Schools wound kids and adults. Our answer: more of the same.

Executive power over schools is expanding without checks and balances from teachers, parents, or students. Democracy is virtually extinct within schools outside of civics and government standards. It’s not impossible that scripted instruction and instructional designs from virtual and F2F content providers will abrogate teachers’ authority and moral imperative to plan instruction for their students. If Texas subscribes wholly to canned curricula, so goes the nation – “teacherproof.”

There are administrators and teachers out there so hamstrung by policy and the economy that they’re compromising their beliefs about kids and learning. They don’t even feel like they can speak out or support one another in doing the right thing. Those who do speak up or act out feel like they’re competing against the system rather than working with it.

While there are schools that succeed by every measure, including and apart from standardized testing, we’re scaling up accountability for testing, rather than for the other factors that make these schools successful.

The Fed, media, charter companies, and unscrupulous charter operators are stealing the charter movement and school choice from kids and parents who need niche schools to meet their needs and wants. School choice is about meeting kids’ needs, not about adults’ failings and power struggles.

Some Possibilities

Ad-hoc schools. An on-going Twitter conversation tagged #revolutioned hopes to create an alliance of teachers who link their classrooms into a cloud-school. Students in participating classrooms will have access to one another’s teachers, talents, and visiting experts. This nascent movement is also called the Rebel Education Alliance (#REA), a possible teachers’ rapid-response force to students’ needs and an un-union alternative to the NEA.

The Race Back Home initiative. School choice, the Race to the Top initiative (RttT), and the economy inspire school boards to charter their divisions into portfolio school systems, awarding the governance and accountability for each school to the team of educators, parents, and students that presents the most compelling and likely-to-succeed curriculum, instructional model, and assessment plan for each school and community. School boards and central offices assess the plans transparently, but also reserve the right to balance division-wide student needs via final differentiation of schools.

DIY classrooms, charters, learning centers and networks. Home-schooling, charter schools, virtual schools, project-based learning, self-directed learning, unschooling, open-source education, the maker aesthetic and ethic, student entrepreneurship, and drop-out education are all coming into play as alternatives to traditional public education. Thanks to social media, determined public school students and teachers can find expert support and models for the authentic learning made possible with each approach. Divisions should formalize their support for these options by publicly supporting teachers and chartering schools to take advantage of DIY resources in pursuit of achievement benchmarks.

Collaborating with – and profiting from – the competition. Local school divisions augment part-time enrollment options for students and educational organizations outside the system via multiple portals to exceptional teachers and courses. Divisions raise revenues and increase enrollment for state and federal funding formulas through virtual schools, teacher and course subscriptions, and second-shift leases of schools’ physical spaces and resources to educational organizations including home-school coöps.

Lateral pressure. Unopposed students and teachers engage in project-based, inquiry-driven, grade-free, service and entrepreneurship learning. They joyfully share learning in safe classrooms that have a real, positive impact on their communities’ well-being. Colleagues, other students, and other parents take note and ask administrators why such schooling isn’t the norm. Dissatisfied with answers about the importance of standardized testing, stake-holders agitate against test-driven instruction.

Which of these can you support? Which of these can you enact? With which of these do you disagree and on what grounds? Let’s puzzle it out together. To retweet Rob Lyons, “Viva la #revolutioned!!“

Spell with flickr: Free?

After reading Pam Moran (@pammoran) and Chad Ratliff’s (@chadratliff’s) coauthored posts about this year’s budget cycle, I’m asking myself, What’s my part? How do I shelter my vision of teaching and learning in the classroom?

First, let me say that money isn’t everything; however, it helps distribute the future more evenly. Best practices in teaching and learning carry over between communications tools, and classroom discussion is a very social medium. Issues of instruction and management certainly persist across platforms. Despite obstacles to learning, gifted storytellers and community builders can help any classroom transcend its brick and mortar, pencil and paper boundaries through meaning-making and imagination. When money is lost, learning shouldn’t be.

I know that whatever successes I’ve had in the classroom have been inspired, strengthened, and synthesized by learning from others. Outside experts, colleagues connected by social media, and students publishing work the world over enrich my practice and offer me novel solutions to local dilemmas. While my colleagues and students teach me all the time, we can learn to look at our shared local problems from new perspectives and ask new questions about them by interacting with caring, inquisitive peers in other places and cultures. Partnerships like these also help make real for all learners the lessons in curiosity, community, and empathy we want to draw from class content.

That’s why I want to maintain 1:1 Internet access in my classroom in support of 1:1 learning. I want students to use social networking to find academic identities they won’t risk exploring in class. I want expert audiences to teach us how to learn better and better share our learning. I want my students to see that learning is life-long and universal.  I want my students to show others the same.  I don’t want financial constraints keeping the possibilities of learning with and from others around the world in check.

While it might not be possible for me to engineer a self-sustaining classroom, I’m thinking a lot this week about what I can do  to support my vision of what next year’s classroom should be and how it should engage students and support their learning.

At the extremely convoluted end, I wonder about incorporating as a non-profit for the explicit purpose of furnishing technology for students in my classroom. At a previous school, I served on a PTO board that incorporated as a non-profit in order to make itself more attractive to perspective donors. Would parents and community partners donate money managed for a single classroom to make sure that its learners have 1:1 access to the Internet? Maybe not, but the benefit of finding a dependable patron in this economy could repay the cost of incorporating, especially if a lawyer could be found to prepare the application and by-laws pro-bono. Would it be helpful (or even possible) to have a board offering accountability and regular feedback to me as a teacher? I like to think so. I think any time spent listening to the wants and needs of diverse stake-holders creates opportunities for learning unavailable to the isolated teacher. I’m interested in the potential of this possibility, but I wonder if it’s at all manageable. It might be better to serve on my PTO and encourage it to incorporate and better crowd-source the fund-raising. It might be better to incorporate a coalition of teachers with a shared vision across schools or divisions. There’s further reflection and learning to be done here.

Regardless of my (perhaps non-starter) non-profit status, it’s clearly time to pitch projects on DonorsChoose.org. For my state, donations supporting technology requests (24%) place third after those for classroom supplies (40%) and books (29%). In 2009 DonorsChoose.org raised over $250,000 for school projects here in Virginia. Twenty-four percent of $250,000 is $60,000 dollars. So, for example, with 5% of that pie ($3,000), I could get 15 iPods Touch at $199 a piece, download some apps, and .pdf-up some DIY flexbook goodness.  I might not outfit my entire classroom at once using this approach, but I can see a group of generous patrons helping us build up capacity over time to provide a class of 25 or 30 with 1:1 Net access.

Likewise, it’s time to get better at grant writing and prepare several this summer.

I’m thinking about school-business partnerships, as well. While it’s doubtful that an Apple or a Microsoft would negotiate special pricing or donations with a single classroom teacher, I think local businesses might be willing to pitch in and lend a hand or furnish a device, especially in return for good press from the division’s communications office, or in return for some kind of expo night for company personnel, board members, and local media to demonstrate how local businesses support local children. Maybe a local software developer would build a phone or web app from student design specs and then sell it online, but donate it to our class.

Finally, I’m thinking about monetizing student work, not-for-profit, to support programs that support students’ learning. I imagine an Etsy-esque online school boutique advertising student work and suggesting donations that support students’ schools. This idea seems workable – we have band fundraisers already, right? – and certainly commerce can lend an authenticity to students’ notions of audience and feedback. However, it’s important to strike a balance here between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, between service and consumerism, and between cooperation and competition. I wouldn’t want students rushing learning to create a product. I wouldn’t want students to lose sight of serving their school with their work. I wouldn’t want students to compete with one another over sales. I wouldn’t want to let “work” ever overshadow learning or ever be something a student felt pressured to do. I think all of these concerns can be addressed while building a classroom culture of learning, creativity, entrepreneurship, service, and choice, but it’s incredibly important to mind student and stake-holder notions of how commodifying student work supports learning.

The bottom line is that I want to help the bottom line.  I don’t just want to keep learning moving forward; I want to keep students’ learning moving out into the world.

Any free advice?

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?