Classroots.org

Here are two quotes I’ve been thinking about all day:

in the red #25 by clickykbd

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism – it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
-Conan O’Brien

“The tension between what I’m actually doing in my classroom and what I think I should be doing in my classroom has gotten to be almost unbearable. I don’t believe that I’m preparing my students to be successful in a world driven by innovation and creativity, but the ONLY tangible indicator of my performance—standardized test scores—says that my students are not as “accomplished” as students in other classrooms in our school and district.”
-Bill Ferriter

What I read most in Ferriter’s (@plugusin) quote is his determination not to be cynical, but rather to hold on to his beliefs about teaching and learning despite the compromises we are asked to make daily in the name of student “achievement.”  I don’t know an American public school colleague who doesn’t feel this tension.

What can we do? How can we resist cynicism? How can we go somewhere else?

In response to these quotes, I suggest we lobby for the creation of a red team per school or division made up of

• Teachers of all sorts.
• Students – especially those who struggle and/or feel disengaged.
• Parents – including home-schoolers, private-schoolers, and virtual-schoolers who will rejoin the division provisionally to champion and monitor change.
• Community partners who will invest human and/or financial resources in the team’s initiatives.
• Building-level and central office administrators who get carte blanche from the school board to speak according to the dictates of their consciences.

Each team would ask two questions:

• What’s our objective?
• What’s in the way?

The red team would report to the principal or to the superintendent and the board.  The school or school system would own the objective and dedicate itself to achieving it and eliminating the obstacles to it through a project-based, balanced scorecard approach.

Or we could hang out here for a while longer and risk Coco’s ire.

Teachers: could you do this with students and/or parents in your classroom?  Frankly, the idea scares me, which is probably a clear indication that I should do it.  I’ve asked for feedback before, but not in a way that invites such honesty about my role in presenting obstacles to individual students’ learning.  Stay tuned.

089/365 Money...What Money by stuartpilbrow

Many school systems, mine included, face unprecedented budget challenges this year. I imagine that in addition to implementing or continuing pay freezes, many divisions also have to consider eliminating teacher leadership stipends. I worry that we’re going to lose great teacher leaders. Why take on more work without more compensation? With looming increases in class size and corresponding cuts in staffing and materials, including IT, teachers will have to do more with less next year regardless of their leadership roles. Is it fair to ask teachers to lead others while they have to negotiate their own responses to rapid change in working conditions?

Certainly a bevy of teachers lead now and will continue to lead with or without a stipend or title like “department chair.” Leaders may also take the loss of stipends as an opportunity to pass along their mantles and duties to a new leader and to coach their successors less formally.

I’m not at all cynical about educators’ desire to do right and to help one another help children.

I’m concerned that teacher leadership will become less attractive to teachers and that uncompensated leadership will become the status quo during the economic downturn.

How could teacher leadership and compensation for it be saved systematically without unfair expectations put on classroom teachers? What do you think? What kinds of compensation remain available to divisions and teacher leaders apart from stipends and IT?

Lately, I’m thinking a lot about grants. I think I can take a much more active role in securing the materials and technology I see my students using in the future. I’ve posted about how I might better resource my class. So far, I’ve pursued two grant opportunities – one for e-readers and another for the tools necessary for student app development and learning space design.

What if we used grants to help replace stipends? What if lead teacher positions rotated fairly and part of the lead teacher’s duty was grant-writing?

Imagine a lead teacher earning more time during the school day to pursue grants that benefit both the department and the lead teacher. Imagine a lead teacher drawing 3-5 more students a piece from concurrent classes in the same content area so the department reaches more children in a shorter amount of time.  Imagine a class size of 30-32 instead of 26-28.  Imagine the lead teacher earning an extra class period, half-block, or duty-period off for the pursuit of grants. Imagine 5% of the curriculum development line-item in each grant budget going to the lead teacher for the R&D necessary for the grant proposal.  This isn’t a new idea – awarding commissions to grant writers – but it could be systematized in a new way for teacher leadership.

Could that lead teacher recoup the cost of a lost stipend? Maybe. Could that lead teacher continue to model scholarship and innovation in best practices? Absolutely.

What do you think, teachers? Would you agree to greatly increased class size one or two periods a day to earn grant-writing time that could underwrite your stipend?

Another thought: what if a lead teacher or department social media maven could earn time to tweet and blog about the great work going on within the department? What if the division’s legal team created a framework for advertising professional texts or professional development on the blog with most of the revenue from clicks going to the department while 5-10% of the revenue went to the lead teacher/department blogger in place of a stipend?

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.

IMG_4672 by cdslug

[Author's note: I love Foyble.com and its potential to add relevance and voice to students' community service. I greatly appreciate the opportunities I have to work with Foyble.com, but I am in no way compensated by the site.]

Monday night I Skyped with Brian Foy (@Foyble_org), a co-founder of Foyble.com, and Jack King (@drjackking), founder of the North Fork Center for Servant Leadership.  Brian and Jack are working on what will be an amazing community service curriculum that trains teachers and students in using social media for good.  Our conversation inspired me to think about community service requirements in our schools and how we could leverage them further to inspire more and more students to do good and to share their work in hope of inspiring others.  The earthquake in Haiti has me thinking further about what it means to serve a community.  If I was a teacher in Haiti, what would I want to do today?  I can only imagine what my answers would be.  Find my loved ones; find my students; recover; rebuild; help and be helped.  (We can help here.)

As teachers, how can we respond to humanitarian disasters? How do we help our students become leaders who can face catastrophe and reach out to the people affected by it?  I think we have to offer students practice time spent facing problems that they can help their communities solve.  I think they have to see that they can help and that they have the power to change the world for the better at a young age.  I think they need a chance to develop the habit of doing good.

And I think Foyble.com can help.

Foyble.com is a social media platform for blogging and mapping your good deeds.  (You can learn more about Foyble.com here.) Foyble also threads the charitable acts others commit in response to your good deeds.  I think Foyble is phenomenal and timely.  I can see Foyble connecting local charities and volunteers.  I can see Foyble sparking flash mobs for community clean-ups.  I can see Foyble members forming new partnerships to address community needs.  I can see Foyble giving students a voice for the good they do.

When I think of community service at the middle school level, I think of hours requirements for social studies courses.  I applaud the requirements.  I recognize that it can be difficult for kids and families to meet them.  I think it must also be challenging for teachers to assess the impact of service hours on students and the communities they serve.  How do you assess for the growth of empathy in a student? Schools and PLCs aren’t always set up to support qualitative assessment of students’ school work or good works.  I don’t find any fault here, but I see both a need and opportunity for letting go of traditional curriculum, instruction, and assessment to make room for student learning that’s about people and how they meet one another’s needs.  I’m also eager to hear from you about examples of this kind of work that are already happening in our schools.

As a platform for blogging and tracking good deeds, Foyble offers classrooms a tool that teachers and students can use to reflect on their work, give one another feedback, and inspire one another to do even more good deeds through the variety of service opportunities blogged by a class. With some assruance of participation, blogs and comments are great for collecting qualitative data and reacting to it.  The democracy that blogging and commenting make possible are also great for teacher/student collaboration.  Imagine participating in community service opportunities that your students organize or suggest in the comments on your Foyble blog.  Imagine the kind of trust and relationships you can build with students inside and outside school thorugh service learning and usig social media for good.

Since Foyble is a social media platform, it also provides teachers and students with a way to publish and interact over their work with community partners.  With enough participation in a division, state, or region, classes and organizaions using Foyble to document their service could even team up and create partnerships to serve larger numbers of people.  Maybe Foyble could even help connect classes and other groups through an algorithm that matches Foyble Friends by analyzing the types of deeds and users active in a specific area.

There was healthy debate on #edchat this week about technology, the tasks to which it’s best suited, and the responsibilities that guide its use.  I think if we match classroom technology to doing good our kids will learn a lot about service, about their responsibilities to their communities, and about themselves.  If we don’t plan lessons around doing good, we run the risk of not seeing the good our students can do.

One more idea: explore other sites dedicated to doing good and imagine how students could use them as motivators and platforms for good deeds that could be blogged, mapped, and threaded on Foyble.  Could your students agree on a DoGood idea for the entire class each day?  Could they find a local niche for work at which they could become expert, like charity: water?

Do we need to teach social studies to do this?  What interdisciplinary connections can we make to doing good?  What are kids at our schools already doing that might find voice on Foyble.com and inspire others?

Teachers and students interested in Foyble.com: please join the Eductors’ Give group.

PS: My work with Brian and Jack came about because I met Jack via Twitter and then over coffe, and because I knew a guy named Justin Lebanowski in college, who knew Brian Foy around the same time even though I didn’t.  When Justin mentioned Foyble.com.com on FaceBook, I tweeted the link to Jack, who contacted Brian via Twitter, email, and Skype to create synergies between Foyble and the North Fork Center for Servant Leadership.  I never expected to be brainstorming about a social media service learning curriculum, nor did I really think about the need for one before meeting Jack and then Brian.  Sometimes technology helps us make discoveries that we can’t imagine living without after we make them.  I suspect technology can do the same for students.  As we match our tech to the tasks at hand, we have to remember to make a little room for play and the possibility that students will discover new, authentic, and personally meaningful work we could never have imagined assigning them.

[Author's note: Thanks for this post's inspiration go to Shelley Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) of Teach Paperless fame for his crazy stuff challenge, as well as to those who have already commented!]

Gnarls Barkley by Jeremy Farmer Photog

Invert & Green the School Calendar

First, let’s invert the school calendar to promote sustainable food projects and maintain alternatives to food monocultures. If we put Summer Vacation in the middle of winter, we could “start” each school in the spring and plant a diverse-as-possible, locally viable garden or farm per school. Students could work on STEM in agriculture throughout the spring, determining plantable areas, calculating the optimal seed density per crop, engineering systems to help make work more efficient and crop yields higher, and writing the procedures and hypotheses of experiments for summer farming. Summer time could then be spent tending the crops, blogging observations, and calculating and comparing the growth rates and yields of different crops or groups of the same crop planted and/or tended differently. Fall could be spent harvesting and working on recipes and cookbooks to give students work with ratios, copy writing, design, and publishing.

Based on what they learn about their soil, plants, and community needs and wants, students could also research and propose next year’s crops as a summative presentation to peers, teachers, and local farmers. High scoring presentations could be adopted to give students power over what’s planted or to attract partnerships with local farms and garden clubs. Students could donate portions of each crop to local food banks – or bring fresh flowers to senior centers weekly – , market their cookbooks for donations to their schools or local food banks, and participate in – or host - local farmers’ markets, making the school a community center once again.

We could also avoid snow days by adopting this calendar, or perhaps add an opt-in Winter semester of onsite and/or virtual extension and inquiry offerings. We could assign every student a cellular computing device to help with making audio/visual field observations throughout the school year and delivering virtual content in the winter time. If we’re unwilling to scrap an agricultural calendar, let’s re-schedule school to take advantage of it, bringing together information age learning and agricultural entrepreneurship. Urban schools could create summer partnerships with suburban or rural host schools for a summer semester and prepare for farm work by following their partner’s blogs and wikis throughout the year. Urban schools could revitalize community gardens or pursue funding for green roofs to support limited planting.

Turn Schools into Pop Art

Our host school has a giant boulder decorated and signed by members of each year’s exiting 8th grade class. A local high school graffitis a railroad bridge with pro-social messages based on community, choice theory, and reality-therapy. The local university has a bridge anyone can paint so long as they stay the night and maintain a vigil over the work.

Why aren’t we painting more? Why don’t we give our buildings – or apportion huge swaths of their exteriors – to our students? With oversight from a committee of students, teachers, admin, parents, and neighborhood stakeholders, surely we could run STEM and arts design competitions to solicit student proposals for transforming our staid school houses into pieces of pop art. Older students could mentor younger students in determining areas to be covered, the amount and type of paint needed for outdoor use, and in preparing student criteria, design mock-ups, and proposals for review committees. Local history and current events could factor into students’ designs, as could students’ passions and visions of the future. Students could design and propose in the fall, run experiments on paints and surfaces during the winter, and paint in the spring.

Committees could also recruit local artists to serve as pro-bono project managers for student painting. Parent and community volunteers could help students execute their designs.

New schools could be designed as canvases and built according to a schedule that allows incoming students to paint the buildings before they open. Schools no longer need look the same.

Separate Licensure & Certification

Let’s run the background checks and screen the resumes and put together incredible interview questions, but let’s also give principals and local school-boards the power to grant 1-year, project-based licenses to field-tested professionals matched to school needs, renewable for up to 3 years before candidates have to either commit to certification in partnership with their home division, or find another division with which to partner.

Consider mathematics hiring in secondary schools. There seems to be a perpetual shortage of highly qualified math teachers. Let’s allow principals to exercise their judgment in hiring field practitioners who can bring their tools and habits of mind to our classrooms.  Let’s hook the most promising teachers of these professionals on the rewards of working with children and serving the greater good. Let principals match professionals to schools’ needs and initiatives. Give principals the authority to release licensed, uncertified personnel quickly if things don’t work out while giving schools the chance to staff hard to fill positions with content area experts.

Given the dynamic nature of our work and the financial enticements of admin and private-sector jobs, career teachers are invaluable and must be supported in their professional development and retained. We also need to create more of them and let the profession evolve to retain them. In the meantime, we have a generation of students depending on us to provide them with an authentic education that connects their inseparably lives to learning. I say we give exemplar professionals living in our communities a shot at sharing that work with us.

number 4 by Leo Reynolds

What’s the difference between strategic thinking and strategic planning in the classroom?

I frequently find myself designing instruction according to the principles of strategic planning. I have in my mind a predictable future – a particular product or a pacing guide. The formulation and implementation of learning are clearly defined: before, during, and after; direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice, and assessment. I manage the plan and pass it out to students. I assert control through frequent feedback and pacing decisions about which parts of the lesson to implement when. I let students know what I expect through pre-assessments, criteria, feedback, and grades.

For me, planning a lesson is an analytic pursuit, like solving a logic puzzle. I want to believe that the product will come together through the right combination of pieces. My focus is on the plan, on connecting content, process, and students to promote learning toward a discrete objective.  While I sometimes plan lessons that allow me to lead-manage during class, I behave like a boss-manager when planning instruction, as I’ve been trained to do.  For me, lesson planning is strategic planning.

However, when class begins strategic thinking takes over. In practice, as classroom relationships play out, it’s true that students will learn, but what they’ll learn when is uncertain.  During class, the sequential, discrete lessons in a unit give way to an expanding cloud of interactions between class members that creates a give-and-take of information about more than the lesson at hand. Boundaries are pushed. Moods are gauged. Questions are raised. Students’ participation in the strategically planned lesson – even their resistance to it – is a clear sign of their desire to be active and engaged learners, of their desire to be treated as collaborators and not subordinates. They want to take advantage of the learning opportunities that occur to them tangentially as the teacher invites, coaxes, coerces, and sometimes engages them with the teacher-intended work. Competing visions of what should to be learned create a chaos of intents the teacher can acknowledge – with or without acting on it – or ignore. Students’ roles directly impact who learns what when whether those roles are leveraged well or managed poorly by the teacher. Change courses throughout the class as the teacher and students choose their reactions to the intended lesson. The teacher and students adopt a series of micro-strategies to move forward each class member wants to happen.

During a lesson everyone thinks strategically in response to the strategic plan drafted by the teacher.

However, in the middle of a tanking lesson – or even in the middle of a “good” lesson that a few kids resist – I resist strategic thinking. Or, rather, I use strategic thinking to resist changing what I expect. I don’t ask myself to look at students’ behaviors and desires as new avenues into the intended learning. Instead, I ask myself questions like these: how can I get kids back on track? How can I redirect students from Photo Booth back to the class blog? How can I make sure we finish by Wednesday?

At times like these my failing lesson feels like a form of control – a comfort, a terror, a battlefield, and a prize. It becomes an abstract anchor in a sea of real human interactions. It becomes not-learning set in opposition to what learning really is – the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, rather than the delivery of them.

But even when the lesson becomes an obstacle to learning, I’m not sure what to do without it.

In the age of testing, can you create a public school classroom of learning without delivering specific content? Is it ever desirable to do so? What is teaching anyway anymore? Are we delivery people or models? Do we give students what they should study, or do we ask them to study us? Do we insist on a role apart from students’? Are we willing to become co-learners and to design classrooms that reflect a single intent: to learn alongside students?

But here again I’m caught in strategic planning, trying to imagine a definite role for myself – a way to maintain my expectations of what I should do each day in the classroom. That’s such an attractive notion. It’s captivating; it’s the history of public schooling – the history of how can teachers remain the focus of attention?

So here’s to change.  Here’s to strategic thinking: to learning instead of teaching; to discovering instead of delivering; to intending instead of expecting.  And here are four intents for the general shape of the future:

Intent 1 – Make all learners great

Today I read this article about what makes a great teacher. I wasn’t taken with either the implicit measure of greatness used (standardized testing) or the students’ use of memorized math facts to calculate decontextualized figures. I can see how the students’ skills would help them on a standardized test and how their results would make their teacher seem great compared to teachers whose students did poorly on the tests, but the product of the students’ work isn’t great. It’s test scores. It’s a fixed, predictable objective of legislative strategic planning.

The article brought several questions to mind.  Are teachers the focus of our educational system?  Should it  be the objective of ed schools and professional development programs to make great teachers or to cause great learning?   Is it great teaching to ensure that all students master the same thing at the same time for a decontextualized measure that the media and government use to judge teachers and schools, rather than learning?  I feel like we face tremendous media and political pressure to define ourselves and any greatness allowed us by test scores, whereas the greatness we earn is shared with students and is endebtted to their learning which standardized tests frequently fail to measure.  The tests neither account for any academic growth made by a student who fails them, nor indicate whether or not a student who passes them could have passed them two years ago.  The “tendencies” of “superstar teachers” cited in the article seem good to me, but they also seem mischaracterized.  They don’t make a teacher great because they boost test scores; they help students learn, which is a great thing teachers support.

Education – schooling – should be about making all learners great. That should be our primary strategic intent.  Our strategic thinking should focus on what individual learners need to move forward in their acquisition of knowledge and skills so that they become great learners and great at what they love to do. How do we do this in the classrom?  How do we do this with scheduling?  How do we do this through school choice?

Intent 2 – Promote change to promote learning

We need to think strategically about all the non-negotiables schooling imposes on students, teachers, schools, and divisions. Why are students in public schools limited to their grade level’s standards and tests? Why aren’t alternative assessment mainstream? Why do we set up schools and classrooms like factories in a post-industrial society? Why do we so limit the scope of every course, grade-level, and student tracking-scheme to create predictable outcomes for students based on what we resource ourselves to teach?

We need leaders who can think strategically and come up with unpredictable solutions to our most pressing problems. We need to be able to work strategically to get students thinking strategically. Can an educational system stuck in strategic planning create leaders for a world that needs strategic thinking? How can we plan to have innovative thinkers when we won’t think strategically about school?

Our intent should be to cause disruptive innovations at the classroom, school, and division level that demonstrate new possibilities for students’ learning and our own. If we’re stuck with annual testing, I suggest we start there.

Intent 3 – Involve students in professional development

Becky Fisher (@beckyfisher73) has greatly helped my thinking here.

We need to radically change professional development. As much as social media makes it possible for teachers to engage in deeply meaningful, inquiry-based learning, we don’t work or teach in isolation. We work with teams of teachers and teams of students, even when PLCs, departments, and classes don’t feel very team-like. It’s vital that we find individual professional development for our own learning; it’s just as vital that we engage with the people with whom we work in thinking about how to all learners forward.

We need to create learning opportunities for ourselves that partner us with colleagues and students so that when we train to implement authentic, interdisciplinary project-based instruction, we train with the co-workers and students who will be part of the implementation.

For example, one way to reinvent both summer professional development and summer school might be to create academies attended by teachers and teams of students they’ll serve next year. These teams could work together to think strategically about last year’s challenges and opportunities and a variety of ways to meet them head-on in the Fall. Imagine combining professional development , curriculum development, at-risk, algebra-readiness, literacy, and appropriate grant funds for such a summer school. I bet you could pay both facilitators and attending teachers and provide teacher-student teams with the materials and technologies for which their Fall strategies call. Imagine enrolling your neediest students, establishing egalitarian relationships between them and their teachers, giving them voice in instructional intent, and sending them home with the technology and materials they’re going to use in their classes in the Fall – materials and technologies they help develop and secure for classmates and their teachers.

Intent 4 – Think instruction

We classroom teachers set ourselves and our students up for conflict by strategically planning units when our classroom interactions are based on strategic thinking. It’s our shared human nature to make discoveries and connections as we learn. When we insist on one path or outcome – when we coerce students to learn one thing or to learn one way – we truncate learning opportunities and short circuit students’ curiosity.  I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately: is it better to redirect a student back to my plan, or to investigate with the student how a new path can lead to or past the day’s lesson? That seems like a rhetorical question, but it takes on ambiguity and urgency in the middle of class.

There’s no way individualize instruction this way in a classroom of 25-30 students set up for whole group instruction. We need flexible classrooms and outlooks. What learning can students direct? What options do we have for designing our classrooms? What are our options for grouping students in our classrooms? What are our options for providing each group with choices that prompt the learning we intend? What independent work can a group of students do in support of learning while we support another group? Can we see each group every class? Every other class? How can we brainstorm, test, and adopt multiple infrastructures and infra-schedules in our own rooms and across our teammates rooms?

This is more than planning a menu of differentiated instruction. This is the willingness and preparation required to cycle through multiple means of learning multiple times in designing and implementing classrooms and instruction. Thinking instruction instead of planning it asks us to stop seeing students’ actions as effects caused by our authoritative choices. Instead, thinking instruction asks us to consider how each student behavior can cause learning. To do so we need to develop a broad repertoire of spatial, relational, temporal and instructional designs. Thinking instruction asks us to translate the momentum of classroom behaviors in the present into learning in the future.

To think instruction, we have to begin open to a multitude of possibilities about how and when a student will learn what we intend in our instructional design, and then we need to work with the student to find the right combination of possibilities for that student so she feels great learning and creates something great with her learning.  What would you need for such radical differentiation?  How much of what you need could you get this year or next?

I feel fundamentally challenged by these intents. They have profound ramifications for my beliefs and practice. They ask me to let go of as much as they ask me to take on. They’re not entirely comfortable yet. Maybe if I think strategically enough – and shed enough of my bad habits – one day they’ll fit.