I plan to post ideas, experiences, and resources related to my teaching and learning as well as some personal things. Thanks for coming to Mark's Learning Blog!
Two groups made their presentations today and I enjoyed both very much because they were mostly very well-researched, organized, and delivered with passion.
Nice work!
1. Insects - I can't remember the exact title, but one group presented the argument that people in developed countries such as Japan should eat more insects. The most shocking part of the presentation was the demo, where the audience was invited (forced?) to try four kinds of insects cooked in sweet soy sauce. The presentation argued that insects are very efficient to grow in terms of farm land and water or feed input, are nutritious with high protein and low fat, and can be safely and deliciously eaten by cooking them. The points were very easy to follow and well-illustrated with pictures and key words on the visual slide show. The speaking of each member was quite good, too! I liked how each member came forward and spoke with authority on their section's content.
My only suggestion in terms of content was perhaps to add photos of how insects can be cooked deliciously or processed so that the shape does not turn people away.
When I tasted the insects, I felt the locusts were the best. The silk worm larva had a peculiar taste to it and I think I'll avoid that in the future unless the taste can be changed with spices.
2. Better Support for Working Mothers in Japan (to stop the falling birth rate): This was another well-researched presentation that explained how the Japanese government should improve laws and system to support working mothers in Japan and help them feel more comfortable with continuing their careers even after they have children. More flexibility for working hours should be made possible to take care of children or pick up / drop off children from schools or child care. Also, the quantity and convenience of child care centers should be improved.
I felt that both ideas were very important, and the difficulty is just how the government will work together with mothers, labor unions, and corporations to make those systems function effectively. Changes in the thinking of Japanese corporate leaders, especially in small companies, seem needed, possibly with incentives or fines by law.
Congratulations on finishing and good luck to the groups presenting on Friday!
This 7 min. video came around today to all instructors in our English Language Program from Rab, a colleague who is active in introducing new technologies into our curriculum. I have great respect for teachers like him who are constantly updating methods of research and teaching and sharing new ideas. I tend to be a bit more conservative "wait and see" type before I adopt new tools and systems, and even more cautious about proposing changes that will affect other teachers, but my cycle of innovation and experimentation has been getting faster over the years thanks to some very progressive type colleagues I have had a chance to work with.
Basically, the message in the video is that teachers using "traditional" methods of teaching should consider using more networked technologies such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts to engage and stimulate learning. The message suggests that our students are bored by traditional methods and want more interactive and more individually-relevant and customized learning.
So, what do I think about this?
Most importantly, I agree with the point that learning should always be relevant to the lives of students. If instructors cannot convincingly persuade students that what they are doing is strongly relevant and valuable to their personal goals and future development, there is something wrong with the learning or with the communication about the learning. Withing a standardized curriculum, especially one that has a "one size fits all" or "everyone must do this exactly the same way" kind of approach, making required content relevant to students can be a big challenge for instructors. Some may argue that "good students" just accept what they have to do and make it meaningful for themselves. I agree that students like that are nice to teach and make our lives easy--we enforce that on them by GPA systems and so on, so they often have no choice but to be nice. But, ideally, learning systems should incorporate a large number of choices for students which they make to customize and personalize highly relevant learning based on informed discussions with their instructors.
They should be defining what they need to learn by themselves and discovering the answers on their own, using a variety of resources including the instructors. Assessments/evaluations of learning should be more flexible and dynamic to help students find their goals and needs, and to encourage them to be resourceful, thoughtful, and reflective.
The Reading/Writing Workshop Method, with some variations for college level learning, is one promising way for achieving this, and I have enjoyed researching and incorporating elements of the method into my own teaching where I can.
I also agree with the idea that teaching methods should keep up with the communication methods and learning methods that young learners enjoy using. As the video argues, teenagers today are used to learning through networks, through Googling searches when they want information, through blogging when they have ideas, text-messaging or twittering when they want feedback or comments from friends, and accessing online audio/video/textual information that teaches them on demand.
As long as all of my students have somewhat equal access to such tools, I am more than willing to incorporate their use when I am teaching. I only worry about inequality of access. Not all students have iPods or high-tech cell phones, or even Internet access at home. Most do, but not all, and that makes me hesitate somewhat.
Of course, I also know that if most students have it, it is valuable to just jump in and try it to experiment and develop new ways even if some students may be inconvenienced...they will find ways to survive. I have seen colleagues go ahead and impose some new and experimental system on students only to lead to a high amount of technology-related stress at the expense of other learning that the students should be focusing on. I usually try to find a balance by making new tool use optional rather than required.
For some reason, the program that I am teaching in now does not seem to completely match what I wrote above. My own teaching does not completely match it either. I want to keep working on making learning activities relevant and meaningful for my students.
After confirming schedule items such as the upcoming exam on Wagar and the JLP exchange class, and making sure everyone understood their essay drafts need to be shared with me some time this week, we examined the concept of effective visuals for presentations.
I showed the following video Death by PowerPoint, which make four nicely illustrated points about how presentations need Significance, Structure, Simplicity, and Rehearsal. I will probably need to clarify my expectations one more time on Monday next week, but I hope these concepts will help the groups as they begin to collaborate on their presentation materials.
Notice: It is best to use a small number of key words per slide, and use large, full-screen images that illustrate the points. Also, make sure fonts are easily visible with clear color contrasts!
Bad slide--Too much text and main point is NOT clear. The audience will be busy reading, the presenter will be busy reading, and little communication will occur. Also, the clip art image is not very professional and has little impact. Visuals are NOT your notes. Your notes should be separate. Your visuals should make a point with impact.
Good slide --point is clear. 7 words or less. Big font. Good image.
Best for impact. The presenter has selected what should be emphasized and has visualized the information.
Sean Penn's acting is masterful, but it is the true story of the gay rights activism of Harvey Milk that makes this a meaningful film to watch. What is documented is the fight in 1970 and 80s San Fransisco for gay rights to be respected within a culture where the sexual bias of the heterosexual majority has the possibility of being formulated into religious and cultural laws of what is "normal" or "acceptable." The highlight of the film is Milk's campaign victory to vote down a "bigot" bill in California that would allow all schools to fire teachers for being homosexuals.
In the 2010s in the USA, it is hard to think of such a bill being passed in a referendum, so that shows how far gay rights activists have come since the 1970s. Personally, I have never been directly part of the gay rights movement, but have always supported protection of rights for sexual minorities. As activists in the film argue, if society cannot respect freedom of personal choice in one case (provided it has no harm to others), how can we expect to keep freedoms in other cases?
I will admit that gay kissing or sex scenes such as the few that appear in this film feel strange to me as a heterosexual, but I have no reason to oppose it and don't think religions should either. I think societies of the world (including all religious groups) have much more important things to worry about. Also, it has taken the world a long time to admit this (and some people still deny it), but based on what gay people testify, and what scientific evidence seems to show, a homosexual orientation is not a psychological or physical abnormality that needs to be fixed or suppressed. See this statement by the American Association of Pediatrics, which includes the quote: "the current literature and most scholars in the field state that one’s sexual orientation is not a choice; that is, individuals do not choose to be homosexual or heterosexual...current studies conclude that somewhere between 3% and 10% of the adult population is gay or lesbian, and perhaps a larger percentage is bisexual..
I strongly recommend this film. If nothing else, we should to deepen our understanding about the fragility of justice in democratic societies where a biased majority can use the voting system make laws to reject the rights of a minority. If we don't accept sexual minorities, what minority group is next?
Yesterday was the ICU Entrance Exam and I was one of the faculty proctors for the all-day testing event from 9-4pm covering LARA, social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and English. The stamina that the test-takers need to have is amazing. I want to give my welcome and respect to the close to 1800 students who sat for the test.
The mysterious "LARA" is ICU's most unique test. It stands for Liberal Arts Readiness Assessment, and the questions look like this. How these questions measure whether students are ready for liberal arts is unknown to me, but apparently the theory is that ICU wants students who have flexible minds and can synthesize and apply their math, language, science and other knowledge to solve problems they have never seen before. I am sure that some department at ICU carefully studies the validity of the questions for selecting the type of students we want to come to ICU, so I will leave it at that and just marvel at the intelligence of the students who do well on these questions.
Notwithstanding the name LARA, I think the other tests are more clearly testing liberal arts skills. Personally, I like how the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities tests require students to read long academic texts and answer questions from the context of those texts. I would think only students who are accustomed to analytically reading long intellectually challenging texts and thinking, writing, and talking about them will be successful. This, ideally, will promote meaningful learning in high schools or on a personal basis, and will attract motivated and skilled students who actually enjoy learning and thinking about issues rather than those who just want to get into ICU for the image.
In general, I see the ICU admissions process as successful based on the quality of the students I meet each year. Almost all of my students are highly motivated to improve themselves to prepare to become active global citizens with strong problem solving abilities and communication skills. Only rarely do I meet a student who got into ICU, but did not really want to work so hard in college or did not really have motivation to be challenged in a rigorous program of study.
Ideally, we would ask students to write a personal statement of purpose or essay to see potential for academic work in Japanese and English, but that would require a complex, and partially subjective evaluation process. Currently about a third of our students (200 out of 600ish) are admitted through recommendations of their schools or by special screening of the admissions office based on high school grades, recommendation letters, a personal essay, English standardized test scores, and an interview. Apparently there is no requirement for test scores on the Center test or other tests that would show aptitude for verbal, analytical, mathematics or subject-related skills. In the US, most admissions are like the AO exam, with the addition of the SAT to demonstrate general learning aptitude in a somewhat objective way.
Personally, while this is no doubt a complex process, I think it would be ideal if ICU and other universities in Japan screened for more students in an AO test-like format. It seems more reasonable to to place emphasis on what the student has demonstrated in high school and how much motivation for learning toward personal goals the student has, rather than the outcome of one day of testing. The washback effect on high school learning would no doubt be positive as instructors and students would be freed from the pressures of performing well on ONLY standardized tests. Motivation and personal goals should be taken into consideration as well as a one-day test score.
That being said, I have much respect for the students who came to ICU to do their best, and hope the students who deserve to come get to come!
Discussion groups summarized and critiqued Wagar's predictions regarding the 3 Futures. The students' ideas, critical reactions, and my comments (coming soon) will be summarized on this collaborative Google Document.
I think all groups came up with good critiques on why Wagar's predictions of global change toward socialism, communism, and space colonization are not very likely. Of course, his predictions have the possibility to come true, so the critiques need to recognize some value in his idealistic scenarios, but at the same time should point how human nature may not allow such utopias to ever exist in a sustainable way.
On the point of space colonization, travel, and contact with alien races, I wanted to let everyone know that money is being spent on searching for signals from intelligent life, so I showed a few minutes of the TED video above regarding the SETI project.
I hope everyone will listen to the whole thing to consider whether it is a good application of science budgets or not.
I'm currently teaching and developing a new English for Global Communication Program at Keio Yokohama Elementary School. Until recently, I was an instructor of English for academic purposes at a private Japanese university named International Christian University. I'm American and did my undergraduate and graduate work at the UW in Seattle, but have lived in Japan for many years, including most of my childhood and now since '01 as a university instructor. I enjoy helping my students become effective intercultural communicators and critical thinkers. For fun, I play with my kids, hang out with Megumi my wife, train for marathons and triathlons, plow slowly through modern Chinese literature and films (my Chinese is getting rusty of late), and enjoy a good brew or sake with my friends in izakayas here in Tokyo.
