Classroots.org

[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.

[Editor's note: this one goes out to Shelly Blake-Plock of TeachPaperless and is a kind of meta-testament to the power of a widely distributed PLN to effect classroom reform for authentic engagement.]

The classroom is up and running, and we’ve been through three weeks of shake-out. In the interests of sharing and transparent teaching, I want to take a moment and share the systems we’ve developed together as students and teachers.

Our classroom is uncommonly technology-rich this year due to a combination of design and grant spending deadlines. I recognize how fortunate we are, but would like also to suggest that what follows is one blueprint for a “21st Century” classroom – by which I mean a classroom that values problem-solving, social learning and multiple communications technologies that decentralize the position and role of the teacher.

Campfire by eskimoblood

We work in a technology lab that has been repurposed as a classroom. Because the classroom was a technology lab, it is large. Both the layout of the room and its work-station-furnishing discourage the traditional arrangement of desks in a classroom. Therefore, we have adopted the workstations and have created three distinct learning areas, as well as a smaller alcove for individual conferencing. Our learning areas are each specially purposed. By the door we have our campfire, an area for daily floor meetings during which we share out the story of the day’s class and our goals for it on a SmartBoard. This area also has a bull-pen of five drafting tables for students producing original art for class projects – we’re heavy into original IP and legal use of others’ work. Around the campfire, against the walls, nestled in work-stations, we have our watering holes – social learning stations built around media-production computers. Typically, three students work per station; two use 1:1 laptops to collaborate on the research and resource gathering necessary to produce media on the desktop computer, which the third student “drives.”  In the “back” of the room is our cave, an area for individuals to use when they need to meet a deadline without distraction or to regroup emotionally before working with others.

I think there are two design lessons here. First, new schools should be built with classrooms that provide ample, differentiated space, so teachers explore new ways of orienting themselves and their instruction to students. If you want teachers and students to think outside the box, don’t put them in one. Second, in existing classrooms – especially secondary ones – teachers should design multiple spaces with explicit and consistent purposes to provide spatial and kinesthetic reinforcement to transitions from task to task. Imagine a daily routine that tapped into the strengths of centers, stations, and jig-saw activities. The benefits of building such a culture of purpose and use is worth time taken to establish it.

Apart from a printed work plan designed and followed to build students’ accountability and alleviate their anxiety about what comes next (or when class ends), we compose and submit work on the computers – mostly on-line. The work plan acts as checklist and cheat sheet for students’ FAQ about class activities – what are we doing? What comes next? Can I work with a friend? Can I work on the computer? By providing the work plan to individual students and referring them to it, I hope to help them develop better executive function.  Over time, students learn to organize their work around the plan and take responsibility for checking off completed tasks without prompting from an adult.  In addition to monitoring students’ use of the plans during class, I audit a small sample of the work plans semi-nightly and give private, goal-oriented feedback to students about next steps either in organization (like maintaining an accurate work-plan) or work habits (like making better seating choices).  That feedback, like many of our learning activities and projects, is largely delivered online and then referenced in F2F dicussions during class.

Flat Classroom Skype by superkimbo_in_BKK

While I continue to struggle with finding the right mix of linguistic and non-linguistic differentiation, I think we have made the transition from a paper-based classroom to a nearly paperless one in much less time than I would have anticipated. Sometime in August, after following @teachpaperless for a few weeks on Twitter, I decided to take the plunge and began thinking about which tools fit which purposes in class. Instead of designing a traditional curriculum map shuffling around content, I tried to envision a structure for learning, sharing, and producing new work. I knew in August that if things went well in a division pilot, both Google Apps and Office Live domains would be available for my students by the end of the first marking period. In the meantime, I needed to find existing tools that would protect students’ online IDs without unnecessarily limiting their use of the Internet for learning from others.

Here’s where we are:

• I use Google Docs to generate forms and collect work from students via embeds in a class blog hosted by Blogger.
• The class blog also embeds and links to off-site instructional materials.
• I deliver feedback to students on their work via Edmodo, which we also use to share research links and trade files. For example, a student might make a song on one of our media production machines and then send it to me via Edmodo for me to download to iTunes for assessment.
• We also have a class wiki – hosted by Wikispaces – on which groups of students maintain pages for the work of their documentary production companies and on which I post media production tutorials.
• Different pieces of the system are shared out to coaches who work with students on history, production value, usability, and writing rubrics for their documentary work.
• Student use other applications, like iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Garage Band, as their work warrants.

This week I’ll print out interim reports to send home with students; apart from work plans, those interims will be the first paper products I’ve made for class this year. Going paperless has been easier than I thought it would be, and I feel organized like never before while enjoying access to student work from any web-capable device. I wholeheartedly recommend taking whatever part of the plunge you can in your work. Moving away from paper is a step toward the reinvention of school-work, as is moving away from a traditionally shaped or oriented classroom. Maybe you can sign out a lab for a week or grab a laptop cart every Friday for a month. Maybe a local school technology consortium can loan out computers to one of your class projects. Maybe enough of your students have cell phones to snap pictures on a school field trip so that they can return to class and serve others by stitching together a virtual trip for those less fortunate or further away.  Or maybe your step away from paper can pursue another avenue of authentic engagement apart from classroom technology.  Whichever step you take, as with every step into the future, you have to decide to take it.

My students have adapted to the point where they no longer say the computer doesn’t work when a web page fails to load. Instead they ask an adult to proof-read the student-typed address for them. While this is not the zenith of authentic engagement we’re building towards, requests like that reflect a profound shift in students’ attitudes toward technology. Technology is no longer to be feared or blamed, it’s something to be used for learning and the assessment of students’ work.

I’m eager to see what student produce from their learning this year and hopeful that our community and relationships will develop enough so that each student finishes with an impassioned and amazing project, online or off.

If you’re interested in learning more, please begin with the class blog.  Also feel free to write chad@classroots.org.