• Matt Berg – a community-project leader working in Africa.
• Aaron Gross – a animal farming ethicist .
• Neeru Paharia – a costumer behaviorist working at Harvard.
• Trung Le – a learning space designer working for Canon.
• Stanford Thompson – a musician and music educator working in Africa and Philadelphia.

Together the panelists made a great case for differentiation and project- and community-based learning in our classrooms. There sat five people following their passions, making differences in the world, and sharing their energy and insights with us. I defy any content coordinator or administrator to tell me again that kids have to master this program or that before they can dream of doing what those panelists do or begin problem-solving for their schools and neighborhoods.

Moreover, the panelists made a great case for getting out of our kids’ way. I think Thompson illustrated the point best when he compared how kids in his music lessons burn out after two months of direct instruction and guided practice, while kids in his community music programs – who play socially and learn by doing – are becoming movers of their own lives, with, anecdotally, better mental health and academic outcomes than their peers. Give the kid an instrument, Thompson suggested, and let him or her see what he or she can do. In other words, let inquiry drive innovation in focused, usefully constrained ways – let kids play together and with mentors to learn an instrument and to perform in a group.

All of this brings me back to our perennial dilemma. Our need to innovate solutions to our problems will not go away. As Gross explained, we have created the problems in our systems and those problems will continue until we realign our systems with our ethical beliefs rather than expeditious convenience. Until we concern ourselves with conserving the welfare of the animals we eat – or of the inhabitants of any of our systems – those creatures will suffer harm that we don’t actually wish on them.

So long as we create obstacle les for ourselves, we’ll need to innovate. In another post, I want to talk about how Jane McGonigal, in her new book Reality is Broken, suggests we tackle these problems. For now, I want to explore how we teachers – the “street level bureaucrats” of education – might approach such problems.

Chris Lehman, principal of EduCon host Science Leadership Academy and as quoted by last night’s moderator, said that innovation is positive social change.

We are the agents of social change, or not, for high-stakes testing. It is a problem we have, but we don’t always own it. We accept it and its diabolical accoutrements as a condition of our employment. We teach to it. Or we compromise with it. Or we ignore it. Or we find a way to teach above or past it – I’m not too good at that yet. In all honesty, that solution seems like a dsitractor to me.

Nevertheless, high-stakes testing remains a problem, and we remain without a cohesive national strategy for dealing with it from the classroom.

Paharia shared with us last night the results of behavioral studies that show a significant difference between what we say we would give someone in need and how much we actually give – if we give anything – when asked. She encouraged us to be more truthful in our self-assessments of honesty, generosity, and ethical behavior.

We don’t say we support high-stakes testing. We don’t want high-stakes testing. If we could go back thirty years, or a hundred and fifty years, and redesign testing or comprehensive schools to conserve the welfare of children we might not have high-stakes testing.

But here we are with high-stakes testing.

What are we willing to innovate as a response to testing that conserves the welfare of our students, promotes their authentic learning, and changes the system to reflect our personal and professional values?

We have so much in our country, I heard said last night, but we do so little with it.

I spent years teaching down to students – I spent years ignoring how much community, potential, and brilliance surrounded me. I did so little teaching of lasting worth. I saw, first-hand, last year how powerless that kind of teaching is to address issues of relevance and relationships in the classroom. I felt how powerless I was a teacher to insist on learning. I got out of the way as a way to preserve myself, my classroom, and my students’ welfare. Since then we’ve come a long way together in establishing trust and taking on work with some modicum of relevance.

And then last week I gave my mid-year assessments and end-of-course, high-stakes testing predictors.

How ethical a teacher am I? How much can I really blame the system? How much can I really pine for the freedom to innovate if I don’t take that freedom for myself? How can I recognize, value, and react positively to student rebellion against the status quo if I remain its valet?

I want to leave EduCon knowing something more about myself and how innovative I’m willing to be. I’m going to think on it. I hope you’ll join me in aspiring to a more honest self-assessment of our personal and professional ethics against the actions we’re taking and the opportunity costs of whatever it is we do – or are willing to do – to find or avoid our solution.

Can we be the Matt Bergs of public education, helping kids innovate their own solutions to learning classroom by classroom? Can we help them use their learning to serve their communities? Can we carve out the time from our busy testing lives to help kids demonstrate learning with immediate, positive geographic impact?

Look at our curriculum. How much of it could kids discover through focused play? How much could they innovate from it?

If our kids can’t discover our curriculum through inquiry or play, or if our kids can’t innovate with our content, should it be what we choose to teach? If what we teach can be discovered through inquiry and play, or if kids can innovate with our curriculum, are we teaching out of the way?

As Trung Le said last night regarding design, even the best designed school won’t work without our cooperation. So with what and with whom and how do we want to work?

At the very least, can we work SHTEAM – science, humanities, technology, engineering, arts, and math – into all of our classrooms and see what happens? It only starts to seem silly to try to cram so much into a single course so long as we ignore the obvious and powerful ways to do it.

Sometimes we say work smarter, not harder. Sometimes we say don’t work harder than your students. Sometimes we say kids these days.

In any case, it’s on us – as well as the system – to do more with what we have, and what a fantastic job that is.

There are several ways to help uncover students’ talents at making games.

1. First, we can let students play widely. Just as you get better at writing by reading, you get better at designing by playing.
2. Second, we can provide students with an authentic outlet for their writing. Game design and programming require students to show depth in thinking not only about what they want to make, but also about how it will work. It takes iteration, feedback, and reflection to finish alpha, beta, and gold builds of games. It takes the writing process to make a game, and it takes the writing process further than a teacher-described genre or multiple choice question about what comes after prewriting.
3. Third, we can remake our classrooms to feel more like information age workplaces. These workplaces clearly value their workers in ways that classrooms value neither students nor teachers. I’m imagining a place with a lot of natural light, mobile furniture, individual work stations, and a collaborative space filled with inspiration and materials for “reading” and prototyping. There would be several types of tools available for several types of tasks, including maintaining developers’ diaries. It would be okay to eat and drink there. It would be okay to communicate with the outside world there. It would be okay to bring friends and family there to play-test. A GBL space/lab/library space/school-within-a-school/charter would be a workshop that favored collaboration, communication, and spontaneous celebration of failure and success, rather than a classroom that favored competition, monologue, and looming consequence.

Here’s my take on a classroom for games-based learning (GBL). It would include

• Light, color, art: everywhere.
• Modular, mobile furniture.
• Mutable zoning by project.
• A commons area.
• A common multi-monitor screen for streaming and presenting student work, class backchannels, and relevant class texts.
• A dedicated play area.
• Individual work stations.
• A library of excellent texts, including books, films, and games.
• A library of toys.
• Mobile, kid-level planning surfaces.
• Multiple copies of class development platforms, games with authoring tools, and software development kits.
• Mobile communications tools available to every student or hardwired communications tools at every student work station.
• Permissions policies allowing the teacher to manage student communications and publications with relevant experts and entities
• Access to an outdoor campus for play, planning, and mobile computing.
• Differentiated seating.
• Refrigerators and pantries.
• 2D & 3D materials for prototyping and making games and asset models. (Has no one done the custom vinyl figure novel character visualization yet?)
• Architecture and wiring that created discrete sound zones.
• Rotating roles so every kid produces at least 2 design documents, 2 levels authored in other games, and 2 alpha builds of project in something like Scratch.

Teachers across the world would pitch content needs. Students would pitch back concepts and make alpha builds for feedback from their teacher clients, student play-testers, and outside experts. Kids could change projects in a fluid manner to produce the best products possible. Kids from a poorly reviewed alpha could contribute to the beta build of a project favorited by more peers, clients, and experts, improving its quality and/or shortening its development time.

There would be embedded art, engineering, math, workplace readiness and roles, reading, and writing standards in an open-ended curriculum of iterative development in service to others’ learning needs and students’ communities.

Imagine an Urgent Evoke-like game for a kid’s town through a Gowalla-like AR interface.

Who wants to play? What are the bugs?

LittleBigPlanet is a platformer.  A platformer is a game made up of levels that require  players to pass obstacles using timing, accuracy and  leaping.  Most Super Mario Bros games are platformers.  LittleBigPlanet provides players with a suite of level construction tools and the ability to upload player-created levels to the PlayStation Network (PSN) for other owners of the game to play.  Since the game’s release in 2008, players have uploaded over 2 million user-generated levels.

Two million isn’t a big number compared to, say, 400 million: the number of Facebook users worldwide.  Two million isn’t a big number compared to, say, 32 million: the number of PlayStation 3 owners worldwide (both figures found here).  However, LittleBigPlanet encourages player creativity and modding in ways collection games like Farm Life and proprietary hardware like the PS3 do not.  There are very few games that offer as robust and attractive a set of tools as LittleBigPlanet does for creating such varied levels.  To wit, check out these two user-generated levels. Everything in them was assembled by players from the tools and behaviors included in the game’s level design suite.

Museum levels in Little Big Planet typically show off the art and machines players have made for use in their other levels.  The PlayStation Eye, a peripheral camera for the PS3, also lets users take pictures of themselves or their own and-drawn art for use in museums-as-photo-albums.  The museums collect and share the resources with other players. Inside the museums players can use capture tools to grab images.  The museum’s creators can also make their displayed objects and machines available to visitors either as prize-bubbles in the museum or as rewards earned at the end of the level for visiting the museum.

So far, we’ve imagine making a level of captioned sculptures and art that provide the unit’s information, interspersed with short gameplay episodes that are meant to capture the points of view of people involved in the war in different ways.  As the girls move through the tutorials, and as I back out of the project, I’m really eager to see what they make to share their learning.  I’ll defnitely tweet out whatever safe account name we come up with when we’re finished so you can find the level on the PSN, and we’ll record a play-through video and post it online somehow.

I don’t know that every piece of authentic work will change the world, but I think this one might open up some students’ eyes to the possibilities of school and interdisciplinary work in gaming.  Even if we’re not changing the world, I’m eager to see what we learn by making our own little one. We should get a developers’ diary up on a blog so they girls can share their learning and ask for input about what to include in terms of content & gameplay, too.

What other tools are your students using to create “museums” of learning?  How much control do your student shave over those tools? How interactive are the finished products?  What do you think of investing class time into gaming for learning? How could we be doing this better?

PS: I am kind of falling for STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math learning. I would love to teach geometry, concepts like frequency and proportion, or simple machines using LittleBigPlanet. Anyone using off the shelf video games and/or consoles in STEM classrooms?  If you are, please comment below to share your work and/or provide a link to it!

poker chips by .pixel .

You know that song, “The Gambler?” I love that song. I loved listening to it in between G’n'R and Alice in Chains before high school football games. I love it when Kenny Rogers sings it. I love it when Mike Doughty sings it. Please comment below and tell me who else sings it. I can’t get enough of it.

I cleaned out my car today and found a CD with “The Gambler” on it. I made my kids listen to it. I sang it as if I was a cast member on Glee (Sue Sylvester?! Come on!  Destination: Re-take!). Then my teacher brain – which is like a live tweeter perched on my limbic system – took over and it was all like, “You know, you are, in fact, out of aces. Schools have to count their money at the table before state and federal dealing are done. You’ve got to know when -”

At which point I said, “Shut up!” (you know, in my mind) and kept singing to my son, who was getting into it, and to my daughter, who just wanted to know, “What time is it?!”

The song ended. We went inside the house. I kept my teacher-brain at bay imagining “The Gambler” on Glee. Until about now. Teacher-brain, if you will…

The temperatures in Central Virginia clawed above 40 degrees Fahrenheit this week melting much of the snow cover left over from the Blizzard of ‘09. I know we’re not exactly roughing it (I was a Yankee in a former life), but the warmth and sunlight are a welcome break from the flash frozen air of the past few weeks.

Whenever the sun comes out to stay this time of year I think about summer. Specifically, I think about summer school. Now is the time to pour through mid year data to begin identifying kids who could use another shot at this year’s curriculum. Now is the time to think about who could use a safe-harbor this summer. Now is the time to think about what I’d do if I had the first semester over again.

It’s also budget season – a lean one that calls for new ideas of how to take up the daunting challenge of fostering more learning with fewer resources. Education changes slowly, which makes abrupt cuts in revenue – like those facing school systems in the near future – especially hard to handle. For many divisions, it’s time to change education without the funds necessary to maintain the status quo. It’s hard to entertain sacrificing anything that could help a child. With these difficulties in mind, I’d like to suggest that we act now to save summer school and use it as a lab for ed reform.

Outside of high school credit recovery courses, elementary and middle school summer programs are just the right length and can accommodate just the right number of teacher and students to test out new structures, schedules, partnerships and pedagogy without impacting the bottom line of credit hours on a student’s progress towards his or her diploma.  By using summer school strategically as an innovation incubator, any division could create for itself a lab school.

Summer school is a great opportunity for aspiring reformers and teacher leaders to gain practical experience with remediation, extension, curriculum design, instruction, assessment, data-analysis and administration. Summer schools are microcosms of their host schools. Principals, in my experience, are eager to find directors who bring something new to the table, something that pulls students in need out of the academic dead-time of summer, something that hooks them on a compelling project and keeps them coming back day after day for as long as possible, keeping them as engaged and safe as possible. While polarized policy-makers line up to defend and decry charters, summer school gives us all an opportunity to innovate ideas about teaching and learning that can be site tested by pre- and post-assessments, attendance and discipline records, and feedback from teacher and student participants alike.

Take some time this budget season to think about your summer school pitch. If you had a shot to change something about your school, what would you aim for – scheduling? Leveling? Tracking? Entrepreneurship? Project-based learning? Service-learning? Technology infusion? How would you structure a day in your program? How would you structure a week? How would you assess student progress after a month or 6-weeks or a marking period? What would your school look like if you could remake it into what you think would work for your neediest students?

I keep having these STEM day dreams about upper elementary and middle school students transforming their schools’ walls into art.  Students work in a classroom with a teacher from their school and an artist from their community. First the kids form teams and use a digifab lab – or pencils and paper – to make scale models of their work surface. Then they propose mural designs and reach consensus as a group about which elements to incorporate in a final class design.  The class design then goes to review by a committee of teachers, administrators, parents, and community members who will see it daily.  The committee gives the kids feedback for revision and approves a final design.  When the final design is set, older students from the local career and technical education center visit school and help the kids recreate their small mural model as a 1/4- or 1/8-scale brick wall on a wooden cart. The older students teach the younger students some basic masonry skills, advertise their program, and get good press for mentoring the younger kids. Next the summer school kids scale up their design and paint it on both sides of their 1/4- or 1/8-scale wall using a different brand of paint on each side. For the next few weeks, the kids move the carts inside and outside and run experiments simulating different weather effects on each side of the wall and observe how the different brands of paint hold up to the elements. The kids evaluate which paint is best for the job and spend the last few weeks of summer school scaling-up and painting the mural on the school with help from their local artist who serves as a project-manager- and/or advisor-in-residence. Throughout the experience, the kids read daily from customized RSS feeds and blog about virtual field trips to murals around the world.

What’s your dream job? What are you doing in your Walter Mitty classroom? Could you try it out during summer school? Could you propose and direct a program? Collaborate on a proposal? Bring together a staff and leader other than yourself to follow? Could you draw in community partners? High-school mentors?

Giving up your summer is a sacrifice, but for a chance to find what works, in the seasons of sacrifice to come, it might be the most strategic sacrifice we can make. Think about your pitch; capture your vision; pass it on or run with it. Hold on to summer school; fight for it and present a vision of innovation that brings new value to what can be a flat remedial experience. With the economy folding and tax revenue running, don’t walk away from a chance to change school for the better if only for a few weeks. Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, but the best that we can hope for is better than breaking even – we can hope that summer school helps us break out of education’s staid past into its uncertain and exciting future.

If you have an idea about ed reform, challenge yourself to test it this summer.

Thanks, teacher-brain! I’ll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, I gotta go on a Muppets, Glee, and “Gambler” YouTube binge.

[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.