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This week we spent some time Thursday coming up with teamwork and game-play strategies for our Friday Wii collaboration contest.

Results of our strategizing were mixed with only half the groups improving from last week to this week. At this point I’m wishing I had taken a research-design course sometime in the past decade so I could present you with better conclusions from my too-small-a-sample action study. Regardless, here goes.

Group 1 stayed at 10:1. Group 1’s goal was “to not die a lot,” and their strategies included, “work together, not leave people behind, not trash talk, go fast…[and] not jump big jumps.” We need to write more specific goals next week – I’m not sure of the group thinks 10 lives per level is a little or a lot. However, the group did follow its strategies.

Repeat champs group 2 improved from 2:1 to 1:1. Group 2’s strategy was “beat 8 levels…lose less than 10 lives.” The group’s strategies were “bubble, [save] lives, and speed.” I don’t know either, but it worked. Group 2’s most effective strategy is to play levels it knows from past experience rather than to attempt brand new levels. I wonder why they didn’t list it.

Group 3 decided on these goals: “not to hit, or push people off ledges [and] not to leave people behind.” To meet its goals, the group adopted these strategies: “work together, share shrumes [sic & middle school], be nice.” The group followed its strategies and wound up turing in its best performance to date. Since the group began by spending 50 lives per level last month, I call this significant progress in teamwork.

Group 4 spent the same amount of lives per level this week as last despite meeting its goal and following its strategies. The group tried all new levels – the highest levels unlocked in the game so far, and I think it’s likely that this is what kept their ratio from decreasing. They spent their time sight-reading the levels like gaming musicians. However, as I said, they met their goal – “not killing or eating each other” – and they used their strategies – “not yelling and not telling each other that you suck[...] everybody agree on a level, don’t give attitude [and] don’t force people to do stuff that they don’t want to do.”

Group 5 wanted “to beat as many levels as possible.” That’s too nebulous a goal for us to measure and we need to work on setting more specific and attainable goals for our work together. Group 5 wound up with a higher lives lost to levels won ratio this week than last; however, group 5 did beat 2 levels after beating only 1 1/2 each of the previous 3 contests. Group 5’s strategies were “bubble up, try not to argue, help each other [and] try not to be competitive.” By my observation, the group used it’s strategies, but may or may not have reached it’s goal. We need to debrief next week.

Group 6 tried “to win as many levels as possible without losing any lives.” The group wound up spending 16 lives per level, and so it did not meet its goal. The group’s strategies were “try not to yell at each other, practice outside of school, try not to be jerks [and] wait for each other.” In this group, a student got a little bit bossy with the other group members. While this didn’t constitute yelling, it did frustrate the other players. I wonder if all group embers have the same conception of “yelling” or “jerks,” or if they could set a more attainable goal for the next contest with more positive steps to take in terms of pro-social behaviors and effective game-play.

I might change up the rules next week and require all groups to sight-read a series of levels unlocked and selected by me. I’m curious about whether or not groups will change their strategies to play brand new levels rather than levels they’ve seen before.

Look for student responses to these results next week after our debriefing. Please suggest any questions you’d like me to ask them or any games we could use to develop and transfer our soft skills in the classroom.

Our impromptu two week vacation at the beginning of February did little for our teamwork. It seems like we need to be together to practice cooperating.

Or, really, do we? If we had a social network (or better used our existing Edmodo network) or virtual day set up, couldn’t student teams compete with one another on a FaceBook game? On a prompt or menu of activities left as a message on our class Google Voice line? I have to sit down and make a contingency plan for the next snow day, publish it, and distribute it to students, and I need to design it so we somehow have at least the opportunity to keep our classwork and cooperation rolling.

In contrast to the slide in cooperation several groups evidenced while playing together last Friday, students’ individual analyses of their group’s growth in cooperation continue to improve in quality – you know, qualitatively speaking. Here are some of our debriefing questions and students’ answers to them:

Wii by swannman

Question 1: How do you know your group’s cooperation has improved since we first started playing?

• “We have completed more levels.”
• “People are calmer.”
• “We are learning from each other.”
• “Now I enjoy playing with my group.”
• “We know what to do and say.”
• “We have a strategy.”
• “We won every time.”

Question 2: What have you learned about cooperation so far?

• “That you can’t yell at other players.”
• “Cooperation makes things go better.”
• “You need a lot of it to do work.”
• “You need a leader, but not everyone can be a leader.”
• “It’s not that hard and it helps you get further.”
• “It’s fun and frustrating to work together.”

Ambiguity rears it’s ugly head in schoolwork. Awesome.

Question 3: What is a strength that your group has that helps group members cooperate?

• “Confidence.”
• “We stay on task.”
• “We are nerds.”
• “Talking.”
• “Speed and communication.”

Question 4: What is an area of cooperation in which your group can improve?

• “Not cuss.”
• “Friendship.”
• “Helping one another.”
• “Strategy.”
• “Nerdiness.”

What else can we do to make school be a place where students feel confident, stay on-task, feel good about being nerds, and participate as equal partners in communication for learning?

I think it’s probably time to hand the small-group gaming commentary off to student guest bloggers or else have students create their own blogs ASAP so they can share their learning directly with you. I’m a bit behind the times this year on the student blogging front; this could be the impetus for getting back into the swing of it.

I’m thinking about bringing in Kodu Game Lab and Little Big Planet to add a game/level-creation tier to project menus. For example, a student could create a level in Little Big Planet with platforming metaphors for the major events of the 1930s (can’t you see a series of rising platforms filled with prize bubbles representing the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression drops the bottom out of the level?), or use Kodu Game Lab to write a game with branching paths that simultaneously summarizes a story and speculates on its what-ifs (Pac-man vs. The Maze Runner mash-up?).   I hope, too, that the co-op levels of “Game 3,” a.k.a “BattleBlock Theater,” will offer opportunities for teamwork and reflection like New Super Mario Bros. Wii that can compete with the slapstick lure of its other modes. I suppose that where the learning design comes into play.

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.)

This Monday we dedicated a station to analyzing our data from last week’s small-group gaming.

Yoshi by Yoshi Huang

• Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
• Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
• Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more with the highest ratio group or the lowest.
• Students identified strategies from the lowest ratio group to try this week in class.
• Students explained how playing the game was like and unlike class.
• Students suggested ways by which they and the teachers could make class more game-like.

Here are some student quotes that caught my eye:

• “It was like class because some succeeded, and some didn’t.”
• “It was more fun than class.”
• “You can fail like in class.”
• “We all need more team work.”
• “We should play on Monday when we need more fun.”

Obviously, I have some hearts and minds work to do here in my allegedly mastery-learning classroom.

This afternoon in class, two usually antagonistic students had this interchange about today’s game play:

Student 1: “Wow.  You did a good job.”
Student 2: “Thank you.”

Maybe my students don’t often compliment one another on their work like that because it’s not relevant enough for them to assess or value it.  Also, I couldn’t engage 2 students with the gaming this week.  More work to do and social learning opportunities to design.

Here’s a comparison of each group’s performance last week and this week:

Group 1 greatly improved positive communication and finished more levels this week than last, but spent a few more lives doing so.  I wonder about how much of the other groups’  improvement is due to reflection about collaboration and how much is due to learning the levels.  I have to think about switching games or levels next week and measuring work in such a way that the qualitative observations on collaboration count for as much as the ratios without making me seem subjective to the students.  Help, PLN! Ideas?

NB: Group 6 consisted of a lone gamer today.  Apparently working alone greatly increases collaboration.

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.

Windows by robynejay

Last week during a bout of insomnia, I watched The Remains of the Day twice in a row. I had never seen it before or read the book, though I dearly love and frequently sniffle while reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The Remains of the Day follows Mr. Stevens, a butler, who serves Lord Darlington, an appeaser, before World War II, and a retired American lawmaker, Mr. Lewis, after the war. Mr. Stevens lives inside several cages of propriety. He’s serving an English Lord. Lord Darlington’s new housekeeper, Ms Kenton, challenges him because while she’s great at her job, she also allows herself to be human in the service of Lord Darlington, which Mr. Stevens does not allow himself to do the same. Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton circumscribe romance as their relationship deepens over time, but Mr. Stevens can’t return Ms Kenton’s affection when she expresses it. Ms Kenton leaves and marries a former colleague. After World War II, Mr. Stevens searches out Ms Kenton to invite her back to work for Mr. Lewis. Ms Kenton agrees to a meeting and seems ready to rejoin Mr. Stevens – her marriage is breaking – but then Ms Kenton’s estranged husband shows up to reconcile with her bearing news of their daughter’s pregnancy. On the appointed day of Mr. Stevens’s vacation, Ms Kenton meets him and explains that she plans now to stay with her husband, near her daughter and grandchild. Mr. Stevens barely lets his dismay show, which is the end of any hope he has of winning Ms Kenton back or being able to share his feelings. Even after crossing the country on holiday to find Ms Kenton, Mr. Stevens can’t ask her to return for him. At the end of the day, Mr. Stevens walks Ms Kenton to her bus, wears his half-smile shield, and waves good-bye as Ms Kenton looks back at him, weeping for Mr. Stevens. He can’t, or won’t, find the person she sees.

What resonates for me in this film is Mr. Stevens’s inability to pursue his passion for fear of losing his intertwined job, identity, and self-control. He cannot find a way to reconcile a life of service with self-affirming and self-serving actions and emotions, so he chooses self-abnegation both in losing Ms Kenton and preventing himself from becoming who he might be apart from his role in his lords’ household.

I think of myself teaching between the world of policy and the world I want. I worry that I will always teach in a limbo of well-intentioned starts and fits towards something new without ever making the leap to fundamentally change how I teach or who I am as a teacher. I can see myself waving goodbye to scary and amazing chances to reinvent what a school is and what a school does. I don’t know that I can reconcile the job of teaching with my passion for it.

To wit, now I’m thinking about testing windows. In Virginia, middle-school students take Standards of Learning (SOL) tests at the end of a course – either at the semester or at the end of the year. Many middle schools therefore schedule semester-long science and social studies courses. Students take either science or social studies first semester; take an SOL test in January, and then switch subjects and test again in May. The idea here is that students have a better chance to retrieve content shortly after learning it than they do later. If a test item asks a student to recall a piece of content from September, the student has a better chance to do so in January than in May. Dedicated educators invested in students and learning find ways to embed this content in meaningful work so that students hold on to their learning regardless of the testing schedule’s emphasis on short-term retention.

No middle school in Virginia that I know of runs semester-long language arts or math courses because of AYP. Educators want students to have the most time possible to master spiraling skills in advance of taking tests that determine schools’ fates. It makes sense given the current national agenda and testing systems. It’s not that science and social studies don’t have rich traditions of investigation, interpretation, and discovery; it’s just AYP.

I wonder if we could free up middle schools’ scheduling and management of human capital if we risked differentiating testing windows.

What if incoming 6th graders all took reading and math tests in September as pre-assessments for grouping?

What if students who passed the test took the rest of the year for project-based, inquiry-driven local and global learning partnerships?

What if any 6th grade student who passed the first test could elect to take the 7th grade test at the semester, and the 8th grade test at the end of the year? Why not give that student the opportunity to earn 2 test-free years of learning without built-in limits?

What if 6th grade students who did not pass the test were given the same chance to re-test in January, or again at the end of the year? If the stakes are so high for schools, why not generate some student buy-in through choice and self-determination in attacking standardized tests?

What if we took the hit on a 6th grade entrance SOL and then didn’t test students who “failed” again until the end of 7th grade, or until the student and his or her teachers felt he or she was ready at the semester, end of 6th grade, or beginning of 7th grade after a summer school experience acting as proxy for year-round schooling? What if we traded off 6th grade testing for more prep time for – and success with – 7th and 8th grade tests? Would teachers under pressure to cut out everything but the tested curriculum find ways to enrich learning for student sentenced to remediation if they had more time to prepare for tests? Would federal and state governments bless a system of curriculum and assessment that recognizes schools’ strides in student growth by weighing 7th or 8th grade AYP over 6th?

Differentiating scheduling by differentiating testing windows would take a significant investment of student, teacher, counselor, and administrator time at the beginning of the school year, but the strategic scheduling, teaching, and learning made possible by such differentiation might reward the risk. Certainly the approach would help justify larger class sizes of students already exited from testing and smaller class sizes for those still working to demonstrate their learning on standardized measures.

Differentiating scheduling by testing windows and early passes might also allow an administrator to assign personnel to areas of instruction in which they excel, which carries its pros and cons in terms of teacher efficacy versus an over-specialized work force. It might be too daunting a change, it might be made moot by policy, or it might turn out that the number of student exiting testing requirements would be too small to justify a differentiates testing scheme. Nevertheless, I struggle with holding students who have surpassed a curriculum captive to it, and I struggle with asking students to face three tests in three years per assessed subject area if differentiation by testing and time could provide the desired results from one test.

I’m not a big fan of these questions I’ve been asking. I would rather ask questions like, “How can we become co-learners with students in the cloud-classrooms of School 3.0?,” but how can our testing system provide more opportunity than limits? What core standards have a chance of making schools more relevant to students who aren’t participating in their creation? What national agendas mired in the spent oil of an industrial educational system have a chance of changing our country today?

It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to make learning relevant to students. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to favor innovation over replication. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to push back against the system, to play with schedules that provide access to learning, not just to curriculum.

Maybe this can be teachers’ new role; maybe this can be the purpose of teachers’ social networking and professional development; maybe this can be teachers’ legacy after standardized tests are gone: in partnership with students we create relevance from the nothing that exists without it. Let the Fed and the SEAs and LEAs own the sound and fury of curriculum and testing. We create relevance. We celebrate discovery. We connect context and identity. We learn together.

I think what I’m going to do is this: take time over break to see what’s left to teach. Pick the content I least look forward to teaching. Push aside my anxieties and biases against it. Imagine each one of my students learning about it joyfully. Take notes on what students are learning and how they’re learning it. Build a resource or unit from those visions of engaging, inspiring work. Gather materials. Call in favors. Make it work. Try it and see. Find out where it goes. Not be afraid.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, and blogs. To follow in your footsteps, in the interest of advancing authentic engagement with our classwork on narrative, writing, and questioning, today we started tweeting to Tanzania.

We began with a simple interactive whiteboard activity. This week we’ve been learning the terms and definitions of plot structure and matching them up together along the St. Louis arch, U2’s Popmart arch, and roller-coasters. We’ve been using the terms to write and our own stories and analyze those we’re reading. Today, we looked at a scrambled narrative adapted from the Epic Change blog to learn the TwitterKids’ story. We ordered the pieces according to plot structure on the SmartBoard, and then used Google Earth to get us from here (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA) to there (Arusha, Tanzania) in our minds. Finally, we brain-dumped a bunch of questions for the TwitterKids and chose a few per class to tweet in hopes of responses to read and respond to later in class.

Here are some of our interactive whiteboard and Twitter artifacts from class (via Seesmic):

TwitterKids Plot Structure Exercise - Before

Twitterkids from Tanzania Plot Structure - After

Tweeting with the Twitterkids of Tanzania

You can follow the Twitter Kids here; you can follow our class account here.

For me as a teacher, the big idea here is to act. There are great models out there of how to bring the world into your classroom and how to broadcast your classroom to the world. Find one that seems manageable to you. Find an idea, lesson, or unit that you can emulate with success and try it. The small steps you take for your classroom’s engagement with the world will help American education make the giant leap into relevance that we teachers and our students need, desire, and deserve.

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?