Classroots.org

Day 223 - Learning to use computers by LShave

Here is today’s leading #edchat question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer: I still want my giant iPhone.

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

Super Mario Brothers Candy by sonson

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

• Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
• Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with the fewest lives lost in 20 minutes.
• A teacher kept track of lives lost and levels won on a graphic organizer and took notes, as well, about groups’ pro- and anti-social behavior.
• Lives could also be lost on paper for trash-talking.
• Trash-talking was addressed whenever it occurred, and serial trash-talkers were asked to stop playing.
• The group with the lowest lives lost to levels won ratio was awarded 3 lunch periods on the Wii.

Here are our results (lives lost:levels beat, reduced to the lowest equivalent ratio):

• Group 1 – 10:1
• Group 2 – 6:1
• Group 3 – 50:1
• Group 4 – 22: 1
• Group 5 – 15:1
• Group 6 – 10:1

Here are comments from the groups with the lowest and highest ratios, respectively:

• Comments from Group 2: “Backed up to easier levels; good teamwork and talk; [Student A] led them through the levels and made sure all followed.”
• Comments from Group 3: “Students fought each other and never started working together.”

I can see that Group 3 needs some social stories work before playing together again, and that the difference between Groups 2 and 3 wasn’t necessarily the amount of communication, but the type of communication that went on between group members.  Before the next contest, I’ll use the data and observations from this activity to pose questions for students about the value of strategic thinking, positive communication, and leadership to social learning.  To help make the discussion more personally meaningful to students, I might begin by asking students to figure out the ratios and results from the data after I make it anonymous.

What do you think?  Does the competition undercut the collaboration?  Is the reward appropriate? I’ll follow up later so we can see where the activity goes and whether or not it impacts soft-skills and collaboration in the classroom.

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.

When a student asks me a question, I try to answer with a question. Call it Socratic Method Lite.

Smoke and Mirrors by Sean Stayte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the video we used:

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

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

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

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

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

Relationships come first in a joyful classroom. Students’ success and their enjoyment of it depend on positive relationships at school. Certainly, students need to feel safe around their classmates in order to take the academic risks that lead to meaning-making. Students unwilling to share any of themselves with others will have a hard time constructing personal connections to class content or benefiting from social learning.

neuron disruption by autovac

Students also need positive, personal relationships with content. Relevance is the bridge and the filter between students and all the information now available in the world. Irrelevant content has a hard time making inroads to students’ neural networks of knowledge, comprehension, connection, and experience; whereas, relevant content fits right into comforting and enjoyable patterns and connections of prior knowledge. The squiggly lines of relevance connect the boxy shapes of content.

Of course, positive relationships between students and teachers also help children engage with their learning. However, I wonder if the fundamental nature of the student-teacher relationship is changing. I wonder if we can grasp the change and adapt to it. I wonder if a major shortcoming of the status quo its participants’ resistance to adopting a new kind of relationship between teachers and students.

If what it means to be a teacher is changing, then don’t we have to change our relationships with students?

Teachers have to change how they treat students. Students have to change how their view teachers. Parents have to change their expectations. Administrators have to change their notions of classroom management.

And I’m not talking about coaching. I’m not sure that metaphor fits our most resistant students for whom changing the status quo is most important. In my experience, very few of these students play team sports or respond any more positively to coaches than teachers because both are authority figures. The students we need to reach the most don’t respond well to extrinsic authority, and I suspect that more successful students would rather not have to pretend like they do, either.

Part of me wants to say “conductor,” but conductors carry authority. I don’t know that authority is advancing the profession of teaching. I don’t know that authority is a perk of accountability anymore.

What is something that is decentralized, but organized? A nervous system? An audience? A republic? What captures a teacher’s duties to bureaucracy and responsibilities to individual students? What acknowledges a teacher’s primacy in the life of a classroom while equating it to students’ self-efficacy and success?

Maybe it’s not a new metaphor, but a new definition that I crave. A set direction. A compass bearing. A nod. But we’re in the middle of the messy work of confronting our own outdated educational system and a world set to overtake American accomplishments in the information age. We need an agenda for change. We need a mandate for innovation. We need new assessments to drive new thinking in how we structure school and teach class.

Innovation by Vermin Inc

And we need that agenda to be authentic to ourselves.

In the absence of anything new in the policies, standards, or assessment of the status quo, take a night to define teaching for yourself. Look at your relationship with your profession. Which moments have made your work authentic and relevant to you?

Look back at what you’ve accomplished. Look ahead to what you want to accomplish. Look in all of your work for your best self. How does that teacher do it? How does that teacher plan such authentic, engaging work? How does that teacher spark a smile on the face of that student? How does that teacher communicate with parents and convince administrators that new ideas will work?

How does that teacher innovate, instead of replicate?

How do we become those teachers now? What do we need to get their jobs done? When do we found our republics of change?

Trevor Przyuski works as an instructional coach for Albemarle County Public Schools.  In, “Let Them Own It,” he writes about the tension between children’s authentic engagement with personally meaningful work and their struggles with traditional school work.  By sharing an anecdote from his own experience as a classroom teacher, Trevor offers a model of instructional decision making that favors following the “happy accidents” of authentic engagement over sticking with the teacher’s plans.

Trevor’s post makes a startling point: the genius of a lesson plan may be in its failure.  If a plan prompts students to follow their interests and passions in taking the work in another direction, then its failure can provide more authentic engagement than its success.  Indeed, to move past thinking about our own lessons as successes and failures, we need to make students equal partners in the differentiation of their learning.

After reading Trevor’s post, the big question for me is: how do we shift our mindest and planning practices to prepare for the “accidents” of authentic engagement?  Even in a classroom rich with opportunities for authentic engagement, students will make discoveries about themselves and their learning that will take them in unanticipated directions.  When planning for authentic engagement, what’s the right balance to maintain between familiar structures and the unknown?

Trevor’s blog is here, and you can follow him on Twitter via @trevorprzyuski.  Please read on and comment!

I’m very grateful to be able to share with you the work going on at Murray High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. Murray High School is “the world’s first Glasser Quality Public High School.” The school uses William Glasser’s Choice Theory and Quality Schools framework to re-engage students with the joy of learning. The creation of “Quality Work” and “Quality Product” in a joyful place drives success at the school.

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.

“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”
-Thomas Paine

Everyone takes sides in education.  People disagree about what’s best for students, but agree that students and their success matter most.  The dividing lines get drawn between adults debating definitions, outcomes, and processes.   What is success?  Who defines it?  By which standards?  Are the standards common or not?  How do we assess for success?  Are the assessments common or not?  People are united by their hunger for answers, and divided by the answers they espouse.

the same horizon, by Norma Desmond

This debate is essential to reform.  We need to crowd-source innovation.  We need people in the box thinking about how to get out, and we need people outside the box thinking about how to open it.  We need to talk through the box’s walls.  The more people we have working on the problem, the more likely we are to find multiple, sustainable, and scalable solutions to the problems of inequity embedded in the status quo.

When we stop thinking about the problems, the last shadows of justice, equality, and opportunity beat the scene along with liberty.

The horizon as a dividing line is a tricky metaphor, though.

To us, Earth’s physical horizon seems to travel in measured increments as we spin around and circle the Sun.  There are definite days and nights, though some last for weeks.  The sun rises and sets.  There are two parts.

In Paine’s mind, however, the light doesn’t need to end.  It ends when we give up thinking, when we stop casting the light of human thought on what it is that makes us human.  With a sustained commitment to inquiry, that light can shine forever.  The horizon can be infinite.  Night falls only when we let it, when we stop envisioning what we’d like to see in the light of day, when we stop working toward the world we want.

Since this horizon is infinite, it can accommodate more than two points of view.  It can accommodate more than the known and unknown.  It permits more types of division, but also allows for unity.  It fosters nuanced meanings and negotiation.  It provides room for things that are becoming, growing, and transforming.  Paired with action, the infinite horizon of human thought enables persuasion, reflection, and innovation.

We need to meet up and tweet up under that bright and endless sky.  We need to share thoughts and deeds across the dividing lines, rather than imagine that there is nothing to shared across them.

We also need to recognize that our classrooms belong under the infinite horizon, that the boundary between American schools and the real-world is increasingly imaginary.  Lines do not divide them from one another, but rather connect them to each other.

Paula asked me if authentic work has to be published outside the classroom.  I confess that at first I wanted to say yes.  Then I thought about the horizon, and googled quotes, and decided to blog.  Where in the big country of cognition is the authenticity of that task?  In creating the metaphor or posting about it?

The authenticity is in both.  This metaphor matters.  So does sharing it.

“A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.”
-John Powell

In our classroom practice, as we work to foster students’ authentic engagement with learning, we have to design learning that’s personally meaningful to our students.  We need to make sure that they connect the learning to their inner lives and real world experiences.  We also have to be ready to let them share their learning.  Think of an actor rehearsing a script.  There are rewards from learning the part, in exploring a role and discovering its ties to life.  Now think of an actor performing a script.  There are rewards in creating and sharing work with others, in the affirmation that comes at the end of a performance.

Some students will be happy to rehearse, and we can take the next instructional step to offer them authentically engaging opportunities to publish.  Some students will be eager to publish, but need help rehearsing first.  There are certainly an infinite number of types of student across our classrooms.

Consider Popham’s learning progressions; in explaining them he encourages us to be ready to adjust instruction tactically according to student performance.  To flow between personal and public instances of authentic engagement and work, be ready to extend the audience for students’ authentic learning.  Be ready to provide authentic opportunities for publication.  Be ready to provide incrementally higher levels of affirmation and product-focused learning for your students.  Help them feel what it’s like to get a standing ovation from a novel audience.

It could happen like this:

Teacher: What did you learn today?

Student: We learned how you can keep splitting one thing into smaller fractions.

Teacher: Tell me about times in your life when you do that.

Student: It’s like when we split up to play football at recess.

First Down by cobalt123

Teacher: That connection seems to fit really well.  What made you think of it?

Student: We keep splitting up the whole group until we have two halves, but sometimes we have an odd number.

Teacher: [Here come the tactics.  Rip, mix, & invent.] Do you want to share that with the class?  Do you want to make a drawing of that to put on the bulletin board, to put in the class notebook, or to take home?  Do you want to make a comic for the bulletin board or notebook or class webpage or blog that shows us what happens and explains what you mean?  Do you want to post about your connection on the class blog?  Do you want to allow comments?  Do you you want to post a picture of a team on the class blog and VoiceThread what you said about fractions?  Do you want to let people add their voices to your picture?  Do you want to tweet what you said to your parents? Do you want to email your idea to our university partner and ask what he or she thinks?  Would you rather call?  Would you like to film this at recess today and then make a movie tomorrow where you explain what’s happening with math?  Do you want to think back over the course of the week?  Is there something else you think is more important or exciting to share?  How do you want to share it?

Authentic learning happens under an infinite horizon that lets students create personally meaningful connections to learning.  We can’t preclude that connection-making with “event-horizon” work that never escapes the classroom in terms of relevancy.  Don’t limit a student’s horizon; partner with him or her to see how far learning can go into real-world application.  Let the student set the waypoints for learning so long as its authentic to him or her.  School work is not relevant enough on its own to create authentic engagement with learning for struggling students or students collecting good grades by rote means.  These students are afraid of taking academic risks.  Moreover, they are conditioned to accept the false and unnecessary horizon of either/or, the cruel systemic divisions between “winners” and “losers” in America’s schools.  Authentic engagement with learning can help all students break out of the box, our 3D metaphor of division, and  into the light of thinking, of authentic engagement and learning through meaning-making.

Don’t give up the infinite horizon, teachers; keep thinking; keep debating; shine the light of human thought on success and failure alike; help each other out of the box; look at the future all around you and act.