January 28, 2016

École Doncaster Elementary School Newsletter

NOTES FROM THE PRINCIPAL...

I was chatting with a teacher friend from another province recently about what teachers are supposed to do for their students—my friend

was having a difference of views with his supervisor. The old idea that teachers know certain facts and their job is to transmit these same facts to

students doesn’t cover it. If that ever described a teachers job it certainly doesn't now. Of course, teaching always has and still does involve under-

standing and sharing facts. There are things that students should know, but facts are not the essence of teaching. Some of the talk around the new BC

curriculum is happening because people wonder whether it has enough facts. I can’t say I have heard a definitive answer yet, but I do know the focal

point of the new curriculum is less the stuff to be known and more on the student and what they might need to do with this stuff.

When trying to define the role of a teacher, thinking about teaching as a focus on facts versus a focus on the student and the world they

face is pretty important. We can say that teaching is now and has always been about helping students learn to expand their thinking and to expand

their world, but that looks different now that our access to facts is so different than ever before. Almost all of us have virtually instant access to far

more facts in seconds online than any of our teachers ever could have known, no matter how smart they were. So what a teacher does to help expand

students' worlds is less about just giving them facts than it ever has been.

This distinction between teaching facts and expanding thinking is a lot older than the new curriculum and smartphones, but smartphones

help make the distinction clear. Math is a good way to illustrate. It is still important for a student to know how to multiply and to have quick recall of

multiplication facts. It is less important to spend hundreds of hours on a certain way of multiplying in order to answer to a 4 digit by 4 digit problem—

a task we would almost never do without a calculating device. I have heard someone wonder what the point is of teaching children to become very slow

and much less accurate versions of the calculators they have in their hands. But then, the point of math education is not now (nor was it) to be able to

multiply numbers - it is to be able to make sense of and work with the math around us. If we need to be able to understand if a loan would be a bad

financial decision or what materials we need to make a dinner for ten guests, multiplication is going to be a part of figuring that out. But the calcula-

tion is the tool part and not the thinking part.

The same distinction between facts and thinking occurs in other aspects of school, like social studies. In order to tackle the problems of

the world around us - the environment, government finances, the role of first nations - we need to have a good sense about who we are and how we

got here and facts are still part of that. For example, knowing the date that First Nations people first got the vote in Canada is likely going to help me

understand more about First Nations, but the important part my is the significance of the date rather than the date itself. Dates are some of the puz-

zle pieces but they are not the whole picture. And while this has always been true of history, it is even more true now with so many ideas at our fin-

gertips. (For example I knew that First Nations in Canada got the vote in the early sixties, but I Googled it and found the actual date was July 1, 1960.

Knowing this happened just a little more than 50 years ago adds much to my understanding of First Nations in Canada—knowing that is was specifically

55 years and seven months ago not as much.

My friend and I didn’t finish our conversation. He was going to be going back to argue a point with his administration, and I am going back

to working on understanding and helping implement the BC curriculum.

You can follow me on twitter @JHansenVic

November 26, 2015

École Doncaster Elementary

As we have been discussing in these pages, the new BC curriculum is an attempt to set up our children’s education so that they have the abilities, skills and ways of thinking they will need for the 21st century. While no one can be sure of exactly what all of these will be, we do know that some of the most im-portant are creativity, adaptability, resilience and connecting with other peo-ple.

Creativity might be easy to recognize in art or music but it can be tricky to define in the context of science or math or life skills. One of our teachers was working on just this issue in math with her students the other week. In or-der to better understand how to apply multiplication and division, students had to make up their own math problems and then solve each other’s. After-wards, the teacher articulated the idea that creativity is really about synthesis—that is, about putting things together in different ways. At a recent workshop I heard a creativity similarly described as connecting ideas in unique ways. In other words, creativity is not creating something from nothing and it is not necessarily even making something nobody has seen before. Rather it is taking your own and other’s ideas and connecting them to whatever it is you are doing in a way which helps solve a problem. So, as educators, in order to foster our students’ creativity we need to help them acquire knowledge and ideas, help them learn to share these ideas and then to apply all this stuff they know in some kind of different way that will help them solve whatever task is at hand.

This poses some issues for the classroom. In order for students to think creatively, they still need to learn basic content such as how to read big words, how to multiply numbers, how the rain cycle works and where Afghanistan is. The emphasis, though, is not on just knowing these facts, but rather on how to put what you know together to solve problems. Of course, this isn’t new –it is what good teaching has always been. Maybe, however, putting creativity more directly into the new curriculum helps clear away some of what always seems to get in the way.

Furthermore, in order for creativity to happen, the classroom environ-ment needs to support taking risks. If a student is worried about being seen making mistakes then they are far less likely to try new ideas, let alone share them. Creativity also takes time—time to think, to talk, to try things that may not work and then start over again. Again, none of this is new—it is what we have always wanted our classrooms to be. So maybe the big advantage of a new curriculum is that it is trying to structure the system in a way that better recog-nizes and supports creative classrooms.

You can follow me on twitter @JHansenVic

Notes from the Principal...

October 29, 2015

NOTES FROM

Ecole Doncaster Elementary School Newsletter

Last month I wrote about the significant changes that are being made to

the BC curriculum in order to better teach our children to deal with very signifi-

cant changes in our society. There are many new ideas, adaptations and revisions,

but the fundamental purpose of the curriculum has not changed– it is an attempt

to write down the stuff kids need to understand in order to make sense of the

world around them and to sort meaning from nonsense. I want to write a little

more here about sorting meaning from nonsense, in particular dealing with jar-

gon.

In our modern world, we deal with jargon all the time. Jargon words origi-

nate as specialized words used for complicated ideas. For example, in the work he

did to win the 2015 Nobel Prize for physics, Canadian Arthur McDonald needed

very particular words—worlds like ‘neutrino” because he would have been much

slowed down talking to his colleagues if he had to keep referring to “super tiny

little zippy thingys”. There are examples in teaching, too. You might overhear one

teacher ask another something like “How did you use formative assessment help

students connect to their prior knowledge?” The teachers in this example are com-

municating a very important idea that would take longer to communicate or be

incomplete without the jargon. So in one sense we need jargon, because special-

ized words act as a shortcut to bigger, more complex ideas. But jargon can all-to-

easily lead to vague or confused thinking, or even undermine any meaning at all.

It’s not hard to find examples of this kind of jargon - you may have heard Weird

Al’s recent song “Mission Statement”, which includes lines of almost poetic non-

sense like “leveraging our core competencies in order to holistically administrate

exceptional synergies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4).

Interestingly enough, the very words “core competencies” appear in the

new BC curriculum, which seems at first to be a little ironic, since the curriculum

is ultimately designed to help children think through the mental junk food jargon

can be (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/competencies ). However, it is not that the

words ’core competencies’ are inherently meaningless – the difference between

them communicating something profound and becoming empty buzzwords de-

pends on the power we have to think about what we read and on our willingness

NOTES FROM THE PRINCIPAL...

Ecole Doncaster Elementary School News- Page 2

Cont...from Page 1

to take the time to think. To put it another way, whether jargon helps us understand

something depends a lot on whether we know how to deal with it. (And, of course,

whether the writer was thinking very clearly when she wrote them.) Jargon is all

around us and we have to teach our kids to deal it.

Practically, all this puts a bit of work on your plate as you will begin to see

things coming home from school, like report cards, which use the language of the new

curriculum, This school-year it is optional, which means some of your children’s

teachers will be using it for their November report cards, while other teachers will

start next year.

Here is some of what you will see—the new curriculum organizes what your

child does in class into three aspects: big ideas, learning standards and core competen-

cies. Big ideas are the underlying concepts, the reasons why it is important to learn

particular ideas, things and skills. Learning standards are what students are expected

know, understand and be able to do.

And core competencies—well those are: “sets of intellectual, personal, and so-

cial and emotional proficiencies that all students need to develop in order to engage in

deep learning and life-long learning.” Hmmm. . . sounds a bit like the Weird Al song.

But don’t worry, you still have a while to think about this. It may help to know that

the new curriculum has a glossary (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/sites/curriculum.gov.bc.ca/

files/pdf/glossary.pdf ) .

It may also be encouraging to know that teachers and other staff in our school

district have created a new report card, which will help present the ideas of the new

curriculum to you. Teachers here at Doncaster are starting to put their reports togeth-

er and we have been discussing ways to best make them work for you. Parents reading

them in a little over a month should get a good picture of what is happening in their

child’s class and how their child is doing—and that is the whole point of report cards.

Hopefully we will all meet or exceed expectations in understanding jargon.

You can find me on twitter @JHansenVic

A very important concept in teaching is to begin with the end in mind—as teachers plan lessons they

need a clear idea of what it is they want students to know or do by the end of it. Starting with the end in mind is

important for a whole school system, too. Even as students start in Kindergarten, we need to have a good idea

of what we want them to know and what we want them to be able to do when they finish grade 12.

If you want to know what that end of education in BC is supposed to be, the provincial curriculum is a good

place to look (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/ ). And it is a good time to look, because our curriculum is undergoing

a fairly big change.

Curriculum changes are not that new or unusual - there have been significant changes to our curricula

every ten years or so. One thing different about this change, though, is that it seems to be getting more media

coverage - hearing discussions on the radio and in the local newspaper about what the possible changes could

mean is something I have not seen before. The publicity is a good thing, in any case. What our curriculum and,

therefore, what teaching should look like is better talked about than left unsaid!

If you do have a look at the curriculum, you will see that the purported reason for the changes are: "so

students can succeed in the 21st Century." This would seem to be a very reasonable goal. Considering that

some of the fundamental structures of school are based in the 19th century industrial revolution, changes are

necessary. If you were working in a factory in 1850, (and, chances are, if you were living in an industrialized

society you would be) the most important thing for you to have learned at school was to show up on time and

do what you were told, likely over and over again in the same way. That is not the world our children are grow-

ing up into.

So we are left asking what the world our children are going to be entering will be like. No one is precise-

ly sure of what it will be, although there is widespread agreement that there is going to be a tremendous

amount of change. (If you have a moment, Google “shift happens” and you’ll find a series of videos filled with

facts and ideas of how fast change is occurring.) This leaves us with the paradox of working inside an institution

originally created to keep things as uniform as possible while dealing with a situation in which the most constant

thing is change. It is a paradox that can keep an educator (or parent) awake at night.

Which brings us back to the curriculum - BC’s attempt to straddle the old and the new in a way that

gives teachers the direction to help our students prepare for life in the 21st century. Doncaster staff spent a fair

bit of our time on the Pro-D day last Monday thinking about the 21st century student generally and the new cur-

riculum specifically. Many different ideas came up, two of the most common themes being critical thinking and

effective communication. A far cry from what was needed for the factory floor. The discussions are timely, be-

cause the new curriculum is optional this year but will be mandatory next September. The more time we spend

to understand the job we are doing, or are going to be doing very soon, the better we will be able to do it.

You can follow me on twitter at @JhansenVic

September 24, 2015

École Doncaster Elementary Newsletter

NOTES FROM THE

May 28, 2015

École Doncaster Elementary School Newsletter

NOTES FROM THE PRINCIPAL.. . Take a moment, if you could, and think about a song in which the music really touches you. You may not realize that a lot of your enjoyment is your brain engaging in the math behind it. Perhaps that sounds counter-intuitive – we may be more likely to think math is hard, or ster-ile or dry, quite unlike the emotional connection we make to a favourite tune. But the music thing is true. As one German philosopher said long ago, “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” A more scientific ex-planation of this same idea is that music is both a predictable, repeated pattern and something unexpected and new at the same time – and our brains really love this mix of repetition and novelty. So if we take a commonly held definition of math as the science of patterns – both re-peated and novel, then yes, the reason you love a piece of music is very related to the math behind it. (For an example which I think demonstrates the point, listen to the instruments in this song through headphones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O1weQ3oGAM. Mathe-matically speaking, it is an incredibly complex example of common multiples and patterns. Emotionally, it just feels nice.)

My point here is not just that math doesn’t suck, although that is part of it. Math is a crit-

ically important part of our world, and it is an unfortunate North American tendency to be afraid

of or dislike math. It is another unfortunate tendency to think that we are either born good at

math or we are not, which is simply not true. For each of us, our attitudes and ability with math

has been shaped by our math experiences and math education, many of these from a very

early age, and much of which we are not even aware of. For example, there is good research

showing that a father’s attitude towards women in math has a significant effect on how well his

daughters do in math (more so than their mother’s attitude!).

I needn’t go on at length about how important good math skills are in the modern world.

Aside from being able to write your own employment ticket with good math-based jobs. like

computer programmer, financial analyst, accountant, engineer, carpenter, baker and so on, be-

ing good at math makes a big difference to daily life. Being able to balance our credit cards,

knowing whether the interest on a loan is a good or bad idea, figuring out which cell phone deal

is less worse, are all examples of where good math thinking can make our lives easier and bet-

ter.

To summarize, math is all around us, skill in it is not innate and how well our children do

in math is greatly affected by what we adults say and do and by the math environment around

them. So whenever you have the chance, play Yahtzee, or crib or backgammon, or cards or

Monopoly with your children, And maybe, if it doesn’t feel silly, you can listen

to a favourite piece of music and consider the beautiful complexity of the math

within it.

You can follow me on twitter @JhansenVic.

This week, you may have been flipping through the newspapers and noticed an article or two about Gallipoli.

Whether you decided read the article or just keep going probably depended on whether your brain already had any

connections to that word. Now I don’t mean to spend time here writing about Gallipoli - I could have used any num-

ber of other terms. Rather I use it here as a quick example of how our brain makes meaning and the importance of

context and how that relates to the whole purpose of education.

If your brain does make any connections to the word Gallipoli, it might be because you saw the 1981 film with Mel

Gibson, or maybe you have stood in the graveyard in where the sea meets the sand, or perhaps you are from Aus-

tralia, New Zealand or Turkey. If any of these things are the case, your brain likely makes all kinds of pictures when

you see the word. If not, Gallipoli may well be a meaningless term that merely gyres and gimbles in the wabe. The

same can be said of all kinds of other words that might be in the news, like ziggurat, Pleistocene or diatonic, which

will mean something to some people and nothing to others, largely depending on each person's experience.

Kids face the same issue at school. They see all kinds of words that someone has put in front of them because

somebody thought the words were worth knowing; somebody believed that each of these word helps explain some-

thing about the world a little better. And the way our brains work, each new word is a bit like a rung on a ladder that

gets your brain ready to learn another word, then another in a never ending process. You could say that the words

each of us knows are what make up the boundaries that define the size and the scope of our worlds. To relate this

to education, we try to bring as many words as we can to students in a way that their helps their brains connect

these words to something they already know. From that, they can create new, meaningful ideas. Thus their worlds

keep expanding, bit by bit. One of the great things for learning in the 21st century is that it is easier to explore and

make meaning from new words than it ever has been. Google Gallipoli, (or ziggurat, or diatonic) and you can find

descriptions, pictures, videos, even folksongs, all of which give your brain something from which to make meaning.

We couldn’t do this just a few years ago and it can be a big step in learning. However, some of that can also be

superficial. If the word Gallipoli didn't connect with anything else you already know, a scrollable picture really

doesn’t add much and you will likely not care enough about it to have learned much. So if the goal of school is to

help students understand and make their worlds bigger, educators need to be clear about the big difference in val-

ue between a teacher-guided lesson, reading a book, or even singing a song compared to just looking something

up on Wikipedia, Google Maps, or Instagram.

Of course, there are always a legion of words waiting to be discovered - a checklist of the 1000 most important

terms is not really what we are after at school. What we try to do is to help give our students the framework and the

connections that will allow them to make new meanings, which in turn will become new frameworks and connec-

tions that will allow them to keep adding new words and more meaning. With this process they will be better able to

understand and interact with the world around them.

Notes from the Principal...

École Doncaster

Elementary School

Newsletter

April 30, 2015

March 26, 2015

École Doncaster Elementary

School Newsletter

I saw this quotation and photo online a few weeks ago.

It made me laugh, I suppose because it is obvious

online nonsense, warning us about online nonsense. It

also seems to speak to the many allures of the internet,

touching on how effectively ideas can be presented on

the internet in ways that get past our thinking defenses.

It alludes to a fundamental question of learning in our

time - what parts of the incredible amount of information

and the plethora of ideas on the internet can we trust. How do we filter out what is

thoughtful, truthful and worthwhile from what is mindless, wrong and a waste of time

or even dangerous.

This is a question that educators face as what we need to now and why we need to

know it is changing, whether we are actually working online with everyday with our

students or not. Sorting good and useful ideas and information from bad and

wasteful is no easy task - I have yet to see it put clearly and concisely. Rather, it

seems to take a whole lot of time and effort and even willpower to sort it out for

oneself. (As I write this, for example, I am fighting not to Google the current hockey

scores, even though my team tied it up sometime during writing my first paragraph).

The advantages of almost instantaneous information from anywhere in the world are

obvious to see. It is easier to help kids make connections and see different places

and people than ever before. Kids themselves can find things out and explore for

themselves in amazing and incredible ways. This should mean that kids (and

adults, of course) should be expanding our worlds and ways of thinking, becoming

more understanding of each other and honing how and what we think with an ever

more clear sense of ourselves and our neighbours. But we're not, or so it seems. At

the same time as the internet allows us to link to better information, too often it also

seems to help us reinforce prejudices and help us confirm what we already believe.

Looking at the politics around us, looking at discussions around climate change

and to vaccinations, it is hard to make the case that we are more thoughtful as a

group than we used to be.

Clearly, we need to spend a great deal of time at school (because if not here, then

where?) teaching kids to think very carefully about what we know and how we

know it, and how to evaluate and integrate new information and new ideas. Spe-

cifically, we need to help children think about the internet and how it shapes how

we think.

And none of this takes away from the fundamental role in school to teach children

how to read, how to work with numbers, and how not to hit when we get annoyed

with each other.

Notes from the Principal….

Here we are near the beginning of a new calendar year and just about halfway through the school year - a good

opportunity to focus discussion on what and why school is about. A quotation from Canadian playwright John

MacLachlan Grey often comes to my mind in this context:

An essential part of growing up, it seems to me, entails an awareness, an understanding, of who and where

one is. Without this insight, a person can never be truly effective in life, for his actions will be based on the

wrong set of facts and an outright fantasy. That is why we drag our kids away from their TV shows and com-

puter games, why we send them to camp and on cultural exchanges, why we encourage them to get part-

time jobs – as an aid to growing up in the real world.

I have always liked this whole passage (you may have noticed it before on my office door) but it is the last line that

always strikes me – the notion of helping kids grow up in the real world. The real world, as we know, is rich in ideas

and experiences, far richer than any virtual TV or computer world, but the real world is also a place full of dan-

gers—a place rich in opportunities for success and also rife with failures. As I wrote about last month, we try to

help our children gain the insights, skills and attitudes they need for the real world with enough support to keep

them going – feeding their enthusiasm while helping them work through and around discouragement and failure.

We might call this ingenuity, self-motivation, resourcefulness, inventiveness and imagination, or to put it all in one

single idea, we are trying to teach our children initiative.

While thinking about insight into what initiative means, I stuck on an example from Canadian history that my fami-

ly and I found during our travels last year. One of the places that particularly stuck in our memories was Juno

beach in Normandy, France. Juno was where Canadian troops landed on D-Day in the Second World War at the

beginning of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. During three months fighting in Normandy, Canadian troops

held out and then advanced under intense fighting and high casualties. One of the things that stood out about

the Canadians troops was that they remained effective, even if they lost their officers.* It seems that Canadian en-

listed men were more likely to step up and lead their comrades in these situations than were the British or the

French. This apparently made a big difference in the Canadians’ ultimate success.

What strikes me about this is the idea that there was something about the Canadian troops that meant they were

more likely to take the initiative under the intense stress of combat. Perhaps it was something that they learned

at school. Perhaps it was because they grew up on farms, in the woods and in small communities where there was

no choice but for you and the few people around you to deal with whatever things happened to you.

Of course, this example has limits for comparison; foremost is that we all us hope that our children never have to

go to war. But we do know that our children are going to face all kinds of situations in which they will have to rely

on themselves and those immediately around them without us to help them. Ultimately, that is our goal for the

students we educate – when we are finished, they will be able to succeed without us. They will be able to make

their way through whatever mess and situation they find themselves in. And for that to work, it’s not just about

the skills, it’s also about student’s attitude - being able to stand up and take charge of the issues and problems

they face in their life. Which means we the adults in their lives need to emphasize initiative in our children as we

work to educate them.

You can follow me on Twitter @JHansenVic

*If you are interested, I would recommend Victoria author Mark Zehlke’s series of books: Juno, Holding Juno and

Breakout from Juno

NOTES FROM THE PRINCIPAL

École Doncaster Elementary School January 29, 2015

DECEMBER 18, 2014

Notes From the Principal… I am always struck by how quickly time passes in December. I think the pace has a lot to do with

it; December is eventful! For example, the evening this after leaving work I went to the mall to do

some shopping, came home to make dinner and afterwards went to my older daughter's school

dance recital. Then I came home to do some work on the newsletter. And the next night looks

pretty similar - so does the day after that as 2014 draws to an end in a frantic spiral. You remem-

ber that line from Clement Clark Moore's Twas the Night before Christmas: "And Mama in her

'kerchief, and I in my cap, had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap."? All I can say is that

he must have written that line a long time ago, well before late-night shopping anyway, because I

don’t forsee much brain settling for many days yet! And I know how many of you are going through

much the same, living in 5/4 time, because I’ve seen many of you on similar rounds and errands

over the last few weeks as you waved ‘hello’.

Of course, for many kids the pace of December runs counterclockwise to the adult’s. Each day

crawls maddeningly slower than the last. There is still plenty of work to do at school, there are

crafts and presents to finish along with dicteés and tests still to come. The performances in De-

cember take a lot of work too. Practice makes perfect, but practicing the same songs over and

over again gets wearing. And while the adults listening can hear the incremental improvement

and will marvel at how nice the songs sound when performed at the final show, the whole process

can seem interminable to an eight-year-old. And for kids, all this school stuff is all just a prelude

to the main event anyway - Christmas traditions or not, there is big holiday time coming up!

And yet despite the speed, this is still a favourite time of year for many of us (count me as one).

Part of it is the excitement, part of it is the nostalgia and part of it is the pursuit of wonder and

love and peace and stillness.

The stillness is rather difficult to find in our little elementary school right now, especially this fall!

Everyone runs a little faster than usual, trying to get students to where they typically are at the end

of December. Even so, there are occasional moments of reflection when students and teachers

briefly step outside the excitement. There is also the nervous kind of quiet early each morning as

people start to arrive and the poignant quiet at the end of the day.

Wonder is an easier thing to spot—there may be no better place for the wonder of the season than

an elementary school. You can see it in the children’s faces on the way to performances or while

building gingerbread houses. You can see it on the bulletin boards around the school. I can’t help

but marvel at the variety and creativity of ideas around the season! (We have started

putting a few sample pictures you can view online at Musée d’Oncaster at https://

doncaster.sd61.bc.ca/our-school/musee-doncaster/ .)

So as I write, nibbling on a constant stream of mandarin oranges to help ward of sea-

sonal colds, I look forward to the fabled “long winter’s nap”. I certainly will

get up as late as I possibly can on December 20th,

before a few more days of sprinting. And you’ll

hear me exclaim as I ride out of sight, happy holi-

day and we look forward to seeing you again in

the new year.

École Doncaster