reading ruined already?

I'm sitting here helping my 2nd grade daughter with her homework.

She is to complete three story maps, each on a book from her shelves here at home that she has read and knows well. This task has paralyzed her.

And that's what I find fascinating.

With as natural as stories are to us as human beings, how is it that a task to map out a story paralyzes my child? How is it that identifying the characters, the setting, the problem/solution, and the important plot details is making my child believe that she is unable to succeed?

Normally my child whips through her homework. But tonight, she had to take a five minute break under a blanket on the couch. Now that she's been back at the table she has written down three plot details in about 15 minutes. Not the usual pace for a kid who can complete a week's worth of homework math story problems in about a half hour.

She's sitting next to me, whiny, doodling on her page. "What happens next in the story?" I ask her.

"I don't know. I forgot," she says very sadly. "You told me but I don't remember."

We had just read the story together. Surely she has not forgotten the details of the story yet?

"What if there's a right and wrong?" she asks me. "My teacher writes A LOT when we do these at school. We copy down what she writes on the board."

"Are you worried that you aren't writing enough?" I ask.

She finishes with another plot detail and asks me what's next. She has just flipped through the book again but asks ME what's next. She asks me to write it even. Or at least to tell her what to write. When I make a suggestion, she tells me that it's too long, too many words (this from a child who has handwritten several pages of her autobiography in one sitting, a child who read about eight Magic Treehouse house books in one weekend and has no problem with stories).

I worry that already school is teaching her that there is only one set of right answers about a story. I worry that already she is learning that what the teacher says about a book is right and her job is just to copy it down neatly on her story map. I worry that she is learning already that the purpose of reading a story in school is just to identify its parts and pieces, not to say what she thinks about a story.

I ask her if she would rather write about what she thinks about the story. She says the story map never asks her to do that.

I ask her why she picked the book she used for the first story map--and she said it was because it was short and she thought it would be easy to work with.

Oh my. Already? Choosing a book for a school task because it's short? How did this happen?

I'm certain her teacher means well and does not intend for any of this to happen. In fact, I have been quite impressed by what I know of my daughter's classroom. I know that the literacy approaches taken there are all informed by researched best practice.

But it's absolutely fascinating to see my child struggling already with a task in school that boils a book down to its mere components, separated from pondering what the story has to say about our life as human beings. She's so worried about not writing enough and not writing the right details that she's paralyzed.

Well, we just agreed she could have some chocolate if she finished another story map... now she's somewhat more motivated. Good in the short term for getting the homework done. Bad in the long term for her love of reading?

No wonder so many of my high school students aren't readers.

Signing off--
M. Shelley

What if?

You'll be seeing a lot from the book I'm currently reading, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, edited by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Reif. This book is becoming highly relevant to the work I need to do to contextualize the pilot the district has supported me in running next year with my seniors. In short, in order to more effectively differentiate to meet my students' needs, I'll be able to work with attendance in a flexible manner. There will be some days where not all of my students will need to be in class, thus making it possible for the ones who work well independently to do so and giving me more time to work one-on-one with the students who need more of that kind of support. It will be a hybrid online/face time course with a strong web presence to keep everyone on the same page.

I'm excited about this, but I want to approach it well. I want to know exactly WHY I think this might work. I want to know what to look for to see if it is working. And in the end, I want to be able to say with some certainty whether or not it's an approach worth repeating and exactly why. I've got a student teacher this semester and a bit more time on my hands to read, so hence my obsession with this book. I imagine I'll be using this space here to capture some of the passages and thoughts from the book that strike me as critical in my thinking about this pilot project.

So here's today's contribution (actually, I had intended to post it on Tuesday--but as F. Scott already indicated we had a crazy week here with state testing AND parent/teacher conferences). Kylene Beers wonders:

What if students sometimes worked independently and other times worked with others in their school community, local community, state community, or across the globe? What if schooling valued multiple intelligences and the curriculum were dependent on technology and multimedia? What if authentic assessments were more important than multiple-choice state tests? What if asking the probing question were valued more than providing the correct answer? What if students were required to do some sort of service project or community work and what if learning content in the textbook were not substituted for figuring out what to do with that content? What if school were the place where students found their voice, discovered how to think, and saw that what they did and believed and thought mattered? What if school were where students learned a lot (not all, but certainly a lot) about being a part of a democracy, a contributing part? What if school were a place for figuring out, where trying mattered at least as much as adequate progress, where learning proceeded at each student's level and pace instead of lock-step pace? I think if those things happened, then a high school diploma might mean something, and the something it would mean would be far different than what it meant in 1986 or 1996 or even today in 2006. (11)

So yes, what if? I love this vision of the potential the high school education. This vision might better engage more students, thus making school something real and relevant and worth their time.

We need more people wondering what if? and imagining other possible worlds for our students' lives in school.

For now, signing off--
M. Shelley

Quantify this!

In a week where I spent a good chunk of my working time watching 9th graders take a state mandated test that does not help them and tells us very little that we didn't already know, maintaining a positive attitude is tough (we had conferences as well- so additionally an exhausting week).

So I smiled this morning to read this great vignette from Joe Bower at for the love of learning.

I won't repost the whole thing, but the end is perfect:

This quick, light-hearted interaction with these two boys initiated a relationship that engaged them in learning for the remainder of time they spent with me. And in the end, they needed the relationship more than the math.

Can you test for that? How do you quantify the master teacher's judgement that the relationship is more important than the curriculum at that moment? Would you penalize Mr. Bower for failing to focus on the math (his ostensible job). Would you fire him because he's 'not a good teacher?'

Or would you PRAY, to what ever power you believe in, that your kid has teachers like that.

It's always the relationship first.

'No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.'

-F. Scott

The issue with teachers and students- Animated!

This video has been making the rounds on the internet- It came to me by way of a friend on Facebook. Ah Facebook- occasionally good for something other than sucking your creative soul. It is a really fun animated version of Daniel Pink's talk at RSA. I love creative stuff like this, so I was instantly captivated. In fact, I watched it twice in a row so I would remember his main points. And I immediately found myself connecting his comments on drive, or what motivates us, to the occupations of both teaching and being a student.

Here is the video, some comments from me are below.



Pink identifies three factors that impact what he calls 'drive': Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Oh yeah, money is a factor, but not they way we might think, according to Pink (sorry for the rhyme).

Here is how I think this relates to the lives of teachers (I'll address students in another post when I have a chance- because I think what he says is also important in thinking about the experiences of students). For much of the history of public education- at least in my memory, teaching has been a comfortable middle class job. No one was getting rich, but none of us expected that. We made a living. This was using money in the way Pink identified- teachers made enough money to take the issue of money off the table. In return for stability, teachers lived with the fact that they wouldn't be subject to huge financial reward. For most of us that was a fair trade. Of course the high social prestige of the profession made up for some of that (note sarcasm here), but what was important was that it was a fair living, and since most of use have ambitions other than monetary, that was good enough.

What made teaching great was the abundance of the other three factors. Teaching has buckets of purpose. I have never met a teacher that didn't really believe in what they were doing- it's importance, it's meaningfulness, it's worth. You want purpose, education has purpose. Helping children learn and understand the world around them feels as meaningful as anything one could be doing.

For a long time, education has also had a fair bit of autonomy. Sure, in public education we are (and should be) accountable to our students and communities for providing the collective vision of eduction we are charged with, But for the most part, teachers and schools have had a high degree of autonomy in not only how we do our work, but often what that work actually is. Teachers were invited to participate in the discussion of what we should be doing, and had genuine influence. Further, in our classrooms, we often had tremendous autonomy. Though we were often told the what, the how of our work was mostly left up to teachers and groups of teachers in schools. As long as we met the expectations of our community, we were allowed freedom in how we did what we did. Note that the teachers we revere, both in our own lives and in our mythology, are the ones that exercised autonomy (think Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society)

And, teaching is hard. Really hard. It is the sort of higher level cognitive work Pink is discussing (I know it is fashionable in some quarters to claim that 'any person with the appropriate background can teach,' but that simply isn't true. It is hard, complicated, and takes time to get competent- a minimum of three years according to most research I have read). So mastery takes work. And we are never done. Over the nine years I have been in the high school classroom I have gotten continuously better, and every time I became aware that I had achieved a new level of competence in some way, it was also apparent to me how much further I needed to go.

So teachers were willing to put up with low social status and the less appealing parts of the job because it provided large amounts of the other things that Pink identifies as key to 'drive.' In many ways it was the perfect job (for the right sort of person). The rewards Pink is describing to produce high performance we actually working pretty well.

However, today what is happening in eduction is changing that. There is less financial stability, so money becomes an issue. I already live with a salary far below the average for my level of education, but the budget squeeze at the federal, state and district level is real and serious. My salary has never held pace with inflation, but it wasn't that far behind. Now we face real changes in the monetary aspects of education. One of my colleagues was literally in tears in her office the other day having heard that our districts 'offer' in this year's negotiations was a pay cut. It not that we are or should be immune from the realities of economics, I'm just pointing out that the game is changing. Money has been put back on the table in education and we are worried. And the stability that we used to trade for the lower salary is no longer. Benefits are being cut or squeezed, teachers are getting laid off in large numbers, and this will continue for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, there are major changes in the other factors Pink discusses. It is, again, fashionable right now to blame teachers for the problems in education. This has produced the most top heavy, top down model of management one can imagine. Teachers are losing autonomy very quickly right now. At the federal, state and district level, more focus is being put on controlling not only the what, but the how of teaching. Teachng is being transformed in some quarters from the cognitively challenging work it should be, into the sort of mechanical, menial labor that Pink says is exactly the sort of work in which the simple reward paradigm does work. Which might not be that big a deal, except that if you remember the best teachers you ever had, they probably weren't the ones who treated their work as mechanical menial work. They treated it like the intellectually complex challenging task that good teaching is. And if you think about the worst teachers you ever had, they were probably exactly the type of teacher that will fit well in the new vision of teaching.

As for the other two factors, education will never lack purpose, but if it feels like the very system you work in has committed itself to making it difficult if not impossible to achieve that purpose, then eventually all but the least imaginative will quit in frustration. And if we turn the job into a mechanical menial function, then there is no challenge in mastery, and that will cease to be a factor.

Now for the editorializing. As if I wasn't already doing that. It is always interesting to me that we (the collective 'we'- read 'that guy who has the Secretary of Education post and many others like him) think that 'business ideas' will save education, but when you hear that, the person saying it does not mean ideas like the one in Pink's lecture (or in the awesomely creative deployment by RSA Animate). No, the lessons of 'business' that we want to deploy in education all come from the manufacturing sector. Efficiency, scale, standardization. A business model with little room for the factors that Pink identifies as key to "drive." Also, interestingly, it is the part of our economy that our leaders continually tell us is not the future for our country. So we are trying to make a system for educating children (which NO-ONE ever says is not of grave importance), who we want to be passionate, autonomous and committed to mastery, using a system which researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago found is unlikely to allow the people who are the delivery system to be passionate, autonomous or committed to mastery. But we really want innovation? We think we want creativity in education? We want teachers passionately committed to the work they do and willing to labor at continuously improving? We could do that. But I don't think that's the direction we are heading right now.

It's two weeks to the end of the school year. I just spent two hours in which I should have been grading thinking about this, which is perfect anecdotal support for what Pink was saying. But I REALLY have to grade some papers today. Really.

-F. Scott

Out of the office, into the classroom

A great moment today at work (in a day that REALLY needed a great moment).

I was writing a paper to use as a model for my students in a fairly traditional 11th Grade class. They are working on an assignment in which they have to analyze a passage from a play by Shakespeare. So I chose a passage from a different play (one of my favorites- yes I am a literature geek). I wrote a paper (about 750 words- these are very short papers), and handed it off to my teammate to give it a read. We were sitting in my office and my office-mate (M. Shelly) joined in the conversation (I wasn't trying to cut her out, we just don't teach the same classes). Soon we were all involved in a conversation about not only my paper, but what we thought a paper like this should look like. What qualities made a paper like this good? We were, in essence, fully engaged in a writing conference, with my writing as the center of attention.

It was a really interesting experience from several different perspectives. First, writing this paper was tough. And I am a professional in this field, I know the play I was writing about, I know the passage cold (mostly have it memorized), and most days I am a pretty good writer. Even so, this is a tough assignment. It isn't tough to think about the passage, but to convert that thinking into a cogent, articulate and extremely focused piece of writing was really challenging. It was a good reminder that what we ask our students to do every day is hard. Even for our good students (and most of my students are very good at being students).

Second, it was interesting to have my writing worked over in the same way that I do my student's writing. I am serious about both writing and thinking about literature. I am a veteran of writing workshops, have my own committed writing practice, and have the toughest editor I know close to hand (I am married to her). It is tough to take criticism, even from people I know like and trust, in a neutral setting! And I really trust both the source of the criticism and the nature of the comments. I have no doubt that following my colleague's advice will improve my paper, and I still wanted to fight about it.

My students are worried about being 'right,' worried about what I will think of them, worried about what their peers will think of them, and all too often they don't really understand why I care about their writing, because they don't. They just want a grade and to move on. Or they want to know how to get to the 'right' answer- and that is tough when studying literature. For many, English class is a perennial mystery, where they never really get a grip on what it is we are doing, no matter how hard my colleagues and I try to make it transparent (yes, I know that there are just as many who love this class, but I am not as worried about them for immediate purposes). What must it be like to have a conference with me?

And third, in the middle of a really engaged conversation about my paper and papers like this in general- a thought struck me. I said to my colleagues, "Wee need to stop doing this in here (here being in our office) and do it in our classrooms." We need to model what it really takes to get good at writing, which was all the things we had in play in my office. I was genuinely committed to the writing (my geekiness knows no bounds), my colleagues we genuinely committed to helping me, and we had the freedom to have a real conversations because we had an already established relationship of trust and respect, making the office a safe place to float my writing.

So I guess the tough question is really, how do I get students to that place. That, of course, is a pretty complicated question. It would be great if the intertube out there had some answers. I am not sure it does. We did talk about how to arrange our schedules so that we could model these kinds of discussions for our students. That is a start.

I am actually not going to show my students a revised draft of the paper, at least not right away. I want them to see it in its raw first draft, without the benefit of the revision process. I took some notes, and Shelly wrote some things on the back of my draft, and I think I will take some suggestions from my students as well.

It was, far and away, the best part of my day.

F. Scott

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.