Classroots.org

What is Skype? by malthe

Today one of my reading groups started “small-group Skyping” (thanks for the phrase, @bjnichols) with some of Karin Perry’s (@kperry) students. The students met on Skype and then watched three book trailers before settling on Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies as the novel they wanted to read and discuss together after winter break. I thought the entire experience was awesome and illustrative of how teachers can use social media for familiar things like reading groups or lit circles. I think proof-of-concept successes with common practices bridged across classrooms by new technologies have great potential for attracting skeptical teachers to embrace meaningful uses of classroom technology. Certainly small-group Skyping can be the gateway to re-imagining several common classroom practices like character tea-parties or interviews.

Karin and I met at Teri Lesense’s (@professornana) #NCTE09 presentation on new classics. We sat next to each other at a table in the back corner. I arrived after Karin and thought she had picked the best spot for live-tweeting. We followed one another on Twitter, exchanged blog URLs, and kept in touch about the possibility of a Skyped reading group. Neither of us had much experience with Skype, but we set up our accounts, put together a pool of books, tweeted back and forth about our meet & greet/book-trailer lesson plan, tested our Skype connection at school, recruited kids and brought them together, and then got out of the way. The kids did a great job. They commented on the moods and tones of the trailers; they talked about taking into account everyone’s genre preferences, they set up an opt-in agreement to read one book over break, and they all agreed to read another book together afterwards. I can’t wait to read with them and hear what they say. I can’t wait to figure out how to scale up what works. I most enjoyed watching the students’ synchronous engagement with discovery and learning.

We watched trailers for American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, The Maze Runner, by James Dashner, and Uglies. Uglies won as the book group, while The Maze Runner became the opt-in title over break.  Each trailer was unique in its approach and production values.  It was cool to watch the fan made trailer for Uglies and think about having students undertake a similar project for a book.

Here are initial student comments:

• “It was fun to talk with different people from different places.”
• “I liked meeting new people on Skype because I didn’t have to write to people or type numbers on a phone.”
• “It was interesting. It draws your attention.”

I’m looking forward to students’ reflections on their books and their new partnership at the end of our project, whenever that will be.  Hopefully, the students will resist an endpoint.  Today’s activity had a lot of splash, but for me, the lasting educational benefits of small-group Skyping and other communications technologies come from the relationships formed around learning long after the novelty of the technology fades.  I hope students will feel the same way.

Windows by robynejay

Last week during a bout of insomnia, I watched The Remains of the Day twice in a row. I had never seen it before or read the book, though I dearly love and frequently sniffle while reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The Remains of the Day follows Mr. Stevens, a butler, who serves Lord Darlington, an appeaser, before World War II, and a retired American lawmaker, Mr. Lewis, after the war. Mr. Stevens lives inside several cages of propriety. He’s serving an English Lord. Lord Darlington’s new housekeeper, Ms Kenton, challenges him because while she’s great at her job, she also allows herself to be human in the service of Lord Darlington, which Mr. Stevens does not allow himself to do the same. Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton circumscribe romance as their relationship deepens over time, but Mr. Stevens can’t return Ms Kenton’s affection when she expresses it. Ms Kenton leaves and marries a former colleague. After World War II, Mr. Stevens searches out Ms Kenton to invite her back to work for Mr. Lewis. Ms Kenton agrees to a meeting and seems ready to rejoin Mr. Stevens – her marriage is breaking – but then Ms Kenton’s estranged husband shows up to reconcile with her bearing news of their daughter’s pregnancy. On the appointed day of Mr. Stevens’s vacation, Ms Kenton meets him and explains that she plans now to stay with her husband, near her daughter and grandchild. Mr. Stevens barely lets his dismay show, which is the end of any hope he has of winning Ms Kenton back or being able to share his feelings. Even after crossing the country on holiday to find Ms Kenton, Mr. Stevens can’t ask her to return for him. At the end of the day, Mr. Stevens walks Ms Kenton to her bus, wears his half-smile shield, and waves good-bye as Ms Kenton looks back at him, weeping for Mr. Stevens. He can’t, or won’t, find the person she sees.

What resonates for me in this film is Mr. Stevens’s inability to pursue his passion for fear of losing his intertwined job, identity, and self-control. He cannot find a way to reconcile a life of service with self-affirming and self-serving actions and emotions, so he chooses self-abnegation both in losing Ms Kenton and preventing himself from becoming who he might be apart from his role in his lords’ household.

I think of myself teaching between the world of policy and the world I want. I worry that I will always teach in a limbo of well-intentioned starts and fits towards something new without ever making the leap to fundamentally change how I teach or who I am as a teacher. I can see myself waving goodbye to scary and amazing chances to reinvent what a school is and what a school does. I don’t know that I can reconcile the job of teaching with my passion for it.

To wit, now I’m thinking about testing windows. In Virginia, middle-school students take Standards of Learning (SOL) tests at the end of a course – either at the semester or at the end of the year. Many middle schools therefore schedule semester-long science and social studies courses. Students take either science or social studies first semester; take an SOL test in January, and then switch subjects and test again in May. The idea here is that students have a better chance to retrieve content shortly after learning it than they do later. If a test item asks a student to recall a piece of content from September, the student has a better chance to do so in January than in May. Dedicated educators invested in students and learning find ways to embed this content in meaningful work so that students hold on to their learning regardless of the testing schedule’s emphasis on short-term retention.

No middle school in Virginia that I know of runs semester-long language arts or math courses because of AYP. Educators want students to have the most time possible to master spiraling skills in advance of taking tests that determine schools’ fates. It makes sense given the current national agenda and testing systems. It’s not that science and social studies don’t have rich traditions of investigation, interpretation, and discovery; it’s just AYP.

I wonder if we could free up middle schools’ scheduling and management of human capital if we risked differentiating testing windows.

What if incoming 6th graders all took reading and math tests in September as pre-assessments for grouping?

What if students who passed the test took the rest of the year for project-based, inquiry-driven local and global learning partnerships?

What if any 6th grade student who passed the first test could elect to take the 7th grade test at the semester, and the 8th grade test at the end of the year? Why not give that student the opportunity to earn 2 test-free years of learning without built-in limits?

What if 6th grade students who did not pass the test were given the same chance to re-test in January, or again at the end of the year? If the stakes are so high for schools, why not generate some student buy-in through choice and self-determination in attacking standardized tests?

What if we took the hit on a 6th grade entrance SOL and then didn’t test students who “failed” again until the end of 7th grade, or until the student and his or her teachers felt he or she was ready at the semester, end of 6th grade, or beginning of 7th grade after a summer school experience acting as proxy for year-round schooling? What if we traded off 6th grade testing for more prep time for – and success with – 7th and 8th grade tests? Would teachers under pressure to cut out everything but the tested curriculum find ways to enrich learning for student sentenced to remediation if they had more time to prepare for tests? Would federal and state governments bless a system of curriculum and assessment that recognizes schools’ strides in student growth by weighing 7th or 8th grade AYP over 6th?

Differentiating scheduling by differentiating testing windows would take a significant investment of student, teacher, counselor, and administrator time at the beginning of the school year, but the strategic scheduling, teaching, and learning made possible by such differentiation might reward the risk. Certainly the approach would help justify larger class sizes of students already exited from testing and smaller class sizes for those still working to demonstrate their learning on standardized measures.

Differentiating scheduling by testing windows and early passes might also allow an administrator to assign personnel to areas of instruction in which they excel, which carries its pros and cons in terms of teacher efficacy versus an over-specialized work force. It might be too daunting a change, it might be made moot by policy, or it might turn out that the number of student exiting testing requirements would be too small to justify a differentiates testing scheme. Nevertheless, I struggle with holding students who have surpassed a curriculum captive to it, and I struggle with asking students to face three tests in three years per assessed subject area if differentiation by testing and time could provide the desired results from one test.

I’m not a big fan of these questions I’ve been asking. I would rather ask questions like, “How can we become co-learners with students in the cloud-classrooms of School 3.0?,” but how can our testing system provide more opportunity than limits? What core standards have a chance of making schools more relevant to students who aren’t participating in their creation? What national agendas mired in the spent oil of an industrial educational system have a chance of changing our country today?

It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to make learning relevant to students. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to favor innovation over replication. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to push back against the system, to play with schedules that provide access to learning, not just to curriculum.

Maybe this can be teachers’ new role; maybe this can be the purpose of teachers’ social networking and professional development; maybe this can be teachers’ legacy after standardized tests are gone: in partnership with students we create relevance from the nothing that exists without it. Let the Fed and the SEAs and LEAs own the sound and fury of curriculum and testing. We create relevance. We celebrate discovery. We connect context and identity. We learn together.

I think what I’m going to do is this: take time over break to see what’s left to teach. Pick the content I least look forward to teaching. Push aside my anxieties and biases against it. Imagine each one of my students learning about it joyfully. Take notes on what students are learning and how they’re learning it. Build a resource or unit from those visions of engaging, inspiring work. Gather materials. Call in favors. Make it work. Try it and see. Find out where it goes. Not be afraid.

In response to this post by Shelly Terell (@shellterrell), Philly Teacher Mary Beth Hertz (@mbteach) shared her own reflections on lessons learned from great educators and then  tagged me to do the same.  Here goes (with all due apologies to Alan Moore, who, along with Anne Carson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, and Vladimir Nabokov, taught me what I love about memory – its paradoxical flexibility to seem absolute according to whatever we need in our lives as they go).

Hershey's Store by elisart

The checklist is in my hand. It’s the assessment menu for a unit on Greek mythology. Mrs. Labonte is explaining how we’ll be graded. I don’t remember anything but the dozens of choices on the handout. Draw a picture of a god. Write a letter to a god. Make a business using a god’s name or symbol as its logo. Dozens of choices. I don’t remember being offered this much freedom at any other time in my education. It’s the 6th grade.

The phaser is in my hand. It’s The Taming of the Shrew as performed by Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Kate. I remember saving the most bawdy, sci-fi-Shakespearian jokes we could imagine and write in sloppy iambic pentameter for the parent-night performance, and that Mr. O’Neil didn’t bother to hide his smile while he shook his head. Where does the Enterprise wear its photon torpedos? It’s the 7th grade.

The mid-term is in my hand. It’s the first I remember taking, and it’s the first time I read “Ozymandias.” Mrs. Goldstein is expecting me to say something. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember she trusted me to figure it out. It’s the 8th grade.

The novel is in my hand. It’s As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Ms Fotino is drawing a wheel on the board. Addie is in the middle. Her husband and children are the spokes. The rim is plot of the story rolling on as each character moves further and further away from the central event of Addie’s death. It’s the Wheel of Fotino. It’s the first graphic organizer I remember valuing. Ms Fotino is also the first teacher I remember talking with me about books as a fellow reader instead of a as teacher. After The Sound and the Fury,  she points me towards Truman Capote and Tennesse Williams. She’s also the first teacher I remember setting up safe and effective peer-review for our writing. It’s the 10th grade.

The F paper is in my hand. It’s about The Good Soldier or The Return of the Soldier or maybe Pride or Prejudice (without zombies). It’s the first F I’ve ever gotten in English. I’m in the English department office talking with Mr. Grant, who is not the teacher who gave me the F, asking him for help. He doesn’t even talk about the paper. He talks about how I write when I have a story to tell and how I write when I want to be finished with something. He’s asking me how I would tell someone my ideas instead of writing them as quickly as I think them. He’s telling me to write the telling. He’s the first teacher to succeed in getting me to realize that while I can tell a good story, sometimes I make the choice to ignore my audience. It’s the 11th grade.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is in my hand. It’s Spanish class, and we’re reading García Márquez in English. Dr. Joba is asking us questions and making us write about an author outside the English department canon, an author outside American and British lit. I realize I didn’t know anyone could write this way. I start learning about what’s going on in Colombia. It’s the 12th grade.

The coffee is in my hand. It’s burnt, like all the coffee in Athens, Ohio, in 1998. Professor Bartlett is somehow sitting there with me, this unknowable Welshman who has spent six months pointing out everything I still don’t know about the Restoration. He’s telling me that I’ll understand; he’s telling me that he’s always been the outsider. I understand, but I didn’t expect him to find me like that with some ingrained outcast echo-locator. Later he offers me my pick of the art in his office; he’s retiring. He was a coal miner in Wales before becoming a professor in America. I wonder if he feels like we didn’t learn enough about him when he tells us we don’t know enough about the Restoration. It’s the second year of college.

The poem is in my hand. It’s mine and it’s terrible. It’s about communists and Dan Rather and a coffee shop and completely inferior to the one in which I re-imagine the Monolith from 2001 as a giant Hershey Bar. Mary Ruefle is at the end of the table, looking at my watch, trying to find some words. “Mary,” she says, “there is no beginning, and there is no end.” It’s not really about my work, but it’s the only teacher comment near it that I can quote verbatim. It’s the third year of college.

The transcripts are in my hand. I’ve made them from pages of an American woman’s diary written after the death of her husband as she tries to maintain her hold over a hacienda in revolutionary Mexico. Pepo is listening as I read them. He seems really interested. He’s asking questions about what I’ll do with them and how I’ll edit them. I have no idea, but I know he’ll help. After a while we stop talking about work and talk about his son, his health, his plans in Ohio. I think he’s so cool and such a good father and I hope he will be okay. It’s still the third year of college, but since there is no beginning and there is no end….

The chalk is in my hand. I’m student teaching with Pat.  It’s all I can do to keep up with her pace of thinking, her interrogation and reinvention of what’s not working, and her ceaseless devotion to every student.  It’s absolutelty apparent that she’s never taught the same year twice and that her enthusiasm for teaching and learning grow exponentionally from year to year.  It’s the second year of grad school.

The data is in my hand. Lori is leading us to a common understanding and championing of what we have to do: Eliminate the Achievement Gap.  I’m finally figuring out that teaching is not about me being good at it; it’s about learning for all.  It’s the fourth year of my career.

These teachers and their dedicated, gifted colleagues shared with me many gifts that I try, fail, and try again to pass along in my teaching: freedom, humor, expectation, equality, generosity, awareness, empathy, idiosyncrasy, humanity, care, passion, and determination.

However, when I look back at the design of my education, what’s missing are two pieces that we still struggle with today: standardization and authenticity. The teachers who taught me the most about myself and the power of communication to share feeling, meaning, and memory either allowed me the most freedom or pushed me the most to do something more than settle.  They did not standardize me.  The teachers whom I let hurt me were the ones who tried to do that.  While it’s absolutely right, necessary, and human that we create circumstances to lift up one another through all kinds of teaching and learning, standardized testing cannot be the endpoint of public education.  We have to find a more fitting destination for the variety of human existence than standardized testing.

We also need to build more authentic schools. We need schools that are not schools.  I fell in love with reading and writing at an early age, and my schools were geared toward students like me.  While many teachers reached me me, I have no idea if or how they reached students with different gifts and needs. My education was authentic to me because reading and writing were personally meaningful to me, but that was not the case for many others.  Many students had profound gifts, but few outlets.  School was not an authentic or personally meaningful experience for them.   Who knows what else I might have been good at or learned to do from a teacher or classmate if I hadn’t been tracked in my own way? I spent my youth in books.  I’m certain now that there were other things going on outside.  Schools need to connect with all students’ lives, not only to engage kids with authentic work, but also to enable students to learn from one another.  We need to push learning into students lives by pushing it past classrooms’ physical boundaries.  We need to committ to choice in the classroom.  We need to provide choice within school systems.  The choices we offer need to be shaped by the needs and wants of our learners.

While I loved reading and writing, it’s my responsibility to help my students find what they love.

Tag, @msstewart, @englishcomp, @stevejmoore, @engltchrleo, @tweenteacher, @mctownsley: if you have the time and inclination, you’re it.  Be sure to link back to Shelly and Mary Beth’s posts.