Category: epm12

Things I Know 277 of 365: Parent conferences can be student conferences

It is critical that both parent and teacher know that the goals for the child are indeed shared goals, both teacher and parent want what is best for the child/student.

– Sue

Twice each year, the folks at SLA sit down with their advisees and their advisees’ parents and have a discussion of each student’s progress. It’s not an unfamiliar process, but the structures at SLA are different than those I’d experienced in any previous schools I’d attended or taught in.

Growing up, my parents would disappear two nights each year to meet with my teachers.

Upon their return, we would all sit at the kitchen table where my mom would work teacher-by-teacher beginning each review with, “What do you think she had to say about you?”

A torturous process in the moment, I see now what she was trying to do and the habits of mind she was attempting to build.

Last year, at SLA, I felt as though I’d finally gotten my vision of these conferences to line up with the actual practice.

The key was to prep our advisees as much as possible. In years prior, I’d told my advisees they would be responsible for leading the conference discussions, but failed to give them adequate practice in anticipating what they might want to say and how they would make the conversations run as effectively as possible.

How would they steer their parents clear of obsessing over the one low grade to the exclusion of the other A’s and B’s? If the narratives and report cards fell short of their own explanations, how did they plan to reverse course in subsequent quarters?

I’d forgotten my time and training as a teacher had provided me with myriad ways to navigate these waters.

Childhood, adolescence and schooling had provided my students with two strategies – But mom… and (silence).

Neither proved tremendously effective in fostering a discussion or ownership of learning.

Diana asked me earlier today if I had written anything about what made last year’s conferences so successful. I hadn’t. Here it is.

  1. My co-advisor Matt Kay and I showed our advisees both their report cards and narrative report cards in the advisories prior to the conferences. We asked them to compare the grades on the report cards with the comments from the corresponding teachers’ narratives. What did they notice? What surprised them? What made them feel seen? What did they want to highlight with their parents?
  2. Each advisee filled in a table with columns labeled, “What I want to stay the same,” “What I want to change,” “How I’m going to change it.”
  3. Looking at their report cards, their narratives, and their tables, our advisees planned the flow of their conferences. Matt and I offered guiding questions. Would it be better for your parents to hear disappointing news earlier or later? Does it make more sense to show your report card before your narratives or the other way around?
  4. Once it was planned, we asked one student to volunteer for a mock conference where two other advisees played the parents. The rest of us watched. After the mock conference, the whole advisory debriefed and reflected on possible topics or situations we saw that might come up in their own conferences and how they could be approached.
  5. On the day of the conference, the students were the leaders. Matt and I had digital copies of the narratives and report cards, but we kept mum. The entire time, my internal monologue was, “Shut up, Zac. Your only job is to support.”

When all was said and done, I saw more student ownership and parent-child conversation along with teacher restraint in last year’s conferences than any others I’ve been a part of.

How do you conference?

Things I Know 274 of 365: Letters make great teacher gifts

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

– William James

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

It sits on the shelf in my bedroom – a manilla folder that should be a box, but whose contents I haven’t taken the time transfer. The tab of the folder bears the faded name of a former student, but the work inside isn’t his.

If I were to give it a name, I’d go with something like, “The Good Stuff.” This is the folder that holds the notes and letters received from students over the last eight years. I don’t have them all, but I have enough.

When I was teaching, this file lived in a drawer in my classroom. On days when I felt like the last thing I should be doing with my life or to the lives of my students was teaching, I’d flip through it and convince myself there must be some good there.

The folder inspired my annual end-of-year assignment that asked students to write a letter to a teacher who had inspired them giving an update on their lives and letting them know the impact their teaching made.

The folder is also what inspires my recommendation for a holiday gift for a teacher. Write a letter – a real letter – letting them know the effect they’ve had in your life or your child’s life. The only thing it will cost you is time, but it will be more valuable to the receiving teacher than you can know.

Take it a step further, write a letter of appreciation about the teacher and send it to the principal.

One of my favorite parts of having my students write their inspiring teachers was the chance to write letters to my own. Even if you are not a student or the parent of a student, consider giving the gift of a letter of appreciation this year to a teacher who’s made a positive impact in your life.

I know from experience how much those letters can mean and how their contents can sustain us in moments of doubt.

Things I Know 272 of 365: Sketching a school brought clarity of practice

Architecture aims at eternity.

– Christopher Wren

Tonight, in preparation for our next learning task, the class was asked to think about the physical design of a school or learning organization.

What would it look like?

On the heals of drafting our theories of learning and how we might design for difference, this learning tasks makes sense.

It’s also right up the alley of thought I’ve been strolling down recently. Design has been on my brain.

Interestingly, when the professor gave us time to play and told us to see what we could come up with in sketching out what our schools would look like, I had no previous experience to draw from.

I’ve spent the last 8 years re-tooling, rearranging and rethinking classroom design. For the last 6, I’ve been thinking heavily about the systems, structures and pedagogy that work best to the good of the children and adults in schools.

If you asked me what I thought it would look like to see teachers and students interacting in these environments, I’d rattle off words like caring, collaborative, curious, reflective. Then I’d pepper it with examples from my own experiences.

The thing I haven’t done, that I hadn’t done until tonight, is sit down and sketch out what the physical structure of that place might be.

Part of that is likely tied to the fact that those in schools rarely get input into the spaces in which they teach and learn. Often, it’s a rehabilitated building or one that’s been around for decades. To design the physical space is a rarity.

I doodled for a bit tonight, playing with shapes and trying to piece together the structures I’m drawn to and where my students have told me they learn best.

More than anything, I wanted a set of LEGOs. The paper didn’t do what I wanted it to. I needed something bigger and more malleable.

Just before time was called, my group asked me to piece all of our sketches together for a composite final product. You can see it below.

What I said to me team, and what is still true, was that this space is a place I’d both want to teach in and send my kids to.

And that’s just one the first try.

I wonder what would happen if teachers took five minutes to doodle their ideal teaching spaces and then worked to teach as though they were in those spaces. I wonder what would shift. I wonder how interactions and expectations of the students would change.

I wonder what they would sketch with their practice.

Things I Know 271 of 365: Innovation takes both less and more

Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?

– Plato

While the reading in grad school is just as ridiculously intense as promised, if I time it properly, I can still be curator of at least a small sliver of my reading diet.

This morning, heading out the door, I picked up a copy of William Glasser’s The Quality School. I’m not sure where I got it, but it was on my shelf.

Early in the book, Glasser writes, “We should keep in mind that the power of innovation is not that it increases the number of innovative people but that it gives the effective people we have a better chance to demonstrate their effectiveness.”

The quotation struck me as tweetworthy (and given the tonnage of reading I’ve been doing, that bar is high).

Joan Young responded, “That quote makes me wonder how many innovators lie dormant in settings that don’t foster creativity. Thanks for making me think.”

John Spencer jumped in, “I agree. And yet creativity often thrives because of the limitations, barriers and restrictions of a context.”

The conversation turned to the allowances afforded by limitations. Young commented she had arrived at her most creative solutions when confronted with distinct limitations.

This makes sense to me. It echoes the sentiment of last year’s EduCon Friday panelists.

Innovation, the panelists seemed to contend, comes from the intersection of necessity and limitation.

I don’t contend this is untrue, but it can’t be the only path to innovation. Or, they aren’t the only necessary ingredients.

When I think of spaces where creativity and innovation can thrive, I think of the playgrounds of my youth. Before everything was safety-coated, they were spaces of steel, wood and gravel. If you squinted, they looked like residential construction sites.

For my friends and I, they were castles, pirate ships, mansions, and underground lairs.

Our resources were certainly limited. I’d also argue our excess stores of energy necessitated building some sort of imaginary worlds.

There weren’t the only pieces that let the playgrounds become whatever we wanted and needed them to be.

Two other factors cleared the way for our imaginations.

Our parents were nearby, watching from the periphery in case someone got hurt, but otherwise refraining from interference. They needed to be their for their own piece of mind, and we needed them there in case we got in over our heads.

We also needed one another.

These were our first moments of collaboration. We were writing the rules of the game. Where I saw a castle, another might see a space ship.

Because of our limitations of space, our necessity of play, the safety provided by our parents’ watchful eyes and the want to play with another, we settled on a space castle.

And that was the beauty of the recipe. We didn’t know what we couldn’t do, so we did it.

Gradually, our parents increased their perimeter and we became more responsible for ourselves. Unfortunately, this also led to access to more resources. While they weren’t castles or space ships or space castles, they were new and shiny.

I sometimes wonder about the guy in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” I’m certain, after seeing the light and the forms of things, he had to wander back home. With all he’d seen, I still imagine him working some cave Thanksgiving to see what his family saw dancing across the wall.

“Oh, look at that fernodan!” someone must have said.

“There’s no such things as a fernodan,” I bet he said.

How they must have laughed at him.

Things I Know 267 of 365: I got some advice on designing for difference

Last week, I was working on an assignment that asked me to define difference as it related to educational design. From there, I needed to develop my principles of school design. It seemed like the perfect chance to draw on the wisdom of friends, so I sent out an e-mail to some designers I know with the question from my assignment:

What counts, or should count, as a “learning difference” in the organization of learning environments?

The paper ran long, and some of the responses came back after I’d shaped my draft, so I didn’t get to explicitly use their responses. They took the time to craft their responses, though, and I wanted to honor that by sharing them here. My text on the question is at the bottom.

I can’t help but lean towards a student (at the scale of one) having the proactive ability to discern useful resources / flexibility found within a given learning environment, rather than just to assume that clarity will be given to them. Thus, how we set up a student to seek such resources / clues (within a test, within a project, within a team, within a community, etc) may therefore suggest a way to measure (or design for) differences.

– Christian Long

We are going to have an interesting conversation on Thursday at the Goldberg Center on “alternative assignments” for students.  that is, rather than a teacher saying “term paper due on Friday,” the students can devise their own ways to demonstrate their knowledge (we will have one example on Thursday of a student who demonstrated his knowledge by choreographing and performing an interpretive ice dance of a novel he had read…)  I can recall a student once who said to me “rather than an exam, I would much prefer to give a speech to demonstrate what I know.”  I’ve often thought that would be an intriguing way for students to own their learning.

– David Staley

What if one of the first thing a learner did was to design how they would be measured and configure their learning experience to match that and then have that be a part of some sort of public “learning identity” allowing their differences to both set up the parameters for their education and encourage peers to understand each other and connect to one another because of their differences?

e.g. I see from Sally’s profile that she is so good at advanced math that she was able to test out and focus on French history – I wonder if she would consider tutoring me in math and whether we could team up on our French Revolution project?

– Andrew Sturm

Listing the learning differences for which we are accounting, we risk inadvertently neglecting or denying a possible impact of a difference. In thinking about possible differences, it is helpful to appropriate Rosabeth Kanter’s (1993) understanding of difference from “A Tale of ‘O’” in which she defines the normative culture as those who are found in large numbers and those who are different as “the people who are scarce.” Different learning tasks create shifts in populations. In a classroom where students are expected to remain at their desks, a student in a wheelchair could be considered part of the normative culture, while the hyperactive child who squirms and wiggles in his seat looking for any reason to move would appear different. This same group of students on a soccer field during a P.E. class shifts the norms of expected behavior in such a way that the former student now appears different while the latter student becomes normative. Context must be considered when considering the organization of learning.

Non-physical differences can also impact student learning. Personal perception as affected by the stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) or a fixed theory of learning (Dweck, 2000) shift student performance on learning tasks. Unlike those differences described above, these internal differences are not easily perceived, nor should they be presumed in students belonging to one group or another. All possible differences should be counted a differences affecting learning in organizing learning environments. This means subscribing to David Rose’s (2011) rejection of the notion of the standard child, and acceptance of variability as universal.

– me

Things I Know 265 of 365: I’ve been worrying over grades

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

– Pres. Ronald Reagan

I’ve decided, if possible, to take all of next semester’s courses pass/fail.

It was a decision I almost made when I registered this semester, but the schooly devil on my shoulder shouted pretty loudly.

I’m not failing any of my classes and I’m reading and learning more than any aggregate moment of my undergraduate career. The problem is that I’m worried about the grades in a way that makes me uncomfortable and that leaves me wondering if the learning I felt like I was doing matched the grades on my assignments.

This problem works both ways.

Earlier this week, I received a graded stats assignment (and you know how much I’m loving stats). Along with the comments from the Teaching Fellow (what Harvard calls TAs) was an A. I received an A on the assignment.

Then I got angry. I’ve been reminding myself any B I’ve received this semester was someone else’s interpretation of my learning and not a reflection of what I’d actually learned on the assignment. Most of the time, I’ve interacted with the grading TF no more than a sum of 10 minutes. Even if it’s been more, the samples of my work and thinking my graders have seen have been minimal. It’s a little like a standardized testing window.

My anger at the A rested in how quickly I was willing to accept a complimentary grade when it validated my self concept.

I can’t have it both ways. No matter my reaction, the effect is the same. Grades distract me from learning.

This is not to say, as Dave Thomer commented the other day, that I don’t respect and internalized my teachers’ critiques of my work. I’m here to study with experts and learn from them. Part of that means submitting my work for their response.

Whereas a grade hits me like a period of exclamation point marking the end of my thinking on the matter, a paper returned riddled with questions and comments begs a conversation.

I read a grade as, “We’re done here.”

I read comments as, “Say more.”

One of these is internalized as a statement of worth.

The other is read as the invitation to keep thinking and asking questions.

I’m hoping removing overall grades will cancel out some of the background noise and help me focus on my learning and my professors’ coaching of that learning.

Things I Know 263 of 365: Citizenship is both digital and analog

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

– Ralph Nader

The son of one of the dean’s here at school was missing this week. Last night, he returned home, and everyone is safe.

After a friend e-mailed me the flier being circulated in conjunction with the search, I posted it to my Facebook page. I also posted it to the Facebook group for students at HGSE.

When I checked Facebook this morning, the post to my general Facebook wall had been shared 14 times in the night.

Each sharer (Is that the proper colloquialism?) was somehow connected to SLA. Former students, students I’d never taught, graduates from our first class, parents of my advisees, students’ friends from other schools – they all shared the post to their walls, though only one of them is near Boston.

It was a reminder of community and one of those infrequent signs that Facebook might be good for something.

I realize none of the people who passed the message along did any serious lifting beyond a couple clicks, but that’s another vote in favor of the virtual network.

The message moved quickly and didn’t require anyone to inconvenience themselves. This was a worry to someone they were connected to and the relative cost for adding their voices was null.

This could have and has had distinctly negative effects. Petitions, rumors and photos go viral in minutes, and attempts to rectify the wrongs take much more work and are largely ineffective.

In this instance, that wasn’t the case. The objective was to spread the word and help someone else. It happened.

Of similar interest was the fact no one in the HGSE group shared the flier to their walls. Ostensibly, they’re the group that had the most investment in the ordeal.

The temptation is to suggest weaker communal ties. I wonder if that’s it. Everyone I’ve met here is quite caring for one another, and I’ve witnessed their support first hand.

The possibility that comes to mind is perhaps the groups – SLA and HGSE – view the agency afforded by Facebook differently.

Without wading into the riptide of the digital native / digital immigrant debate, I wonder if it seems more natural for such an alert to be transmitted virtually for my SLA community while my HGSE community considers it to be a more physically-bound action.  While both are caring and active communities, I could certainly see how the learning environment of SLA would differently shape a person’s paradigm of citizenship and what participatory culture looks like and can look like. It’s possible HGSE citizenship is analog while SLA citizenship blends the analog with the digital.

It seems to me citizenship should be both and the seams should be invisible.

Things I Know 262 of 365: I wasn’t paying attention

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

– Henry David Thoreau

Yesterday, I was the student I’ve heard teachers worry about as they describe the detrimental effects of lifting prohibitions on mobile devices in the classroom.

Two-thirds of the way through 3-hour class, in class discussion, someone made an interesting point I hadn’t before considered. The point wasn’t made directly to me or even in my general discussion. Within the lecture hall, the content of the remark was diluted by follow-up comments moments after it escaped my classmate’s mouth.

I’m not sure what the follow-up comments were. The initial remark made me curious and I started following my questions around the Internet. Browser tabs began propagating one another, and I soon had enough information to qualify as deeper understanding.

I knew something about what my classmate said that I hadn’t known before I started poking around online.

I hadn’t followed or heard a single word of the discussion once I’d tuned out; yet, I’d kept on learning.

What’s more, once I returned to the conversation, I was able to bring more information with me and deepen the level of discourse.

I’ll admit to feeling a little guilty for tuning out. The conditioned student in me worried the professor would notice I wasn’t following the conversation and be upset or cold call me to bring my attention back.

That’s where my dissonance lived.

I was learning, but I wasn’t in the conversation.

I was on topic, but I wasn’t in sync with those around me.

After class, the whole thing stuck with me. The kind of augmented learning I did isn’t possible or even allowed in most classrooms. Teachers and administrators are worried access to tools and information will lead to distraction in the classroom. I’ve taught long enough with cell phones and instant messenger in my classroom to know there’s some truth to that.

The experience also taught me the need to shift my game. If I was doing things or sharing information students’ points of access could provide, I was wasting my time. Constant information access meant I could focus on what we could do and build with that information. It meant we were free to ask better questions.

That’s what I did last night, deeply engaged in my learning and worried those around me would think ill of me for asking questions to build the fund of knowledge.

Not paying attention, as it turned out, didn’t mean I wasn’t learning.

Things I Know 261 of 365: Teachers aren’t stupid

We are not recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college.

– McKinsey & Company

Of every sobering statistic bouncing around the halls here, that we recruit our teaching population from the bottom third of high school students going to college is one I can’t go a week without hearing cited.

The problem, people are arguing, is our teachers aren’t smart enough to do the job.

I’m done with it.

The same people we are asking to improve schools, to whom we entrust our children, and whom we consistently ask to work harder for more hours are also also supposed to do so while we call them stupid?

Then, beautifully, we stand around and wonder why we can’t attract more candidates to the field.

“Only the worst performing people want this job,” we say to potential recruits, “Come apply.”

As tempted as I am to look into the math of all of this, others have taken care of it. David Wees has this compelling post that pulls apart the implicit meaning of the statistic, writing, “I think the US public should be very insulted by this argument rather than being up in arms about how poorly qualified their teachers are.”

Things really heat up in the comments section.

Wees also points to a post by Larry Ferlazzo who actually digs around to understand the math of the claim and tears greatly at its validity.

At the end of it all, Ferlazzo writes, “In other words, this bottom-third thing does seem to me to be a bunch of baloney.”

I don’t want to re-write Wees or Ferlazzo’s argument or this relevant piece from Scott McLeod.

What has been troubling me is the glomming on to the idea that a student’s grades in school are reflections of his intelligence rather than reflections at how well that student played at school.

I’m not discounting the idea that a student who received strong grades in school could also possess other, more disruptive intelligences.

I’m asking us not to discount the idea that the student who received weaker grades in school might be just as intelligent.

In the comments of Ferlazzo’s post, the question is raised of the correlation between higher ACT and SAT scores and a person’s effectiveness as a teacher. A moderate or even high correlation wouldn’t surprise me. I can see little reason why a person who scored well on a standardized test wouldn’t be more effective at helping others learn to score well on such tests.

And, finally, I wonder about anyone’s willingness to use a test administered to 16-18 year olds as a measure for their intelligence as adults. From a developmental standpoint, their brains and bodies are in a state of absolute flux. I’m more intelligent than I was at 17, but I don’t know that I’d do as well on the ACT.

I am certain 30-year-old me or even 22-year-old me was better prepared to lead a classroom than 17-year-old me.

The McKinsey report from which the statistic originated has been around since 2007 and has probably been used to denegrate teachers since then. Any of the people I’ve heard cite the stat this semester could have spent the same 10 minutes I did researching to understand its flaws.

I worry they didn’t.

Things I Know 260 of 365: I’m not sure what I did right

When we fail in this diagnostic role we begin to worry about ‘assessment.’

– David Hawkins

I’m struggling to write tonight. I’ve been struggling to write for the last few days.

I’ve an assignment due tomorrow – 8-10 pages, and I can’t get myself invested in it. Or, I’m too invested in it.

For the last assignment in this class, I submitted work of which I was proud. I spent time and thought on the assignment. I worked to refine my thinking and understand which other thinkers served as progenitors to my ideas.

My work was submitted with a feeling of having been thoughtful and diligent in my work. I had learned something new and refined   old thinking.

When I got my assignment back, I struggled to find positive comments. I struggled to find comments that were in response to my ideas.

I didn’t need praise lobbed at me or ego stroking. I just needed a clear sign of where I was on the right track; otherwise, I start to question if I was anywhere near that track.

Because I am who I am, I submitted a re-write of the assignment. Re-doubling my efforts, I consulted the rubric even more the second time than the first.

While my grade on the second attempt was higher than the grade on the first, I’m still sitting here stymied as I work to complete this new assignment.

It’s a horrible feeling.

I don’t know what I did well in the last assignment upon which I can build for this go-round. I have lists of things to avoid, but I don’t know what I’m good at in context of trying to do what’s been asked of me.

I’ll write more tonight.

I’ll write more tomorrow.

I’ll turn in my assignment tomorrow.

I’ll be hesitant to feel proud.

And the thing that kills me – that absolutely drive me batty – the work I did on the first assignment and the work I did for the re-write was fine work. I am still proud of that work.

But there’s a teacher’s opinion in there. There’s a teacher’s opinion muddying the waters of my learning.

And I’m really hating the fact that matters to me.