Classroots.org

This week we spent some time Thursday coming up with teamwork and game-play strategies for our Friday Wii collaboration contest.

Results of our strategizing were mixed with only half the groups improving from last week to this week. At this point I’m wishing I had taken a research-design course sometime in the past decade so I could present you with better conclusions from my too-small-a-sample action study. Regardless, here goes.

Group 1 stayed at 10:1. Group 1’s goal was “to not die a lot,” and their strategies included, “work together, not leave people behind, not trash talk, go fast…[and] not jump big jumps.” We need to write more specific goals next week – I’m not sure of the group thinks 10 lives per level is a little or a lot. However, the group did follow its strategies.

Repeat champs group 2 improved from 2:1 to 1:1. Group 2’s strategy was “beat 8 levels…lose less than 10 lives.” The group’s strategies were “bubble, [save] lives, and speed.” I don’t know either, but it worked. Group 2’s most effective strategy is to play levels it knows from past experience rather than to attempt brand new levels. I wonder why they didn’t list it.

Group 3 decided on these goals: “not to hit, or push people off ledges [and] not to leave people behind.” To meet its goals, the group adopted these strategies: “work together, share shrumes [sic & middle school], be nice.” The group followed its strategies and wound up turing in its best performance to date. Since the group began by spending 50 lives per level last month, I call this significant progress in teamwork.

Group 4 spent the same amount of lives per level this week as last despite meeting its goal and following its strategies. The group tried all new levels – the highest levels unlocked in the game so far, and I think it’s likely that this is what kept their ratio from decreasing. They spent their time sight-reading the levels like gaming musicians. However, as I said, they met their goal – “not killing or eating each other” – and they used their strategies – “not yelling and not telling each other that you suck[...] everybody agree on a level, don’t give attitude [and] don’t force people to do stuff that they don’t want to do.”

Group 5 wanted “to beat as many levels as possible.” That’s too nebulous a goal for us to measure and we need to work on setting more specific and attainable goals for our work together. Group 5 wound up with a higher lives lost to levels won ratio this week than last; however, group 5 did beat 2 levels after beating only 1 1/2 each of the previous 3 contests. Group 5’s strategies were “bubble up, try not to argue, help each other [and] try not to be competitive.” By my observation, the group used it’s strategies, but may or may not have reached it’s goal. We need to debrief next week.

Group 6 tried “to win as many levels as possible without losing any lives.” The group wound up spending 16 lives per level, and so it did not meet its goal. The group’s strategies were “try not to yell at each other, practice outside of school, try not to be jerks [and] wait for each other.” In this group, a student got a little bit bossy with the other group members. While this didn’t constitute yelling, it did frustrate the other players. I wonder if all group embers have the same conception of “yelling” or “jerks,” or if they could set a more attainable goal for the next contest with more positive steps to take in terms of pro-social behaviors and effective game-play.

I might change up the rules next week and require all groups to sight-read a series of levels unlocked and selected by me. I’m curious about whether or not groups will change their strategies to play brand new levels rather than levels they’ve seen before.

Look for student responses to these results next week after our debriefing. Please suggest any questions you’d like me to ask them or any games we could use to develop and transfer our soft skills in the classroom.

pieces of the puzzle by mikelietz

Virginia Secretary of Education Gerard Robinson visited my school today to see it in operation and speak with division personnel, school leaders, and teachers about how we can work together to met students’ needs. I appreciated the visit, the attention to our school, and the time we spent talking as a group about how to raise up education for all students using the charter movement as one lever to do so. Secretary Robinson is well informed and experienced in education and policy. I really look forward to seeing how our school and division’s experience with Virginia charter schools and policy helps the state use charter schools as part of a tool set to reach learners at risk of complete disengagement with schooling.

Secretary Robinson speaks eloquently and directly for himself, so I won’t report out on his positions here or try to recount a play-by-play of our heartening conversation about supporting start-up schools in fulfilling students’ needs. Instead, I’d like to talk about what it’s like to work at a charter school that is entirely distinct from KIPP and the other name brands of the charter movement. I’d like to talk about what’s happening below the radar of politics. NB: The rest of this post reflects only my own opinions.

Below the radar, we are you.

• We are trying to design and implement individualized literacy interventions.
• We are trying to develop and enact an arts-infused, project-based curriculum.
• We are trying to teach students the habits of quality work and the intrinsic rewards of mastering and sharing their learning.
• We are trying to teach students personal responsibility without using a carrot or stick.
• We are trying to integrate instructional technology and applications with opportunities for authentic and social learning.
• We are trying to unlearn traditional instruction and traditional discipline.
• We are trying to pass all the tests.
• We are trying to fulfill our students’ learning needs.

Why are we necessary? For the same reasons you are. Our children need teachers dedicated to helping them connect their lives to learning. We have banded together as a small school rather than a department, team, or PLC so we can move more quickly together as a unit in finding what works for our learners thanks to the vision, mission, and flexibility our charter details. We try to act more like a classroom teacher than an entire traditional middle school in terms of knowing our students and reacting to the shifting circumstances of their lives and learning.  Not every student needs us, but we’re convinced that ours do.

I understand why educators discriminate between charter franchises and public education. Large-scale charter operations want money so they can self-replicate. The point of their programs is the perpetuation of their programs. They need customers who fit their programs for their programs to succeed. They need their programs to succeed to get “results.” They need “results” to get press. They need press to attract customers – divisions and families – to get money. They believe in what they do. They are businesses.

We are a school. We are learners. We are classroom scientists testing our hypotheses about how to rekindle the love of learning in students who have learned not to love school. The point of our endeavor is to graduate students who have connected school to authentic learning and expect that connection to continue.

We are you.

When you think of charter schools, by all means, question anyone who tells you that they have it right.

Please also think of schools like ours as we try to serve our students, our division, and public education by creating a safe place for resistant learners to unpack their incredibly complex and complicated lives in pursuit of changing, growing, and learning into the brave and generous people they want to be.

We are you. Our students are yours. Whenever we take it upon ourselves to make learning better for children, we are all of us charters.

Our impromptu two week vacation at the beginning of February did little for our teamwork. It seems like we need to be together to practice cooperating.

Or, really, do we? If we had a social network (or better used our existing Edmodo network) or virtual day set up, couldn’t student teams compete with one another on a FaceBook game? On a prompt or menu of activities left as a message on our class Google Voice line? I have to sit down and make a contingency plan for the next snow day, publish it, and distribute it to students, and I need to design it so we somehow have at least the opportunity to keep our classwork and cooperation rolling.

In contrast to the slide in cooperation several groups evidenced while playing together last Friday, students’ individual analyses of their group’s growth in cooperation continue to improve in quality – you know, qualitatively speaking. Here are some of our debriefing questions and students’ answers to them:

Wii by swannman

Question 1: How do you know your group’s cooperation has improved since we first started playing?

• “We have completed more levels.”
• “People are calmer.”
• “We are learning from each other.”
• “Now I enjoy playing with my group.”
• “We know what to do and say.”
• “We have a strategy.”
• “We won every time.”

Question 2: What have you learned about cooperation so far?

• “That you can’t yell at other players.”
• “Cooperation makes things go better.”
• “You need a lot of it to do work.”
• “You need a leader, but not everyone can be a leader.”
• “It’s not that hard and it helps you get further.”
• “It’s fun and frustrating to work together.”

Ambiguity rears it’s ugly head in schoolwork. Awesome.

Question 3: What is a strength that your group has that helps group members cooperate?

• “Confidence.”
• “We stay on task.”
• “We are nerds.”
• “Talking.”
• “Speed and communication.”

Question 4: What is an area of cooperation in which your group can improve?

• “Not cuss.”
• “Friendship.”
• “Helping one another.”
• “Strategy.”
• “Nerdiness.”

What else can we do to make school be a place where students feel confident, stay on-task, feel good about being nerds, and participate as equal partners in communication for learning?

I think it’s probably time to hand the small-group gaming commentary off to student guest bloggers or else have students create their own blogs ASAP so they can share their learning directly with you. I’m a bit behind the times this year on the student blogging front; this could be the impetus for getting back into the swing of it.

I’m thinking about bringing in Kodu Game Lab and Little Big Planet to add a game/level-creation tier to project menus. For example, a student could create a level in Little Big Planet with platforming metaphors for the major events of the 1930s (can’t you see a series of rising platforms filled with prize bubbles representing the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression drops the bottom out of the level?), or use Kodu Game Lab to write a game with branching paths that simultaneously summarizes a story and speculates on its what-ifs (Pac-man vs. The Maze Runner mash-up?).   I hope, too, that the co-op levels of “Game 3,” a.k.a “BattleBlock Theater,” will offer opportunities for teamwork and reflection like New Super Mario Bros. Wii that can compete with the slapstick lure of its other modes. I suppose that where the learning design comes into play.

Dreaming about work by Claudio.Ar

As a husband, parent, teacher, and blogger, I’m always thinking about second chances. What do I believe? What did I say? What did I do? How did it all end up? How would I have done it differently if only given the chance? If given the chance, would I behave differently?

As much attention as I pay to learning objectives and processes and products at work, I don’t know that I use backwards design nearly enough in my life. I have gotten used to reacting – the fridge needs food; the car need gas; the kids need out of the house; (ZOINKS I need to collect and submit my recert docs).

Candidly, even at work reaction often wins the day. There’s data that needs a response. There’s a blown lesson or scrapped project that needs salvaging. There’s a relationship that needs attention. There’s a student that needs something other than school work today. There’s the budget.

Then it all ends and begins again. Every Autumn feels like a second chance, but really, it isn’t. When I say I never want to teach the same year twice, I’m being disingenuous. I want to riff. I want to tweak. I want to perfect. Really, in my teaching so far, the new school year hasn’t been a second chance. It’s been a proxy for the past with revised goals, new props, and a new cast. A revival of an old show. A re-telling of a classic tale. A reboot of a classic franchise. A cover of a genre standard.

If there’s a second chance to be had in my teaching, it’s in beginning again, building up from the ground floor, and breaking with the past.

I think this is my second chance. This is my opportunity to innovate and collaborate and co-learn with kids and colleagues across the country. This is something new, something different, and something daring.

Paula White (@paulawhite) invited me into this Reimagining Learning grant application, and I’m grateful for it.

I want to take this opportunity and run with it. I want to plan a break with my classrooms’ past. I want new goals that look nothing like the old. I want to innovate through “transmedia” collaborations that help us transform the warez that we view as our competition for kids’ attention into learning tools. I want to offer my students new kinds of leadership true to a vision and not so beholden to reaction. I want to document our work to reimagine learners as designers. I want to share it. I want to celebrate its successes and analyze its failures. I want it to be of use to you. I want to run a middle school class that feels like it belongs to the future problem-solvers of the world, and not to outmoded ideas about the inviolability of content-areas and fallacious limits of what should be learned when. I want to make Joe Bower (@joe_bower) proud.

I want to use this opportunity to hold myself accountable to creating a second chance for teaching and learning in my classroom. I want to stop covering the same old ground. I want to bring down the curtain on my own personal run of Cats. (NB: awesome writing & design assignment embedded in that link.)

We have until Monday to collect all the comments and questions we can. Please visit the application, take a moment to register, and comment. Ask questions and we will answer. Challenge us. Push us further ahead. Take a stake in our work and we’ll do everything we can to return on your investment for kids and their learning.

Grant or no grant, I want to do something new. I want to make a second chance and not wait for one to appear from thin air. Maybe something serviceable. Maybe something edible. Maybe a little big humanities project with help from DonorsChoose.org. Something that values little big minds. Something novel. Something good.

What are you going to do?

What should we do together? Let’s dream up a second chance and take it.

And don’t forget to comment.

Day 223 - Learning to use computers by LShave

Here is today’s leading #edchat question:

How does the internet change the role of content and prior knowledge?

It doesn’t. Kids still need a personal stake in both to create meaning.  While everyone can learn content and has prior-knowledge, school-valued content and prior knowledge remain commodities that some have and some do not.  I would further argue that how kids access that information outside school has changed a lot more than classroom practice inside school. Think about the types of information students pursue on their own time in accordance with their own interests. They know where to go and what to search for regarding their passions, hobbies, interests, and fads.  I think kids are used to learning at a faster pace outside of school than inside.  The relevance of what students are learning and their specialization in search tools speeds up the pace of learning for them. Because we still insist on a curriculum being a curriculum and a school year being a school year (and a $14.95 unit is a $14.95 unit, and a mini-lesson is 5-15 minutes, dammit!), we educators often keep ourselves from re-imagining learning through personal, rather than curricular, connections at a different pace. It’s like when Vger DMed Earth and it took an outsider like Spock to realize humanity’s “child” was on Twitter, not email.  See scene 175.  I mean, obviously. K1RK GOT PWNED, NOOB! FAIL! I was totally ROFL.

At school, however, most students are still told what to research and how to research it. They’re told what to learn and how to learn it (Question: in paragraph 3, is the underlined phrase ROFL figurative or literal, and how does the reader know?). Choice of browser, search tool, and/or subject can sometimes cloak schoolwork in relevancy, but I don’t see many teachers, myself included, radically changing classroom practice specifically in response to the amount of information and access points provided by the Internet and associated instructional technology. I still struggle to balance inquiry and test prep in making design decisions.

Then again, while I encourage students to Google it whenever possible, I’ve never been a fan or practitioner of the research project. Teachers who have incorporated the Internet into research projects, what’s worked for you and your students? How have new opportunities to find information changed the way you teach students how to gather, analyze, and use it? How has the Internet changed student research habits?

I wonder if a next step isn’t to elevate the search to an art form complete with peer critique. How much more would students learn about the what and the how if we ran conversational search seminars? What if students brought stuck or failed searches to the table and then talked or messaged with one another about the best ways to find relevant information? What if we crowd-sourced both the relevance and the rigor of search lessons to students and their relationships?

I don’t think technology has changed to role of content or background knowledge in learning, but I think it continues to change how we collect information and what we do with it. How else should I look at the question, PLN? How do you think the role of content and prior knowledge have, indeed, changed? Has access given them a new primacy? Has standardized testing? Or is the purpose of instructional technology to package content and prior knowledge for quicker assimilation into more rigorous work?

How do we get better at helping students learn how and why? How do we take advantage the ways that technology speeds up the what? How do we involve students in all this content and prior knowledge?  The questions remain the same.

Disclaimer: I still want my giant iPhone.

(Answer: figurative or literal – either way the question is illogical.)