Using a graphic organizer, students have self-identified reading and writing goals, reading and writing interests, and projects that they would like to undertake, either to learn something new or to show off their learning in reading and writing.

Over time I’ve increased the amount of structure around our self-directed learning.

• First, I assembled resources catering to student goals, interests, and project proposals (though in the next iteration I’ll outsource this work to students, and we’ll use something other than Portaportal).
• Then I asked students to play around with the resources for a week.
• Next I asked students to draft schedules with learning/reading days, project days, and feedback days.
• After that I introduced entrance/exit slips asking students to set goals at the start of self-directed learning time and to self-assess their progress at the end of self-directed learning time.
• Within the next few days I’ll ask students to tell me how they’d like to be assessed on both their goals and projects (though in the next iteration we’ll do this right after play).
• Finally, for this go-round, I’ll evaluate students’ products over Spring Break, assess students’ learning, and think about how to improve the process and allow for more student input throughout the Spring.

At present, students have self-differentiated into undertaking

• Blogs.
• Comics.
• Glogs.
• Scratch games.

Several students have also started a friendly Free Rice competition, and some are amazingly invested in teaching themselves cursive.

Cursive? Yeah, cursive. Why? Well, here’s what the students who practice cursive have in common according to my informal observations: in each student’s life, some adult who is crucial to the student’s sense of self-worth has criticized his handwriting and made, in the student’s mind, an implicit connection between the quality of his handwriting and his intelligence. I’m torn; what would you do? Let the kids take class time to practice cursive? Tell them that handwriting doesn’t matter – at least not in the way they think it does? Both? Bottom line: we have to stop judging kids’ worth by their proficiency at what we were asked to, whether it was worthwhile or not – and especially if what we were asked to do wounded us.

Here’s something else to ponder.

I work with students who are disengaged from school for a variety of reasons. Many struggle with reading. Many students who struggle with reading put down “read better” or “read faster” as a goal for self-directed learning. This is a pretty brave admission for any of them.

In response to their goals, I found spreeder, an online reading tool that takes a chunk of pasted text and flashes it one word at a time in a box on the screen. Users can paste in anything they want and set the words-per-minute (WPM) rate, font-size, and background and text colors. While spreeder bills itself as a speed-reading trainer, it can also chunk lengthy texts into manageable bits for readers who struggle with fluency and/or comprehension because of their eyesight or visual information processing. The tool allows for WPM rates well below 100 and font-sizes of about 220 before the text starts to intersect the progress bar. The progress bar works just like those on iTunes or YouTube; users can drag a slider to rewind or advance texts at will.

Since discovering spreeder, several students who struggle with fluency and comprehension have latched on to it. It helps them access online texts that they want to read. During self-directed learning time, they use spreeder to read and re-read self-selected texts. They bump up the WPM by 5 each time.

Today we did not have any self-directed learning time scheduled. Instead, we had online text practice. Students had the “choice” of continuing online practice tests for their online reading SOL, or of reading one of three online news articles and answering constructed-response items aligned to state reading standards.

After hearing the instructions, two of my spreeders – without missing a beat – each went to our class blog, chose an article, copied it, pasted it into spreeder, and read it before tackling the questions. They requested help with the questions, which is not out of the ordinary, but doesn’t make a slam-bang case for pairing spreeder and comprehension yet.

While I introduced spreeder, the students found an application for it outside of self-directed learning time.

I think this is great, but I’m also starting to think of “read better” and “read faster” like “write in cursive.” Something is still missing. These kids have purpose, but I don’t know if they have joy. Another next step to take.

I’m curious; what would you do? About cursive? About reading? About self-directed learning? About classroom joy?

What can you do? What do you think you can’t do? How will the balance be righted?

Certainly anyone interested in the materials we’ve used can email me here.

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

Smoke and Mirrors by Sean Stayte

However, there’s one question I keep answering over and over again, and I need to stop. Whenever a student asks me, “Why does this matter?”, I’m ready with one of three flavors of answer:

• Because it’s a life-long learning skill.
• Because it’s a work-place skill you’re going to need.
• Because you need to understand this before we go on to that.

Really, though, haven’t I missed the point? By the time a student asks, “Why does this matter?”, I’ve already lost the PR battle, the differentiation battle, and the innovation battle. I haven’t engaged the student, found the right combination of content, process, and product, or bought myself instructional time with novelty. I’m willing to posit that students want and need clarification from time to time, but my answers are a habit, a conditioned response over time to repeated instances of, “Why does this matter?”

Why haven’t I asked students, why do you think it matters? Or why should it matter to you? Or how could you use this lesson today?

Is it a matter of trust or fear? Am I afraid that the honest and appropriate student response will be, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t care,” both of which translate in my mind to, “You haven’t helped me make the connection on my own.” Am I afraid that I’m pushing an irrelevant curriculum? Am I afraid that I’m not doing a good enough job with a relevant curriculum?

None of this is to say that planning relevance is easy, or that it should be. None of this is to say that together my students and I don’t ever get relevance right. Regardless, all of these questions need to be asked. As the teacher, I cannot be the sole determiner of relevance. It’s a resource to collect from students. It’s an energizing current that we need to tap into to provide electrifying instruction. It’s an attempt after which we need to celebrate shared successes and forgive ourselves instructional failures.

Relevance is like a sub-atomic particle. You have to watch for it, hope that it shows up, and try to determine which shade of gluonic quantum chromatics it embodies so you know how it will bind the quarks of how and why into the hadrons of what . Relevance is nothing at all like this paragraph (except for quantum mechanists, which goes to the point).

Today, for a half hour or so at a time, class by class, we got relevance right.

We’re making documentaries about United States history. We have expert coaches visiting us monthly. We have rudimentary production company pages for each group. We have the technology to pull off the project. Work proceeds apace, but until today it was missing a spark. Frankly, I suspect that our technology bought us strategic compliance.

Today we started a new campfire activity called “Video of the Day.” We gather around the old SmartBoard, play a “relevant” video, and then we reverse engineer the video’s script as a way to model writing and name the techniques the filmmakers used to hook us as an audience. The hope here is that by connecting relevant videos to scriptwriting, students will see scriptwriting as a way to communicate personally meaningful things, and that by analyzing the techniques successful filmmakers use to engage an audience, students will learn to use them, as well.

Here’s the video we used:

The video worked. It created relevance. We didn’t need to talk about why it mattered, because it did. Instead we talked about

• Moose Markowicz, my Algebra II teacher, who could be cajoled into telling stories for an entire period in the days of 47-minute classes.
• Why I don’t wear more T-shirts to work (mine are all too geeky).
• What we would do with our own gym in our own building (a rock-climbing wall, a Wii wall, and an American football/soccer hero wall).
• Whether or not you would use a new slug line or CUT TO when the image changes in a script, but the location does not.
• How the music and quick cuts held our attention.
• How the video took something we knew (Guitar Hero) and made it cooler (now with sick soccer players).
• How the incredibly talented players failed horribly, stuck with the problem sixteen more times anyway, changed how they played to help one another, and celebrated being good, but not perfect.

I wanted the video to work. I wanted it to be relevant. I wanted the gluons of relevance to put together the hadrons of content and process into the protons and neutrons of completed classwork. I was on the look-out, and I saw it. I saw relevance happen for the students and found some for myself.

Of all the things the video is really about, it’s really about the patience, dedication, and community needed to master learning in an authentic way. It’s about trying until you meet an personally meaningful goal, and then celebrating. It’s about depending on others. It’s about everyone playing a different part in a symphony of action. It’s about joy, and maybe that’s the relevance we should be differentiating for all the time.

NB: Differentiation is a powerful tool for creating relevance. See last night’s differentiation #edchat for all kinds of inspiration about what to try next on your students’ behalf.