Category: Post-A-Day

43/365 Assign Projects

Alex transferred to SLA in his junior year from one of large comprehensive schools in Philadelphia after it closed. Toward the end of the first week, I asked him how SLA compared to his former school. It was similar, he said, many of the same classes he’d seen where he came from.

“But that learning, though…You guys are way ahead of us on learning.”

It took time for him to become accustomed to the way of doing things at SLA. The transition was a culture shift, and it wasn’t one he’d asked for.

If we had administered test, I’m sure we would have found gaps in Alex’s literacy and math scores. In conversations in class, he would often ask for clarification on historical ideas that were common knowledge to his classmates.

Using these pieces of assessment, we would have enough data to draw up a deficit model of Alex that fit him somewhere in a remedial class in a traditional school.

That wasn’t the philosophy of the school.

If you want a dipstick along the way, use a quiz or test. If you want to know what a student has truly learned, assign a project.

Throughout his first quarter with us, Alex was assigned a joint project through his English and history classes. He was to find a named building in his neighborhood and research both the building and the person for whom it was named. That done, he was to tell the story of both.

Alex selected a middle school near his house and decided a video documentary would best convey what he found.

The physical structure of the school, Alex found, had been under contract for sale to a local business. Though the contract had fallen through, it hadn’t fallen through before the district installed a new heating system as part of the deal.

Alex found the heating system hadn’t been connected or made operational. It sat in the basement unused while the inefficient system the building was built with limped along.

Then, Alex found something on the tour that changed the story he was telling. In the school’s library, he found bare shelves and was told the school hadn’t purchased a new book for the space in more than five years.

When he returned to SLA, he was impassioned. Recognizing the injustice he’d uncovered, Alex approached the editing and production of his project with new intensity. He had found something real through the asking of authentic questions, and worked to marshal all of his abilities to make the best product he could.

While Alex’s case is not the norm for all projects, it does highlight what can happen with projects at their best. Because he had been givent he scope and charge to build something of meaning that required dexterity with primary sources, interviews, storytelling and myriad other skills, Alex created something that blew the possible deficit understanding of his learning out of the water.

The video narrative he created laid out in stark relief the images he’d captured of the heating system and juxtaposed them heartbreakingly with his images of the library. After the viewing in class, his classmates gave him a round of applause and peppered him with questions, hungry to better understand what he’d uncovered.

As teachers were able to assess his discrete skills through quizzes and other assessments and and offer Alex help in augmenting the areas in which he was weakest. Because of the project, though, we were able to see the best of what Alex was capable and, in turn, she the best of Alex.

42/365 Story Matters

Each spring, a group of SLA juniors leave the familiar confines of Philadelphia for the foreignness of Flagstaff, AZ. They go as part of an independent trip where they and 10 students from Flagstaff raft down the San Juan river for four days, experiencing nature and America in a way few people will ever have the chance. Along the way, they stop, disembark their rafts and study collections of ancient petroglyphs left by Native Americans in a time long forgotten.

While archeologists have theories as to the meanings of these alien pictures, we don’t quite know for sure. Each year, students stand near the walls and wonder at the remnants of a people and what they have left behind.

Story matters.

This is most obvious in English and language arts classrooms. Built on narratives, fiction and non, their purpose is to connect story to its parts and parts to story while helping students access both the whole and the pieces so that they might interpret the world. Story most clearly and forthrightly matters in these classrooms. One would be hard pressed to find a contrarian ready to stake a claim in opposition to this fact.

Where we fall down in appreciating story but where it is no less necessary is in the classrooms not officially demarcated as the homes of stories. Math, science, even history classrooms are often thought to be devoid of story or of the requirement of story.

Here, though, is where stories are most necessary.

They need not be the stories of content. While helpful, it is not required that students know the stories of Pythagorus or Euclid. If they learn them, fine, but they are not required.

What should be required, and what should weigh on the heads of all teachers are the stories each of their students lived before they became part of this grade and this class in this school. What were their math, history, science, English, physical education stories before they walked into our classrooms?

Almost inevitably, we fail to ask for our students’ stories of prior experiences in school with specific regard to whatever subject matter we’re charged with transmitting. When those stories are exchanged, when a student finds an unlikely mechanism for alerting her teacher to the story of how she came to think of her self as always deficient in math, we have few mechanisms for honoring those stories.

Instead, we charge through, foolhardily focused on curriculum timelines and learning objectives for our students without concerning ourselves with our own learning objectives – understanding where our students are coming from and how we might tailor our practice to meet them at the end of their last stories so that our chapters might be more fulfilling.

This is difficult work. It requires the asking of questions to which we might not like the answers. Each year as an English teacher, I heard new students exclaim that they did not like reading, abhorred writing and didn’t even want to consider whatever it was we might consider “classics.”

The instinctual response was not surprising – put so much of all of their aforementioned hatreds in front of them that they couldn’t help but be overcome by wonder at how wrong they were to dismiss those pieces of school that had been part of stories of the failure, difficulty, and embarrassment. Not surprisingly, when I gave room for this instinct, it ended poorly.

When I gave room to their stories, though, and listened for the pieces of previous classes that had hindered my students’ ability to access content and learning, I was able to change my practice and consider thoughtfully how that year might tell a better story than the last.

It is an understandable reflex of the classroom teacher to assume the blank slate of the school year applies to whatever subject area for which she is responsible. This is not so, can never be so.

Given this, we must listen to the stories our students bring with them to our classes. We must listen to them as the first and most important pieces of data available to us in crafting learning experiences that might lead to better stories for whomever is responsible for our students after us.

41/365 We Must Be Our Whole Selves in the Classroom

Remember when you were in school and saw a teacher out in the real world? Do you remember that feeling of awe as you realized this person existed outside of the classroom? It was a mind-bending experience for me, filled with questions – Could they still grade without the classroom? Were they talking to everyone in the grocery store about the quadratic formula? Were they hiding our homework in their purses?

Then, when I was safely back in our roles as teachers and students in the classroom, I could say, “I saw you this weekend!” as though we’d caught them out of bounds. Those are times burned into our memories.

They have no place in the schools we need.

As much as we can, we must be out whole selves in the classroom.

It is easy to step into a classroom and decide, “This is my teacher self. This is who the students will see.” Then, when the day is done, we return to our nerdy appreciation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meet up with our kickball teams, or join with our fiction writers’ workshop as though the two identities are completely separate.

The separation of our professional selves and our private selves must be maintained, to be sure. Taking the problems and worries of every student home with us each night creates martyrs, not teachers.

Still, there is a place for our whole selves in the classroom.

This is the support to which our students must have access. We bring social capital with us. To ignore that and deny our students access is to do them a detriment and limit their access to the “real world.”

Whatever we were before we were teachers, we must take these roles with us into the classroom. In fact, we cannot help it, so we might as well make it explicit.

No matter the social standing of our students outside of school we must consider ourselves as conduits to the cultures they might access when they leave us. Much has been made of the “funds of knowledge” in which our students exist outside of schools, in their daily cultures. To be sure, these are cultures from which teachers should and must learn.

Little to nothing has been mentioned of the funds of knowledge existing in the non-school lives of teachers. Learning lives there. Whatever can be used by students to access the lives of their teachers can be used by teachers to access the lives of students.

As much as we must be our best teacher selves, we must consider how much of our whole selves we can be in the classroom.

A former student recently asked about how much she might share regarding her past. Now in college and preparing for student teaching, this student knew the hardships she’d known in childhood could act as anchors for her students. She knew she would have found it easier to navigate the difficult and tumultuous psychological spaces she’s encountered if she’d had a teacher in her life who’d said, “I’ve been where you are, and I found the way out.” Realizing she was about to enter the lives of her own students, this young woman wanted to make sure she was as transparent as she could be so that her students saw her as a source of strength if they were working through some of the same personal crises.

Certainly, teaching does not require we lay our lives bare for our students in hopes such nakedness of spirit will help them at our experience. When possible, though, whether it be a favorite television show or a traumatic event, begin our whole selves in the classroom gives students access not only to who we are as people, but to who they might become.

40/365 Build Your Own Faculty Lounge

A group of student teachers sits around a table in a classroom long after the school day has ended. They are participating in a seminar required of them by their university. The intent is to help them through student teaching. Still near the top of the semester, they’re not yet in the long grass of the student teaching experience.

“I’m just not clear on why,” one of them says to their supervisor, “I mean, I don’t know why twitter would be important to teachers. What’s the point?”

It’s a fair question, considering each of the student teachers has just been asked to sign up for a twitter account and assigned to participate in #engchat, one of the many weekly twitter meetups of teachers from around the world dedicated to generating conversation specific to the discipline of teaching English.

It’s a fair question not only for these student teachers, but for any teacher who’s ever looked at twitter or some other type of social networking tool and asked, “Why?”

My answer to these teachers, though seemingly flippant, “You can’t control who teaches next to you.”

Perhaps more explanation is in order.

Only a small percentage of our school culture where faculty is concerned is within our own individual locus of control. We may sit on interview committees or help to recruit talented teachers we’ve met into our schools. For the most part, though, the grim reality is that we may not connect with or be inspired by the other teachers with whom we work.

Social networking tools allow for the construction of the faculty lounges we wish we had. For most people outside of schools, the teachers’ lounge remains a mythical place where teachers retreat during lunch or planning and then return when it’s time for class with no hint of what they’ve done in the interim.

For those who work in schools, I know what depressing, pessimistic places faculty lounges can be. All it takes is one teacher who’s been in the classroom past his expiration date to turn an otherwise reflective space into the physical equivalent of anonymous online commenting.

Social networking tools allow teachers to escape those physical spaces and curate networks of colleagues from across the world to help improve practice, augment resources, and build conduits of collaboration. In their book, Student Achievement Through Staff Development, Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers argue moving from a situation of practicing theory with low-risk feedback to one of coaching, study teams, or peer feedback moves incidence of application and problem solving from 10-15% saturation to 85-90% saturation in teacher practice.

The issue? Not every teacher finds himself surrounded by peers to whom he can turn for such coaching and the like. This is where the digital network should come in. Through connections with other like-minded teachers and those teachers who act as the loyal opposition, teachers can build networks of professional development while working within schools that would otherwise let their learning languish.

These are networks of people who can improve spirits on an otherwise dreary teaching day, work collaboratively in a document to help build a unit plan, and share links to the perfect resources for helping students access learning.

While there are no set ways for developing online faculty lounges, some approaches have been anecdotally helpful in building networks of support.

  • Begin by reading. The Internet has no shortage of teachers offering their thoughts on everything from education policy to professional practice. Many new to online networks take solace in knowing they can lurk and read long before they ever begin to craft their online selves into existence.
  • Comment. Some of the best conversation that can come from connecting via social networks is not the production of new content, but the questioning and commenting on the work of others. This is by no means an encouragement to recklessly argue. It is more of a push in the direction of creation. If you’re reading, you might as well stop and comment, right?
  • Follow the bread crumbs. While linking online can lead to an echo chamber at times, it more often can be counted on to help introduce you to new voices. In the physical world, this is the equivalent of meeting a friend of a friend and finding out you’ve got similar interests. One of the great benefits of hypertextual writing is that you are reading along with the writer and able to trace many of the ideas that influenced what she is saying and the ideas that influenced those ideas.
  • Embrace the fire hose. This may be the most difficult. If you were to look at the listing of online voices we follow at this moment, you’d find hundreds of posts we’ve not yet had the time to attend to. In traditional texts, this would be frustrating. Online, it need not be. There will always be a fire hose of information waiting for you to put yourself in front of it. Some days, you’ll have time. Other times, you’ll step aside and mark everything as read. That’s okay. In the same way you have the right to put down a book without reaching its end, you have the right not to read everything on the Internet. No one is expecting you to. Read what you want. The rest will always be there if you change your mind.
  • Make your own path. You were likely taught to approach a book in a certain way, to look for certain markers and to take note of certain things. This need not be the case in online spaces and in curating your online networks. Let your love of learning mingle with your love of pictures of kittens. Sometimes, those posting the kitten photos are the ones who can challenge your ideas about what it means to learn in new and powerful ways.

While these are five ways to approach building your online faculty lounge, they are just as easily five ways not to build that lounge. This is the democracy of online spaces, and it is key as a contrast to the physical space where you might find yourself. You have control over those to whom you turn for support and advice, and you can always move away from those who bring pessimism to your practice.

39/365 What We Want for Students, We Must Want for Teachers

A friend of mine, a classroom teacher with more than 15 years of experience working with students at all grade levels, found herself a new school in a new city after years of experience in another school system. Because of tough economic conditions, few teaching positions were open, and she took a job at a school about which she’d heard mixed reviews.

A few months later, she resigned from the school. She left it broken in places no teacher should be broken by a school.

What we want for our students, we must want for our teachers.

Within her school, my friend was constantly being evaluated and given feedback that she had not met the expectations on the school-wide evaluation form. During one observation, when a student spoke out, rather than awarding that student with a demerit as policy dictated, this teacher approached the student and spoke to him as a person about community and what it means to be a member.

At the end of the lesson, the teacher’s observer commented that she’d failed to follow school protocol and would be marked “unsatisfactory” as a result.

This is a story of a particular time and place, but it could easily be the story of innumerable schools across the country. We are treating our teachers, practicing professionals, as though they step into the classroom devoid of wisdom, care, and creativity.

We must stop this. Teachers must refuse to subject themselves to this kind of treatment. When teachers are not trusted or allowed to connect with their students in human ways that help to model how to be members of a community, when they are forced to award consequences devoid of conversation, when their professionalism is called into question when they treat children as people – it diminishes our democracy let alone the professionalism of teachers.

In many cases, it is our youngest teachers, drawn to the profession (often with minimal training) who find themselves in these schools. As it is there first foray into professional teaching they may not know to be insulted by the feedback they receive. Indeed, because of the feeling of treading water that comes with any novice teachers, they may welcome the feedback as the only chance to improve.

In time they may become dependent on this feedback, relying on the outside judgement of others in place of developing their own since of success based on their professional opinion. Worse yet, some may master the criteria of the observation form, receive “outstanding” ratings in all areas and come to think of this as a mark of completion. For those teachers who were, themselves, the schooliest of students, counting success as the approval of their assessors will make perfect sense.

We must want more for teachers.

We must want more for teachers because we want more for students and for society.

Oftentimes, those who call for the improvement of the teaching profession employ the same deficit model of thinking they apply to rhetoric about those students who come from communities in poverty to the teachers they’re attempting to “improve.”

I am reminded of the passage from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation where he describes fast food’s attempt to alter their production lines so that workers with no experience and limited or no English proficiency can prepare food based on a system of pictures.

While the school reform movement has not made it this far, such a horizon is not as distant as some might think.

Scripted curricula, check-off observation forms – these tools and those like them not only generate a stifling “one size for all” mindset about schools, but they ask less and less of our teachers, not more.

And we should ask more of our teachers – more creativity, more imagination, more inquiry, more investigation.

As it sits, though, we are asking for more conformity, as though our children come from one mold, as though our teachers should as well.

38/365 ‘Sequester,’ It’s not Just for Juries Anymore

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As a newly minted Coloradan, I’ve been taking great joy and great pride in living as close as I ever have to a National Park. So, when the local rag ran this story about the National Park Service announcing the cuts it would have to make if the sequester I’ve been hearing so much about came to fruition, I decided it was time to figure out why keeping a jury out of the public eye was going to cut short my hiking prospects.

Research completed, I thought it might be helpful to post here for other folks who want to figure this stuff out in 20 minutes or less.

The bulk of the basics can be accomplished with the first two pieces below. If you’ve other links to resources for a non-econ primer on the looming fiscal oblivion, please post them in the comments below.

Artifact 1: The “Deficit and Debt Ceiling” According to Khan

Though a bit old, this is a great start to understanding not only the debt ceiling, but debt and deficit in general. Oh, Sal, is there anything you can’t explain?

Artifact 2: Planet Money Presents Fiscal-Cliff Jargon

If Planet Money had existed when I was high school, it’s likely I would have actually finished that AP econ class I was taking via delayed satellite broadcast. This simple story takes you through the terms and big ideas in a simple < 5 min. bite. MMMMMM… Information is tasty.

Artifact 3: This Memo from a Law Firm in …Arizona?

If you’ve a few more than 20 minutes, you should check out this memo from a D.C. law firm posted by the Arizona Department of Education explaining the nuance of the sequester as well as how and which programs would be affected if it kicks in.

37/365 What I’d Want from a Director of Blended Learning

I love a good question, so I couldn’t very well ignore the inquiry throwdown from Ben Wilkoff earlier this week. In the running for Denver Public Schools Director of Blended Learning, Ben published the video below asking his network what they would do if they got the job. This isn’t because Ben is at a loss for ideas, but because he’s working to prove the larger point of his video – he plans on taking his network with him.

In a time when we pay much lip service to the value of connection, networks and the strength of weak ties, Ben is putting it to work and planning on leveraging it to do the important work of teaching the students of Denver.

Published as a vlog entry on YouTube, Ben’s video invites replies via comment or video. I’ve been thinking about my response since I heard about Ben’s call, and my hesitancy turns out to be my answer.

I’m typing my response to the video because recording online video isn’t a persona I’ve built yet for myself or a piece I’ve adapted my online persona to include.

That’s what I’d want from a Director of Blended Learning – someone who will help those within a large urban school district to evolve their understanding of their personae as educational practitioners to include new methods and media for helping students learn.

It’s something Ben does exceedingly well, and it’s why I hope he gets the job.

Somewhere in between the future, the present, and the past, we allowed it to be okay for teachers and administrators to identify themselves as “computer-illiterate,” or somewhere on a scale that includes the term. I’d want a director who sees all pieces and means of communication and leveraging learning to be part of who we are as educators and as learners. I’d also want that person to be someone who understands the difficulty of this shift of mindset for many and is willing to take the little steps necessary to help those many move forward.

Yes, I’d want practical skills, an understandings of classroom practices and online possibilities, but I’d want more than that. I’d want a director who finds joy in play, in learning, in problem solving and in working to help others. That joy can be infectuous, and I can think of no other contagion more necessary to our practice than the joy of learning, experimenting, and iterating solutions until they’ve become a solution to the problems at hand.

In many ways, Ben’s video posing the question illustrates these concepts. Rather than sitting in front of a camera and speaking, he drew from his repertoire as a creator, scholar and networker to craft a question rich in both depth and symbolism.

I’d want a director of blended learning who understands this shifting of how we deliver a message so that it can connect with readership across strata and experiences.

In many ways, the technical proficiency is easy (too easy) to find. Buzzwords like flipped classroom, MOOCs and even blended learning are easy to espouse. I’d want someone who could do all those things while asking questions, inspiring creative thought, and moving to make problems into solutions and opportunities for learning.

That’s pretty simple, no?

36/365 Turning a Snow Day into a School Day (a guest post)

Paul Tritter is a friend and Boston school teacher who found himself up against some deadlines in the wake up Nemo. I asked him to share how he pulled the majority of his students into an impromptu online course to keep momentum moving.

You might have heard that we had a little snow storm up here in Boston last week.  I love snow. Nothing creates neighborhood camaraderie quite like the morning shovelling after a big blizzard, and as a teacher, I love a snow day or two. The unexpected time to relax (i.e. catch up on grading and planning) is always welcome. School was cancelled Friday, and the call came Sunday that we would be out Monday as well (eventually we missed Tuesday too). At my school we have half-days scheduled for Wednesday and Friday, and school vacation is next week. Lots of time off.

As any teacher knows, this is a little bit too much time off.  Momentum in a classroom is hard to develop and maintain, and all of this stopping and starting is not going to be much help.  This interruption is going to be felt most acutely by the seniors in my IB Literature course. Those who are familiar with the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme, will know that students in the second year of their literature courses are about to run up against a series of internationally determined deadlines for various rather high-stakes assessments. The dates won’t change, and I’ve just lost three days.

In my class, the students are preparing for the sin qua non of IB assessment, The Literary Commentary.  For this assignment, students are given a poem with which they are familiar, but that they have not studied in depth during class time. They do not know exactly what poem they will be given until they arrive in a room and are presented with a stack of envelopes each containing a different work.  The student is given precisely 20 minutes to prepare an 8-minute commentary (known in French as an explication de texte) on the poem. The commentary should have a central argument that is more than just an interpretation of the poem.  Students must walk through the poem identifying and explaining the various literary devices, authorial choices, and writer’s moves, explaining the effect of each, and discuss how it contributes to the overall meaning or effect of the poem. The 8-minutes is followed by two minutes of Q&A and then a 10-minute conversation about another work that we have studied in the course.
The commentary is conducted one-on-one with the teacher, recorded, and sent to IB for external assessment.
It’s stressful, and it’s hard.

The primary aim of my teaching in the unit leading up to the commentary is to get students to unlearn one of the nasty habits of reading poetry, reflexive interpretation. In the commentary, and in reading poems in general, it is important to first focus on the literal, to be able to notice and articulate what is on the page, that which is indisputably true.  There is a temptation to make the first question after reading a poem, “What does it mean?”  But in an exercise like the commentary, and really in developing any good reading of a poem, the first order of business must always be to ask, “What is there?” or “What do you notice?” This way, students are asked to slow down their thinking and make clear what precisely in the poem leads to their overarching interpretation of the piece.

There are lots of ways to get at this particular skill of noticing, but nothing so effective as consistent practice, and all of these schedule interruptions are not going to be helpful in this process.

So I had an idea. I would try to get together an impromptu online class for my students on the snow day.

While shovelling, I checked in with some high school kids in my neighborhood who told me that they would probably not participate in such a thing unless there was extra credit involved.  I usually have a “no extra credit” policy, but I was kind of curious to see what this would look like.

I posted a note on our class edmodo site offering the bonus and asking for interest.  Twelve of the nineteen students in the class expressed interest.  Great! But I hadn’t really thought through how I would go about running the class, and as I continued to think about it, I came up with more and more problems.  Here are the main ones:

  1. I needed a free or cheap platform through which to conduct the class.
  2. The work and learning of the class needed to be completely extra-curricular. Because this was optional and dependent on using technology that all students may not have readily available in their homes, I couldn’t assign any of the material that would be required for my class.
  3. The learning needed to be meaningful, but the agenda not overly ambitious for an experimental venture.

Solution #1:
Through a quick tech consult with Zac, I decided it would be best to use a hangout on Google+, even though they are limited to 10 participants.  I would livestream the hangout for overflow participants and set up a backchannel for chatting and linking. While this was not ideal, it would work well for the experiment. I would use a google doc to capture the student work.

Solution #2:
I had planned at some point to read this article about poetry and meaning with my students.  In it, the writers examine an example of found poetry created from Craigslist Missed Connection posts, and essentially provide a commentary on the poem. It is to some extent a professional model of the work I am asking students to do. With the condensed schedule, I wasn’t going to be able to cover it in the depth I wanted to, or do the activity I was planning, so I decided to use its premise as the basis for the lesson. I figured that students sitting at their computers during the lesson would have ready access to source material to turn into found poetry. It occurred to me that I should not ask my students to go onto Missed Connections, so I had them use their own Facebook and Twitter feeds as source material.

Solution #3:
The focusing question for the lesson was: What makes a poem a poem?

Here were the basic steps.

  1. Students would look through their social media feeds and find one post (ideally fewer than 50 words) that was striking or interesting in some way and paste that post to the google doc I had set up for the class.
  2. We would scroll through the document and have each student read his or her post and say why they picked it.
  3. Students would make a second copy of the post and, without changing any words or punctuation, turn it into a poem.
  4. Students would read their poems, and then verbally and in writing explain what they did to turn the post into a poem.

The idea was to get students to notice and articulate the choices they were making that made their selected post become a poem. My thinking was that if they could see themselves turning everyday prose into poetic language, they might be more attuned to the types of moves that poets make in the texts we will read in class.

What happened.

The biggest challenges ended up being the technical ones. I am not in the habit of making friends with my students on social media, so I created a new Google+ account just for this purpose.  Students had trouble finding it, and some of those who had not used the site before found it confusing and less than user-friendly (I am with them on that. I never use my Google+ except for hangouts.)  By the time we were ready to get started, 11 of them had found and added me and two more were trying to.

I decided not to spend a lot of time delaying the hangout to deal with these difficulties because it was, after all, an experiment.  By the time we really got started, I had eight participants. Good enough.

The real problem was my computer. For some reason, I was unable to get my microphone to work. I unmuted everything. I tried the built-in and an external mic, but no matter what I tried, I could not get my students to hear me (What else is new?). I debated cancelling the session, but instead decided to press on using the chat feature in the hangout.  This was slow-going, but I was able to copy and paste some of the notes I had written in my rough lesson plan, and one of the students kept reminding the others to look at what I was typing. It was not ideal, but it went well.  This created the most problems near the end when I was trying to get students to clearly articulate their rationales and begin to develop interpretations of their poems. It was just taking too long to type everything.

When all was said and done, we had been on the chat for nearly two hours. Though I think the work could have been a little bit better in quality, it wasn’t bad for a snowday lesson under technical duress.  Some of the student observations included:

  • I found two words that rhymed and put them at the ends of lines.
  • I put a word by itself on a line to add emphasis.
  • I put the word “small” by itself on a line to be a physical representation of the meaning of the word.
  • I added line breaks where I thought the tone of the original changed.

(Note:  Once I get all of the students’ permission, I will post the document we created.)

These comments and others were exactly what I was after from the lesson. Had we had more time (or any audio) I might have encouraged them to develop more complete interpretations of their poems, but I was happy with these outcomes.  Students were articulating the types of features that make poems poetic. Now we’ll see how this transfers to our actual classroom work and whether, having created poems themselves, the student will be more attuned to the choices of the poets we study.

Here are some of my takeaways from the experience:

  1. Despite the hassles, the students thought it was fun.  Several said that they wish we could have online class more often.  I think it was critically important that this was an interactive forum rather than the one-way types of online courses that pervade. We learned together.
  2. I spent a lot of time setting this up.  In the future, I might make the basic setup of a system like this a part of my beginning of the year routine. That way, when such a situation arises again, I won’t be running around the internet like a chicken with my head cut off (or a teacher who forgot to make copies).
  3. Not being able to talk is not the worst thing in the world.  One of the main goals in my practice this year is to talk less in classes and have students talk more.  I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it, and this was a natural extension of that work.
  4. Pedagogy matters more than technology does. A lesson has to be uniquely tailored to the students and the context. This was an Arthur C. Clarke experience, and I think I’m safe for now.

Questions that remain (and I’d love to hear your thoughts):

  • Has anyone else had similar experiences?  I’d love to hear your stories.
  • Which platforms might be better for something like this?
  • I have heard and read several news stories of teachers and districts doing similar things. Should this become a regular practice in our schools? If it does, how do we account for the lack of access to technology in many of our students’ homes?
  • A pedagogical question: I considered asking the students to choose source material that they found poetic even though it was not a poem. I opted to simply have them choose any post they found interesting on the theory that any interesting text has some qualities that could be considered poetic and thus be enhanced by the poetic form.  My concern was that by introducing the idea that the the language should be poetic too early in the process, they would later be less aware of the specific choices they had made to turn it into a poem. Would this alternate phrasing of the original task have changed the final outcome?  If so, how?

Thanks for reading, and thanks Zac for the forum.

Paul tweets at @ptritter.

Learning Grounds Ep. 008: In which David talks about moving to what’s next and what’s key to his learning

In this episode, Zac sits down with David Bill to talk about what’s moving him from a formal school setting and what he’s moving toward. We discuss his passion for authentic learning and where it originated.

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34/365 My Four Rules for Conference Session Attendance

Before my second session at IETA, ran to the vendor hall to snag a pad of paper. I’d rushed in to my first session without laying down some ground rules, and figured writing them down would help me to remember to say them aloud this time. The photo below are the four rules I count as key to positive conversations where learning is involved.

four rules

1. Yes, and…
It’s a key to improv, and experience has shown it to be a key to getting anything done that might look like a solution. If you’ve ever spoken to a group of teachers (or any other group of adults in a system who’ve grown accustomed to how things are done), you know the tendancy of a momentum-killing phrase to pop up, “Yeah, but…” By asking folks to agree to a mindset of “Yes, and…” for at least 90 minutes, you’re able to stave off comments that sound a lot like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea, but here’s why it won’t work in my school…” Instead, “Yes, and…” asks participants to approach new ideas from the perspective of, “Yes, that’s a great idea, and here’s how I’d have to modify it to work in my school…” If I can get people to agree to this line of thinking for the 90 minutes, it’s possible we might get some actual work done.

2. Assume positive intent.
My friend Mike believes what he believes. At the same time, he’s willing to hear other people out and change his mind if the argument makes sense. “I always assume positive intent,” he told me at the beginning of the year. “Even if I disagree completely with what other people are saying, I assume they’re coming from a positive place.” It was the first time I’d heard the idea put in such a way. It was more adult and less Pollyanna than, “I look for the best in people.”
When working with a group, I ask them to assume positive intent. At IETA, for example, the room was full of school, district, and state administrators as well as classroom teachers. These are group that can be counted upon to gripe about each other behind closed doors and mumble those gripes when in the same session. By explicitly asking (and reminding) people to assume the things they heard and disagreed with were coming from a place of positive intent, I hoped to help folks look for common cause.

3. We are raising barns.
One of my professors started class last year by having us read this article on taking a “barn-raising” approach to class conversations. Acknowledging the fact that ideas in groups can quickly get floated and then sink when the next speaker makes clear he was really just waiting for his turn to talk rather than listening, this piece sets a different tone. It asks participants to listen to those who are speaking and comment from a place of supporting or building on what’s been said instead of moving to a tangent. The approach helps a group keep focus and allows for the following of ideas to deeper and deeper places. It’s a beautiful thing.

4. Twitter for Introverts
It’s a back channel with a purpose. Lately, I’ve been trying to make room for people who have questions or disagree with what I’m saying in a space. This comes from my increasing realization that, as an extrovert, I’m fine speaking up in a group. Others, as it turns out, aren’t as comfortable. If I start by inviting folks to tweet me as things move on with questions or comments they don’t necessarily feel comfortable saying aloud, I can invite a richer conversation. The key is remembering to check my phone for updates. This tactic allows me to tailor what’s going on to a larger portion of the room, keeps my ego in check and clears a path to follow-up conversations later.

There are other hopes and norms to be set when working with a group. These four, though, set a tone that I hope for in a classroom of students, but don’t have time to work on so gradually in a conference or breakout session. Plus, when it works, it’s a beautiful, iterative, and solutions-oriented conversation.