Meme: Passion Quilt

It’s a fickle thing, our relationship to words, so when Bach tagged me for this meme, I immediately conjured up images Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. Not because of the topic, but just that word: Passion. There probably is some little known codicil of blog etiquette I am breaking here by comparing a serious topic to cheap club songs from previous topics, and I do apologize for that, but the thought process just happened. I am over it now.

This has actually been sitting on my GTD list for a few days now, moving between Today and Next depending on my level of commitment to the writing process, which has been low. We have a delayed opening due to weather this morning, and what better time to devote to this while everyone sleeps in a little.

Here are the rules:

• Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network

I’ll tag the next five people:

• Patrick Chodkiewicz
• Ben Wilkoff
• Carter Smith
• Bing Miller
• Jen Wagner
• Erica Hartman
• Michael Gregory
• Cathy Wille
• Angela Davis
• Brad Davis

Image credit: Untitled from Mirissa’s photostream

The Students Have Spoken

Diane Cordell and I have been conducting some impromptu research via our own interest in the role of schools in the lives of children and the communities in which they exist. The original post was spurred on by Barry Bachenheimer’s question to me:

Is the purpose of school to get students ready for the world of work? I argue, no. I think the purpose of school is the encourage students to do, read, see, and learn things that they wouldn’t do if left to their own adolescent devices. For example, if left to me, I never would have read half the “classic” novels I read in high school, watched classic films, read the NY Times, or gone to certain museums. Now as an adult, I am glad that I was pushed to do those things. It has made me a more rounded person.

but it came to be much more because Diane and I pushed it out to our students (well, I borrowed some). Diane’s student’s responses can be found here and are well worth a look. They drive at the need for school to be a safe place that has clear expectations.

Our students were a little more specific, and that may have a lot to do with how I framed the question. But needless to say, here is how the students I asked the question of responded on the class wiki:

In my honest opinion, I believe that schools are doing the best they can right now, they are teaching life skills and how to react with people, while giving them an education. I think that I learn best in a clean environment.

I think that school should provide a base education for students to give them as many opportunities in the future as possible. The standard for base education should be high though, don’t get me wrong. Schools should prepare us for life by supplying us with knowledge, obviously, and other skills needed to survive in the world, like social skills, common sense, knowing right from wrong, and other things. It isn’t the school’s problem if the students don’t use the skills taught to them once out of school, but the schools need to provide these things so that the students have the greatest possibility of success. The school enviroment should be clean, friendly, and practical. The environment isn’t all that important because all students learn differently in different atmospheres.

…

I also believe that schools are doing as best as they can, but I live in a middle-upperclass town so I do not know if the same can be said for towns and cities with a lower school budget. Although, I feel that schools should be clean and well-equiped with modern technology.

…

In general, schools should be geared to meet the needs of the majority of students. For our school, that probably means preparation for college or other higher learning. I myself am fortunate enough to have a voice inside my head (not literally) who helps to ensure that I take the proper steps in order to reach my college education, but many I people I know lack such a “voice”. Because of this, I feel, rather strongly, that high schools need to be more goal-oriented toward the futures of their respective students, and they should be better acquainted with the college admissions process.

…

You asked, and I will answer. I’m going to say the honest truth. I have become jaded for school. I do not believe it will influence ANYTHING in my future career course, unless there’s a Video game Design and Development class in this school. What I want is a teacher who can connect to the student, who can teach with all the modern technology (props to Davis and Scott on the wikis), and a teacher who can be forgiving in a time of a mistake. Life is not meant to be a non-stop 79mph crash course through a never ending flow of work. Teachers seem to forget that as students, we have opinions on our work. As a Game Designer, how will I ever need to use Proofs of Geometry? That makes the class boring, and therefore listening and learning become RIDICULOUSLY more difficult. In my life, weekends = essays, projects, outlines, etc. When I come to school, I want a teacher who realizes that we have lives outside of school that need tending to. I am of the belief that all things in moderation leads to a successful life.

Also, this may just be me talking, but I prefer a more Socratic method of teaching. As in, talking and discussing, and where everyone’s opinion is key to the lesson. We still use the archaic, slow, mind-tramping process of learning through reading the text. I feel true knowledge can not be plainly read, it must be taken in of one’s own accord, processed, understood, and released to others. If we read what we are forced to, we simply scan the information and speak or write it when someone puts a quarter in the slot, and just like machines, we don’t benefit.

…

I think that schools should both prepare students for the workforce later on in life and give them a standard education. However, if you want to be a fashion designer, I don’t think that whether or not you took physics should matter. There should be certain requirements, but they should be catered to certain career paths. This is because so many people, when they are done with high school, are not prepared for the workforce, not even the work they are passionate about. School and its work takes up so much time, that many people can’t uphold or maintain jobs, thus acquiring a poor work ethic. If you constantly have to quit jobs left and right, it will not only make you look less dependable in a job interview, but then for the rest of your life, when the going gets tough either in work, or outside of it, you will always find some reason to quit or to stop showing up. Schools should try to incorporate classes that prepare students for the workforce and that can help them develop a good work ethic.

I think we should be allowed to use cell phones and IPODS in school. If it is going to be shoved in our faces left and right, how could you ignore it? By integrating websites such as this one into our education, we are not only saving trees, but benefiting from one anothers ideas. This website allows kids who are shy or quiet or even mute to share their opinions. But that’s just my opinion…

Regardless of teen angst or the current reconstruction project going on at our high school, these comments speak to the idea of relevance, and that more than anything else we need to be teaching content that matters, that moves, that equips our students for a lifetime of change, and fluid, seemingly disparate careers that blend into one another. Our students are really ready for us to change.

Image credit:
“Student Protestors” Dave Bullock / eecue

Tailgating on the road to reform

Another school change post, but who’s counting? Tom Haskins’ post today got me thinking about all of the work, the conversations, and the connections we are making in any of the various “2.0″ intimations that we are creating. But what are we really waiting for? What are the divides that keep us from moving forward? Haskins points to this:

Schools will change when the need to change shows up in the rear view mirror. The economy and culture will already have made the turn and changed direction without the proper education to do so. The know howto invent new models, enterprises and social constructs will not reflect how the innovators were taught, graded or indoctrinated. The change agents will have gotten their education from what works (evidence based), what seems inspired (unconscious guidance) and what makes the most sense at the time (reflective practice).

My response to this post is below:

I like your thinking here–that systemic change in education will only occur when
there is direct need as seen by the most affected stakeholders. Those
stakeholders are obviously not us. We see the need. In actuality, I
hope it’s the students.

If we have truly done our job of preparing students for life, then (the students) taking hold of their learning might be a natural outgrowth of that. Our system as it is now is set up so
that our students are just passengers along for an educational tour of
content. Until we put them in a position to pilot the tour themselves,
that rear-view mirror will look mighty clear.

Karl Fisch and others noted the lack of student presence at conferences like NECC07, and I am beginning to think that that might be the single most important thing we do in the near future. I remember in college, I was trying to impress a girl, Alicia, I think was her name. In order to impress dulcet Alicia, I participated in something known as a critical mass bike ride to protest lack of cycling lanes in our fair collegiate city. There we were on a Friday afternoon, all 250 of us on bikes, flooding every intersection we came to proving that a large group of determined people could really push for change, or at least annoy some commuters into illicit gestures from the safety of their sedans.

A critical mass of students pushing school systems to change in order to engage them. How does that happen? Terry Holliday via LeaderTalk addressed the need for this shift and characterized it as the most exciting and challenging part of his whole career:

As school leaders, we are faced with translating changing requirements for 21st century readiness that call for more rigor, relevance, and relationships to our parents, staff, and students. In translating these requirements, we are expected to make
changes in systems that have been in place for over 100 years. The
first step in creating change is usually to create a sense of urgency for that change and to relate the change required into “local” numbers and impact. This is hard work and very challenging. It is the proverbial “squeeze play” that
school leaders find themselves in every day. While it is the most
challenging work I have encountered in 35 years of education, it is
also the most exciting work that I have done. We indeed are preparing
messengers to a time that we will not see and cannot accurately predict.

The more I interact with teachers, the more I realize how hard they work just to do the things that are asked of them by the state, their administrators, etc. Having me come in and tell them that they should be engaging the students on a whole other plane is not a soothing moment or one that causes a “eureka” moment. The teachers I work with do want to give their students the best possible chance to succeed as they move through life. I just happen to think it will be the students who determine what it is they will need.

Technorati Tags: schoolchange, fisch, haskins, criticalmass, NECC07, 21stCenturyskills

Philosophy for sale

Scott McLeod’s spate of posts which he put under the umbrella term of “Change Week,” really kicked over a hornet’s nest in my shrubbery, so to speak. If any of you are like me, the really huge problems in life, I tend to avoid, and the really big ideas I usually tend to share them with more connected people. Recently, however, I feel that this is changing within me, and I want to reel in these bigger fish while I am at the helm. This is in no way a power trip, but I feel that I am able to work toward greater goals at this point in my life.

The schools I work in, up until about three years ago, fit the description of School 1.0 perfectly. With some diligent work and some innovative teachers, that all began to change, and more and more resources are becoming available for teachers to change the way they approach their teaching. In beginning to use some of the recommended tools that Scott talked about in his posts, I realize that we are in the middle of a philosophical shift, and need to be guided through to the end. That is where I come in. I am an agent of change. Sounds all cloak-and-dagger, and I dig it.

Looking at the big picture is daunting: we have major reconstruction going on, and we have a lot of trust to gain back after a year of spotty network coverage and unreliable, often aging machines. To allow this to remain a setback, and not spring over it would be simple; I have a core group of teachers that religiously take the classes I offer and implement some great strategies in the classroom. However, I have to look at this differently–according the improved, big-game hunter version of myself, this is something I must see through.

That’s not to say that the obstacles of mistrust and physical space will be overcome next year, or even the year after. They may not be. That core group of teachers, my agent provocateurs, if you will, will go a long way towards tipping the scales in favor of philosophical change.

One thing did strike me as notable in one of Scott’s posts. Scott, pulling from their 2005 Phi Delta Kappan article, Can Schools Improve?, Christensen, Aaron, & Clark speak about changing current public education systems, quotes:

Our current system is . . . incapable of changing itself. Most people know – even if they are loath to admit it – that it’s easier to start from scratch than to try to salvage what’s already there. We may wish otherwise, but we ought not to be wishful thinkers. Systemic, transformational change in public education can only happen if we are willing to start from scratch.

At this point, I am going to refuse to buy into this one. That may be my naivete, and although it is waning, my youthful optimism still weighs in fairly heavily that effective and inspirational leadership coupled with sound pedagogy and goal-setting can bring about a shift in how schools and all members of the school community view themselves.

A tempered rant.

Dean Shareski posted the other day about Possibility v. Probability, where by he addressed the issue of building an infrastructure within his school where change was seen as urgent and necessary in regards to how we use technology in our teaching. This same idea, in various forms, is one that I find myself answering to both internally and with teachers that I work with. The most frustrating aspect of my job so far has been the feeling that teachers don’t see the value in what I do in regards to their own teaching methods. There are two disconnects I see in the schools today: complaints I hear regarding cell phone usage, the ubiquity of iPods, and the persistent time-wasting of online gaming and social networking through MySpace and Facebook and the lack of change in pedagogical methods to captivate that audience and use those ideas and technologies to draw in the learners, and the sore-thumb syndrome, whereby teachers are using technology for technology’s sake rather than as a tool that will foster growth and understanding. Below, is a great clip from Stephen Downes as he responded to Dean’s post and follow up question of what schools will look like in five years, followed by my own comment:

Comment by Stephen Downes

May 26, 2007 @ 6:54 am

Well
there’s no easy answer to that. Schools change very slowly, so although
there will be increased penetration for tech (usually sanitized to
separate students from society) things will look much like they will
today. There will be increased pressure – especially from the U.S. -
for alternatives, but it will be difficult to separate educational
ventures from commercial ventures.

Meanwhile, online media will have gradually become more pervasive
and more immersive. It will occupy an increasing amount of students’
time. Online will be – indeed, is already – be thought of as ‘normal’
and most students will be in constant communication with their friends
(watch out for loners shut out of this network, as they will be more
isolated than ever).

Mostly, school will be about socializing and learning pushed to the
back burner (at least, for students). There will be an ongoing (and
losing) battle by teachers to prevent students from using their
technology. The number of schools breaking down and accepting the
online world will increase. Adoption will be uneven, with urban schools
being at the forefront, rural schools late adopters.

The students’ real learning environment – their online world – will
penetrate the school environment one class at a time. Innovative
teachers will attempt to actually remove students from the school
grounds much more frequently than in the old field-trip days (this
allowing for 100 percent use of online techs). The amount of school
time actually spent ins school, as an average, will constantly decrease
(in five years it should be roughly 80 percent, give or take a lot; in
ten years it could be down to 50 percent, give or take a lot).

Comment by Patrick

May 27, 2007 @ 4:44 am

Depending
on where you are, as Stephen said above, the ratio of innovative
teachers to traditional teachers will fall in favor of transformation.
For districts that lie in the suburbs and are truly committed to having
their schools remain centers of community outside of athletics and
arts, the shift is essential and the acquisition and support of
“shifted” teachers will bely their success at being involved in the
real learning process of their students.

This thought process that you had, Dean, is one that I have been
struggling with as I attempt to penetrate(I hope that word doesn’t
sound to pugnacious) classrooms that don’t necessarily see the need for
change. My biggest issue is with the technology not being as
transparent as it should yet. I have several teachers dieing to use
“technology” in their classroom, and several Professional Improvement
Plans submitted by teachers that use that terminology “integrate
technology” but what for? It’s apparent that they are taking that step
just for the sake of using technology. What about making it
transparent, so that it’s just another tool, like heterogeneous
grouping, that they they use to accomplish the goal of learning? That
is where my biggest disconnect is: the technology sticks out too much.

Technorati Tags: technology, education, integration, embedding, edtech

Remixed Versions

It seems like every new remix of Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know” gets better and better and the message is made more and more clear. This latest version from Tom Woodward and Jim Coe (check out their Bionicteaching blog) which I pulled off of TeacherTube is great.

The Death of the Term Paper?

…the old-fashioned term paper — composed by sweating students on a
typewriter as they sat elbow-deep in reference books — has no useful
heir in the digital age. It’s time for schools and educators to
recognize the truth: The term paper is dead.

This is from Jason Johnson’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post on Sunday. I think it speaks volumes about what we call school reform and the entrenched systems that are going to change.

The article is titled “Cut and Paste is a Skill, Too.” Right there, he captivates. In working with both teachers and students, this might be the number one concern about switching to Web 2.0 applications: how do I stop them from plagiarizing? Johnson says we might not be able to.

Internet plagiarism is growing at a rapid pace, according to recent
studies and the anecdotal evidence I hear from my former colleagues in
education — and there’s no end in sight.

Within the article, Johnson makes reference to the fact that not only are students turning to term paper services like StudentOfFortune for term papers, but for homework answers as well, with that transaction cost being $1 per answer. The culture of sharing through social networking is being taken to a new level by students of today. Should educators be discouraging this transfer? Or should we reevaluate what we are asking students to do?

The larger question here is what does this tell us about today’s student? If it’s possible to tear ourselves away from our own school experience and focus on the skills necessary for success in today’s world, what does this tell us about the relevance of things like term papers? I will not go as far as Johnson, yet, to call for the death of the term paper; however, this is a topic worth looking into when we begin to redesign our schools. It was even more telling to look at the comments left by readers of the article. One commenter noted that to copy and paste one source makes you a plagiarizer, but to copy and paste many sources makes you a scholar.

Nevertheless, the educational system needs to acknowledge what the
paper is today: more of a work product that tests very particular
skills — the ability to synthesize and properly cite the work of
others — and not students’ knowledge, originality and overall ability.

Does the ability to synthesize information from disparate sources into one continuous form have merit in today’s world? Absolutely. However, the assessment aspect of the “term paper” should never be ignored. What are our new options? I foresee a shift from the term paper that stresses large-scale research, utilizing various sources, visualizing data in multiple ways, and finishing with a demonstration of tangible learning by either presentation in an oral way, or through a rich, multi-media design. Johnson makes a key point about the relationship between how most schools assess term papers that “cut and paste” and about what they may show regarding student learning:

Students who are able to create convincing amalgamations have gained a
valuable business skill. Unfortunately, most schools fail to recognize
that any skills have been used at all, and an entire paper can be
discarded because of a few lines repeated from another source without
quotation marks.

Services like TurnItIn.com, and Google searches with large chunks of student writing feel more like band-aids at the moment, and it’s only a matter of time before students figure out how to get around those measures (if they haven’t already). Instead of being reactionary, let’s jump ahead of the curve and re-design our idea of the research paper to incorporate this amalgamation that Johnson talks about.

Technorati Tags: research, school, reform, termpaper,

Setting us on Fire

On Tuesday, Scott McLeod fired off some fighting words in his post entitled “Overblown Alarmism and Empty Rhetoric,” and rightfully so. Here are some of the choicest words, those that most unsettled me:

What’s your plan? We mean a real plan. Not just “kids learning independently on matters of personal interest, taking advantage of the power of digital technology to help them do so.” What will the structures look like? Policies? Laws? Funding streams? How will we know if kids have learned anything important? How will we handle parents’ very real needs for someone to take their kids while they go to work?

Quit offering us wishes. Quit offering us dreams. Quit preaching to us about what is morally right and educationally appropriate. Help us realize, in terms we can understand, what this new thing might actually look like AT SCALE and how we might reasonably get here. Even if we agree with you that this is important, without a vision AND a plan we’re just as stuck as you are.

It reminded me of being a sophomore in college, coming home and arguing about the state of the world with relatives, them being ultra-conservative, and me naturally being young and liberal. When pressed, I never could give them concrete evidence or a tangible plan of action on issues like universal health care or whatever it was at the time. This is the same call here; what cards are we holding?

Most of us on the tech side are coming at this from a philosophical perspective, where we can see the value in these applications; however, more and more of the teachers I meet and listen to really want to know the nuts and bolts–how is school going to look and where is my place in it going to be? We talked about BHAG’s for quite a while not too long ago. Would this not be the best of all? Let’s make it actually have shape, and form, this idea of School 2.0. What are the standards that will be assessed? What will assessment mean in this new form? Are our physical structures going to look the same? Is the nature of instruction going to be so radically different that we have to tear down everything that has come before?

My take on Scott’s piece is one of optimism. Let’s answer real questions with real solutions that make sense to a broad spectrum of stakeholders. The community that supports a school may not have the time or the wherewithal to care about our methodology and the minutiae of what we talk about here in the edublogosphere, but they do care about the product and they do care about how it is created, because more often than not, they are the ones paying for it.

Technorati Tags: bhag, school, reform

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Unplugged

How do keep students from turning us off as they arrive in school? If you have walked through an American high school recently, you have seen the clandestine use of mobile devices and you have probably seen your share of disaffected students. If you spoken in front of a group of them, chances are, unless you were 100% compelling, you saw at least one set of eyes roll in the ubiquitous sign of adolescent lassitude: “whatever.”

I should rephrase that–that scene could have been any time within in the last twenty years, but after reading Roy Wenzl’s article “Are We Losing our Boys?” from the Wichita Eagle, a confluence of recent ideas began to identify itself as a pattern within my head.

Thanks to Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant for pointing me towards this article in the first place, and his final thoughts on the post set off this chain for me:

As educators, we are in a battle for eyes, ears, and brainwaves. So far many of us are losing (and, as a result, so are our students).

This has been the trend for several years, and I can easily recall scores of conversations from either graduate school or in new-teacher meetings in districts I have worked in, where the complaint was that we were expected to “perform” in order to compete with everything grabbing the students attention. I may even have been guilty of uttering those words as well. The idea was that we had to sing and dance to keep the attention of the student. George Siemens points out that the idea of sitting through a lecture is not an evil one, and I think that in the whole scheme of a curriculum, it will always have a place. But if that is all you are offering, you have the wrong mindset, and I think that is obvious. That competition is long since over.

If it’s a battleground we’re looking for, Ron Matson, chairman of the department of sociology at Wichita State University, when speaking about reasons for the “checking out” of adolescent men, had this to offer:

“They are playing video games,” he said. “Or withdrawing from society, and with computers and television, you can do a lot of withdrawing.”I look at my kids and grandkids and think, holy smoke, what kind of world will they inherit?”

That’s entirely up to us, isn’t it? If we choose to persist with the lecture, the “drill and kill” so many of the students in Wenzl’s article talked about as par for the course (and as so many students across the U.S. can attest to), and fail to use the same “distractive” technologies that Matson earmarks as contributors to student malaise, then, yes, our future is bleak. But what about flipping the script and using the mentality of the group over at Epistemic Games? The very same technologies that are forcing kids to power down when they enter school will be our avenue to power them up and keep them charged long enough to become the lifelong learners they will have to be.

Passion is the key to all of this. Will Richardson is noted for telling educators to jump into the read/write web by finding something they are passionate about and immersing yourself in the resources available through Web 2.0. Identifying those within students has long provided educators with portals into tough to reach students, and now is no different. Our passions will direct our learning, both teacher and student, in School 2.0 (and life, for that matter); rarely is a student, male or female, passionate about worksheets, lectures, or passive learning. Students today and tomorrow need to interact with, remix, and create content.

Trent Watta, one of the students profiled in the article, states:

“When you find something you’re passionate about, it no longer becomes work. You don’t even realize you’re working.”

And that’s one to grow on.

Finding the Rabbit

Thanks to Chris Sessums for drawing my attention to this:

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. Dir. Michael Wesch. 2007.

A link of David Warlick’s post to Julie Coiro’s recent work got me motivated. A lot of my thinking lately has been directed in not only digesting the power of connectivism and the potential of Web 2.0 as it applies to school, but also how to sell it to educators. My job is to facilitate the use of technology in classrooms and to support the staff as they implement it.

It requires a little more when we begin talking about an entire pedagogical shift. It becomes a matter of first making it meaningful to the staff. I would never want to ask a teacher to stand in front of a room of students, especially the digital natives that we have in class today, and have them teach using Web 2.0 tools, unless that teacher had bought in themselves.

Coiro uses the Miss Rumphius Awards as an example for steps that teachers should take when integrating technology in a meaningful way. I like them for what I want to do, and how I want to approach my staff. Taken directly from her site, here they are:

1. Start out small and move through stages.
2. Take a few risks along the way.
3. Take a proactive approach to learning.
4. Encourage your students to share their expertise.
5. Never underestimate the power of collaboration.
6. Seek authentic learning opportunities.
7. Be prepared for change.

Every district has what I term “rabbits,” and this term was bandied about at the conference with Will Richardson on Friday. This morning, I listened to his podcast with Rob Mancabelli regarding how to implement social networking technologies into existing schools and the idea of passion and meaning in regards to selling districts on these ideas matched up succinctly with the idea of the “rabbit.” We need these tools to mean something to our staff before we ask them to take it to the students. They have to buy in and see the value for themselves as learners, before they use them as teachers.