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| This red, but not as cute source |
"Perhaps you could give us an exemplar... That would help a lot. Then we could pattern something after it", I suggested reasonably in the Active Physics Collaborative Team meeting, as my colleague (and team leader) squirmed in his chair, his face becoming red. Our
International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program coordinator, the current object of his frustration, became a bit flustered himself, and after some hemming and hawing, basically admitted he could not provide one. It turns out that although Mount Vernon High School is an
IB World School, which is why we have an emphasis on the IBMYP program, there are very few other schools in the county that do IBMYP. It just happens that our principal is a true believer in the program, and brought a passion for it over from his previous position. Prior to his arrival, we had the IBMYP program in our school, but it was not something upon which we really followed through.
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| Object in motion encounters outside force Photo: Mark Garfinkel source |
In this case, the issue which was causing such frustration (and a possible planned murder), was the IBMYP Unit Plan. Most of this was pretty straightforward, if cumbersome (even advocates of IB admit it does involve paperwork), but the sticking point was that we were supposed to come up with an open ended overarching essential question, something which did not have a correct answer, which students could debate, and which could be connected to other courses. This wasn't a problem with the Ethics unit we teach every year, but we were having some difficulty coming up with something that worked for, say, Newton's Laws. The results of having a different opinion on Newton's 1st Law can be seen to the left.
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| The FCPS Central Office Develops Portrait of a Graduate source |
This apparent lack of focus on IB struck me during this week's readings, because as I
didn't read the Portrait of a Graduate (I teach in Fairfax County Public Schools, and for the course I teach now, Geosystems, we have to align every unit to the PoG... I'm familiar) I was again struck by the way that FCPS seems to have taken the
IB Learner Profile, combined a few concepts to make it more compact, and
called it a day. This is not to say that I disagree with the approach. I think the point Ken Robinson raises in the two videos is right... Students need to learn to collborate, and think divergently, and discuss. FCPS (and Mount Vernon) are currently promoting the concept of Read/Write/Think/Discuss to promote disciplinary literacy, and the research speaks for itself. I just think it's weird that given that focus, and given that the IB program is steeped in that research and those ideas, FCPS is not all in on IB. Even Mount Vernon offers some advanced courses via
AP, which to my understanding is much more like the traditional model Eric Mazur criticizes in his video... Learn the content, spit it back on a test.
In any case, I feel like the IB model represents the reform discussed in the videos, and our principal certainly believes in it, as does FCPS apparently, who liked it enough to steal it, even if it's not implemented in its actual form everywhere. I am more suspicious of the reforms championed in the article (Finn, Fairchild, 2012) that seems to suggest that online learning is the digital panacea which will reduce costs, destroy parochialism, and free students everywhere from the shackles of mediocre (or worse) local education. Mainly this is because my personal experience, as I have discussed before, aligns much more closely with the New York Times Op Ed by David Kirp, where he notes that an essential element of education is a bond with students, something that is especially true for MY students. There are any number of ways proposed to improve and provide this kind of relationship online, but my personal experience is that it's not the same, an experience that is matched by the reading from EDIT 760 which shows that the results are much worse than they are for brick and mortar schools, as covered in previous blog entries here (Schwalb, 2018). Yes, I cited myself, and it was just as weird as I thought it would be. Good thing I'm probably not going to be moving into a field where I'll have to do that, as I am pleasantly employed and overtaken by inertia (not the Newton's 1st kind).
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