• Matt Berg – a community-project leader working in Africa.
• Aaron Gross – a animal farming ethicist .
• Neeru Paharia – a costumer behaviorist working at Harvard.
• Trung Le – a learning space designer working for Canon.
• Stanford Thompson – a musician and music educator working in Africa and Philadelphia.

Together the panelists made a great case for differentiation and project- and community-based learning in our classrooms. There sat five people following their passions, making differences in the world, and sharing their energy and insights with us. I defy any content coordinator or administrator to tell me again that kids have to master this program or that before they can dream of doing what those panelists do or begin problem-solving for their schools and neighborhoods.

Moreover, the panelists made a great case for getting out of our kids’ way. I think Thompson illustrated the point best when he compared how kids in his music lessons burn out after two months of direct instruction and guided practice, while kids in his community music programs – who play socially and learn by doing – are becoming movers of their own lives, with, anecdotally, better mental health and academic outcomes than their peers. Give the kid an instrument, Thompson suggested, and let him or her see what he or she can do. In other words, let inquiry drive innovation in focused, usefully constrained ways – let kids play together and with mentors to learn an instrument and to perform in a group.

All of this brings me back to our perennial dilemma. Our need to innovate solutions to our problems will not go away. As Gross explained, we have created the problems in our systems and those problems will continue until we realign our systems with our ethical beliefs rather than expeditious convenience. Until we concern ourselves with conserving the welfare of the animals we eat – or of the inhabitants of any of our systems – those creatures will suffer harm that we don’t actually wish on them.

So long as we create obstacle les for ourselves, we’ll need to innovate. In another post, I want to talk about how Jane McGonigal, in her new book Reality is Broken, suggests we tackle these problems. For now, I want to explore how we teachers – the “street level bureaucrats” of education – might approach such problems.

Chris Lehman, principal of EduCon host Science Leadership Academy and as quoted by last night’s moderator, said that innovation is positive social change.

We are the agents of social change, or not, for high-stakes testing. It is a problem we have, but we don’t always own it. We accept it and its diabolical accoutrements as a condition of our employment. We teach to it. Or we compromise with it. Or we ignore it. Or we find a way to teach above or past it – I’m not too good at that yet. In all honesty, that solution seems like a dsitractor to me.

Nevertheless, high-stakes testing remains a problem, and we remain without a cohesive national strategy for dealing with it from the classroom.

Paharia shared with us last night the results of behavioral studies that show a significant difference between what we say we would give someone in need and how much we actually give – if we give anything – when asked. She encouraged us to be more truthful in our self-assessments of honesty, generosity, and ethical behavior.

We don’t say we support high-stakes testing. We don’t want high-stakes testing. If we could go back thirty years, or a hundred and fifty years, and redesign testing or comprehensive schools to conserve the welfare of children we might not have high-stakes testing.

But here we are with high-stakes testing.

What are we willing to innovate as a response to testing that conserves the welfare of our students, promotes their authentic learning, and changes the system to reflect our personal and professional values?

We have so much in our country, I heard said last night, but we do so little with it.

I spent years teaching down to students – I spent years ignoring how much community, potential, and brilliance surrounded me. I did so little teaching of lasting worth. I saw, first-hand, last year how powerless that kind of teaching is to address issues of relevance and relationships in the classroom. I felt how powerless I was a teacher to insist on learning. I got out of the way as a way to preserve myself, my classroom, and my students’ welfare. Since then we’ve come a long way together in establishing trust and taking on work with some modicum of relevance.

And then last week I gave my mid-year assessments and end-of-course, high-stakes testing predictors.

How ethical a teacher am I? How much can I really blame the system? How much can I really pine for the freedom to innovate if I don’t take that freedom for myself? How can I recognize, value, and react positively to student rebellion against the status quo if I remain its valet?

I want to leave EduCon knowing something more about myself and how innovative I’m willing to be. I’m going to think on it. I hope you’ll join me in aspiring to a more honest self-assessment of our personal and professional ethics against the actions we’re taking and the opportunity costs of whatever it is we do – or are willing to do – to find or avoid our solution.

Can we be the Matt Bergs of public education, helping kids innovate their own solutions to learning classroom by classroom? Can we help them use their learning to serve their communities? Can we carve out the time from our busy testing lives to help kids demonstrate learning with immediate, positive geographic impact?

Look at our curriculum. How much of it could kids discover through focused play? How much could they innovate from it?

If our kids can’t discover our curriculum through inquiry or play, or if our kids can’t innovate with our content, should it be what we choose to teach? If what we teach can be discovered through inquiry and play, or if kids can innovate with our curriculum, are we teaching out of the way?

As Trung Le said last night regarding design, even the best designed school won’t work without our cooperation. So with what and with whom and how do we want to work?

At the very least, can we work SHTEAM – science, humanities, technology, engineering, arts, and math – into all of our classrooms and see what happens? It only starts to seem silly to try to cram so much into a single course so long as we ignore the obvious and powerful ways to do it.

Sometimes we say work smarter, not harder. Sometimes we say don’t work harder than your students. Sometimes we say kids these days.

In any case, it’s on us – as well as the system – to do more with what we have, and what a fantastic job that is.

That’s a tall order for underfunded schools facing an extension of federal policies that mandate educational obsolescence. Regardless, it’s the vision of school I want for my students, children, colleagues, and me.

That being said, even looking into the future I want, I still dwell on obsolesence.

First, I need to let go of the idea that differentiating school for students means designing and implementing 100+ curricula a day, or controlling 100+ students.

I need to think of differentiation as a systems problem. How do I, as a teacher, enable and give feedback on the self-directed workflow of 100+ colleagues a day – as a kind of information officer rather than a manager?

I’m addicted to reinventing the wheel. I don’t enjoy or feel successful teaching with other people’s lessons. I love bringing new media and tools into the classroom, but I just don’t feel like I’m doing what I want to do unless I’m delivering novel instruction around them.

I may need to get over this quickly. To accomplish what I want to accomplish I will need to accept a lot of help teaching thing I can’t teach. I need to become that colleague and stop trying to manage. I need to think about systems that will let me contribute connections, metaphors, and feedback to students and colleagues. I need to network my work and classroom much more than I do now, and find the room in my system to do it in a transparent way that contributes to our shared work.

So, I know what I want, even if I don’t know how to do it. Back to obsolesence: what I want, I think, is a new kind of PLC that functions like a project-based unit and includes students, teachers, and either non-teaching programmers or hybrid teacher-programmers.

The New PLC, click to enlarge

I think of school as an app store for learning. I think of students shopping for apps that inspire them to learn. I think of teachers as co-learners and customers at the same store, shopping for apps that network their classrooms to their communities and the world through service, project-based learning, and social media. I think of app-developers as reciprocal customers at the same store learning about students, teachers, and their experiences. Information and its manipulation are the store’s currency. I think of a school division as a brand name and of its schools as the brand’s flagship stores.

To create, market, and distribute a useful product you need a trusted brand, a space – F2F or virtual – to house its products. You need students, teachers, and programmers in the same space, and you need to think of them learning dynamically like sliders on spectra of content, learning, programming, and user experience. There needs to be shared ownership of learning and an easy interchange of roles and positions on those spectra so students and teachers make sound decisions about product purchases, and programmers make sound products.

School divisions should bring app development in house. In fact, divisions should make it the focus of classroom work shared in new PLCs made up of students, teachers, and programmers. Get the kids involved in self-assessment of their work with the apps. Get teachers thinking about how to deliver students’ learning and work to the world, rather than about how to deliver content to students. Get programers embedded in their audiences.

How can this work?

Are programmers much more expensive than teachers? Can schools reconcile the different ways programmers and teachers move up the pay scale and get promotions? How much would need to be spent to develop a cadre of hybrid teacher-programmers, clearing-houses of customizable apps (or do we have them already?), networks of divisions sharing resources, and budgetary and instructional structures to enable students to self-assemble drag-and-drop curricula? How many teacher-programmer pairs or hybrids do you need per how many students? Can you restructure school to group students by self-identified interests? Can you do this for part of a school day with part of a school? Can you charter this? Can your charter an app development high school that creates the apps for an elementary school?

Can ed schools train teachers to develop apps? Can ed schools be convinced that programming is a noble part of teaching?

Could you better retain Gen Y teacher-programmers than teachers due to the project-based nature of app development?

Can school systems pay hybrid teacher-programmers a hybrid salary? Can communities be convinced to support programmers as a necessary part of quality schooling? Can communities be convinced to pay teachers programmers’ salaries?

Can communities be convinced that sharing responsibility for curriculum and learning with students isn’t lazy teaching or a waste of money?

Can schools find new roles and partners for students and teachers?

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.

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.

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.

[Editor's note: I've been extremely fortunate in being able to speak and msg with several pre-service teachers this Fall.  Each and every one of them has helped me better articulate my beliefs and practices.  They certainly are colleagues and a great addition to any PLN.  This post goes out to all pre-service teachers with warm regards, fond memories of Fall 2000, and a standing offer to help.]

Dear Colleague,

6.23.08, by aprilzosia

What do you think of when you think of a classroom? What do you see? How are the desks arranged? Where is the work done?  How are people behaving?  Does the room look like your classroom – the one you remember from your youth? Does it look like one from high school or college? Elementary school or middle? Does it look like your favorite teacher’s classroom?  Does it look like the classroom you’re in now while you finish student-teaching?  Does it look like a lab? The band room? A gym?

How do you think classrooms will look in 5 years? In 10? How should they look right now?

When I think of a classroom, I think of rows. I think of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. I think of the chalkboard and the windows set perpendicular to the students, an irresistible provocation to look away from the board if ever there was one. I think of all these things and fight against them.

For decades there has been no change in the way the American public thinks of the classroom or of what should go on in it. School should be a certain way. Children should be taught as their parents were. A classroom must be orderly to be organized. Unless the work today looks like the work of yesterday, it’s not real work.

Here’s a quick assignment. Go to YouTube, which never lies. Mute your computer (very important step) and watch the first few seconds of this video. Next, watch this video for a few seconds beginning at 3:14. Then move along and watch a few sconds of this video. Finally, check out this video for just a few seconds more.

That’s four decades of popular thought across demographics about what goes on in schools.  If you need more proof, look here and here.  It’s the same for vampires.  How do the set-ups of those classrooms compare to the classroom in your head?

What do those classrooms value? How do their physical spaces constrain students’ possibilities for learning? How do their physical spaces constrain teachers’ possibilities for teaching?

How can you, as an individual teacher, help to change our country’s decades-old view of what school should be, beginning with your classroom?

That’s a tough question for any teacher to answer, but it’s especially important that you ask it of yourself because you are on-deck. Your work will advance new ideas of what school can be or further cement obsolete notions of the same. You will either participate in a paradigm shift or resist it.

Take some time this Spring to reflect on what you know and trust works for kids. Create a vision for yourself of the ideal classroom. Ask for feedback on it from teachers you trust, but don’t be afraid to differ from them. As you interview, be mindful of your vision and find ways to feel out whether or not your prospective administrators will support it. Ask about the kinds of mentoring you will receive as a first-year teacher and the beliefs of your prospective mentors.  Look for support in achieving your vision, not in replacing it.

Set up your first classroom so that it’s default setting allows the kinds of teaching and learning you want to experience on a daily basis. It takes any teacher time to create a new classroom culture. It takes longer to undo one culture and replace it with another after things “settle down.”  You’ll need to make changes once the kids show up, but make those changes based on the feedback students give you.  Share your vision; don’t abandon it.

If you’re interested in technology (and you should be; is anyone out there still texting on paper?), when you’re hired, use F2F social networking to find out how your division filters the Internet and recycles its computers. Find the person who can tell you whether or not you can get the computers sitting in surplus put in your classroom with the understanding that the division will not support them. Find out if you can get Internet connections for them anyway and find unblocked, free, DIY Web apps to replace the expensive software that’s no longer supported on your machines. As long as you can provide a consistent, low ratio of Web-enabled machines to students, you can find the tools you need online for free. Many online tools have great tech support and user forums, as well, which means that you won’t need division staff to mess with malfunctioning programs. In fact, your tech support people will love you and be more likely to help you in the future because a) you’re doing something cool with technology that b) they don’t need to support. Your administrator, too, will point to you as an innovator if you can cobble together a Web-enabled classroom for little or no cost to your school.

You are on-deck, but not in-line to inherit outmoded ideas of what a school or classroom can be. Dream big and count on yourselves and one another to find ways to fulfill those dreams. You’re about to be given an old classroom. Do something new with it.

Murray specializes in making work personally meaningful to its students. The school engages students with both rigorous academics and an equally challenging process of self-discovery and -management through Choice Theory. The work Murray invests in building trusting relationships throughout the community also plays a key role in creating an environment safe for academic risk-taking.

Murray Choices Teacher, NBCT, and Practicum Supervisor for the William Glasser Institute Charlotte Wellen has written “Walter’s Struggles and Accomplishments” to share with us what authentic engagement with learning and authentic work look like at a Glasser Quality School. You can read about “Walter,” a composite of students’ experiences at Murray, here.

You can also hear from Murray’s students here, as well as see state measurement of the school’s impact on student achievement here.

As you and your colleagues gain steam in planning for the upcoming school year, remember CTO Chopra’s message; help him find the innovations in your classrooms, schools, and districts; ask him for the technical support you need to change the game for your students.

You can find more of CTO Chopra’s message via the Albemarle County Public Schools YouTube channel here.