INQUIRY INTO TEACHER EDUCATION
Our year of teacher education has only begun and already we have been introduced to so many knowledgeable instructors, inspiring mentors, and wonderful peers. Even early on, many of us were treated to moments that validated our decision to become educators and made us even more excited for the year to come. Since then we've continued to be exposed to still more inspiring innovators in education such as Sir Ken Robinson, Al Sakai, Chris Kennedy, and Neil Stephenson.
Despite these positive moments, some of us have noticed what we feel are significant conflicts and contradictions within our program: ones that are not only intellectually confounding but also make our learning difficult. In his talk with us, Al Sakai spoke about the use and value of writing as a key medium through which to reflect on and work toward resolving one’s problems. Here we’ve attempted to take that advice. The opinions that follow will not be representative of every member of our cohort, though most are routinely echoed in conversations among many in the CITE cohort and across other cohorts within the Teacher Education Program. We hope that what follows will be read in the spirit of inquiry and with the same good humour and deep interest with which it was written. We acknowledge that we know little of the hard work that has gone into developing our courses and the CITE cohort program, or the reasoning behind any of that. We have assumed these decisions were all made with the best of intentions. Please read what follows as our inquiry into and reflection upon this unseen process.
While this letter is long, we hope that it is not long-winded; we have tried to provide enough detail and specific examples that this document will be useful. We have also made some effort to provide necessary detail without singling anyone out, in an attempt to keep this professional, constructive, and prevent anyone from taking offence. We write this reflection at this time, during the program, and not after its completion, in an attempt to be proactive and affect a change that we ourselves might benefit from.
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At the outset, right on day one of our orientation, the entire Education cohort viewed an inspiring excerpt from a talk by Ken Robinson. Following this, in different classes, our CITE cohort has been treated to several of Sir Ken’s videos. Curiously, it seems that many in the academic community, at least at UBC, think he is just talking about changes needed in certain elementary schools; but he is clearly talking about education as a whole. In fact, he takes time in different talks to specifically pinpoint academics and universities as the major source of the problem with education. Robinson says, to great applause, that “every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment – and it’s not enough. Reform is no use because that’s just improving a broken model. What we need … is not evolution but a revolution in education: it has to be transformed into something else.”
Some of us in this cohort have been involved in classes, whole semesters, and even entire undergraduate programs that begin to approach what Ken Robinson might call revolutionary. So there are working models out there. Our experience so far at UBC – in a program that was just improved – is that it appears to have been inspired less by Ken Robinson’s call for revolution and more out of some sort of academic resignation. As his first TED talk was made public in 2006, and has garnered world-wide attention for the better part of a decade, some of us wonder what we’re waiting for? Why, for instance, is it that at UBC, between our seven (very knowledgeable, thoughtful, helpful, friendly) instructors, no one has thought it useful or necessary to run an assessment-based class, engage us in regular problem-based learning, or even involved us in any outdoor education? We’ve not had one class outside despite some amazing weather and our campus being embedded in a prime coastal rainforest, surrounded by beautiful beaches, all lining the Pacific ocean. Throughout the BEd program consternation abounds!
What are we being taught? What is the model we’re taking with us to elementary schools? If we’re not experiencing what we're told is best practice here in the Education program, few of us have seen anything like it up to this point in previous schooling, and fewer still will experience it in our practicum schools and classrooms, how and from where are these needed revolutionary teachers going to spring forth – and why? Interestingly, we were all recently told the story of a former teacher candidate who stood at the front of his practicum class and lectured at them for forty minutes. This was a hilarious example of what not to do. Sure. But for some of us listening to this it was the Faculty Advisor’s surprise at this person’s teaching technique that was most shocking. Undoubtedly this sort of thing is all this student teacher, as well as many in our CITE cohort, has had modelled for them throughout their entire school experience. And is there any doubt that it's the teaching they've experienced over the previous seventeen years of school, and not the contents of one lecture or a handful of readings, that informs the bulk of one's teacher training? And then isn't expecting them to deviate radically from everything they've seen and done a pretty unrealistic expectation? From the perspective of a non-educator it certainly seems so.
In our program we talk constantly, as we should, about good pedagogy. We speak of engaging learners where they’re at; uncovering, embracing, and making use of prior knowledge; engaging different interests and skills; etcetera… And yet this is not done in our classes, where it feels a bit like a do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do scenario. For instance, we all completed degrees before applying to this programme (some of us have several degrees and/or Master’s degrees) and yet seldom are any of our skills or prior knowledge valued or made use of in any meaningful way; instead, we've all been forced to sit through long lectures and info sessions on subjects some of us are thoroughly versed in. In fact, in a few instances we were all demonstrably better informed than the person delivering the information. To get specific, aside from the standard page or two of remarks in each of our course outlines, we’ve also had numerous mentions in class about academic honesty and plagiarism, what it is and how to avoid it. There appears to be no assumption, or expectation, that we come to a professional program (in Education) with such knowledge, despite all of us having no less than four years of academic experience. On a similar note, we've now had three different sessions, all “required”, on how to use the library. This alone is shocking. And it's more shocking still when you consider that some of our classmates have had careers as librarians and one has a Master’s degree in library sciences. Were these sessions, at the very least, a waste of their time? I imagine so. All of us were also “required” to attend an info session about blogging. Some of us have had our own blogs for a decade or more and contribute to our own and others regularly. Several of us have even designed and built websites professionally and are able to code in several programming languages. And we can safely say that the concept of blogging and how to compose a blog post are even more obvious and easily undertaken by anyone whose used a computer in the last two decades than is plagiarism and how to avoid it to university graduate. So was this blogging session the best use of our time? Perhaps not. Yet this session came with the same “mandatory” status as countless other sessions of similarly questionable merit. We can’t help but feel that this is curious way to treat a group of people paying to be here. And we would ask what it means for something in this program to be “required”? If it is not required for our learning going forward, because we already possess the knowledge or skills the task or session intends to impart, then what (or who) is it required for? We cannot imagine. For another example, before to our two-week practicum, we had two virtually identical lesson-planning assignments due in different classes. This was essential, we were told, so that we could get invaluable feedback before heading off on our practicum. However, neither assignment was returned to us before practicum. In this light these assignments felt, and actually proved to be, more like busy work than anything. As such, it appears that those responsible are not only disregarding their audience but also their prior experience and the value of their time. In an education setting, one in which we are regularly and pointedly discouraged from committing these very mistakes ourselves with our future students, this reality feels hugely scandalous.
This issue of not using our time wisely and not feeling respected by our school and its staff comes up in other ways too. Before we are asked to pay another professional development fee, or made to volunteer to pay our way, we ask that our instructors and institution reflect on three important details about the Teacher Education program and the students enrolled in it. First, this program is among the most expensive at UBC (behind only Medicine and Law) and one of the most costly in history (adjusted for inflation what did it cost in 1985 and, critically, what was it worth then compared to today?) Second, many of us have volunteered dozens and even hundreds of hours in Lower Mainland schools already, as a prerequisite to applying to UBC (so in-kind payment has already been made.) And third, we in the CITE cohort are already engaged in what amounts to a 600+ hour unpaid internship program. So then we'd like the school to consider that, even at BC’s paltry minimum wage the labour of our CITE cohort alone is worth more than $6,000 per person (or $178,000 total) to the Richmond school district. At a living wage that number is closer to $350,000. And at the lowest TOC pay rate, of $27 per hour (a shockingly low rate for someone with no less than two degrees) we're talking about $470,000. And, of course, if you multiply this by the hundreds of teacher candidates currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Education program we’re talking about several million dollars in unpaid labour. This number represents the direct economic benefit teacher candidates deliver to the districts they volunteer in. Is such a calculation ridiculous? How do you see this time and consider its worth? Regardless, as a result, many of us feel that asking for $30, or $150, or four more hours of our time on top of everything else, including what's yet to come, is a prime example of the failure of this institution to fully practice what it preaches in terms of appreciating students and their time. Even just acknowledging the above would feel like a huge cultural shift – a mini perceptual revolution, if you will.
Also relating to our use of time, while revisiting key themes is good teaching practice, and is often essential, it seems a bit excessive here in our program. We’ve read the same children's books (Shin-Chi’s Canoe, Shi-shi-Etko, It's a Book, Goodnight iPad, and others), watched the same videos, covered much of the same material, and done the same or very similar activities in multiple classes. To be specific, though we understand that this is an inquiry cohort and personal reflection is key, we did several personal reflections, profiles, and résumés just to apply to the program. We followed this in our first two weeks of school with nearly identical reflections, pseudo-résumés, and autobiographical assignments in every one of our classes. Every one! Then when we started our classroom observations we did another set of résumé-like profiles with identical guidelines to those done prior... It seems impossible that anything was taught or learned through this process. And in this same way, in another recent class, around a discussion of multiculturalism with a guest speaker, we were asked to talk with a partner about our family history and identity and then share our personal background with the whole group. To drive home this point, we would like our school to notice that it doesn’t just take up an hour of our time to show up at such a session. Instead, a “one hour info session” with our class costs no less than 30 person hours. And as we all travelled to school (some of us from two hours away) often just for one session (as happens weekly) the number is far higher. So we wonder what two weeks of your time is worth and why you would value someone else's differently? In the above scenario it was only the third time our cohort, this exact same group of 30 people, did this exact same activity in just two months. (That's 3 hours x 30 students, or 90 hours.) Of course some of us have been doing a similar multiculturalism activity annually since we were in grade three; and, sadly, other than being a nice icebreaker, this activity, even in a university setting, never leads to a conversation more substantial than “Wow, look how multicultural we are!” So it's a common issue in our program to repeat very simplistic concepts and activities and rarely go in depth, or even have a chance to meaningfully engage with our learning. (No doubt at all, this kind of activity will then be repeated by teacher candidates in their practicum schools and in their own classrooms some day, as it's virtually all they know.)
With assignments and course material so similar, and close together in time, several of us have noticed that it would make a lot of sense to combine EDUC 440 with EDST 401, creating one Social Justice class. And LLED 350 could easily be combined with 353, and possibly even 352, all into one general, year-long language class. There are many ways and many good reasons to do this. Of course, doing so would only remove some of the course redundancy but still wouldn’t require these courses to be team taught, involve multi- or transdisciplinary approaches, make them experiential, or get any of us outside or even out of our desks – all things we would like to see this department consider.
Another common concern is that we are constantly being told the importance of ensuring we have good work/life balance: spending time with loved ones and taking appropriate time and care for our own physical and mental health. We are told this immediately after being informed that it’s inappropriate to miss any classes, even if sick. The only consequence of this is that half the cohort comes to school while unwell, impacting the health of the rest of us. So not only is this an ineffective policy, but it essentially treats adults as children. Importantly, it also fails to make appropriate use of the abundantly available technology that, in theory, is there to support our learning. This program talks constantly about the meaningful application of technology in the classroom but we've never been asked to contribute to online discussions, we aren’t engaging with other programs, cohorts, or universities in our coursework, and we’ve never had a class streamed online for us. Of course streaming our classes, or recording and making them available, would mean that even if someone is sick they can still attend virtually. This would be an extremely useful application of technology. In fact, some of us – including West Vancouver Superintendent Chris Kennedy – would argue that, if anything, this is what the internet in schools is for! But, instead, what do we see in our UBC classrooms? Only the most mundane applications of technology, replicating what is done just as well or better even on paper or in person, and often just educators repeating the analog activities they know but doing so, or just presenting it, digitally. That's not what tech is for.
There's also a stinging contradiction here too. Our instructors, all of whom lecture on proper teaching practice, make our learning more difficult than it needs to be. For instance, over the Thanksgiving holiday, we had four assignments due. In addition to these four assignments we had 149 pages of “required” readings (with some of us having a presentation and discussion facilitation to do, that included another 34 pages of reading; while others had a French lesson presentation to prepare for Wednesday.) Added to this workload, on the Friday we all had another 20 pages of reading and a group project due in LLED 353. With so many assignments and readings in such a short amount of time, deliberately piling on the work and placing due dates on and around a holiday, makes it impossible for us to maintain the balance we are told is so essential to our success this year. Note that what we are not saying here is that we are getting too much work, or that the work is too hard. Critically, what we are saying is that there is no doubt we learn very little from such assignments, where we are forced to focus on speed and volume over quality. Would Ken Robinson call this “revolutionary” or a perfect example of the industrial-style education we all know so well and have come to expect?
Troublingly, when this issue was raised with a few of our instructors, it was put back on us: recommended that we make better use of our time and do our assignments earlier on in the course in order to lessen our workload later. What this advice said to us is that the course content we are required to receive daily is unnecessary for completing our assignments. (For what else could it mean?) This in turn suggests our assignments fit more in the category of busy work (in no way a gauge of our learning) and are less aligned with the practice of inquiry. If we were able to complete all of the assignments without the “required” readings, lectures, and in-class discussions and resources, then all the course and it’s assignments assess is our prior knowledge and, perhaps, our personality. Needless to say, such a course would fail to fit into anyone’s “zone of proximal learning.”
Further, what are the goals of such a short and intense program if much research shows this style of education to be less than ideal for learning? It would be much more beneficial for us, as Neil Stephen says, to “SLOW the process down” and have more time to really think about these assignments, do critical readings, talk about the research, submit and resubmit our work, and put something approaching our best effort into what we do. We are all future educators – some of us are downright nerds – and we all love learning and want to delve into this subject matter. (That’s why we’re here!) Yet, we simply have no time to sink our teeth into the stuff we’re interested in; instead, we just press on through and hand in passable material because, whoops, the clock is ticking and it’s time to move on to the next topic. This leaves us asking “If not now, when will we get to wade into and absorb this valuable content?”
We were told a common calendar system was employed specifically so that students and instructors could schedule effectively and not have overlapping due dates. Yet, no one can use the course calendar on the site for its stated purpose as it only contains partial information. For instance, according to the calendar we had two assignments due between Saturday October 12th and Friday October 18th. In fact numerous people had a total of six assignments and more than 200 pages of readings. (This isn’t a one-time error: the following week said there were two assignments due when there were actually four...) So our main organizational tool was operating at about 40% accuracy for the month of October, over a month into our program. All these assignments are known, so some of us are asking why the criteria for what goes on the calendar is not inclusive of all the assignments and required readings: those things that need doing?
Another related communication issue affecting everyone in the cohort, and something that comes up all the time, is that we receive many emails every day. With 30 students and never less than 7 instructors all needing to communicate on a daily basis, it’s extremely important that we aren’t overloading each other with information. And yet we receive multiple emails from various instructors each day, often including last-minute changes to work, to schedules, or to meeting places. Of course, as you can imagine, teacher candidates are also constantly emailing one another to confirm due dates and readings, share resources, coordinate group projects, organize rides and more. On top of all this we have school system accounts we are asked to navigate as well. So is there any doubt then that information gets lost in the mix and some in the cohort report being in a near-constant state of uncertainty? We wonder when the next due date is; what is expected of us; how and where we are to submit assignments ("Is this one handed in on paper, via Connect, on our Connect blog, through UBC email, or personal email?"); and even, in some cases, where our class is supposed to meet, when, and with whom. Much of this information is difficult to find, changes regularly, and thus demands we are all on email, Facebook, and Connect almost constantly. And that is seldom enough: we have to sift through all of our communications for the latest correspondence, check multiple Connect site postings, various blog pages, confirm with course outlines, class notes, our own content management systems, and our colleagues just to piece it all together. This makes some of us feel that we could and should eliminate much of the technology currently being employed in our program. This technology is not making our lives easier or helping us to be more effective – and this is important for us to recognize. (We ask ourselves what, then, is the point of technology? How did people conduct classes and acquire degrees before 1994? Was their experience and education diminished or invalid?) Ultimately we would like to be told once and have the details of important communications available in one consistent, easily-accessible place. The present scenario indicates that we aren’t expected to listen and follow instructions, aren’t expected to be organized and professional and, some might argue, aren’t actually expected to learn anything.
Related to this is another set of mixed messages and low expectations. The standard set out for this program is “pass or fail”, with pass constituting a grade of 76% or higher. Yet most of our assignments have a pass criteria of, well, little or nothing. For instance, one instructor gave us the following criteria for an assignment:
Pass: (1) examines a BC-related educational policy and uses appropriate social justice framework; (2) presentation is easy to follow (well organized argument; concise); (3) provides examples and explanations based on course readings; (4) no more than 50% is co-authored work.
Fail: (1) does not examine BC policy and/or neglects to use relevant social justice framework ; (2) lacks examples; (3) lacks transitions between thoughts or fails to make an argument; (4) more than 50% is co-authored work, or unattributed.
Does this mean that in order to fail one would have to submit an irrelevant essay, lacking in examples, that is poorly constructed, and makes academically inappropriate and dishonest use of other’s work? I would suggest such work falls somewhat lower than the suggested 76%. I would submit that a student handing in such work, at this point in their academic career, should have them stripped of their prior degree. Worse, some of us feel it would be a more challenging, educative, and creative task to try and submit something that would meet this “fail” criteria than to produce another bland summary of an academic paper or policy document – an activity that cannot possible demonstrate anything more than one's prior achievement of a ninth grade reading level. Sadly this has been the status quo so far. We are asked weekly to hand in pages and pages of last-minute writing, do PowerPoint presentations, and all of the other exact same activities all of us have done for the last four or more years. (Some of these very projects are even on topics such as “innovative teaching and learning” or “multimodality and engaging multiple literacies.” In hindsight, some of us have begun to wonder if – and hope – the point of these assignments is to notice this irony and to acknowledge just how boring and pointless such writing can be so that we don't ever punish our own students this way.) Again, all of this would be tolerable were we in a Physics or History program, but we’re in Education, and so it feels far less than ideal and have a hard time seeing much of this as more than busy work. Which is must be as we just had papers returned to us. Many had no useful remarks of any kind. One marker wrote “A superb paper! Well written and well thought out. Please keep up with the good work! Pass.” While being a nice compliment, this in no way helps this person learn; in fact, we’ve read and been told many times by education professionals that this kind of praise is in fact detrimental to learning. We would ask this instructor if they feel the person who wrote the paper has no other reading to do and nothing else to learn? We might also ask, could this student have handed in a paper of the same content and quality two months or two years ago? It would seem safe to assume so. And if that is the case then is any evidence anywhere to suggest that higher learning taking place here? Or are we all just jumping through hoops?
If a lack of useful feedback is due to the volume of papers needing to be marked, or the heavy workload of the instructors, there are effective and beneficial alternatives. If we need to write papers (which is highly questionable) what if, as future educators, Education students peer edited or marked one another’s papers? The benefits to doing so are numerous. We would learn something deeper about the subject by reviewing something other than what we ourselves wrote on; we would improve our own writing by viewing, analyzing, and correcting someone else’s; we would practice assessing and giving good feedback; and all of this while eliminating much of the burden on our instructors. In fact, is there a reason this doesn't happen in every course?
Curiously, we were told close to a dozen times recently, both written and orally, not to do any school work over the winter break. Some of us love learning and enjoy all of the reading, writing, plotting, drawing, communicating, sharing, and reflecting… As such, some of us have interpreted this assertion to mean that learning is generally understood by the Education department and its faculty as tedious or painful work that is generally not enjoyed. For instance, relating to our inquiry paper, “Don’t do any work over the holidays, you need a break” can clearly be interpreted to suggest that we were not to pick a topic we're interested in and that learning isn’t stimulating or fun and, as a result, isn’t the kind of thing you should want to do in your spare time or while on vacation. Why else would we be actively discouraged, in the way we have, from engaging with the subject we chose for ourselves, are deeply interested in, and excited to dig into? This is very confusing. We would love to believe there is some legitimate pedagogical reason that we can’t see.
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Some of us can’t help but feel the contradictions we've noticed are a test of our own abilities to inquire into teacher education and challenge the backward conventions found there. We all came into this program, and indeed this cohort, with the impression that we were entering into an innovative and forward-thinking learning environment. (And this wasn't our own naive hopefulness, as we were told this explicitly in all the promotional material for the program and formally in our introductory sessions, too.) This is a worthwhile goal in our eyes, but one that's far from being realized.
With this paper, we hope that we have highlighted some of the specific problems that we have heard echoed over and over from past graduates of the Teacher Education program, among those in other cohorts in our current year, and from our own peers in the current CITE cohort. As educators of future educators we hope that our instructors are aware that everything they do and bring to the classroom is being examined, critiqued, and reflected upon – and we trust that they are in the position they are because they are open to dialogue about these choices. Because of the nature of this program, we hold our educators to high standards. And we feel that experiencing the innovative teaching strategies we hear so much about has to be the most effective way for us to learn to bring these into our own teaching practice. Moreover, engaging students in the design of our courses and the assessment of our work would be a powerful way for us to demonstrate our knowledge and allow us the opportunity to learn and grow in the areas we feel we need to develop, rather than spending so much time immersed in repetitive and sometimes mindless classroom tasks. We truly feel that much of what is occurring in the program could easily be changed for the better. But we need your help. We need the help of those in institutional positions make this change happen. The ideas that Sir Ken Robinson and so many others have for so long preached – and that this school appears to endorse – must finally come to UBC. We don’t need to form an executive planning committee or convene any special administrative meetings. And we don’t have to wait a year or a week or even one more day.
All of the pieces are in place and we're all on the same page.
The education revolution is here.
The time is now.
