CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

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Middle School Challenge Week by John McKinley, 8th grade Social Studies Teacher Stop trying to please us. You will not be graded on your ability to tell us what we already know. Don’t ask if this is good enough. What does that mean anyway? Better than the minimum? Good enough for whom? Don’t ask us what you should do. That’s what you’ll be telling us soon enough. You spent 7.5 hours at school yesterday. What did you learn? And even more important, why did you learn it? Today is the day you take those 7.5 hours back. For the equivalent of one measly school day, you’re going to decide what matters. You’re going to put the self back in self-direction; the purpose back in purposeful learning. And you’re going to be creative. You’re going to decide what to learn. You’re going to decide how to learn it. And you’re going to decide when you’ve learned enough. All we ask is a glimpse behind the curtain - show us how you did it. For five days, 8th grade students were given free reign to explore their bliss for two class periods per day. This is Challenge Week. Time to waste: the roots of Challenge Week Giving a student a full school day to use as he or she pleases might seem like a recipe for wasting time, but what would you do if you were given time away from your typical routine? What if you were encouraged to surrender to something that had you intellectually preoccupied – and then encouraged to commit to fully exploring it? Atlassian, a software development firm in Australia, takes 24 hours, four times a year, to stop doing what it does best. During what they call FedEx Day (“for when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”), employees stop their normal routine to re-ignite their creative passions by doing something that is intentionally not what they do every day. The idea is to allow employees to explore their interests and passions, to focus on problems that have nagged them, and to march 2013 CON NEX ION 8 basically satisfy intellectual cravings. The day is focused on Atlassian’s widely varied products, but the experience allows creativity a space to exist. At the end of 24 hours employees have three minutes to amaze their co-workers with the tasks they’ve chosen to tackle. Sometimes their work is wildly successful, and sometimes it isn’t. Regardless, the process remains an engine for generating creativity. Atlassian isn’t alone in encouraging this “off task” behavior. At Google, it’s called “20-Percent Time” (one day every week) and is attributed with creating half of Google’s products, while 3M’s version is “15% Culture.” These three companies are among a growing cadre recognizing that free time leads to creativity, and creativity leads to innovation. Is it any surprise that innovation thrives outside of a traditionally structured environment? Titans of innovative industries have repeatedly found their niche while being focused outside the status quo. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg never managed to earn university degrees, but all had driving intellectual passions, and developed expertise doing what wasn’t on the official agenda. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear According to Benjamin Goering, a software engineer at the startup, Livefyre, “Education isn’t a four-year program, it’s a mind-set.” Goering put on hold his pursuit of a computer science degree from the University of Kansas because he felt it wasn’t quite getting him where he wanted to be - making Web experiences for others. The point isn’t that seeking a degree isn’t a worthy endeavor, rather it’s that becoming educated needn’t necessarily be confined to a traditional classroom or institution. And if education can take place outside of these confines, what should schools be doing to remain relevant and necessary? According to Seth Godin, new media ideas-man and author of the manifesto, “Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?),” if you were in school yesterday, you likely spent much of it being prepared for a 19 th century economy in order to meet the needs of the industrial age. Obedience, standardization, and learning things that can be explicitly tested have become hallmarks of the educational structure. What we need to be doing instead, he argues, is creating adaptive and intellectually passionate kids who are intrigued by the challenge of solving interesting problems. Godin writes, “Here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?” We still have traditional physical centers of learning in place, but our libraries and our schools are no longer isolated hubs of knowledge. When the Internet flung open the doors to knowledge, we began seeing a constant barrage of people so excited by their knowledge that they’re giving it away by the millions on YouTube, blogs, and any number of other new iterations of the web. Ubiquitous access to these resources is making our classroom walls ever more porous as teachers and students savvily use technology to bring new information from the outside world into the classroom in the quest to make learning relevant. An entrepreneurial shift in education is already well underway, and it’s moving away from the fringes of the educational establishment, as opportunities for learning become less exclusive. CS 221, the Stanford University course on artificial Intelligence, became one of the first official MOOCs (massive open online courses) when it offered the entire course, for free, via the Internet. 160,000 users registered for the course. 20,000 completed it. Student enrollment at Stanford is 15,870. The desire to spread knowledge is making gains against the desire to merely possess it. Excuses of lacking access and lacking experience “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” - Confucius have evaporated. The only thing effectively standing in anyone’s way is a lack of will. No one can force you to learn anything When people talk about the value of lifelong learning, they’re often talking about valuing knowledge for its own sake, continuously craving knowledge and discovery, and somehow developing the mindset that becoming educated is an opportunity and not a burden. Challenge Week is where the rubber meets the road. It’s a student’s chance to demonstrate that he or she values the opportunity to learn. If this value isn’t present it serves as a chance to develop it. Challenge I: Learn whatever you want An inconceivable amount of information is now literally seconds away. It’s no longer enough to simply absorb the content you’re presented – decision-making about what to know is itself a part of the learning process. Somehow, this part of the process was the most difficult for students. When you’re so used to being instructed, having to decide for yourself what you want to know is fraught with complication. Suddenly they weren’t so sure what interested them. When it hit them that the time they were wasting really was their own time to learn, students became more selective in how they spent their time. They began seeking value in lieu of entertainment. Some discovered that they really were just wasting time, and set out to actually find something worth learning. It was a paradigm shift. Again and again students would ask if a topic was a good one to study. They were really asking for us to tell them what to know. They were like salesmen who wouldn’t take no for an answer, rephrasing the question in order to gain anything other than, “Is it something you’re interested in?” and “Will it challenge you to learn it?” They were forced to answer the question for themselves: What do I want to know? Doing that is the real key to becoming a lifelong learner. Most kids are taken to school where they perform for a teacher while being told they should value learning for its own sake. They’re required to value what we’re telling them rather than develop their own sense of autonomy in deciding for themselves. I won’t claim that the week produced a sea of students focused on learning in a way I’d never seen before; but it was different and good. For one thing, students were engaged. Most started class without being told and many stayed after class to finish what they were doing, scarcely noticing the bell they normally so eagerly await. Students began to rely on teachers for clarity, not instruction. Many used YouTube tutorials (found in baffling abundance and specificity) while others found experts in their families or community. They recognized connections between their individual challenges to create communities of interest, collaborating with each other and demonstrating their progress. They monitored their progress knowing they would need to show classmates what they had done. Most implausibly of all, some even gave themselves homework – because doing what interests you doesn’t really seem like work at all, and you can’t always do it in a day. As educators we are always trying to make connections between the real world and our content. But when we stripped away the content requirements, there was only the real world left – that, and Edgar studying science, math, and English – while developing visual/spatial awareness – as he investigated something he’s always wondered about: the internal combustion engine. In the past this has often been a vocational subject, but for Edgar, might it be the first step towards mechanical engineering? We saw Anna, Mariana and Joaquin learning sign language, at first independently, until they realized how much more efficient group work could make it. Are they fluent? Of course not. But the seed of curiosity has been sown. Andrea and Paola spent hours at home identifying the underlying structure of dress patterns, consulting experts in the field and practicing rudimentary sewing techniques. Kids were learning second, third, and Middle School fourth languages – not because their families had moved or enrolled them in an institute, but because for seven and a half hours they could choose to do so. Kids sought clarifying materials and used critical thinking skills. Who knew solving a Rubik’s cube was a simple matter of knowing and then applying a few algorithms? One of the most frustrating questions a teacher hears is, “Why are we doing this?” For one week we were able to respond: You’re doing it because you want to learn it. march 2013 CON NEX ION 9
PE & Sports 10 ASOMEX ASFG Guadalajara 2013 por Alejandro Garza, Director Deportivo del ASFG En la última reunión de Directores Atléticos ASOMEX se optó por un sistema de convivencias masivas con competencias deportivas en una misma sede, con el fin de garantizar a nuestros alumnos e invitados un evento con las medidas necesarias de seguridad y optimizar el uso de las instalaciones deportivas de cada institución anfitriona. Es por ello que del 25 al 30 de enero fuimos anfitriones de la convivencia deportiva ASOMEX en donde por primera vez se llevó a cabo la organización de dos eventos deportivos de manera simultánea: futbol en la categoría juvenil “A” en ambas ramas y voleibol en la rama femenil en todas sus categorías. Los resultados obtenidos por nuestros equipos fueron los siguientes: Deporte Equipo Lugar Voleibol Infantil Primer Lugar Voleibol Juvenil “A” Primer Lugar Voleibol Juvenil “B” Primer Lugar Voleibol Juvenil “C” Primer Lugar Futbol Juvenil “A” varonil Sexto Lugar march 2013 CON NEX ION ASOMEX Puebla En la ciudad de Puebla, del 7 al 12 de febrero nuestro equipo de futbol Juvenil “C” y los representativos de basquetbol de las categorías Juvenil “A” e Infantil participaron en el ASOMEX organizado por The American School Foundation of Puebla. Cabe resaltar que los tres equipos obtuvieron en su competencia el trofeo Sportmanship, el cual se otorga a los equipos con mejor comportamiento tanto dentro como fuera de la cancha. Los resultados obtenidos por nuestros equipos fueron los siguientes: Deporte Equipo Lugar Basquetbol Infantil Primer Lugar Basquetbol Infantil SPORTSMANSHIP Basquetbol Juvenil “A” SPORTSMANSHIP Basquetbol Juvenil “A” Sexto Lugar Futbol Juvenil “C” SPORTSMANSHIP Futbol Juvenil “C” Sexto Lugar Enhorabuena a todos nuestros estudiantes deportistas que representaron a nuestro colegio en estos dos magnos eventos, nos sentimos orgullosos de su esfuerzo y dedicación. ¡MUCHAS FELICIDADES! Assessing Oral Proficiency in Foreign Languages by the Language Institute Team The assessment of oral skills in a foreign language has always been a brain-teaser for foreign language educators around the world. Whereas most research on assessment agrees that listening, reading, and writing skills are assessed effectively to some extent through standardized tests such as the TOEFL iBT or IELTS, these tests have not proven to be valid or reliable regarding oral language. Two years ago, Michael Dunand of the American School Language Institute conducted an extensive literature review entitled “ESL/ EFL instructor´s classroom assessment practices and the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Oral Proficiency Interview: a pragmatic approach.” The research concluded that The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) was a superior assessment tool, stating, “It seems widely accepted that the OPI is substantially reliable, with inter-rater reliability ranging from .94 to .99.” The institute decided to apply for a full membership at ACTFL as well as promoting the OPI tester certification among its staff; first in English and French, and after two years in other less-taught languages. Furthermore, as a language institute, we were very interested in being able to assess our students/teachers proficiency across all languages in a standardized fashion. The OPI is a valid and reliable standardized procedure for the global assessment of functional speaking ability. It is a 20-30 minute face-to-face or telephonic interview between a certified ACTFL tester and an examinee. It determines how well a person speaks a language by comparing his or her performance of specific communication tasks with the criteria for each of ten proficiency levels described in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012 – Speaking. The ten proficiency levels are: Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, and Language Institute Novice; Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice being divided into High, Medium and Low sublevels. The interview is interactive and adapts to the speaking abilities of the individual being tested. The topics that are discussed during the interview are based on the interests and experiences of the test candidate. Through a series of personalized questions, the interviewer elicits examples of the candidate’s ability to handle the communication tasks specified for each level of proficiency in order to establish a clear 'floor' and 'ceiling' of consistent functional ability. Often candidates are asked to take part in a role-play. This task provides the opportunity for linguistic functions not easily elicited through the conversational format. The interview is double rated, and an Official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Certificate stating the candidate’s proficiency level is issued to the candidate. The ACTFL OPI is currently used worldwide by academic institutions, government agencies, and private corporations for purposes such as academic placement, student assessment, program evaluation, professional certification, hiring, and promotional qualification. The ACTFL OPI is recognized by the American Council on Education (ACE) for the awarding of college credit. More than 10,000 OPIs in 37 different languages are conducted through the ACTFL Testing Program every year. We are thrilled to be working on this very important project which we believe will help the institute in reaching excellency in our language programs. 11 march 2013 CON NEX ION
Page 1 and 2: From our LEARNING GOALS Our ASFG co
Page 3 and 4: Editor’s note Joaquin, 5 th grade
Page 5: ASFG´s Instructional Programs marc
Page 9 and 10: Library 14 Taking Time to Read marc
Page 11 and 12: Early Childhood 18 Drawing to Learn
Page 13 and 14: Early Childhood 22 El pensamiento c
Page 15 and 16: High School 26 THE ENHANCEMENT OF C
Page 17 and 18: Early Childhood 30 march 2013 CON N
Page 19 and 20: Middle School 34 The Fish Pharaoh:

CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

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