The Embedded Curriculum

(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.

Is there a solution right before us?

Warning: somewhat of a tech bend to this post.

Last week, while I was on vacation we had a huge server meltdown.  While I am not an IT guy, I do understand some of the implications of what that means.  For example, our student information system (a great little product called Genesis), our wireless Internet radios, our Moodle courses, and many of our other essential services experienced outages that slowed workplace productivity to a crawl.  While it was a great week to be on vacation, it did bring to light some very glaring issues.

Jim Moulton, over at The Future of Education is Here, writes about a March article in eSchoolnews that cited:

Only 31 percent of respondents said their districts have enough IT staff to satisfy their needs; that’s up only marginally from 27 percent in last year’s survey. And 55 percent of those polled–the same percentage as last year–said they spend more than half their time reacting to technical problems, instead of working proactively on long-range planning and projects.

IT staffs in schools are traditionally understaffed.  In most districts I’ve been in, the ratios between number of IT staff and machines to service, not to mention servers and systems, is outrageous.  When issues like the one we ran into last week occur, an overworked staff becomes increasingly stressed.

Last October at TechForum Northeast, I was fortunate enough to sit on a panel with David Warlick in which we discussed some hurdles to implementation of new thinking in schools.  One teacher from the audience lamented, much as Jim did in his post, that the tech staff in his building are guarded and unwilling to allow for teachers to experiment with open-source technologies for fear of corruption to the network.  If, this audience member suggested, teachers are expected to push the limit on what they can have students achieving in the classroom, should they be constrained by an IT staff that does not have the best interest of the students in mind?

It’s an interesting dichotomy, the students v. IT staff one, isn’t it?  On the one hand we have students who are growing up in a world where 11-year olds make huge profits by designing iPhone apps, and on the other we have them working in school environments that can’t give them access to the types of tools that would let them create such apps.

At the tale end of Jim’s post, he presents a solution, one that I have heard via Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez in the past: give the students the ability to aid the IT department.  We are not talking giving them access to the firewall, or the major components of the infrastructure, but rather allow them to handle basic repairs, quick imaging and system setups so that the IT staff can begin doing some of their own imaginative work.

Be sure to check out her list of GenYes Schools where this solution is actually in place.

And Sometimes We Feel Like This…

I have not been a contributor to any of those whom I rely on for inspiration in quite some time.  This space, twitter, any of the Ning’s I belong to–all of them have been foreign to me.  While a good many of the teachers who find it difficult to contribute during the year have truly blossomed (I have been reading) in their comments and reflections during these summer months, there hasn’t been much for me to say.  Or, I haven’t had the motivation or the open thinking space in my days to make the effort.

See, I’ve reached a saturation point of sorts that I have been ignoring for a few weeks.  My influx of information is at an all-time high; more resources, conversations, and ideas come at me on a daily basis than I ever thought possible when I started down this road a few years back, but my ability to handle them has not kept up.  I need some pruning, and, actually, I need some tips on how to handle this overload.

Gasp.

A short time ago, I would have scoffed at the notion that I needed to figure out a way to handle all of the information coming my way.  RSS, Diigo, social networks, etc. was a rush.  Every day, sometimes multiple times a day I would gather the newest round of articles, links, quotes, or whatever my manual trolling brought in.  Not so any more.  I’ll admit it, I can’t keep up.  There are too many of you now that have great ideas.

So I ask, what is the next level?  I feel like I’ve just worked so hard to attain access to the Dragon Scroll, yet I don’t have enough inner knowledge to understand its message.  Can anyone point me to resources that attack this next level of information mastery?  Who has great systems in place for being discretionary about information?

Do Something That’s Worth It.

From Jim Moulton over at The Future of Education:

I think Cisco is on target with their ad campaign that celebrates the human network. I was reminded of just how important the people side of things is when I had the opportunity to sit next to  Walt Ratterman on a recent flight from Atlanta to Portland, OR. He is the power behind SunEnergy Power International, described this way on its web site: “SEPI [as a 501(c)(3)]develops and implements humanitarian renewable energy projects in remote, rural parts of the world. It is the mission of SunEnergy Power International to promote an increased quality of life in remote, rural regions of the world through the use of renewable energy.”

He was on his way home from Senegal where he had been working with local folks to install solar power generating equipment for schools across that nation. Beyond the details, I met a man who has great technical skills and knowledge.  In and of itself, the technical conversation around solar was interesting. But it was what he was doing with his knowledge and skills to help real people do real things that made his story so powerfully fascinating.

So – how are learners using their knowledge and skills where you and yours live and learn?  I sure hope it is for more than getting good scores on tests and passing from grade to grade. They need to do more, and the world needs them to do more.

The emphasis is mine.  I really like Jim’s thinking, and it dovetails nicely with the thinking that I have been doing lately on the types of things we should be learning and teaching with our students.  It’s key here, too, that Jim mentions the brilliance of this man within his solitary discipline, but then expands upon it by showing that it’s simply not enough to just be good at that.

The question he asks is perhaps the most important idea driving me right now.

Service Learning is Different from Community Service

Maurice Elias’ short piece on service learning in Edutopia had been sitting as an open tab just staring at me for about a week now.  It’s common practice for me to dump all open tabs at the end of a day just as a means of starting fresh for the next day.  However, each day I would run through the tabs, dumping many of the grand ideas in hyperlink form culled from the network, and make decisions about what was worth my time, and this one would stick.  I just couldn’t dump it.

Today I decided to give it a real once over to see if it there was anything within it I could pull together for our Connections teachers.  Last year, as I have noted previously, the idea that we allowed them to push student thinking to action led them into projects that had real-world implications: refugees in Darfur, analysis of the market fluctuations and their affect on the global economy, carbon footprint, and many more.  What struck me most about the work the students chose to do was the desire they showed in wanting to do more than just read and write about the causes they studied; they wanted to contribute.

Elias points to a few studies that show the academic benefits of service learning, and hints at the fact there may not be definite academic measures (in  the form of the number of  A’s, B’s, and C’s received by students who participated in service learning projects being higher than those who did not), but there are other indicators that are reliable:

Further evidence comes from the work of Andrew Furco, who compared high school students who engaged in service learning with peers who either performed community service or participated in no service. The service-learning group scored higher on all academic measures — based on a rubric of academic goals — and engaged in ongoing reflective opportunities.

One line that struck me was that he calls out the dichotomy that exists between what people call community service and actual service learning:

a plain distinction needs to be made between community service and service learning. When youth engage in service learning, it involves more than arriving at a soup kitchen or a park and serving food or cleaning up. It begins with preparation and learning about the particular problem area or context the service experience will address and, ideally, is linked to academic subject matter being studied.

One piece that I noticed this year was that our students, although truly engaged in the work they were doing, remained disconnected from the people they were helping.  Often was raised, a check was written, and off both parties went in their separate ways.  Elias points to these elements that as teachers we must inherently design into these service learning projects:

• direct collaboration with the recipients of the service
• should be genuine and personally meaningful
• generating emotional consequences that can build empathy and challenge preexisting ideas and values.

That last piece there is one that I’ve harped on before–the need for a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance infused in all that we do.  I’ve seen great teachers do this with students and the effect is profound.  Let’s build the relationships between students and community so that rather than just a service relationship, we foster one that is of mutual respect and obligation.  Too often our community service projects end the moment we are no longer physically bound to the cause, but if we can begin to create emotional ties to projects, that will go a long way towards creating the democracy we all want.

Please be sure to check out Maurice Elias’ article.  He has linked to some excellent documents surrounding the creation of service learning projects in schools.

Picasso’s Guernica

I have been spending so much time with the art teachers in my district lately putting together their curriculum, and beyond the fact that my vocabulary is increasing exponentially (terms like gesso, tragacanth, brayer, and fresco are now commonplace for me), it’s been an incredible insight into a very different view of education.  They differentiate by default, and the rest of us struggle to change to it.

In many ways, I am beginning to see the realities of what people like Daniel Pink and Sir Ken Robinson keep talking about.  Art is essential to how we behave as citizens and as society.

So when Marcy Webb posted this the other day, I had to put it up here too.

The Length of Our Reach

The more powerful our reach, the more important the question.

Since I came to education a while after she made huge headlines in the 1990’s, I didn’t know much about Liz Coleman and the work she had done at Bennigton College.  When the title of her TED Talk came up on my iTunes account today, I didn’t truly understand the history behind the iTunes generated titling “Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education.”  What followed was another one of those serendipitous moments that I hope will begin to shape what I help create over the next few years.

Coleman in the 1990’s was viewed in many ways as Michelle Rhee is now, only at the college level.  When she assumed the post of President of Bennington College, she immediately began the abolition of tenure, elimination of departments, and the firing of many professors.  Her aim was to radically reshape how liberal arts education functions.  As I look at various writings that have come my way, some from enlightened folk like Ryan Bretag, whose statements of belief about curriculum and supervision are so right on the money I want to steal them outright and call them my own, and some from the minds that are greatly influencing the direction that the state of New Jersey is heading in, I hear what Coleman talks about as being equivalent to auditory gold.

There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.

A while back, I read this Wall Street Journal article by Mark Taylor.  Coupling the ideas within that article about the over-specialization of academic disciplines with the ideas that Coleman has put into practice leads me to one conclusion: I want to design curriculum that is centered around big problems and the search for those solutions.  While I don’t know how that looks yet, in a public high school setting, I see it as being an undercurrent for students to study: a humanities curriculum that allows them to focus on problems within one specific area, but attacked from the perspective of several disciplines.   Solving suburban planning through good design.  The politics of environmental activism.  The science and mathematics of the credit crisis.  The affect of global food production on the economy and the environment.  The language and rhetoric of mass media.

The problem with this, as I see it, is not falling into the trap of seeing how we can do this in the existing model.  I want teachers to begin seeing themselves not as English, history, science, or math teachers, but rather as leaders of thought, of solution, and of growth.  The end result of all of this should be action.  If you have been a reader of this blog in the past, you may know that I value actionable curriculum over that which is static.  Make those that learn with you move to action.  It’s not always a reality, but it is an ideal worth striving for.  A redesign of this magnitude would require that the curriculum ask those within it to be actors in towards the solution of the problem. 

Coleman’s last line provides me with more than enough motto to go on.  After I finish typing this, I am going to bust out some really big paper and start sketching this out.  I can’t wait to see where it goes.

You have a mind and you have other people.  Start with those and change the world.

Daily Diigo Links 06/28/2009

• NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing – Annotated

  More fodder for writing as embodying many different forms.

  tags: writing, ncte, english, ELA, metacognition

  • Often, in school, students write only to prove that they did something they were asked to do, in order to get credit for it. Or, students are taught a single type of writing and are led to believe this type will suffice in all situations. Writers outside of school have many different purposes beyond demonstrating accountability, and they practice myriad types and genres. In order to make sure students are learning how writing differs when the purpose and the audience differ, it is important that teachers create opportunities for students to be in different kinds of writing situations, where the relationships and agendas are varied. Even within academic settings, the characteristics of good writing vary among disciplines; what counts as a successful lab report, for example, differs from a successful history paper, essay exam, or literary interpretation.
    • This is such a loaded statement–in a great way. I feel that our teachers are scared away from teaching any type of writing that is not academic or testable. Likewise, I feel our students are often robbed of original voice because they are not allowed the freedom to explore other media, or the opportunity to see other forms of writing as legitimate. – post by pjhiggins

• Technology Review: $100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC

  this is a very cool development.

  tags: olpc, linux, elementary, computer, software

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

An Era of Rapid Change

Graduation season around here has come to a close.  The skies parted for a brief moment, and the final piece to our annual graduation lineup was able to be held in its intended setting: outside under a June sky.  Throughout the day, each speaker, and there were quite a few of them, touched on the pre-requisite graduational topics: friends, opening doors, closing doors, opportunities, blazing paths not following them, and myriad quotes from men and women more wise than us all.  However, one idea permeated all of them: change.  Not just simple change, but rapid, constant and continuous change.

Apropos?

Whether or not we buy into the changing nature of how students can learn now, or whether or not we choose to wait for the research to come back that tells us that giving students access to content and learning when they want it and how they want it, is immaterial.  It’s here.  And it’s apparent to everyone–even graduation speech writers.

Over the last month, I have received more pushback from the teachers I work with, both constructive and destructive, about the way in which the business of curriculum is run.  Which direction are we going in?  Are we driven by the AP test/state report card/U.S. News and World Report Rankings?  What is the vision you have for us?  When will this relentless change stop or at least slow down?

There’s that word again.

It’s great to work with people who have been through situations like this before, situations in which those that work with you are frustrated and feel like they have no voice.  My boss, when I relayed some of the information and sentiments that I was fielding in my meetings, responded with this:

Listen to what they are saying, not how they are saying it.

It’s now three weeks since those meetings and those conversations with the teachers.  What have I taken away?  What were they saying?

Voice.

We need to have one.  We need to know that what we are feeling and what we are dealing with is going to be acted upon in some manner.  We also need to know that what we say has value and that we are heard.  We want to be a part of the change process.

Relevance.

We need to be working on ideas, plans, materal that is relevant to what we do on a daily basis.

Access.

We need to see what everyone else is doing.  Common planning time plus observation of other teachers within this department is essential to our growth.  How can we develop that?

How I respond to these ideas is a huge part of my summer plans.

Daily Diigo Links 06/27/2009

• Practical Learning: Reuniting Thinking and Doing

  I love this article. Very timely as well.

  tags: learning, doing, connections, life, philosophy, education, learning2.0

• Auschwitz-Birkenau – Main Page

  tags: genocide, holocaust, auschwitz, history, socialstudies

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.