In planning for next week, I’ve been a part of a few conversations about one of our major goals as a school – to help students think like an artist.

I like this list by Craig Roland posted at Artjuntion.org:

Learning to think like an artist means:

• looking at things more closely than most people do.
• finding beauty in everyday things and situations.
• making connections between different things and ideas.
• going beyond ordinary ways of thinking and doing things.
• looking at things in different ways in order to generate new perspectives.
• taking risks and exposing yourself to possible failure.
• arranging things in new and interesting ways.
• working hard and at the edge of your potential.
• persisting where others may give up.
• concentrating tour effort and attention for long periods of time.
• dreaming and fantasizing about things.
• using old ideas to create new ideas and ways of seeing things.
• doing something simply because it’s interesting and personally challenging to do so.

I could have linked a bevy of classrooms and schools to those items, but I didn’t want to alter the list too much. Instead, I’ll encourage you to link each habit in the list to a leaner or place of learning you know.

What strikes me about the list is how easily compatible it is with the rhetoric of American public education and how profoundly incompatible it is with the practices of American public education. I don’t think our schools encourage students or teachers to develop and use these habits on the job. What a bind. How am I supposed to dream and fantasize about innovative instruction while I’m afraid of taking risks and exposing myself and my portion of my family’s income to possible failure? Where is my incentive for “going beyond ordinary ways of thinking and doing things?”

Let’s get real about alternative assessment for a moment, because #artsed, at its core, is alternative education. It’s another way of learning that does not bow to reading and writing, but really encompasses them in some subgenres. In others, reading and writing are unnecessary, and I imagine that irks us gatekeepers at some level because reading and writing are the twin deadbolts locking up our society. It’s not so much that the arts put a ladder up against our gates without a permit, it’s that we live inside a world of art and crafting that reading and writing belong to, and we’d like to keep out the INFPs and ISFPs, the ENFPs and ESFPs, the INFJs and ISFJs, and – especially – the ENFJs and ESFJs from our analytically secured neighborhood.

When you think of alternative education, do you think of the arts? Do you think of an elective period, once a day, off in the elective wing? Do you think about how unfair it is #artsed teachers aren’t measured by test results?

When you think of alternative education, do you think how “nice” it is for those kids to have a place to belong that isn’t with “normal” kids? Do you think the purpose of alternative education is to train alternative kids to be “normal?” Do you think “normal” means to be able to sit for four, straight 90 minute blocks of largely teacher-centerd instruction? Is this college-readiness?

Is the purpose of alternative education – a field with which I increasingly self-identify – to norm “abnormal” kids to American public schools, or is it to learn how to teach people in the ways in which they learn? Is alternative education an opportunity to fix broken kids or to fix broken teaching practices?

Is #artsed under-appreciated as a field that could help “core” teachers teach more effectively, if only we could agree on what should be taught, where, how, and by whom?

Being an alternative educator, or an #artsed teacher, or a charter school teacher is not about where you teach. It’s about how you learn. It’s about how willing you are to reform classroom practice based on how your students learn, regardless of what other adults tell you. Conversely, you can indeed be a traditional teacher in an alternative setting, in an #artsed classroom, or at a charter school.

Being an alternative educator, or an #artsed teacher, or a charter school teacher is about thinking like an artist – or like a scientist – or like a humanist – or like an entrepreneur. It’s more social enterprise than job description.

If that’s just something I tell myself to feel better and more successful as a teacher, then it’s working.

But I digress.

Arts-infusion: what is it?

I think it’s a spectrum of learning opportunities designed to activate those habits in learner’s minds. I see it in sketches of observations and technical drawings. I see and hear it in performing music and theater incorporating class content and learners’ passions. I smell it in new recipes. I feel it hammering away in the classroom next door. I see it in parts of interactive notebooks, in classroom rituals and routines focused on close attention to the world around us. I see it in projects that transform rote learning into a consideration of that learning outside the textbook, tradebook, or classroom. I see it in designing and making and evaluating and critiquing. I see it in drafting and revising. Sometimes it becomes so ingrained in how someone learns that it looks routine to an outside observer. Sometimes it looks exotic and spectacular. At its best it gives voice to the voiceless and makes invisible learners and learning felt, heard, and seen. At its worst it’s not arts-infusion, it’s an activity, a craft, a “lesson” students have to do without choice, reason, or engagement. It’s ritual compliance rather than habitual re-consideration.

So where are we?

We have some pretty consistent visual-meaning making going on through content-specific activities mashing-up features of before-during-after progressions with interactive notebook vocabulary work.

We continue to have choice in summative products including making comics, filmmaking, and music production.

We’re hitting our stride with the citizen artist projects. Students have pulled together light research and drafts of their expository pieces on artists who exhibit some duty, responsibility, or trait of citizenship in their work, and a few have begun sketching their portrait designs on used canvases donated to us by the art teacher. Our gallery of finished portraits should include music-makers and video-game designers, local and otherwise.

I also took inspiration from Humument, by Tom Philips, to design an arts-infused tone and word choice activity. Students are skimming Watership Down for passages that display obvious tones. Students are summarizing the passages, identifying the tone, and listing the words and phrases used to create the tone. Then students are identifying words on the page that could be used to create a new tone in a new combination. Students circle these words and then use art to edit out all the other words on the page with a picture that matches the new tone and/or narrative. Here are a few examples showing the original pages and students’ edits:

Today a student did a design sketch on a separate piece of paper with color testing and then made a pencil sketch in the book before inking and coloring it. The writing process is alive and well through the arts for that student.

A few students wanted to match the tone of the original page and isolated key words that showed the tone. The next step for them will be choosing a page to edit for a change in tone.

Students will keep the books (which I scavenged from the rubbish of our host school a few years ago) and will be free to use them as art journals to create new stories whenever ready for an extension in class, if they so desire. We have enough scavenged copies to send an unedited copy home with each kid, as well, for any and all students who want to read Watership Down.

Not everything is arts-infused, but the the balance of work is leaning slowly towards arts-infused side of the scale.

Let me know via comment, email, or DM if you’d like any of the activities I’ve described.

I’ll end this post with thanks to my instructional coach for the conversation that gave me the inspiration to write it.

[Disclaimer: I've tested twice as an INTJ, as my poor administrators and mentors can surely attest. Feel free to share your type and insights on education in the comments.]

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.

It’s hard to articulate fairly my next point. Please remember that I think we need all kinds of schools to meet all kinds of kids’ (and teachers’) needs and wants. We hold ourselves accountable to helping students’ pass EOC tests, and our board holds us accountable for that, too, but we have opportunities to create systems that fit our kids in pursuit of life-long learning habits and academic achievement. I think administrators and teachers at traditional schools try to do this all the time, as well, but face implicit pressure to make kids conform to the schools’ management systems.

Or not.

I wonder how many questions are waiting to be asked, and how many administrators are ready to say, “Yes.” Can we teach morally and charter ourselves and one another? Can we agree on what moral teaching is?

Here is a sample of our kids’ work. Each also wrote about the work, its process, and how the work represented William Glasser’s idea of quality.

Student thoughts on quality work

D-Day Scratch Game Title Screen

D-Day Scratch Game: Avoid the Nazi Guns, Land the Troops

Title Screen of Student Claymation DVD

From a D-Day Landing Claymation

From a Pearl Harbor Claymation: Zero Bombing the USS Arizona

From our resident graffiti artist

Rainbow Waves

Diversity of Life Collage

Paramore Glog

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.

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

Map Of Your Head, by Daniel Conway

I found Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth’s  Social Media Campaign image a few days ago via Steven Anderson’s (@web20classroom) Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom.  It broadened my thinking about the curriculum map due to my head of school in September.  I work at a middle school that strives to differentiate instruction by content, process, product, and time in hopes of re-engaging struggling students with a love of learning before high school.  Any one, traditional curriculum map I create will, by necessity, be obsolete before I begin writing it.  My state standards are already written; my description of our class structure is done; our coaches and experts have been recruited (including members of the Virginia Experiment and Music Resource Center); we’ve drafted rubrics collaboratively; now we need students and time for the model to take hold.  I’ve been  struggling with writing a traditional curriculum map because I don’t know what it will add to our work.  Enter the image.

After reading Steven’s post, I started thinking about a curriculm map as a picture of a classroom’s learning system.  Thinking about virtual charter schools, authentic engagement with the global community, and the needs of our students, I put together a picture of the “how” instead of the “what.”  I’m not sure it’s “right,” but it represents how I hope our class will learn.

To move past teaching for the test, we’ll need to map past the test, as well.  Maybe one way to do that is to map systems in place of content, or to separate content (the plug-in or add-on) from the learning model (the program).

Please take the curriculum map below to pieces, question it, and help me figure out how to better articulate the model of learning.  Administrators, parents, students, and tax-payers, what else would you want to see from a teacher’s curriculum map?  Teachers, what else would you include?

A curriculum map of "how" instead of "what"