(Caveat: I haven’t written anything worthwhile in some time, so I apologize for this post’s and any subsequent posts’ inherent lack of quality voice. These writing muscles are near atrophied.)
This phrase has often been spoken of as the aspects of your curriculum you don’t explicitly state as your objectives: socialization, team-building, self-expression, etc. These are the words that don’t fit neatly into state standards documents.
After spending my spring and summer of this past year creating and editing new curriculum for over twenty new courses, I am noticing something else in regards to the term “embedded curriculum.” It’s the ability to get students the tools they need. It’s not an add-on anymore. It’s necessary and vital to the success of not only the programs we create for them, but to their success after they leave us.
In our district, every teacher from grades six through twelve has a laptop (either a tablet PC, a MacBook, or a standard laptop), so at that level we have put tools in the hands of the teachers. We’ve automated and digitized much of their administrative tasks: our SIS handles all grading, scheduling, attendance, conduct, and record-keeping, all lesson plans are done via our online lesson planner, we have more than half of our K-12 population with Moodle accounts, our Google Apps will be up and running in days, and I could go on.
But what does it all mean?
Our teachers are very wired, but our kids don’t have the same access.
For the most part.
We’ve begun the “Great Netbook Experiment,” in twelve of our classrooms at the middle school. Initial returns are positive, but I haven’t seen the dynamic change yet. What does your classroom look like when you have ten laptops that are always available? How does your teaching change? How can your students learn differently? These are questions I need answers to before I go heavy in that direction.
Recently, we’ve been interviewing for another position in the district, and one of the candidates really hooked me when he stated that the next big hurdle for schools was to put the power to learn back into the hands of students. For me, that means moving the focus from giving the teachers the technology towards putting it in the hands of the students.
So when I sit down this year to re-create our Journalism class, my focus is going to be on giving these students the tools of new media specialists, the kind that Mark S. Luckie speaks about in his new book, “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook.” When I sit down to work with our Mandarin Chinese teacher to formalize his curriculum from 6-12, I’ll ask him which tools he’ll need to make his student successful. Wacom Tablets? Headsets for conversing? We have to start tipping the scales in favor of the question “what could they do if they had…” and go from there. If there is no money for it, fine. But at least let’s start there.
I saw this exchange between Gary Stager and Miguel Guhlin late this evening after returning home from the senior awards dinner:
Last year at this time, I was doing a lot of writing about the creation of a class calledConnections, a writing class aimed at critical thinking, analytic reading, and centered around the idea of transfer. We had been working with teachers for a few months on the ideas behind it, but had no model for what it would look like. During the last few weeks of school here, I am going to be meeting with those teachers to do some exploratory surgery on the class after one year of implementation.
One element that all of the nine teachers who taught the class this year seemed to center on, and something they all indicated generated the most interest from the students, was that of service learning. What gave me pause was that most of the service learning projects we did all had to do with raising money or buying materials for the causes we employed (one group did raise money to make a series of Kiva loans, which was an interesting process). Is that what our students are viewing as service learning?
Gary and Miguel’s brief conversation brought this out again for me, and in conversations with my boss lately we have been wondering if there is reason to shift any service-type project away from raising money, and more towards raising awareness. Timely enough, ASCD released a brief meta-analysis of research on service learning projects. According to the studies examined, projects with
the strongest effects have generally been found for service learning programs that have the explicit aim of developing active citizenship, in contrast with those that emphasize community service and character building.
So the question as I go into helping the teachers redesign their process is how can we capture the motivation that the students showed this past year for raising money, and harness it in some project that is civic-minded and has little or no connection to raising money and sending it elsewhere. It jives very well with Gary’s line above. Let’s see if we can take care of our own house in the hopes that it will make those around us better for it.
It’s coming to that time of the year for school districts around the world where we begin assigning our summer reading to our students. In the next few weeks, PTO’s and other fund-raising groups will be competing with one another to raise money through the sale of every district’s summer book lists.
Concurrently, students and teachers are pondering the merits of the titles on the lists. Students are wondering if there are Spark Notes or a movie for the books in question, and teachers are wondering which of the titles they have chosen, if any, will resonate with students.
I am wondering about the reasons behind summer reading.
My office receives more calls about summer reading than we do about just about any other topic within curriculum, including honors placements. Surprisingly, half of the calls are complaints about the fact we actually assign summer reading (students need a break), and the other half of the calls are just the opposite: that we don’t assign enough (sharpen the saw). How do you win?
For some reason, summer reading has become the bane of my existence in that I can’t determine its role in our curriculum. In looking at it, I see it as playing one of two roles:
Addendum to the curriculum, meaning that these are books within your curriculum that you cannot get to during the year, but are necessary to the successful completion of the course. This is truly only applicable in courses where the curriculum is external to the school district, as in AP or IB.
Demonstrating to students that reading is not solely an academic endeavor, but a lifelong skill. This model is not to prevalent in our schools today, but exists in communities that show the value of reading through their actions.
I’ve been looking at various models of summer reading, and I’ve asked the question several places, and what I’ve come up with is that in order for summer reading not to fall back on the drudgery associated with it, both from the students standpoint of reading (or Spark-Noting) the books, or the teachers who spend time assessing the work of the students in the first weeks of September. I don’t know which is worse: having to write a paper about a book that meant nothing to you, or having to read a paper from a student about a book that obviously meant nothing to them. What’s the solution? I’ll present two that I liked from the many responses I got out there. The first is employs the use of social media, the second, not so much.
As I said above, I asked this question of several people, both on Twitter and on the English Companion Ning, and the responses I got were insightful. Kristin Hokanson gave me this bit of transition, which matched my thinking very closely:
Her first post, which is the bottom image, shows how I view the traditional summer reading process, but the second one shows how her district is toying with the idea that there has to be something more to what the students do with the text; we have to allow them to read together. In his Wall Street Journal piece from a few weeks ago, writer Steven Johnson describes that the future of reading will involve us reading together and having discussion write on the pages of the texts that are on our e-book readers, so that at any given moment I can discuss with colleagues, or look for discussions that others have had right on the very page I am reading. Distracting, perhaps, but as an alternate assignment for some sub-groups of students it may work. Seriously, if I had the ability to take time out and get some clarification while slogging through Jane Eyre as a sophomore, I would have jumped all over it. That book nearly destroyed my desire to read. Thank goodness for Holden Caulfield, who arrived swiftly in September.
Others, too, are turning to social media to help them facilitate discussion around summer reading as it’s happening, and leveraging the technology to make the assignments richer. The English faculty at Fredericksburg Academy have all spoken up about their use of social media with their summer reading as a means to increase engagement.
Late last night, I received this from Candace Follis in response to some prompting:
and it changed some things. Should summer reading include summer writing, and should that writing be in such a form that it builds communications skills around the text? Can you have informed dialogue around why a novel is not in your top five? Simply, can we tell a student that if they don’t like the book, they need to illuminate for us in some capacity why they didn’t love the book? I am sure several hundred thousand English teachers have done this, but I like how Candace phrased it; it changes the way I see what we ask students to do in the summer.
Lastly, Dana Huff is really the impetus behind this thought stream, and her description of their program is below. If you look back at some of the posts I wrote during the ASCD Conference this year, you’ll see that I hovered around one idea specifically: modeling expert thinking. Dana’s school, The Weber School, includes an element in their September evaluation of summer reading that I feel does just that:
Students in grades 10-12 have the opportunity to read books selected for study by faculty members. Students will select which novel they will study prior to the end of second semester the previous year. During the first week of school, students will participate in seminar discussions led by faculty based on these selections. Students will be evaluated by faculty, and these evaluations will be part of the students’ grades for English during the first semester. Faculty members may request that students complete pre-discussion activities. Our goals are to encourage students to become life-long readers who read critically, insightfully, and enjoyably, to give our faculty and staff an opportunity to model the behavior of life-long readers, to familiarize our students with authors and literary works that include a range of genres and universal themes transcending time and place, and to challenge our students to grow, to reach, to stretch, and to broaden their experience of what it means to be human.
In the next few days, I’ll be posting about what we plan on doing here in our district, and appealing to all anyone who has ideas about making it work well. Whatever we decide to do on the assessment side of summer reading, if we decide to do anything at all, I am going to use Brian Smith’s post as my guiding principle:
“summer-reading-533.jpg.” Online Image. New York Times. August 7, 2008. May 13, 2009 <http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/recommended-reading/>.
We are in the middle of a huge curriculum writing season here, if there is such a thing. The list of courses we are either writing anew or creating from scratch is mind-boggling. One of the newer course we are adding to our high school Social Studies offerings is Contemporary Issues. Today was the first day we really got down to discussing what we want to do with the class.
Our idea was to marry a few areas together into this class:
applying the lens of historical inquiry to the flow of information we call news
learning how to recognize how media is manipulated
manage to trim the deluge of information present in the media to a manageable and intelligible framework so that it “works” for you.
Here is what we came up with for our introductory unit:
The idea of creating a “current events” class kind of turned us off. We didn’t want the class to turn into an academic version of TMZ every day (although that idea will rear it’s head somewhere in the design), so we we’ll begin this class withe the election of 2000. A watershed event to help the students understand the true workings of a contested election. It’s also a great jumping off point for the discussion of the role of modern media propaganda. We want to walk the thin line between historical analysis and modern themes.
We haven’t really begun to forge our assessments yet, nor have we ironed out the tech backbone for this class, but a good deal of that will depend on the comfort level of the teacher I am working with. Thoughts?
I just stopped into the Convention Center here to pick up my media kit, and I immediately noticed a big shift from last year’s conference in New Orleans: tech. Flat screens, laptops, live streaming of sessions, and a dedicated Technology Corridor (that’s going to be a separate post). All things that had they been here last year, I wouldn’t have stuck out so much sitting all by myself in session rooms because the only viable electrical outlets for people with laptops were on the fringes of sessions.
Seriously, there is a decided effort on the part of ASCD to be visible, to pull in “21st Century Skills,” a word that the world has claimed as its buzzword du jour, and if you look through the session descriptions, there is a huge focus on these topics:
Visual Literacy and infusion of Visual Art into the classroom
Using assessment wisely to allow students to show they understand
Web 2.0 and its use in the classroom
21st Century Skills and their broad definition
Over the last few days, I’ve spent some time looking at the sessions that immediately call out to me as valuable in what I do on a daily basis. If you’ve been following some of the thoughts here lately, especially the dialogue between Scott McLeod and on a recent links post, you’ll understand that there has to be a marriage between teaching “soft skills,” and making sure content knowledge is sufficiently understood. There is a balance we need to strive for in our work over the next few years in curriculum writing. Scott really hit it here in this reference:
In Built to Last, Collins & Porras describe how visionary organizations do not “oppress themselves with … the ‘Tyranny of the OR’” (i.e., citizenship preparation v. employment preparation) but instead “liberate themselves with the ‘Genius of the AND.’” As they note, yin and yang are “both at the same time, all of the time.” Why is this so hard for educators to do?
I’d like to find some examples here at ASCD that show me this is happening, or at least show ways in which I can move forward to help teachers create learning environments that are innovative for students and teachers alike, yet provide a solid academic foundation for the future. As I have said before, it never was an Either/Or.
The second major focus I have this weekend is to leave here with more actionable content which I am taking to mean both teaching strategy and assessment strategy. When I work with teachers, especially in light of all the buzz about the influx of creativity and innovation ideas into the NJCCCS, they often ask me how they are supposed to teach these skills. The sessions I have chosen center around giving teachers strategies for stretching student minds within their content areas. In my own personal practice, I always fall back on the Kagan Structures and other forms of cooperative learning (and it just so happens, Kagan is presenting on Sunday). With that creativity in how we approach teaching, I’d like to explore some innovation in how we assess our students.
Be sure to pick up the twitter feed also, which you can find here and here.
This week I have spent a good portion of my time working with teachers in grades PK-2 talking about creativity and innovation. Due to the changes that New Jersey is proposing in the new draft standards, which came about through their membership in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (among other factors as well), the elements that are stressed in the P21 manifesto have populated themselves into the new standards. Themes such as:
Global awareness
Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy
Civic literacy
Health literacy
and skills like:
Creativity and Innovation
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Communication and Collaboration
are all now written into our standards from PK-12.
If you come from middle or high school teaching into an administration position in which you work with grades PK-5, you will understand how stressful it is to work with elementary teachers. They are wonderful people; I should know, I am married to one. But when you look at all they have to do in a day and the limited time they have to do it in, having them sit in an afterschool meeting to work with curriculum is daunting. To introduce these ideas to our elementary teachers, we used our good friend Sir Ken Robinson. We took a page from the P21 Framework that centered on creativity and innovation and had the teachers use it as a backbone for writing down ideas that struck them while watching Sir Ken’s TED talk from 2006. From there, we had them answer two prompts in groups of 4-5:
Identify the structures in place in your classroom that promote creativity and innovation either in your students or yourself.
So what? What Now?
The responses were phenomenal, especially in relation to the areas where Sir Ken spoke about finding creative capacities and working with them instead of educating them out of them. However, one thing I have learned in administration in regards to any kind of meeting is that you have to be ready for the “don’t waste my time question of the day,” which is the part where you have to make it matter to them. A teacher asked the question very bluntly:
“where is this going? How are we to fit these ideas, which by the way we all believe in, into what we already do?”
My answer wasn’t great, I’ll admit, and it had a lot to do with explaining where the ideas behind the new standards revisions came from, but it stuck with me.
Last night, in my reader appeared an article from Patrick Riccards at Eduflack in which he debated the mode of delivery that the P21 people have chosen. This gem was smack in the middle of it:
The debate over 21CS skills should not be one between one set of curricular goals versus the other. This isn’t core knowledge versus soft skills. No, our focus should be on how we teach those core subjects that are necessary. How do we teach math and science so that we better integrate technology and critical thinking skills? How do we teach the social sciences in a manner that focuses on project-based learning and team-based activities? How do we ensure that a 21st century student is not being forced to unplug when they enter the classroom, and instead uses the technologies and interests that drive the rest of their life to boost their interest and achievement in core academic subjects? And most importantly, how do we ensure all students are graduating with the content knowledge and skills needed to truly achieve in the 21st century economy
One does not go forward by jettisoning the skills with which we gathered. To me it’s not about introducing new content, but rather how we engage students in content using the “soft skills” that we need them to develop. The ability to have a lasting understanding is our goal here, and providing relevant context to what we do in the classroom is a great way to get there. So my answer to that question is not to change the content of what you do, but to use the same skills you are trying to develop in the students in your own practice. Be innovative, be creative, be prepared to fail often, collaborate, model the behaviors you want to see in your students.
The first has to do with my TED addiction. Maria Popova has created a remix of some of the more passionate TED speakers in order to create a singular TED voice. I love it’s simplicity and message.
The second is called Street Art Locator. If you are anything like me, you stumble randomly into some amazing art on your travels. I would, however, like to plan that out a little bit more so that I can be a little more prepared. This may help.
Digging through Diigo in search of something I can’t even recall now, I found this nugget from Bill Breen at Fast Company: “The 6 Myths of Creativity.” Finding this may have been the reason I was digging through all of my back tags and pages in the first place, because when I found the article and re-read it, the six myths called to mind several instances of awkward thinking I see very often. Let’s walk through them:
Myth 1: Creativity Comes From Creative Types
Breen brings up the idea that looking for creativity in corporate departments like accounting might seem oxymoronic at first glance. However, we recognize innovation in any form and in any pursuit if it truly transcends the status quo and creates original thoughts or processes. In the contexts in which I work, the idea of creative thought applied to either discipline or process has unbelievable merit. We look for “withitness” within our teachers; we look for them to be able to resonate with students regardless of teacher age or experience, student age or ability level, and regardless of content. Do they get it? What if we apply that principle to guidance departments? Curriculum writing? Schedule creation? Why push for anything less than creative environments and people in those areas?
Myth 2: Money Is a Creativity Motivator
Breen states that
People want the opportunity to deeply engage in their work and make real progress. So it’s critical for leaders to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they’re stretching their skills
and our work in schools is no different. When we ask teachers to come and work with us, whether it’s for curriculum or for some form of professional development, we offer the option of coming during school and receiving substitute coverage, or coming after school and receiving compensation at a decent rate. Our participation is very closely split down the middle. Other reasons (child care, coaching, etc.) aside, we also find that those that come during the day and receive no compensation produce work that is equally as credible as those that come after school. The difference, and this is a purely personal observation, comes when you do as Breen suggests, and match people that truly care about what they create and feel that they are pushing themselves and their colleagues around them. Last week I worked with two teachers who were so full of ideas and so willing to take risks in regards to their ideas, the amount of work we got down and the quality of that work was astounding. All three of us were truly blown away by the possibility of bringing to life the ideas we came up with. That’s power.
Myth 3: Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
In college and graduate school I lived by the mantra “if you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” While snarky and fun, when I began teaching, it didn’t cut it as a model to share with students of how to prepare and perform at you best. So it was easily scrapped in favor of advance preparation. In schools, we work amid lots of deadlines placed either by ourselves or external pressures. However, having kids of my own, I realized something about being stressed: it’s contagious. When I am under the gun with a project or presentation, I become a bear and my work suffers for it. I feel guilty for not spending time with my family, and that weighs on me; I feel badly that my work is suffering due to lack of focus. It’s a vicious cycle. Solution: advance planning and preparation that allows you to focus on the whole when you need to.
I’ll admit it: I just watched my own session from EduCon 2.1 on video. Granted it’s not the whole thing, but it’s enough.
I didn’t know whether to take the athlete track or the celebrity track here: athletes do it without question, while celebs, when asked, never admit to watching their own movies. When it came down to it, I decided that watching would be so much easier to stomach than knowing it was out there and neglecting the chance to reflect on the session. Tony Gwynn used to do this for every at bat. Why can’t I?
After EduCon 2.0 last year, Dan and I came back a bit overblown by the whole thing. We knew what we were walking into, but sensing the passion the presenters had and the depths to which many of these people were willing to reach to change public schooling made us really reflect on what we were doing. What we heard was that “top-down” change was not enough. Grass-roots change had to happen in order for systemic change to sustain itself. We took that back and tried to make it happen through our actions.
That idea, that change had to be a marriage between administrative direction and teacher action, received yet another tweak as we learned through the weekend of January 23-25 that the student element was missing from our curriculum redesign process. We took our two major redesigns last year, Technology Career, and Consumer Sciences and our critical thinking class called Connections, and put them through the ringer with what we had learned from the sessions we had attended at EduCon 2.0. Now, a year later the idea that we haven’t included students to the level we need to is chasing me around as I plan to work with Visual and Performing Arts as they re-make their curriculum this summer. What’s their role? How much input should the greatest source of human capital in a school district have on the creation of curriculum? It’s no longer just a “top-down/bottom-up” issue, but instead it’s a “who should be in the room” issue.
Although he didn’t appear in the video of our session, Chris Lehmann popped into our session for the opening discussion. I’ll attribute these words to him:
“If we say that we believe in something, we should point toward something in your schools that show, illustrate those values, those beliefs (and how they resonate in the school community)”
And, although he didn’t say it officially until Sunday, he implied it all weekend: if you believe in something, show me where your actions, your systems, and your decisions make it true. We are at a point in our discussion and our study of what we know about about what works in education that we should be able to show in our own practice as educators what we are doing in light of our beliefs. That works for everyone from superintendents to students themselves. What are your ideals? Where can you show me in your practice that these are reflected? When we look at the inclusion of students in the curriculum redesign process, how does it reflect our beliefs about learning? About the students we teach?
This post is the transcript of the notes I posted to our English Department Group page. I thought I’d make them public here as some of our discussion might spark some conversation elsewhere.
This month’s meeting had a dual focus:
Resource Sharing
Summer Reading Discussion
We began the meeting by discussing the following passage:
“I am a second year teacher who teaches at a high school where the
SparkNotes epidemic is in full force. In fact, I had students in a
college prep class gloat over the fact that they hadn’t read a single book all year and were passing (barely, mind you).
We all know the list: SparkNotes, Cliff notes, BookRags, Pink Monkey,
etc. etc.; and for some, like myself, it’s difficult to imagine not
reading the book and simply relying on a website as a primary source.
(After all, you don’t get that lovely used book smell. Aahh.) Ugh, but
it’s happening…a lot.
I’ve talked to my collegues about this, and we’ve griped about it
together. I’m very creative with my lesson plans and want to teach
heavier concepts, but it’s extremely difficult when no one
is reading. One teacher told me she purposely goes on these websites to
create her quizzes based on information not mentioned in the plot
summaries and character analysis. It sounds a bit malicious, but what
else is there to do?
Does anyone have a suggestion how to combat SparkNotes? Or do I throw
in the towel whenever I assign a bit of reading that contains more than
fifty pages?”
The purpose behind this was two-fold. Obviously the piece generated discussion amongst the group regarding how we work with this, and how to find the holes in the SparkNotes summaries that students read. Several of you discussed how you read the SparkNotes summaries and use them to create you assessments. Doing so enables you to focus on details and elements not included in a pat summary.
Questions that came up (both during the meeting and in my head after):
Do we take the role of “gotcha” with our assessments? If so, what affect does that have on students desire to read?
What other sites are out there for them to use? (Schmoop, BookRags)
If we don’t acknowledge the use of it and use it as a tool for ourselves as well, will it become abused?
The second purpose of reading this passage was to give an example of the type of discussion that is occurring at a social networking site created by English teacher Jim Burke called The English Companion. The site has over a thousand members from around the world, most of them English teachers. The amount of sharing of resources and ideas that is occurring there is truly phenomenal. I find myself reading and commenting often. Learning as we know it is changing rapidly, and our ability to find sources of dialogue about these changes is crucial to our understanding of it.
The second article we shared was an editorial from the Washington Post by Nancy Schnog titled “We are Teaching Books that Don’t Stack Up.” The article originally ran in August, but I wanted to tie it into our discussion on summer reading. Schnog argues that as much as our desire as teachers of literature is to engage our students in the thrills we have all found in literature and the requisite critical analysis of it, we might be doing them a disservice. Jamie pointed out that she remembers being a student and wanting to just read a passage without having to dissect every nuance and literary symbol. Schnog also spoke about the timing of literature and the genres offered to students at their various age levels. She spoke about students reading Catcher in the Ryeas Juniors rather than as 8th graders because of how they could relate to it on a completely different level. When we speak about summer reading, we often include similar ideas: is this book going to engage the boys? is this title going to pull in reluctant readers.
If our goal is to push students to read for enjoyment, are we accomplishing that? If that isn’t the goal of summer reading, what is? Andrew brought up a point at the end of the meeting regarding what we can ask students to read and what we can ask them to respond like. His reading, he stated, has become focused on editorial and opinion pieces over the last year, and looking at the summer reading list, Angela asks her students to keep dialectic journals while reading a self-selected group of editorials from either the New York Times or the Washington Post. What if we asked our students to do this at every level? Due to the participatory nature of politics and news at the moment, this might work to engage them in reading for pleasure.
This being my first full year in this position, there were some things that I have not yet experienced. For one, the yearly construction of the high school course of studies. Every year there is a race to beat the deadline for any changes we are making to what we offer to our high schoolers. This year my departments are undergoing some significant change, and our course choices are expanding. It was a rush, to be blunt.
We are adding AP Art History, History of Genocide/Holocaust Studies, Contemporary Issues, and Philosophy to the History Department. We have completely overhauled our Visual Art classes to include more full year classes instead of semester courses, and we have added AP Art Studio as an option for our Juniors and Seniors. We also made some changes to the prerequisites for our Music Theory students.
What does this all mean for me? It means that I have no less than 11 new classes to coordinate the creation and curriculum writing for. Truly, this is what I call an opportunity to create something dynamic, lasting, and important for the students in our district. Hence the title of this post. There will be heavy reliance on this network over the course of the next few months. I know you are up for it.
Also, this means that there are fundamental questions that must be answered in December about classes that are (or are not depending on student choice) going to run in September. The biggest of all of those questions is undoubtedly my budget. Traditionally, when a course is created and curriculum is written textbook selection and review is a huge part of that process. This article by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post on 12/15/08 spoke to an idea that has been bandied about the educational intertubes before: do we spend money on textbooks?
From the article:
In the classrooms I visit, it is often a good sign that the textbooks
are stacked on a corner bookshelf or window sill, gathering dust. The
best teachers have an ongoing conversation with their class, calling on
every student, challenging sloth, praising fresh ideas, moving the
group beyond the text, which covers only the state’s or the school’s
curricular requirements.
and
If teachers can write their own textbooks, why not students? It would
make a fine group project, with each kid doing a chapter. Debate the
fine points, put them on the Web and pass them around, irresistible
preparation for the final exam.
I look at the classes above, and aside from the AP classes, is there a need for a textual resource for every student? Financially speaking, for the price of textbooks for one departments’ classes, I can purchase the “Internet accessing device of the moment” as well as subscriptions to any database on earth. What I am going to struggle with is creating classes in that light with stakeholders that will not see the logic in leaving textbooks out of the equation.
Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be lurking on your posts looking for ways to gain access to teachers you know that are creating classes in this manner, that are, as Matthews described his history teacher, Mr. Ladendorff, using “our U.S. history text like a bull’s-eye on a firing range.” This should be good.
A few days back, Alex Ragone posted this via twitter (I just don’t feel comfortable saying “tweeted”):
Working on technology vision for students and faculty. We really need to look big picture and design curric to match that. Not so now.
I’ve never met Alex face-to-face, only through a twitter request that landed me in his professional development workshop last year, but his thinking in 140 characters or less gave me an idea: Alex lives in New Jersey, so do I. His thought made me think about what we’ve been working on in our locale regarding the same issues. How do you design curriculum so that your pedagogy and technology are in harmony to the point where we don’t talk about technology as an isolated event that happens in the lab or is viewed as a separate bullet point in a curriculum document?
My response was simple
@alexragone would love to get a skype session about curricular vision with a few of us from NJ.
Those simple connections led us to including Bill Stites, Dan Sutherland, and Barry Bachenheimer in the conversation via a collaborative planning document and a skype conversation. In our daily jobs as administrators, tech coordinators, and teachers, we often get mired in the issues that bog us down: supplies that don’t arrive, inter-departmental squabbles, crab-bucket culture, etc. Having the opportunity to engage our minds in this form of big-picture play keeps us free, keeps us from the feeling that we are running through mud.
This conversation will address the following essential questions: What does the student experience in a classroom look like when the curriculum is integrated with technology that they use? What support structures need to be in place for this classroom to exist? For the experiences to exist? Bring your curriculum design question and we’ll help you develop it for the dynamic needs of today’s and tomorrow’s students.
We’ll demonstrate successful classroom practices using social networking, online course management systems, global and local collaboration, and online writing to create audience for your students.
It hasn’t been accepted as of yet, but if it does, and you are in the tri-state area, please come join us. There will be four of us leading this workshop in a hands-on format. We are hoping for a lot of small group discussion and creation of solutions for participants. One phrase I remember uttering during our skype planning session was that I wanted each of us to remember the key elements from the best conference workshop we’ve ever been to, and I want us to re-create them here. We need to teach this one in the manner with which we would want to learn it. For me, that’s conversation and sharing among participants.
We’ve been fortunate over the last few years in that most of the time we invite someone to speak to our staff virtually, it happens. Yesterday, we had the pleasure of having Dina Strasser from Rochester, NY skype into our Language Arts meetings for both 8th and 6th grades. On many levels, yesterday was a special event.
First, our teachers are being asked to switch their mode of thinking about their classrooms and the way they function. We are moving towards a workshop-based approach to integrated Language Arts. With that comes considerable pushback and anxiety. I understand that and most of my job is to help them manage that stress. Thinking about helping them make this transition, several ideas came about: layout a physical model of what the classroom will look like, take what they already do and transform it into this new modely by breaking it into pieces, and have them work step-by-step in the new model. But what has always served me well, both as a teacher and as an administrator, is to bring someone in who is, for lack of a better term, smarter than me. Why should I try to convince these teachers of something they could easily say I know little about in practice.
Enter Dina. The descriptions, the answers, the ideas, the issues and concerns, and help she was able to give our teachers was monumental. Dina is immersed in this same change that we are asking our teachers to undertake. The reason I found Dina was through her post: “Junking it…Literature Circles,” in which she clearly outlined what the perfect model for literature circles is, what she was trying to do (and failing), and what she would then move to in the hopes of making the change sustainable. What she is modeling is exactly the process we need to spread among our staff. Not just the fact that she is reflecting on her craft in the view of others, but just the fact that there is internal dialogue that assesses her own performance in an objective manner. We need more Dina’s.
Secondly, as Dina stated in her post earlier today, this was another display of PLN in action. We have never met each other, and we may never in the future, but you can be sure that if I have questions, or if someone asks me for a resource on literature circles or anything middle school Language Arts related, I am going to send them Dina’s way. She’s now much more than a node in my network; she’s a person to me, and a generous one at that for giving up two hours on her day off. We need more PLN interaction in front of staff members that have limited exposure to their own networks. More teachers and administrators need to construct these type networks to model how we can leverage “wicked-smart” people that we have access to.
My goals for yesterday’s meetings going in were to help our teachers feel more comfortable in their own skin with this new change. What I left with was just that, and with new goals for what I can do to help them. I need to be present when they are struggling, not for punitive purposes, but to offer instructional support. I need to get them access to materials, because I realize how fortunate we are to have the means to gain that access. I need to let them know that failing is just fine, but refusing to attempt is a poor model.
J. Clark Evans posted a piece at her blog, My Continuing Education, today called “Worst Class…Best Class” in which she recounts a recent day where the discussion in her 10th grade British Literature class did not go as she wanted to. We’ve all been there on that day where you’ve hatched out these ground-breaking discussion questions about the novel you are reading or the era you are studying, and then when you unleash them on your students in the hopes of them coming to a new great American understanding, they look back at you as if you weren’t even there. What do you do then? Well, Evans did this:
I literally threw my hands up in the air and ended the lesson. I asked students to reflect on their lack of participation and offer ideas for ways to improve in an email to me.
My best quality as a teacher is my desire and willingness to reflect. I spent the rest of the day reviewing their comments, taking to another grade level teacher, and agonizing over how I could help them to be more successful.
I learned a new word today via the Open Dictionary: Andragogy. Andragogy means the practice of teaching adults with emphasis on participation of students in the planning and evaluation. Due to the nature of the Open Dictionary, I can’t be 100% sure it’s an official word, but I like it’s meaning nonetheless. Evan’s example of andragogy is on that I feel we are lacking more of. While she is teaching “almost adults,” the point is the same. Can we teach our students to be part of the planning process? Look closely at the way in which she implemented it too:
My second class British literature class also has problems with participation during general class discussions. A couple of students will attempt answers only after awkward silences. But the majority of students won’t speak, maybe if called on, but it’s so painful for both them and me that I hate to do that and put someone on the spot.
I started class by asking if they wanted to go with “regularly scheduled programming” or try something radically different. I would give them a task and when they accomplished it they would be dismissed, even if that was in ten minutes. They were a little reluctant but then encouraged each other to give it a try. They encouraged each other to get energized about a challenge in English class.
My favorite part of this was the conclusion she came to from the morning’s failure. It wasn’t to let the students design the learning completely on their own, but rather to design something teacher-driven, but aimed at the students’ expressed desires from the morning class. We are really beginning to look at assessment-driven instruction–using what our students know and don’t know to drive what we teach–in our district, and I like this example. Here is the comment I left for her:
Here’s where you had me, and them, I believe:
“My best quality as a teacher is my desire and willingness to reflect.”
If one thing came through for your students it was that you listened to them. You took a failure, a rather public one, and pivoted in front of them. The student quote at the end of the post demonstrates what several of them were most likely feeling, even if they didn’t intimate it the same way.
In a new way, you showed what the use of assessment should look like. It wasn’t a book test, an essay, or anything pscyhometric, but you used it to inform your instruction. This is what we need everyone to be doing: look at your practice, look at what the students “tell” you, and make adjustments. The added bonus for us is that you wrote about it here and we can share it with more people.
And I hear you about the grading of papers. Feedback on graded material was always my downfall.
Using assessment doesn’t mean that you give pre-tests or previous examination grades; it can mean that you make an informed decision based on information you gathered through observation, much like Evans did. This, I feel, is sometimes lost when we talk about using assessment to drive instruction.
This image, passed to me via Coolinfographics, is exactly the type of divergent thinking I envision our schools fostering now and in the future. Oh. It was created in 1823. What are we missing?
Our Connections class is predicated on this idea. We process and recreate information in ways that are meaningful to us and others.
In several of the informal conversations I had with Ryan and David last Friday, they laid out their plan for a learning space whereby all of student work from moment they enter the high school will travel with them through the four years of high school. Let me clarify a little from what I gleaned from them.
A problem, as Ryan pointed out in our panel discussion, occurred at several points in their experience with student blogging:
What happened if you were blogging in science class, in English class, and in social studies? Did you as a student have the responsibility for maintaining three distinct blogs?
What happened when you finished the year with that teacher? Did your blog die? Were you able to take it with you and continue to write on your own?
These points came up as we were trying to get at what lies beyond the tools. Having students keep isolated, individual blogs goes against most of what we strive for: transfer of understanding from seemingly unrelated areas to others. We want students relating semi-permeable cell membranes to porous and non-defined border policies. Having isolated learning spaces goes a long way toward furthering that view of education that our learning is isolated into small, un-meshed parts, when in actuality we learn through our connections to already processed material.
What this calls for is a systemic change within a school whereby students are asked to create their own learning space and tie it into the appropriate places within their subject areas. For example, if a student sat down to write a piece for social studies on their blog, but found connections within the topic to a novel or short story they read in English, they could tag it with both socialstudies and english and the learning space would feed it to both of those courses’ Moodle site. The teachers could then review the writing and help the student make deeper connections between the two.
Having some platform for blogging that is external, but able to be configured to be private is key here. Google Apps may work, and I am sure you could configure WPMU to do this as well (both of which are beyond my realm). This way, the students, as they graduate in four years, are able to take a body of writing over time with them to the college level, thus it becomes their portfolio.
I am truly just beginning to think beyond the glitz and glam of this tool or that one and delve into the deep possibilities we now have. It’s empowering to know that we are capable of giving students this ability and that it really is very close to happening in certain places. However, the biggest hurdle is getting more of my staff on board with the architecture of it. Not every teacher understands blogging, tagging, or even what RSS is, nevertheless the connective and transformative nature of the tools.
That, however, was my second takeaway from last Friday.
Over the course of the last few months, I have been writing about the creation of a new class in our middle school called Connections which focuses on critical thinking and problem solving through multi-disciplinary writing. Last week our middle school opened and the Connections classes began. Below is the initial reaction from several of the teachers after that first day:
-I had a great day! The kids are very curious about the Connections class and the use of technology within the class. I was floored to see that I would say that about 90% of them said that they have cellphone. I think it’s going to be a great year!
-Things went well, students are highly interested in Connections, although not completely sure what it is yet. They enjoyed learning about the Web 2.0 applications we will be using and can’t wait to use Google Apps for Education. I am glad we prepared in the summer for the first 2 weeks, it is making the beginning of the year much easier.
-The kids seemed really interested in the course. The idea of podcasts and other multimedia projects definitely seemed to go over well. I think some of the students were a bit overwhelmed, but I’m hoping that a gradual transition into our first unit will ease their anxiety.
-I totally hooked them with the pollanywhere.com survey! When I asked them to explain what the Connections class was, they really got it! They said they’d be learning how to think, use what they already know, use technology to demonstrate their understanding and other stuff I can’t remember because my brain is fried.
-They were initially hooked by the “no homework/no tests” aspect. Once they heard a litttle more they still seemed eager to begin. There was a mixture of excitement and fear, which is exactly what I wanted/expected. I think they are ready for the freedom, challenge, and responsibility that Connections entails.
We are now a full week beyond these initial reactions and I have been popping into the rooms to see how things are going. Initial reaction? It’s difficult when you know in your gut that what you are doing is the right thing to do, but not too many people have tried it on such a large scale, so to see it in action was frightening for me. Here’s what I saw:
The legs knocked out from under them: The students were confronted with a class that focuses on writing, yet does not grade for mechanics and spelling, only content, clear ideas, and connection to other subject areas. In one class, the teacher was using Socratic Questioning to continually force the students to challenge their own assumptions and habits. They were so uncomfortable! Their cognitive dissonance was palpable and then she made them write about it. Thinking through writing.
Ubiquitous technology: We really tried to hide the technology behind the purposes of this class, and so far it is just that. They are using Moodle in spots, Google Apps in others, but all for the purposes of being connected to each other. As the year moves on, and I try to keep connecting the teachers to others of you out there doing great things, I am hoping that our students will see that too.
Excitement: This feeling is shared by both the students and the teachers. Our schedule rotates so that the teachers teach 5 classes, but only see them 4 times in a week. On that drop day, we have students complaining that they miss what happened in Connections that day. I hope we keep this up.
Before I begin this brief description of the fledgling process I have cobbled together from various sources and methods, I wanted to send out a few thank yous to all of those that have contributed to my resource collection: Carolyn Foote, Tom Haskins, Barry Bachenheimer, Lisa Huff, Dana Huff, Nick Senger and the rest of the folks at Literacy Lighthouse, Diane Cordell, and Karen Janowski. Aside from feeling like I just won an Oscar after listing all of those names, I can’t think of a better research team than the network that exists around me. When I need things, they appear from everywhere.
The idea that our research process needed looking at came about during the middle of this past school year when the construction schedule for our new high school was released and it became clear to us that the Media Center as we knew it (read: one that contained books) would cease to exist. Our research process relied heavily on the use of database and print resources, as well as some internet sources depending on their validity. However, our ability to bring a class of students to the Media Center would not be there this year, so a lot of the processes we had used over the years would no longer be applicable. This led me to dig a little deeper: what was it that we wanted to teach the students about research? What are the essential skills that students should leave our high school with? Do processes like note cards have a place in an increasingly digital world? What about how we determine validity? Looking at these questions tore the roof off of the process, because now I was getting what really mattered about doing research. Tying this into what we’ve been throwing around with the 4 R’s of Rigor, Relevance, Relationship, and Results, I put some questions out to the network: And, in a moment of frustration: By the end of last week I was ready to start assembling the various parts I had gleaned from my own research and the links, as evidenced in tweets like this one in response to Carolyn Foote’s suggestion to check out Carol Kuhlthau’s research on how students engage in research processes and the emotional range they go through in doing it. That led me to the work of Jamie McKenzie. His Research Cycle uses a lot of the elements I had taken and co-opted for my own purposes here. I realized that we needed a framework in which to teach the essential skills of research in this day and age, and we needed one that relied heavily on inquiry and student-driven research. Within that framework, we could create all sorts of projects and learning outcomes. Here is the diagram for the final outcome, which takes into account McKenzie’s work, coupled with some other modes to work within:
This chart shows how the process centers on six essential skills, which in their final form, will represent the essential questions of the research process for students: Use of Inquiry and Questioning (throughout the process as idea generator, and as idea refiner), Information Retrieval Skills, Evaluation of Sources for Reliability and Validity, Synthesis of Information from Multiple Sources and Multiple Media, Attribution of Sources, Publishing for a Larger Audience. Throughout the course of their four years of high school, four modes with which to instruct students in McKenzie’s Research Cycle will be offered: Controlled, Guided, Modeled, and Free. It is very easy to lump those categories into grade levels where Freshman conduct controlled research, Sophomores do guided, etc. However, I designed this with the idea that the mode that a student does his or her research in can be differentiated by readiness level. If a Freshman demonstrates the requisite skill necessary to carry out higher-level research, let them do a modeled or free research project, and it works conversely so as well.
It’s early in the process, and our teachers haven’t convened to review this, and I desperately need them to see where I believe we should be moving. In my haste to eschew the old methods, I asked questions of the network, as I stated earlier. One of the most eye-opening responses I got was from Lisa Huff. I had asked whether or not we needed to be teaching the use of note cards in student research:
make them aware that there are multiple ways to attribute sources: the most appropriate may depend on the genre and context. For example, are there times when hyperlinked sources (throughout a published piece or at the end) are more appropriate than a formal MLA or APA works cited page? As for bib cards and note cards, I think, again, our focus should be on helping our students understand the process and available strategies for identifying important information from sources and selecting an organizational strategy to synthesize that information. If we show them multiple strategies and tools–underlining, highlighting, note cards, Furl, Digg, del.icio.us, online bib makers–I think we come closer to preparing them for the real information literacy demands they’ll face in their futures.
Although the highlight is my own, when I read this, that immediately stood out to me as an important thing we do for students: prepare them for the demands their futures will present them with. Additionally, just as we focus so intently on the tech tools that we like to use, what is truly meaningful behind them is the utility that they bring to our lives. If a tool doesn’t suit the job, discard it. That comment, coupled with a response from Tom Haskins on a previous post regarding research:
The issue of “how to do research” has come up every time I’ve taught college seniors. I have a low tolerance for the voice in academic research papers. They read as “dry and boring” to me, just as they do to the students who write them. I tell them that a small minority of the “knowledge workers in the world” ever use their school experience of writing research papers again. The few that do are either college professors, research scientists or members of think tanks. Most everyone else is doing write-ups of field research. That includes journalists, authors, screenwriters, management consultants, counselors, social workers, law enforcement officers, anthropologists, an every kind of manager (product, HR, team, market, team, etc). The data is gathered from informal conversations, casual observations, formal interviews, photographic records, background reading, and comparisons with colleagues’ similar research.
When we ask students to do research, are we concerned with voice? Tom spoke of that as being of paramount importance, and lacking from the majority of research work that high school and college students do, yet such a small percentage of people actually ever do that type of research when they leave college. There is a point there; let’s prepare them for their futures by equipping them with the research skills, including both digital and traditional (if they are still relevant), that will make their lives in college and beyond much more rewarding.
And, above all, let’s make it mean something to them.
So, there I was, watching this great advertisement from Nokia:
during Darren and Clarence’s presentation at BLC (third link to both of them in three days–I promise I am not link-stalking), when things began to unfold.
I needed data for this.
We are opening the school year with our Connections class, a second language arts class focused on problem-solving and writing as a thinking tool. What we are really having difficulty with is the fact that the students may struggle with the format of the class; getting an “A” will require strong habits of mind and a focus on proving that your answer has merit. We’ve stripped out grading for grammar and spelling, we’ve focused our assessment on process thinking, cooperative group discussion, portfolio defense, and for lack of a better word, “out of the box” thinking. Getting the students on board immediately is imperative for any class, but for this one, which they are already viewing as “2nd English,” is crucial not only for the success of this year, but also for the success of the program.
There is a part in the video, which I hope you took the time to watch, where the narrator talks about how the 3rd screen privatized our lives and learning, but the 4th screen freed us to venture outside and do the things we love. My gears were cranking. I’ve admired the work Darren has done with the use of imagery in math, but what really struck me about him was his outsourcing of the legwork of the photography to his students. Two of my favorite things right there: atypical assignments and student-created content.
What could we do with this information? Well, here was my hook: How many of your students have cellular phones? How often do you text per day? Does your phone have a camera? Video? Does your phone have the ability to access the internet? What do you use more often in the course of a normal day: cell phone or computer? How could you use your cell phone to help you learn?
The idea would be to have the students compile data using a survey tool like surveymonkey, surveygizmo, or our in-house survey software. Once the data is collected, a whole slew of possibilities open up:
Use the texting data to demonstrate how we communicate most and discuss reasoning behind this. Compare this to a survey of the teaching staff.
What does the data comparing the computer v. cell phone usage say?
What ideas do students have for the use of cell phones in class?
The ability to have students create the data, analyze the data and then let it “incubate” as Ewan McIntosh stated, make this one a go for me. Very beta right now and as I look at the questions there, they are in sore need of some higher level revision. The power of what is in their pockets is, as I remarked to my colleagues in our notes, game-changing. Again, as I sit here and write this, I can’t help but think of the almost Draconian rules that exist in some parts of our buildings regarding the use of mobile devices. This idea, aside from the student inclusion in the creation of the lesson, may serve to break down some barriers for us. One can only hope….
I love writing and sharing, and while I don’t profess to have a “great process” for getting it out there, I willingly share my practices, both success and failure, with anyone who cares to listen. That being said, and after listening to Clarence and Darren on Friday morning as they laid out the real possibilities that our teachers and students have before them, I know I live in perpetual beta. What that means for me is that, yes, I will continue to write about my personal struggles and successes with motivating today’s student and helping teachers understand changes that can help their instruction and effectiveness, but I will keep things close to my vest too.
Before I get up there and share like mad and give it away, I want to run it through the ringer here. I went to BLC with our administrative team, and my focus was on finding ways to make the goals we had set work well. That meant that we worked together almost exclusively. I missed sharing with some of the people there, but I felt the conversation pieces were lacking (or not built into the conference like at EduCon). My first priority in all of this is to the people I work with and for, the students, teachers, and parents in my district. Until I feel a sense of accomplishment within the audience of that crowd, I am finding it difficult to begin to share our practices. In other words, I don’t want to just get in front of people and talk about the cool things we do with this tool or that tool. I want to give the people I am fortunate enough to share with solid methods and practices they can go back and share with their students, teachers and parents. That hasn’t arrived for me yet.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve accomplished some wonderful things, and we are really trying to up the ante this year with our staff at every building; however, where’s the proof that what we are doing is better? or at least creating fascination and wonder on the part of both teacher and student? I need that before I jump out of beta and into limited release.
Our summer administrators book group is rounding into shape, aside from Barnes and Noble’s policy of claiming something is “in-stock” and if there is one copy, yet letting you order 12 without telling you that you’ll only get one. Our first choice was Moral Leadership, but B&N decided to only send us one copy. That’s OK, we’ll share.
For learning to take place with any kind of efficiency students
must be motivated. To be motivated, they must become interested. And
they become interested when they are actively working on projects which
they can relate to their values and goals in life.
How do you find what it is that motivates and interests your students? What are some methods that work to find out what makes students tick?
When I look at the situations in which I have interacted critically with both students and teachers, I often find it difficult for both parties to tell me what interests them, and further, how it relates to what they teach. Index cards as they walk into the room at the beginning of the year? Is that feasible for 120-150 students? If so, how do you manage that?
Some of the other questions I came up with regarding the first section of the book:
Can we train people to think using both hemispheres of the brain? Is R-Directed thinking something that can be learned?
If we ask that our teachers come into this system (the education system, classroom, school environment, etc.) with right-brained skills in addition to the traditional left-brained skills, are we setting them up for failure?
this was in the context of looking at how schools haven’t physically changed in over a hundred years. Those of us in education tend to be successful products of the system, meaning that we did well in the system that we went through, thus we tend to re-create the system we are used to.
If that is the case, does it make sense that we hire teachers expecting them to think “outside the box” only to put them back into an environment that is exclusively “in the box?”
How do we respond to this statement: “We don’t have time to include R-directed thinking; we are trying to prepare our students for taking these standardized tests (NJASK, SAT, HSPA, etc.)”
Does this statement have merit: “The changing world is leaving the SAT behind?”
Should these three statements (from page 51) drive the decision making in our building regarding what we are creating with our students?
Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
Can a computer do it faster?
Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance?
Are we wasting our students’ time by teaching them skills that are irrelevant anymore? If so, what are they?
I was just trying to respond to Bill’s comment on a previous post and then this happened:
Bill,
As always, a great question. I have to tell you, that very same question came to us very soon after we introduced this class to the department that would be teaching it. The Language Arts department asked whether or not this class was a permanent class, or one that would be phased out after a few years (other changes had been made within the last two years to this department, and they were/are skeptical). Your question goes at the very heart of the debate about state testing: if classes are designed around state standards, and state assessments are designed to reflect mastery of state standards, what happens when your students don’t perform well.
From reading your writing, I know you often struggle with this issue of having your students learn a great deal, but not perform where they are “supposed” to on the state assessment. What we did when we designed this class was to remove that pressure from the design. We still have standards, but we are using standards from every core discipline (and some others) that the state of New Jersey standardizes. Only, we took the standards that we might call “Power Standards,” and used them. For example, one of the science standards we chose to write our curriculum around is:
” Habits of Mind
1. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of data, claims, and arguments.
2. Communicate experimental findings to others.
3. Recognize that the results of scientific investigations are seldom exactly the same and that replication is often necessary.
4. Recognize that curiosity, skepticism, open-mindedness, and honesty are attributes of scientists.”
We left these teachers with the ability to create a standards-based class, but give them a little leeway in their ability to cover broad topics and insert seemingly insurmountable problems into their students’ course of study.
So, to answer your question with a question, should low performance on state tests eliminate a class that is based on standards from every core discipline? My opinion is that it should not. In a perfect world, this class, aside from the obvious benefits of metacognition and critical thinking, would provide the students with an edge in the open-ended section of the tests–the section of the test that allows students to express their answers in a few ways, other than just filling in bubbles on a scantron.
This is what happens when you let really smart people see your thinking. I am glad I do this.
When I sit down to create lessons for teachers, or help them create lessons for students, one of my most frequent points is how they are creating “good stress,” within their students. Without pressing, most know what I mean inherently: there is an amount or type of mental strain that permits the mind to flex around a new issue or concept in order to overcome it and create new knowledge.
Stealing this from George Siemens (whom I have been robbing a lot from lately)
A
bit of stress, a bit of ambiguity, and a bit of confusion are healthy
contributors to learning. As long as we have a feedback loop where
learners can contribute and faculty can respond and adapt, we have the
basics in place.
Connections are the starting point of all learning. It’s so
obvious…and therefore so often overlooked. We really need to think
about types of connections learners have with each other and
content…and ways that we can extend the learning experience by
critically analyzing and forming those initial connections.
In two places in the above quote, Siemens mentions the word “connections,” and when we sat down to begin designing the additional language arts course for next year that was focused on critical thinking and writing across the curriculum, I thought back to my days at Eric Smith School in Ramsey. They had a school-wide standards system called “The Quality Standards.” It was partially a gaff among the staff at the triteness of the name, but in actuality, it was sound. The standards were:
Following Directions
Presentation
Supporting Details
Connections
Higher Level Thinking
Evaluation and Revision
Designing this class forced me to think back to the most effective of those standards, and by far it was connections, and the name for the class was born. In light of reading Siemens post, and in conversations with the teachers of the class, I can see that the term fits. We need students to create links, both mentally and digitally, from what they know already, to what they are trying to know. We are stressing “cognitive leaps” and learning by doing as often as we can, but there are inherent problems with that.
The last time I had the group of teachers together who will be teaching the class this fall, I stressed the first two weeks of instruction. Sure, what a shocker; however, we are asking these students in grades 6-8 to do some things that there are not going to be used to. For example, by the time they reach middle school, a good percentage of students have already perfected the question “will this be on the test?” and have figured out that there is a formula to getting good grades: find the answer the teacher wants, and give it–case closed. Now, we are going to have them walk into a classroom this fall and tell them that there is no right answer, only the answer you can defend in writing and in your ability to argue it. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
One of our group had shared with me a document (which I am trying to get a copy of at the moment) that was a letter to parents informing them of what to expect from this class. When we are trying to move students away from “schooliness” and do some in-country “unschooling” we are going to hit some rough spots, from both students who are not used to being confused or stressed about school, and their parents who haven’t seen their child struggle with school before. As always, we will deal with those situations as they arise.
OK. I’ll admit it. I came to find all of these fabulous social media and international collaborative project opportunities at a point which I had limited access to classes, only via other teachers. That being said, I often feel like I would like to sink my teeth into some hugely collaborative project, or even just be associated with one. There’s been a lot of talk, or maybe I should say, I am reading a lot of writing about:
Rigor: How do we allow students to achieve flow-the right balance of challenge and stress to optimize learning in our classrooms?
Relevance: Are we teaching with the values, thoughts, feelings, and experiences of our students in mind?
Relationships: Are we respecting students’ lives and cultures?
Results: Do we have measurable, tangible results that represent our ideas and goals?
as they relate to individual student motivation. A truly collaborative, either locally or globally, project stands a great chance of really getting at those four elements if done well.
So, in an effort to further my selfish aims to be associated with a collaborative project, I offer this: one of the teachers with whom I am working on designing curriculum for our new writing and critical thinking class sent me the following email:
I am interested in incorporating the idea of a global classroom into several of my units. I know there are sites that are dedicated to hooking up educators so that they can participate in these kinds of exchanges with their classes. I just don’t remember what they are or how to get them. I kind of remember someone, it might have been you, providing us with some links that let classrooms from various corners of the world work together on a common project. I am very interested in reaching out to several teachers across the globe and linking up. At minimum, I would like to give our students access to the differing perspectives that naturally arise out of geographical differences.
Question Authority: Media Literacy: How can I identify the underlying messages in mainstream media?
Disconnected: I Text, Therefore I am: • How have humans communicated throughout history?
• How and why is communication different throughout the world?
• What is the impact of human communication on a given society?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks to different forms of communication?
• What might human communication be like in the future and what factors will influence these trends?
First off, you can’t imagine how jealous I am of this group of teachers to be able to teach a class that lets them answer these types of questions, but also how jealous I am of these students that they get to wrestle with such cool content. If you are interested, or know of someone who might be interested in some form of collaborative project under these unit topics or others like them, please drop me a line in the comments below. This is a 7th grade class (12-13 year old students).
A few weeks back, I pitched the idea of a summer professional book club to the administrators in our district. Knowing that schedules are hectic and people like to travel in the summer, myself included, I didn’t expect too much of a response. All of the building leadership is headed to BLC this summer, and we thought it might be a great idea to begin getting ourselves on the same page. Surprisingly, and thankfully, most did and we solicited some advice for some summer reading material from the twitterverse at large.
I put out a survey to the group with a list of titles and asked them to rate them according to preference. Here is the original list:
When the dust settled after the survey, the group chose one clearly above the rest, and two others tied for second. Moral Leadership will be our summer reading choice for the group, with A Whole New Mind and Failure is not an Option as stand-ins. I’d like to thank the twitterverse, and especially Bill Ferriter and Chris Lehman for their suggestions, as the ones you recommended were all high on the choice list.
Now, for the really serious question: format? How do you successfully run a book discussion with administrators? If anyone has done something like this, please chime in with some suggestions. I would like to make it loose, but still have some group accountability.
This class sounds like a jewel in the making. I’d love to know nitty-gritty (length? scheduling? vertical alignment?) if you’re willing.
I wonder this too: it was recently at a meeting of the minds educational panel (2004 NYS Teacher of the Year, 2008 NYS Teacher of the Year, and a former National Science Teacher of the Year) that I heard this put forth as a pedagogical touchstone: “Who owns the question?”
I thought of this as I read the list of questions your colleagues have drawn up– truly exciting and challenging stuff. Will these ideas exist with the leeway for students to determine their own critical inquiries?
In other words– in your proposed class, who do you think will own the questions? I’d love to know.
Dina’s question has been sitting on me for a few days, possibly weeks, now, and it’s not that I’ve been ignoring it, but rather gathering some resources to include in my response. One of the things I found was a recent post by Dr. Tim Tyson called Value Chain 2.0. Dina had asked who was going to own the questions that these teachers were proposing as essential to the unit of study, the students or the teachers? Tyson’s article asks a much similar question, but he refers it to “who owns the learning in the classroom: the teachers or the students? It also raises questions for me in the area of responsibilities shared by students and teachers. A while back I wrote about being impressed with Alan November’s idea that teachers should “outsource” a lot of what they do to the students. Tyson’s point about who is doing the thinking work in the class goes to that–are you doing all of the thinking, or are the students?
What I am struggling with, and I think it’s a struggle that all teachers and administrators will face in the coming years, is convincing and working with teachers to learn alongside their students, to model their practice for them, to fail in front of them, and to resurrect themselves in front of them. The key point I have been trying to drive home with the teachers I am working with is that this class should be designed around topics that both you and the students want to learn about, and that this class has unbelievable potential for personal learning. That being said, I like the idea that the ownership of both the learning and the questions be distributed evenly between the teachers and students. Student-centered? Teacher-centered? How about learning-centered? or inquiry-centered?
As with anything we do in education, there needs to be some structural framework to all of this, and we are ramming up against that pretty hard as we write the curriculum. Questions of assessment strategies keep arising being that we are stripping out all of the focus on conventions (spelling, grammar, mechanics) and focusing solely on thinking process and ability to express ideas. We are also running into the issue of how to structure this class on a daily basis, how do we set this up technologically (please, any classroom bloggers out there, we need your methods and practices that have been successful!), and what do we do to convince students that writing and thinking are not drudgery?
Over the course of Thursday and Friday, I am working with a group of 75 teachers, 9 at a time, to evaluate the first year of our tablet PC pilot program for our high school. We asked them to sign up for some time slots to discuss how the tablet has helped them instructionally this year. On several levels, it’s teaching me quite a few things.
Firstly, the teachers were not eager to come together, especially this close to finals, to discuss how they use the tablet instructionally. That initially gave me pause, but then I thought about it from their perspective: these sessions are evaluative, and regardless of how we try to spin it, they feel like they are being evaluated. Over the course of this year, this group has received over ten hours of professional development directed at using the tablet instructionally and on creating a 24/7 learning environment, and in the session before these, they generated a list of characteristics that they would expect to see from teachers who use the tablet effectively to create “on-demand” learning environments for their students. So, at least they were responsible for planning the evaluation criteria, and that went a long way towards easing their trepidation.
Secondly, I am discovering that if we don’t have these types of share sessions more, we are doing a major disservice to our teachers and ultimately our students. On many different occasions within the sessions today, teachers who had always wanted to try something with their students heard from teachers who had done it. We heard about pitfalls and successes, ideas for next year, and modifications to ideas on the fly. In some cases, presentations turned into group thinkalouds for the presenter. Yes, there were pats on the back, but also some serious questions about practice and application. What I love most about some of the presenters was that they gave us great feedback about the viability of using tablets instead of laptops. We asked for unfiltered feedback, and we got it.
Perhaps the thing that has most stood out, and we are only halfway through the presentations, is one given by a high school English teacher in which she elaborated on all of the things she did this year, including blogging and digital storytelling, that did not work for her or her students. She finished her presentation with a demonstration of how Google Groups fit her needs exactly and how her students became so much more prolific in discussing novels when they were responding to each other on the group page. For me, she exemplifies the type of teacher and students we need to see more of: those that try and fail, try again and fail again, and continue to try until they find the solution that works for their problem. I made a point of telling her as she left how amazed I was at her willingness to take risks and that she should be proud of giving that model to her students.
I’ve been going through the comments left by the New Teachers the other day in their exit cards and I thought I would take the time to post them for review here. Regardless if they are read by a large audience or not, they are already proving useful to me. To continue along the “be the change you want to see in others” vein, the information we are getting from these comments is already shaping the format for next month’s meeting. What amazes me is how easy it was to elicit feedback that is useful to my planning. I remember being in the classroom searching for meaningful information to help me plan my lessons, and the last thing I thought of was asking the students what they thought and what they needed. But when I did, the results were exactly what I needed. I hope these are of some value to anyone who has been reading the last few posts.
“What I Learned:”
To have students come up with their own goals and feedback–triggers brain to work and students assess themselves
The information of timely feedback was very interesting. It makes sense, but it’s good to see the research to back it up.
I learned a lot of interesting ways to have students self-evaluate–mostly from talking to colleagues who are doing great things.
Students can effectively monitor their own progress and this form of feedback is strongly affective
Feedback should be corrective and provide discussion of why the response was correct or incorrect and what makes a response correct or incorrect.
There are some very creative and productive ways to modify my objectives and goals
Feedback should be immediate after a test
How important it is to have student input
How to incorporate several structures in a seamless way.
It is important to set flexible goals; kinesthetic learning is more fun
Student self-assessment is important and should be included in lesson planning.
Setting goals and objectives can be negative. Students sometimes miss the big picture.
There are many ways to set goals with students.
Feedback should be provided rapidly in various forms
Learned the RAFT technique
I learned that other subject areas have students self-assess in a similar manner. This is truly a universal method.
Goals are more effective when they are student driven.
I learned that there are many ways to get information across. I like incorporating the different styles of learning–kinesthetic, intrapersonal, verbal, doing group activities.
I have the students set goals and give feedback, but not consistently. In my class it could work to do it everyday. I could structure my class all around this if I remember.
Have students involved in setting the learning objectives.
The real importance of feedback and the timeliness of it.
Goals should not be too specific; allow students to personalize them.
To focus on making my goals attainable and not to forget that students should be involved in goal setting.
Give feedback in a timely manner
That goal setting in the kindergarten level is not much different than the High School level.
I learned that it is really important to provide students with goals for each lesson. I sometimes am not consistent when I do this and when I do remember, I know they get more out of the lesson. I also learned that timely feedback is important.
When given the opportunity, students can assess themselves and provide feedback to themselves directly. This is an example of becoming a mature person who is capable of self-reliance and growth. We should, as teachers, provide this often and encourage it in other situations.
I learned it was important to be more specific when providing feedback–target particular areas.
That goals need to be more personal.
Today I realized how important quick feedback is to students.
I learned how amazing it is that different grade levels and subject areas can use the same “modified” ideas to attain goals in student achievement.
The fluidity of groups to increase learning.
Importance of setting goals. Impact of immediate feedback.
I learned that it is really important to set specific goals in planning. I also learned that feedback is more influential in learning than I previously thought.
I found the idea of students creating their own learning objectives interesting. My curiosity is piqued about incorporating this into the novels I teach.
Corrective feedback has a “shelf-life” and if I wait too long, the lesson is lost.
Goals need to be more general and not too specific otherwise students get so focused on the specific goal that they miss out on the other learning.
New ways to include students in their learning and assessment.
The description of goal-setting is similar to backward design in the sense of general direction and fundamental understandings.
“What I would change:”
I think the structure of the lessons have improved already since September.
Wow, I liked actually trying the strategies rather than talking about them. I wonder if we could have some concrete examples of how teachers use goals and feedback.
Wow! I liked the flexibility of today’s lesson.
I liked the session–It would be helpful to debrief the reading so we understand your perspective on the readings.
The “Wow,” exercise was easy to do, but the “wonder,” part was hard to do about the same statement.
Walk and talk was difficult because you had to write, too!
I wonder if you could have let us in on your lesson plan. I had no idea what we were learning about until it was all over.
I wonder if my students feel the same way about doing group work?
Thought it was very well done. More geared toward the elementary level?
At first it was difficult to understand your goal for the lesson.
At this point–no questions. I really enjoyed going through each of the structures.
The activities were useful, but I think there were a bit too many. I wonder how this would have worked if we cut one or two out?
Very organized; I enjoyed it very much.
How can you get the students to strive for their goals and feedback when it is lacking choices and options. Loved being able to talk with other teachers–more personal info and helpful to grow.
So far this has been one of my favorite professional developments. I liked actively testing out the different strategies and giving and getting feedback to different groups. The activities made the learning more fun. Thanks!
We touched on it, but perhaps one or two more lessons and even some demos of differentiated instruction
I wonder if we could have new teacher meetings everyday. I learned a lot about goals and differentiated instruction.
I enjoyed moving around. I wonder if we could have established an overall goal at the beginning of the session.
I enjoyed today’s time. Although at times the activity seemed confusing or the guidelines for completing the activity seemed vague it all came together nice and clear in the end.
Spend more time outside.
Provide every teacher with a MacBook!
Practicing group activities was beneficial.
More time to develop lessons and activities using some of the concepts presented.
I feel a lot of the topics discussed would be more beneficial with some veteran teachers instead of all 1st year teachers–they know what works better.
I thought the first chart we had to fill out was confusing.
It’s good to talk to peers in different grade levels and subject areas to learn new ideas.
The first part of the meeting was confusing, but then it was really clear and helpful.
I enjoyed moving and talking/collaborating with other teachers. More of the same would be fantastic.
I did not feel that the instructional goals section had much value. The readings were widely interpreted and more guidance was needed.
Liked the way the lesson was guided and not completely structured. This allowed for more creativity and interaction between colleagues.
Make sure reading was done ahead of time and then we could recap.
I really liked this meeting because I am a big fan of cooperative learning. I learned a lot of different structures today that I will definitely implement in my classroom.
Enjoyed the co-op groups and actually met new people!
Being active is important to me. I learn so much more when i play a role in the lesson.
I liked the different activities we did today. It was interesting to meet with other teachers at different levels and subjects.
There were too many activities today. Hard to take it all in.
Each month, we meet with our first year teachers in the district to help them adjust to the expectations and the rigors of being in the classroom everyday. I have spoken about this before, but the program uses Marzano, et al’s, book Classroom Instruction That Works as a framework for teaching strategies that are research-based and effective. More than anything we do instructionally, the workshops always help the teachers come together to discuss success and failure in their classrooms; it provides them with a support structure in which they can reflect on their practice and share their uncertainties about what they are doing.
Last month we spent some time with cooperative learning structures and how to use them to help students take responsibility for their own learning through collaboration. The feedback we got from that meeting was really positive, so this month we decided to use the structures as a means to teach the next theme in the book: Goal-Setting and Feedback.
One of the most significant parts of my own learning this year has been to make every attempt I can to be a practitioner of what I teach. You have read it here before: “Be the change you want to see in others.” So when we were planning this month, Dan and I created the sessions entirely around learning structures and reaching as many intelligences as we could. Here is a list of what we did and the accompanying structures:
Clock Buddies: as soon as they walked in we handed them appointment clocks on paper and asked them to make appointments at 12 (with someone not in your building), 3 (with someone in your building), 6 (someone in your subject area), and 9 (random). We used these throughout the session to organize ourselves.
this got them moving and engaging and really set the tone for their activity level for the day.
RAFT: Sternberg created this concept based on his three intelligences. What we did is ask the teachers to write an entry on their blog using the idea of choosing a Role (object in their classroom, a student in their classroom, an observing administrator), an Audience (a parent, an administrator, a reluctant c colleague, etc.) a Format (classified ad, instruction manual, letter to the editor, observation narrative, etc.) and write about a Topic (why should we use cooperative learning structures in the classroom?).
immediately it got them thinking differently because we asked them to reflect via a different modality then they were used to. A little cognitive dissonance is a good thing!
Walk and Talk: They read a section of the book on their own, then we used our 12 o’clock buddies and asked each group to do some guided reflection using a graphic organizer. However, we asked them to do it while on a Walk and Talk. Since yesterday was a gorgeous day here in New Jersey, we allowed them to walk anywhere on the school grounds, inside or out, and asked them to discuss the reading and fill in the graphic organizer as they strolled.
“Wows and Wonders:” More reading was done independently and then we used our 3 o’clock buddies and paired the groups up to form larger groups. Since we were talking about goal setting, we asked each teacher to write a brief statement about how they use goal setting in their classroom. We then used a Round Robin format where they passed their statement to the left. Each person was responsible for writing a “Wow,” on the page and then passed it along to the next person in the circle until eventually they all received their own page back. We did the same again, only this time we asked each person to write a “Wonder,” statement on each other’s page.
This allowed everyone to get positive feedback, but also framed the constructive feedback in the form of a suggestive question, which works a lot better than a “you should have done this” statement.
Four Corners: After reading the feedback section in the book, we asked the teachers to pick one of the four research points made in the reading as the one that they would like to have a discussion about. Each corner of the room represented a different point. They moved to that corner and were asked to use a graphic organize to lead their discussion about that point.
Numbered Heads: as they discussed, we walked around and gave numbers to each group member. When it came time to wrap up, we picked numbers randomly and asked that that person tell us what their group discussed about a certain point within their topic.
this gave everyone time to add additional information to their organizer and hear points that pushed their own thinking.
Parking Lot: also as they were discussing feedback, Dan and I circled the room and distributed a blue and a yellow post-it not to everyone. We asked that on the yellow they tell us something about their own learning from the day’s session–what did you learn today? On the blue, we asked that they help us with our learning–what could we have done differently today? As they left the room for the day, they put the yellows on one wall and the blues on another.
We are in the process of sorting our notes out and going over the feedback (it was just yesterday), but I could already see that the teachers were engaged with one another at a level that we’d seen glimpses of before but couldn’t sustain. Also, on a selfish note, I did so much less talking, used so much less tech, and spent so much more time listening than I had in any of the the previous meetings.
If we are truly about changing the way our schools work, about reforming our practices to meet the needs of students, modeling said practices and methods should be the first order of business. Think of your next factulty meeting. How much will you move about the room to discuss an issue or concern or theory (trips to the food area don’t count)? Will the dialog be one-way, two-way, or circular and constant?
I realize that all meetings and sessions vary, and that decisions about presentation and lesson design are germane to the material itself, but when we can we should use what we know to produce lessons, meetings, professional development courses that we would want to sit through. Ask yourself, would you want to be in your class?
Barry Bachenheimer started this on a whim today, and tagged me with it to get it going. Most memes have very definitive rules for passing along or posting certain material, but Barry has given this one some really free “legs.” It’s description is simple:
National Public Radio does a piece called “This We Believe” where individuals share essays they have written that enumerates their philosophies. With this concept in mind in terms of curriculum ideas, (with apologies to the National Middle School Association and National Public Radio), “This I Believe”:
I believe that assessment and grades are not the same entity.
I believe the purpose of schools is still to “turn the lights on,” but not in the sense it meant for our parents; schools should never cease to inspire, challenge, and engage students in ideas and topics they might otherwise have missed on their own.
I believe the driving force behind curriculum should be the essential understandings behind the content.
I believe that we teach students first, and content second.
I believe in creating multiple outlets for students to demonstrate understanding. As long as we are committed to differentiating instruction, we must also be committed to differentiating the way we allow students to show us they’ve learned.
I believe that the best way for students to learn from our teachers is to see them as practitioners; model learning and curiosity for them in your own practice and you will soon see it in your students.
I believe our social technologies that allow for anyone to publish require that we create curriculum that maximizes the role of audience. Today’s students will grow up in a world where the content they create will be accessible by far more people than solely their classroom teachers.
I believe that when it comes to information overload, we need to educate our students on the difference between what is noise and what is symphony.
I believe in erring on the side of depth when writing curriculum, rather than breadth; fewer topics covered critically are far more meaningful than many topics covered in brief.
I believe that students in high school should have the same enthusiasm for learning that students in 3rd grade do.
So, now for the requisite tagging part. To continue this meme, I tag:
With all credit to Bill Ferriter who posted a link to his Pageflakes page that he uses with his students, I created this iGoogle Page to begin to flesh out an idea I have for a writing class that I am thinking about for a future pet project.
Inspired by all of the work Justin and Dennis, Jeff, and Kim have done in Asia, as well as a host of the other wonderful people in my network, I’ve decided to begin to craft the vision of what I think a writing class should look like in the grade 6-12 setting. Here is my short list of adjectives/descriptive phrases for what it should look like:
Connected: our students and their writing should be done in conjunction with some other, larger project that connects them to other classrooms and work being done in their community or another community somewhere in the world.
Reflective: our teachers should be striving to teach their students to understand how they are learning, not just what they are learning. By asking them to discuss their learning and their progress, failures, and processes, we allow them the freedom to think out loud and open their thinking to the world.
Archival/Portfolio-driven: students need to be shown visual representations of their improvement, and shown often. Being able to pull out writing from September to view in June and show growth and depth will change the way a student looks at their writing.
Driven by student-interest: I keep hearing about student apathy from the teachers I work with. I want it to stop, and I want to know how you can drive student interest through the roof. Tim Tyson made Mabry Middle School “Irresistible;” why can’t I?
Public: Hearing Chris talk about how SLA was a walled garden, yet so full of connections made me think hard about my definition of audience. Yes, I would like our students writing to be global, but I would also like it to be intensely local as well. Regardless of where it’s seen, I know it needs to be seen. Students need audience in order to shape their voice.
Vibrant: I didn’t grab onto writing for myself until I got to college, and many people don’t ever or won’t ever. Clay speaks often about taking his high school students into the fray by helping them find their writerly voice. It’s difficult, it’s going to be marred by failures, but I want these students to find the spark, the one piece that generates interest–the one that keeps them coming back to the page to try again.
I am in the early stages of creating this class, but it’s exciting to do this. My appeal to all out there who might come across this is simple: what would you include in a writing class that spans all academic disciplines in its content?
Technology is in a constant state of evolution and change. Access speeds,hardware, software, and computer capabilities all evolve and improve ona monthly basis….Is it not time that we create a curriculum model that understands this fact and works with it rather than tries to control it?
When I hear thoughts like that one, and like this one here:
Instead of asking the question “What technology skills must a student have to face in the 21st century?” should we not be asking “What thinking and literacy skills must a student have to face the 21st century?” These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather aim to provide students with the thinking skills and thus the opportunities to succeed no matter what their futures hold.”
I get excited that minds like these are helping to shape policy for schools somewhere in the world; the fact that it is halfway around the world is a bit unfortunate for my immediate needs, but in this ever-shrinking world, one of the graduates from that school may turn out to play a major role in my life at some point, so I am warmed by their progressive ideas.
They go further and define some essential questions, a la McTighe and Wiggins to really spell out their purpose:
From this, which would have wholly consumed me, I found myself searching for some more research on teaching thinking the thought process. Now, a few months ago, Harter and Medved would have been enough for me, but things have changed, and the world of technology has shrunken for me, so to speak. In dealing with larger numbers of teachers, I have come to realize more than ever that there use of technology has less to do with good teaching than I thought or had experienced before. If you are not convinced of this, go read the T.C. Williams debacle and its various off-shoots.
In my search for more information, I came across Marion Brady’s article in Educational Leadership “Cover the Material–Or Teach Students to Think?” in which he argues that our obsession with standardized testing is more than just irrelevant, it’s downright criminal to the upcoming generations. One of my favorite discussions in the article deals with the passing along of information from one generation to the next, which Brady describes as language of allusion, the information that allows societies to share complicated information in only a few words for the purpose of sending
students on their way with meaning attached to thousands of ideas like
those, efficient, society-sustaining dialogue is possible.
In most cases we often argue for the need for schools to socialize our children, and, while this need is apparent and real, it may be less necessary for our students to learn the language of allusion of a world whose solution sets don’t serve the future.
Now before I get all future-drunk here, the thinking and the teaching of thinking is what is critical in our schools today. Time is always an issue, as is adherence to state standards when teaching material, but I like what Brady points out near the end of the article: that teaching these skills is not as difficult as we make it out to be. Look locally. As near as your own school environment, opportunities for teaching thinking skills that draw upon the need to transfer the “” skills they have memorized and assimilated from textbooks, abound and present themselves as legitimate modes of inquiry. Some examples:
For example, at the middle or high school level, teachers can pose
myriad school-focused questions related to every field of study: What
kinds of energy power the school? How are these energy sources created
and measured? At what cost to taxpayers? At what cost to the
environment? What kind of waste does the school produce? Where does it
go and how is it processed? What could be done to decrease the school’s
carbon footprint?
Getting back to the ideas of Harter/Medved/Wiggins/McTighe, huge questions that cause learners, whether they be teacher or student, to draw upon their knowledge or ability to acquire necessary knowledge, are key. However, as Brady points out, their location geographically is irrelevant.
“In order to think outside the box, you need to know what is in the box.”
Change is a loaded word. It strikes fear into the hearts of even the most secure of professionals. In looking at the idea of change, I see it as coming from one of two directions: either top-down, where those in charge of your program, your superintendent, building administrator, or your supervisor bring it about, or bottom-up, also termed “organic, or “grass-roots,” where change comes from the classrooms and spreads throughout a school building or district based on the practices of teachers and the work of students.
What I am seeing
When I started the process if looking at pedagogy rather than looking at tools as ways to help engage students, the world of technology became small. Granted, I really began this process in earnest about 5 months ago, so the sample size here is small, but nonetheless, what I see is what Chris Lehmann so aptly termed in his session at EduCon: “It’s not the product, it’s the process.” Learning experience matters infinitely more than the end result. Focusing on that process rather than the final paper or diorama or wiki is a difficult thing to do when the tools that take us there are so unbelievably slick.
Our situation in regards to change
Our process of change that is occurring has been and continues to be top-down, where we as administrators and tech coordinators are introducing teachers to tools and pedagogies that are transformative and engaging, but we are relying on their trust and their willingness to open themselves to developing expertise. How well will this continue to work? It remains to be seen whether or not it is a model for systemic change with our staff. We are working within 5 buildings, each with varying levels of both adoption and readiness. When that is the case, your strategy involves as much trust-building as it does introduction to new ideas. We have worked hard on that, but there are elements that are lacking in our design:
overarching curricular goals that are written directly into our curriculum plans at the start. Technology and the pedagogy to use it transformatively is often left out of that process.
teacher’s as vocal advocates for change a building-level plan for helping teachers teach with these adapted methodologies (notice I said adapted methodologies because we are not re-inventing the wheel here; the methods we advocate are still the same we have been touting for years: differentiating, cooperative learning, co-teaching, questioning skills, etc. Only now we are truly elevating their effectiveness through the use of social, collaborative and expressive technologies.)
An environment that allows teachers to be free from the fear of failure and it’s supposed administrative repercussions. If we expect our students to learn, unlearn, and re-learn, then we must give our teachers the freedom to create, experiment and play with content and its delivery to students.
I sat in Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez’s session about creating lasting change within a school district using the Future Search Process, and I remember thinking about all the ideas that were flying about the room in terms of gathering the necessary parties needed for creating change. The one that keeps sticking with me is the reference they made to something called “The Burning Platform,” whereby an individual is placed in a situation (a burning oil platform) where they must choose either certain death (staying on the platform) or the likelihood of death (jumping into the water). The analogy to education is that there is a situation whereby the outcome of staying still is obvious: student apathy and loss of engagement, but the outcome of changing and moving is less obvious but possibly a salvation.
I am looking at a situation where I don’t know if teachers understand that the platform is burning. They don’t know whether to jump, stay still, or get marshmallows. I want to create a community that is not afraid of change, that feels like they have a stake in the change process, and is willing to help create that change even if makes their role in the classroom change to one that is better capable of creating methods to solve rather than providing answers.
If you could create a class, perhaps one that exists in the schools you are all talking about at Clay’s post, what it would be structured like?
I ask this for a very specific reason: we are creating new classes and we’d love to push the envelope a little and create them based on the ideas of the 21st Century Collaborative. We want this:
Among the other things that my Uncle Bill and I talked about was the need for everyone involved in changing processes within their organization to have a “territory,” or in our case, some idea that you own that is yours undeniably. He spoke about looking at a situation from a process redesign perspective and saying: this is mine, and you may not enter it unless it is on my terms. Sounded intimidating as I listened, but I let it marinate for a few days.
Education, unlike the corporate world, has no financial interest in changing or upgrading, but rather our interest comes from that age-old desire to give our students the best opportunity to learn. It is the job of the corporate change agent to see the change, initiate it, and weed out the barriers to it, whether they be people or logistical, or both. Cold.
I’ve spent the better part of the last few days thinking about the translation to education. Can you take that approach? I think it has to be modified to reflect that belief that change has no extrinsic reward. The change agent in education will spend as much time building community as he or she will introducing ideas. Education exists as both an art and a science, something we all learned in our induction programs, I am sure. Being so dichotomous, both aspects must be represented in your plan for change. So you can have your ideas, but those entrenched in the positions who will practice what you prescribe, teachers, must be able to identify with what you are attempting to change and contribute to it. Warmer?
This has my attention. Bring your ideas to the table, own them and flesh them out, but be aware of how they are interpreted; don’t let them be modified in practice to the point that they are unrecognizable. Reading over the last few days, I came across Bob Sprankle’s post at TechLearning in which he spoke about NetDay Survey’s that he conducted in his district, which were aimed at assessing student attitudes about technology and learning. Towards the end of his post, he wrote the following:
At the Christa McAuliffe Conference, Dr. Tim Tysontalked about the idea of “childhood” being a relatively new concept; that children used to have very little time for “play” due to demands of helping the family survive. In the past, children were first and foremost expected to make a contribution and Tyson wonders if some of the problems that ail our children these days are due to the absence of attending to this contribution need. He asks the question: how old does someone need to be before they can make a contribution? Tyson calls for allowing students to make significant contributions now rather than later in life.
He goes on later to make it more formulaic
Safety + Inclusion + Meaningful Contribution + Play = Success for Our Students.
This is a plan for change, I thought immediately. This simple formula could be integrated into any curriculum or classroom implementation plan. This is the beginning of my “territory.”
I can think of a few teachers (Maybe 4 out of the 30 or so that I had) who inspired me, made me think, and instilled a love of what they loved. It had nothing to do with technology, but their passion for what they taught, authentic learning, and most importantly, pushing me to do something that I wouldn;t necessarily done on my own at that age.
I see that as one of the purposes of school that can;t be accomplished online or by yourself: doing things that at age 15 that I would never do on my own, but had some benefit as an adult. Examples: reading Chaucer, learning about mitochondria, perfecting a golf swing, working with special needs kids, studying Melville, or analyzing art.
Pulling this all together, here’s the next shift I’d like to see in my practice: design curriculum that pushes students to solve actual problems through creation and play and offer meaningful results for their efforts. The idea that we ask students to do things they normally wouldn’t do is not new, as Barry shows through his comment, so I would like to try to design a curriculum or tweak an existing one to reflect all requisite standards, but also enable teachers and students to design meaningful solutions to problems, or create useful and necessary materials. Do you use anticipatory sets? Why not assign students to create them in advance? Do you create study guides for big exams? Let the students create their own on a wiki that you can co-edit. In addition to reading Chaucer and studying mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell, by the way), we could have them produce content, either digitally or traditionally, that demonstrates to a larger audience that they have understood the concepts involved, and that they have transferred that learning to a medium that all can interpret and enjoy. Give them, as Sprankle said via Tim Tyson’s meaning, a responsibility that is tangible.
I had a great Christmas. I realized a few things, saw my son explode with joy over the least likely gift, spent some quiet time with my wife, and had one of the most meaningful and perfectly timed conversations with my uncle.
Everyone should have an Uncle Bill like mine. He was an executive for various corporations for over 30 years, specializing in systems, which, during his time, meant that he was in charge of initiating change in process design for production and data analysis. He was the guy who brought computers to your parent’s or grandparent’s office and redesigned their jobs.
On Christmas day, after everyone had left the house, we sat down while my daughter snored on my chest, and we talked about change, and why it doesn’t make great bedfellows with workplace harmony. Just some light holiday banter, right?
That conversation, coupled withwhatI’vebeenreadinglately have pointed me towards some new ideas, ideas that I am going to use the next few days of quiet time to figure out.
Last week, Barry Bachenheimer, a fellow New Jerseyan, came to some realizations after thinking about professional development in his district. His aptly titled post, “Everything You Know is Wrong,” expressed a desire that we are going about helping our students and teachers in the wrong way if we offer them traditional methods to learn and grow. If you have given a workshop lately, what was expected of you by your audience? What did you deliver? For me, I have tried to move away from “sit and get,” and more towards “here is what you can do, here is the way to get started.” Lowered attendance and more requests for “specific activities we can take with us” have given me pause about the state of where we are professionally.
Barry advocates an idea, and I will gladly catch that grenade and chuck it farther:
For many teachers who are late adapters of technology and whom it is a struggle to get them to use digital tools to foster these ideas, we shouldn’t bother. I would argue it might be more important for them to effectively develop critical thinking, cooperative learning, and analysis skills for their students with paper and chalk rather than do it marginally with a SMART Board and a laptop.
Uncle Bill and I spoke about where your change comes from, who you target and who you tacitly neglect in the interest of the greater good. In an era where we are so focused on time, do we have it to spend on those that are not willing to accept change? I am more inclined to agree with Clay Burell, in his comment on Barry’s post:
When I look back, I don’t see much to be proud of in education over the last decades. But maybe that’s just my own student experience speaking.
My problem is, I don’t see change happening quickly either. I don’t like the view behind or ahead.
Where was the engagement in my education? Identifying with Clay’s student experience, the engagement came when I was with a teacher who cared about their craft to push boundaries and ask me to think originally, as scary as that was at the time. Do educators who don’t push themselves to grow professionally, at least a little, have that ability to reach students?
While we sat and talked about resistance to change and how my role will be defined, Uncle Bill gave me this advice: “Your job is to make it better for those who are yet to be in your charge, not to make it acceptable for those currently in your charge.”
As believers in educational change, who are we working for? The students and teachers of today, or the students and teachers of tomorrow?
Just as I am entering full-on anxiety mode, along comes Tracy Weeks’s post at LeaderTalk. Tomorrow is my official start date as Director of Curriculum for Humanities. Notice I capitalized that. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job title that needed to be capitalized before.
I’ve been thinking about what to expect as I make this transition, and I will admit, there is a lot of apprehension in changing roles; I’ve never known a job that was as diverse and challenging as the one I am leaving. What this next one holds, I don’t fully know, but the glimpses I have seen in the last few days show me that the stakes are higher, the responsibilities greater, and challenges more complex than any I have ever known. I’ve never been one to shy away from things that are difficult, and I have to say I am excited for the challenge.
Things do worry me, though. For example, the idea of change has been on that I’ve bandied about on this blog for a while now. How do you effectively institute it without alienating those that fear it most? And several of us have spoken in the past that people in the field of education have an odd relationship with change. For the most part, we see it as arbitrary, and often hitched to political agenda.
What I learned so well from being immersed in, for lack of a better term, “all things 2.0″ over the last year and a half, is that this change we immersed in did not come as a mandate from some overarching political edict. Rather, just the opposite. It has come from the needs of our students, and the desires of some extremely talented teachers who want to reach them with undeniably meaningful and timely lessons using sound pedagogy combined with new tools.
So I look at tomorrow morning with apprehension, but also renewed excitement, as I will take with me the skill set that I have honed up until this point in my career. Tracy spoke of a few things that I really liked, and plan to carry over in some way to my new role:
Being the Change Tracy talks about using tools with people rather than just showing or telling about the tools. This idea is one I plan to implement as I will be involved in so many projects and groups and committees that keeping track of them will be daunting. Putting my theory into practice by using a wiki for organization, or really trying Google Groups to keep members up to speed will show how willing I am to push the “change” agenda forward, and do so with results in my own practice.
Leading and Learning by Example One of the greatest by-products of my time as technology coordinator was how closely I was able to examine my own learning. The outcome of that introspection has helped me see the kinds of things that Will Richardson has been talking about for quite a while: teachers and administrators need to look at how they learn, just as they need to look at how their students learn. Getting teachers and administrators to come together to discuss how professional development is changing is a goal of mine, one that I have begun on our district blog, Tech Dossier, but would like to see spill over into what Tracy calls “Lunch n’ Learns.” When you get administrators and the teachers that work with them to the same table to discuss how things are changing, or the ideas that they have for working with students, or how to expand the walls of the classroom (or better, knock them down completely), you get honest change, and you get hope.
We’ll see how this goes. I know this is going to be transformative, and that my life will change dramatically as of tomorrow morning, but this is the right move. This is the direction my head has been going for a while anyway. Wish me luck.
Explaining the significance of my stumbling onto iTunes University this weekend to my wife was pretty hilarious. She loves me and tolerates me, but it must have been too much for her to hear me signaling the end of the traditional college education as being upon us. We had a good laugh as I regaled her with tales of how much money we would save on the kids’ college education. I mean, how much does 30GB iPod cost? Certainly much less than the loans I am still paying off.
iTunes University is a collection of podcasts and vodcasts created by university professors and made available for free. Free university lectures on topics that I can choose from? Unbelievable. This is where it begins to get interesting for me. I have always wanted to design my own course of study, and this begins to allow me to do that. Add this to the idea of a personal learning environment and I can begin to see how it is completely possible to be the driver, even more so than we can be now.
We are equipping some of our teachers with tablet PC’s and wireless projectors next year, and in designing the things that I think they will need next year, this fits really well. I love that they can break from what they might have done in the past, i.e. show a movie, and break out Professor so-and-so from Vanderbilt who is discussing the very same topic they are learning about, but has a different spin, or better resources. Powerful.
Yesterday, most of the questions I was generating were in regard to how to actually create the content for the classes offered. Today’s session will deal mainly with curriculum design and instructional strategies. What I am looking for is what type of experience students are having in this environment. When a student decides to take an online course, what will they be doing with other students? Will they collaborate, and if so, how? When I think about 21st Century skills, and creating students capable of recognizing patterns and being empathetic, I wonder about the sometimes isolating nature of the online world.
Course Development
* every course has a motif o engagement is begun here. o the example being given here is Comprehensive Math for 6th grade where the class is built around a zoo motif. The student is assuming the role of the zookeeper, and will use the math skills he or she learns to successfully maintain a zoo. * When students remain the center of the class, success is inevitable o students benefit, teachers benefit, school benefits. * Courses are developed using a multiple intelligence modality. Learning styles are targeted through varied course content and varied choices for student output. o allows students to feel success regardless of their talents. * Students can show mastery in a variety of ways
Quote from the main course screen: “instructors have access to all areas of the student account. Your email account is for school use only.” Science might be a problem–how do you do labs? Look and Feel
* material in the course, the actual pages, are chunked for the students, so that there is limited scrolling. * courses mirror the diverse population. * Readability levels o chunks of contents o web links o other resources o average o courses do not use materials that dip too far below grade level, or too far above grade level * Writing o personal reflection o Upper level Bloom’s o Comparable to lesson * These two components appeal to both ends of the spectrum.
Some notes from how the course looks as you enter it:
* The first thing I noticed is that the interface is really basic, with not a lot of busy-ness on the screen. * Also, the students must decide at what pace they will proceed. When they decide this, they must write the instructor with a rationale for their pace choice. Accelerated is 18 weeks, Traditional is 34 weeks, or Extended, where the pace is decided on by the student and teacher together. * The autograde function is interesting in that you can design assessments to include questions that are graded by the LMS, but also have on that same assessment an essay or short-answer portion that is sent to the teacher for grading. * What these course will always need is rich web content and collaboration. If the students could also create course content that other students use, that adds another huge element to this. * Could we design a course around an MMORG? I am thinking of Civilizations here, where the students are required to use the game as an integral part of learning ancient civilizations, in addition to other content from a more traditional sense.
Standards and alignment
* must align to state, national and now world standards * specific to each state * if designed well, courses and lessons will blend the standards together seamlessly and fluidly o standards–objective–lesson–assessment
Interactivity, Multi-Media, Technology
The nature of an online school lends itself to using multi-media as a means to create content, whether teacher-created or student-created. The rise of things like Second Life where several members of the class could meet in a quasi-physical way adds another level of meaning to this.
* How to allow them to use Web 2.0 technologies * Can we incorporate these into our classes online? o necessary and obvious
Assessment
* autograde- students submit a quiz online that is graded immediately * written * oral assessment * project * self-assessment
What are some of the collaborative activities that are included in the assessments?
* classmates- interaction through discussion boards o students are given an option sometimes through the assessment piece–individual or collaborative o this is in beta right now. o students have the ability to reach outside of the classroom and connect * family * community- students can work with their communities for school projects
21st Century Skills
* Life skills- how to collaborate and how to interact * core subjects * learning and thinking skills * internet and medial literacy- how to detect credibility online and how to assess what constitutes a good source. * 21st Century Content
Resources
* web links * guided web activities * subscriptions * software
In late March, Vicki Davis posted on whether or not it was school’s responsibility to prepare the students for the outside world. Her post was in response to a quote found on Dangerously Irrelevant made by a school administrator which went something like this:
the school district is legally obligated to protect our students from the outside. It is not legally obligated to prepare them for the outside.
Her stance, one that showed moral obligation to prepare rather than legal obligation, was well echoed in the comments on both her post and on Scott’s. And, in my opinion, it should have been. This idea that just because we block sites in school, and just because we don’t use certain mediums within the classroom, that students will not have access to them and will inherently use them ethically is obscene. We need to create these “teachable moments” in a controlled and observed atmosphere, so that by example we can teach ethical internet conduct.
By inviting students to create and share digital stories about Oklahoma history with others in our state and around the world, we’re working to help equip students with the skills they’ll need for the 21st century. Digital learners don’t just need TECHNICAL skills, however, they also need to develop (THROUGH PRACTICE, not just theoretical classroom discussions) ethical decision making skills.
As we design our curriculum to include 2.0 technologies, especially those with collaborative, social, and synthesis-oriented aspects, we have to include some time for the demonstration and discussion of acceptable uses, as well as the implications for unacceptable uses. This case that Wes brings up here is one that would gain immediate traction in any high school American History, government or civics class because of its Constitutional and societal issues. However, when that curriculum was designed, was there ample time given to consideration of these type issues? Probably not. That does not preclude the discussion, but will there be time allotted for it? Going forward, the role of the technology integration specialist, or tech coordinator should increasingly be one of consultant in curriculum planning. Here is where a sizable chunk of the work needs to be done, and the classroom integration can occur with the proper discourse included.
The idea of preparing students for the outside world, for making them contributing members of this democracy, needs to be fleshed out in the philosophy of a district. Very basic questions like “What types of students do we want walking our halls today, tomorrow and in ten years?” do not have simple answers, but they are most definitely the right questions to be asking of your stakeholders.
Anyone for a think aloud? A lot of discussion, as much as I could glean from the limited access I have had over the last few weeks, has centered on the question that David Warlick originally asked:
“Are computer applications something that should be taught in a class, or something that should be learned by the students, independent of a class curriculum?“
This couldn’t come at a more appropriate time for me because I recently began meeting with our computer applications teacher and with the curriculum director for our district There is a push to redesign the class from both sides. But where do we go? I responded on David’s blog with the following:
Speaking from a personal standpoint, I would like to see a computer applications class taught, but not from a Microsoft Office standpoint. …Why not use the Comp Apps class to introduce the students to some of the great data mashups out there, or some of the online office suites that this generation might see in their work experiences? Instead of doing away with it, we should use it as a vehicle for change, to teach problem solving skills as they pertain to choosing the best application for a specific endeavor. In this era of unknown problems and uncertain solutions, demonstrating how to find the right app will be a useful skill.
But I’ll take it one step further. We have to be careful about teaching applications, because applications change. Let’s teach tech literacy, and teach kids to do graphic manipulation where Photoshop is a tool, not an end… we need to teach kids to use these tools, yes, but we need to make sure the kids understand that the specific tool is merely a means to an end, and merely one means to that end.
From my perspective, we look at this class as part of the business department, where the focus is on giving students the necessary skills to perform successfully in a business environment. For the last decade or so, the requisite skills barely deviated from the Microsoft Office suite. I can see this radically changing over the course of our students careers, from a desktop suite to an online, moveable, scaleable, and customizable platform in the form of OpenOffice, Zoho, Zimbra, or Coventi. In looking at these few examples over the last couple of days, what strikes me immediately is the Read/Write aspect of them that is missing currently from our Computer Applications curriculum.
My incomplete reading of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat has fortunately given me some insight into the nature of what we may see emerging as the future of work flow in the 21st Century: a project started in San Luis Obispo may be edited by a worker in San Antonio, signed off by a manager from his living room in San Sebastian and sent to printing in Macau. This idea is better stated by David Williamson Shaffer, via Padraig Nash at Epistemic Games
The United States is outsourcing standardized jobs, and will continue to send them overseas until, in the very near future, the only good jobs left will be for people who can do innovative and creative work. Yet in the face of this dramatic economic change, our schools have been spending more time on basic skills for standardized tests and less time teaching children to solve challenging problems and think in innovative ways.
What about giving the students the ability to see many applications then be given a problem, or series of problems and ask them to choose their application to solve the problem? At Science Leadership Academy, they attack the problem by coordinating their computer applications class with their subject area needs, so if the English department needs the students to know certain applications by a certain date, the computer applications teacher takes care of that. This could be my answer.
Lastly, I stumbled upon this “Unknown Quote” recently and I can’t reconcile it. Does this fit our schools?
“School is the place where kids come to watch teachers work.”
Her first post, which is the bottom image, shows how I view the traditional summer reading process, but the second one shows how her district is toying with the idea that there has to be something more to what the students do with the text; we have to allow them to read together. In his 
Breen states that
” we are going to hit some rough spots, from both students who are not used to being confused or stressed about school, and their parents who haven’t seen their child struggle with school before. As always, we will deal with those situations as they arise.
That being said, I often feel like I would like to sink my teeth into some hugely collaborative project, or even just be associated with one. There’s been a 
