What CPDD & Cedar Did

PEDAGOGICAL ELEMENTS & STRATEGIES

In September – October 2007, CPDD, Cedar Primary and Lego Education (Denmark), through a series of workshops and discussion facilitated by The Idea Factory, discussed the trends that will affect education in the future. The team first did research on some aspects of future society such as citizenship, inclusivity, pop culture, virtual worlds, education, social trends, identity, bioethics, literacy, morality, work places and the economy, and brainstorm the skills that students would need to master in the future. We then began to identify measures to engage the students in these skills, such as improvisation, imagination, interaction, resilience, risk seeking and navigation. 

The team then went on to brainstorm pedagogical strategies that related to each of the alpha ideas: e.g., focus-based, dream-driven, immersive, defeat-driven, justice or ethics driven, critical and experimental pedagogies, and described what these would look like in the classroom. To draw some insights to enhance these concept trails, ethnography was done on three teachers and six students in the primary school during that period, to find out how they lived and learnt and what their aspirations were. A few ideas were picked and in groups, team members brainstormed examples of lessons centred on the key idea behind the pedagogy.

The teachers of Cedar Primary prototyped pedagogical elements such as the following: emotional, dialogical, praxis, justice, spontaneity and real world relevance by incorporating elements of these into lessons in English, Social Studies and Science.

In a lesson on poverty for instance, the emotional element was introduced to angle the lesson to appeal to the emotions as opposed to the mind. The approach brought emotions back to the centre of the pedagogy in the hope that students would learn through their heart and not just their head. Three methods were used during the lesson, the cognitive – through the use of statistics and a discussion on the network of causes of poverty; the emotional, through the use of graphics, images, video with a song from www.makepovertyhistory.com and the narrative, through the story of a day in the life of an African child. The findings were that the emotional approach was most effective in engaging students while the cognitive component was also important to demonstrate the scale of the issue being discussed. Pupils, on the whole, found the narrative most interesting. The teachers hoped to follow on with an investigation into how the sequence of each element may affect the outcome of the lesson, and the impact of the extent of the use of the element as well as the role of music and type of music on the emotional. The general conclusion was that an awareness of these pedagogical elements will help in expanding the repertoire of teachers and enhance their imagination.

The curriculum developers focused on 12 pedagogies and for each of these, discussed questions such as the need for the pedagogy, how it would be carried out in class and the expected outcome of the use of each of these pedagogical strategies:

futuring - centred on contents of the future

pattern-breaking -  centred on de-education

identity-searching - centred on deep self-awareness

chaos navigation - centred on sense-making

option creation - centred on choices

inspire to aspire - centred on dialogues for inspiration

responsible rebellion -  centred on championing a cause

circle of life -  focused on the concept of ecological systems

defeat-driven pedagogy – a strategy that exploits the merits of defeat or failure

moshing - centred on collaboration and co-creation of knowledge

spin-a-tale - centred on story-telling

soak-it-in - centred on immersive environments

The curriculum developers took time to work through what was common among the pedagogical strategies and here are some pedagogies that we felt could be integrated into lesson design to better engage students. Here are seven examples of pedagogical strategies, as reported by Tham Kum Chee:

Story-it: a pedagogy centred on narratives

Beyond the primary and lower secondary levels, and beyond the legitimate subject of literature, most schools do not seem to care for narratives or the art of story-telling, at least not in many Singapore schools.  So it is with surprise, for some more pleasant than for others, that we hear that the University of Southern California had mandated that its final year Engineering course students should present their final year project – to design an engineering solution to a problem that affects human lives – in digital story-telling format, over and above the traditional academic paper mode.

If your curiosity has been piqued, perhaps one question you are entertaining is, “Why would a School of Engineering wish to see its students’ academic work presented in a story-telling mode?”  Apparently, narratives create richness of content. People now recognise that facts independent of a context make for harder understanding and make for difficulty in remembering.  Stories grip the human imagination and by its very nature of contextualising a situation, bring out substance better than a record of facts or pure data.

Possible Application:

Mathematics, especially abstract mathematical concepts, is taught as if it is a matter of manoeuvre of symbols.  Those endowed with logical-mathematical intelligence have an advantage in the study of mathematics, while those deficient in such intelligence may struggle.  The mathematical concept of infinity, which the Greeks struggled to understand for centuries, is possibly still one of the hardest to grasp.  German mathematician, David Hilbert (1862-1943) is probably one of the most successful at explaining it, by using a narrative, ‘The Hotel Infinity’ (also known as ‘Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel’).  Hilbert concretises the abstract concept by giving it a human context – a dilemma faced by the manager of a Hotel that is supposed to be able to accommodate any number of guests knocking on its doors.  With every threat of the infinite number of rooms at Hotel Infinity being fully occupied and unable to accommodate even one more guest, Hilbert narrates a solution that can also be expressed mathematically.  In following the narrative, any listener or reader is also confronting and coming to terms with the concept of infinity.  A pedagogy centred on narratives could give more people, not just those endowed with logical-mathematical intelligence, ways to understand abstract concepts that they could not understand when expressed in symbols.   What matters is not that more people may understand mathematics; what matters is that more people may understand ways of knowing in mathematics – made possible because they were listening to a story.

A survey of current classroom practice may reveal that in fact narratives have been used to bring concepts, laws, principles to students’ attention.  Witness how Archimedes’ Principle or the Law of Gravity are almost always explained first by the story behind the discovery of each principle or law. 

Moshing: a pedagogy centred on collaborative creation of knowledge

Definitions

mosh pit: a clearing in front of the stage where music concert goers may gather and dance as the (usually heavy metal, punk rock, or alternative rock) music plays live. 

Moshing:

1.   the activity in which audience members at live music performances aggressively push or slam into each other.

2.      a form of positive feedback or reflection of enjoyment from live audiences.

Expected behaviour:

§     In decidedly friendly mosh pits, etiquette requires participants to lend a hand to others who fall so that the latter may be helped out of harm’s way; violent styles of dancing are frowned upon, and a feeling of "community" is pervasive.

§     In deliberately violent mosh pits, participants are observed to push, shove, bounce off each other, or run wild; those who fall risk being trampled on.

In the education landscape, we use moshing as a metaphor to illustrate a less organized and more free-flowing process where different people come together to play, to perform and perhaps to pull off a feat not possible outside the pit.  Sounds like group work?  So what’s new?

Group work is not new of course.  We even have a subject in the ‘A’ level curriculum that demands that students work as a group.  However, our thinking about group work so far has tended to be governed by the principle of equity, that is, we have tended to design group work with fairness in mind; so we stipulate that groups must be composed of roughly equal number of members, members are of roughly the same profile (same school, same class, same age), the task for groups must be the same, etc.  The principle to work with has tended to be no one group must be seen to have an unfair advantage over another. 

Yet, in the spaces outside school, we are more likely to find loosely defined working groups (than rigidly defined ones), unequal size groups (than equal size ones), or groups of diverse profiles (than groups of a uniform profile). We do not insist on equity always because we recognise that different kinds of work need different treatment.  Moshing may be a way to help us move away from the insistence on equity thinking.  Begin by thinking, why not let students decide what size groups they want to get a job done; why not let students profess membership in more than one group; why not let students co-opt expertise from outside the class or school, if they can justify why they would appreciate that expertise. 

What good can come out of students moshing in friendly mosh-pits that promote a sense of community which compels participants to help one another out?  We hope moshing as a pedagogy will create a play situation where because students have a common interest to play, will find a way that suits everyone and play together.  Further, we hope such collaborative creation of knowledge, precisely because there can be comparison of group size and profile, will make students reflect on factors that may contribute to one group’s success or another group’s lack of success.   

Inspire to Aspire: a pedagogy centred on dialogues for inspiration

Ever watched ‘American Idol’, the talent-scouting show packaged in reality-TV style?  By the time the competition is whittled down to 12 finalists, the contestants get to attend individual tuition sessions with singers and songwriters every week.  For some contestants, these tuition sessions are the best thing that happened to them in the whole competition.  Some of them are so moved by the advice, encouraging words, or harsh reality check given by the industry expert, or just the experience of close contact with a respected representative in the industry, that they cry openly.  Better yet, some change their behaviour and transform into better performers. 

Inspire to Aspire takes inspiration from this approach.  Some students have shown a particular talent, and what they need is that kind of undivided attention from an adult who can move a young person to aspire to greater heights in his talent area.  At the risk of sounding elitist, this is not a pedagogy used for delivering a body of knowledge to a mass audience.  Use it selectively, on a select group of students or with individuals, and not necessarily at the same time.  You may not reap benefits for the masses, but you could create a life-defining moment for an individual, one at a time.

Chaos Navigation: a pedagogy centred on sense-making

Chaos may be complete confusion or disorder, or it may be a state of formlessness which leaves one feeling helpless. 

Much has been said about the future being uncertain.  If we pause and recall how many of the emerging technologies have come to be called ‘disruptive technologies’, we can well imagine why the future, assuming a continuing stream of disruptive technologies, can seem like chaos or a state of confusion or formlessness arising from such disruption.  The scenario of the future is one where students are confronted with many quick, short problems demanding quick, but not necessarily long-term, solutions.

To navigate is to find one's way through, along, over or across something and to hold one's course.  It can also mean to give another person directions on the correct route.

Imagine the Apollo 13 crew reporting, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”  When its flight plan failed to go as predicted, the Apollo 13 crew had to navigate its way through, along, over or across the ‘problem’ and hold its course, with support from ground crew heavens away.  The threat of the Apollo 13 crew not making it home to planet Earth safely had to be broken down into smaller composite problems all needing quick solutions.  It took the three stranded astronauts and many times as many engineers, technicians, specialists at NASA to navigate the tricky situation, the chaos, that they had never before found themselves in.    

Chaos, especially when it is a matter of life and death, necessitates quick thinking.   Chaos navigation as a pedagogical strategy should promote the ability to do quick thinking, and make relevant connections between seemingly discrete tasks, so that the whole hangs together.  In the 21^st century, the images-laden and senses-rich landscape in the real world and in virtual worlds can make for chaos; students will need navigation skills, the ability to do quick thinking, the ability to keep an eye on core concerns even as he works on smaller problems that contribute to.

Pattern-breaking: a pedagogy focused on deconstruction of the norm so as to create options

In many respects, pattern recognition is a prized skill.  We reward the ability to recognise patterns in standard IQ tests.  We trace patterns to make sense of the random so that we may understand a new phenomenon, like SARS.  We look to patterns to inform us of symmetry that we can leverage on when we wish to persuade.  The insistence to pick out patterns, or the compulsion to order things, is almost instinctive in many of us.  And indeed, great things have been achieved because of this instinct.  

Then there are times when the impossible is achieved because people departed from the normal pattern; or the unspeakable is made manifest because people investigated the totally asymmetrical; or the equally viable alternative revealed because people broke away from the convention.

For years, the pattern was to expect telephone wires to be laid before a community could have phone access.  Then the mobile phone made many a Chinese or Indian village leap overnight from a phone-less rural backwater into a brave new connected community.  For some years now, the pattern had been to ban mobile phones in classrooms and even condemn students’ use of mobile phones in classrooms as anti-social behaviour.  What if teachers turn the mobile phone into a gadget with which to control a powerpoint delivery on differential equations, or to share an interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in a 3-minute granule?

Futuring: a pedagogy focused on finding the future

Michelangelo’s flying machine was fantasy until it became reality centuries from the first time he drew his impressions of a flying machine.  Huxley’s Brave New World conjured images of cloning half a century ahead of the science of that time. 

What is it about these thinkers that made them capable of imagining the future?  If we like this capability, how do we promote it in our students? 

A technologically unsophisticated era may deprive the masses of access to tools that excite the imagination.  But a technologically sophisticated age like ours witnessing technological advancement by the second, has no lack of tools and real-world material to excite the imagination.  Add to that the belief that the future is complex, and has a ready laundry list of intractable problems, and we can see why we should wish for our children to be capable of imagining the future. 

Identity evolution: a pedagogy centred on cultivating deep self-awareness

Popular culture may promote fads; parents may move children in directions that they wish to see their children head towards; peers may encourage herd behaviour.  What is the individual to make of these pressures?  The quest for an identity is as old as man himself.  The changing times and emerging technologies make the tools by which man ‘finds’ himself more varied and maybe even, bewildering. 

The digital generation growing up accustomed to avatar-based environments may not be able to distinguish the real and virtual, reality and fantasy.

Embed in our curriculum the habit and the courage of asking, ‘Who are you?’, ‘What do you wish to reveal about yourself?’, ‘What do you wish to hide about yourself?’, ‘Who are you unafraid to be in these circumstances?’, ‘What are you afraid to lose under these circumstances? Why?’

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