Year-end, Part I.

I don’t know why I would conclude a post name with “Part I,” when due to the schedule I am keeping these days, there is no guarantee there will be a “Part II,” but I guess it’s wishful writing.  Unless you are living in solitary confinement or have taken a holiday break job as a fire lookout, you’ve seen the onslaught of year-end posts that have been funneling through your mailbox, reader, or inbox.  For me, it’s a great lesson in how to deal with information overload.  Every one of these year-end recaps always points to some future point where the ills we’ve either created or ignored in the previous year can be righted.  This from Tom Friedman in the 12/23 NYT:

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot.
We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover.
That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S.
history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the
bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make
certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our
kids’ future, is spent wisely.

Earlier in the article, he alluded to the many ills that plague our great nation, taking a stab at our livelihood in stating that we have “…public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating…”  and as Clay so rightly put it in his comment on this via Twitter:

It’s context, I understand, and Friedman as making a point about the state of innovation in America–all things I agree with him on here.  But I know that standards as we’ve come to expect them from the federal government are not ones I want placed upon me or the students I work for.

I’ve got this statement stuck in my mind this week, and it’s one that has appeared in various forms over the years:

“the most important skill of the future may be the ability to forget what you’ve learned, and learn something new.” —by Patrick Tucker, Senior Editor, THE FUTURIST

The feedback I’ve gotten on this one so far has been slightly comical, but let’s break it down over the next few days.  What does it mean for us if what we know, what we are competent in, no longer makes our livelihoods stable?  In education, we tend to feel immune to the fluctuations of the job market.  But what if we are not?  What if the profound changes that the futurists are predicting, these disruptive innovations, happen sooner rather than later?  This is something I’d like to look into over the course of the next few days, time permitting…

The Pre-Beta Release

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.

Thoughts to act upon.

I realize it might be poor etiquette to clip and post nearly the whole text of the recent Google Blog entry titled “Our Googley Advice: Major in Learning,” but in light of what I am charged with helping to create lately, these skills and the messages that define them really hit home.  The highlights are my own.

At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving
skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a
matter of course. After all, that’s what most education is concerned
with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create
competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative
thought and tenacity.

… analytical reasoning.
Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a
decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk
about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

… communication skills. Marshaling and understanding the available evidence isn’t useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

… a willingness to experiment.
Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no
formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of
treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment
analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a
willingness to accept the evidence even if you don’t like it.

… team players.
Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need
to work well together and perform up to the team’s expectations.

… passion and leadership.
This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning
languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase
Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you
do.

These characteristics are not just important in our
business, but in every business, as well as in government,
philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming
generation is how to acquire them. It’s easy to educate for the
routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many
required skills will change: developers today code in something called
Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for
reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most
challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.

in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are
not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your
success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free
market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

I read that and thought of the possibilities that lay ahead for us, and the ideas we have yet to have.  I get excited at the prospect of a whole life filled with change and refinement of thought–how can we do this better?  What about what we are already doing works well and can be translated to new situations?  What should we leave behind?

Nevertheless, as we returned from BLC and came back to our realities of working within a strict system, we began to have some doubts about the differences we can make.  Looking through our notes I pulled this one from Ewan’s keynote:

All mankind is divided into three groups: those that are immovable,
those that are movable and those that move. — Benjamin
Franklin

And the coup de grace:

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing
new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down
new paths.–Walt Disney

I started thinking about this Disney quote (we watched Meet the Robinsons last night) and thinking about an opening day with staff speech.  Can you weave this into the message that you give to you staff on opening day?  Would it not move them to higher action.  Unfortunately (I should watch what I say) I don’t have that responsibility this year, but if I did, these messages would be interwoven into what I would deliver.  We always need to be moving forward, and we need to remember how to learn.

Pass the Beaker, Man

“We should see ourselves as all being in research and development.”

That line, or something strikingly close to it came from Ewan McIntosh’s keynote address last Wednesday at BLC.  It’s not the first time I had heard a speaker ask that we all focus on our own development, or transforming our classrooms into teacher-researcher laboratories, but it was the first time where I heard it as an administrator.  Oddly enough, just the semantic shift in title changes the meaning behind McIntosh’s statement for me.  In our notes, a few of us remarked about the statement, and later on in the day I took it upon myself to synthesize some of the bigger ideas we had all been having in our debriefings at dinner.  Here is what I came up with for the R and D idea:

Teachers as researchers: one of the things we all see the need for is to create a culture in our buildings where our teachers see themselves, to quote McIntosh, as “in research and development.”

1. What makes that happen in your school?
   one of the things I keep thinking about personally is the use of pilot programs that last only a few months.
   1. Screencasting: ask teachers to incorporate Eric Marcos “kids teaching kids” methods for 3 months and then have the selected teachers share their experience with other teachers in their building.
   2. Promote open collaboration between classrooms within the building and around the nation/world through getting the teachers into other rooms to observe, and through connecting our teachers with others outside the U.S.  Have them pitch their idea to the building principals, execute the plan, and have them present their product to the staff.
   3. Showing teacher work and student work off
      1. there is a theme running through a lot of the workshops here that incorporates the idea that we should promote the teachers that “get it.”
      2. Which teachers get it, and I don’t mean technologically only, but which teachers will look at something new and attack it, refine it and make it their own?  Find them and ask them to show how they do it.  Do this often.
      3. Let students show teachers how things work.  Have you heard Alan’s quote: “always bring a student to a technology conference?”  Let students show their teachers what they are actually capable of (from Eric Marcos’ presentation, and Ewan’s keynote: “-Give a button to a teacher and they ask what to do with it, give a button to a kid and they play with it and discover“
   4. District-wide PD conference
      1. We have been sitting in workshops for a day now and at some point or another we have all remarked that we have teachers doing this or doing that.  Can we pull them together and run our own “in-house” conference?
      2. The willing and able can present what they do to the rest of the staff and we go from there.
   5. School-wide or grade-wide Custom search engines
      1. we can use Google Custom Search to enable teachers to create their own search engines based on the links they already provide to the students for research.  They can still limit content to the sites they want, but it is an incredible time saver if all of the staff combines their resources into one search engine.
      2. It gives them exposure to the collaborative nature of the web.
   6. Everyone is in R and D.

I’ll be brutally honest here: I went to BLC not wanting another tool to add to my belt (although I did get a few); I wanted answers to questions from teachers who don’t see value in change.  I wanted to be able to return and say, “look, here is my magic bullet, and it’s wireless.” Truthfully, I set myself up for some disappointment, but I did walk away with several fantastic ideas worth taking action on immediately.

Among other things, I realized, thanks to a few pushes, that it’s time to get out there and share what we’re doing here.  Not that it’s earth-shattering, but we have inertia, and I think that might be valuable to some people.  We have been pushing and pulling on what we know and understand about teaching and learning there, getting a lot of feedback from our staff, and it’s time that we also looked at ourselves as researchers and developers.  What better lesson in humility than to fail in public and try again?  I think we are ready for what’s next.

Image Credit: “Comfortable Research,” from Joel Bedford (formerly J.A.L.E.X.)’s photostream

Stress, Ambiguity, and Confusion are Good for You?

You betcha.

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:

1. Following Directions
2. Presentation
3. Supporting Details
4. Connections
5. Higher Level Thinking
6. 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.

Image Credits: “Creative Commons = Creative Confusion?” from Joe Pemberton’s photostream

“Confusion” from Lithoglyphic’s photostream

An Appeal for Collaboration, or at Least a Good Way to Focus your Summer Thinking

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.

She’s talented and extremely capable of pulling this off.  We worked together back in November of this year to Ustream her classes Just One Less Summit, which some of you out there were able to attend virtually.  Here are some samples of what she plans to do next year:

• Food Wars: based on Salt and Fast Food Nation
• Mental Fitness: How mentally fit are you?
• 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).

Image Credit: “Earth, As Seen from Space,” by por2able’s photostream on Flickr

Somebody, please help me realize my dream..

Using Your Best Judgment

We’ve often talked about choosing the right tool to use for the right setting educationally, and now we’ve got some research to back it up. Recently, Laila Weir at Edutopia wrote about the results of a study done by the Metiri Group, and commissioned by Cisco Systems. The study was aimed at understanding how and when using technology in regards to learning works best. A lot of what came out of the survey is common sense, but some it struck me as I read it because I’ve been wrestling with this in my practice lately.

Weir writes about how the Metiri Group debunks the “Cone of Experience” theory, whereby:

each of us learns 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we
hear, 30 percent of what we see, 50 percent of what we hear and see, 70
percent of what we say or write, and 90 percent of what we say as we do
a thing.

The skinny behind the research here is that when teaching basic skills, like asking students to learn and memorize the chemical symbols on the Periodic Chart, the use of technology and multi-modal teaching does not raise student scores as much as a lesson that isn’t interactive (21 percentage points v. 9 percentage points). However,when more complex skills or concepts are being taught, there is a noticeable uptick in student achievement scores (32 percentile points for multi-modal learning v. 20 percentile points for non multi-modal).

During our sessions with our teachers participating in our tablet program a few weeks back, the topic of multi-tasking came up quite frequently.  Some of them had said that while having the use of portable technology made them more productive, they always felt more compelled to work on something.  That impulse often came in the middle of other aspects of their lives that didn’t include the processes involved in creative work.  One teacher stated that they couldn’t get anything done because it always seemed they had way too much going on at once.  Another teacher chimed in with a quote from an article about the fallacy of multi-tasking.  As it turns out, the Cisco study also reaches the same conclusion about multi-tasking:

“New scientific studies reveal the losses in efficiency in . . . multitasking,” the Cisco report says. “Researchers find that thinking processes happen serially, resulting in delays caused by switching from one task to another. The delays become more pronounced as the complexity of the task increases.”

I can’t speak for others, but unless I have clearly defined parameters to work and think in that center on a singular idea, I can’t accomplish much.  So, for me, I’ve always been one to shy away from multi-tasking.  And when teaching complex processes, it makes logical sense to teach them serially, at least to me.  It also follows from the study that when you present students with information in a clear, concise manner that flows logically they have a better chance at coming to grips with it.

But, perhaps the part of the article that will be most useful in my practice, is this:

if you never recognize or actually think about that audio input, you’re unlikely to remember it later. Translate that same concept to students simply letting the words of a lecture or a textbook wash over them, and the benefits of engaging a “working memory,” a deeper kind of thinking, are obvious.

Allowing for student reflection time about the lecture, and allowing for them to access various parts of their memories to create connections between this new information and the knowledge they already have has positive affects on learning.  This may seem elementary to some, but it still makes me shudder a bit at all of the workshops I have given this year and last in which I presented a whole slew of information to people, and due to time constraints, moved right into something else without giving them time to digest.

What I’d like to be doing is to build reflection directly into the classes and workshops I teach.  How do you do that successfully?

Image Credit: “Reflection,” by Guacamole Goalie on Flickr