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

poker chips by .pixel .

You know that song, “The Gambler?” I love that song. I loved listening to it in between G’n'R and Alice in Chains before high school football games. I love it when Kenny Rogers sings it. I love it when Mike Doughty sings it. Please comment below and tell me who else sings it. I can’t get enough of it.

I cleaned out my car today and found a CD with “The Gambler” on it. I made my kids listen to it. I sang it as if I was a cast member on Glee (Sue Sylvester?! Come on!  Destination: Re-take!). Then my teacher brain – which is like a live tweeter perched on my limbic system – took over and it was all like, “You know, you are, in fact, out of aces. Schools have to count their money at the table before state and federal dealing are done. You’ve got to know when -”

At which point I said, “Shut up!” (you know, in my mind) and kept singing to my son, who was getting into it, and to my daughter, who just wanted to know, “What time is it?!”

The song ended. We went inside the house. I kept my teacher-brain at bay imagining “The Gambler” on Glee. Until about now. Teacher-brain, if you will…

The temperatures in Central Virginia clawed above 40 degrees Fahrenheit this week melting much of the snow cover left over from the Blizzard of ‘09. I know we’re not exactly roughing it (I was a Yankee in a former life), but the warmth and sunlight are a welcome break from the flash frozen air of the past few weeks.

Whenever the sun comes out to stay this time of year I think about summer. Specifically, I think about summer school. Now is the time to pour through mid year data to begin identifying kids who could use another shot at this year’s curriculum. Now is the time to think about who could use a safe-harbor this summer. Now is the time to think about what I’d do if I had the first semester over again.

It’s also budget season – a lean one that calls for new ideas of how to take up the daunting challenge of fostering more learning with fewer resources. Education changes slowly, which makes abrupt cuts in revenue – like those facing school systems in the near future – especially hard to handle. For many divisions, it’s time to change education without the funds necessary to maintain the status quo. It’s hard to entertain sacrificing anything that could help a child. With these difficulties in mind, I’d like to suggest that we act now to save summer school and use it as a lab for ed reform.

Outside of high school credit recovery courses, elementary and middle school summer programs are just the right length and can accommodate just the right number of teacher and students to test out new structures, schedules, partnerships and pedagogy without impacting the bottom line of credit hours on a student’s progress towards his or her diploma.  By using summer school strategically as an innovation incubator, any division could create for itself a lab school.

Summer school is a great opportunity for aspiring reformers and teacher leaders to gain practical experience with remediation, extension, curriculum design, instruction, assessment, data-analysis and administration. Summer schools are microcosms of their host schools. Principals, in my experience, are eager to find directors who bring something new to the table, something that pulls students in need out of the academic dead-time of summer, something that hooks them on a compelling project and keeps them coming back day after day for as long as possible, keeping them as engaged and safe as possible. While polarized policy-makers line up to defend and decry charters, summer school gives us all an opportunity to innovate ideas about teaching and learning that can be site tested by pre- and post-assessments, attendance and discipline records, and feedback from teacher and student participants alike.

Take some time this budget season to think about your summer school pitch. If you had a shot to change something about your school, what would you aim for – scheduling? Leveling? Tracking? Entrepreneurship? Project-based learning? Service-learning? Technology infusion? How would you structure a day in your program? How would you structure a week? How would you assess student progress after a month or 6-weeks or a marking period? What would your school look like if you could remake it into what you think would work for your neediest students?

I keep having these STEM day dreams about upper elementary and middle school students transforming their schools’ walls into art.  Students work in a classroom with a teacher from their school and an artist from their community. First the kids form teams and use a digifab lab – or pencils and paper – to make scale models of their work surface. Then they propose mural designs and reach consensus as a group about which elements to incorporate in a final class design.  The class design then goes to review by a committee of teachers, administrators, parents, and community members who will see it daily.  The committee gives the kids feedback for revision and approves a final design.  When the final design is set, older students from the local career and technical education center visit school and help the kids recreate their small mural model as a 1/4- or 1/8-scale brick wall on a wooden cart. The older students teach the younger students some basic masonry skills, advertise their program, and get good press for mentoring the younger kids. Next the summer school kids scale up their design and paint it on both sides of their 1/4- or 1/8-scale wall using a different brand of paint on each side. For the next few weeks, the kids move the carts inside and outside and run experiments simulating different weather effects on each side of the wall and observe how the different brands of paint hold up to the elements. The kids evaluate which paint is best for the job and spend the last few weeks of summer school scaling-up and painting the mural on the school with help from their local artist who serves as a project-manager- and/or advisor-in-residence. Throughout the experience, the kids read daily from customized RSS feeds and blog about virtual field trips to murals around the world.

What’s your dream job? What are you doing in your Walter Mitty classroom? Could you try it out during summer school? Could you propose and direct a program? Collaborate on a proposal? Bring together a staff and leader other than yourself to follow? Could you draw in community partners? High-school mentors?

Giving up your summer is a sacrifice, but for a chance to find what works, in the seasons of sacrifice to come, it might be the most strategic sacrifice we can make. Think about your pitch; capture your vision; pass it on or run with it. Hold on to summer school; fight for it and present a vision of innovation that brings new value to what can be a flat remedial experience. With the economy folding and tax revenue running, don’t walk away from a chance to change school for the better if only for a few weeks. Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, but the best that we can hope for is better than breaking even – we can hope that summer school helps us break out of education’s staid past into its uncertain and exciting future.

If you have an idea about ed reform, challenge yourself to test it this summer.

Thanks, teacher-brain! I’ll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, I gotta go on a Muppets, Glee, and “Gambler” YouTube binge.