Tag: engagement

Connecting Families and Schools: A New Framework

The U.S. Department of Education, the Institute for Educational Leadership board members, and Karen Mapp of the Harvard Ed School unveiled their jointly-created “Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships,” and it’s a quick read worthy of the eyes of anyone who’s ever wondered how to get families and schools working together.

Most noteworthy is the recognition within the framework that both families and schools often require increased capacity for facilitating and maintaining such partnerships. More specifically:

If effective cradle-to-career educational partnerships between home and school are to be implemented with fidelity and sustained, engagement initiatives must include a concerted focus on developing adult capacity, whether through pre- and in-service professional development for educators; academies, workshops, seminars, and workplace trainings for families; or as an integrated part of parent-teacher partnership activities.

 

The framework, itself is only three pages long (plus requisite infographic), so I won’t dissect it too much here. What I will point to are the successful examples of the kinds of programs the Framework can help to create. It’s not as easy to find on page 3 of the Frequently Asked Questions, but helps point interested folks to models of what’s possible:

The idea of this framework sits well with me as an immediately actionable way of thinking about bringing community members and schools together to support students’ learning. It does the further work of honoring the households from which students arrive at schools by outlining a key outcome for school and program staff as the ability to “honor and recognize families’ funds of knowledge.”

I’ll be interested in the next few months to see how more specifics and examples of programs working through this framework come to light. For right now, this looks like a helpful tool and frame for doing some important work in our schools.

120/365 Smoldering in the Minds

Fires in the Mind cover image

This has been a summer of attempting to get through many of those books which have lived on the shelves of three different houses now without actually having, you know, been read.

Aside from the weak-willed ordering of still more books from Amazon and picking up a few the other day at the local privately-owned book store, I’m making progress.

Today, I finished Kathleen Cushman’s Fires in the Mind. It earned two stars from me on GoodReads.com, but I wanted to want to award it much more.

Cushman and her teenage collaborators take as their focus of investigation the idea of expertise and how a person becomes an expert. As they work through these ideas in the first few chapters, they turn their attention to schools and what formal education systems can do to encourage the same kinds of mind fires as students’ outside interests as discussed in the first half of the book.

From just this premise, I was hopeful. It’s a topic that has the potential to illuminate faculty meetings, and pre-service teacher classrooms everywhere. What are we doing in education if not working to encourage students’ curiosity and ability to work toward expertise?

The book falls short in a few ways.

First, Cushman laces the text with quotations from her “collaborators” throughout. These were teenagers who participated in the Practice Project as an attempt to answer the questions mentioned above. The quotations made the reading choppy and I found myself working to hold on to a singular narrative voice. While appreciating the inclusion of direct ideas from students, I often found myself wishing they had written the book outright alongside Cushman rather than Cushman trying to put their words where she felt they belonged.

Similar to this, the student quotations are apparently taken verbatim from student interviews. As such, they include the odd error in traditional grammar. I suppose this is an attempt to validate the approach and show that these are regular kids offering up their ideas in their own voices. I celebrate that idea. At the same time, should Cushman have faltered from Standard Formal English, her editor would surely have dinged her on the mistake.

If we are talking about kids becoming authentic collaborators, it feels wrong to lower the bar for how their words are presented.

The other fault I found as I was reading was the lack of direct references to others who have walked this way before and done the work of research expertise and engagement. Perhaps this was done so as not to crowd out the students’ voices. For me, though, it ended up taking the legs out from under the text. I would be far more likely to recommend this book to others if the student researchers’ findings sat alongside and made reference to the others in the field doing this work. At the back of the book, Cushman acknowledges that the work of the Practice Project was informed by the writings and research of many others and lists those texts, writing that she was glad the students were able to read the other authors’ work.

By hiding this until some curious reader tries to figure out what’s happening, the book creates a sort of fence around the students’ work that keeps it in a different arena than the experts. This keeps them as “student experts” rather than full-fledged “experts” and the separation was a perpetual frustration for me.

If you are going to pick up this book, and I’m sure there are those who would benefit from its reading, start in the middle. This is where the text starts to wrap the students’ findings around the everyday work of schools. Each chapter in the concluding half included passages that sought to provide concrete suggestions for making homework worthwhile, creating engaging projects, etc. I almost missed this when I considered putting the book down and walking away early on.

As I was reading Fires in the Mind, I was hesitant to acknowledge my criticisms of the text. I finally came to terms with the fact that criticizing the book was not the same as criticizing the important work and her collaborators engaged in throughout the Practice Project.

The project sounds as though it was worthwhile, informative and engaging for students. The retelling of the project, however, left me wanting more.

Learning Grounds Ep. 016: Dean Shareski and Creating Online Community

In this episode, Zac talks with Dean Shareski about the difficulties unique to attempting to create a sense of community in online courses compared to face-to-face learning as well as other unique difficulties in community creation in conference presentations.

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What’s the barrier between gov’t. agencies and civic engagement via social media?

“We do agree agencies aren’t doing the best job of engaging on these networks yet,” wrote Dash in an e-mail to techPresident in response to some questions about lessons learned from the Expert Labs experience. “One key finding we’ve focused on in our final reports is that the division between communications/outreach arms of agencies, which typically manage social networking accounts, and the policy making groups within agencies, which actually impact the decisions being made, is a pretty significant barrier to public participation.”

via Expert Labs: Putting The ‘Public’ Into Public Policy Wasn’t Easy | TechPresident.

Things I Know 233 of 365: Kids could do with a bit of boredom

Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.
– Buddha

Any classroom observation form worth it’s government subsidy includes a box for the evaluator to note engagement. Sometimes it’s a likert scale – Suzie was very engaged. Sometimes it’s a percentage of the students – 75% of the students were engaged. Sometimes it’s a percentage of the class period – the majority of the class was engaged during 65% of the observed lesson. It could even be a checkbox – Were the students engaged during the observed lesson? X
Among other standards, we’re obsessed with engaging our students. If they’re not looking at us, talking to their peers, copying notes, raising their hands, tracking, SLANTing or otherwise participating, the train has clearly jumped the track.
Any sign of inertia and the lesson is damned, the teacher is ineffective and the children have been failed.
I say inertia.
When I was a little kid, we called it boredom.
There’s space for boredom in the classroom.
A few years ago, on the advice of an occupational therapist, I started having my students make a single sound together. Somewhere between a om and hm, the sound was a bit of a “mmmmm.” Everyone took a deep breath together. On the exhale, we all started making the sound. As individuals’ air ran out, they fell silent – no forcing it or trying to outlast your neighbor. After a bit of practice, we finished in complete silence. Our brains were a little bit empty.
“Can we do it again?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I feel calmer.”
“Good.”
The Buddha knew what I’m talking about. He understood the power of doing nothing and thinking about nothing.
We pretend to do this sometimes in classrooms.
“I’m going to give you some ‘think time,'” the teacher will say to the class. “I’m going to wait five seconds before I call on anyone.”
In my experience, it takes more than five seconds for the answers to come.
According to the Wall Street Journal, at Boring 2010, journalist and author Naomi Alderman put it best, “When we learn to tolerate boredom, we learn who we really are.”
I’m not arguing for classrooms of total inertia or a return to authoritarian silence as the teacher readies his lessons.
Some boredom, some interia, a piece of quietude, though, could be a lovely thing.
If every once in a while we helped students jettison their warp drives and find some silence, maybe it would help them find out who they really are.