Thought Leader - Dr Yong Zhao

Dr Yong Zhao

@YongZhaoEd
zhaolearning.com

I was lucky enough to hear this amazing educator talk at Christ's College in Christchurch on Friday. He was entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time. Many laughs were had and many conversations were held about how his research and ideas would challenge our way of teaching and how we think our students learn best.

This blogs is a summary of my notes from the talk. Most of the information he  gave us in his talk is on his website (I have linked to some of his blogs), but I wanted to sum up what I felt were the main points.

What makes a good educator?

 Counting what counts - Reframing Education Outcomes

 What we mainly focus on now is the curriculum. Students should be able to do this and know that. For example, in the USA they focus on language and math. We want to prescribe best possible programme for students to achieve but so much is based on assessment and content. See Dr Zhao's blog on A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners

Parents want to know who is better so we rank students and we rank schools (PISA).

What we need is transformation. In an interesting story about his childhood, Dr Zhao showed how useless it was as a farmer to go to school. He also showed that in one place you can be useless and in another you can be useful. It's about finding what your place is.

Problems

Disengaged students.

Youth unemployment. This generation had more education than any other generation but still in the USA there are over 50% underemployed or unemployed.

Boomerang generation  - average of $20,000 in debt.

See his blog on College Ready vs Out-of-Basement Ready for expansion on this.

Equity issues

He talked about talent being the potential to learn something. Being talented in math means you can learn faster. Everyone is talented in some area. Nature gives us the ability, nurture gives us the opportunity. Are you exposing students to lots so they can find out if they are good at it? Just because they can learn something doesn't mean they will be good at it. School can narrow us down from our talents.



He talked about the 16 basic human motivators and their object of desire by Dr Steven Reiss, which he related to education. Some people are naturally more curious than others. Some people love to run or ski because they get energy from it, but others are not interested. If we look at these motivators, there are a lot of bell curves and we could be high on some and low on others.

At the moment we want to turn students into homogenous students who can all do the same things. He related this to a sausage making process. If you want sausages then a sausage making machine is good.  However, we do not produce great kids. Lady Gaga would be useless on a production line.

Universities have students who play the game, get their degree but can't find a job. They have played the game but the game no longer works. We are delivering the wrong education.

This picture shows the types of jobs  and the change over time.  We can see the changes that the Industrial Revolution had in the 1800s and then in the 1950s when technology became more prevalent. We are now entering the 4th Industrial Revolution with smart machines and computers doing a lot of the work. He talked about the flow-on effect from just one area - driverless cars. Once we have those then many other jobs will become redundant. Police Officers, Traffic light controllers, no job is safe.

On the other hand it brings new opportunities.  You can drink more wine becuase there won't be drink driving issues, people will want new things in cars that they can do while travelling. There will be more leisure time and more disposable income. In this age of abundance you consume more. When it is personal it is better because you have choice.

 He talked about shampoo - you have a huge choice. So many people involved, from producers to advertisers.

 When you are not useful in one area, you can be useful in another. He talked about Kim Kardashian who is famous for being well known! He used the story of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer being brought up where the national standard for noses was black. Rudolph became famous because he was unique and had a global following.

New paradigm of education

He suggested reading "The End of Average" by Todd Rose

Every student comes to us unique so we need a student driven and personalised profile. We need to find out what they have and develop it fully. Get students to discover strengths and weaknesses for themselves. This then changes the effect of schooling. Schools should give students opportunities to shine.

Product-oriented learning

The last section was about identifying problems worth solving. Are we bettering people's lives? Entrepreneurship was highlighted with particular comments around projects outlined on http://www.edcorps.org/ . One in particular he talked about was  a group of students setting up a business that made a lot of money which they then gave to charity. Every child played a role and they ran it as a company that played to their strengths. Each student had something to offer and it was shown on a global campus.

The following are taken from his book "World Class Learners" which has some great questions for educators to think about. Here is a Youtube clip to watch as well.

Student Autonomy - What

Product-Oriented Learning - How

Global Campus - Where

We can learn from, with, and for everyone in the world.

When you assess something you lose something. Top scores have been shown to correleate to low confidence and interest. This might improve test reading score but then they may hate reading for ever.

We need to foster curiosity. If you teach a 4 yr old how to play with a toy, they will learn quickly but lose interest quickly.

We need to ask businesses to sponsor schools to support change. Businesses do not lie in the past. Education does not have enough funds to be innovative.  We need a diversity of ideas, institutions and practise. Encourage local students, staff. Teachers need to be a curator and create learning opportunities with feedback.  Students need to be free to play.

I really enjoyed the morning and certainly have a lot more reading to do. I know I am on the right track with what I am doing in my classes. It was nice to have some validation for this and ideas on what I can improve on.

 I think we worry so much about teaching we forget about learning. Leave students to do it themselves and just guide them in their passions.

Most likely to succeed

Tonight was the Christchurch screening of  an amazing documentary about the purpose of school. You can read a bit about the background to this in this article about Ted Dintersmith and his documentary "Most Likely to Succeed". I have been lucky enough to watch this movie today and this is my notes and reflection on it.

"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow." ~John Dewey

This quote really sums up the movie for me. Change is needed and certainly this was brought home tonight.
It started with talking about how Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess in 1997 and started the change in what computers can do and what humans can do. There was a very interesting interview with Jeopardy contestant Ken Jennings who came up against the Jeopardy Supercomputer and lost. He talked about how his job of knowing things was one of the first jobs to become obsolete.  A good question was

"What are people going to do when muscle power is not needed anymore?"

The next section was about the history of education and they talked about how education was put into age, ability and subject groups back in 1843. This was related to the Industrial Revolution and then led to the Committee of Ten which was a group of educators who designed the American curriculum back in 1892. This was 120 years ago and very little has changed since. We need to think about what skills we need now - not 120 years ago.

High Tech High is the High School that is the main feature of this documentary. It is a Charter School in San Diego and has a project based curriculum where students are responsible for their learning. There are no bells, classes are not in subjects, teachers are on one year contracts and they can teach what they want - they teach to their passions. The students start with a Socratic Seminar and they have to organise the seating themselves. They struggle with this at first and I love the comment from the staff member:

 "I can micromanage you through this or you can do it on your own"

All projects are planned around a public exhibition at the end, so all students know what they are aiming for. Four words used for the process are observation, reflection, documentation and exhibition. They are looking to  grow students who are resourceful, resilient and have a learning growth mindset. They need to produce creative ideas and try things. The students fail and learn from failures.

One of the strong themes was that education is about retention of skills, not just knowledge. The soft skills were mentioned often and confidence, perseverance and a good work ethic were listed as important skills. One question that came up around these soft skills was:

 "How can you go through High School and never  have been asked to make a decision?"

Discussion was had about the measure of success. If the measure is about passing the SAT then they ask why we teach subjects such as Art and Inquiry. If we are just teaching to tests then we should drill students. When a group of students were asked if they would rather learn knowledge or ace tests, they asked to ace the tests so they could get to College. I understand this as that is the mindset they have. We need to change that mindset and get them and parents to realise that knowledge is worth more. An interesting study was done where a group of students were tested on the same test 3 months after they sat their SAT and the average grade went from a B+ to an F! Not one student actually had a command of the test. They take it in just to memorise it but it doesn't stay. This test preparation is purely a factual recall test and tells employers nothing about work ethics, resilience, learning and working with others. A Google representative talked about the skills they look for, not necessarily taking the smartest people. They want highly creative, curious empathetic people who can give and take feedback.

The students took a lot of pride in their presentations at the end of the project cycle. They had satisfaction in making something that wasn't there before. This means they felt that they mattered and that they added value to things. One student didn't finish in time but learnt from his mistakes and still managed to eventually finish - in the summer break!

The end talked about educating our students for jobs that haven't been invented yet. About giving teachers greater autonomy and giving students a sense of purpose. I loved the analogy that teaching was more like gardening than engineering. We need to nurture and grow the students and if they find something that energises them, we can't keep them down.

After the movie we had some time to reflect and I felt good about what we had been doing in the School of Music and the School of Apps (see earlier blog). My only thoughts at this time were about how we could extend this school wide and how this also transfers into University.

The discussion afterwards from a group of panellists was also inspiring. John Ascroft, Coralanne Child, Kaila Colbin, Dick Edmundson, Janelle Riki-Waaka and Riki Welsh gave some good answers to questions and certainly gave us more to think about. Some of the main points I got from this were:

• 47-81% of jobs are under threat from technology in the next 20 years
• John Ascroft from Jade said that they were hiring 85-90% on soft skills rather than on capability
• The more we compartmentalise, the harder it is to get equality
• Content needs to be relevant to the student's lives - need a sense of belonging
• We need to teach decision making skills
• There is a strong relationship between the Socratic seminar and wananga -  the Maori way of working together
• Creativity is not born from spoon feeding
• If you were born today you will likely live to 2100. That's like being born in 1915 to 2000
• Need to shift from the 'power over' to the 'power with' model
• There is a disconnect between what is happening in society with what is happening in education
• We need to redefine success with individual programmes
• Teachers will be facilitators - the word teacher may not be the right one anymore
• Problem solving skills would increase resilience against mental health issues

Where to?
The Education Review Act is happening - make a submission and tell them the things that are stopping us from doing a great job.
Let students show their learning in whatever way they want as a first step.
For me - it's about taking what I already do to the next step.

In the words of Riki Welsh:

Reshaping Education is scary. Don't get too scared Christchurch.