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?

Longleat Hedge Maze by Howard?Gees

Today we had a great time introducing ourselves to Laura Oldham’s (@engltchrleo) new reading classes via Edmodo; our small-group Skyping cohort also happily reconnected with Karin Perry’s (@kperry) students to discuss James Dashner’s The Maze Runner.  We used 1:1 iPods Touch and m.Edmodo.com for our introductions; we gathered around Skype on a MacBook for our book club.  We posted our introductions mostly asynchronously with some nearly synchronous replying via Edmodo, back and forth with Laura’s enthusiastic students; our Skype session was live with Karin’s.  Students had a list of questions to focus their introductions on reading, but not exclusively so; we used teacher generated questions planned over Gmail for the Skype discussion as our two groups came to today’s discussion having read different amounts of The Maze Runner.

That is to say, Karin’s group had finished the book and was ready to start discussing our next book, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.  Our group members had reached chapter 2 of The Maze Runner.  While we had opted-in and committed to read The Maze Runner over Winter Break, we did not do so.  Therefore, instead of discussing the entire book today, we responded to some broader, abstract questions about the book’s premise:

• How would you run a world with no adults?
• Have you ever been confronted by an unsolveable problem?
• Is it fair for teachers to assign problems with no clear solutions?
• Would you rather have an adventurous, dangerous job, or a safe, dirty one?

The students huddled at each end of the videoconference and then shared out their answers over Skype.  There was a great deal of nuanced thinking and middle-school humor.  Some highlights:

• “We would need a democracy.”
• “We would need leaders.”
• “We wouldn’t want a tyrancy [sic].”
• “It’s not fair for a teacher to assign you a problem you can’t solve if it’s going to be graded.”
• “It’s okay if the problem imparts some larger life lesson.”
• “I guess we know who the heroes are in these groups.”
• “I would stay in the kitchen and save the world with treats.”

After the Skype session ended, our group talked about accountability.  We did not draft a reading schedule before break.  We did not keep in touch via Edmodo or our class Google Voice line, though we could have. Before break, we opted in to read The Maze Runner, committed ourselves to Skyping again today, and went home with our books.  We could have done more – I could have done more – to make sure we were finished with the book by today, but after our talk today I’m not sure that I would have changed a thing.  We didn’t do our part; while that’s not okay, per se, everything was ok thanks to our partners’ kindness and our discoveries about accountability.

I’m chagrined that we didn’t uphold our end of the bargain.  I’m vexed we didn’t do what we said we were going to do.  I’m sorry we hadn’t read enough to engage with the questions and conclusions our partners were ready to ask and share.  However, I’m kind of thrilled that today we discovered personal accountability because of our audience of peers.  There was no life lesson I had to impart (and on Friday who’s ready to do that?); no metaphor connecting schoolwork to real work (but the book was about a maze full of monsters that kids had to escape).  There were no excuses (no dogs were harmed in the eating of our books); there was no external consequence handed down by the teacher (you’ll never be allowed to teleconference again!).  There was common personal regret and embarrassment, but also a very vital and genuine determination to meet our partners half-way next time.

Our partners were exceptionally gracious today – kindly helping us with characters’ names and really engaging with us in the general questions that made possible our participation in the conversation.  We recognized that and appreciated it greatly.  We owe them one heck of a book club.  We had fun with reading today because of them.

And we found personal meaning in preparing for class thanks to peer & personal accountability.  We want to do better so we feel better about our contributions to collaborative projects with peers.

It might not get any better than that.

Except, you know, for reading (finishing) really good books.

We’ll let you know in a few weeks.

My kids today also gave me an opportunity to see again how we can turn any situation into a learning opportunity if we all come to the social media platform with open hearts and minds.  What cuts learning short when students aren’t prepared isn’t so much their lack of preparation, but a teacher’s insistance that they be prepared before being allowed to move forward with learning.  Aren’t we always ready to learn?  Isn’t there another question we could ask?  Haven’t we all failed at a task before finding a solution – one of many?

Finally, here’s an idea for next year to harness the power of social media for peer accountability in the classroom: 1:1 accountability partners.

It’s hard to find meaning in doing work because a teacher says so.  It’s hard to find meaning in letting down your group when you’re horsing around again by recess.  It’s hard to listen to an authority figure talk about what you should have done.

What if we tried this instead?

• Partner classes across schools for semi-quarterly projects, but weekly or semi-daily blogging.
• Connect students with 1:1 partners sharing similar interests and ideas about school.
• Ask partners to post weekly or semi-daily to a blog shared between the two of them.
• Ask partners to post each Monday on what they want to accomplish academically over the next five days at school.
• Ask students to report each Friday on their progress towards their goals.
• Ask partners to post a positive comment about a success each week and to pose an encouraging question about a work in progress.
• Ask partners to send one another supportive Tweets, Yams, or Edmodula (?)  regarding their goals throughout the week.

I think we could come up with a reasonable permissions and assessment framework for this, and maybe succeed in part in decentralizing accountability in the classroom, making for less coercive teacher-student relationships.  I bet we could even do this with the classes next door.

We could experiment with “do what you say you’re going to do” being the law of the land, rather than “do what the teacher/rubric/calendar says to do.”

Anyone want to opt-in?

Dandelion Invasion by ®DS

Social reading

I want synched e-readers with color screens and robust tablet features for annotation and audio/visual mark-up, and I want them licensed to download the latest young adult lit. I want to pay smart phone prices for the devices and download prices for the books. The trouble with marking up a class set of books is that the books have to be used again by the next class. I want to invest in one social reader per student that follows him or her throughout an elementary, middle, high school, or K12 career. I want each student to leave school with not only a record of their reading, but also an archive of the connections they’ve made between texts, their lives, and the teachers and classmates learning with them. I want interactions with the text and between readers to appear synchronously across a synched set of readers. I want publishers to host databases of who’s reading what when so that connecting with another class or reader near the same page is a search-and-click away on the reader. I want new networks of readers to revisit texts after a unit or course. I want to be able to tag and rate pages, passages, and characters, and to be able to upload those tags and ratings to publishers’ databases. Let’s go, Bezos; make it happen: evolving humanities flexbooks with site-based social licensing of new works available on demand.

Webpage Challenge Policies

No more social media firewalls. Take best-practice book challenge practices and apply them to classroom use of the Internet. Trust teachers and students to use good judgment; expect teachers to manage behavior and provide engaging instruction that’s augmented – and not replaced – by technology. If a student objects to a particular website, have alternatives ready. If a parent objects to a webpage after an alternative assignment is made available, invite the parent to review the page thoroughly and fill out a complaint to be reviewed by a committee including the parent, a subject-area coordinator, a subject-area teacher, and a representative from tech support. Require students and parents to object to single instances or pages of defensible sites or services so a school or system doesn’t lose access to an entire, appropriately used product with proven educational value.

Social media goes local

I have a folderful of shared papers and proposals on Google Docs co-authored by educators in a half-dozen states. This year our humanities class has tweeted Tanzania, begun a whole-class Edmodo book club with @engltchrleo’s class in New Mexico, and started another, smaller book club with @kperry’s students in Oklahoma. However, we haven’t read and blogged along with another middle school class in our division. We haven’t Skyped read-alouds to elementary school students or worked on our own fluency with high school mentors. We haven’t used VoiceThread to comment on electronic galleries of political cartoons made by students in local social studies classes. We haven’t asked for feedback on our class wiki from other sixth and seventh graders in our system. I wonder why not. I hope that the strides we’re making in connecting with classrooms online will help us form tighter PLCs and more meaningful learning partnerships locally.

Innovation gets cloudy

Entrepreneurship, invention, and workplace best practices appear in more and more K12 classes. The classes find voice and find one another online. More administrators, teachers, and students join the ongoing work of reforming classroom practice. Teachers and students become more systematic about documenting and sharing planning and work. Administrators and teachers find ways to schedule standards-aligned classes focused on authentic work. They work with legal to draft new permissions policies for publishing and selling student work to sustain such classes. Public education teachers pick up on blended-instruction, distance learning, and the radical differentiation offered by competitors like virtual, independent, and home schools. Conversations online broker local discussions that lead to real change in how teachers, departments, schools, and divisions approach teaching and learning. New definitions and widespread rollout of CTE help American public schools become a part of the world instead of remaining apart from it. Teachers begin treating classrooms like work spaces and students like collaborators. Vision, mission, and strategy work at the classroom level creates accountability, responsibility, and interdependency between learners of all ages. Regardless of school tracking and scheduling schemes, teachers find more meaningful ways to structure physical space and grouping in the classroom – campfire, watering hole, cave; entrepreneurs, inventors, artists. A wider variety of richly authentic, self-selected tags apply to teacher and students alike creating new relational connections inside and between classrooms – and between learning inside and outside school – so process, product, and feedback become better differentiated to meet students needs. Learning becomes quantum as learners use flexible grouping and social media to learn in several ways and “places” at once.  Imagine a school where learners use 1:1 network access to determine inquiry-based daily schedules built around tags and ratings from administrators, teachers, current students, and alumni.  Imagine K12 public education distance learning built around following microblogs of other students attending classes at other learning sites.  Inquiry by RSS becomes common practice for building differentiated textbooks.

Teacher evaluation gets the NCLB treatment

Regardless of local outcomes, RttT assurance efforts and value-added debates spur deep local conversations about teacher evaluation, tenure, and the disparities between different teacher pay schemes and between teacher salaries and the value of the time and results they produce. New pay menus and branching career paths come into play as it becomes obvious that imposing new terms on obsolete learning models and career progressions is unfair and unworkable. Teachers and administrators work through messy conversations about where teacher value comes from, and teachers have to decide between joining pay pilots, waiting for whatever gets implemented, or being grandfathered into current systems that cap pay and annual increases. New opportunities for different types of pay increases encourage teachers to become project-based and develop versatile career portfolios like those of Gen Y professionals in other fields.

Yeah. That’s right – next year. Bam. Done. All five predictions. 2010. Love those round numbers. Something wonderful is going to happen.