Here I started to study the experience of school teachers in pedagogy - and all of a sudden I discovered a bunch of important principles for project management. In the sense that I again want to introduce you to a strange person and tell you about his experience. So, meet an ordinary teacher in the Astrakhan gymnasium, Olga Anisimova, who tore me all the templates of what happens in an ordinary school.
She does not teach children how to solve a problem, she teaches them to first find the problem itself, then estimate the range of options for an approach, and only then how to get an answer specifically. She allows herself to be wrong, allows children to correct their mistakes and argue with her reasonably. Moreover, she sometimes deliberately makes mistakes so that the children do not relax.
She treats children as adults in many ways.
She allows you to prepare cheat sheets and cheat. Allows children to "push out" the answer of the one who has learned the topic. Uses gamification that children understand for motivation.
In general, everything is so imbued with common sense that it simply cannot and should not happen at school. At the damn school!
Systemic difference between Galadriel and Aragorn
Let's imagine that we have an elf and a human. The first one lives for more than a thousand years , and the second one is 72 years old. . If you are in no hurry, then the education system is not needed either: sooner or later a new member of society will figure it out on his own. But if suddenly it "sorted out" begins to take up a significant part of life, such a system is needed. Another interesting mental exercise: Imagine that we need to train orcs with an average lifespan of 21 years. What would be the system for them?
Funnily enough, the "elven" system, without dedicated training, was widely used. In total, in 1833, there was a report to the Parliament of England on the situation of the working class (about which we know thanks to Friedrich Engels), which mentioned that children begin to work in factories at the age of 5-8 and their working day is about 14 hours.
The child ceased to be regarded as a consumable only in the sixteenth century:
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The K-strategy of human reproduction involves the improvement of the individual. The best medicine, the best nutrition, and the best education. But here for some reason we almost immediately rushed to the "Orcish" approach. In the conditions of total illiteracy at the start of the USSR, it was necessary to create a country of builders of the future. We needed terraformers, engineers, officers, chemists and biologists, but most importantly, production workers. The solution for serving information is pretty straightforward: lossy compression. Divergent thinking fell into a loss, the frameworks of which could be obtained, in fact, in research institutes, but not in the basic school. Yes, our education at that time was progressive and cool. But since then, about everything has changed.
The convergent path of education is when a problem has one party-approved solution. A divergent path is when a problem has multiple paths of solution, and it is not so much a specific square-nesting approach that is taught, but how to use the available resources creatively. Teaching a child to think divergently is long and expensive, it is often much better to give working heuristics and release them into the big life. The approach is more than practical in fact, because in business it sounds like this: line personnel work according to clear instructions, while the rest set themselves tasks. Yes, the instructions can be quite flexible, but it is better to implement the best practices in the form of a script right away than to wait until the person reaches them himself. If suddenly a line officer begins to show signs of increased consciousness, then this is not a soldier, but an officer.
Divergent approach in practice
In business, the most important question is "why?" The answer to it changes the composition of projects within the company, the way projects are implemented, the approach to team building, and much more. In Eastern philosophy there is an exercise of mindfulness, when a Taoist disciple voices his every action. By this, he simultaneously learns both decomposition and the allocation of different streams of thinking (that is, introspection), and, which is the purpose of the exercise, comes to the habit of not doing anything aimless or “automatic”. That is, as in a crisis, every expense of the company is considered manually for the purpose of necessity, so here every action is evaluated according to whether it should be left during cleaning or thrown away.
So, we go back to secondary school. The first thing that the beautiful Olga Aleksandrovna does is let the children set the very task of the lesson in the lesson. The coaches of Meteor do the same. For example, if a striker takes the ball to his near foot, and then it is immediately taken away from him, the bad coach will say “you took the ball badly”. Thanks, cap, from the new information for the child there was only the transaction "you crooked freak". The coach will better highlight the specific phase of the error: for example, he put his foot badly, missed the timing, or even took on the wrong foot. Here the child already understands what he did wrong, but does not understand why. A good coach will allow the child to try several dozen more times in order to understand what can be improved in this particular movement: that is, the child must both find the problem himself and find the solution himself. Practice has shownthat trained players play much worse than those who are able to understand what is happening on the field. The Taoists would be brutally happy for them if they didn't really care.
Or Olga writes the number 13 on the blackboard and asks what the topic of the lesson might be. Children dig deeper into the number and may decide that these are two-digit numbers, for example. And then it is interesting: someone says that you need to understand their history, someone says that you need to understand why they are called that (thirteen, not ten three, like twenty three), or figure out how to subtract 4 from it and 5, because on sticks it is naturally understandable, but without sticks and a calculator - no longer. At this moment, two things happen: first, Olga collects data about what is interesting to children, and how to tell the topic through this. Secondly, she immediately catches the misunderstandings that the children have identified here - which means that they will not remain "unlit". Thirdly, they will now write down the goal, and at the end of the lesson they will check whether it worked or not. And if not, they will decidehow to share homework to achieve it together.
By the way, this gives another bonus. If the child has been teaching all evening, and answered poorly, he can check for himself whether the result has been achieved or not. And if not, it is clear that the effort does not deserve an A. And then at home there will be an uncharacteristic scene "Mom, they gave me a three, I taught the whole evening, the teacher is a sheep", and "I shook it, I didn't answer, I didn't say it, I was prompted here." And, again, if the parents understand that they cannot be scolded for this, this is cool.
In Russian lessons, the search for a problem does not always look so beautiful due to the humanitarian nature of the subject - when this does not work out, the teacher can set a goal. But our heroine never gives a ready-made solution. Just like leaders in business seem to understand that if you set a task without explaining why it is needed (and how to understand that everything was done correctly), it will be worse. At the moment, the society believes that such an approach is better than the old convention, and this is enshrined in the federal state educational standards of the new generation.
Something like the following
26.11.2010 â„– 1241, 22.09.2011 â„– 2357:
That is, society now believes that children should learn everything on their own. The key role of the teacher - the teacher must show how you can find a way to solve the problem, demonstrate, teach. The old framework said that you need to show a sample of the result, give a goal, write down an algorithm for achieving and supervise its implementation at every stage.
That is, not a single physics teacher should be offended by the solution of the problem about the height of the tower and the barometer: “sell the barometer, and pay the builder for the drawing” - but should demand new and new solutions, together with the child evaluate their applicability, limitations, accuracy and chances of success.
The teacher can be wrong
One of those things that pissed me off at school incredibly was not only the fact that no teacher was ever ready for alternative solutions to a problem, but also did not admit his mistake. Somehow my classmate got a triple in physics for drawing on the blackboard a "wrong" diagram of an electric motor with a stator inside the rotor: "Nobody does that." We spent a week in all seriousness to assemble the device according to this principle, showed - "hmm, yes, but I will not ferry." Goodbye physics. In my first year at university, I took the value of the ordinate as the horizontal axis, because this way the graph fit better on the sheet. Despite the fact that it was completely correct, I had to rewrite the work.
In this regard, I am reminded of stories that are happening more often. The general outline is something like this: a child answers in a literature lesson on a standard topic “what meaning did the author put in this,” and the teacher tries to impose her thoughtful point of view on him. The only problem was that children are able to find the author on Facebook and ask directly.
Do you know how an official differs from an entrepreneur? If an official is not mistaken, he is good - but at the same time, one can not undertake anything risky (and generally do nothing at an extreme). A good entrepreneur makes mistakes as quickly and widely as possible - this is an experimental approach, and each mistake gives new information. The question is the controllability of the experimental conditions. To be wrong is a natural property of progress. Moreover, perfectionism is also often incompatible with progress.
But back to the children. Here's another example: after the dictation, there are 5 minutes for self-examination, so that the child reads what he wrote again. Normal healthy children of generation Z do not read anything again, but simply give the finished work. Olga says the following: whoever finds all the mistakes at this stage may not do their homework (well, or get an additional point on another dictation). And this dramatically changes the attitude. Children are looking because the conditions of the game have changed immediately.
And also, children should not take on faith everything that the teacher gives, but train their skills of this very rational thinking. Therefore, Olga often deliberately makes mistakes in what she writes on the board, waiting for the children's reaction. In fact, by this she still keeps their attention - but the main lesson is that the real world can set you up at any moment, and, as Comrade Major said, "be extremely vigilant." In general, she has something of a Taoist.
Children can argue with the teacher
Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are not - but the task is not to cut off and put them in place, but to parse in detail the premises, the type of thinking and why the child did not understand something (if he is wrong). The obvious problem is that children in elementary school are not very friendly with logic, and they do not have any apparatus for a reasoned argument. That is, the first thing that Olgasanna teaches is the basic principles of rational thinking. Thanks to Harry Potter and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Here are the children arguing with the teacher about the stress in the word "imbovy". The word itself arose at the moment when they were doing the "alphabet challenge" on a five-minute spelling - they wrote an adjective for each letter of the alphabet. First, I was indescribably surprised that instead of telling the child that there was no such word, she set the task to make morphological and lexical analysis. Secondly, the children did this analysis, and came to the conclusion that, according to classical word formation, the stress should be on the second syllable. But the popular twitch streamers, speaking with the accent on the first syllable, were cited as an argument. And Olga admitted that the language follows the native speakers, so there is no definite answer. Checkmate, traditional school!
Arguments with children about the expediency of education in general are much funnier. These are the most difficult moments, because there you need to maintain a balance between the authority of the teacher and the resentment of the student who is not convinced. And convincing children using children's thinking is like negotiating with aliens. Yes, they are very gullible, yes, most situations simply do not arise with the high authority of the teacher - but there are times when the head nerd of the class asks an innocent question like, is it possible not to go to art or technology (works). And he argues his point of view by the fact that it will be useful to him in life about like a hedgehog a T-shirt. At one time I solved this question simply by setting a record of the Astrakhan Technical Lyceum for absenteeism (though I did skip in the university's magnetostriction laboratory), but it seems that this path is not suitable for everyone. By the way,to about the same question at the university, the teacher answered - "figure it out, hand it over now and don't go." I passed and did not go, everything is fair. But in an elementary school lesson, Olga needs to load a child with a whole complex of thoughts: why is education at all, and that it is necessary to develop different skills and abilities, and that fine art is not about drawing a house, but about spatial thinking, and technology is not about “ fix a stool ”, but about working with plastic matter. And she has 136 hours on a subject, and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it downloads the entire expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.hand over now and don't go. " I passed and did not go, everything is fair. But in an elementary school lesson, Olga needs to load a child with a whole complex of thoughts: why is education at all, and that it is necessary to develop different skills and abilities, and that fine art is not about drawing a house, but about spatial thinking, and technology is not about “ fix a stool ”, but about working with plastic matter. And she has 136 hours on a subject, and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it downloads all the expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.hand over now and don't go. " I passed and did not go, everything is fair. But in an elementary school lesson, Olga needs to load a child with a whole range of thoughts: why is education at all, and that it is necessary to develop different skills and abilities, and that fine art is not about drawing a house, but about spatial thinking, and technology is not about “ fix a stool ”, but about working with plastic matter. And she has 136 hours on a subject, and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it loads the entire expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.and why education at all, and that it is necessary to develop different skills and abilities, and that fine art is not about drawing a house, but about spatial thinking, and technology is not about "fixing a stool", but about working with plastic matter. And she has 136 hours on a subject, and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it loads the entire expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.and why education at all, and that it is necessary to develop different skills and abilities, and that fine art is not about drawing a house, but about spatial thinking, and technology is not about "fixing a stool", but about working with plastic matter. And she has 136 hours on a subject, and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it downloads the entire expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it loads the entire expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.and she is not ready to argue the whole lesson. The natural solution is that it downloads all the expediency of learning in advance, and the children roughly imagine that they are actually preparing to take over the world, and in general they need it themselves. More precisely, this is a late motivation, the early one lies in the plane “mom will like it” or “you can do it”.
The motivation for the old framework is not to get things done, not get punished. “If you doubt the teacher, you will get a deuce, and then your parents will scold you” is a completely logical chain until the child realizes that grades are a useless abstraction. And this is happening pretty quickly now.
You can write off
Since the divergent approach to education assumes that the child will learn something, and not pass the exam in the proper form, Olga allows you to prepare cheat sheets. The agreement with the class is as follows: you can write off if she did not see it - it is legal. That is, it is absolutely the same as in all schools and in all grades in terms of the result, but different in the number of notes prepared by children.
And if anything, making a good cheat sheet is almost as difficult as understanding the material. If the tasks are divergent, and not for memory. In this regard, I adore my university programming teachers, who were allowed to use any sources for exams - but we never had problems either for erudition or for memory. Only practical things.
Practice-oriented approach
Here are the children going through the ancient Slavs in elementary school. There are pretty simple things: appearance (clothes, for example), names, main occupations. Actually, there at the end you need to do a level test "Which name is more Slavic: Hans the Blue or the Big Nest?"
But then Olga invited the children to take a piece of paper and draw an Instagram profile of some Slav. Well, you know, with an avatar, a short biography and examples of posts. This is everything at once: the Russian language, and the testing of all knowledge, and the education of taxonomy between disciplines. “Today I nailed the tyn so that the Polovtsians would not come”, “I bargained for horseshoes from a Novgorod merchant, I’m going to tune the horse” - this is wonderful.
In the same way, homework can be taken in the form of a 60-second video for Tiktok - and in terms of the intensity of the preparation of the work there will be much more than in the usual homework.
Instant reinforcement
At some point, our coaches noticed that yes, it's cool to praise a child after every successful action, but I would also like to fix it somehow. And they asked the Methodolgs to give them something. The methodologists gave an album with achievements, where you need to glue the appropriate stickers .
Olga also uses stickers, only without an album. If the child did something well, he receives a sticker with the character of the now popular cartoon. You don't need to glue it anywhere, but you can change, sit proud, or do whatever you want with it. The reasons for receiving the sticker are interesting: usually it is a corrected mistake by the teacher, some kind of good addition to the answer, or personal progress. Personal progress can consist, for example, in the fact that after three triples the child received a four. The atmosphere in the classroom is so cool that everyone claps and climbs to hug such a character, because he overcame and snatched a point from the system) The sticker here serves as a trigger. And in other cases - with a reinforced "you're done" transaction.
This system is not the most sophisticated in terms of gamification of the process (there are "ten points to Gryffindor", and all sorts of complex systems), but it works well enough for children to come up to the teacher after school and say:
- Olgasanna, have you seen, seen that Sasha pulled his hand four times today? Will you give him the sticker tomorrow, if he answers correctly?
Treat children like people
This is perhaps the hardest part. And this is not about "equal", but about respect. The whole story about scientific disputes above and so on rests precisely on the fact that there is a productive atmosphere in the classroom. At Meteor, it is important to support it: there is something in the methodology, and the coaches themselves do not come with a finger. But when you have a specific sporting task like "beat the neighboring school", it's easier.
In the classroom, Olga, during 1: 1 conversations, tries to sit next to the children (so that her eyes are approximately at their level) - this already forms trust. Then he does not press, but allows him to decide for himself. At the end of the lesson, during the tactical analysis of the game, the coaches also always sit so that their eyes are on a level with the children's - this way the children express their opinion much better (and generally feel better).
Here is the boy in the art lesson did not want to draw. She sat down next to her and asked what had happened. He explains: "Mom said that I can't draw, is there any point in hesitating?" In this situation, the authority of the parents should not be diminished - but also the child should not be left in the “I am crooked” state. Then a series of questions: “What do you think? Why does mom think so? " Then they managed to convince the child that this was one special case, and because of one failure it went like that. Then Olga showed right on the phone how different abstract artists paint. Like, like it? - “Well, not really” - “Do you know how much this picture is worth? Look, 50 million. " At this moment, the child already understands that not everything is so bad. The dialogue continues: "What do you think you are going to do now?" Child: “I’ll probably try to draw, then I’ll talk to my mother again” - “Okay, then tell me,how was it".
And then everything depends on the mother. That time it worked out well.
Problems
The first obvious problem with this approach is time . Subjects according to the standard have a limited number of hours, and explaining them in detail, simultaneously loading rational thinking, atmosphere and creative thinking, is still a task. One of the main problems of school education at this stage is when some in the class have already understood everything, and some have not yet. The class moves at the speed of the slowest. It is clear that the tightest will remain in the second year, but this is a very poor speed control tool. Systems with a consistent departure of students work much better (usually this is a good professional training - a la Olympiad at school) - but this is not possible in a regular classroom. That is, you will always have children with different learning rates - and at the same time it will be bad for those who do not understand, and for those who understand and miss.
If you read Goldratt's Objective, it clearly describes how this type of bottleneck production is managed. I'm sure Olga never managed production, but she made the decision exactly according to Goldratt: she did not sit “nerds in front, bully in the back”, but in pairs “nerd-hooligan”. Well, I'm oversimplifying again, but the diagram is like this.
As a result, someone at recess will not get points, and someone in the lesson will understand the subject faster. Because smart children love to explain, and they know how to do it in exactly the words that the same child will understand. The rule applies: if one has decided everything, then he can help a neighbor on a desk. But the result is not the answer to the problem, but the independent reproduction of the solution by the neighbor with an explanation of why what step.
The classical scheme implies that the "brake" will go to finish their studies with the tutor, while the class has gone further. This is neither good nor bad, it's just that the approaches have different objectives.
The second problem is parental resistance . Parents want their children to be taught exactly as they once did (in general). And here the teacher begins to work as a project manager, convincing not only his team, but also stakeholders that this is how it should be done. First example: homework to make a crossword puzzle from cartoons and games. There are two independent works for the whole class: Gravity Falls crosswords and with Minecraft jargon terms. The rest were done by the parents - because the children were clearly doing some kind of garbage that did not correspond to their ideas about beauty.
Or Olga took and explained linear equations to the children in the first grade. They are easy, if anything, my grandfather explained them to me in the first grade too, and they fit into the system very logically. Parents found out about this: "you want too much from our children." We started to figure it out: was it difficult for the children? They did not understand and asked you? No, the children absorbed everything at once, no problem. It's just that equations from the parents' point of view are for third grade, and everything has its time.
The third problem is that despite the fact that the standards state the desire for divergent learning, in the exams we have the good old "choose one of the options"... This is the most flawed system possible, because in many subjects it is “find the excess in the row” or “continue the row”. Rows 2, 4, 6, 10 may well be continued with the number 11. What is superfluous in a set of "spoon, knife, saucepan, glasses" strongly depends on what the task is. Olga tries to get the children to find the solution conceived by the author of the problem among others - but she does not require only it. Fortunately, she still does not need to explain to the children the logic of the compilers of the exam.
And yes, if we talk about exams, even in the tool "choose an option" there is a magically cool " Russian Bear ", which is so good that it drives the second generation of parents crazy.
The fourth problem - the school is not ready for digital learning... If anything, there are marathons on Uchi.ru, when children can take some tasks and do them. The class that solves this bullshit better than others wins. That is, for the sake of this MMO, children begin to really understand the subject. Because it's one thing when it's just learning, and it's another thing when you can bypass 3B from a neighboring school! Even though her children won one such "Russian championship" in Russian, the parents were actively against such approaches. Because the telephone, and the telephone, spoils the eyes and kills all life in the child. Although the pandemic and remote control turned everything upside down, this problem is no longer so acute.
Well, the last problem is the fact that after such primary grades, high school awaits children.... Where educators can come across far from adhering to the same educational ideas. This means that children who are used to being held out to be human may lose motivation to study subjects.
Olga Anisimova was with us today
In general, I just wanted to share with you that the school that we may hate is no longer the same. And the changes apply not only to private schools. But this future is still unevenly distributed.