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David Small’s graphic-novel memoir, Stitches, recounts – from Small’s point of view – both the secret and obvious pains he and his family endure during the author’s childhood and adolescence. Counseling and art emancipate Small from his family’s dysfunction. Art becomes Small’s “home” and “voice” and gives him “everything [he has] ever wanted or needed since” leaving home at age 16. Small credits art with fulfilling needs his family either created or could not meet. Small’s parents seem unwilling to grant him approval because it would require them to confront their own pain, especially regarding decisions they have made about David and their family. When Small’s father eventually owns up to his role in hurting David, dad’s speech comes across more as personal expiation than familial reconciliation. Small moves out shortly thereafter, demonstrating the inadequacy of his father’s admission in closing the rift between them. Small’s artistic liberation and formation of an identity apart from his family are especially compelling against the backdrop of his early life.

zap by r.i.c.h.

Josh Lieb’s darkly comic young-adult-lit novel I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I want to be your Class President offers another take on a son’s quest to shape his identity in response to a father’s lack of approval. Oliver Watson is the titular genius who controls a global empire of legitimate and criminal enterprises behind a prop mogul and the mask of “dumbest boy in [the] English class.” His father is afraid of him because Oliver represents both lost opportunities and the opportunity to stop making excuses and excel, which is a terrifying prospect for dad. Knowing his father’s weakness for token shows of nobility – such as turning down high paying private-sector jobs and the “democracy” of student elections – Oliver decides to win his school’s election for class president to ruin his father’s memory of student council service. Oliver thinks that by proving a seemingly dumb kid like him can win, he’ll corrupt his father’s belief in student democracy and cheapen dad’s former glories. Oliver loses the election in a scene of comedic triumph, but in losing he wins his father’s approval. His dad, after all, is a fan of noble causes like defeat. To signal the change in their relationship, Oliver calls off the squadron of fighter-bombers on its way to raze his school. His father’s approval fulfills Oliver’s need to belong so much that he no longer feels the need to destroy his school, a place where he clearly does not belong.

With all the complexities of human experience at play in our lives, especially during the holidays, I’m not going to venture much further into analyzing the two disparate studies in father-son relationships. Instead, I’ll write about teaching, which we all know is totally simple.

I think of the power-struggle as perhaps the most obvious form of dysfunction in teacher-student relationships. I think of teachers and students for whom power struggles and defensiveness are classroom norms. We all have students whose behaviors trigger us into feeling the need for control, and all students have teachers who trigger the same. How we handle ourselves as community members determines how far struggles escalate in the classroom and which behaviors we and students choose in response to one another. Sometimes we over-react; sometimes conscious of our over-reactions, we under-react; sometimes we get it right, defuse the situation, improve our relationships, and get back to the essential work of teaching and learning.

I think here about David and his parents. David was a mirror for them of the choices they had made as partners and parents. Because they were afraid to honestly confront some of those decisions, their frustrations and regrets transferred to David. How often do we teachers see our emotions and choices reflected by our students? How comfortable or skilled are we at stepping back, depersonalizing the situation, and dealing with our own decisions and emotions before more fairly assessing students’ choices and humane and effective responses to them? How much time do we spend coaching our students to find what really matters to them and to work for it, even when triggered by an adult’s actions or demeanor? How much time do we spend showing students how to redirect themselves to work rather than reacting defensively to redirection from a teacher?

When I think of Oliver and his dad, I think about our expectations for students and how often we give them positive reinforcement and feedback on the way to meeting those expectations. To our credit, though we disagree on the particulars, as a profession we teachers believe that all students can learn. How can we help one another act in accordance with that belief even when the chips are down, the work is late, and the kids are disengaged? How do we balance out internal feelings of disappointment and frustration with external, proactive, and positive steps towards righting the course of our shared work with students?

Many of us find effective ways to help many students feel motivated and successful, but there are so many disenfranchised and disengaged youth for whom education is a power struggle rather than a means of emancipation from childhoods of adversity. What is our message to these children? How do we judge them? Are disappointment and frustration inherent in the structure of work and assessment we have told them to do? Does school put us all on the defensive?  Does school create us and them?

Sadly, yes, in many ways, it does.

So here’s my challenge to myself this holiday season:

1. Remain thankful for my time with my students and for their willingness to come to school each day.
2. Engage more often in a healthy, internal struggle to measure my actions in helping students re-connect with education.
3. Engage less often in dysfunctional, external power struggles in the classroom.
4. Re-assess what my students believe about school, themselves, and our class.
5. Make education better for all of us.

Speaking at NCTE, Junot Diaz said that we create monsters from youth when we don’t provide positive positive reflections of youth in our culture and the media it promotes. We need to work to make sure students see positive reflections of themselves in us. When they look at us they’re looking for a part of themselves. They shouldn’t see disappointment and frustration. They shouldn’t see monsters.  When we look at them, we too, are looking for parts of ourselves and we don’t want to see monsters. We’re going to have days where nothing works; we’re going to feel defeated; we can’t project that feeling on students. Looking at our students should lift us up; we should lift up our students. There is always a chance to make things better so long as we dare ourselves to look away from defeat.  Act without fear.  Re-engage with your vision of teaching and learning and reflect it to everyone in your classroom.

Yesterday I ran a Tech-To-Go kiosk at NCTE.  It was a lot of fun talking with teachers eager to learn more about social media.  At NCTE, I think there is a clear and strong desire out there, even amongst colleagues not yet on the PLN, to learn how to use technology to improve their teaching, spark their learning, and engage their kids.  I wound up jumping all over the web showing off sites like Twitter, Google Docs, Flickr, Wikispaces,and the EduPln Ning.  Below are the slides I put together when I had no idea what to expect.

Assessment reform is crucial to education reform. Junot Diaz spoke at NCTE last night about the work we have to do to move away from the “journey of approval” (make the grade or face punishment) to the “journey of discovery,” wherein meaningful reading, learning, and heuristic mistake-making occur. Until an American administration takes up this challenge, what can we do?  (Perhaps look at Polk County, FL?)

Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot DIaz by somethingstartedcrazy

Embracing standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR) is a difficult, but achievable, goal for classroom teachers who want to begin the journey now.  As long as you’re wiling to compromise at the end of each marking period and create a formula that cross-walks your feedback and students growth into a letter grade, it’s likely that the merits of SBAR will help you win over your administrator for a micro-pilot in your own classroom.

Essentially, SBAR is rigorous backwards design and the teaching, grading, and reporting practices that go with it. You unpack your assigned standards, decide which are most essential and umbrella-like, and then teach to those power standards and provide students with meaningful rubric-based feedback. The feedback has to provide concrete next steps and make use of a mangeable 3, 4, or 5-point rubric. Moving from not-proficient to proficient, with specific steps to follow, is a lot more motivating and attainable for a student than moving from, say, an F to a C with only a percentage to guide him or her.

Matt Townsley (@mctownsley) blogs on his SBAR journey in great detail and reflective depth. Robert Marzano, Rick Stiggins, and Rick Wormeli, et al., have all written extensively on setting up an SBAR program, including how to maintain and report out records of student achievement. To these experts’ work, I would only add a few pieces of advice for teachers hungry to make a difference in assessment as quickly as is reasonably possible.

1. Take at least year to learn and prepare. It’s too difficult to learn SBAR on the go.  Don’t implement an incomplete SBAR plan.  That’s’s not fair to students and other stakeholders who depend on you to be consistent and effective in your feedback. Be really good at backwards design and learn to offer timely narrative feedback before you begin with SBAR. Train for SBAR. My journey towards practice took 2+ years of synthesis. I worked for a longer time to accomplish more difficult goals with SBAR than for NBCT certification.
2. Find a critical friend who will at least listen and learn with you and observe your work or meet regularly with you to discuss and compare student work between classes. This will help make sure your implementation of SBAR doesn’t inflate or depress the “value” of grades in your classroom.
3. Approach your administrator with a concrete plan and explanation of how you will educate students, parents, other teachers, and the administration. Be prepared also to cross-walk your feedback and students’ achievement to your school’s grading scale so the principal’s political liability is limited. Have your gradebook and report card ready and explain why they’re better than traditional models.
4. Prepare yourself for mastery learning and the teaching that goes with it. You won’t end up with percents to average.  You will need to follow up on your feedback and help students join a culture of quality work and determination to master content and skills essential to them.
5. Practice your spiel. You will have to explain, defend, and champion SBAR to all kinds of audiences – students, parents, colleagues – with all kinds of attitudes – curiosity, skepticism, hostility. Always be willing to share, but never push. Teachers heavily invested in traditional models of scoring and reporting will be on the defensive around SBAR; they will rightly want proof of SBAR’s effectiveness. Share your data, but don’t use it as a wedge.
6. Always make class time to explain SBAR and enable students to master work. You are the teacher; the students are the learners. You are interdependent, and your classroom culture needs to reflect that. Don’t give students awesome feedback in class and then marginalize them to after- or before-school sessions. Show them that your feedback and their work really matters. Make time for mastery in class. W. James Popham’s Transformative Assessment can help here.
7. Stick with it. Don’t give up on SBAR. Stay the course for the year. For all your planing, there will be some learning and tweaking on the go. Remember that you are engaged in the right struggle for kids.
8. Grow out slowly. Only expand the work of SBAR to engage enthusiastic and willing participants who will learn and plan for another year before practicing SBAR in the classroom. You have to be sure that all teachers practicing SBAR have a core set of common beliefs and an common set of practices that ensure consistency and fairness in the program.

If that sounds daunting, it is; however, it’s possible to out together a great SBAR program. As self-doubting and forward-looking as I can be, I hold on to my students’ comments about SBAR. The students who said I never explained it well enough were right. The students who said that the only time they felt like they really learned was when we used SBAR were also right. SBAR is what you make of it.  Take the necessary time and care to craft a manageable and effective system.

Students engaged in creating media that they value mostly do so either outside of school or underground at school. Many teams of teachers and students create work together that both value, but too often the “fun stuff” is either cut out of the school day or limited to what @budtheteacher calls “semi-school environments” in this reflection on Day 1 of the National Writing Project’s meeting at this year’s NCTE conference.

Respect by arimoore

The major obstacle here is relationship-based. What teachers value in students’ work isn’t necessarily what students value. Would a student resist work he or she found authentically engaging and personally meaningful? Think of the difference in quality between work a student chooses to do and work a student has to do. Think of the difference in quality between work that connects to students’ lives and work that does not. Clearly, digitally speaking or not, one way to reduce student resistance to work is to make it matter to them. To do so, we teachers have to redefine what we value, as well as recognize and celebrate distinct qualities of work that students value. We have to value the content, processes, and products students bring to class during the regular school day.

We can’t rely on ourselves as the single means of valuing student work. We can’t armor ourselves in standards or expectations that serve only to separate us from our students.

We have to create learning spaces where authentic engagement and meaningful expectations combine in a symbiosis of learning. Our students need to matter more than the standards, while at the same time we need to reduce the distance between our students lives and the standards to zero. For students to find personal meaning in the work we ask of them, the standards we hold for students have to overlap with their lives.

If it takes “semi-school environments” to do so, then our classrooms should become semi-school environments that host a large audience of F2F and networked assessors or and collaborators with student work. We need to create contexts during the day that give students’ a sense of meaning in school work. If school work needs to change in order to create meaning, then change school work. Create opportunities for publication and entrepreneurship. Bring in expert coaches who can help kids create quality work in media outside your own expertise. Create a team of caring adults and engaged students who share a variety of interests, but a common purpose: authentic learning during the course of the regular school day.

It is not an admission of defeat to open up our classrooms and notions of what learning should be and look like. It’s the most important internal, professional victory we can win. It is not a loss of control. It’s a creation of – and bringing together of – an interdependent symphony of learners. It is not soft or fuzzy. It’s the beginning of the difficult work it takes to articulate what our classrooms value, as well as what we have to do so that our work at long last reflects our values, including joy.  A classroom should look more joyful when full than empty.

Grading is easy; teaching is hard.  Real accountability is interpersonal rather than statistical.

NB: in addition to @budtheteacher’s post, a conversation I had with @beckyfisher73 and this video have me hungering for partnerships between classrooms to create audience, context, and meaning for student work. What if elementary school students created their own mixes of prompts for a tool like this, and then a HS computer science class built a new tool for them and then joined class for a morning of writing and sharing? What if a HS English class story-boarded phone apps for kids books, sent the story-boards to a university engineering program to be built, and then joined the engineers to share the apps with students in lower grades?

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, and blogs. To follow in your footsteps, in the interest of advancing authentic engagement with our classwork on narrative, writing, and questioning, today we started tweeting to Tanzania.

We began with a simple interactive whiteboard activity. This week we’ve been learning the terms and definitions of plot structure and matching them up together along the St. Louis arch, U2’s Popmart arch, and roller-coasters. We’ve been using the terms to write and our own stories and analyze those we’re reading. Today, we looked at a scrambled narrative adapted from the Epic Change blog to learn the TwitterKids’ story. We ordered the pieces according to plot structure on the SmartBoard, and then used Google Earth to get us from here (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA) to there (Arusha, Tanzania) in our minds. Finally, we brain-dumped a bunch of questions for the TwitterKids and chose a few per class to tweet in hopes of responses to read and respond to later in class.

Here are some of our interactive whiteboard and Twitter artifacts from class (via Seesmic):

TwitterKids Plot Structure Exercise - Before

Twitterkids from Tanzania Plot Structure - After

Tweeting with the Twitterkids of Tanzania

You can follow the Twitter Kids here; you can follow our class account here.

For me as a teacher, the big idea here is to act. There are great models out there of how to bring the world into your classroom and how to broadcast your classroom to the world. Find one that seems manageable to you. Find an idea, lesson, or unit that you can emulate with success and try it. The small steps you take for your classroom’s engagement with the world will help American education make the giant leap into relevance that we teachers and our students need, desire, and deserve.

When a student asks me a question, I try to answer with a question. Call it Socratic Method Lite.

Smoke and Mirrors by Sean Stayte

However, there’s one question I keep answering over and over again, and I need to stop. Whenever a student asks me, “Why does this matter?”, I’m ready with one of three flavors of answer:

• Because it’s a life-long learning skill.
• Because it’s a work-place skill you’re going to need.
• Because you need to understand this before we go on to that.

Really, though, haven’t I missed the point? By the time a student asks, “Why does this matter?”, I’ve already lost the PR battle, the differentiation battle, and the innovation battle. I haven’t engaged the student, found the right combination of content, process, and product, or bought myself instructional time with novelty. I’m willing to posit that students want and need clarification from time to time, but my answers are a habit, a conditioned response over time to repeated instances of, “Why does this matter?”

Why haven’t I asked students, why do you think it matters? Or why should it matter to you? Or how could you use this lesson today?

Is it a matter of trust or fear? Am I afraid that the honest and appropriate student response will be, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t care,” both of which translate in my mind to, “You haven’t helped me make the connection on my own.” Am I afraid that I’m pushing an irrelevant curriculum? Am I afraid that I’m not doing a good enough job with a relevant curriculum?

None of this is to say that planning relevance is easy, or that it should be. None of this is to say that together my students and I don’t ever get relevance right. Regardless, all of these questions need to be asked. As the teacher, I cannot be the sole determiner of relevance. It’s a resource to collect from students. It’s an energizing current that we need to tap into to provide electrifying instruction. It’s an attempt after which we need to celebrate shared successes and forgive ourselves instructional failures.

Relevance is like a sub-atomic particle. You have to watch for it, hope that it shows up, and try to determine which shade of gluonic quantum chromatics it embodies so you know how it will bind the quarks of how and why into the hadrons of what . Relevance is nothing at all like this paragraph (except for quantum mechanists, which goes to the point).

Today, for a half hour or so at a time, class by class, we got relevance right.

We’re making documentaries about United States history. We have expert coaches visiting us monthly. We have rudimentary production company pages for each group. We have the technology to pull off the project. Work proceeds apace, but until today it was missing a spark. Frankly, I suspect that our technology bought us strategic compliance.

Today we started a new campfire activity called “Video of the Day.” We gather around the old SmartBoard, play a “relevant” video, and then we reverse engineer the video’s script as a way to model writing and name the techniques the filmmakers used to hook us as an audience. The hope here is that by connecting relevant videos to scriptwriting, students will see scriptwriting as a way to communicate personally meaningful things, and that by analyzing the techniques successful filmmakers use to engage an audience, students will learn to use them, as well.

Here’s the video we used:

The video worked. It created relevance. We didn’t need to talk about why it mattered, because it did. Instead we talked about

• Moose Markowicz, my Algebra II teacher, who could be cajoled into telling stories for an entire period in the days of 47-minute classes.
• Why I don’t wear more T-shirts to work (mine are all too geeky).
• What we would do with our own gym in our own building (a rock-climbing wall, a Wii wall, and an American football/soccer hero wall).
• Whether or not you would use a new slug line or CUT TO when the image changes in a script, but the location does not.
• How the music and quick cuts held our attention.
• How the video took something we knew (Guitar Hero) and made it cooler (now with sick soccer players).
• How the incredibly talented players failed horribly, stuck with the problem sixteen more times anyway, changed how they played to help one another, and celebrated being good, but not perfect.

I wanted the video to work. I wanted it to be relevant. I wanted the gluons of relevance to put together the hadrons of content and process into the protons and neutrons of completed classwork. I was on the look-out, and I saw it. I saw relevance happen for the students and found some for myself.

Of all the things the video is really about, it’s really about the patience, dedication, and community needed to master learning in an authentic way. It’s about trying until you meet an personally meaningful goal, and then celebrating. It’s about depending on others. It’s about everyone playing a different part in a symphony of action. It’s about joy, and maybe that’s the relevance we should be differentiating for all the time.

NB: Differentiation is a powerful tool for creating relevance. See last night’s differentiation #edchat for all kinds of inspiration about what to try next on your students’ behalf.