Classroom by Marlith

However, middle school serves high school more than it serves the developmental characteristics of its learners. It is especially ill-suited, by design, to handle boys – or girls, or learners - for whom middle school unfolds as a Dickensian serial of disappointed expectations and chastisement. Furthermore, middle school does no better than any other level of schooling in serving the under-served.

I cite data here only to show that middle schools don’t succeed in what they are designed to do – assimilate children into high school culture. I can think of no better argument for utterly transforming both middle and high school.

There are many way to approach the middle school problem. We need a more diverse teaching corps. We need to put learning before teaching. We need to align standards to kids’ passions and questions. We need to schedule in such a way that doesn’t scatter what little relevance there is in most curricula across falsely-schismed content area fiefdoms.

I think we also need to redesign middle graded education based on what we can learn from schools like the PCA and NWPHS. These schools welcome students where they are and work with them so long as they want to learn until students are ready to graduate or must exit high school by law.

Why insist on a 3-year middle-grade experience based on mimicking high school?

Because high school is the “real world?” Hardly; though it paints over our eyes the smarmy veneer of the capitalist viewpoint our corporate culture wants students to have.

Because we’re setting kids up for failure by not teaching them to pass the tests? Only if you agree with vendors that students and teachers are best measured by rigged numbers. Only if you agree that the tests are, indeed, our schools raison de etre.

Because that’s what their high school teachers expect? It seems to me that our expectations are unsound, obsolete, outmoded, divisive, and harmful. Let a new breed of middle schoolers and their parents confront the old breed of high school. Let educated consumers demand their rights to learn by producing.

I don’t see any learning- or student-centered reason to maintain the status quo. Let kids learn rotely, but let it be in service of personally meaningful work – don’t accept rote learning as the end of schooling. Let students graduate, but help more students graduate by creating more personally meaningful schools.

What, then, should we do to change things for the better?

Why not look at middle school as a 3-4 year experience of project-based learning through teacher- and student-designed electives aligned to state standards? Why not do away with the idea of separate 6th, 7th, and 8th grades in favor of grouping students by choice of electives and academic readiness? Why not let students either begin or end with a year of intensive math and reading tutorials meant to catch them to peers reading, writing, calculating, and problerm-solving at the “norm?” Why not let that year of tutorials float until a student chooses it and brings his or her own purpose to remediation without being ostracized by teacher-juried retention?

I think we should radically alter middler school to offer standards-aligned electives that students choose and help develop. I think we should radically alter middle school to do away with grade-levels and group students by interest. I think we should radically alter middle school to provided struggling students with a floating year of tutorial support and project-based learning free of all other curricular and testing mandates apart from increasing those students’ reading and math skills.

I think middle school students, boys and girls alike, should be on their curriculum committees along with educators, experts, and community leaders. All of those adults should listen to the students and help them achieve their vision. There is little that cannot be translated into learning if we adults will let go of teaching.

What do you think? Could you do this in your school? Could you start a program like this? Would you?

How else would you better re-design middle school to do its part in dropout prevention and recovery?

In response to Michelle Rhee’s new studentsfirts.org initiative, I’d like to offer the following convictions:

My mission is to defend the safety, dignity, independence, and curiosity of children in my classroom and pursue authentic reform in public education so that student learning is recognized and acknowledged inside and outside traditional school buildings, schedules, and structures. While the data might be clear, it is not clear to me at all that we are schooling for the right purpose. The data we collect and the instruction it drives are harming children by limiting their learning and the potential of their teachers, who need to break at every opportunity the ceiling of low instructional expectations placed on them by standardized testing.

I believe all children deserve outstanding teachers who are free to teach and learn – and to innovate through trial and error – in outstanding ways. I’m willing to pursue and pay for a third-union certification that allows me to do such; I’m willing to negotiate a contract that hold me responsible for facilitating juried work and adding tangible value to the lives of my students, school system, and community.

I believe experiencing authentic learning should be a matter of fact and be facilitated by great schools at a variety of locations throughout a community and through student internships, externships, and expeditions. I believe that robust and diverse school marketplace of radical customization and niche-education better serves children than one built on competition for a single resource – test scores.

I believe that public dollars belong where they make the greatest difference – in supporting students and teachers to pursue personally meaningful learning that tangibly benefits schools’ communities; we must fight spending money on standardizing children. Schools need authentic learning and assessment – not testing.

I believe that parent and family involvement is key to student safety, confidence, and curiosity, and that interdependent school, home, and community involvement should lift children up as change agents in their schools, families, and communities. The effort to improve our schools is not the same thing as the effort to improve our test scores, despite their episodic fiscal and political overlap. School should not be a vaccine sold against generational dysfunction; it should be a lab full of learners pursuing solutions to the problems posed by their own lives and passions.

What do you believe? How will you start your movement?

Tag – you’re it.

I encourage us all to declare ourselves and take action for Blog 4 Real Education Reform – The Sequel on January 1st, 2011.

I am grateful to Michelle Rhee for confronting me with an opportunity to reflect.

Last year we used a lives-lost-per-level ratio to determine which teams of players were most efficient at preserving one another’s lives. Teams with more fluent players were sometimes at an advantage (when they could manage their own lives well) and sometime at a disadvantage (when they were impatient to “win” and didn’t shepherd less fluent players). The best evidence of teamwork came during strategy-planning sessions midway through our experiment as students discovered they could converse and work well with one another before certain levels taxed their patience with the game and one another. We did have the game beaten by the end of the year – a collaborative effort of 22 students (and a few adults).

This year we’re going to play local multi-player Mario Kart. We’ll play for 25-minutes each Friday in groups of four as part of our normal class rotation through stations. We’re going to play like a cycling team dedicated to helping rotating captains win each race. We’re going to graph group members’ placement distributions to find out which teams are best at spreading out first place finishes amongst all group members. Students are already thinking about how to block the bots so less skilled players can win. I’m also thinking about what kind of controller would be best for each student. I need to invest in more Wii Wheels.

My hope is that students will learn to put others’ interests before their own – or even to see how putting others’ before themselves is sometimes in their best interest. I’d like us to work through a similar progression of lessons as we did last year:

• Week 1: Introduce the content and let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 2: Talk about how difficult it was to spread out the wins; ask what worked; let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 3: Introduce a goal- and strategy-setting organizer; let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 4 and onward: continue with goal- and strategy-setting, playing, and graphing; start analyzing graphs for trends, success stories, and strategies to share; maybe start an online strategy guide.

Last year, a small group of students hit a wall when they experienced how much work went into platformer level design and how much that work depended on collaboration between students who acted as researchers and artists. This year, however, we’re demonstrating on a daily basis remarkable pro-academic behaviors that we only inconsistently demonstrated last year. I wonder if we’re ready to stick with game design that integrates curriculum.

I have to figure out how to get kids like me – kids eager to spend hours in sandbox editors – to bridge school content into their worlds, or to draw “real-world” lessons from their design work. It’s a challenge. How do you help a kid move school into his or her quality world when you share a mistrust of what school has been, but don’t have a shared vision of what it could be? (And how can I get Little Big Planet 2 into the classroom?)

I’m hitting the wall separating what I saw and what I see. I need to pull an Inception and start dreaming the wall and walking on it instead of familiar ground.

I’m looping with our school’s inaugural class for the third straight year. I feel a desperate need to get it right. I feel a desperate need to decide what right is.

I’m reading tweets like this one and wondering about the fate of school choice in Virginia. I wish the law was flexible enough to let us spend Read 180 money (see page 6) on literacy coaches and arts teachers. I feel like we’ve given Toby to the Goblin King.

I’m reading posts like this one and wondering how to teach for the jobs that don’t exist from one that won’t exist. I’m imagining a lighter, mobile teaching force licensed to coffee shops and finding it still inadequate to the preservation of democracy and the widespread diffusion of community- and project-based learning and living for our kids.

I’m trying to figure out how to stop being such an outsider without going back inside.

More encouragingly, here’s what’s working:

• Kids who can count on one hand the number of books they’ve read should be finished reading and/or listening to The House of the Scorpion by Halloween after scripting conversations with their imaginary clones, drafting and debating clones’ rights bills, and drawing some conclusions about word choice on the way.
• By the end of October we also should have raised the money to start a class Kiva fund entirely through students’ self-directed service work in civics.
• And around that very same time we ought to have a gallery of portraits of citizen-artists including pieces about video game makers who have contributed to Child’s Play. I never would have learned about that charity without students’ inquiry into what makes an artist and how video game makers help their communities.

Given room to run, teaching and learning can always chase each other into the real world. We can all get better at getting out of the way.

Let me know if the materials scaffolding any of that learning would be useful to you.

Anyways, thanks for listening and for being polite.

I do seem to remember a process where you people ask me questions and I give you answers, and then I ask you questions and you give me answers, and that’s the way we find out things. I think I read that in a manual somewhere.

-Dr. Heywood Floyd, 2010: The Year We Make Contact

The best thing I ever did for my teaching was to stop teaching.

Before I get into that, here’s a quick to-do list for next year.

1. Organize better for self-directed learning. I shifted my work with students into a more democratic, self-directed space midway through the year in an attempt to improve our relationships, to meet students’ learning needs, and to let students’ natural curiosity and creativity take over our time together. However, I wasn’t prepared to capture as much of the work as I should have. I’ll play around with a bunch of models and combinations this summer and be ready for students to pick ways to archive and reflect on their work this fall.

2. Learn more outside the school. We worked with several partners this year – with local instructional coaches (like @bethcosta6 and @tborash) and community partners, as well as with PLN tweeps like @crudbasher, @engltchrleo, and @kperry. However, we did so somewhat haphazardly thanks to snow-days and other hiccups in pacing. I’d like to work with my school to set aside specific time each week for each students to do, learn, and/or make something outside of school. I have in mind “electives” with a blacksmith, a master carpenter, a green roof nursery, a nursing home, and a musician. That covers maybe 3/5 of us according to numbers and interests. I need to do more legwork in soliciting ideas from students and lining up expert tutors this summer.

3. Bring in the parents. I know a few parents are happy that I’ve developed better relationships with their children. I know a few parents are happy that I’ve implemented self-directed learning. I know a few parents are always going to ask about grades. I know a few parents wonder what the hell I’m doing. I need to set up parent education nights – several of them, repeating and then spiraling – to try and share the big picture of teaching and learning to which I ascribe. I need to explain how a nascent democratic, self-directed classroom looks in a public school and how it promotes and tracks deep and authentic student learning. I need to explain how our class might be different from others, but also how every class here is alike in its determination to serve our students and rehabilitate their notions of learning and what school can be.

Back to teaching better by not teaching.

Here’s an embarrassing story. I’m so glad that this kid stuck with me. Note my sterling use of Choice Theory in August. Crikey.

August: Here’s your work. Hey, look, its on a computer. Let’s go. Hey. Come on. Do something. It’s right there. Wiggle the mouse. Come on. Click. CLICK! What? Come on. Get your foot down. Okay, okay. Now get your foot out of the drawer. Please. Out of the drawer. Let’s go. Come on. Can I help you? Can you tell me why you’re choosing not to work right now? You have to work to be here. Come on. You don’t have to go. You just have to choose to work. I’ll help. Hey – FOOT! DRAWER! If you won’t talk to me, go make a plan…

…December: Blah blah blah work blah blah choice blah help blah WHAT? I’m sorry, but you can’t say “this is [frakking bullpoop]” and stay in class. Go make a plan.

February: Okay. So we’re going to try something new. It’s called self-directed learning. You’re going to make a plan to learn about whatever you want. You’re going to make something to show me what you learned. You can make whatever you want. The idea is to read and write about something you love, and to make something with what you read and write. You tell me when to check in with you. I want you to do something you like at school. You do have to direct yourself to learn – it’s not do whatever you want time; it’s self-directed learning time. A blog? Sure. Basketball? Sure. What are you going to do? Write about the games? Okay. Can I leave you comments? Great. FOOT!

March: Can I see what you wrote? Okay. Let’s talk about organization. Like when you switch from one game to another, start a new paragraph so I can see I should think about a new game.

April: Great headline. Can we talk some more? Great. I wrote about elaboration in your comments last night. Elaboration just means details. Like when you predict who will win the playoffs, you give me your idea, but you don’t tell me why. If you tell me why – if you can give me some stats or reasons for your prediction – then you’re adding detail or elaboration. Okay? Okay. Try it.

May: A report? On what? Three-point shooters? Okay. Are you willing to research? Can you come up with questions? Sure I can help. How many questions do you think would give you enough detail to write a paragraph about each player? Three? Okay. Try it.

June: No, seriously. We have to do this before the end of the year. Please put your blog away. Yeah, I know, it’s [frakking bullpoop], but here we are. Save your draft. Let’s go. Thank you. I’ll get you back to it as soon as possible.

Here’s the student’s first post from March, after he got his blog set up:

Minnesota Timberwolves are on there 16 losing streak.

Here’s one of his inquiry posts from May:

Nate Robinson is one of the best dunkers in the NBA. He plays for the celtics now but near the begining of the year he played for the Knicks he is so awesome at dunking it is amazing. Once he dunked over yow ming he is really tall. He entered the dunk contest three times. He won the dunk contest three times. That is really good. He helped his team a lot when he was on the Knicks but when he was on the celtics he’s not that good now. He dose not play that much anymore but he is a good dunker.

Lebron James is one of the best dunkers in the NBA he can jump from really far and can do some awesome tricks in the air. Lebron James helps his team a lot he is like the best player on that team and he is like the best player in the league. Lebron James is a bad sport though and last year this guy named shannon Brown entered the dunk contest that is why he didn’t enter he was going to but then he punked out because he was scared. But he is good at basketball.

Andrey iguodala is a awesome basketball player and a dunker he should join the dunk contest then people will se his skills. He has got some real serious jumps he can dunk over just about anybody thats why i think he is such a good dunker. He helped his team a lot over the years. He plays for the 76ixer’s they are ok but not that good they did not make it to the play-off’s 

Dwight Howard plays for the magic that team is really good they are still in the playoffs. Dwight Howard has only entered the dunk contest once but he won he finished it with this dunk called the superman it was awesome he put on a cape and then got the basketball and started running and then he jumped in the air so high up in the air that he through the basketball strait down in to the hoop it was awesome i did not get to se it but i still herd about it on ESPN he won the whole entire thing with that. He is a big man. I told my brother about that and i said why did he win he did not even dunk it and my brother said the whole reason that he won is because the fact that he was high enough to throw the ball in to the hoop in the air. It was amazing for guy that tall and big to jump that high.

Jr Smith is one of the best dunkers in the NBA he so good at dunking and three point shots. He should enter a dunk contest thats how good he is at dunking he would might even win the whole thing if he try’s his very best in the dunk contest. He plays for the nuggets that team is okay but they are not the best team in the league. He helps his team a lot by how good his dunks are and by how good he is at three point shooting in the game. He will not let the nuggets down in the next playoffs i just know that he wont let them him down.

This is great progress, but, look, I know there’s work to be done. I know several students who accomplished more with me in a shorter amount of time in a traditional classroom. But I also know that there are kids out there like this basketball blogger who don’t have a shot at feeling safe, acknowledged, or valued in the traditional classroom. And I know it’s not the kid’s fault. It was mine. For all the other kids like this one in my first eight and half years of teaching, the fault was mine. I am sorry.

Sometimes you have to stop teaching because no amount of it will fix a broken relationship or make up for one where there isn’t one.

Sometimes you have to let go of yourself to hold a kid up.

Sometime you have to turn your back on what you were taught in order to learn what’s right. You have to turn your back on what you know to do what you believe. You have to turn your back on your past to change a kid’s future. You have to stop investing your salary in test scores and gamble it all away on finding ways to make learning matter. You have to stop measuring yourself by your best students’ scores and start measuring yourself by what you’re keeping all of them from for the love of a stratified society.

You can’t give up kids to the system and still be the one who won’t let them down.

Margo Figgins, an associate professor with the university’s Curry School of Education, directs the workshop. I especially like the program’s goals, writing widgets, and clear educational philosophy:

Our program is dedicated to developing the work of young writers in the range of rising freshman to seniors in high school. The desire to write is what counts. We encourage inexperienced as well as practiced writers to apply. You will receive feedback, personal attention, and the level of instruction you need in order to grow. You will also receive written commentaries from your instructor specific to your progress and suggestions toward eventual publication.

One of the program’s long-term goals is the creation of a full-time school, which could be a charter school housed in the surrounding community or at UVA itself if Virginia ever legislates multiple charter authorizers. This ambition got me thinking about post-test school scheduling.

If our current norm is to teach for the test before the test, why teach for the test after the test? We should – by all means and at all times – get students the support they need in literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, compassion, and self-expression regardless of our testing schedules. However, if the only time we’re systematically allowed to stop teaching to the test is after the test, then let’s not keep teaching to the test. Let’s not insist on business as usual when the business of testing is done. Let’s not talk about how we’re going to maintain control over kids when – well, not ever. Let’s not put all the responsibility for enriching learning and entertaining students on individual teachers.

Instead, let’s think systematically about using the time after testing to create school-wide new schedules and structures built on authentic, interdisciplinary learning. Bobbi Snow, one of our school’s co-founders, has started me thinking on this. Let’s try what we seldom try during the year. Let’s go out into the community and learn about our neighbors, their needs, and ourselves. Let’s bring our communities into our schools. Let’s experiment and find out what works in authentic engagement so we can infuse all of next year’s lessons with more choice and meaning for kids.

I’d love to hear what Margo and her collaborators think about helping struggling writers succeed at school. I’d love to see how they would adapt their schedule to ours. I’d love to see how they further foster choice and meaning inside our school.

So, I’ve got an email to write.

What programs exist in your community and offer kids authentic learning experiences outside school? What insights and expertise can they offer you, your students, your school, and your system? How can you partner with them this Spring to better infuse the entirety of next year with more choice and meaning for students? What relationships can you develop from your classroom to bring in visiting experts and community educators as volunteers?

One way to get every kid into a camp is to bring camp to school. One way to transform school is to make it more camp-like. If you can’t convince your school to restructure its day for more authentic learning after testing is done, think about how you can transform your classroom over the last few weeks of school and ask yourself who can help you do it.

If you’re outside the classroom, can you find one to support in authentic learning?

Can we make room in curriculum maps for partnerships like these throughout the year? Can we recruit and join with pre-service teachers to run opportunities like these on Saturdays for our students and offer them field-experience credit in conjunction with ed schools? Can we showcase our schools to students, families, and communities in enough ways to get ourselves thinking of schools as something else?

LittleBigPlanet is a platformer.  A platformer is a game made up of levels that require  players to pass obstacles using timing, accuracy and  leaping.  Most Super Mario Bros games are platformers.  LittleBigPlanet provides players with a suite of level construction tools and the ability to upload player-created levels to the PlayStation Network (PSN) for other owners of the game to play.  Since the game’s release in 2008, players have uploaded over 2 million user-generated levels.

Two million isn’t a big number compared to, say, 400 million: the number of Facebook users worldwide.  Two million isn’t a big number compared to, say, 32 million: the number of PlayStation 3 owners worldwide (both figures found here).  However, LittleBigPlanet encourages player creativity and modding in ways collection games like Farm Life and proprietary hardware like the PS3 do not.  There are very few games that offer as robust and attractive a set of tools as LittleBigPlanet does for creating such varied levels.  To wit, check out these two user-generated levels. Everything in them was assembled by players from the tools and behaviors included in the game’s level design suite.

Museum levels in Little Big Planet typically show off the art and machines players have made for use in their other levels.  The PlayStation Eye, a peripheral camera for the PS3, also lets users take pictures of themselves or their own and-drawn art for use in museums-as-photo-albums.  The museums collect and share the resources with other players. Inside the museums players can use capture tools to grab images.  The museum’s creators can also make their displayed objects and machines available to visitors either as prize-bubbles in the museum or as rewards earned at the end of the level for visiting the museum.

So far, we’ve imagine making a level of captioned sculptures and art that provide the unit’s information, interspersed with short gameplay episodes that are meant to capture the points of view of people involved in the war in different ways.  As the girls move through the tutorials, and as I back out of the project, I’m really eager to see what they make to share their learning.  I’ll defnitely tweet out whatever safe account name we come up with when we’re finished so you can find the level on the PSN, and we’ll record a play-through video and post it online somehow.

I don’t know that every piece of authentic work will change the world, but I think this one might open up some students’ eyes to the possibilities of school and interdisciplinary work in gaming.  Even if we’re not changing the world, I’m eager to see what we learn by making our own little one. We should get a developers’ diary up on a blog so they girls can share their learning and ask for input about what to include in terms of content & gameplay, too.

What other tools are your students using to create “museums” of learning?  How much control do your student shave over those tools? How interactive are the finished products?  What do you think of investing class time into gaming for learning? How could we be doing this better?

PS: I am kind of falling for STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math learning. I would love to teach geometry, concepts like frequency and proportion, or simple machines using LittleBigPlanet. Anyone using off the shelf video games and/or consoles in STEM classrooms?  If you are, please comment below to share your work and/or provide a link to it!

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.

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.

Techno-Teenagers by Leonard John Matthews

What’s the goal of differentiation? Mastery of a curriculum? Inquiry-based life-long learning? Relationship building?

Can we ask the question another way: what is school?

Is it 1:1 learning? Is it 1:1 curriculum? Is it 1:1 access to “the best of what’s been thought and said?” Is it the 1:1:1:1:1… replication of workers or citizens?

We have the tools and access to information about learning to differentiate school for students. We can provide 1:1 rigor, relevance, and relationships. We can go F2F, blended, hybrid, dual-enrollment, CTE, charter, magnet, specialty center - we can go anywhere we’ve made something. Can we go anywhere students want? Should we in public education customize teaching and learning? Should we student-source curriculum?

I think so. The faster the better. Why keep spending money building things and places that some students will use? Why not build an infrastructure all students can use to learn a 1:1 curriculum and produce a unique product – an app, a book, a business, a charity, a machine?

Could we save money and increase learning opportunities by adopting an inquiry-based, electronic, student-created and/or micro-transaction secondary curriculum and creating an “All-But-Graduated” (ABG) designation for students who assess out of class requirements for credits? If a 14 year old can learn to write/produce about what he or she loves and score a 5 on an AP exam, should we ask that 14 year old to take more HS classes when the AP results net college credit? Could ABG students be funneled into “primary” school volunteerism, professional CTE, entrepreneurship & service labs, community colleges, local universities, work experiences, and/or internships? Could we save money by housing