genuine meaning behind it so I am in the process of developing a unit from the bottom up based on this question, (using the social inquiry model) which will lend itself to a future focused topic as well as a conflict topic, both of which James Beane recommends as being consistently successful for a student centered, integrative curriculum. Students gave me some great material to work with after a series of provocative questions I threw at them based on this question. Now it is a matter of turning this into a sustained and meaningful unit. Hopefully it gets easier and more manageable because only one of the two year 10 classes asked this question! The other class decided that all the things we had brainstormed about the future were simply too depressing and they wanted to do something 'happier'. This wasn't quite the same cue as the NZ draft question but I have taken the fact that New Zealand was the first country to enfranchise women as a start and I will try and get them to organise a rally - 1 pro suffrage and one anti suffrage, based on the information and evidence I give them. Then we'll have a period looking at women's changing role over the 20th century and how they are 'represented' in the 21st century. After that, I'm not too sure. Perhaps New Zealand's nuclear role. It isn't quite gelling though. And again, the time it takes to put together.... My main concern though is that integration has gone out the window. I guess you don't always need it and the reality is that there are only so many hours in the day to meet and think with other teachers.

The main problem with my approach this term has been the lack of stimulus material. Had I had some better stuff before asking them the question about their concerns and questions of the future, something coherent could have come from it and they would have taken more ownership of the topic's title. As a complexiy theorist would say, I didn't create enough internal redundancy, there was no common learning experience that we could all relate to and learn from together. Perhaps that way both classes would be on the same page and I wouldn't need to be doing completely different units with them!!

Assessing the AOs "authentically"

In the lead up to students completing their exhibition I had been working with the Level 5 AO "understanding how economic decisions impact on people, communities and nations". However, the way to check if students understand a concept is if they demonstrate the use of it in a non-contrived way. But if in an integrated programme 4 teachers all tell students that their exhibition displays have to involve the demonstration of concepts set out at the outset, it is sure to kill any creativity through too much structure. As a complexity theorist would say, the constraints would be far from enabling.

So instead my students did what they wanted to do for their displays and I turned the AO into a question for them to answer in a test situation. Very few, understandably, actually bought into it. The exhibition diplays were not done with any particular attention to their social significance, or backgrounding in depth and detail the social issue, or any real consideration of values and perspectives. And as for involving a social action, I have written about that else where. So to summarise, the problem is that students didn't have a clear understanding of what we do in social studies education, which meant they were not able in any systematic way to strive towards them. And although they were all familiar with the Achievement Objective I was teaching them, the assessment of it was contrived and almost none used their exhibition to demonstrate conceptual knowledge of it.

Here are some solutions to the problem as I see it at the moment:

• Negotiate the theme with students as I have written about in the previous blog entry and based on this, decide which AO and conceptual understanding fits best to what emerges.

This turns some fairly traditional notions of planning on their head though. "Topics" wouldn't be known until the teaching had started, although the teacher would need a general idea about what might interest them to get the ideas flowing. And much of the planning such as the social studies inquiry template would need to be tailing the teaching. At the end this could be filed away as a record of what worked in one instance and could work in another instance with another teacher, but probably not without some considerable adaptation. Teaching and learning would have to be emergent from the specific conditions and interactions of the moment. We would have to be very well prepared for what arises, not well planned for what we predict.

• Tell students that the exhibition (or other performance opportunity) is a place for them to demonstrate an understanding of the concept under study. But if the concept focused on during the class time leading up to the performance opportunity really doesn't fit with their interest, they could discuss with the teacher another AO and conceptual understanding to demonstrate.

There is nothing in the curriculum document that says all the AOs must be taught, much less that they must be taught sequentially, or at the same time to everybody. Schools would need to have a system whereby teachers could keep a track of what has been taught and when. ERO will probably struggle with this level of complexity but there is no reason why anyone else should.

• Discuss with, or tell students which aspect of the social studies inquiry rubric (see image and previous blog) they will need to focus on for their exhibition or learning performance.

It would be great if towards the end of a two year teaching cycle and when students are very familiar with what we do in social studies, they could choose what aspect they wanted to be assessed on. Otherwise I think they use the key concept derived from the AO studied in class or personalised for them to "do" one of the aims as per the rubric. Another layer of assessment rubric will be too cumbersome. And if this doesn't happen, there should be numerous opportunities in social studies class time for students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding. Perhaps some more thinking is required here. The last thing students need is multiple layers of assessment rubrics! But in an integrated approach it is more than possible for me to assess anything they choose to learn about and perform for others for social studies, as long as what they do is related to some kind of real world issue.

Shifting the focus - the consequences of now

I tried an experiment in student-centered planning for a new integrated unit last week with some success. Floundering around at the end of last term with class discussions, provocative questions, free writing, watching and critiquing the film "The Pursuit of Happyness" had not led me to anything solid for this term's unit that we could integrate. So it was back to the books over the holidays to find some answers and James A Beane, or at least an article in a book he edited came to the rescue, as did a meeting with a Victoria University lecturer before school started.

Beane writes that there are some themes that are consistently successful in their ability to interest young people and one of those was "Living in the Future". This was exactly what I needed because it seemed to pull a few of the ideas students had raised together. But it was still not quite right.

This is where an author in Democratic Schools, edited by Beane and Apple came in handy. She suggested asking students to silently write their response to the question "What questions or concerns do you have for the future for you personally and the world generally?" Students then were put into groups and told to share and write down any similar concerns on a piece of paper. They then connected up any self and world concerns or questions that they thought were related some how. We then put these up on the board and they had to decide on a theme based upon them. They came up with two, shifting the focus and the consequences of now and after a vote couldn't decide so we put them together. The next step will be for students to brainstorm any activities they want to do that will relate to this theme and for the teachers to do this as well. I want to look at Utopias and dystopias as well as some best case scenarios and worst case scenarios. It will be fun to make a timecapsule for when students leave school but also one to be opened in 2045, when they celebrate their 50th birthday.

I'm not up to this step though, and I even wonder if it wouldn't be worth getting them to make a collage as a title page with some magazines with their interpretation of the theme before we do that. In the blog entry about the exhibition there is a picture of a person looking at the globe and I was worried that for this assignment there had been too much observing and not enough participating. I asked showed students this image and asked them if thy could think of one that would serve as one to demonstrate the participating aspect. This proved too hard. The next period I found three examples from the net on the Education for Enterprise and Education for Sustainability websites. We watched two videos of a student radio station, a student magazine that had involved the community and a project to get some water tanks installed into a secondary school. The students then had to create, for want of a better word, a "body static image" of participation in the world with someone to explain it to the class. Then they did three minutes silent writing on the question "what is social studies". I think a better question might be "what do we do in social studies" but we'll see. If students regularly answered this question it would be a great way to check your teaching. The more sophisticated the answers the better the teaching is going. Of course it depends on a deep or at least continuing knowledge of the aims of social studies education. In that regard I have been fortunate enough to benefit from an assessment schedule our department is using created by Andrea Milligan, a Victoria University lecturer which is in the image. It is based on the different aspects of the Social Studies Inquiry booklet and planning rubric put out by the Ministry of Education. It will be interesting so see whether or not student's suggestions for activities to do and learn about are affected by the lesson described previously and the different aspects of the , marking schedule, essentially and rubric explaining what the purpose of social studies is and which they now all have glued into their books.