failure and mastery

In this video from TED, Slaman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

And more importantly, how to structure learning that rewards experimentation, encourages risk, AND results in mastery. Pretty cool.

a nice place to learn

I went to Belleville yesterday to do a presentation about literacy for a group of people who work in literacy, settlement and employment services. Nice people.


I took the train down in the morning and had to wait until 9:30 until I could get a train home. What to do?

Hang out with the amazing folks at Quinte Adult Day School of course. The staff are Marsha, Gary, Chris, Cory and Stacey and are just what you would expect from literacy workers - funny, compassionate and passionate. And, of course, fantastically smart, innovative and creative.

One thing they do at QADS is work with people on job skills and one of the ways they do that is by restoring the beautiful old buildings of Belleville and Trenton to their former glory ... and into well-appointed places to learn.

Needless to say, I learned a LOT!

Thank you QADS people and thank you Community Literacy Ontario for providing us with this opportunity.

originally posted @ StoryJuice

never stop

Joanne Kaattari from Community Literacy Ontario sent me this link and I thought I would share it with you too.

I think it is good for those days when everything seems a bit overwhelming and we need a little pep talk (from Morgan Freeman!) about how great we are, how much the world needs our brains and how very possible everything is.

new esl/literacy horizons

The New American Horizons Foundation has created a couple fantastic videos about teaching ESL/Literacy.

I used the video called "Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers," hot off the press, with Teaching English as a Second Language Certificate (TESL) students to show them one way all the elements we cover in the ESL/Literacy component of their course can come together in a classroom.

One thing some TESL students used to say during the ESL Literacy workshops was that they could not see how it all came together -- how it would actually work with real students. As we cannot observe an actual class as part of the workshops, I struggled to figure out how to convey how ESL Literacy classes work. That struggle is over thanks to the good people at the New American Horizons Foundation. The TESL students really enjoyed the video and I noticed that the kind of lesson plans this group submitted showed a deeper understanding of working with ESL Literacy students. A win win. And how often does that happen in literacy :)

Watch the video here or on the NAH site. You can buy the DVD for $5 plus shipping.

catalyst

It has been a little while since the last post. I was not really sure how to follow Ms. Waring :)

Have you been to the Catalyst Centre: The One-Stop Pop-Ed Shop Worker Co-op website lately? Lots of good new stuff happening there.

In case you have never been there, here is what they do:

The One-Stop Pop-Ed Shop Worker Co-op is a collective of educators committed to democratic, social justice education and community development. Popular Education is movement, a practice and a theory of social change that based on learning and committed to resisting unjust uses of power.

One thing they have posted that might be a good follow up to the Who's counting? video is an activity called Jobology.

This activity can be used to develop some awareness in a group on the history of work i.e., how has work changed historically for different classes of people and the role of unpaid work in sustaining capitalism. These can be used for activist work against poverty, develop awareness of class, gender and hierarchy in society. Download the activity description here (1 MB PDF)

Here are some of the questions they suggest:

• How and why has work changed globally and personally over the generations?
• When and why is it important to know our history - what stops us from knowing?
• What are your thoughts about unpaid community contributions? E.g. from the union and community?
• Does anyone see a class picture here?
• What is class?
• How do students fit in this picture of work? Is learning a job?

If you try it out, let us know how it went.

ch-ch-ch-change?

I hope everybody had a great Adult Learning Week. ABC Canada changed their name for the occasion. Nothing so drastic here. I took a virtual trip south of the border and read a couple of articles over at the New York Times about some change that is happening there.

The first one was about how Diane Ravitch, formerly a staunch believer in standardized testing, charter schools and the power of free markets to improve schools, has changed her analysis of how education works. She now thinks that charter schools have proved to be no better than regular schools but redirect resources from the public system and that testing has become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.

Welcome to the dark side Ms. Ravitch. That is more than a mere name change.

The other, Building a Better Teacher, is about Doug Lemov's eureka moment:

Lemov spent his early career putting his faith in market forces, building accountability systems meant to reward high-performing charter schools and force the lower-performing ones to either improve or go out of business. ...

...he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. ... But what makes a good teacher?

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.

It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?

Congratulations Mr. Lemov.

I would take exception to "in disguise" of course. The best teachers can make it feel invisible, but even that they do on purpose.The best teachers know that the best teaching and learning happens when no-one is disguising anything.

Every day is different. Every learner is different. And every time we "teach" something, we have to make a different series of bite-sized moves. To see how it is done, head back over to Wendell's blog. Here is the latest example of how those bite-sized moves create a banquet.

Never mind all the successes in the world. Each time we start anew, and "best practice" means what works best for that learner in that moment.

mind-mapping at the NFB

This just in:
The National Film Board of Canada posted this on Twitter:
Educators – have you tried mind mapping with NFB films? The blog post is here.

I have not tried this but it looks pretty cool.

Mind-mapping is a great way for students to organize ideas and the teaching guide that accompanies our Films for Change playlist explains how this is done.

With the aid of simple technology (i.e.: a pen and paper) or more complex mapping software, students can plot out and connect the relationships between different concepts. Instructional Strategies Online provides information on how to integrate mind mapping into your teaching.

The image at the top of this post shows how we created a mind map to raise awareness of global environmental issues with facts taken from NFB films.

Follow the NFB on Twitter.

report cards

The news hit the pages of the Globe and Mail under this headline last Friday: Conservatives stop funding for learning organization.

The news is that the federal government will not provide further funding for the Canadian Council on Learning, an organization established in 2004 by a Liberal government with a five-year grant of $85-million to promote lifelong education.

The CCL was established because "In 2004, Canada saw that it had some catching up to do. Canadians were falling behind the rest of the world in some crucial areas. Innovation. Creativity. Skills development. Learning. There was no debate about what we had to do to stop the decline, and begin to improve. We had to figure out what works in education and learning, from early childhood to post-secondary schooling, from job training through adult literacy improvement, and we had to monitor our progress so that we were certain we were always on the right path."

I am not sure that I agree with the basic premise. I see little real world evidence that Canadians are less innovative, creative, skilled and/or learned than their counterparts around the world. In fact, the solutions to our recent economic woes seem to point to a past underuse of the innovation, creativity, skills and learning of many Canadians rather than any deficits in those areas. But the creation of the CCL intrigued me. It seemed to hold promise - perhaps we could create an education think tank that would shine a light on the innovation, creativity, skills and learning of educators in Canada and that this knowledge would inform policy.

The CCL divided its work into 5 knowledge centres: Aboriginal Learning (based in the Prairies, NWT and Nunavut); Adult Learning (based in Atlantic Canada); Early Childhood Learning (based in Quebec); Health and Learning (based in British Columbia and Yukon); and Work and Learning (based in Ontario).

I have had the most experience with the Adult Learning Knowledge Centre. In 2007 I worked on a research-in-practice project that was funded through the ALKC and, in June 2007, I went to an ALKC conference. At the conference I was impressed by the grassroots nature of some of the projects but became aware of a focus on measuring. As time went on, I realized that the CCL was less a "learning organization" and more a measuring organization.

The Globe and Mail article quotes Mr. Cappon about the loss of funding: “What Canada would lose without CCL would be like being a student without a report card of any kind. And we'd be prevented from knowing how far behind the competition we're slipping."

CCL brought us several report cards over the years.

The Composite Learning Index (CLI) measures Canada’s progress in lifelong learning based on statistical indicators that reflect the many ways Canadians learn, whether in school, in the home, at work or within the community. The CLI tells us things like this: "For the first time, Canada's overall score on the Composite Learning Index has declined, dropping two points to 75 in 2009, from 77 in 2008. The decrease is being driven by the Learning to Be pillar, even though there has been an increase on the Learning to Do pillar."

The Projections of Adult Literacy: Measuring Movement (PALMM) provides a statistical “snapshot” of Canada’s adult literacy future through 2031; calculates future adult literacy rates according to province/territory and specific population groups; and generates graphs for incorporating into planning for literacy policy and program interventions. The PALMM tells us things like this: "Although the proportion of immigrants with low literacy skills will decrease by 2031, the actual number of low-skilled immigrants will increase by 61%. However, there will also be an increase in the number of immigrants with higher literacy levels."

The July 2008 literacy educators got a CCL report card. Reading the Future: Planning to meet Canada’s future literacy uses the PALMM to assess the state of adult literacy in Canada and makes recommendations on how literacy programming should be structured and delivered. This report was well discussed on this blog (and here) and in our special bulletin. One of our concerns was that this report makes recommendations about professionalization, teaching methods and time limits that overlook "the rich and varied techniques Canadian practitioners use to teach adults successfully and share in practitioner-based research reports." Reading the Future was a signal to the literacy field that the CCL was not developing knowledge based on the innovation, creativity, skills and learning of educators but was taking a top down approach to develop policy recommendations based on survey data.

In March of last year, CCL presented the adult literacy community with their online literacy assessment tool, also well discussed on this blog. This tool allowed us to develop our own report card on our own IALSS level. CCL told us we could also use the tool to assess learner needs overlooking the fact that the IALSS is a survey tool and is not an appropriate assessment for learning

"In anticipation of renewed funding, CCL had proposed an exciting slate of projects for the coming years."

Many in the list of 10 proposed projects, not surprisingly, seem to be about collecting more data to create more measuring tools. The Literacy Self-Assessments looks to be an expansion of the above mentioned online assessment: "CCL plans to launch a series of free, online tests that will allow individual Canadians to measure their competencies in three areas: prose literacy, document literacy and numeracy. Based on the International Adult Literacy and Skills survey, these tests will also provide teachers and instructors with a convenient means of assessing strengths and weaknesses to ensure programs meet learner needs." Once again CCL is overlooking the folly of using a survey tool to assess for learning and using a standardized test for self-assessment.

That report card argument may resonate in some sectors but I am not sure what literacy workers will think about it. You can probably tell what I think :), but what about you? Do we need these report cards? How do they help us in our work? How do they help learners in their learning? How does the report card argument resonate with you?

my life as a squirrel

I have been thinking about squirrels quite a bit lately so it was nice to see how squirrel behaviour, science and adult learning all come together in this article from the New York Times.

Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

This is good news for those of us that work in adult literacy. Many of the learners who come to literacy programs are in middle age as are many of us who work there. We are all familiar with this phenomenon:

Start boiling water for pasta, go answer the doorbell and — whoosh — all thoughts of boiling water disappear. Indeed, aging brains, even in the middle years, fall into what’s called the default mode, during which the mind wanders off and begin daydreaming.

There is more good news -- this dreamy default mode does not mean the internet has killed our attention spans. Even though "neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age,":

The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

So what does this mean for adult learners and educators? Even more good news. Keep doing what you have always been doing:

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

Whew! Thank you science. And thank you middle age for my squirrel brain.

more time to think

This is how Simon [a young student and son of the author Anne Trubek] describes why he hates to handwrite: "I have it all in my memory bank, and then I stop, and my memory bank gets wiped out."

As a great follow up to Letters Of Note, here is an article about the art and history of handwriting. In Handwriting Is History, Anne Trubek starts by discussing how we connect handwriting to "personal identity (handwriting signals something unique about each of us), intelligence (good handwriting reflects good thinking) and virtue (a civilized culture requires handwriting)." She traces the history of writing to try to understand how we got to the point where the technology of forming letters on paper with an ink-delivery device came to mean so much to us.

Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication. When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

Our romanticism of handwriting has led to the "handwriting effect" where assessors rank elegantly scripted prose much higher than the same prose written in chicken scrawl.

"...[T]yping in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage."

But more than that, using a keyboard rather than handscripting allows us "cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. ... This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think."

Sr. Freire is alive and well in...

West Sacramento, California...

For three months, a group of teens in West Sacramento, called the Sactown Heroes, took cameras and microphones to the streets to document what they liked and disliked about the city and talk about changes they would like to see.

Throughout the project, youth documented their views on West Sacramento through videos, photographs, and audio recordings, which are posted on this map.

They presented their work and their ideas at City Hall this week.

Describe your reality.

Reflect upon your reality.

Plan how to change your reality.

Transform your reality.

You can read more at the Sacramento Bee :: West Sacramento teens make their voices heard at City Hall

faithful

The reading and research I have done this week has left me feeling a little out of sorts. I just wrote a post about how everything is changing and nothing is changing but I now do not want to publish it. Maybe some other time.

So instead I am going to re-publish something I wrote for the The National Institute for Literacy (NIFL - US) Technology List discussion about integrating technology. (You can sign up here.)

I do not feel like this today but I did on Thursday and I will again soon I am sure. I face the weekend with hope.

Some people have talked about how integrating technology changes the role of the teacher.

In some ways, I think that integrating technology allows teachers to do some of the things they have long wanted to do but found challenging.

One thing I have been thinking about lately is the role of the canon — that “dead white guys canon” we deride but that still gives us currency we use daily.

We used to talk a lot about how to bring the canon to literacy – how to balance giving literacy learners access to the canon that lets us be part of the Western Judeo-Christian discourse with creating an alternative canon that includes a more diverse range of contributors. We valued the alternative canon and wanted to promote a more democratic, post-colonial canon but we knew this canon is not valued in some of the places literacy learners want to go.

Literacy students come to programs to change the access they have. I remember an occasion when we read Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening and the next day, Pierre Trudeau’s (former prime minister of Canada) son paraphrased the poem at his father’s funeral. The students knew the reference which made the quote more meaningful to them and also made them feel they were part of a conversation – not onlookers or outsiders. I think that is an important role for literacy education.

The challenge in finding the balance was always access to resources and the ways in which resources were organized. We used libraries and indexes that were developed by experts. They were useful but we had no ownership and no way to contribute. Most of what students saw was stuff we brought. Most of what students thought was valuable was the stuff we brought. They trusted us to know the index and to choose wisely.

I think that the internet and publishing tools help us find a better balance – or a better way of creating balance. It allows us (compels us?), teachers and students alike, to create our own resource lists and index them in ways that are useful to us. It allows us to index items from the revered canon with items from our own personal canons side-by-side. It allows us to publish our own work and see it beside, linked to, and with reference to any other work we choose. It allows us to join a discourse and create a discourse. And it means that each teacher and each student can create their own balance.

And the great thing for those of us working in literacy, those lists and canons and conversations can be less print-based and people who are not primarily reader-learners can participate in them more easily.

the literacy avengers

faster than a speeding social capitalist,
more powerful than a knowledge manager,
and able to leap the zone of proximal development in a single bound.




















Let everyone see your inner superhero at the Hero Factory.

You build your heroine/hero and the Factory folk name her/him. I think it is pretty apropos that the café hero is called the Thoughtful Philanthropist.

Send us your comic book cover or a link to it so we can see the Literacy Avengers Community of Practice.

family math resources

I just got this message from Kate Nonesuch:

Family Math Groups: An Exploration of Content and Style has just been made available at NALD (The National Adult Literacy Database).

It reports on a project in which I worked with parents to develop a manual of math activities for parents and kids to do together.

This new report outlines the project and discusses the effects of the group: parents had fun, grew more interested and less frustrated with math, and learned specific strategies to help their kids with math, which often resulted in improved communication and smoother relationships with their kids. The report finishes with recommendations for facilitating family math groups.

It be downloaded free of charge at http://www.nald.ca/library/research/fammatgro/fammatgro.pdf

The manual, called Family Math Fun!, is full of family math activities, ready to use in early literacy programs, day care centres, primary grades and Adult Basic Education/Literacy programs. Patterns, recipes, and hand-outs all included (109 pages). http://www.nald.ca/library/learning/familymath/familymath.pdf

For more information: Kate [dot] Nonesuch [at] viu [dot] ca

film shorts as text

From Bill Boyd @ the Literacy Advisor:

The short film is an ideal medium for developing the “traditional” literacies of reading, writing, talking and listening, a “short” film being a complete text lasting anything up to 30 minutes, but for our purposes ideally no more than ten or fifteen minutes, which means it can be shown two or three times in the course of a lesson if necessary. This is preferable to using an extract from a feature film as it doesn’t require an understanding of the whole work from which it has been taken, and there is a huge range of texts available, from animation to live action, fiction to documentary.

With a minimal understanding of the language of film, teachers can use short films to introduce and reinforce concepts related to reading and writing printed texts, such as narrative viewpoint, plot, characters and setting, as well as developing a greater understanding of the medium of film itself, the medium with which most of us engage most frequently. It is important to emphasise the similarities between printed and moving image texts, as well as the differences, since ultimately they are both about telling stories, and why we tell stories is arguably the reason for studying any kind of texts at all!

At the National Film Board site you can watch full-length NFB documentaries, animations and dramas online - beta.nfb.ca/

tried, tested and true

from Where's Freire?, Literacies #1

Where I really saw Freire in action was in Nicaragua during the time of the Sandinista government. The materials were very rudimentary and the curriculum was clearly based on Freire. The topics were always very, very close to their own reality. They were coffee farmers. Each lesson followed the same steps:

• observe your reality,
• discuss your reality,
• read about it,
• analyse it and finally,
• transform it.

These steps were part of every single lesson – and they always ended with transform your reality – they didn’t stop with just read or write about it – the last part of every lesson was always action. I have never seen it so clear cut.

from the Beginner's Guide to Learning Circles, Chapter 7,
The Learning Circles Project

Diane Hill, an adult educator who specializes in working with aboriginal adults says, “All learning moves through a cycle.” Aboriginal people understand that there are four stages in learning:

• see
• feel/relate
• think
• and act

All learning begins with awareness. Insights, intuitions and dreams activate the learning process and challenge the way we feel/relate, think, and act.

The next stage in the learning cycle is to examine how one feels or relates to their new awareness, their self, and others. It is about our relationships and connectedness. Here we express and articulate our feelings about self and how we relate to the total environment. The learning process can evoke a range of feelings from joy to sorrow as people work to make changes, adjust to the challenges of learning something new, or engage in examining their lived experiences. In this stage we bring new light to the factors that contribute to our experiences, making difficult situations manageable.

The third stage is thinking and learning how our thinking creates change in our lives. It is what we have come to know and understand about ourselves and the world through information and facts. It is also the integration of new patterns that are the result of positive life experiences. This stage exemplifies our skill, our ability to solve problems and to make informed decisions.

The final stage is the actualization of one’s learning. Knowledge, skills, and attitudes (beliefs and feelings) are internalized and used to maintain positive patterns. It is what we do and how we act (or react) in the face of the challenges that present themselves in our day to day lives.

from Our class on how we run our class,
Digital Ethnography, April 24, 2009

First off, we organize it as a research group, not a class.

The basic format is this:

• First 3 weeks: exploration stage
• Second 3 weeks: guided introduction to the field
• Next 4 weeks: self-guided research
• Due at 11th week: Research paper (followed by collaboration exercises)
• Final (16th week): Share with world (video, website, etc.)

leading lights

I am not sure whether adult education teachers are most appropriately grouped with the artists (people-oriented, open-minded, intuitive, and visionary) or the craftspeople (humane, dedicated, knowledgeable, and wise). Probably a little of both. Actually, definitely a LOT of both.

I do know that adult educators do have a lot to offer the “recovery,” -- to the creation and nourishment of strong communities. And so does Dr. Stephen Brookfield, co-author with Stephen Preskill of Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice. You can listen to what he says about adult educators as leaders here*. You can download a chapter of the book here. (Thanks again to Nancy Friday for linking me to this fantastic, and as she says, affirming resource.)

To get you started, here are what Brookfield and Preskill refer to as the nine learning tasks of leadership:

1. Learning how to be open to the contributions of others

2. Learning how to reflect critically on one’s practice

3. Learning how to support the growth of others

4. Learning how to develop collective leadership

5. Learning how to analyze experience

6. Learning how to question oneself and others

7. Learning democracy

8. Learning to sustain hope in the face of struggle

9. Learning to create community

It seems to me that this comes pretty close to the list of the skills required of adult literacy workers. These are the skills and learning – the crazy wisdom – literacy teachers and learners demonstrate strongly and daily everywhere they work together. It is certainly this list of learning tasks that shows up in the articles in Literacies.

I wonder when literacy workers and learners will take their rightful places in the corridors of power. I do not think that invitations are coming any time soon. I think that the artists and craftspeople and learning leaders are going to have to collaborate and sneak in the back door while the technocrats are busy guarding the front door.

*Sometimes this site requests a user name and password.
I entered abc for both and it let me in.

the r-word

This is the 40th anniversary of the Special Olympics in Canada.

"In June 1969, in Toronto, Ontario, the very first Special Olympics competition was held in Canada, less than one year after the sports movement was born on Chicago’s Soldier Field. It attracted 1,400 individuals with intellectual disabilities from towns and cities across the country who came to compete in athletics, aquatics and no surprise here, floor hockey."

This year the Special Olympics (Canadian site) is launching a new campaign on March 31: Spread the Word to the End the Word. Special Olympics is asking us to recognize and rethink our use of the word "retard," or the "R-word."

"Most people don't think of this word as hate speech, but that's exactly what it feels like to millions of people with intellectual disabilities, their families and friends. This word is just as cruel and offensive as any other slur."

I thought that this was something we had all learned a long time ago but I have noticed the resurgence of the word over the past few years. I thought perhaps the word had lost its connection to a group of people, but it turns out I thought wrong. I actually used "retarded" as an adjective last week. I noted it because I was shocked to hear that word coming from my mouth for the first time since my playground days when I was sharply chastised for it. I am still not clear why it happened. I thought that I needed to check myself. And I thought about how common usage can enter, or re-enter, our lexicons so easily if we are not paying attention.

It is something even the mightiest of us are learning, or re-learning. Last Thursday, on The Tonight Show, President Obama said his bowling skills are "like Special Olympics or something." He was trying to make a self-deprecating joke of course, but then realized that he had instead insulted a whole group of people. On his way home, Obama called the Special Olympics Chairman, Timothy Shriver, to apologize for the remark.

I guess, at least for the President and me, this campaign could not come at a better time.

You can learn more about the campaign and make a pledge at http://www.r-word.org/.

it is all fun and games until...

The Canadian Council on Learning has posted their online literacy assessment tool.

The tool can be used to assess your IALSS level. IALSS is the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey:

"The International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey was a seven-country initiative conducted in 2003. In every country nationally representative samples of adults aged 16-65 were interviewed and tested at home, using the same psychometric test to measure prose and document literacy as well as numeracy and problem-solving skills.

• ...The main purpose of the survey was to find out how well adults used printed information to function in society.
• Another aim was to collect data on the incidence and volume of participation in adult education and training, and to investigate the relationships between initial and adult education, on the one hand, and literacy, numeracy and problem-solving proficiency and wider economic and social outcomes, on the other.
• In addition, a subsidiary goal was to provide information regarding change in the distribution of skills over the years since the previous survey (the 1994, International Adult Literacy Survey).
• ...The data are used to inform policy decisions, help effectively allocate resources where needed and inform decisions on the composition and content of remedial skill development course and adult education."

Ever since the first IALS survey in 1994, there has been debate* about what exactly these data tell us, but, until now, I do not think that anyone has suggested that an IALSS-based test, designed to survey a population, ever be used to assess and assign levels to individuals. If they have, they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

A couple of us tried the test. It took ages, the fonts were teeny weeny, the interface did not work in any browser, and it was incredibly dull. I think that the test could take quite a long time to complete. We did not want to spend too long on it so we tried not to get bogged down. We just clicked on our first good idea for the right answer and let it go.

We both scored Level 4 (Strong skills -- individuals at these levels can process information of a complex and demanding nature) in Document Literacy (The ability to find and use information in forms, charts, graphs and other tables).

My colleague scored Level 4 in Numeracy (The ability to use basic math skills in everyday life) and I scored Level 3 (Adequate to cope with the demands of everyday life and work in an advanced society -- roughly denotes the skill level required for successful high school completion and college entry). I must admit I did not feel like doing some of the calculations and guessed at some of the answers but Level 3 is what I would guess is correct for me in any case and, as it turns out, I am a pretty good guesser.

Now the bad news. We both scored Level 2 (A capacity to deal only with simple, clear material involving uncomplicated tasks -- people at this level may develop everyday coping skills, but their poor literacy skills make it hard to conquer challenges such as learning new job skills) in Prose Literacy (The knowledge and skills required to understand and appropriately use information from print materials). CCL recommends that all Canadians need to be at Level 3 if they are to achieve prosperity, health and happiness.

My colleague is very clever and has exemplary prose literacy skills. I am using this fact to cheer myself up a little. I am surprised to find that despite my rather cavalier attitude to this test, the result made me feel a little crappy. I usually feel fine about my ability to understand and appropriately use information from print materials. There are things that challenge me but I have confidence that if I persevere I will get it.

Our Level 2 scores prompted another colleague to wonder, "If the CCL online test is based on or reflects the IALSS test and if [these two] only scored 2 on the Prose test, perhaps the IALSS test is underestimating people’s literacy levels."

One of the questions that has been raised about IALS and IALSS is why the results show such high numbers of people at Level 1 and 2 when people self-assess at a much greater ability to understand and appropriately use information from print materials.

But the biggest question for me remains, “Why do I want to know what IALSS level I am at?” or “Why does anyone want to know what IALSS level any individual is at?”

What we want to know is how do we work with text now and how do we want or need to be able to work with text to do what we want or need to do. To do this we can use a method such as the Canadian Adult Reading Assessment that assesses reading skills and strategies in a manageable, non-invasive, non-judgmental way and demonstrates how learner-centred assessment leads to the development of a learner-centred curriculum that is relevant and effective.

C'mon CCL, stop now before somebody gets hurt.

*For some of that debate see Literacies Issue #2 and the Literacies IALS web forum.

what did you learn?

Here are the program response recommendations from the Canadian Council on Learning as stated in their report Reading the Future (page 52). Click the graphic to see it full size :P






Here are the "Best Practice" program responses to each market segment from DataAngel as stated in their report Addressing Canada's Literacy Challenge: A Cost/ Benefit Analysis (page 37). As above.

And here is the trailer from Entre les murs (The Class):

Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood. Directed by Laurent Cantet.

This film shows learning the way everybody who has ever tried to help anybody learn anything understands it. It shows how learning does not happen by tick boxes, charts, timelines and goalsetting. It shows how learning is chaotic, free-ranging, exasperating and energizing;

• that 17 'teachable moments' fly past every minute and no-one can catch them all;
• that the moments when a teacher and student find a way to communicate authentically are transcendent but often fleeting; 
• that when students can control the context, process and content, learning is meaningful and deep; 
• that everything matters forever; and 
• that the most difficult thing to do is to say what you learned at the end of it all.