Why can’t the Parent Community Join the Dots?
By Paul McMahon on Feb 18, 2008 in Education in Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place
It must be the time of year or something but I find I am not the only one posting at the moment about trying to get the message of the need to teach kids 21st Century Skills and not just some random content for getting through exams.
Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have just written an article for Education week discussing the way education reform has moved in the US and commenting on what we can really learn from PISA and TIMMS results. I haven’t read it all yet but it is quite profound.
This sort of blind reliance on tables, figures, examinations etc. amazes me when most of the people in business are not looking for workers who blindly follow. They want self-directed learners who have empathy with others.
Why are they not asking schools to produce these sort of workers?
5 Comment(s)
> Why are they not asking schools to produce these sort of workers?
Perhaps for the same reason they don’t in the UK. Here, the government frequently consults ‘business leaders’ about what they want from state education. A ‘business leader’ is defined as a large employer, or the representative of large employers. These businesses do, in general, want procedural drones of the kind our education system excels at producing.
What is missing from this is that the bulk of employment ,and nearly all long-term growth, comes from smaller businesses, not the tiny minority of corporations. And those businesses, as you say, are in desperate need of self-directed learners.
Thanks Ian, it is reassuring to know that it is not only in Asia that the parents are so blinkered to examination results. It sounds like there are some great projects happening in the UK. Sadly there are only very few here in Hong Kong and they tend to take place out of the normal teaching time to appease the parents that it will not bring down junior’s examination preparation. There is a very small band of us doing our bit to try to promote the good practice here but there is nothing like the groundswell of the UK.
We will keep chipping away! Thanks for the support.
Paul
Actually, I’m a little more optimistic than you. Most initiatives fail because they don’t appeal to the key stakeholders; parents and teachers. Most of these people are working with a very short decision horizon – teachers have to get kids through exams, parents need to get their kids into university. For them, changing the world can wait.
With Yacapaca, I have tried to work with, rather than against, this. Particularly with teachers, I show them how Yacapaca can give them better exam results this term. Once they have got into it, they start to discover it can do far more than that, and a significant proportion of them become true elearning converts.
Incidentally, we currently have 16 teacher-members in Hong Kong, that I know of – probably more in reality. I wonder how many of them have also been on one of your courses.
Ian
Hi Again Ian,
I agree that I am not being very optimistic. The reason for this is that I am not only working for the 45 international schools here in Hong Kong. I try to work with the 1000 other schools most of whom try to employ a native English teacher in a program with the aim of introducting some school reform as well as just teaching English.
My bet would be that the 16 teacher-members that you have would be attached to an international school rather than a local one. Not that this is a problem but I want to try to spread the word a bit wider as do the NETs and we do run into some brick walls in HK.
On a more optimistic note, I remember seeing something about Yacpaca at BETT. Was it at the Teachmeet?
It looks a great resource for teachers. Is it written in Unicode to allow for foreign language input?
> My bet would be that the 16 teacher-members that you have would be attached to an international school
Plus two universities, yes, as far as I can make out. But… this may simply be that word has not got out yet. Provided teachers and pupils in state schools have access to computers (at home or at school) they can use Yacapaca to boost results. That’s back to Yacapaca’s role as a bridge between current pedagogy and the new pedagogies enabled by technology.
> Was it at the Teachmeet?
Yes. I gave a hideously dull presentation, and was furious with myself afterwards.
> Is it written in Unicode to allow for foreign language input?
Yes. In fact, we already have some fantastic Chinese resources written by a teacher in Singapore:
http://yacapaca.com/teacher/assign_new.php?step=3&tgroup=2514
‘Fraid you have to sign in to see them; they are of a type that cannot be exposed outside site security. If I could see there was a demand, we could skin the site in Chinese as well.
I would certainly be delighted to support anyone who wanted to try out some HK-curriculum assessments on the system.