A 'pick me up...'

I spent the last two days at the National School Board Association T+L conference in Denver. Other than the blizzard in Denver this week, it was a really invigorating time (though I guess you could say that the blizzard was invigorating). There were too many interesting ideas to list them all in one post, but there were some themes- at least for me.

Project based learning came up a lot, in several different contexts. It fit nicely with the thinking I have been doing about "Focus, frame and form." (Updates on that little experiment are forthcoming). Using technology (it was the T+L conference after all) as leverage to engage our students in the larger world, project based learning feels like something I have been headed towards for a while. I was mulling classroom ideas over to myself while listening to several presentations- always a good sign.

Frans Johanssen, author of The Medici Effect, who spoke on Wednesday morning, was everything you might hope for as a dynamic and engaging speaker. He definitely comes across as a guy you'd want to hang out with. His message about the nature of innovation was powerful, as was his admonition that we must be willing to fail in order to innovate. How often do we think/hear/feel that in our working lives? Rarely if ever, though it seems obvious once you think about it. Note to self- how to you say that to students? How do we encourage them to take risks? How do we make a place that's safe to take risks? In our school? In our classroom? In our own heads?

All the presentation addressed innovation, breaking barriers, learning that is meaningful to our students. It was great to hear/participate in some really rich conversations. I was also sorry that so little of this thinking is part of our national dialogue about education. No one in Denver was talking about testing. Everyone was talking about assessing in meaningful ways. Sounds like semantics, but it isn't. There is a difference.

Finally, this conference is, at least ostensibly, about technology. But much more of the conversation was about learning. Yes, up on the main floor three hundred companies were waiting to pitch you software, hardware or services that were technological in nature. But I had way fewer conversations about 'stuff' than I anticipated. It isn't about stuff. It is about what we want kids to know or be able to do, and how to get them there in a way that works.

So back to home. And tomorrow, back to school. I'm tired, but in a good way. With a bag full of ideas that I will have to sort through. Try a few out, maybe fail a time or two?

-F. Scott

Ed Sec Speaks- it can't be good.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be speaking at Columbia Teacher's College tomorrow- according to CNN. He will apparently be calling for overhaul of teacher preparation to better "prepar(e) teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom." Given the initiatives of the Obama Administration in education policy, which have read like an uninterrupted continuation of the Bush administration, Arne Duncan talking about the 21st Century Classroom is a bit like the CEO of Hormel talking about animal rights. Though I am pretty sure that if the CEO of Hormel claimed to know something about pigs, and even claimed to like them, I would believe him. Whereas when Duncan claims to know anything about real students in the real world, it's awfully tough to buy his rap.

Over and over again, from our district to the Secretary of Education, we hear politicians make noise about 21st century education while pushing agendas that from a more nuanced perspective seem only designed to return us to the 18th century (at best).

Alfie Kohn had a great piece in District Administration in the February issue that said it way better than I.

-F. Scott

One more thing

In the midst of all of this stress today I got some horrible news.

One of my students from last year (and the year before--he was stuck with me for two years in a row) passed away on Friday. The circumstances of his death are not yet certain, but it may have been a suicide, and drugs and/or alcohol were likely involved.

The truth is that this kid struggled intensely in his life. He was in my class nearly every day the first year he was on my roster--but the second year, well, he disappeared pretty much halfway through first semester. His life was crashing in on him. He was one of those kids I never felt like I quite reached--never really knew well, never really convinced him that he deserved to be successful. It always seemed like there were much more significant things going on in his mind/world to care too much about what I asked him to do.

What this leaves for me today is just a pit of sadness in the center of everything. And a connection to times past where I learned about something that they don't teach you in methods classes in college. During a period of 10 months at the school where I taught about seven years ago, we lost seven students. The first was a student in my fifth hour freshman language arts class. It was a car accident in a highway construction zone. I had no idea how to handle this--how to deal with my own grief along side the grief on the faces of my students as we all noticed the violently empty desk in the middle of our classroom.

We muddled through and began to heal, and just about three weeks later, there was another tragic highway construction zone accident--this time with a car load of five of our students. Two died at the scene. The other three were lucky to have survived. In a school of 800 students, this is a lot of tragedy in three weeks. We were all stunned.

Instead of school for the rest of the school year (it was only about a week or so), my students and I talked about life, ate cookies, went on walks, and played games together. It was therapeutic, and we all needed it. Life curriculum trumped school curriculum.

The next school year we lost a student to a skateboarding/car accident (he was also one of mine), two students (a brother and sister) to a house fire, and another student to a terminal illness.

There is something nearly unbearable about attending a funeral or memorial service for a high school student, one that you can remember so clearly as full of life and possibility, eyes on the future, youth shining from their very souls.

And on Thursday evening, there I will be again, trying to grasp all of this. Death of youth.

This time it's different in some ways--instead of a sudden, unexpected disappearance of an energetic life force as was the case of my students about seven years back--here we have a possible suicide. I've not been through this ground before. How much pain must he have been dealing with in his life? As he was sitting in MY classroom? Did anything I ever asked him to do have any meaning to his life? Is there anything I could have done as his teacher to heal the pain?

I'm not suggesting I feel responsible. I just hope that I was somehow a positive spot in his world. That, in short, is really the best, truest goal I can have as a teacher.

The sadness from the students I lost before still creeps in on me once in a while. It catches me in the quiet moments--not as much as it used to, but it still catches me. This week, though, the sadness for this student's death now will creep and hover all around, omnipresent, just waiting for my attention to divert from whatever else I might be focused on at the moment so it can swallow my thoughts whole.

I'll let it. The grief needs acknowledgment.

And it's how I will be able to honor this student--by letting his passing sink in, by working to remember what I can about him, by hoping that he has finally reached some peace.

M. Shelley

So F. Scott said to blog about it

I'm stressed out.

Here's the problem: I'm a member of a state-level committee to rewrite our standards for reading and writing. I've been working with this committee for months. We are up against our final deadline, but we need more time.

Standards documents have never been more high stakes. The results of the assessments tied to them are having more and more real implications for schools, students, and teachers--some even tied to school funding and teacher pay.

That means that standards documents have got to be very carefully constructed: coherent, clear, carrying high expectations for students and teachers. Anything short of this could have catastrophic consequences that we can't even see clearly now.

So why am I stressed out? My fellow committee members and I have built a document that we really want to believe in, but it is not quite there yet. We need more time, and we are not getting it. The whole process has been fraught with unreasonable deadlines and assurances that we would later have the time to do the alignment and articulation work that the document desperately needs.

But we are not getting the support from our department of education to do this right. In fact, I was pretty much told not to even come in tomorrow to work on it--perhaps they think that I'll muddy the process because of my desire to make the document as strong as possible, to do the major big picture articulation with the document that will take more time than the smaller tweaks that the department of education imagined for the document at this point in the game.

It seems that the goal here is no longer on building a strong and visionary standards document that will take my state boldly into the 21st century. It seems that the goal has now become simply a finished document.

Time to get my mind off of this and try to get some grading done.
M. Shelley

A curve ball today

Something surprised me today and still leaves me somewhat unsettled.

Whereas I feel like the reading is going pretty well so far (see my previous post), the group project that I debuted today is not leaving me with quite as much confidence.

The group project was one of the required forms that I presented at the beginning of the unit (that and the compare/contrast paper that is a common assessment across all eight sections of the course I'm teaching, taught by a total of three different teachers). My requirements on the project were few--draw on the stories of your own life experiences to teach us something. Create something to share with us what there is to learn from your life experiences. Integrate into project and/or presentation some text you find that connects in a meaningful way to Into the Wild.

To help explain why I was leaving this all so open, I showed them two youtube videos that both I think make essentially the same argument: schools do not line up with who our students are today. They are not presented with relevant, meaningful classrooms that actually engage their interests and thinking. "A Vision of Students Today" was created by a cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University two years ago. "A Vision on K12 Students Today" is similar but focuses on K12 students. As a teacher, I look at both of these videos as a direct plea to me to make my classroom meaningful, to give them room to design classroom experiences that will have relevance to their lives. That was my initial intent with the group project described above--a few general parameters but then lots of space for them to design something meaningful and interesting to them.

What surprised me was this: my students came up with a few readings of these videos I did not anticipate. Once young man said that the videos showed how lazy students are. If they would only focus and pay attention in class instead of Facebooking, they would be more successful. This interpretation never even entered my brain. I saw the detail about the KSU students Facebooking through class as an indication that the class wasn't relevant and meaningful, not that the students were lazy. Another interpretation from another young man in my class was that education is being ruined by technology, that clearly all these students are distracted by technology and if it just wasn't there they would be doing fine in school. I saw all of the mentions of technology as a plea to teachers to pull that world into the classroom world, to make what we ask them to do in our classrooms better merge with what they do in their lives outside of school. I firmly believe that if we don't do this, school could become obsolete in the minds of our students.

I was not prepared for these responses from my students. Not at all.

And I'm not feeling so much confidence in this group project to achieve the aims that I had for it. I don't see the excitement that I hoped for. I'm not seeing the outside-of-the-box projects developing that I thought would surface when I stepped aside and said, "create something." I'm not sure if I actually ended up directing its focus too much and something that is intended to provide space for students to build relevance to their lives is actually one more teacher-centered endeavor. Or maybe I didn't give enough direction and my students are already flailing?

I just don't know.

But I'll write later to describe how it has gone.

And I have my first discussion planned for tomorrow over the first chunk of reading. I would like to do what F. Scott did by sitting down in the back of the room, taking attendance, and letting them figure out that they better get discussing, but I'm not sure that would work (I don't have here the same kind of super-motivated students that he has in the classes he wrote about). But I do want to think about maybe doing it that way.

Signing off. M. Shelley.

Reporting on that homework of the weekend before last...

And it's been a blur since I (M. Shelley here) made that last posting. Funny how a teaching life will do that.

I did complete the homework I assigned to myself, to cobble together an argument for my students about why they should care to read. I started with explaining to them the concept of procedural display, that it looks like learning, but it's not. I gave them examples from my own schooling (like how I got through AP English Literature with a B without reading a single book), and they shared their own examples. Just as they were accusing me of telling them how to slide through school without actually doing anything of consequence, I asked them if they ever engage in fake reading where you read the words but don't construct any meaning from them. The words just slide on by, for pages even, and you have no clue what you've read once you stop and look back. I admitted (to the shock of several of my students) that this happens to me all the time and that I have to work hard sometimes to avoid it. They talked about their own adventures in fake reading as well.

Then I asked, "what is literacy?" Right away students blurted out responses about being able to simply read and write. I let them keep suggesting ideas until I heard someone say something about "understanding." Aha. It's more than being able to decode the words on the page--you have to be able to construct meaning from them.

I presented a few ideas about literacy--one from here that reviews Paolo Friere's ideas on literacy: "Literacy, [Friere] insisted, is an active phenomenon, deeply linked to personal and cultural identity. It's power lies not in a received ability to read and write, but rather in an individual's capacity to put those skills to work in shaping the course of his or her own life. [...] Friere's view of literacy is at once practical and all-encompassing. It refers to the ability to manipulate any set of codes and conventions--whether it is the words of a language, the symbols in a mathematical system, or images posted to the Internet--to live healthy and productive lives." I used this to talk about how they possess all kinds of literacies--like that the football players in my class have football literacy: the ability to manipulate the set of "codes and conventions" specific to football in order to "shape the course" of their own lives (i.e., to win a game). I talked about how this view of literacy makes the argument that it is so much more than mere reading and writing, but the ability to use those skills to write one's life, and a "healthy and productive" one at that.

The second view on literacy that I presented to them comes from The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, a definition that I found in the Wikipedia page about literacy: "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute, and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society." I repeated the list of skills: identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute, and use. I asked them how confident they felt with these skills and their abilities to use them to build the lives that they imagine for themselves. I asked them if they considered themselves literate in all these areas.

They were pretty quiet for a few moments.

Next I argued that whereas I knew that they each possessed skilled literacies in many areas of their lives, there was one particular area that I was most worried about for all of them. The key I saw to the type of literacy I want them to work on is engagement. As learners, they need to be thoughtfully and meaningfully engaged in the learning. What I meant was that they needed to practice the kind of sustained engagement you can practice when you really, truly read a book (something that many of my students have admitted to not have done for several years).

I asked, "when was the last time you practiced this kind of sustained engagement?"

I asked, "do you know the tricks of successful reading?"

I told them that it takes work but that working on their reading and sustained engagement in this way is critical to their future success in our evolving world.

I reminded them that the most complex, difficult book they will ever read is their own life. This practice now will help them later.

From there, I gave them a letter I had written to them explaining the tricks of successful reading as described in Cris Tovani's book. I asked them to write me back to tell me which of those tricks they already employ, which they want to work on, and which they don't understand. I asked them to tell me what kind of readers they are, what kind of readers they want to become, and how my class can help them get there. I've collected and read these letters, which I found to be candid and real. I will give them back to them at some later time and ask them to re-evaluate and look for growth in their reading goals.

And then the next day we started reading Into the Wild together. They were taking it pretty seriously. We stopped often and talked about it, asked questions, made predictions, pointed out what seemed important, told connected stories from our lives. We did that for a couple of classes to round out the week. On Monday then, it was dedicated reading time--individual silent reading, group directed reading (with either the sped teacher that I team teach with for one class or the education student I have working with me in the other two classes) or small pairs or triads of students in their own reading groups. This was the best used reading day I have ever had in my class--even the groups that sat out in the hall and read to each other actually read and discussed what they were reading.

I'm anxious to see how the first chunk of the book will go--the first reading deadline is tomorrow (the first seven chapters of the book). One idea that came up in our negotiations about what should be on the unit calendar for this book was the no-penalty reading quiz. They suggested that they get extra credit for correct answers and no points lost for wrong answers.

Now think about this for a minute: what my students proposed is an incentive system for reading instead of the kind of punishing quizzes that we often end up enacting. I was willing to forgo the reading quizzes altogether since most students in our first pass through of negotiations on the calendar for the unit said that they didn't want them at all. But when I asked them what they really, truly NEEDED to inspire them to get a particular range of reading done, they came up with this idea, and pretty much everyone (in all three of my classes) loved it.

We will do this for the first time tomorrow and we'll see how it goes. Groups of students will each draft one question for the quiz and submit the question and answer to me. I will then type the questions up one at a time on the screen and students will write their answers on paper and submit. We'll then review the questions (which will be the start of our discussion for the day over the first seven chapters).

Do you see what will be happening here? LOTS of discussion about the reading! The no-penalty reading quiz will be an occasion for discussion, for students to check their own understanding of what they read. For students to help each other capture the details.

Of course it won't work so well if after all of our conversation about this students didn't read. I'll add one more question to the quiz: did you read? If so, how much? If not, why not? I'll remind them that there is no penalty on this one either--their honesty is what I'm searching for.

So I'm feeling like I did something right (so far) to establish a positive beginning for a reading experience in school. But like I said, what will be interesting is how many of them will actually read.

More on that later.
M. Shelley

Actually 'Making the Shift'- Update 2

Oooooof. A week or so into this experiment. There are a lot of things I could comment on here, but the main thing to think about right now is my own reaction to the change in dynamic. I (we?) are so used to having not only the control, but also the responsibility, for what our students do. I was really feeling a lack of both this week. I wanted to jump in and start telling them what to do. My teacher brain was screaming, "Oh no, they might do the wrong thing!" The impulse to be the one in the room 'making things happen' was pretty powerful. As much as I was able, I refrained.

In both sections the students had planned to 'have discussions' this week. Both groups decided that they did want to read from the text as a way of gathering some background information, and then have a discussion in class. On the day of discussion, I came in to the room, and rather than taking 'center stage' as I might normally do, I just sat in back and took attendance. The students sitting near me in both classes we watching to see what I would do, but for the most part the group happily ignored me.

In my first class (a bit smaller and harder to hide in), a student asked me after a moment, "aren't we having a discussion today?" I tried to keep my response as neutral as possible. I think I said something like, "I believe that's what you had put on the calendar." She got the point and immediately enlisted some of her fellows in organizing the class (the classes are filled with motivated honors students, so their willingness to take initiative is pretty high). That class launched into a discussion that lasted almost an hour.

On the whole they stayed pretty on topic. I noticed that, especially given the nature of the topic they were discussing (the formulation of knowledge in the social sciences), they raised and discussed some pretty complicated ideas. This class has been doing this with my direction for almost a year now, so they have had practice and some modeling and coaching, but it was still pretty cool to see them try it on their own. After a few minutes they realized that

I just wasn't going to say anything, so they ignored me.

It was really tough to keep my mouth shut, especially when I heard things that were factually incorrect or not well though out. Several times the group shied away from engaging an idea because the voice asserting it was particularly aggressive, even when I could see some pretty significant disagreement in the group as a whole. It was tough not to play 'referee' or my normal role as devil's advocate, especially in the face of ideas that deserved more interrogation than they received.

I kept track of how many members of the class participated- in a group of 22, six voices carried the majority of the conversation, nine participated at some level, and seven did not speak. Of those who did not talk at all, I would say four of them were engaged, but just chose not to speak, and the rest seemed outwardly disengaged (though it can be very tough to tell- just because they look like they aren't listening does not mean they aren't tracking the conversation.

Other than my own struggle to keep my mouth shut, I actually found it quite relaxing. On the whole the discussion was at least as good as an average discussion led by me, and in some ways perhaps more genuine. While it was hard not to immediately jump in when I heard something I thought was 'wrong' the group seemed to work through those moments on its own, more or less, and I almost always heard the 'right' or more accurate information at least raised. I also found that I had the time to observe the class much more carefully than I do when I am leading the discussion. I was much more aware of who was engaged, who was participating, who seemed totally checked out.

When there were only a few minutes left in class, and the conversation was winding down, several students turned to me and asked essentially 'how did we do?' I shared some of what I wrote above, and then asked them how they thought it went. On the whole they seemed pleased. I told them that I would be asking them for ideas on how they could make it even better when we were done with this unit.

Trying this experiment has raised what I think is a major issue in education (for me). When we talk about teaching/learning, are we talking about what occurred in the classroom, or are we talking about what the students take with them when they leave. We all know the dynamic of 'covering the content' in which we make sure that whatever material we feel beholden to is exposed in the room. But we also know that there is a great distance between that and what students actually retain. Engaging my students in their own sense of responsibility for learning certainly seems like it will up their level of learning. But my urge to make sure everything is 'covered' in class is pretty powerful.

I will have to wait and see how they demonstrate and difference understanding on the next assessment, which is next week. They, of course, is the real proof here. I plan to video the presentation so we can digest them as a class. But so far I have to say that the class experience seems a lot more genuine. There is less 'playing at school,' on all our parts. That has to be good, I think.

This weekend's homework

How do you convince high school students that it's important to read? That's my homework this weekend. I want to cobble together an argument to make to my students--seniors, the often unmotivated type--on Monday as we head into our first book together. I will also give them a letter that includes Cris Tovani's tricks of successful readers and ask them to write me back about which they already do, which they need to work on, which they don't understand. Essentially, I want to know about what kind of readers my students are, what kind they want to become, and how my class can help them achieve that. But I want to frame the letter with a strong argument as to why they should even care about what kind of readers they are. An argument with a Truth that speaks to them. An argument that makes them care about their lives as readers, that makes them care to improve. An argument that will send some of them into the first book they have actually READ in high school.

So we'll see what I come up with, but that's my self-assigned homework for the weekend.
Speaking of weekend, let's get that started. Signing off now to go pick up my kid from school.
--M. Shelley