My map this year will look more course-specific than last year’s meta-map, which I think is still a useful model for project-based work. Here’s an early draft of this year’s map:

I’m mapping more granularly – at least in terms of structures and opportunities, if not content – in response to what worked this year in stations, pacing, and independent work. I’m also mapping to ensure that student learning moves flexibly and organically back and forth, inside and outside the classroom, physically and virtually, in service to students’ passions and in service to others.

Here are three constraints I’m using:

1. In terms of content, I plan to “cover” the state language arts and civics & economics curricula through direct instruction and blended learning modules that I create and then replace with subsequent student work. I will negotiate with students the particular standards each wants to master in a unit so long as she produces excellent work that demonstrates her learning. I would rather students leave the class as experts on what interests them about citizenship than as students with a superficial knowledge of sentence structure and/or our government’s org chart. Therefore, to help students master their chosen content more strategically, here’s the first useful constraint I want to use: “spaced learning.”

2. In terms of self-directed learning, I plan to protect at least 20% of class time for students’ self-directed learning. I love this line from the RSA animation of Dan Pink’s Drive talk: “you probably want to do something interesting…let me get out of your way!” Pink talks about the Australian software firm Atlassian and it’s quarterly employee autonomy days. Employees get to work on what they want for a day so long as they share out their work at the end in a celebration. The company benefits from its employees’ creativity in tackling nagging software bugs and proposing new products. I’ve seen this work in the classroom. I’ve seen a kid make a Scratch game about a jet-pack-wearing space panda that shoots palm trees from its butt to fight aliens turn the same skills he used in learning that game into a series of animations explaining the Cold War, ICBMs, and MAD. I never would have seen those content-specific short films without giving over class time to SPACE PANDA 2010. Other kids made similar transfers; this was not an isolated case. Kids will bring the skills they learn through self-directed learning to the content we are tasked to cover. Bet on it. Call it what you will: Google Time, Atlassian Days, self-directed learning. It’ my second useful constraint.

3. Because we know that timely feedback helps classroom relationships, increases student achievement, and helps curtail downtime, I will attempt to be in all places at all times via Edmodo. I’d like increase my capacity to give feedback during class time as I move between stations or groups. My kids have experience with Edmodo on their computers and iPods. If I’m working with a group and can’t make it across the room to answer a question that’s been shouted out, perhaps I can find the time to post a quick reply to a quick question or give an ETA and suggest a independent next step without engaging in disruptive cross-room conversation. Regardless, the big idea here is not to manage my classroom’s noise level, but to reward students’ investment in their work by improving the timeliness of my feedback and by providing students with a back-channel for helping one another and for giving feedback on the class. I also want to establish a daily community meeting time to make sure we work together on improving class for everyone based on our feedback about it. So my third useful constraint is better coaching and better communication make for better learning.

I will also remove arbitrary restraints on student democracy, community, and learning by abandoning traditional grading, trivial standards, and sending “problem” children out of my room to be “solved” by someone outside our own relationships.

What am I missing? What doesn’t best serve students and their learning? What boundaries on the map should I redraw?

An audience member said “curriculum needs to drive technology.” I asked what should drive curriculum. Dan Fink responded in good humor.

Dan’s response evoked some energy for me, so I want to paste my reply to him here; I think it’s a statement worth taking accountability for, and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m willing to let it sit on Mary Beth’s blog, but not my own.

I hear you, and I’m grinning, but I’m not convinced we can’t get away with greater flexibility and student choice. I think we self-limit here.

There are compromises we can make in how we choose to use class time. Google time is a possibility (say 20%). Negotiating state curriculum with students is a possibility (you give me three standards, and we’ll get you a blog and a trip/Skype call to the aquarium for or action research). Subverting the state curriculum is a possibility (A People’s Textbook of Algebra, anyone?). Ignoring the state curriculum is a possibility (gulp).

I feel keenly the conflict between my vocation as an educator to help others learn and my occupation as a public school teacher to cover state curriculum in such a manner that students recall it for an end of course test. I have positive evaluations, but my test scores have dropped since I stopped obsessively teaching to the state test. People walk through my classroom a few times a year and offer me a few complimentary generalities about what they see. Then, at the end of the year, people talk to me about all kinds of numbers in great specificity. I am confused in so many ways by this, but remain convinced that leaving public education to escape this confusion is self-serving. I recognize why I get talked to about numbers and I acknowledge the effective job people do in working with them – I value their efforts on our kids’ behalf and their work with me to push my teaching. I am lucky to be so supported in my work by my division.

My point: if we’re willing to dwell in ambiguity and take year-end commentary on our tests scores as feedback from adults with different priorities rather than as judgment from our betters – our approvers, our gatekeepers, even our mentors – then during the year we have a lot of wiggle room in covering “the” curriculum.

I worry that the easy answer is an easy target for our complaints and thus helps us be complacent in sitting in judgment without acting in accordance with what we know about learning, child development, and human motivation.

Yours,
C

I would add that there are fantastic administrators out there ready to partner with teachers and students in negotiating curriculum and establishing more targeted power standards embedded in powerful project- and service-based learning. I won’t name anyone in particular as I don’t want to suggest that this post speaks for him or her, but such administrators know who they are, and so do their teachers.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot DIaz by somethingstartedcrazy

Embracing standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR) is a difficult, but achievable, goal for classroom teachers who want to begin the journey now.  As long as you’re wiling to compromise at the end of each marking period and create a formula that cross-walks your feedback and students growth into a letter grade, it’s likely that the merits of SBAR will help you win over your administrator for a micro-pilot in your own classroom.

Essentially, SBAR is rigorous backwards design and the teaching, grading, and reporting practices that go with it. You unpack your assigned standards, decide which are most essential and umbrella-like, and then teach to those power standards and provide students with meaningful rubric-based feedback. The feedback has to provide concrete next steps and make use of a mangeable 3, 4, or 5-point rubric. Moving from not-proficient to proficient, with specific steps to follow, is a lot more motivating and attainable for a student than moving from, say, an F to a C with only a percentage to guide him or her.

Matt Townsley (@mctownsley) blogs on his SBAR journey in great detail and reflective depth. Robert Marzano, Rick Stiggins, and Rick Wormeli, et al., have all written extensively on setting up an SBAR program, including how to maintain and report out records of student achievement. To these experts’ work, I would only add a few pieces of advice for teachers hungry to make a difference in assessment as quickly as is reasonably possible.

1. Take at least year to learn and prepare. It’s too difficult to learn SBAR on the go.  Don’t implement an incomplete SBAR plan.  That’s’s not fair to students and other stakeholders who depend on you to be consistent and effective in your feedback. Be really good at backwards design and learn to offer timely narrative feedback before you begin with SBAR. Train for SBAR. My journey towards practice took 2+ years of synthesis. I worked for a longer time to accomplish more difficult goals with SBAR than for NBCT certification.
2. Find a critical friend who will at least listen and learn with you and observe your work or meet regularly with you to discuss and compare student work between classes. This will help make sure your implementation of SBAR doesn’t inflate or depress the “value” of grades in your classroom.
3. Approach your administrator with a concrete plan and explanation of how you will educate students, parents, other teachers, and the administration. Be prepared also to cross-walk your feedback and students’ achievement to your school’s grading scale so the principal’s political liability is limited. Have your gradebook and report card ready and explain why they’re better than traditional models.
4. Prepare yourself for mastery learning and the teaching that goes with it. You won’t end up with percents to average.  You will need to follow up on your feedback and help students join a culture of quality work and determination to master content and skills essential to them.
5. Practice your spiel. You will have to explain, defend, and champion SBAR to all kinds of audiences – students, parents, colleagues – with all kinds of attitudes – curiosity, skepticism, hostility. Always be willing to share, but never push. Teachers heavily invested in traditional models of scoring and reporting will be on the defensive around SBAR; they will rightly want proof of SBAR’s effectiveness. Share your data, but don’t use it as a wedge.
6. Always make class time to explain SBAR and enable students to master work. You are the teacher; the students are the learners. You are interdependent, and your classroom culture needs to reflect that. Don’t give students awesome feedback in class and then marginalize them to after- or before-school sessions. Show them that your feedback and their work really matters. Make time for mastery in class. W. James Popham’s Transformative Assessment can help here.
7. Stick with it. Don’t give up on SBAR. Stay the course for the year. For all your planing, there will be some learning and tweaking on the go. Remember that you are engaged in the right struggle for kids.
8. Grow out slowly. Only expand the work of SBAR to engage enthusiastic and willing participants who will learn and plan for another year before practicing SBAR in the classroom. You have to be sure that all teachers practicing SBAR have a core set of common beliefs and an common set of practices that ensure consistency and fairness in the program.

If that sounds daunting, it is; however, it’s possible to out together a great SBAR program. As self-doubting and forward-looking as I can be, I hold on to my students’ comments about SBAR. The students who said I never explained it well enough were right. The students who said that the only time they felt like they really learned was when we used SBAR were also right. SBAR is what you make of it.  Take the necessary time and care to craft a manageable and effective system.

Respect by arimoore

The major obstacle here is relationship-based. What teachers value in students’ work isn’t necessarily what students value. Would a student resist work he or she found authentically engaging and personally meaningful? Think of the difference in quality between work a student chooses to do and work a student has to do. Think of the difference in quality between work that connects to students’ lives and work that does not. Clearly, digitally speaking or not, one way to reduce student resistance to work is to make it matter to them. To do so, we teachers have to redefine what we value, as well as recognize and celebrate distinct qualities of work that students value. We have to value the content, processes, and products students bring to class during the regular school day.

We can’t rely on ourselves as the single means of valuing student work. We can’t armor ourselves in standards or expectations that serve only to separate us from our students.

We have to create learning spaces where authentic engagement and meaningful expectations combine in a symbiosis of learning. Our students need to matter more than the standards, while at the same time we need to reduce the distance between our students lives and the standards to zero. For students to find personal meaning in the work we ask of them, the standards we hold for students have to overlap with their lives.

If it takes “semi-school environments” to do so, then our classrooms should become semi-school environments that host a large audience of F2F and networked assessors or and collaborators with student work. We need to create contexts during the day that give students’ a sense of meaning in school work. If school work needs to change in order to create meaning, then change school work. Create opportunities for publication and entrepreneurship. Bring in expert coaches who can help kids create quality work in media outside your own expertise. Create a team of caring adults and engaged students who share a variety of interests, but a common purpose: authentic learning during the course of the regular school day.

It is not an admission of defeat to open up our classrooms and notions of what learning should be and look like. It’s the most important internal, professional victory we can win. It is not a loss of control. It’s a creation of – and bringing together of – an interdependent symphony of learners. It is not soft or fuzzy. It’s the beginning of the difficult work it takes to articulate what our classrooms value, as well as what we have to do so that our work at long last reflects our values, including joy.  A classroom should look more joyful when full than empty.

Grading is easy; teaching is hard.  Real accountability is interpersonal rather than statistical.

NB: in addition to @budtheteacher’s post, a conversation I had with @beckyfisher73 and this video have me hungering for partnerships between classrooms to create audience, context, and meaning for student work. What if elementary school students created their own mixes of prompts for a tool like this, and then a HS computer science class built a new tool for them and then joined class for a morning of writing and sharing? What if a HS English class story-boarded phone apps for kids books, sent the story-boards to a university engineering program to be built, and then joined the engineers to share the apps with students in lower grades?

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"