Tag: collaboration

When Collaboration isn’t the Skill You Need

Google Docs new sharing feature

I’ve enjoyed these of these posts. Aside from that damned tree question, each question you’ve posted on Twitter has been one I’ve met with curiosity and an element of joy unique to the experience. These posts are a kind of writing I’ve not gotten to do for years, and certainly have an audience much different from my day gig.

It is collaboration moving apace with some of the best of what’s possible. Each morning twitter lets me know you’ve posed the day’s question, and I know my question to you has been sent along the string connecting our technological tin cans. From there, I add it to my queue of questions to be answered. For a few, I’ve pulled them into the physical world, explained our setup and asked what other folks would say. Usually when I’ve done this, it’s a combination of wanting to know what others think, and hoping they could help me jumpstart my own thinking when my answer isn’t apparent.

For the more confounding questions you’ve posed, I’ve pulled you aside in online chats to see exactly what you meant. My favorite response you’ve given thus far, by the way, has been, “You know these questions are open to interpretation, right?”

Again, collaboration working at its potential.

Sometimes, though, collaboration isn’t what’s necessary. Sometimes, what’s necessary is a solitary, thoughtful effort that asks a person to turn inward on herself or on a problem to be considered.

Sometimes, collaboration is a bad idea.

I don’t have a list of these situations. I don’t even have a list of attributes to help you determine where collaboration is called for and where it should be avoided. Instead, I have three other big picture concepts that should be the part of all learning experiences – choice, context, and openness.

Choice in collaborating or not comes down to the task for me. If you ask me to draft a piece of writing, my response is likely going to be to pull up a new doc, throw on my headphones, and ignore the world until I’m done. At that point, I’ll show you my first effort. Until then, for me, writing is a collaboration-free task. Ask me to solve a complex statistical problem, though, and it’s all hands on deck. Not only will I want you to collaborate with me, I’ll need it.

Collaboration is right in some contexts, and not in others. If I’m writing a blog post, it’s going to be a solitary task as mentioned above. The editing is going to stay solitary as well. If I’m writing something for larger distribution (say, a book), my editing and revising process is going to draw in as many voices as make sense for the audience of the text. Similarly, if the effort is to be representative of an organization or system beyond me, again, context points to collaboration.

Openness means several things. It has to do with my openness to the ideas of others as I work my way through a problem. Sometimes, I don’t want to hear your ideas, even if they’re better that mine. It also has to do with how open I want to be with my process. Sometimes, writing is ugly. Sometimes building a unit plan means I need to let things sit until the last minute. As it is, I have a project of import for the day gig. I haven’t yet fully collaborated with anyone because the ideas I’m working with are still in my head. I’ve erased the white board of my mind several times over the last few weeks because I need to be the sole owner of the ideas for now. Eventually, collaboration will be called for and I’ll invite others in to the process to pull things apart. For now, though, the work is solitary.

I love collaborating. I love the thrill that comes from building something that reflects the perspectives of many minds. I also have an abiding love for working alone.

From Theory to Practice:

  • When designing tasks for your students, ask if they need to be collaborative, solitary, or either. Sometimes, the social-emotional learning comes from being able to rightly decide whether you want and need to work alone or as part of a team.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

I’d Build a Constellation of Philanthropies

milky way

While I know some things about some things, everyone seems to think starting their own philanthropy is the answer. I think about it differently.

Instead of having a multitude of smart, dedicated people working on the same problem from a million different places, what might happen if that multitude of people (and perspectives) was asked to work together to consider a problem? A charitable DARPA.

Instead of starting a philanthropy, I’d try to use that sum of money to entice existing, similarly-aligned philanthropies to join forces and work to solve a given problem together.

Homelessness, unemployment, hunger, education, nutrition – all pieces of poverty – I’d find the leading organizations and minds and say, “I’ll fund a coalition if you choose to work together.” As the work progressed, we’d keep our doors open to other organizations that felt common cause while holding different views as to the solutions.

As I’d argue is endemic to our culture when people disagree, it has become too difficult to take our toys and go play somewhere else. This isn’t conducive to a rich debate, collaborative effort, or deep exchange of ideas. We don’t need more philanthropies, we need more efficient philanthropies.

Looking for Advanced Group Work

I’ve just finished the penultimate chapter of Jim Knight’s Unmistakable Impact as part of a book study with other district leaders. Below are my thoughts on the chapter, “Intensive Learning Teams.”

It’s not that I don’t appreciate Knight’s thinking throughout this book, it’s that a better title might have been, Put Some Structure in Your Schools.

Each chapter thus far has been filled with interesting and helpful information gussied up in terms like Chapter 6’s “intensive learning teams.” I don’t deny the effectiveness of getting a group of people together to build curriculum, courses, or even schools. I do worry that some of Knight’s branding might get in the way of doing the work or readers feeling as though they can step out of bounds of the processes he describes in order to do what is best for their schools or districts.

Ch. 6 is built around Peter Senge‘s assertion that, “on average [a group] will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide.”

Knight proceeds to pull together his own work and the work of others to build the case and the process for creating effective group work. In describing Intensive Learning Teams (ILTs) specifically, “ILTs bring together groups of teachers from across a district for short, intensive collaborative meetings to refine or reinvent the course or grade that they share responsibility for teaching.”

From there, he outlines how each of the “partnership principles” from earlier in the book can be embodied in the practice of ILTs. Again, this has happened throughout each chapter of the book. While I appreciate the parallel structure and the transparency of values, I found myself wishing Knight would highlight the core principles most involved in the content of this chapter. Giving each equal weight throughout has been a bit difficult.

For the content of the chapter, I found myself wishing Knight would point to George Lakey’s Facilitating Group Learning. Knight’s focus was largely on making things as easy as possible and reducing the friction of a team as they went through their work.

In practice, the work is more complex. At least it should be. Lakey devotes an entire chapter to “Diversity and Conflict Styles,” alerting his readers to the need to lean in to the conflict and embrace the struggle of finding common ground. Knight not only ignores conflict, he architects ways to avoid it.

Lakey writes:

And yet the trainers’ intuition back in the day, that conflict is necessary, is correct. In direct education our alternative to inciting conflict is using activities and interventions to elicit the conflicts present in the group.

Granted, Lakey is writing largely about diversity work, and I’d argue that all education work is diversity work. Often, we search for the team meeting protocol, the agenda structure or the facilitation style that avoids contentious issues as much as possible. If we do this, if we steer clear of friction as often as possible, we’ll be ignoring the important work of building a community of education as often as possible as well.

Perhaps this is my greatest qualm with Knight’s work. While I agree with much of what he offers in the way of structures, I worry that this text is the 101 version of doing the work, and leaves those who follow its suggestions unprepared or willfully ignorant of the conversations we’ve been ignoring for generations – class, race, culture, gender, sexuality, location, etc.

89/365 Adopt Change at a School Zone Speed Limit

As soon as it was taken up as a tentpole issue for the champions of “21st Century Skills,” collaborative effort was destined to wiggle its way into the goals of any school’s annual planning for at least the first two decades of the 21st century. By 2030, we’re likely to be championing “22nd Century Skills.” For now, though, let us focus on the century at hand.

In the rush to adopt a practice of collaboration, many schools have set decrees and adopted protocols to ensure collaboration in actions if not in spirit. Lest a school’s culture – its leaders, its teachers, its students – has decided to own the effort of collaboration, practice by decree is sure to be mired in “almost implimentation.”

The schools we need allow for a school zone speed limit to taking up a practice of collaboration.

For schools having difficulties initiating collaborative approaches, the danger lies not in doing something new or different, but in doing something much more quickly than is comfortable to those responsible for the work.

While we are firm believers in learning the work by doing the work, this does not mean doing all the work at once and expecting it is all done well.

A school zone speed limit adoption method takes on all the practical implications of asking drivers to slow down when traveling through a school zone. Moving at full speed in these areas will mean they are not likely to fully appreciate where they are doing, and they will be much more liable to interfere or endanger the travels of others who are attempting to move through the same space.

The same principles apply to full-speed adoption of collaboration. Asking people to jump in to a practice of collaboration with full integration of lesson planning, peer observation, brainstorming, curriculum planning, etc. makes it entirely unlikely this newly adopted approach will not notice the small but significant details important to improving collaborative practices.

They will go through the motions of collaborating, as the drive will likely still stop at a stop sign, speed zone or not. They will not, take or have the time to reflect on what happens when they change this or that element of their practice.

A school speed zone approach to adopting a new practice and adapting a system to this practice’s inclusion might include the following steps:

  • At the top of each school-wide meeting, asking all teachers to share with those around them a single sentence explaining something they are working on with their students.
  • Asking for a group of teachers to volunteer to sit in on at least one of their peers’ classes during a week and to welcome others to do the same in their own classes.
  • The creation of a common physical or online space where teachers are asked to share questions and ideas relevant to what they are teaching or planning to teach with immediate means for others to offer answers and suggestions.
  • The allocation of 5 minutes at the beginning of every faculty meeting for teachers to stand and share those things they saw that they identified as good in a peer’s classrooms since the previous meeting.

The list could continue forever. Indeed, as a learning organization feels more and more comfortable with collaborative practice and begin to speed up, the list is likely to lengthen exponentially. It should do.

Slowing down, focusing on a few key elements of practice will allow those being asked for mindfulnes to see and reflect on the shifting of the organization. They will have the ability to refine these new efforts and the practice will evolve.

We can surely get somewhere as quickly as possible. To do so often means sacrificing safety and ignoring our surroundings. It’s possible, but rarely worth it.

88/365 We Work Together Because We’re Better for It

In a room filled with teachers of students from grades 6 to 12, the discussion is focused on the new direction for the school. On the table at the moment – the question of yearly themes and grade-level essential questions.

A teacher, not convinced of the need for either, raises her hand, “Why do we need themes? Why can’t we just trust that teachers will go in to their classrooms, do their very best for students, and help them learn?” The overarching constructs being debated sound look and sound a lot like further encroachment on the territory of teachers’ professional judgement.

“And,” the teacher added, “Isn’t me prescribing essential questions just more teacher-centered learning? What if these aren’t the questions my students have? Why can’t each student decide which questions are most interesting?” Again, the questions smack of contrivances and the undercutting of student interests.

Two responses are most key to this teacher’s questions. The first is general and free of considerations of the merits of her arguments. Surveying the room, every teacher, not the consultant who’s been brought in to facilitate the conversation should have an answer to this teacher’s questions. Each teacher should, to varying degrees of detail, be able to proffer an answer as to why this is the way forward for their faculty and students.

Without an ability to explain why what they are proposing is what they should be doing, this faculty, like many others, will not move forward. Rather, they will move everywhere. Without a clear philosophy of practice as described by Dewey in Experience & Education, this school (or any school) will not know why they are doing what they are doing, and they will not know whether they are doing it well.

Many contemporary schools are suffering both mission drift as well as theory drift. Some began with visionary leaders and teams who possessed clear, sound arguments for why they would do what they would do in a certain way toward the goal of teaching children. As time inevitably passes, more urgent matters erupt, and faculty change, that initial vision can become clouded or forgotten.

The hope, for this school at least, would be prior to ratifying any specific change of course, each member of the teaching community is asked to explain both what they want for the school and why they want it. If each teacher can do this, the future will look much brighter.

The second response is a direct answer to the questions posed. It has several parts. First, trusting teachers to do the very best they know is not in question. On an individual basis, some training may be necessary and some teachers may not be up to snuff. Themes, essential questions, and other boundary-crossing curricular elements mean creating pathways for teachers to do there very best together through the sharing, challenging, and iteration of ideas. Cross-classroom components build in space for teachers to do better by doing together. It staves off the siloed teaching of traditional classrooms and raises new questions.

Such elements also work to eliminate the false boundaries between “subjects” established by the traditional structures of schools. By working across classes to answer a question like “What is my role in my community?” students can come to realize there isn’t one answer, nor does any answer belong to a specific class or subject area. Citizenship, literacy, ethics, anything – these are themes and understandings that have implications across all areas of learning, and any question asked without considering all disciplines would be the lesser for its exclusion.

Finally, two pieces to the question of excluding student interests. First, to say teachers could work separately and each allow students to chase the answers to their individual questions rests on a key assumption. It requires an answer to the following: Does every teacher within this school have the practical and professional capacity to help each individual student in his or her care ask whatever questions of interest?

If the answer is yes, this school is unique in its capacity and should be captured for study. If the answer is the more likely “no,” then the students would be better served and the teachers’ stress greatly reduced by a team approach to drawing out curiosity and crafting experiences around it.

Secondly, there are issues we, as educators and professionals understand more deeply than our students. We have the “mature” knowledge as Dewey described it, and we should not free directing student learning in a throughout, goal-based way to help students become the citizens we need and intend. This rests on the assumption mentioned above, we must be intentional with our practice, and we must not fear nor be ashamed of our own expertise.

Working together need not sacrifice individuality. Providing for student choice does not mean abdicating a teacher’s responsibility to direct. There’s more complexity than an assumed dichotomy would suggest.

84/365 Collaboration Requires (formal) Space

Collaboration, as anyone talking about the evolution of education will tell you, is a good thing. Some will argue collaboration to be a 21st century skill as though civilization would have had any chance at progressing to this point had people not been collaborating for various virtuous and nefarious purposes up to this point.

As we have stumbled upon collaboration again, perhaps we could be more purposeful in its execution.

Nary a school leader will voice opposition to the adoption of a collaborative mindset in their space. Indeed, ask a principal if they want their teachers to be collaborating with one another and you’re unlikely to find any who say no. You are equally likely to hear multitudinous reasons why it’s not happening. Chief among these is some variation on, “Well, I’ve done my best to encourage collaboration among my staff, but they don’t seem to want to collaborate with one another or to take the time to collaborate.”

This is not surprising.

In the schools we need, we must not only encourage collaboration, we must make space for it.

Those same principals who lament the lack of faculty interest in collaboration are rarely mindful of the space they’ve created for such culture shift in their schools.

Proclamation of a collaborative spirit must be accompanied by both physical and temporal space for the implementation of that spirit.

To a principal it can appear that their encouragement has fallen on deaf ears. To teachers, this is often not the case. They have heard the calls for working together to design, execute, and refine new teaching practices, but they are left wondering what, if anything, they can let go to make space for such efforts.

Without the leadership and permission of ending certain practices, then principals’ encouragement to begin collaborating will be heard as asking to do more with less.

To foster collaborative spaces, schools must consider re-designing schedules in ways that allow the breathing room for teachers to work together without the pressure to complete other prescribed tasks. In some cases, this will mean keeping time on the schedule clear of administrative minutiae. In others it will mean moving to privilege teacher time to remove unofficial encroachments on things like duty-free preps or lunch periods.

If collaborative time is to be privileged within a school, then it must be prioritized clearly and without conditions in a school’s schedule.

Similarly, collaborative physical spaces must be designated within schools. These are spaces where teachers know they can go to sit alongside their peers, share ideas, and gain helpful feedback on what they are creating. These are spaces where school’s resources are aggregated, shared, and celebrated to encourage their examination and remixing by anyone interested. For some, this may sound like a school library. For others, it might be a faculty lounge. For many, it may sound like no space that yet exists within their schools. For all, they should be spaces that help to serve as a physical hub of collaboration.

A final space necessary for collaboration is actually that which principals try to create before or in spite of these formal temporal and physical spaces. They hope that some sort of amorphous collaborative space will happen within schools and school days. Such collaborative seepage will happen, but it will not happen if collaboration is not privileged beyond the messaging of a school.

Professing a collaborative atmosphere is one thing. Having a collaborative atmosphere requires the ability to point to the times and spaces where collaboration has been given formal space to grow and leak into the culture of a school.

73/365 Schools Have Built-In Audiences

While outside audiences must be curated, and it’s a skill rightly worth teaching, there are other considerations for audience in learning and how schools can leverage them more effectively. Most specifically, students are a built-in audience, and we could leverage better.

The schools we need realize audience is built in.

The easiest way to think about this is the English classroom. Students are assigned essays to write. Even the most traditional teacher is likely, from time to time, to ask students to share their work with one another during the editing process and peer edit. In technology deserts, this is usually the act of trading handwritten drafts, asking students to read what’s on the page and mark them up. It’s a start, and we can do better.

Simply trading papers leaves the editor with a lack of direction. She’s likely to read through, mark the most glaring punctuation errors, write “good job” and hand it back to her partner.

Without guidance, students aren’t likely to get the feedback they want or need from their pre-published audiences. They’re also not likely to reflect on what that desired feedback might be. Using a more structured approach like the writer’s memo described by Jeffrey Sommers in his article “Behind the Paper: Using the Student-Teacher Memo” asks both writer and audience to think about their focus in the feedback process and what will be most helpful to the writer.

Tools like the writer’s memo take better advantage of the in-school audience than the traditional trade-and-mark approach and ask students to reflect on what they’ve created as well.

Once student work has reached a published phase, we can take better advantage of built-in audiences as well. We can ask students to make the work useful to their audience rather than a simple exhibition of the skills they’ve been working on. The most misguided example of this is the use of social video sites for school projects.

In a math class, the teacher may ask her students to create a video explaining the concepts taught (and hopefully learned) during a unit of study. The students work alone or in groups to complete the assignment, upload their videos to the designated site, and the teacher reviews them, makes comments and sends them back. In some cases the teacher might take class time to highlight some of what she has deemed as the best productions.

These videos can be more useful.

This is surely not the last time these concepts will be taught in the school. The next year or next semester, other students will follow and need to learn these concepts. Too often the teacher will forget the video archive students have created and leave them to languish. Instead, leveraging built-in audience means realizing these new students can start their learning with the previous year’s videos and utilize the commenting function to activate the prior students as tutors or co-teachers of the content. Suddenly, the videos live on and the previous students are asked to re-activate knowledge in the service of this new audience.

A year is a long time to wait, and there’s no need. Sticking with our math video example, consider the power of teachers of subsequent math classes collaborating and the teacher of the higher-level math class asking what concepts the lower-level math class will be learning about first. Then, the higher-level students review the previous year’s content and craft learning tools to help the younger students. Given the spiraling of most math curricula, this return to more fundamental concepts is likely to shore up the higher-level students’ skills while providing lower-level students learning objects that are crafted in language divorced from the formality of textbooks.

As the Internet has opened the world up to our schools, the temptation has become to think of the world as our audience. Remembering the audience already in our classrooms and schools can help to deepen knowledge and work to create local learning communities.

26/365 A Great Way for Students to Prep for Quizzes

In observing some of my student teachers this semester, I noticed they were approaching in-class quizzes in some pretty traditional ways. In debriefing the lessons after observing, I kept wanting to explain how my friend and colleague Matt Kay has his students review their reading and prepare for quizzes. Luckily, Matt’s a great guy and agreed to type up his practice so I could share it here.

When he mentions SATs, that stands for Student Assistant Teachers. At SLA, seniors who have room for an elective in their schedule can sign up to be SATs and work as assistant teachers alongside those teachers they’ve connected with during the course of their high school experience. It’s a beautiful piece of built-in mentorship, and Matt highlights its possibilities here.

From Matt:

My classes are divided into Small Learning Communities that I call “Pods.” Each one has 3-4 students. In the first quarter, they are chosen at random, but for each quarter after that, they are created with a purposeful mix of ability levels and social observations.
These pods meet up the day after any assigned reading. The students walk into class and sit immediately into their pods. They then have 10-12 minutes to discuss the previous night’s reading, and the notes that they have taken the night before. I have found that the struggling students are far more willing to ask each other questions than they are to ask during whole-group instruction. When this time is up, the students move to their seats and take the quiz.
Right now, my student assistants are making the quizzes. They are all factual questions that are not answered in spark notes or cliff notes. (I assess richer understandings in different ways). The SATs come to class with seven questions, and I pick five while the pods are meeting. The SATs give the questions, then they grade the quizzes.

Bringing the Phone Tree out of the Moth Balls

Never having played sports in school (or ever, really), the phone tree, as I understood it being used by soccer moms, never really entered into my life. I got the concept, but never needed.

When talking to a music teacher a few weeks ago about how he was using technology to care for students, the phone tree became suddenly relevant.

After a marching band gig, the teacher had sent a mass text to all of his musicians thanking them for showing up and performing. A simple act this teacher hadn’t thought much about until I’d worked to underline the importance of the ethic of care in the classroom.

It was a simple act that, after the instruments had been packed away, reminded the students that what they did mattered to other people and that they were valued.

Nice.

It also got me thinking about a possiblity for phone trees in the classroom. Apps are great and I’m all for welcoming kids to bring tech into school spaces. Oftentimes, this transitions to a mandate or a platform requirement.

Enter, phone ring.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

  1. At a class’ opening, each student is linked to another. A to B, B to C, C to D, etc. until Z is linked back around to A in the end. (More of a phone ring, I’m realizing.)
  2. Working on anything – homework, projects, whatever – if C has a question she can’t quite figure out, she gets ahold of D via whatever means necessary. It can be text, IM, e-mail (gasp), phone call (double gasp). D and C work together find an answer.
  3. If they can’t, that’s cool. The ring continues. D says, “I think we need another brain,” and gets ahold of E. The ring continues.
  4. Knowing the system is in place, the teacher begins the next class asking if any questions or troubles made it around the ring since their last meeting. It’s a formative assessment gold mine.

Student are practicing social skills, it’s low-threat collaboration, it values the asking of questions. It’s low-cost and allows for the use of mobile technologies without requiring them or the installation of new functionalities.

P.S. In putting together the chain, I’d probably take personalities into consideration and try to build in as much student choice. The easiest way I’ve found is starting with a conversation of what it means to be connected to someone who supports your learning and then asking each student to write down the names of three students they know would support their learning if they were linked and one student who would probably derail their learning. After that, it’s up to teachers’ professional opinion to make matches that foster student growth.

Learning Grounds Episode 001: In which Megan discusses her learning, inclusion, and professional collaboration

For the first episode of the podcast we spent a cup of coffee with Harvard Graduate School of Education student Megan. Over the course of a grandé, we discussed Megan’s drive to implement a truer inclusion program for special needs students as well as the difficulties of professional collaboration when new teachers meet existing systems.

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