I arrived in San Francisco on June 10th, a week before the scheduled start of the Australian Council for Computer Education (ACCE) study tour. I wanted to allow myself some time to adjust to the time zone and also take the opportunity to explore a new city. San Francisco is a fabulous city! During my short ‘holiday’ I did two Hardie related activities:
The Exploratorium
The Exploratorium is a museum on the San Francisco waterfront at Pier 15, which is all about learning through exploring. Throughout the museum are workstations that allow you to interact with various gadgets and devices to learn concepts by tinkering and doing. If you are a person curious about how things work, then this place is simply perfect for you. As a teacher studying technology and investigating the idea of learning by doing, this place was great. It gave me a number of cool ideas for ways in which different things can be taught. I also think that as a place for young people to visit, it’s almost like an educational theme park, loads of fun!
AltSchool
AltSchool in SOMA, San Francisco is a school that was developed to be student focused with highly personalised learning. The main goals are to improve learning personalisation and to improve transparency.
Most schools follow a set curriculum and use set tools and resources for learning, this doesn’t always give students the opportunity to explore concepts in a range of ways. AltSchool tries to model real-world learning through project-based learning and where appropriate experts are brought in from the community to collaborate and assist the students.
There have been times I have felt that education has steered away from the learner and has been more focused on the educator, what they are going to teach and how they are going to teach it, more than focusing on the learning. The idea of designing the education around the learner and their needs is fantastic, it allows for richer learning experiences to be developed.
The primary focus is very much on the student and the personalization of their learning and AltSchool has a huge team behind them to do just that. Something that really struck me was the way they design their own technology, hardware and software to improve the workflow of the educator. These team members will often be buddied together with an educator, they will observe lessons and see if they can figure out ways in which to assist the educator to make their job more efficient and also to improve educational outcomes. Poorly designed technology can inhibit a teachers ability to do their job efficiently and effectively, so having custom designed tools that emulate the way a teacher works naturally is a huge benefit and improvement to workflow.
The technology being developed is not just to assist the educators but also to improve the experience of the students and parents, who are regularly consulted for feedback on products and ideas. As well as teaching students to reflect on their learning and the tools around them, it helps students and parents feel that they have some influence on the education experience. Providing tools accessible to all parties also increases the transparency of educational processes and student learning. The AltSchool teams work with the feedback to make changes where appropriate so that they can improve the experience for all stakeholders.
We were able to observe some students from middle school participating in a summer school program. They were tasked with the use of a makey-makey, a laptop and general construction materials to create a gong. There are two things I love about the activity:
- The kids get to design, create, prototype some really cool stuff. Along the way they need to have an understanding of designing, converting designs to products, some understanding on electronics and creating circuits, electricity conduction and what materials are conductive, they need to prototype, test and refine their designs and so on. These are 10 year olds!!! They each designed different and awesome products, most of which worked (some didn’t work and were still being refined, others weren’t yet complete)
- The gongs were to be used throughout the summer school to celebrate the successes AND failures along the way. I love that they celebrate failures! It encourages kids to give things a whirl more than worrying about getting it right first go. Failure is not a negative thing, it is something we learn from and it is not often enough celebrated.
A general observation so far…
Something I have noticed here in the United States through my observations and discussions is that failure, as well as success, is celebrated. Based on my own experiences I feel that we don’t often celebrate failure as it’s own type of success. We do often encourage students to try things out, but particularly at senior secondary level I find we simply don’t have the time to really tinker and play with concepts to develop our own learning and deeper understanding. The other side is also that many students are often too scared to fail or acknowledge any failures. This will be one of my own focus points, both for my own attitude towards learning and for my students.
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