Author: Mr. Chase

Stocking our libraries with students

Brooklyn Art Library

“Harry — I think I’ve just understood something! I’ve got to go to the library!”
And she sprinted away, up the stairs.
“What does she understand?” said Harry distractedly, still looking around, trying to tell where the voice had come from.
“Loads more than I do,” said Ron, shaking his head.
“But why’s she got to go to the library?”
“Because that’s what Hermione does,” said Ron, shrugging. “When in doubt, go to the library.” 
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

If we are to truly have conversations about students as publishers and have them consider copyright and what rights they want on the works they create, then there are other questions of infrastructure.

The main question, where can we put these things so that they will live on? Sometimes we think that they will be okay if they are put “online” as though the world is standing at their browsers waiting for a new student-produced video to watch.

It is not that we do not value student-produced content on the whole, but that we do not go seeking the fifth-grade research report about bees from four states or two districts away.

We have places for these things and the chance to imbue them with greater worth and an audience relevant to the places in which they were created – libraries.

One of the first questions I ask of potential digital content management systems is, “Can we catalog and feature student work in your system?” If not, move along.

As teachers increase the number of authentic learning experiences to which they introduce students, it’s going to be important that we not only capture that learning and reflection, but that we have a way of sharing it and cataloging it as well.

I work with middle and elementary schools where the younger students feed directly from the lower school to the upper school. As I work with teachers, I ask how their students are building resources and content for those who will come next.

This is obvious in Language Arts classrooms where students can write stories and create picture books for their elementary counterparts to be logged in the catalog systems of each school and accessible to students.

Less obvious might be the science report, the biography of locally-relevant historical figures, histories of businesses or farms within the city or town.

One of my favorite components of Howard Gardner’s definition of intelligence is the ability to create something of use or value to the culture to which a person belongs. Imagine a library with limited budget that can be stocked by the creations of students. Imagine the one student who has been tinkering on a novel or novella secretly who is given the chance to showcase his work across his school or an entire district.

If, as I’ve argued we ask students to consider how they want to copyright work they’ve released into the wild, then we should also create wild spaces where those works can graze and circulate widely.

Instead of a Teachers’ Declaration of Independence…

Dunlap Broadside [Declaration of Independence]

 

“No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we’re alone.” 
― Mitch Albom

I was thinking yesterday about declarations. Specifically, those of independence. The urge was strong to write here about the need for a Teachers’ Declaration of Independence. It would be a bold document staking our claim and our beliefs in the sanctity and sovereignty of our classrooms and schools.

“These are places of learning,” it would shout in some in a powerful font, “and they will not incur invasions by outside influences or sayers of nay.” It would be a beauty to behold, and also, it would not be true.

We do not need a Teachers’ Declaration of Independence. We are not independent operators. Watching the sometimes evolving, sometime devolving situation in Philadelphia’s public schools, seeing the requirements placed on teachers exiting the university system, and watching as schools attempt to provide the best productivity possible under current and proposed FCC e-rate regulations all point to the idea that what happens in our schools and our classrooms is independent of nothing.

The above factors and myriad more are constantly raining down on all schools and teachers no matter their constitutions or pedagogies. We are interdependent on so many systems that to state otherwise would be a foolhardy foolhardy fallacy.

Instead, perhaps today is the perfect opportunity to wonder about what happens after the bounce of independence, when we look around and realize that we are enmeshed in the lives and workings of those around us.

When I work with schools and districts, this is a sentiment I try to engender first. “I will say some things, give some examples that you will like, and would love to try in your setting. Your gut, though, will have a ‘yeah but’ moment. You will think, ‘Yeah, that’s great, but here’s why it won’t work where I am…'”

The key to these moments is realizing we are interdependent operators and to shift the thinking to, “Yeah, that sounds great, and here’s how I would approach it given the nuances of where I work.”

This is interdependent thinking, and it opens the doors to what we see and understand as possible. It also moves toward building a way of thinking about students and co-workers that realizes the interdependent systems at play in their lives.

In my English classroom, students would come in for what I thought was going to be a great lesson, the looks on their faces and the words in their mouths would sometimes tell me that their thoughts were elsewhere. A physics project was bearing down on them and they were stressed and worried about meeting deadlines and understanding material.

By seeing things interdependently, I adjusted my plans. Would 20 minutes to discuss and work through physics be helpful to their abilities to focus on what we were doing in our classroom? Invariably, yes.

It was an approach that alleviated stress, helped pave the way for success elsewhere and set up our relationship as one that was responsive to needs and caring about how they were operating in the system we called school.

This is to say nothing about how what students left when they walked through the school’s doors was interdependently linked to whatever we asked, challenged, or hoped of them in our 8 hours together.

A declaration of independence is a beautiful thing. It allows for the understanding of individuals as individuals. A declaration of interdependence helps to frame one individual as connected to the individuals around him and to larger networks of individuals a state, a country, a world away. Surely, there’s room in the world for such thinking.

5 Links for the Week 7.3.14

Over at the work blog I started a series this last school year to collect and push out resources that might be worth the time and consideration of teachers who might happen by the blog. As that blog’s sleepy during the summer, I thought I might move the series here for a while. Assembled below are 5 Links that have gotten caught in my browser and won’t go away. I share them here in the hopes that I’ll be able to bring myself to close a couple tabs. If you have any suggestions for future 5 Links, leave them in the comments.

Link 1 – Maps just got a little googlier

Smarty Pins this new trivia game integrates Google Maps and gives players clues from a number of categories. You get your clue and you position your pin on the location you think the clue is referencing. My record number of questions thus far? Seven. I’m not proud, but I might be addicted.

Link 2 – Paper or Screen – Is one better?

The answer appears to be “Maybe.” This piece from ft.com by Julian Baggini pulls together some of the current research on the printed and eprinted pages and how they affect reading. Baggini writes, “Overall, there doesn’t seem to be any convincing evidence that reading on screen or paper is better per se.” That said, how do we proceed with teaching reading?

Link 3 – Who’s paying your congressperson?

Represent.us has this piece about 16-year-old Nicholas Rubin who created a plugin which skins your webpage for lawmakers and then provides a fact sheet on where that public servant received their money. If I were a history or English teacher in a tech-enabled setting, this would be on my list of suggested plugins for students.

Link 4 – The Internet as a Public Utility(?)

The video above is from PBS Digital Studios, and I can’t seem to get enough of their content. Mike Rugnetta takes viewers through a 14-minute investigation of Net Neutrality and the “What ifs?” of it all. Well worth watching and keeping under your had to start class discussion, spark debate, encourage research, and help students be more thoughtful citizens.

Link 5 – Where hunger is

The map above, the Global Hunger Index map, is a powerful reminder of where we still need to work as a global community to help those who still do not have access to adequate nutrition. Oftentimes, we unleash maps and data on students without any clear connection to the real world, I could see this tool inspiring weeks of inquiry and investigation. Perhaps, it might even lead to student action.

The wrong way to think about copyright in the classroom

Copyright license choice

“Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can’t tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one – and to my mind, a very strange one.” 
― Michael Montoure, Slices

We might just be teaching copyright wrong. Even those who regularly talk to their students about the importance of fair use, citing sources, and linking to original content are still missing the big ideas. They are still looking at copyright from a consumption model.

Salt-worthy teachers are talking to students about things like Creative Commons and explaining what it means when a content creator claims a specific kind of copyright for a given piece of work.

The boat we too often miss, though, is asking kids how they want to license the things they create. As the quality of what students can do with the tools in their hands increases, students are making things that have worth standalong projects or increased remixing and hacking potential.

If this is true, and the stuff that’s coming out of classrooms is high-quality, we owe it to our kids to ask them who they want to be as content producers and how they want the rest of the world to access their work.

For students blithely torrenting movies and other content from the web, the conversation can become quite different when asked if they want to freely release something they’ve spent time and energy creating. Do they want credit for their work? Do they want compensation?

Perhaps we are mum on this topic because we are worried about hte complicated possibilities of opening up the choices and opportunities that could arise if students start thinking about how they own their work.

Student A releases a report into the public domain. Student B realizes they can pull entire swaths of that report without being legally compelled to cite the source material. What, now, constitutes cheating? Plagiarism? Intellectual property?

This question and others like it are all the ways we should be introducing and learning copyright with our students. It’s ineffective and out-of-touch to teach only a consumption model of copyright. It ignores the productive, creative, prodigious work being done in our classrooms.

What kind of publishing do students want to perpetuate? How do they want to release their work into the wild? What is the difference between the access they want to provide others to their work and what access they expect to the work of others. Above all else, why?

We didn’t have control before

I’ve been spending a great deal of time with educators who are thinking about the changes that will be necessary once a greater saturation of technology is present in their schools and classrooms.

The most frequent topic under this umbrella – classroom management.

Principals and teachers are concerned over a lack of “control,” and that students will be distracted to greater extents now that devices are in their hands. Students will be distracted and engagement will flag, they worry.

Instead of doing what they are asked or expected to, many teachers worry students will do something else, something they choose.

These educators are correct. Faced with the choice to do school and learning as they always have versus an activity or piece of content of their choosing, students are likely to favor the latter.

I cannot blame them.

To prepare for this distraction and tension of control, schools are readying policies and school-wide language for students. They share it with parents who are equally concerned their children will stop paying attention and choose anything else over the prescribed curriculum and tasks.

Schools will tell students when they are allowed to have their devices out and when they are not. There will be signs in the classrooms that teachers can turn over or point to for clarification. Students who are repeatedly off-task will meet with restricted freedoms until they can show a greater ability to act in compliance.

I wish the answer they were giving was a different one. I wish when educators spoke to parents they made a different promise and instead said that they would be working to make their classrooms more interesting, responsive, spaces connected to students’ curiosities and questions. I wish they committed in faculty meetings, not to a common signal, but to a common agreement to be better at asking students to do things that matter in the moment.

We have been skating by in our classrooms. This was a hard truth I ran into head first when I started working in my first 1:1 environment, and my instinct was to intensify the ways in which I showed my students I was in control of their learning. It’s not an instinct of which I’m proud, but that’s often true of the novice learner.

Luckily, I had access to communities (online and physical) who shared both their practices and their thinking about interacting with students in well-saturated technological learning spaces. Following their lead and writing in this space as a place to reflect publicly, I came to realize holding tighter to control wasn’t in the interest of my students or my peace of mind.

Any shift so seismic as the introduction of connected devices to a classroom calls for a greater awareness of practice. We may turn toward that awareness or we may dig in more deeply to what we have always done and choose not to examine our practices and beliefs about learning.

My hope is that teachers and principals will choose to lean in to the conversations and reflections during this shift of opportunity and begin asking what they should stop doing and start doing, given the affordances of a shifting landscape.

Join Us for a Book Study and Conversation Series on Connected Learning

Screen Shot 2014-05-22 at 10.10.55 AMDo devices arriving in the Fall have you feeling a little unprepared? Do you find yourself excited about the prospects of teaching in a connected classroom, and yet also unsure where to start? Have you dabbled with connected learning in the past and are looking for a group of like-minded folks to push your thinking?

If you answered, “Yes,” or even, “Maybe,” to the questions above, you’re going to want to join the SVVSD ITC’s book study of Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom.

The book offers an introduction to the principles of Connected Learning as well as real-world classroom examples from classroom teachers across the country who share their stories of leveraging connected classrooms to increase their students’ abilities to create and connect in the world at large.

Who: Anyone who is interested is welcome to join the book study which will be facilitated by SVVSD Instructional Technology Coordinators Bud Hunt and Zac Chase.

What: An informal study of Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom.

When: The group will hold meetings twice each week on Tuesday at 3:30 PM and Thursday at 8:30:30 PM beginning June 3, taking a recess throughout July and then continuing in August with a concluding meeting the week of August 18:30. Participants are welcome to join either or both weekly calls. (All times MST.)

Where: The meetings will take place in Adobe Connect in this classroom (https://connect.svvsd.org/connectedlearning/). The book can be downloaded as a free PDF here or for $.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store here.

Why: As our classrooms become places of greater and greater connectivity, it is incumbent upon us as teachers to consider the best ways to leverage that connectivity to help students learn and impact the world in which they live.

Connected Learning Principles:

Connected learning is…

  • interest-powered,
  • peer-supported,
  • academically, oriented,
  • production-centered,
  • openly networked,
  • and driven by shared purpose.
DISCUSSION SCHEDULE
Content Discussion Dates and Times
Foreword & Introduction 6/3 @ 3:30PM or 6/5 @ 8:30PM
Chapter 1 – Interest-Driven Learning 6/10 @ 3 PM or 6/12 @ 8:30 PM
Chapter 2 – Peer-Supported Learning 6/17 @ 3:30PM or 6/19 @ 8:30 PM
Chapter 3 – Academically-Oriented Teaching 6/24 @ 3:30PM or 6/26 @ 8:30 PM
JULY RECESS
Chapter 4 – Production-Centered Classrooms 8/5 @ 3:30PM or 8/7 @ 8:30PM
Chapter 5 – Openly Networked 8/12 @ 3:30PM or 8/14 @ 8:30PM
Chapter 6 – Shared Purpose & Conclusion 8/19 @ 3:30PM or 8/21 @ 8:30PM

Write your way into the day, lesson, meeting, keynote…

journal pic

It’s the part of any workshop, presentation, keynote, etc. that starts teachers hesitating. I usually say something like, “Before we begin our work together, let’s make sure we’re here together.”

Then, we do something many of them haven’t been asked to do since, maybe high school – we journal. We write our way in to the work.

Whether it takes place here in the states or with a group of teachers in Capetown, South Africa or Lahore, Pakistan, there is always a moment of hesitation as they settle in.

“Really?” their faces say, “This is how we’re learning about X?”

The answer is yes, it is. Writing and reflecting at the moment of commencement centers participants on where they are, where they’er coming from and where they want to be.

In a recent week-long workshop on project-based learning and educational technologies, I asked participants to journal at the top of each day. The hesitation was there one moment, and a few sentences later, it was gone.

I used the same format I used with high school and middle school students. Projected on the screen at the front of the room were three options: Free write, respond to a given quotation, respond to a given image.

Some days I asked if they’d like to share, other days I did not. While there’s value in the sharing of what teachers write, it’s not the point. They are their own audience in the composition of these reflections. This is a practice meant to help them center.

At the end of the week in Pakistan, teachers of all levels and disciplines approached me on breaks telling me they’d enjoyed the journaling and would be taking it back with them to their own classrooms. A few days after I returned to the States, the photo above appeared in my Facebook timeline. Somewhere in the string of 30+ comments, someone asked of the writing, “You don’t teach English do you?”

It was a gentle jibe at the teacher, commenting on the syntactical and grammatical errors in the writing, the postin teacher’s response was perfect, “No, I’m teaching them social studies. I purposely did not do correction as this was journaling for the felf and I committed to students that it’s their piece of writing.”

And there’s the key. With the championing of failure, we must also champion reflective thought. Failure is only worth as much as you learn from it. And, you’re not likely to learn much without pausing to reflect.

Aside from the professing of their own thinking, this type of reflection also frames writing as a different activity than teachers and students might find familiar. Much, if not all, of the writing both teachers and students are asked to do is meant for evaluation, consideration, and judgement of others. A teacher’s lesson or unit plan, a proposal for a field trip, a book report – they are all meant for someone else to read and evaluate the thinking and learning of the write.

Journaling in this way asks the writer, “What makes the most sense for you to be putting down on the page or the screen in this moment? What have you brought with you into this process?” and then gives space for that creation and reflection.

This is all to say, stop, write, reflect, move on.

From Theory to Practice:

  • The next time you lead a meeting of other folks (children or adults) ask everyone in the room to write their ways into the day. Take 5-10 minutes and ask people to write about where they’re coming from and what they hope out of their time together.
  • Build it as a practice around any major work. For students, ask them to write a reflection on their learning at the end of a lesson, unit, class period, etc. For teachers, take 5 minutes at the beginning or end of the day to reflect on the learning that’s happened and that you hope will happen.
  • Respect the privacy of reflection and allow for the choice of taking it to the public forum. If I know you won’t make me share what I write, I’m likely to write more openly and truthfully. I’m also more likely to write something I’m proud of and want to share.

What I Learned from ‘How Designers Destroyed the World’

Webstock ’13: Mike Monteiro – How Designers Destroyed the World from Webstock on Vimeo.

You may not want to watch the video above if you’re in a space where there’s no room for foul language. Keep it open in your browser, though, and watch it when you get home.

The above talk from Designer Mike Monteiro has been sitting open in my browser for a few months now. Watch it. Find 48 minutes and watch it.

I can’t do better than Monteiro at summing up his message, so let me share some pieces that sparked thinking and feelings of accountability for me.

Monteiro says designers (and I think educators at top-speed fit this category) have four responsibilities:

  1. responsibility to the world in which we live

  2. responsibility to the craft

  3. responsibility to clients (Don’t work for anyone who you’re afraid to say “no” to. you aren’t an order taker, you are a gatekeeper.)

  4. responsibility to self (If you take responsibility for your work, you will do better work, you will enjoy it more, you will have the respect of both your clients and your colleagues…)

Other salient quotes:

“Reputation is just another word for your integrity.”

 

“You are not bigger than the problems you are solving.”

 

“Every time you let someone tell you how to do your job, you are teaching them that that is how the job is done.”

 

“Don’t tell me how. Tell me what. Tell me what needs improvement.”

 

“And I happen to believe in the power of romanic teenage girls, and I believe that they grow up into strong competent women. And they are better at spotting monsters than we are.”

And, finally…

“Wake up. It’s time to be aware of what we are doing.”

Of Papert and District Politics

This piece was published about our district’s Board this week. I particularly like this section:

Mike Schiers, who generally represents the Frederick High School feeder system on the school board, said the district needs to make teaching its top priority.

“Our focus has changed from teaching to following up on the requirements,” Schiers said.

In any regulated industry, compliance with the regulations takes over all functions, Creighton said.

Today, I read this from The Daily Papert:

The very nature of a curriculum requires subordinating individual initiative to the Great Plan. Schools can see no way to make it work other than by exactly the methods and principles that have now been discredited in the Soviet system. All over the world, more and more people are recognizing that these principles do not work in economics. I think that more and more people are also beginning to see that they will not work in education either. These principles fail in the two cases ultimately for exactly the same reason: They hamper individual initiative, and deprive the system of the flexibility to adapt to local situations.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this kind of intersection of theory and practice. I also remain hopeful as to the Board’s new direction.

Dispatch from Pakistan #1 – Hitting the Ground

empty tea cupI arrived in Lahore, Pakistan 3:30 AM local time April 13. I’ll be here through April 23. I’m trying to capture my thoughts and experiences in this series of posts. They will be imperfect and fail to convey all the complex truths of this place. Think of this only as a container for my thoughts.

Initial perceptions. When I first traveled to South Africa and Kenya to work with teachers through Education Beyond Borders, all I had as a comparison were neighborhoods evoked by what I saw in those countries. Such is my similar experience here in Pakistan.

An unfair comparison, to be sure, my mind looks for what is similar to other places I’ve been in the world and then tries to puzzle those comparisons together to make sense of the foreign.

It doesn’t do the place justice, and it’s all I have. The more I’m here, the more I can reject the false comparisons in favor of the truths I’ve see here on the ground.

I’m staying with six teachers here to attend the weeklong workshop. Two are from Malaysian schools in the Beaconhouse network. Four are from schools and district offices in Karachi.

All of them are extremely dedicated to doing right by children. They are studying technology. They are enthused about project-based learning, they have been reading up on inquiry-based learning. It’s the same as you would expect from any group of teachers trying to get the mix right in American schools.

And yet it’s a bit different. When we talk about the issue of security in Karachi, the tone changes slightly. The people setting off bombs, the people kidnapping, the people who make fences and checkpoints necessary. “These people are not representative of Pakistan,” everyone I meet here is quick to point out.

From what I’m seeing (and it’s myopically limited based on only 10 days in-country), this is a country much different from what we see on the news. It turns out, only the bad news makes it out of Pakistan to the American media. No one has reported on the peacefulness I’ve seen here. Nor are they interested in the eggs, toast and jam on the table each morning when I come down to breakfast.

These are the pieces of ordinary daily life. The comings and goings of a people that aren’t worthy of report in papers and on the news networks.

It’s a mix of this. It’s the ordinary with the extraordinary. Daily life lives alongside a subtle shadow of actual insecurity. As a visitor, I’m trying to get my mind around it.