Anyway, I have two stories today from a nearly democratic classroom.

This morning a student saw me carrying around a copy of Guerilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver. He immediately ditched his Google Sketch Up skate-board design project, grabbed the book from me, and Googled The Teenage Liberation Handbook, also by Llewellyn. Then he showed his friends. Then they had a big dust up over homeschooling and whether it was sick and pro or fail and noob. They were greatly confused. They wanted to be home, but not necessarily alone. They wanted to learn something new each day, but not necessarily on their own. They had ascribed in their minds some worth to being at school even though they often resist it greatly. They ended up agreeing that they would like to learn what they want to learn, but that leaving school didn’t seem okay – it was “hobo.” I kept quiet, let go of their self-directed learning goals for the day, and felt a little heartbroken that these marvelous boys still trusted school even though it has wounded them so much and so clearly failed to meet their needs and wants as people and learners.

This afternoon, while researching the civil rights movement through some resources I’d gathered, another student edited the Wikipedia page for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I watched him add a bunch of periods to the top of the entry. I kept quiet. I watched him save the entry. I watched him open the entry again to delete the periods. I asked him afterwards why he undid his edit. He said, “I didn’t want to get in trouble.” I asked him what he thought would happen to him. He didn’t know. We talked about how other editors would have undone his work and why. He added, “I didn’t want to be mean.” He smiled the whole time we talked, kind of amazed at his own power and proud, I think, of his decision to be responsible when given the chance to make amends for an impulsive act of Web 2.0 learning.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

It’s hard to articulate fairly my next point. Please remember that I think we need all kinds of schools to meet all kinds of kids’ (and teachers’) needs and wants. We hold ourselves accountable to helping students’ pass EOC tests, and our board holds us accountable for that, too, but we have opportunities to create systems that fit our kids in pursuit of life-long learning habits and academic achievement. I think administrators and teachers at traditional schools try to do this all the time, as well, but face implicit pressure to make kids conform to the schools’ management systems.

Or not.

I wonder how many questions are waiting to be asked, and how many administrators are ready to say, “Yes.” Can we teach morally and charter ourselves and one another? Can we agree on what moral teaching is?

Here is a sample of our kids’ work. Each also wrote about the work, its process, and how the work represented William Glasser’s idea of quality.

Student thoughts on quality work

D-Day Scratch Game Title Screen

D-Day Scratch Game: Avoid the Nazi Guns, Land the Troops

Title Screen of Student Claymation DVD

From a D-Day Landing Claymation

From a Pearl Harbor Claymation: Zero Bombing the USS Arizona

From our resident graffiti artist

Rainbow Waves

Diversity of Life Collage

Paramore Glog

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.

Map Of Your Head, by Daniel Conway

I found Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth’s  Social Media Campaign image a few days ago via Steven Anderson’s (@web20classroom) Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom.  It broadened my thinking about the curriculum map due to my head of school in September.  I work at a middle school that strives to differentiate instruction by content, process, product, and time in hopes of re-engaging struggling students with a love of learning before high school.  Any one, traditional curriculum map I create will, by necessity, be obsolete before I begin writing it.  My state standards are already written; my description of our class structure is done; our coaches and experts have been recruited (including members of the Virginia Experiment and Music Resource Center); we’ve drafted rubrics collaboratively; now we need students and time for the model to take hold.  I’ve been  struggling with writing a traditional curriculum map because I don’t know what it will add to our work.  Enter the image.

After reading Steven’s post, I started thinking about a curriculm map as a picture of a classroom’s learning system.  Thinking about virtual charter schools, authentic engagement with the global community, and the needs of our students, I put together a picture of the “how” instead of the “what.”  I’m not sure it’s “right,” but it represents how I hope our class will learn.

To move past teaching for the test, we’ll need to map past the test, as well.  Maybe one way to do that is to map systems in place of content, or to separate content (the plug-in or add-on) from the learning model (the program).

Please take the curriculum map below to pieces, question it, and help me figure out how to better articulate the model of learning.  Administrators, parents, students, and tax-payers, what else would you want to see from a teacher’s curriculum map?  Teachers, what else would you include?

A curriculum map of "how" instead of "what"