Children teach themselves and each other

I was once more at the Montparnasse tower tonight to show it to my new friend Matt. We got talking about education and how he wants to start a website with his girlfriend to inform Czech students about opportunities to study abroad. Our views on education are very similar and I am looking forward to following the progress of the project! We agree that people need to know much more about all the opportunities that are out there!

He also talked about a film he saw about a school where children teach themselves and each other. I started googling the subject a bit and found a great talk by Sugata Mitra on children discovering how a computer works and teaching each other (link) and on youtube, Tom Munneke also answers some questions on peer teaching (link). Matt suggested that children can easily make other children enthusiastic about stuff and I have to agree! As a child you are very likely to check stuff out that is reccomended to you by a friend while you might not do it anymore as an adult because you think you know your exact taste and as a child you are more open minded.

Matt and I also went to a graffiti exhibition in a modern art centre which was quite cool. Tonight, on the way home I saw some amazing pictures on the metro wall- I wish I could draw like that! :-)

Dan Pink on motivation

Through Twitter, I just found this amazing TED video where Dan Pink talks about motivation: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html He for example says that a system of reward does only improve 'performance' if the task has a basic solution which is known to the worker. Once the task requires the right side of the brain, including creativity and innovation, the idea of a reward actually worsens the performance! He also backs it up with some research and talks about it in the context of IT and economics. The whole talk reminds me very much of Maria Montessori, who also argued against rewarding children because it made them stop what they were doing (well).

Now, for my own teaching, I have to get used to that thought. In my EFL classroom, rewards have always worked very well but then again it might be possible that this is because my tasks were very straight forward and the solution was fairly obvious. And yet this is not how you should teach- apologies to some of my earlier students, I am on my way of being a better teacher, I promise! Dan Pink suggests that the solution to motivation is autonomy, masters and purpose; excatly the factors that should go hand in hand with great teaching and learning! He brings up this example that 20 percent of the time at google workers are allowed to work on whatever they would like. At the end of the year, half of the products released by google were born out of project ideas which came out of this '20 percent time'. Amazing!

On that note, here is also another, older talk by Mae Jemison who passionately argues for the connection between art and science. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html 'The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity'. This is still as relevant today as it was in 2002! Science and art are equally important and thanks to the holistic ideas of Ron Miller, I can know appreaciate a little bit more how they all belong together! Listening to Mae Jemison talk about all the things she loves (space, dance, chemistry, ...) also helps me to be more at ease with all the different things I feel passionate about (ballet, educations, cooking, films, languages, ...). They can all influence and inspire each other and I certainly hope that as a teacher, I will have the opportunity to use all of them to inspire my students to learn.

A weekend in Paris

Guess what? After three weeks at my parisien language school something increadible happened today: It was fun to learn and speak French. What is the world coming to? As you might know by now, I am stuck in Paris because my French lessons are part of the conditions I need to fulfil in order to attend the PGCE at the University of Cambridge in a few weeks time. Because the whole affair is unfortunately fairly expensive, I had to chose the cheapest course available and until now, have been bored ot death partly because of bad teachers, being out in the wrong language level, slow lessons, the heat and the fact that I have not really met one nice person to speak French with. Until today!

Finally, I am in a class where everybody is better than me (which is great because it challenges), we are talking about relevant things and I also met someone who wanted to speak French with me after class. Well, lets say rather that he started speaking French (very well) and refused to stop :-D So that gave me a bit of a boost and I am determined to use my last five days (where has the time gone?!) to actually learn something. Which just shows again how important it is to be inspired to learn in the first place. Plus I am actually using my French now.

Last weekend, my friend Steve from England also visited me and apart me from doing ballet three days in a row, we spent loads of time sightseeing and discovering. It's so much more fun to do that together! On Friday, we had dinner at the Marais and then went to the Lido (which looked very much like a show on a cruise ship!). On Satuday, we took part in an amazing bike tour with the fat tire bike company, had tea at the cite universitaire and dinner at the centre pompidou and afterwards went up the montparnasse tower which was amazing at night!

Most of Sunday, we spent at the Louvre (where you can also have amazing lunch) and then later at Montmartre. So basically, Steve got a great tour of Paris and we spent so much time outside that I now have a sunburn on my shoulders.On Saturday, I am finally going home and although I love Paris now much more than I did in the first weeks, I can't wait to get my flat together, see my friends again and finally start teaching! Hopefully, I will also find some time to travel down to Sands in the next weeks and have a look at the school!

From Turning Points' to 'The Self-Organizing Revolution'

I am almost finished with reading 'Turning Points' and started another book on my way to the Paris city centre today: Ron Miller's 'The Self-Organizing' Revolution. In it, he outlines alternative educational movement and argues that, however different they might be, they also have a lot of things in commong and that the best way forward is to adopt a holistic world view which embraces all of the proposed education forms and see what is best for every individual child. I could not agree more.

Although I understand that there are long not enough schools to offer a proper 'choice' to parents and students, in my opinion the main problem is the publicising of education alternatives. There are way too few people who actually know that the possibility that their child does not need to go to a state school. Only by showing people what is available to them will they be able to make an educated choice- for the best of their child as Ron argues above!

The most amazing thing for me about the AERO conference was the fact that all of these different groups, Montessori, Waldorf, homeschooling, etc..., attended and were not inetersted in promoting their own way of educating, but rather came together in order to create a better education future for society with everybody's contribution! Something like this does not yet exist in Europe but I cannot wait to learn more and maybe one day get involved in building an organisation that brings the whole of the european alternative education together- a kind of AERO Europe project.

I also asked myself for the first time what exactly I would like to to teach. It's funny that it has taken me this long to think outside of the box! I would love to teach cooking and baking for example. And organising. And dancing. And reading out loud. And I bet this is just the tip of the iceberg and I am just too ignorant at the moment to think of more. Teaching languages is also something I like doing, but rather as a means of communicating that remembering vocab! I have always asked people what they enjoy in life, what they want to do, but I never imagined that it would be possible for me to teach things outside of the state corriculum!

So, this brings me to my first ideas for my own school. I am going to start a little section on the left where I am going to collect bits and bobs for my ideal school.

Some time in the last days, I read about the importance of the teacher in the development of the learner and it struck me that I actually really remember my teachers from my school time and not the 'facts' they taught me. Teachers should teach what they are passionate about- and if it is cake making in my case :-) Every human being has so much he/she is passionate about and inspiring someone else to love the same thing is something truly amazing!

When I talked to my (very conservative) dad about education the other day, he argud that it will never bee possible to have all of these different way for children to learn different things and still 'compete' for the same jobs and universitty places. There is already a huge problem (ever within Europe or one country!) to transfer from one school or one university to another. German universities would not consider me for a BA Film course because I had taken media, film and photography in my final year and not maths, science and another foreign language (!). So how is it possible for everybody to learn what they want to and still get on in the 'system'? What if you want to be a lawyer but can't attend uni in Europe because you went to a Montessori school?

There were also some other questions I want to think about:

What do children need to learn? (Truth, goodness, wisdom, love and others come from withine the person!)

Do they need guidance in 'developing' the above abilities?

How do we identiify ourselves? What do we need to learn in order to 'be' ourselves?

Do I want to change the (national or international) educational state system OR do I want to advocate educational alternatives as a way to escape the system?

In the talk with my parents, it also became clear that they see my 'career choice' as a possibility to work in private education and, eventually, earn a lot of money. I am still very confused about where I stand on this. Yes, I grew up in quite a consumerist household and society (my dad is a banker) and I like clothes and shiny things, but I also feel that everybody should have the same right to free education and that I am responsible for fighting for that believe. Opening a private alternative education school for 'rich' kids and support the poorer ones with scholarships will benefit the school (better materials) but might also drive a lot of students away. I will have to think more about this.

Lastly, Ron also placed the alternative education uprising as part of the civil rights movement. And then came the question: Do children have human rights? Oh, that made me think. Of course they do. But they also can't do everything, adults can do and many decisions are made for them. is that good or bad? Should parents choose the way of 'schooling' for their child? According to the United Nation's article 26: yes. But what if the child would like to chose him/herself? And what if the state interferes? (On that note: I can''t believe that homeschooling is still illegal in Germany!)

He also used a great word- philanthropy (love for humanity). I do agree that children need to be educated to build a better world as part of a community. My friend Michael, who I met at the conference, told me about his vision to open a small community village in which every member of the group educates the children together and in a democratic, free way. Believing in the good in human kind is so important and I really hope that Ron is right when he is predicting that this is the way humanity is developing.

Democratic school documentary

EUDEC posted a cool link to a report about the Sudbury Valley school online, which explains the daily life in a democratic school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOpOxcsNlK0 Very intriguing, can't wait to get in touch with people from Sands and hopefully attend the IDEC in Isreal next April! I am now also in contact with Michael who is the EUDEC chair and it will be very exciting to learn and travel more!

I also continued reading 'Turning points' in the metro today and realised that 'Home schooling' is actually a wrong name. It neither has to take place at home (a lot of the home schoolers I read about spend a lot of their time travelling), nor does it resemble what we associate with a school- adults teaching children. It's funny to think that not all parents would actually want to have the responsibility of being with their children all day and providing 'education' of some sort. I can imagine school is a great place for them to send their children to to go to work/ have time for themselves. But why have children if you don't want to spend time with them?

I came across Susan Ohanian today and she wrote a couple of things that made a lot of sense to me. Firstly, she says that it is not important which facts children learn in primary school, but that the only important thing for them to remember is that learning is fun and that 'books can offer information and pleasure'. She also laments that testing and grades do not take into consideration social responsibility, compassion, caring, creativity, curiosity, initiative, self reliance and a lot of other good qualities. I absolutely agree with both of the points. When I teach Englishh in summer schools, it's never really about making kids better at the language but rather about inspiring them that English can be fun so that they might persue it at home- because they WANT to rather than have to.

Three more links for me to explore in the next weeks/months:

Education Otherwise: http://www.education-otherwise.org/

School of Living: http://www.schoolofliving.org/

'Natural Life' magazine: http://www.naturallifemagazine.com/

It's funny to think that by the end of my time here in Paris, my French will have improved only very little, but my knowledge of alternative education (and my ballet skilss :-) will have grown quite a lot! I think I would like to return to France to work in a Primary School where the language is a bit easier and then try to swap teaching the kids German for the kids teaching me some more French! I like to speak it, but the lessons are just so dull!

What makes a good teacher?

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/education-degrees-and-teachers-pay/ Subject knowledge, enthusiasm, experience or teaching skills?

Reading about the adventures at Sands School, I am extremely interested in working in a school where students are able to chose the subjects they want to persue (and need to commit to them for at least a week) and where teachers are able to discover new subjects together with the students. As an example, I am going to start teaching French in September, although my subject knowledge is only intermediate. Same with my Spanish. Even though I hope that I will know more than my students, I am aware that this may cause some difficulty in the higher classes. Working at a school where students and teachers are able to work together and the teacher is able to teach skills rather than facts sounds amazing!

In my experience as a young EFL teacher (and sometimes I was barely a year or two older than teh kids I was teaching) it's all about the enthusiasm and commitment to the subject. Yes, you may know everything about yoour subject area, but if you can't deliver it, you are not a teacher but a lecturer! Creative, convincing lessons will engage learners in the subject and enccourage them to follow their interests at home and in the school. They will want to learn and as a result they are more likely to remember and apply knowledge. It is my firm believe that teacher should be rewaded for the enthusiasm the spark in the children they are teaching. Test scores may not necessarily reflect this love for the subject at all but one should actually talk to the learners!

After all, the goal of a lesson should be that the learner has increased his/her knowledge about the subject, shouldn't it? As a teacher, I want to take a masters degree to find new ways of getting students ineterested in my lessons and if the masters degree is in the subject I am teaching rather than in pedagogy, the widening of the subject knowledge should again only be there to find new niches which the children could be interested in.

Taking a masters is a good thing, but only if it happens for the right reasons and/or if the right things are taken away from it. If the teaching has not improved after a masters degree, was it worth it? As a result, I return to my other point that teachers should rather be rewarded for their ability to engage students rather than for possessing a higher degree as the latter should follow from the former.

Applied democartic education

Actually, I am quite angry that Cambridge forced me to come to Paris. It was one of the conditions for my place on the PGCE course (a condition that cost me around £2000) for fourweeks, and until now the lessons have only improved my French very little and am I not looking forward to going to the language school. Today it was especially bad. After having read tons of stuff on demoncratic education in the last days, I was stuck in a hot, small classroom with 14 other people who were bored and the teacher talked at us and told us about grammar rules. Ialmost fell asleep and, after hypocratically signing the register, left the class half way through to educate myself somewhere else in Paris.

With the metro, I travelled to the cinemtiere du pere lachaise- the biggest graveyard of Paris and wandered around, looking at the huge tombs and gravestones. If you now think a graveyard is

a bit of a strange tourist attraction: wrong! This is one of coolest placed in Paris and does not really resemble a graveyard, but more a huge park with memorial stones and cobble stone streets. I also stumbled upon the tombs of Georges Melies, one of my favourite cinema pioneers. The stone reads 'Createur du spectacle cinematographique, 1861-1938'. Cinematique spectacle is a great discribtion for what he did I think!

The second famous grave I saw was that of Oscar Wilde. Although I am not sure why there was a pompous sculpture, after all, Wilde was all about the subtleties, it was realy funny to see how many women had decorated the stone with lipstick kisses. Wit is sexy! :-) Walking along the paths, some leafs came down from a tree and I realised that it is almost autumn already- the summer went so quickly!

Caring Education & Meaningful Democracy

As an afterthought to the list of questions, Ron Miller, who I also met at the AERO conference, is posing one above all other: What is education for? I also believe that this is the one everybody should think about. Ron also writes about educating people in a society that is all about testing and performance in this article: http://www.educationrevolution.org/caring.html

A few years ago, Ron also published this essay on the different kinds of alterntive eduction that are out there: http://www.educationrevolution.org/altedmap.html A very interesting read and one more important than ever with all the new strands of education being founded in the last years.

'Turning Points'- food for thought on the way

After spending two weeks in Paris, going home for a week and retourning, I had a lot of time to finally make a start on reading 'Turning Points', a book I picked up at the AERO conference in NY in June. In it, 27 education revolutionists tell their story and describe why and how they have changed education and the educational system we live in.

Apart from being very inspiring, it has also given me a few names and projects I would love to get in contact with:

- Northern Lights Media

- Kirsten Olson, who helps schools to integrate alternative education into their curriculum

- the online journal of unschooling and alternative learning (JUAL)

- www.HumaneEducation.org

- the 'Greenhouse for education and social innitiative' course at the HaKibbutzim College in Israel

- the Westmoreland House Institute of Mentoring

There are also lots of questions that emerged from reading:

- What do you think about punishment and rewards in education?

- How can you offer free or cheap education but still make a good living?

- In learning, what is more important, the self or the community?

- Can you start a school without knowing the master theories?

- How is it possible to educate everybody differently and let them study and work all over the world with different or no qualifications?

- How can you inspire children to choose to learn about many different things?

This is just a brief collectiong, but hopefully I will be able to think about my own ppoints of view a little bit more in the future. What I would love to do at this point is travel around, visit lots of schools and homeschooling families and emerge myself into this very exciting community of people who believe in educational alternatives. I would also like to find out how 'alternative' they really are and if there is not a way to convince people in Europe that there are other and better ways than the state school system.

However, I think it is not the worst path to deepen my studies a little bit in Cambridge and also get some teaching esperience in state schools before I embark on my big adventure. Two or three years are not a very long time and the only danger is that I get too comfortable in my life to leave everything behind for a big discovery when the time comes. Let's hope for the best!

Paris, je ne sais pas si je t'aime

At the moment I am in Paris which is quite exciting. I have already seen a lot of the city and and until now, my favourite bits were Montmartre, from which you have an amazing view over Paris and can eat fantastic ice cream in little, green streets and the Rodin museum which is absolutely fanastic!

Other parts which I really liked were the quartre Marais

including the centre Pompidou and the hotel de Ville, in

front of which you can have lunch together with lots of tourists and even more pigeons, and the place de la Bastille.

The best thing about Paris so far however, is the Metro! It's unbelievable how many stations thereare (every 100m you can find one!) and even though you might have to change a few times, you should be at your destination within a few minutes.

The city is making every effort to get rid of the cars in the centre and if you don't like the metro there are bike rental stations everywhere. You just unlock one with your credit card and then it's one euro for every half an hour which is really not bad- plus you get a tan in the georgious weather we have!

The Parisiens themselves are quite friendly, but get

impatient very easily as soon as I start using my French. So far, I have tried ballet and Bikram Yoga and, together with a friend from my language school, also went to free open air cinema the park de la Villette.

Unfortunately, very few things are free here and I was shocked to see how expensive food is. For an ice cream you pay 3 euros and sandwiches and water are even worse. The best thing is really to stock up on food at a

supermarket and then carry it around for the day. The good news is that the Parisian tap water is very drinkable!

The only othern thing I am really not taken by is my room at the cite universitaire which looks like a prison cell and most of the other students at the language school- especially the German ones. In a week, I will return for another fortnight of lessons and hopefully by then, people are a little friendlier!