#edchat #edreform suspects that happy edu-entrepreneurs & innovators will stick around & benefit stdnts; unhappy ones will go & be shunned

#edchat #edreform asks why we don’t embrace structures & create jobs that keep folk like @ThinkThankThunk happy in education

#edchat #edreform offers this post by @ThinkThankThunk as an ex of why what we do now isn’t okay, even if we imrpove it http://bit.ly/dj3SYC

#edchat #edreform & remember, the biggest obstacle to #edreform is asking how we can get better at what we do now

#edchat #edreform says goodnight & look at your school tomorrow: what helps learners? what hurts? what really matters? what does not?

#edchat #edreform says all #edreform is local; don’t rush to DC w/o interrogating state/local code, owning what you can stand up & do today

#edchat authentic #edreform needs pop #edreform’s PR people

#edchat #edreform says watch & listen http://bit.ly/ba3ci7; a first step

#edchat #edreform likes the implications of this video for #edreform http://youtu.be/eNwMut3-z1Y: skunkworks take time, collab, mass

#edchat #edreform requires confrontation w/ brutal facts, such as testing don’t design no hybrid chevys

#edchat #edreform respects gutsy admin, but reminds us that the gutsy admin/disruptive tchr split is so 20th C hierarchy

#edchat #edreform invites & synthesizes contributions from other fields because #edreform acknowledges that it is too close to #edreform

#edchat #edreform admits that best practices & new technologies that keep stdnts leashed to desks are not #edreform

#edchat #edreform admin, how many of you hire to build capacity for disruptive change, overtly or not?

#edchat #edreform admin, how many of you are asking how a tchr successfully subverts harmful practice & culture?

#edchat #edreform admin, how many of you are asking who a tchr brings to your building in her network?

#edchat #edreform begs for new models of collaboration & networking, asks if school is the best place to learn, acts on answers to tough ?s

#edchat #edreform hit the coöp to delve deeper http://bit.ly/cM28Mn; hit @irasocol’s blog to question your assumptions http://bit.ly/BOpsr

#edchat #edreform distributes teaching & learning in places & relationships outside the clssrm, decentralizes act & authority of teaching

#edchat #edreform should dismantle school, immerse students in experience, contextualize skills w/in inquiry, & partner PBL w/ community

Day 223 - Learning to use computers by LShave

Here is today’s leading #edchat question:

How does the internet change the role of content and prior knowledge?

It doesn’t. Kids still need a personal stake in both to create meaning.  While everyone can learn content and has prior-knowledge, school-valued content and prior knowledge remain commodities that some have and some do not.  I would further argue that how kids access that information outside school has changed a lot more than classroom practice inside school. Think about the types of information students pursue on their own time in accordance with their own interests. They know where to go and what to search for regarding their passions, hobbies, interests, and fads.  I think kids are used to learning at a faster pace outside of school than inside.  The relevance of what students are learning and their specialization in search tools speeds up the pace of learning for them. Because we still insist on a curriculum being a curriculum and a school year being a school year (and a $14.95 unit is a $14.95 unit, and a mini-lesson is 5-15 minutes, dammit!), we educators often keep ourselves from re-imagining learning through personal, rather than curricular, connections at a different pace. It’s like when Vger DMed Earth and it took an outsider like Spock to realize humanity’s “child” was on Twitter, not email.  See scene 175.  I mean, obviously. K1RK GOT PWNED, NOOB! FAIL! I was totally ROFL.

At school, however, most students are still told what to research and how to research it. They’re told what to learn and how to learn it (Question: in paragraph 3, is the underlined phrase ROFL figurative or literal, and how does the reader know?). Choice of browser, search tool, and/or subject can sometimes cloak schoolwork in relevancy, but I don’t see many teachers, myself included, radically changing classroom practice specifically in response to the amount of information and access points provided by the Internet and associated instructional technology. I still struggle to balance inquiry and test prep in making design decisions.

Then again, while I encourage students to Google it whenever possible, I’ve never been a fan or practitioner of the research project. Teachers who have incorporated the Internet into research projects, what’s worked for you and your students? How have new opportunities to find information changed the way you teach students how to gather, analyze, and use it? How has the Internet changed student research habits?

I wonder if a next step isn’t to elevate the search to an art form complete with peer critique. How much more would students learn about the what and the how if we ran conversational search seminars? What if students brought stuck or failed searches to the table and then talked or messaged with one another about the best ways to find relevant information? What if we crowd-sourced both the relevance and the rigor of search lessons to students and their relationships?

I don’t think technology has changed to role of content or background knowledge in learning, but I think it continues to change how we collect information and what we do with it. How else should I look at the question, PLN? How do you think the role of content and prior knowledge have, indeed, changed? Has access given them a new primacy? Has standardized testing? Or is the purpose of instructional technology to package content and prior knowledge for quicker assimilation into more rigorous work?

How do we get better at helping students learn how and why? How do we take advantage the ways that technology speeds up the what? How do we involve students in all this content and prior knowledge?  The questions remain the same.

Disclaimer: I still want my giant iPhone.

(Answer: figurative or literal – either way the question is illogical.)

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.

It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.

Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against one another. Significant pieces of our professional identity come from who we think of when we ask ourselves: Who do I want to be? Who do I not want to be? Whose results do I want? Whose results don’t I want?  Students evaluate one another.  We evaluate students.  They evaluate us.  Measures change with points of view, but evaluation remains a personal, human enterprise.  We often run headlong into this challenge in the classroom, where what we value and what students value differs without intentional and prolonged community-building.  I suspect a similar challenge exists in teacher evaluation between teachers and their evaluators.

Evaluation is personal because we view results as shorthand for those who produced them. Consider how often we place students by their grades and test scores; consider how we talk about students because of their grades and test scores and placements.

What if we placed students by interest? By learning style? By mastery of content?

What if we restructured schools to do the same for adults? What if a school system reorganized to better manage its human capital by creating different types of schools where its teachers and students could find success? Why keep putting square peg teachers into round hole classrooms?

Why is our rhetoric all innovation and our funding all conformity? When do we ask radically new questions of the system to help us do the job it says it wants us to do?

We are all impatient for change, because we want results on which we can act. We want a good evaluation so we can evaluate ourselves against others. We’re in a system and entrenched political and media climate that encourages us to do so.  Competition suffuses our schools and our discourse about them. Public schools must be effective so charters are ineffective, or visa versa, so we can act. Teacher A must be effective so Teacher B is ineffective so we can act. Fund this, close that, fire them.

Haven’t we learned enough about either/or? Haven’t we played enough zero-sum games?  Do we want to keep playing Spanish Prisoner with students and test scores? (If you comply now then in X years . . . .) In leaving no child behind, is there no better solution than to leave schools and teachers behind?

Here’s an article that says no, turnarounds aren’t scalable (or maybe they are; links via Eduwonk). Okay. So let’s not turn around schools. Let’s re-organize them to succeed and re-organize our teachers, too. What if every school adopted a mission, and what if every division worked with schools to offer a meaningful choice between effective schools, beyond autonomy zones, but including general curriculum schools? Think of the possibilities for students and adults alike in authentic, passion-driven specialization. Think of the career tracks opened up inside classrooms and schools if novice teachers and administrators had the opportunity to pursue personally relevant professional paths. I want to be a top-notch collaborative special education teacher at the visual arts academy in five years. I want to be a top-notch art teacher helping students create album covers and concert posters at the music academy in three years. I want to be the assistant principal sharing a school-wide vision of scientific inquiry into sustainable living at the STEM academy in two years.  Next year I want to be the coach of students working through the STEM curriculum offsite at a more local lab-within-a-school.  Next year I want to be the R&D teacher inventing new methods that will benefit all learners with students who have mastered the year’s coursework already.

So what does any of this have to do with class roots reform?

First, take up Kyle’s challenge. Connect with a teacher from your PLN and connect with someone in your building. Start a caring partnership. Find the good in one another, acknowledge it, and emulate it. Put aside questions about who you want to be or don’t want to be. Ask new questions. Who are we together? How can we help one another change for the better? Go the extra mile beyond us and them in teacher evaluation. I regret that I have spent so much of my career competing with colleagues in the phantom teaching league of my mind.

Second, ask your leaders new questions. Ask to follow a passion. Ask to let the kids follow their passions. Align the work to standards, show results, and argue that they come from authentic teaching and learning, not from conformity. Ask about the efficacy of leveling. Ask about specialty centers and schools-within schools. Ask about sharing the responsibility for sharing out and scaling up new and successful ideas about how to reach students grouped by something more human than either/or. Invite your PLC to observe something new that’s working; ask for it’s feedback; ask if anyone else is willing to try. If you’ve built the kinds of partnerships Kyle challenges us to build, you’ll find some takers.  Create and advertise your team’s specialties; show others how to develop theirs; recruit and foster like-minded novices.

We can’t go back to the days of closed classroom doors and scatter ourselves to the wind on eccentric pedagogical whims.  However, we can leverage our strengths to create and scale-up classrooms with new approaches to teaching and learning that are authentic to students and politically viable to our leaders.  We can radically differentiate what we do to help students and ourselves, and then regroup in teams, schools, and divisions organized on principles more authentic, lasting, and human than standardized-test results.  Let’s get to the future and ask ourselves how we will organize education when everyone meets every standard.  And if we don’t think that’s possible, again, let’s do something different now to make our students the innovators, entreprenuers, and citizens we all want them to be.

Keep looking up and out and inside whenever the demands of the day let you and reimagine yourself teaching up there, out there, ahead of the curve. Come back with your vision, share it, and evaluate it in performance.

B&S Fans by acb

But what about teachers? Who is our authentic audience, and does our behavior reflect its primacy in our professional lives? For whom do we perform teaching? Recent #edchat about standardized testing and the nation’s discourse about President Obama’s speech to students have turned on the house lights. From the stage we can look out and see our students, but also their parents and our leaders, law-makers, and tax-payers.

Our act requires many types of improvisation. When we see a great idea, we have to adapt it to our circumstances. When we see a students’ needs, we have to differentiate instruction to meet them. When we hear our parent’s and policy-makers’ and public’s shouts, we have to decide what we stand for and how we stand for it.

In this light, in so many ways, neither Obama’s speech (see: Reagan) nor the talk about it are new. Our students, parents, and leaders call for us to act in conflicting ways all the time. The sound and fury of public discourse is really a repeated call to us in our moments of history to decide for ourselves what we value in our work and to act in accordance with our decisions instead of in compromise away from them. At the very least, our moment asks us to push teaching and learning past the tests and to make them personally meaningful for our students. No generation, president, or political party has gotten this right. We won’t get it right unless we face up to our own responsibility to reform classroom practice.

A dear principal of mine began every year encouraging us to work smarter because he believed we couldn’t work any harder. I hear him every time I read a blog post celebrating a teacher’s sense of accomplishment at getting all the students lined up and silent in the hall.

Rules will not eliminate the achievement gap. Orderly lines of complacent children will not improve graduation rates. Standardized tests will not stand the test of time. Our best measure of success will be our students’ lives, not their scores, and the lives of their children. If we don’t find ways to make learning matter to students now, the next generation will have the same views of school and the same mistrust of teachers.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama by Wa-J

Whether we watch Obama’s speech during school on Tuesday or not, our real task is to make what we do as authentically engaging to students as this debate has been to us. We need to switch places with the students and let them perform work inspired by their talents and passions. We need to broaden students’ sense of audience and introduce them to mentors and coaches who have better ideas than we do about how schoolwork connects to the professional lives students want to lead. We need to teach in a way that seems authentic to students who are no longer the audience, but the performers.

The purpose of school shouldn’t be to teach kids how to live inside or outside the lines of a police state. If a school’s grounds and halls need to be patrolled for safety’s sake, then by all means patrol them, but in any school classrooms should be oases. Learning should be a refuge. It should take work to learn, but the work should be joyous and different from the fear-coerced compromises too many students have to make to survive physically, mentally, and emotionally. Teachers: we can’t meet every kid’s every need, but I remain convinced we can do more individually to change the way we teach to address students’ needs for safety, belonging, liberty power, and, yes, fun in the classroom. If we believe in the American Dream, if we believe in rugged individualism, and if we believe in a future where government is smaller because it is truthfully needed less, then it’s time to stop looking for students and parents and tax-payers and policy-makers to change the world. It’s time to change our classrooms, aquí mero, and to prove right the trust we want to teach and learn joyfully with our students in the brief time we have with them. Do right by today’s students, and their parents and children will thank you for it. Decide, teach authentically, and don’t be afraid.