Online learning is very much in vogue, as are futuristic calls for public schools everywhere to embrace “21^st Century Learning Skills.”  A small band of Information  Communication Technologies (ICT) innovators, inspired by futurists like Toronto author Don Tapscott, New Brunswick IT guru William Keirstead and Vancouver teacher David Wees, are certainly out there championing the cause.

A brand new Canadian study covering all provinces and territories, commissioned by the Toronto-based Society for Quality Education,  demonstrates that, with the exception of British Columbia, the spread of online learning and virtual schools has stalled and, for the vast majority of Canada’s five million K to 12 public school students, “the sky has limits.”

Whether it’s Ontario or anywhere except for B.C., ministry of education authorities still remain wedded to modes of teaching and learning circumscribed by the “brick and mortar” model of public schooling.  New online learning initiatives are viewed as potential threats to the prevailing status quo, buttressed by a resistant organizational culture, public sector contract entitlements, and regulations designed to contain the spread of e-learning.

After enjoying an initial advantage, Canada has been overtaken by the United States in the rate of growth of online learning over the past two years.  In 2010-11, Canadian distance education plateaued at 207,096 students or 4.2 per cent of all students. While online learning continues to grow in British Columbia, the provincial leader with 88,000 enrolled students, those gains are offset by static numbers and losses in other provinces such as New Brunswick and Quebec.

America’s leading private enterprise promoting online public schools, K12 Inc., founded in 2000, has expanded into 28 different states, boasts of having delivered over one million online courses to students, and foresees skyrocketing  growth. A newly acquired Division of Pearson Education, Connections Education, now operates in 21 states and forecasts unlimited growth potential. In late 2011, The New York Times also flagged the tremendous proliferation of full-day virtual charter schools.

Online learning is now accepted in Canada as a critical component of the future in K-12 education. So why the hesitancy to move forward?

The first instinct of educational policy-makers, senior administrators, and teacher unionists is to monitor, regulate and control the educational domain.  While other factors come into play, that reflex reaction is particularly pronounced when it comes to the dynamically changing field of e-learning and the frontier of mobile social media.

Educational officialdom is inclined to speak glowingly about the potential of unlocking “21^st Century Skills” in our classrooms.  Yet the same key system stakeholders are consumed with promoting educational equity and few recognize the fact that federal infrastructure investments have already ensured that Canada’s poorest communities, such as Labrador, actually enjoy the best access to ICT.

Whether it is Ontario, Nova Scotia or even Nunavut, educational researchers tend to focus on the so-called “digital divide,” promoting quality of access to ITC and seeking to close the “competency gap” faced by students in lower socio-economic or remote communities. Research ventures such as that of Dianne Looker at Mount Saint Vincent University tend to support policy initiatives directed more at bridging the divide  than on generating prosperity and unleashing the creative potential of learning technologies.

Most provincial teacher unions show tepid support for online learning, holding fast to labour contract agreements which effectively limit online learning to a supplemental role in the K-12 public system. Even in B.C., where “distributed learning” is well-advanced, the provincial teachers’ federation remains torn on the question.

The Nova Scotia Teachers Union collective agreement, running to 191-pages, limits innovation with its 11 different clauses specifying the number of days of instruction, program hours, group sizes, and working conditions. Union activists, such as those in the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF),  pass resolutions to block virtual school initiatives and to hold the line until “equality of service “ can be guaranteed  for all students.

Free from public sector constraints, private educational ventures like Virtual High School (Ontario) and Christian Heritage Online School (B.C.) have jumped-in to fill the need for innovative, online learning school options and are growing by leaps and bounds.

The recent successes of VHS (O) and more than 14 such schools in B.C. directly challenge the “one-size-fits-all” public system in districts where school options were once strictly limited for students and parents.  Such “lighthouse school” ventures  offer a glimmer of hope that school choice, innovation, and quality, first seeded in Alberta, may yet spread to other Canadian provinces.

Related

Tips and Tools for Managing the E-Learning Classroom

Collaboration in the Digital Classroom

Are Computers in the Classroom Doing Kids a Disservice?

More articles by Paul W. Bennett

Paul W. Bennett, Director of Schoolhouse Consulting, Halifax, NS., is the author of “The Sky Has Limits”: Online Learning in Canadian K-12 Public Education (Society for Quality Education, January 2012).

Photograph by Yvonne Berg

William Butler Yeats so aptly once said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” This prominent 20th-century poet and playwright was wise to the vast difference between knowing and understanding. To simply know facts is not to understand what makes those facts knowledge.

“To understand is to be able to wisely and effectively use– transfer– what we know, in context; to apply knowledge and skills effectively, in realistic tasks and settings.”  (From the book Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins)

So how can today’s education system help students achieve this type of “education for understanding?” Teachers– as collaborators and guides– must find creative ways to stimulate their students’ natural curiosities and allow them to make connections between theories, while building the skills and attitudes they will need for life-long learning. Child-centered and retrospective curricula design, combined with inquiry-based learning, will allow schools to foster authentic student learning experiences, by providing students with opportunities to engage in meaningful learning experiences; to explore, investigate, discover, collaborate and communicate with others in an experiential and ‘minds-on’ learning environment.

Backward Design Methodology

In order to lead students to a deeper understanding of the content, teachers must highlight the “Big Ideas” that uncover the value of learning opportunities. “Backward Design” involves looking at the end results in order to coherently design curricula and assessment. In doing so, teachers “identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, and plan learning experiences and instruction” (Wiggins). Enduring Understanding– the “Big Ideas” that propel the planning and assessment process– and Essential Questions are a part of the curriculum development that assists teachers in planning pertinent and authentic learning units, and are clearly established before the learning unfolds. ‘‘So what?” teachers often ‘ask’ in order to determine what they would like students to be able to explain, interpret, apply, have perspective on, empathize, and have self-knowledge about a given topic.

“Backward Design” involves looking at the end results in order to coherently design curricula and assessment.

New Curriculum: Teachers as Designers

To help each student achieve a successful and relevant education, schools must begin with what matters most, keeping the authentic learning experience in mind. For instance, when designing an advertisement, we first think about our desired result: How do we want the finished product to look? What message do we want our target audience to walk away with? Then we begin to plan and organize the images, the fonts, the colours, and the placement of details, such as our logo and contact information. Like so, when teachers plan their curricula, it also makes sense for them to start with the end result in mind: What do we want the children to know and understand, including attitudes and transferable skills? Why and how is this relevant to their learning experiences? The students themselves must also understand the purpose of specific experiences and to what they relate, as well as how these experiences will enable them to achieve their goals as active and responsible learners.

As a method of understanding, the ‘Backward Design’ model is largely compatible with the Core Knowledge curriculum and Reggio Approach to inquiry learning richly embraced by Richland Academy. By combining these viewpoints, and regarding children as creative and capable protagonists, teachers are able to take on the role of researchers for the learning that cultivates real-life application beyond the classroom. Richland’s ‘Big Ideas’ include Community and Structure & Function, to which many of the curriculum concepts are filtered. As a Reggio-inspired, 21st-century learning community, our child-centered, experiential and intellectually-stimulating environment fosters life-long learning skills and attitudes, where our students are challenged to extract multi- faceted ideas from their learning interests. This deeper understanding allows our students to experience meaningful and relevant learning opportunities; thus, truly achieving an “education for understanding.”

Related

The Reggio Philosophy

Conceptual Learning at Richland Academy

Transforming Schools Through Action – Poke the Box Book Review

Curriculum and Teaching Methodologies

I was working on an interview series with Donna Soble Kaufman and, as the researcher-writer on the program, I had to familiarize myself with the work of the great Italian educator. I was mesmerized by what I read. What Dr. Montessori had to say about the enormous capacities of the child stayed with me over the years.

Eventually my career path led me to formal academic study. Peculiarly, in my research at Ryerson, McMaster and the University of Toronto, I never heard Maria Montessori mentioned in any of my lectures. In my years at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (where I completed a doctorate in curriculum), the great Italian educator was completely ignored. I’ve wondered many times about that particular void and I’ve come to the conclusion that what Montessori demands is too difficult. It is far easier, for administrators as well as teachers, to simply create a set of lectures and to endlessly talk to a captive audience. We are paying a terrible price for taking that “easy road.”

It was during my teaching career at Ryerson that I had the chance to test Montessori’s concept of experiential learning. I was dissatisfied with the standard lecture format. It occurred to me that we extended adolescence far too long in a type of unforgiveable intellectual dependency. I sensed that students actually wanted to engage in activities that would test their ideas and skills in a real setting. They were tired of platitudes and untested theories. They wanted to work with colleagues in a collective act of creation.

At that time I revisited books about Montessori and I began to change the standard curriculum in all of the classes I taught. In a sense, I did not know—with any assurance—what I was doing. But the results were breathtaking and even inspiring.

In the television production classes, I gave the students a degree of autonomy they had never before experienced, and they thrived. Instead of arid exercises I allowed them to select from original scripts. I further encouraged them to choose roles in the television production for which they had aptitudes. Access was provided to necessarily limited production resources and stringent deadlines were set. Absenteeism dropped, skill levels rose, and students happily worked around the clock on projects that were completely of their design.

In my coordination of the internship program, I created a “self-management” model that treated the students as capable adults who could deal with accountability. Students actually found their own internships, negotiated with the host company, and set up a contract outlining expectations on the part of the student and the sponsor. The students had maximum autonomy with a minimum of supervision. However, expectations were high and the final report from the sponsor and the student disciplined the entire experience.

How Montessori’s Concepts Made the Greatest Difference in Class

It was in my media-writing classes, however, where Dr. Montessori’s concepts made the greatest difference. Students studied existing dramatic models and then were brought in touch with front-line writers from Los Angeles to actually have their work adjudicated by “readers” who were, themselves, accomplished writers. The results were explosive and profoundly encouraging. Suddenly we found that students in the classes were being hired on front-line shows as junior writers. They had absorbed the theory and the craft from masters in a type of aesthetic apprenticeship. They were stunned to find that their work was being looked at by people of the calibre of Peter Mehlman (Seinfeld), Michael Schwartz and Al Joiner (The Simpsons), and prominent writers from Canadian dramatic series.

The CTV television network was so impressed with the progress of the students that they placed under my direction the expenditure of $200,000. The money was available as part of what is called a “public benefit” when CTV applied to the  Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) for an extension of their system. CTV felt that Canadian television needed more skilled dramatic writers and they decided that our program of study could meet that objective. With the new financial resources I hired professional writers to guest lecture and to review scripts. Contact was established with major shows in Los Angeles, and I set up a process where students would deconstruct existing series and then have their research assessed by writers on the shows they had analyzed. The students had never worked harder in their lives. They also felt confident and assured in their newfound, and profoundly tested, skills.

Recently I’ve been working with Clanmore Montessori School as an educational consultant, and I have become reacquainted with Dr. Montessori in a deeper way. The results have been two seminal articles for Dialogue Online. (Read “The Maria Montessori No One Knows” series, the most popular posts of 2011.) The first deals with Dr. Montessori’s reaction to having a child out of wedlock, and how she turned tragedy into triumph. The second follows Mario and Maria Montessori’s challenges when they were declared enemy aliens in wartime India. As part of my research I had the opportunity to look closely at the Montessori classroom experience and I have emerged from my practical experiences and my theoretical research with a deep conviction. I believe, completely, that Maria Montessori is the most important woman in history. I challenge my colleagues to nominate another candidate for this place in the whole range of development.

The Dialogue articles have clearly touched a nerve. The reaction has been amazing. There’s so much that we do not know about Montessori. Even today no one really understands her. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with very senior academic leaders and not one of them had any significant knowledge of Dr. Montessori. Myths abound and her system has been distorted out of all recognition.

A Revolutionary, But Bizarre, Figure in Education

That distortion, however, is completely understandable. By any measure Montessori is a bizarre creature. She was born in a conservative Italy when Queen Victoria was in the very middle of her reign. She was a friend of Alexander Graham Bell, the first female medical doctor in Italy, and a woman who continued to write and study until the very end of her life in 1952. She had a child out of wedlock, was abandoned by her lover, and forced to deny the existence of her son. She was a superstar in America and then she was ignored. She was considered a revolutionary figure in education, and then she was lampooned as out of date. Through all of this she focused her whole being on addressing the educational needs of the child as it moved towards autonomy. In this she was unrelenting and she accumulated a range of knowledge (through study and observation) that is almost superhuman. Only now is modern science coming to terms with her findings. The tragedy is that so much of what she saw so clearly has been forgotten and, continually, has to be rediscovered. Over and over again I see her insights regurgitated as astounding new information. Occasionally this “new information” was completely understood by Montessori in the early years of the twentieth century.

Her critique of education at primary, secondary, and—perhaps particularly— university, deserves reconsideration. In the field of pedagogy, I would insist that we are “error prone.” One of the best ways to set our professional compass, as educators, is to read (and re-read) The Absorbent Mind. It is pure Montessori: pugnacious, trenchant, disturbing and compelling. You cannot read this book without feeling that, even today, we are all wandering in the wilderness.

Some misguided souls think that Maria Montessori was somehow complicit with Mussolini in the educational system in fascist Italy, not realizing that Dr. Montessori spent the entire duration of the war in India as a “enemy alien” who was loved and admired by the people who, ostensibly, were her captors.

Others think that The Absorbent Mind was written early in the 1900’s, not realizing that it was published in 1949 when she was 79.

Ultimately, what I find fascinating is that Montessori is a truly tragic figure who was buffeted by life and alternately wooed and abandoned by her sometimes admiring public. Nothing of this diminishes the fact that she is a towering figure in the field of education whom we ignore at our peril. I suspect, though, that we will continue to rely on the jaded lecture model not realizing the energy that can be released when young people work in a cooperative way in tasks that have a recognizable relationship to real life.

Related:

The Maria Montessori No One Knows: A Heartbreaking Betrayal (Part 1 of 2)

The Maria Montessori No One Knows: ‘Enemy Alien’ in India (Part 2 of 2)

The Montessori Method and Philosophy

Wikipedia: Montessori Education

The Freedom to Learn in the Conceptual Age of Schooling

From Camp to School And Back Again

Top Education Trends: Environment

* * * * *

How were you influenced by Maria Montessori or other educational heroes? Post your thoughts in the Comments section below.

February 26, 2012
Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, Ontario.

Why Attend

• Find top March Break, Summer and Holiday Camps for kids and teens
• Attend free information seminars to help you choose and prepare for camp
• Learn about charities, discounts, bursaries and tax credits for camp
• Enter for a chance to win $500 voucher to any participating camp (50+ to choose from)

For families looking to find summer activities for their children, this is an event not to be missed..

Camp Expo from Our Kids Net on Vimeo.

SEMINAR: How to choose a camp
Learn a step-by-step approach to choosing the right camp for your child. There are many factors to consider when choosing a camp, and what may be a great camp for your neighbour’s child may not be the best fit for yours. Gain insider information on how to assess your child’s style against your families ‘wants’ and ‘needs’, and get advice on where to start, research tips and must-ask questions.

SEMINAR: Safety at camp
Many families rule out camp because of the cost or outdated stereotypes. Today’s camps offer tremendous benefits and advantages that should not be overlooked. Don’t miss this session that takes a peak into life at camp and identifies some of the common myths and concerns that cause some parents to miss considering what might be the greatest gift they could ever offer their child.

Pre-Register for FREE Admission for your family
Register today to download free admission vouchers for your entire family at www.ourkids.net/campexpo

Recognizing that Twitter-use is not yet widespread in education, I hope to convince you to consider it.

First, some necessary context:

1. Thoroughly educating all children to the extent we wish is not straightforward. The more you teach and learn, the more evident this becomes.
2. Because the world keeps changing and children keep changing, all educators must keep learning. Educators must learn from many sources to ensure their professional judgment, applied endlessly each day, is rooted in as much knowledge as possible. 

With this in mind, here is one of the fundamental barriers to the excellence we all want to see in education: Educators are so busy educating that little time remains to constantly learn and grow from all the various perspectives out there.

Educating is demanding work. Educators are committed, passionate professionals who learn as much as they can and apply it to their practice. But, oh how lovely it is to come across a medium that allows us to significantly increase our knowledge base with the little spare time we can find.

Twitter serves many purposes, many of which have no bearing on professional learning. However, the fact that I can readily access relevant articles, blog posts, videos, resource suggestions, youth commentary, TED Talks and information about the world we live in from credible sources with a flick on my iPad or sweep of my mouse sends shivers up my spine. Sitting down to Twitter each day is like sitting down to the proverbial treasure chest. Rare is the day I don’t find a gem that I would have never otherwise come across—something that challenges, excites, supports, or just introduces a whole new line of thinking.

Ongoing learning matters, especially when it has the potential to make you better able to do what matters. Time, and the wise use of it, also matters.

Where these converge is where I find Twitter.

If this perspective is new to you, I encourage you to check out Twitter, for your interest in education or anything else for that matter. And if new perspectives will help you do what matters to you, enjoy the gems you’ll find there.

* * * * *

How do you use Twitter in your professional development and teaching? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.

Related:

A Look Ahead to the Educational IT Challenges for 2012

Apple and Digital Textbooks: A K-12 Educational Revolution?

The Five Educational Legacies of Steve Jobs

Paul Keery’s articles and IT for Every Classroom columns

Lifting of Ban Means Classrooms Must Use Technology Smartly

Dialogue Magazine New Literacies Edition

More about technology in schools

More about social media in schools

Apple’s Jan. 19 announcement of its new platforms and authoring tools has ignited a firestorm of debate across the Macintosh-based educational community. Has Apple finally found a way to create and digitize textbooks in a format and at a price accessible to everyone?

Apple’s New Paradigm

Apple introduced three big changes for digital education in its announcement.

The first, iBooks 2, is an upgraded version of iBooks, designed to handle the new media-rich textbooks that will be sold by major American publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, through the iTunes store. Students will need an iPad to download and read the textbooks, which range in price from $14.99 to $19.99 U.S. The textbooks, as of this writing, are not yet available outside the United States. Those who have seen them are impressed with the powerful integration of media forms that convey knowledge compellingly and intuitively to readers.

The second, iBooks Author, is a new application that allows Macintosh users to easily and quickly produce e-books in an ePub-like format. From first reports, iBooks Author is remarkably easy to use. It allows users to include text, images, audio, video and a set of widgets that allow users to add Keynote presentations as well as interactive images and 3D objects that can be viewed from any angle.

The third is an expansion of iTunes U. Previously limited to university-level education, iTunes U will now allow K-12 teachers to upload full courses as well. Courses can be taught using video or podcasts, and supported by course content created in iBook Author and available through the new iBooks 2.

With these interlocking applications, Apple has created the tools that may allow imaginative users to redefine education for the 21^st century.

New Opportunities

Digitizing textbooks was apparently Steve Jobs’ last major project at Apple. Jobs saw the textbook industry as ripe for Apple to challenge, as the old method of buying and then carting big, heavy, quickly outdated textbooks from class to class was now obsolete, thanks to the iPad. The challenge was to find a way to take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities to digitize textbooks in a format that could be created easily by publishers and was affordable for students.

Photo from The York School

iBooks 2 and iBooks Author have done this. Creating content for the iPad is now easy for anyone with a Macintosh, iWorks, and the iBooks Author software.  It’s easy to distribute material created with iBooks Author through iTunes to be read using iBooks 2. It’s arguable that the iPad is at last a valuable educational tool for students in secondary school, who can now create content for it; most iPad educational applications have been directed at elementary students.

Content creation is particularly appealing. Creating content with the Pages ePub formatting tool does create ePub e-books, but it’s a clumsy, limited and frustrating process at best. iBooks Author opens up tremendous possibilities for teachers and students if they have access to the necessary hardware and software.

Concerns and Issues

However, Apple’s new educational initiatives do present several challenges for educators and educational administrators.

The most problematic issue is cost. Sure, it’s great that a textbook will cost less than $20; but the cost of the iPad has to be factored into that equation as well.  Are there real savings when an iPad costs, at a minimum, $500? The textbooks files are large, too—often greater than 1 GB. The  8 and 16 GB iPads will not be able to hold too many textbooks. Also, an iPad will last only three or four years and is tremendously vulnerable to abuse—it could potentially be wiped out if someone spills water on it.

Ownership of the content is another problem. If a school downloads textbooks for its students for its iPads, do they own the textbooks in perpetuity? Unlike hard copies, libraries have not been permitted by publishers to buy ownership of e-books outright; the rights to the e-book expire after 18 months or two years. Hard copies of books do deteriorate and often have to be replaced; the digital limitation is meant to simulate this. Will schools face the same issues when buying textbooks from Apple? The same problem also applies to school libraries if the librarians decide to build a textbook collection.

Content creation also poses some problems. Great as it appears to be, iBook Author only works on Macintosh computers that run OS X Lion. Most schools do not run Lion because of cost or because they are running programs that are several years old and need Rosetta (which has been dropped from Lion) to run software originally designed for older processors.

There is a philosophical issue with content creation as well. Before the rise of the Internet, content was vetted for accuracy by publishers before it was printed; now, there is so much erroneous information on the Internet because anyone can create and upload a website (Wikipedia is very conscious of this, as is Citizendium). Will the same problem take a new form in the world of e-book publishing thanks to iBook Author?

Educators should be inspired by the new e-publishing world being opened up by Apple and be prepared to take creative advantage of Apple’s new tools. But they should be very aware of the pitfalls that may entrap them if they don’t think before they innovate.

* * * * *

What do you think about Apple’s e-publishing revolution? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.

Related:

A Look Ahead to the Educational IT Challenges for 2012

The Five Educational Legacies of Steve Jobs

Paul Keery’s articles and IT for Every Classroom columns

Lifting of Ban Means Classrooms Must Use Technology Smartly

Dialogue Magazine New Literacies Edition

More about technology in schools

More about social media in schools

In schools like the West Island College in Calgary (above), students can take music courses to enhance their learning. Research shows that grades are not motivators; in fact, they can kill the desire to learn. PHOTO BY CHRIS BOLIN/OUR KIDS MEDIA

The literature on motivation offers some interesting insights into human behaviour. Psychologists, social scientists and educators have studied the role that incentives (sometimes called rewards) and disincentives (sometimes called punishments) play in the lives of children, students and employees.

Ideally, people work on the most important and meaningful tasks in their lives driven from an internal desire—what is called intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the desire to accomplish a task for the sake of curiosity, interest, pursuing mastery, developing skills, expanding experience, gaining knowledge, and so on.

Extrinsic motivation is the opposite: a person works on a task primarily in order to gain an external reward or avoid a punishment. The focus of the mind under these conditions is not on mastering the task itself but on seeing the task as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Classic extrinsic motivators are pay incentives (bonuses) to encourage greater productivity, grades on school work, honour rolls, academic awards, and praise from teachers or superiors after specific performance results.

Learning becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, when a student is more focused on the external element that the learning moves toward— reward or punishment, high grade or low grade, praise or criticism—than on the sensation of mastery that comes from gaining knowledge and developing skills. Research conducted with students of all ages reveals that performance goals undermine intrinsic interest. In other words, focusing on a grade, a test score, or a reward eats away at a student’s engagement in the actual learning itself. Despite what many people think, grades are not motivators; in fact, they can kill the desire to learn. In a performance-oriented culture, where grades and test scores are of paramount importance, students can lose a genuine interest in the learning tasks.

Key Factors in Student Motivation

Teachers intuitively know this when they say “but students won’t work without grades!” That is precisely the point that researchers are making: once rewards (grades) have been regularly used to influence behaviour, and once learning has become a means-to-an-end activity, many students work only for the rewards (or to avoid the punishments). They become distant from and disinterested in pursuing knowledge and developing skills.

Extrinsic motivators—money, grades and praise —produce short-term effects. Students will study for the test, but mostly the night before, often without much interest in the material itself,  and often using their rote memory. Teachers have all experienced the frustration of working with children who seem to know the material one day and cannot recall it a week later. It is nearly impossible to build deep and genuine learning when students are relying on short-term memory to perform tasks that have an external value to them—a good grade.

Studies tell us that choice is a key factor in motivation. Choice that allows us to exercise control over the type of tasks we engage in as well as the way in which we complete them supports a sense of autonomy. And a sense of autonomy leads to greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.

Choice is the key to self-determination and authenticity. To live and to learn without choice is to feel controlled and to develop instrumental thinking—to work for the reward.

Teachers can foster internal motivation by engaging students with interesting learning materials and environments, constructing learning tasks that promote active involvement, de-emphasizing grades and other extrinsic controls, and supporting autonomy through offering real and meaningful choices both in task and in execution.

The research on motivation is complex and fascinating, and the bottom line is this: Kids are more internally motivated to learn when rewards and punishments are kept at a distance. We don’t want kids “doing school”—going through the motions while focused on praise and grades—because it turns out that they don’t retain their learning with this mindset. The learning is superficial and more about external affirmation than about deep understanding.

Related:

Multitasking Undermines Deep and Sustained Learning, Research Shows

The Country Day School’s Magazine Feeds a Growing Mind

Dialogue Online: Education News and Research

Dialogue Online: Curriculum and Teaching

* * * * *

How do you motivate students? What is the most effective way they learn? Share your tips in the Comments section below.

With more and more students applying to post-secondary education, you need an advantage wherever you can get it. GRIS plays its role in helping students develop into well-rounded and balanced individuals, able to take advantage of gaining admissions into top university programs around the world. We accomplish this through our multi-year program, which includes consistent and high-quality reports to students and parents.

The private school industry is becoming more competitive. We play our role in helping schools differentiate themselves from one another. When a school becomes a “GRIS School”, they are showing parents that they are going beyond the standard to ensure that a student’s future is assured for success.  GRIS helps schools increase their applications and admissions.

Our reports go beyond what most schools issue to students today. We operate under a fundamental belief that reports should include more than just a student’s grade. GRIS Reports included the following:

- Analysis of grade components

- Analysis of academic excellence

- Analysis of extra-curricular activities

- Analysis of overall behaviour and attitudes in an academic setting

At GRIS, we issue more reports as well. During the academic year, we issue a total of 10 reports.

Monthly reports to be able to give more consistent and incremental feedback. End of each term (January and June) reports, are thorough and well analyzed term reports. These give an overall feedback for the previous term and steps for the next year.

Every student is different and we customize and tailor our approach to ensure GRIS is useful in a student’s academic career.

Contact us today to find out more on the GRIS Approach and how we can help your school. Call us at 416-300-2917 or email us at eric@mygris.com ADDRESS: 163 Mabley Crescnet, Thornhill, ON, L4J 2Z7, Canada TELEPHONE WEBSITE EMAIL 416-300-2917 www.mygris.com eric@mygris.com  

If you are a traditional boarding school master, juggling teaching, coaching, dorm duty, formal dinners and your own family, you know that your free time is in short supply. The authors focus on effective management of our most precious resource: our energy. They have found to their surprise that the performance demands most people face in their everyday work environments are often tougher than those professional athletes face. Because athletes train constantly, they are more prepared, whereas most people are in the work game 12 or more hours a day with little or no training at all. Most of us are constantly trying to manage time, but in this book, the authors have instead set out a prescription for managing energy on every level: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

From the book, I learned about the power of a 15-minute power nap, the effects of adjusting my diet to include more fruits and lighter meals, and the role that exercise plays. While some of this may seem common sense, Loehr and Schwartz conducted a great deal of research and present such a strong argument for managing your energy effectively that I was more inclined to stick to their recommendations. Far too often, I would push myself to keep working to finish a project, or spend more time with an advisee, or to grade the last few tests, but what I needed to do was take a break, go for a run, eat an apple, or take a
10-minute nap, and then return to the work with more focus and more energy. When I do this, the results are magnified. The Power of Full Engagement is an easy read and leads to greater happiness and productivity if you work to implement the suggestions made by the authors.

* * * * *

Have you read The Power of Full Engagement and tried its advice? How can we improve performance, health and happiness at work and other aspects of our lives? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.