My 7th graders are in the middle of a big game design project. They have been put into teams to develop serious games that draw attention to a world issue of importance to them. Some of them are in the stage of the process where they are ready to do some beta testing and gather feedback from others. They would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have about what you like about their games and what you think could be done to improve them. They will take that feedback and use it to modify their games.
On Friday I proposed the sacred cow of content objectives be addressed with a new technology, content subjectives. In that post I thought I had possibly coined the term although I had not done sufficient research to see if anyone else had started using it. Today I discovered that Mike Wesch began thinking about the idea of subjectives in a slightly different but very related fashion back in November. Although I think Dr. Wesch makes some great points I am not sure what he is after is quite the same as I am proposing. What he proposes is more like a point of view where I am proposing a teaching tool.
My goal here is to more closely define what a content subjective might be. It is not to come up with a final definition, that would take far more time than I have so far devoted to this idea and ideally would involve the work of many others, but to further a dialog. Hopefully by drawing some differences between learning environments that make use of content subjectives and those that use content objectives just exactly what content subjectives are will emerge. To do this I created an open Google Doc that anyone can edit. Feel free to add your input and ideas there.
Over the weekend I read Larry Cuban's (1986) Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, a great primer on the failed use of information technologies in schools over the past 70 years. This book is one worth reading and considering especially if your school or district is planning on a major edtech initiative. In all of his work Cuban poses questions that must be wrestled with. While I disagree with Cuban's take on teaching information processing skills vs. drill and practice I completely agree with how he frames the reasons why schools are so slow to change. In this book he briefly mentions the notion of lateral thinking as a potential positive benefit of the use of computers in the classroom but quickly brushes it aside because he says that "there has been so little formal study of it."
After reflecting on Cuban's that two or three sentences on lateral thinking over the last few days I came to realize that this was exactly what was present running under all the examples of places I felt were content subjectives were at work. Lateral vs vertical are profoundly different ways of looking at content. Perhaps while content objectives aim at movement vertically within a content area, content subjectives are a device which helps move students laterally. A quick Google search for lateral thinking brought me to this article presenting a definition that I think fits well with what I am proposing with content subjectives. Here is a short piece of that article:
Lateral thinking is one of those terms that many people have heard of, but probably very few of us really know what it means. So when I saw a very clear definition and description of it in Paul Sloane's excellent new book, How to be a Brilliant Thinker: Exercise Your Mind & Find Creative Solutions, I couldn't resist sharing it with you.
"Lateral thinking is a phrase coined by Dr. Edward de Bono as a counterpoint to conventional or vertical thinking. In contentional thinking, we go forward in a predictable, direct fashion. Lateral thinking involves coming at the problem from new directions - literally, from the side."
So, this naturally led me to look up Dr. Edward de Bono. Dr. Bono has developed a system he calls his six hat system for stimulating creative thinking. I still am not quite sure what I think of his system but I do like what he says about lateral thinking:
So, what do content subjectives look like? They look more like questions than statements. They are juxtapositions meant to spark lateral thinking, creativity, and critical analysis. They set students off in a direction but do not determine their destination. They foster discovery and allow students to own their own learning as the path that will ultimately be written by them and be just as much a part of their own intellectual property rights as whatever products that the learning produces. But, more important than questions or rhetorical devices, a content subjective is something that is within the teacher and developed as part of his or her craft over time. It is something that guides a teacher's interactions with students and informs the shifts in direction they encourage students to take. It is also what informs decisions in the classroom environment such as the classroom design, the choice of objects the teacher places there for students to encounter, and what a teacher intentionally leaves out.
Help me nail this down. What is it specifically that defines a content subjective? What have I been describing in this post? How can we define content subjectives any closer? I feel like the answer is obviously before my eyes. Perhaps I am too close to it to see it for what it is. Whatever it is, it needs a name if it is going to have any power.
"The evolution of new technologies is inevitable; we can't stop it. But the character of each technology is up to us." Kevin Kelly
If Kevin Kelly is right, technologies never go extinct, and, if I am right and the sacred cows I wrote about earlier this week are technologies as defined by the broad definition, then none of these things will ever completely go away. It is possible that over time our use of things like standardized tests and content objectives may diminish but they will continue to exist somewhere. In What Technology Wants Kelly also observes that prohibition of a technology is never successful at making it go away. It always finds a way to exist, prohibition only forces it into subversion. The same is true for the prohibition of anything. At best, a prohibition works to slow the effect of a technology until it becomes obsolete.
But, for a technology to become obsolete a new disruptive technology must emerge. If the sacred cows of the invisible technology of school are to be prevented from causing any more harm (such as destroying subjective values, forcing us into oppressive learning situations), or selling us out to the education industrial complex, then we need to develop technologies that can disrupt these sacred cows. The paradoxical answer, as Kelly suggests, to the problems created by technology is more technology.
One of the sacred cows I think inhibits learning the most is oddly one that teachers have the most control over in their classrooms. Except in schools where teachers are mandated to use and display them teachers usually have a choice whether or not to use content objectives as an overt pedagogical tool. The problems with content objectives are many. First, they set unnecessary limits on what students are to learn. Second, they inhibit discovery and in so doing remove agency from the learner. The learning is not the student's but the teacher's. Third, they help to enable other destructive sacred cows such as standardized tests, multiple choice questions, and content standards. They say to students, "This is as far as I expect you to go and I am in control of what you learn." This is a false notion and one that is toxic in a learning environment. Since these objectives are not the student's, unless they have set an objective for themselves that shoots past the teacher's in its trajectory, most will stop once they reach it.
We need a technology that will either make content objectives obsolete or serve as a counter balance. We need a pedagogical tool in our arsenal that will at least make teachers question the value of setting objectives for their students. We need a pedagogical tool that will empower students to set their own objectives while pushing them in the right directions. We need a tool that will not set arbitrary limits on learning possibilities for our students. I think this technology already exists but no one has bothered to identify it or give it a name. Without a name it has little power. Without a name its identity is unknown. I propose we call this new pedagogical device Content Subjectives.
This is a modest proposal. I know that most technologies fail to reach critical mass but I do think this is one which warrants investment. This idea occurred to me yesterday afternoon and sparked the following conversation in Twitter:
I think the technology of Content Subjectives exists already but has gone on without a name. What Stager talks about hints at it, Seymour Papert describes this approach in his work with Logo, the kind of learning environments John Holt describes in How Children Fail and How Children Learn utilize them, the Edvisions schools like Minnesota New Country School utilize them, the Sudbury Schools and unschoolers base their whole curriculum around them, Sugata Mitra's Self Organizing Learning Environments (SOLES) works because of it, the personal learning network (PLN) as teacher professional development model is based on it. It is not enough to just call this constructivism, constructivism is not a tool or a technology the way that content objectives, curriculum, or tests are. It needs a name. I propose Content Subjectives. Are you using content subjectives in your classroom?
