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This Monday we dedicated a station to analyzing our data from last week’s small-group gaming.

Yoshi by Yoshi Huang

• Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
• Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
• Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more with the highest ratio group or the lowest.
• Students identified strategies from the lowest ratio group to try this week in class.
• Students explained how playing the game was like and unlike class.
• Students suggested ways by which they and the teachers could make class more game-like.

Here are some student quotes that caught my eye:

• “It was like class because some succeeded, and some didn’t.”
• “It was more fun than class.”
• “You can fail like in class.”
• “We all need more team work.”
• “We should play on Monday when we need more fun.”

Obviously, I have some hearts and minds work to do here in my allegedly mastery-learning classroom.

This afternoon in class, two usually antagonistic students had this interchange about today’s game play:

Student 1: “Wow.  You did a good job.”
Student 2: “Thank you.”

Maybe my students don’t often compliment one another on their work like that because it’s not relevant enough for them to assess or value it.  Also, I couldn’t engage 2 students with the gaming this week.  More work to do and social learning opportunities to design.

Here’s a comparison of each group’s performance last week and this week:

Group 1 greatly improved positive communication and finished more levels this week than last, but spent a few more lives doing so.  I wonder about how much of the other groups’  improvement is due to reflection about collaboration and how much is due to learning the levels.  I have to think about switching games or levels next week and measuring work in such a way that the qualitative observations on collaboration count for as much as the ratios without making me seem subjective to the students.  Help, PLN! Ideas?

NB: Group 6 consisted of a lone gamer today.  Apparently working alone greatly increases collaboration.

Super Mario Brothers Candy by sonson

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

• Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
• Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with the fewest lives lost in 20 minutes.
• A teacher kept track of lives lost and levels won on a graphic organizer and took notes, as well, about groups’ pro- and anti-social behavior.
• Lives could also be lost on paper for trash-talking.
• Trash-talking was addressed whenever it occurred, and serial trash-talkers were asked to stop playing.
• The group with the lowest lives lost to levels won ratio was awarded 3 lunch periods on the Wii.

Here are our results (lives lost:levels beat, reduced to the lowest equivalent ratio):

• Group 1 – 10:1
• Group 2 – 6:1
• Group 3 – 50:1
• Group 4 – 22: 1
• Group 5 – 15:1
• Group 6 – 10:1

Here are comments from the groups with the lowest and highest ratios, respectively:

• Comments from Group 2: “Backed up to easier levels; good teamwork and talk; [Student A] led them through the levels and made sure all followed.”
• Comments from Group 3: “Students fought each other and never started working together.”

I can see that Group 3 needs some social stories work before playing together again, and that the difference between Groups 2 and 3 wasn’t necessarily the amount of communication, but the type of communication that went on between group members.  Before the next contest, I’ll use the data and observations from this activity to pose questions for students about the value of strategic thinking, positive communication, and leadership to social learning.  To help make the discussion more personally meaningful to students, I might begin by asking students to figure out the ratios and results from the data after I make it anonymous.

What do you think?  Does the competition undercut the collaboration?  Is the reward appropriate? I’ll follow up later so we can see where the activity goes and whether or not it impacts soft-skills and collaboration in the classroom.

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.

Kyle Pace posted a challenge during last night’s #edchat on encouraging teachers to adapt and change in response to the needs of today’s students.

It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.

Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against one another. Significant pieces of our professional identity come from who we think of when we ask ourselves: Who do I want to be? Who do I not want to be? Whose results do I want? Whose results don’t I want?  Students evaluate one another.  We evaluate students.  They evaluate us.  Measures change with points of view, but evaluation remains a personal, human enterprise.  We often run headlong into this challenge in the classroom, where what we value and what students value differs without intentional and prolonged community-building.  I suspect a similar challenge exists in teacher evaluation between teachers and their evaluators.

Evaluation is personal because we view results as shorthand for those who produced them. Consider how often we place students by their grades and test scores; consider how we talk about students because of their grades and test scores and placements.

What if we placed students by interest? By learning style? By mastery of content?

What if we restructured schools to do the same for adults? What if a school system reorganized to better manage its human capital by creating different types of schools where its teachers and students could find success? Why keep putting square peg teachers into round hole classrooms?

Why is our rhetoric all innovation and our funding all conformity? When do we ask radically new questions of the system to help us do the job it says it wants us to do?

We are all impatient for change, because we want results on which we can act. We want a good evaluation so we can evaluate ourselves against others. We’re in a system and entrenched political and media climate that encourages us to do so.  Competition suffuses our schools and our discourse about them. Public schools must be effective so charters are ineffective, or visa versa, so we can act. Teacher A must be effective so Teacher B is ineffective so we can act. Fund this, close that, fire them.

Haven’t we learned enough about either/or? Haven’t we played enough zero-sum games?  Do we want to keep playing Spanish Prisoner with students and test scores? (If you comply now then in X years . . . .) In leaving no child behind, is there no better solution than to leave schools and teachers behind?

Here’s an article that says no, turnarounds aren’t scalable (or maybe they are; links via Eduwonk). Okay. So let’s not turn around schools. Let’s re-organize them to succeed and re-organize our teachers, too. What if every school adopted a mission, and what if every division worked with schools to offer a meaningful choice between effective schools, beyond autonomy zones, but including general curriculum schools? Think of the possibilities for students and adults alike in authentic, passion-driven specialization. Think of the career tracks opened up inside classrooms and schools if novice teachers and administrators had the opportunity to pursue personally relevant professional paths. I want to be a top-notch collaborative special education teacher at the visual arts academy in five years. I want to be a top-notch art teacher helping students create album covers and concert posters at the music academy in three years. I want to be the assistant principal sharing a school-wide vision of scientific inquiry into sustainable living at the STEM academy in two years.  Next year I want to be the coach of students working through the STEM curriculum offsite at a more local lab-within-a-school.  Next year I want to be the R&D teacher inventing new methods that will benefit all learners with students who have mastered the year’s coursework already.

So what does any of this have to do with class roots reform?

First, take up Kyle’s challenge. Connect with a teacher from your PLN and connect with someone in your building. Start a caring partnership. Find the good in one another, acknowledge it, and emulate it. Put aside questions about who you want to be or don’t want to be. Ask new questions. Who are we together? How can we help one another change for the better? Go the extra mile beyond us and them in teacher evaluation. I regret that I have spent so much of my career competing with colleagues in the phantom teaching league of my mind.

Second, ask your leaders new questions. Ask to follow a passion. Ask to let the kids follow their passions. Align the work to standards, show results, and argue that they come from authentic teaching and learning, not from conformity. Ask about the efficacy of leveling. Ask about specialty centers and schools-within schools. Ask about sharing the responsibility for sharing out and scaling up new and successful ideas about how to reach students grouped by something more human than either/or. Invite your PLC to observe something new that’s working; ask for it’s feedback; ask if anyone else is willing to try. If you’ve built the kinds of partnerships Kyle challenges us to build, you’ll find some takers.  Create and advertise your team’s specialties; show others how to develop theirs; recruit and foster like-minded novices.

We can’t go back to the days of closed classroom doors and scatter ourselves to the wind on eccentric pedagogical whims.  However, we can leverage our strengths to create and scale-up classrooms with new approaches to teaching and learning that are authentic to students and politically viable to our leaders.  We can radically differentiate what we do to help students and ourselves, and then regroup in teams, schools, and divisions organized on principles more authentic, lasting, and human than standardized-test results.  Let’s get to the future and ask ourselves how we will organize education when everyone meets every standard.  And if we don’t think that’s possible, again, let’s do something different now to make our students the innovators, entreprenuers, and citizens we all want them to be.

Keep looking up and out and inside whenever the demands of the day let you and reimagine yourself teaching up there, out there, ahead of the curve. Come back with your vision, share it, and evaluate it in performance.

[Editor's note: this one goes out to Shelly Blake-Plock of TeachPaperless and is a kind of meta-testament to the power of a widely distributed PLN to effect classroom reform for authentic engagement.]

The classroom is up and running, and we’ve been through three weeks of shake-out. In the interests of sharing and transparent teaching, I want to take a moment and share the systems we’ve developed together as students and teachers.

Our classroom is uncommonly technology-rich this year due to a combination of design and grant spending deadlines. I recognize how fortunate we are, but would like also to suggest that what follows is one blueprint for a “21st Century” classroom – by which I mean a classroom that values problem-solving, social learning and multiple communications technologies that decentralize the position and role of the teacher.

Campfire by eskimoblood

We work in a technology lab that has been repurposed as a classroom. Because the classroom was a technology lab, it is large. Both the layout of the room and its work-station-furnishing discourage the traditional arrangement of desks in a classroom. Therefore, we have adopted the workstations and have created three distinct learning areas, as well as a smaller alcove for individual conferencing. Our learning areas are each specially purposed. By the door we have our campfire, an area for daily floor meetings during which we share out the story of the day’s class and our goals for it on a SmartBoard. This area also has a bull-pen of five drafting tables for students producing original art for class projects – we’re heavy into original IP and legal use of others’ work. Around the campfire, against the walls, nestled in work-stations, we have our watering holes – social learning stations built around media-production computers. Typically, three students work per station; two use 1:1 laptops to collaborate on the research and resource gathering necessary to produce media on the desktop computer, which the third student “drives.”  In the “back” of the room is our cave, an area for individuals to use when they need to meet a deadline without distraction or to regroup emotionally before working with others.

I think there are two design lessons here. First, new schools should be built with classrooms that provide ample, differentiated space, so teachers explore new ways of orienting themselves and their instruction to students. If you want teachers and students to think outside the box, don’t put them in one. Second, in existing classrooms – especially secondary ones – teachers should design multiple spaces with explicit and consistent purposes to provide spatial and kinesthetic reinforcement to transitions from task to task. Imagine a daily routine that tapped into the strengths of centers, stations, and jig-saw activities. The benefits of building such a culture of purpose and use is worth time taken to establish it.

Apart from a printed work plan designed and followed to build students’ accountability and alleviate their anxiety about what comes next (or when class ends), we compose and submit work on the computers – mostly on-line. The work plan acts as checklist and cheat sheet for students’ FAQ about class activities – what are we doing? What comes next? Can I work with a friend? Can I work on the computer? By providing the work plan to individual students and referring them to it, I hope to help them develop better executive function.  Over time, students learn to organize their work around the plan and take responsibility for checking off completed tasks without prompting from an adult.  In addition to monitoring students’ use of the plans during class, I audit a small sample of the work plans semi-nightly and give private, goal-oriented feedback to students about next steps either in organization (like maintaining an accurate work-plan) or work habits (like making better seating choices).  That feedback, like many of our learning activities and projects, is largely delivered online and then referenced in F2F dicussions during class.

Flat Classroom Skype by superkimbo_in_BKK

While I continue to struggle with finding the right mix of linguistic and non-linguistic differentiation, I think we have made the transition from a paper-based classroom to a nearly paperless one in much less time than I would have anticipated. Sometime in August, after following @teachpaperless for a few weeks on Twitter, I decided to take the plunge and began thinking about which tools fit which purposes in class. Instead of designing a traditional curriculum map shuffling around content, I tried to envision a structure for learning, sharing, and producing new work. I knew in August that if things went well in a division pilot, both Google Apps and Office Live domains would be available for my students by the end of the first marking period. In the meantime, I needed to find existing tools that would protect students’ online IDs without unnecessarily limiting their use of the Internet for learning from others.

Here’s where we are:

• I use Google Docs to generate forms and collect work from students via embeds in a class blog hosted by Blogger.
• The class blog also embeds and links to off-site instructional materials.
• I deliver feedback to students on their work via Edmodo, which we also use to share research links and trade files. For example, a student might make a song on one of our media production machines and then send it to me via Edmodo for me to download to iTunes for assessment.
• We also have a class wiki – hosted by Wikispaces – on which groups of students maintain pages for the work of their documentary production companies and on which I post media production tutorials.
• Different pieces of the system are shared out to coaches who work with students on history, production value, usability, and writing rubrics for their documentary work.
• Student use other applications, like iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Garage Band, as their work warrants.

This week I’ll print out interim reports to send home with students; apart from work plans, those interims will be the first paper products I’ve made for class this year. Going paperless has been easier than I thought it would be, and I feel organized like never before while enjoying access to student work from any web-capable device. I wholeheartedly recommend taking whatever part of the plunge you can in your work. Moving away from paper is a step toward the reinvention of school-work, as is moving away from a traditionally shaped or oriented classroom. Maybe you can sign out a lab for a week or grab a laptop cart every Friday for a month. Maybe a local school technology consortium can loan out computers to one of your class projects. Maybe enough of your students have cell phones to snap pictures on a school field trip so that they can return to class and serve others by stitching together a virtual trip for those less fortunate or further away.  Or maybe your step away from paper can pursue another avenue of authentic engagement apart from classroom technology.  Whichever step you take, as with every step into the future, you have to decide to take it.

My students have adapted to the point where they no longer say the computer doesn’t work when a web page fails to load. Instead they ask an adult to proof-read the student-typed address for them. While this is not the zenith of authentic engagement we’re building towards, requests like that reflect a profound shift in students’ attitudes toward technology. Technology is no longer to be feared or blamed, it’s something to be used for learning and the assessment of students’ work.

I’m eager to see what student produce from their learning this year and hopeful that our community and relationships will develop enough so that each student finishes with an impassioned and amazing project, online or off.

If you’re interested in learning more, please begin with the class blog.  Also feel free to write chad@classroots.org.