My map this year will look more course-specific than last year’s meta-map, which I think is still a useful model for project-based work. Here’s an early draft of this year’s map:

I’m mapping more granularly – at least in terms of structures and opportunities, if not content – in response to what worked this year in stations, pacing, and independent work. I’m also mapping to ensure that student learning moves flexibly and organically back and forth, inside and outside the classroom, physically and virtually, in service to students’ passions and in service to others.

Here are three constraints I’m using:

1. In terms of content, I plan to “cover” the state language arts and civics & economics curricula through direct instruction and blended learning modules that I create and then replace with subsequent student work. I will negotiate with students the particular standards each wants to master in a unit so long as she produces excellent work that demonstrates her learning. I would rather students leave the class as experts on what interests them about citizenship than as students with a superficial knowledge of sentence structure and/or our government’s org chart. Therefore, to help students master their chosen content more strategically, here’s the first useful constraint I want to use: “spaced learning.”

2. In terms of self-directed learning, I plan to protect at least 20% of class time for students’ self-directed learning. I love this line from the RSA animation of Dan Pink’s Drive talk: “you probably want to do something interesting…let me get out of your way!” Pink talks about the Australian software firm Atlassian and it’s quarterly employee autonomy days. Employees get to work on what they want for a day so long as they share out their work at the end in a celebration. The company benefits from its employees’ creativity in tackling nagging software bugs and proposing new products. I’ve seen this work in the classroom. I’ve seen a kid make a Scratch game about a jet-pack-wearing space panda that shoots palm trees from its butt to fight aliens turn the same skills he used in learning that game into a series of animations explaining the Cold War, ICBMs, and MAD. I never would have seen those content-specific short films without giving over class time to SPACE PANDA 2010. Other kids made similar transfers; this was not an isolated case. Kids will bring the skills they learn through self-directed learning to the content we are tasked to cover. Bet on it. Call it what you will: Google Time, Atlassian Days, self-directed learning. It’ my second useful constraint.

3. Because we know that timely feedback helps classroom relationships, increases student achievement, and helps curtail downtime, I will attempt to be in all places at all times via Edmodo. I’d like increase my capacity to give feedback during class time as I move between stations or groups. My kids have experience with Edmodo on their computers and iPods. If I’m working with a group and can’t make it across the room to answer a question that’s been shouted out, perhaps I can find the time to post a quick reply to a quick question or give an ETA and suggest a independent next step without engaging in disruptive cross-room conversation. Regardless, the big idea here is not to manage my classroom’s noise level, but to reward students’ investment in their work by improving the timeliness of my feedback and by providing students with a back-channel for helping one another and for giving feedback on the class. I also want to establish a daily community meeting time to make sure we work together on improving class for everyone based on our feedback about it. So my third useful constraint is better coaching and better communication make for better learning.

I will also remove arbitrary restraints on student democracy, community, and learning by abandoning traditional grading, trivial standards, and sending “problem” children out of my room to be “solved” by someone outside our own relationships.

What am I missing? What doesn’t best serve students and their learning? What boundaries on the map should I redraw?

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.

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"