curriculum
In my humble opinion, Jo Boaler's, recent Education Week column, Where Has All the Knowledge Gone?
The Movement to Keep Americans at the Bottom of the Class in Math, is one of the most important pieces of education journalism in some time.
Is this just a coincidence? Can President Bush really have been so badly advised as to ignore almost all of the research that could have informed the report, or was there something more deliberate at work? How acceptable is it for a government to control the forms of knowledge that are released to the public?
Dr. Boaler is a former Stanford University Mathematics Professor who clearly and succinctly documents how "science" and "research" are used as a blunt weapon by the United States Department of Education. Boaler describes how the President's National Mathematics Advisory Panel was constrained from publishing the best advice for improving mathematics education. Such ideological interference in mathematics education is consistent with the Reading First mess at the center of No Child Left Behind.
My life has been a whirlwind of activity since NECC and I have found it hard to keep up with blogging. I don't know why, but I feel guilty blogging when I have other deadlines looming. Do any of you experience that? Is it illogical? Should I blog anyway, much like we still get the day to day things done at work of home when we have extra tasks on our "to do" lists or should I take any free moment and put it toward the deadlines and follow Grandmas' rule of "work before play"?
I'd love to hear your take.
Disclaimer: Blogging is like play for me- sheer enjoyment. Not necessarily the writing, as for me the writing doesn't come easy, but the thrill of the hits and conversation that follows.
Community Driven System 
The purpose of stealing moments away from my already full agenda this morning though is to share the wonderment of the last week. This week I came to realized more than ever that I am a community driven woman. I believe in the power of the community, the wisdom of the crowd, that the network is more powerful than the node and that none of us are as good as all of us. I believe that School 2.0 means moving from a classroom system to a community system. And now more than ever I also believe that about PD and I mean all PD- conferences(e.g. K12Online08), workshops (e.g. most recently CABOCES Summer Instititue), ongoing, job embedded sync and asysn (e.g. PLP) and as a result I am going to start changing my keynotes even more to flow from a community model as well. As I reflected over the last week I realized even my family operates as a community rather than a traditional family model. I am no loan wolf.
CABOCES Summer Institute
One week ago I landed in Buffalo and was greeted by Rick Weinberg who took me to Selemanca where I would be spending the next week working with educators from the surrounding area. When the day drew closer to the conference Rick shared that unexpectedly numbers were down. I gave him the opportunity to cancel rather than bring me out for just a few people, (I am knee deep in buying my first home in Va and could have used the time) but Rick was firm that they wanted to move forward. I am so glad he made that decision because this week was an incredible week of learning for me personally.
Here are my take aways...
1. When you are focused on educational reform from a community perspective- more is not always better.
Monday- I had 10 administrators who were with me for one day. The small number enabled me to spend time personally getting to know each attendee. I invited Karen Richardson, Chris Lehmann, and Jon Becker to attend a panel discussion answering their concerns and questions. You can listen to the panel discussion here. The strength of intimacy because of such a small number of participants in the room made me realize that relationship is a more powerful tool when trying to leverage change than having large numbers of people in a room who are passively listening to you talk.
John Norton's wine glass metaphor rings true here- (He was drinking a glass of wine when it occurred to him- hence the name) that it is better to have small numbers of highly engaged people when influencing school reform than hundreds of folks who show up but walk away unchanged by the experience.
Also, on Friday when we knew our numbers would be minimal and we had such brilliant panel members coming from the community (Darren Kuropatwa, Kevn Honeycutt, Allanah King, and Mark Clemente) we made it a teachable moment. We spontaneously opened the Elluminate session up to the world (and they showed up) and we used Ustream and a chat channel as well to show if you offer quality the community will come to you- no matter how rural or small you are.
2. My belief was reinforced that for most newbies, teaching tools in isolation is too overwhelming and a waste of time.
Tuesday I tried to lay the foundation and set the context. I also wanted to help attendees understand the today's digital learner. Wes Fryer (Oklahoma), Laura Deisley (Atlanta), Meg Ormiston (Illinois), and
Sue Waters (Australia) talked about personal learning networks and the tools that support them (listen in here) on Wednesday. On Thursday my plan was to look more closely at tools and their pedagogy and how they best relate to various instructional activities and then on Friday to plan inquiry based instruction with an interactive model of building a PBL mini-unit. For the most part things went according to plan, but Thursday's tools, tools, and more tools left me feeling overwhelmed and tense. I know if I had been a newbie in that audience not having been given the opportunity to use the tools in a meaningful application would have been frustrating. The idea was to create an awareness, not mastery, so that on Friday when we created lessons using the TPCK model we would have a web 2.0 list of applications from which to choose. The result though was painful, at least for me.
I brainstormed with Rick Weinberg and Tim Clarke afterward and what we felt would have worked better was to have four tables- with one of us at each table presenting a tool. Our presentations would include the tool, an activity using the tool, and a chance to reflect on best uses of the tool. Then after 45 minutes we would break for 15 and then could present another tool. We would do that three times (12 tools) and participants could choose which tools they wanted to learn.
I really believe that the best examples of tool instruction are within the context of what you are learning. Like our heating and cooling system they should be invisible. The only time we focus on our heating and cooling is when they aren't working properly. Then we have to rethink the tool. Even Bill Fitzgerald (Funny Monkey) after his discussion on Open Source tools left the attendees with the idea of forgetting the tool- focus instead on what you want kids to know and be able to do- then figure out the right task and tool for the job to help them learn or do it.
3. What is most important to 21st Century educational reform is to listen to kids. 
On Tuesday I decided to create a panel of kids from 11th grade to college juniors and talk to them about their reflections on technology. It was the most inspiring part of my week long work. I am still learning from all they taught me during that hour.
Meet Gracie, Maegan, Ryan, Jay, Danny, Christian, Thomas, Caroline and Jesse. You won't be sorry you did.
4. Teachers need time to reflect, explore, and build in the safety net of your workshop.
Teachers, like kids, need you to model and then let them explore authentic use with you there to help. They need to understand how to create lesson plans that use the tools in meaningful ways, but then they need to actually collaborate together to build activities that they can use in school. Activities that leverage the potential of these new mediums for connecting and collaborating.
Typically, in my workshops I only have time to present the shift and the tools- never to actually jump to the most important step of helping teachers contextualize what they are learning. I walked away from this week realizing that this step is what is missing in school reform and why, in my opinion, that change is happening so slowly.
The most exciting time of the conference for me personally was to watch the groups choose a topic- create a concept web, a curriculum web, choose appropriate standards, an essential pedagogy, an appropriate tool and develop several lessons that all integrated not only core disciplines but fell together under a theme, project or problem. The creative juices really began to flow as we constructed together a killer initiating activity that would usher in our year long project and the lessons we would use to teach state mandated content from a passion-based perspective. The tools made sense because they were merely a means to an end- helping students learn about things that interested them from the perspective of a scientist, historian or author.
I am thankful to CABOCES for being willing to invest the time that allowed their educators to not only gain an awareness but to deeply reflect, discuss, and wrestle with the concepts while facilitators and the community stood close to help them make informed choices about change.
I've been writing for magazines for about a decade and on occasion the publisher or Editor-in-Chief objected to the content of a column and refused to punish it. On other occasions I would not make changes I felt would dilute my argument or insult the intelligence of the reader.
Education’s Most Dangerous Idea: Curriculum (from 2006) takes the controversial view that the notion of curriculum is at the root of many education problems.
A friend called a few months back and asked me to tell him my most dangerous idea. What a great question I thought! My answer, “Curriculum is bad.”
Allow me to make the case.
I can turn to almost any page in a textbook, article or website and find an outlandish, inaccurate or confusing idea some curriculum writer thought was brilliant. Even the most well-intentioned efforts at relevance or context stretch credulity, often in a hilarious fashion.
[I realize this post is long. If you'd rather read this post as black text on white background, you can use the "Print This" link to view the post in that format without actually having to print.]
In an earlier post, Humanities and the DY/DAN Method, I linked to Dan Meyer’s blog and his take on assessment and homework in the mathematics discipline as a way to start thinking through similar issues in terms of the English discipline.
In this post, I want to clarify what I mean by “the English discipline” and, related, what I think the goals of an English class are (or should be) at the secondary level. It might also be good to consider what the goals aren’t. This is nothing new or revolutionary, just my take on it all.1 In a later post, I’ll write about some ways to move students toward those goals and to assess whether or not they’ve reached them.
However, I won’t be developing much of a classroom-ready system in these posts, and don’t have the ability to test it even if I did, since I’m not currently in the classroom. I’m offering my idealistic take based on my experiences and the benefit of a year away. Maybe someone can do something useful with it (which could include proving me wrong).
Of course, trying to define “the English discipline and ways to assess it” in a few blog posts is foolish, or arrogant, or both. Many people, with more brains and experience than I, have spent decades debating this (and centuries debating related questions), and there’s no universal consensus yet. Maybe tomorrow.
On the other hand, I think the ultimate goal of an English class is pretty simple: teach students to read and produce texts. There’s a lot to unpack from those terms, though, and even after all the unpacking, the devil is still hiding in the details of the execution.
Despite all this, I’ll still play the fool, but I reserve the right to revise this later using the phrase “that’s what I meant.” If I’m lucky, the discussion might go further through comments or other reactions.
Skills not Content
English should be approached not as a subject or field of study but as a discipline that focuses on and organizes itself around essential skills rather than a body of knowledge.
The question becomes not “What do you know?” but “What can you do?” After four years in secondary English classrooms, students should — with some skill and with an awareness of the their own ability — be able to read, interpret, criticize, discuss, and produce texts in a wide range of modes, genres and media.2
It’s more important to me that a student be proficient with these skills than that she know about a particular collection of texts, a particular set of terms, or a particular hierarchy of grammatical sins. Of course, this isn’t an anti-knowledge curriculum– skillful doing isn’t possible without relevant knowledge — but the knowledge should serve the mastery of the skills. The development of those skills is central, and everything else should support that purpose.
I think it’s worth quoting Robert Scholes here from The Rise and Fall of English:3
We are not artisans shaping the impressionable minds of our students. We are — or should be — masters of our craft helping others to master it, and human beings of integrity helping others to achieve it in their own ways in their own lives.
I think we may at present be too concerned with teaching the right ideas in the classroom and not concerned enough with teaching the most effective ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
The one thing a curriculum in English must do, whatever else it accomplishes on the way, is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers of text.
An advantage of this approach is that it’s scalable and adaptable: given a group of students, discover where their skill levels are and take steps to move them to the next level using texts and approaches best suited for those purposes and those students.
I want to clarify, however, that by “skills,” I do not mean reductive, “back to basics” skills, exemplified by units on “writing an effective sentence” or “nouns and pronouns.” Specifics of this sort are, in my experience, best addressed within the context of larger pursuits, namely, wrestling with texts that are relevant and engaging to the student. Instead, I mean the primary skills listed above: reading, interpreting, critiquing, and producing texts.
Texts not Literature
“Text” includes a variety of modes, genres, and media (film, magazine articles, song lyrics, advertisements, television shows, blog posts, etc.), and texts should be selected primarily to support the teaching of the desired skills — serving as effective or deficient models — while still openly acknowledging (though not “preaching”) the other implications (ideological, cultural, or otherwise) of those selections.
This isn’t to say that the texts should serve only as examples. Texts can serve multiple purposes, and one way to effectively organize them is by topics that are relevant to contemporary concerns and interests. This makes for a dynamic canon, and frees us from the “dead white men” syndrome without denying the importance of those works (see below).
This is also why I believe the texts of “pop culture” are the doorway to further developing students’ competency with writing and engaging their interest in texts of all types. As should be clear by now, I don’t agree with those who believe only “serious literature” is worthy of study. And anyway, to a large extent, “pop culture” is culture, and those things not labeled part of “pop culture” are often in reaction to it. Popular texts (in all varieties) provide the primary lens through which culture is mediated for students, and students are already familiar with and interested in them, which makes them well-suited for study.4
While I agree that having an understanding of literary history is important, I also believe that history should provide context for contemporary and personally-relevant concerns. History of any kind, taught in isolation as a collection of facts, is uninteresting and, worse, useless — which leads students to the logical conclusion that history is boring and irrelevant. Of course, understood properly, history is fascinating and vitally important. That’s why we should start with texts relevant to the interests and concerns of the now and help students to situate those texts in historically-appropriate contexts. Any other approach is just an exercise in really slow Googling.
We should also remember that any “literary history” we do tell, even when skillfully told, is still only one way of telling the story of text and culture. This should be demonstrated, over and over to students, and ultimately, we should help students to discover appropriate contexts for themselves, along with the relevant critical and rhetorical moves.
I am aware of and concerned about criticisms of a “shallow” curriculum,5 where the students never wrestle with anything more complex than a cartoon. That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m arguing that the texts students encounter every day are the ideal starting points for understanding and mastering how to read, interpret, critique, and produce texts of ever-increasing depth and complexity.
Workshop not (Only) Lecture Hall
Placing skills at the center of the curriculum requires that students practice the execution of those skills, examine effective and deficient models, receive guidance and critique relative to their ability, and reflect on their own progress individually and collectively. The class then functions more like an artist’s studio or craftsmen’s workshop, where students produce texts in as wide a range of modes, genres, and media as possible, and where the ultimate test is an examination of the work students produce and the processes they used to achieve it.
On the other hand, direct lecture is, at times, appropriate and necessary, particularly when students require information before moving forward and the process of having students discover that particular information on their own doesn’t justify the time it would take to do so.
A few conditions on lectures:
- Make sure a lecture is the best approach. Helping students discover relevant information for themselves can serve multiple purposes: research skills, plurality of opinion, critical reading skills, etc.
- Make lectures focused and brief, because whatever information is delivered through the lecture should be immediately put to use by the students. The more information you present at once, the more difficult it will be to employ (and thus usefully retain) that information.
- There are effective, engaging ways to lecture. Discover those ways and adapt them.
However, approaching a course as a workshop or studio requires establishing an appropriate environment. At least four major concerns need to be addressed if this is going to work:
- Safety: Students must feel safe enough to exert genuine effort and to share the results of that effort.6
- Value: Students must feel that their interests, opinions, and efforts are valued by the teacher and by the majority of their classmates. By maintaining rigorous standards for the work students produce, we give value to the work. By allowing legitimate choice in what the student pursues, we give value to the student’s interests and opinions. By actually caring about the student’s success, we give value to the student’s efforts.
- Integrity: Teachers must mentor academic truth and integrity in their approach to students, texts, and the texts students produce, and they must require that integrity in response.7
- Space: A workshop approach will not work in a classroom where desks are arranged in long rows with the teacher’s desk taking a position of command in the front or threat in the back. Also, put generally: the space should be arranged for the kind of work you’re doing in it,have the tools you need for that work, and feel like the kind of place you’d actually like to work in.8
I realize this kind of environment is not easy to create or maintain, but I still think it’s necessary.
Process not (Only) Product
The workshop model implies a focus on the process, not on the product exclusively. If we believe we have a craft to teach, then the how of this craft is just as essential as the final what. This is true for both reading and creating texts. After all, it is in the doing, not the having done, where learning occurs, so process is where/when all the real work occurs. The products are the aftermath. This is not to say that products should never matter, but from an educational perspective, they matter mainly in terms of what they reveal about how to improve our process the next time.
However, I don’t want to suggest that there is one process to follow (the writing process, for instance). Instead, process merely recognizes that interactions with text, either in their production or their consumption, does not happen all at once. It involves moving from concept to critical investigation to expression to refinement; from reading, to interpretation, to criticism; from disorganized collections, to selection, to arrangement, to presentation.
Therefore, certain responses — from both teachers and students — are appropriate at one stage of the process that aren’t appropriate at another. Students need to recognize this in terms of how they work with texts and how they respond to their own efforts and the efforts of others. Teachers need to recognize this in order to offer appropriate and effective critique and help the student move successfully from stage to stage, skill level to skill level.
All of this is tied directly to assessment, but I’ll say more about this in the follow-up post.
Open not Closed
I mean a lot of things by this. For one, teachers hide too much from their students. English class shouldn’t feel like a sadistic game: the teacher standing at the front of the room, ready to punish, asking students to guess hidden answers to obscure questions without offering any advice on how the answers might be discovered or evaluated, other than by the say-so of the teacher. If they don’t already believe that we know what we’re doing (and so, buy into the game) then they soon become convinced that we don’t know what we’re talking about (and so, rebel) or that they are the hopeless problem (which is expressed either through disdain or despair).9
Assuming that we do know what we’re talking about (ahem), then we need to be honest and explicit about the reasons behind whatever we’re asking students to do … which means we need to have reasons, and they better be good. Good reasons are ones that don’t waste students’ time. In part, this means having a clear purpose grounded in sound pedagogy and tied to an appropriate skill. It also means giving them every opportunity we can for them to explore and invest their efforts in topics that matter to them.
Related to the above, we should encourage student-generated texts that have, whenever possible, an authentic audience, a real purpose beyond the classroom, and a genuine appeal to the students’ interests. It’s here, more than anywhere else, that I see the power of online technologies to benefit the teaching of the English discipline.10
Another remedy is to provide students with the critical and rhetorical moves they need to help them enter the work of the discipline while making that work as explicit as possible. Too often, we hide the mechanics of “how” texts are decoded and produced. Instead, we should be giving them all the tools and showing them how each one works. In other words, don’t be afraid to be provide formulas with the goal of moving students beyond these formulas as their skills develop. To quote Gerald Graff: “If we refuse to provide such formulas on the grounds that they are too prescriptive or that everything has to come from the students themselves, we just end up hiding the tools of success.”11
Finally, we need to help students to recognize why we hold the standards we do for what they produce by inviting them to determine standards based on their own work with texts. This collaborative approach to standards doesn’t mean we’ll have lower standards that vary from class to class. We are (or should be) the master craftsmen and women, and we can guide students to recognize aspects they miss. We can also scale these aspects to their current level of ability. However, if we don’t involve them in this process, not only do we reinforce the “us and them” tension in the classroom (which is even less helpful in a workshop setting), but we also miss an opportunity for students to genuinely practice their critical skills and become invested in the quality of their own work.
Craftsmen not Priests
First, to any female readers: I apologize for the sexist terms, but “craftspeople not priests or priestesses” just doesn’t roll nicely.
This last section is brief, as it wanders a bit from discussing the English discipline specifically to my own ideas about teaching generally. Still, I think these are important.
An English teacher’s primary responsibility is to teach students to work effectively with texts; teachers should not be using texts to promote ideologies — political, religious, aesthetic, or otherwise. I’ve seen rifts develop in a classes based solely on ideological conflicts between teacher and student. To me, this shouldn’t even be a possibility. Certainly, there are academic truths, schools of theory and criticism, and controversies within the discipline that can inform our practice and become the subject of study, but we aren’t there to indoctrinate students into any ideology other than the primary ideology of the discipline: reasoned argument from multiple perspectives.
Additionally, English teachers should be practitioners not just theoreticians — they should do what they teach. That means they should work with academic integrity and be effective readers, interpreters, critics, and producers of texts in a wide range of genres, modes, and media.12
Finally, teachers should be reflective observers and researchers of their craft, working from clear pedagogy, not mandates. They should be aware of information relevant to their field specifically (textual theory, history, production, and consumption) and generally (education, learning, creativity, etc.).
What Did I Miss?
These are the principles that matter most to me (except for the ones I forgot, of course). I’ll also admit I never held to these principles even half as well as I should have. They’re not easy, which is part of why I think they’re worth pursuing.
I would appreciate any reactions, here or elsewhere, to this list. I’ll try to connect these principles with specific goals and assessments in a later post.
Footnotes:
- Outside of my own experiences in the classroom, my thoughts have been strongly influenced by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Tom Romano, Barry Lane, Don Gallehr, Gerald Graff, Sheridan Blau, Robert Scholes, the National Writing Project, and the many excellent teachers with whom I’ve worked over the past nine years.
- Robert Scholes calls this a “canon of methods,” and much of this comes from his writing on this subject.
- These quotes are presented out of order.
- Related, I’d recommend reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.
- Related, see The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic) by Nicholas Carr
- Peter Elbow wrote about this extensively.
- Scholes defines academic truth and integrity as: “accuracy in citation, regard for what is already known about our subject, and rigor in situating and interrogating whatever material we are considering” — The Rise and Fall of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 57.
- I’ve written about the importance of physical space before here and here. Also consider Michel Foucault’s work, particularly Discipline and Punish.
- If I’m being kind, I attribute this to a desire to keep things simple for students on the one hand (not confusing them with things they don’t need to know) and to keep things from being too simple on the other (not encouraging their laziness by providing them with the answers). If I’m not so kind, I attribute this to a desire to protect our position of authority by pretending the answers are known and we possess them, to hide the fact that we don’t have a good reason for asking them to do something, or to avoid the embarrassing admission that we don’t know the answer and aren’t sure if anyone does.
- Blogging, collaborative work, manipulation of image and sound, etc.
- Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 11.) On the other hand, please don’t beat up and enslave your students with these formulas: they’re steps, training wheels, meant to be left behind.
Similarly, make the questions of and conflicts within the discipline known to students and invite them into the conversation. Most students love a good fight, so show them some. Don’t know where to start? Select a few articles from either side of the music and copyright debate, then decode the texts, pull out strategies, talk about academic integrity, and away you go. ((See Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993).
- This is one of the guiding principles of the National Writing Project: the best teachers of writing are teachers who write. Also, I wrote about this in “Teaching is Consequential“
During last night's coverage of the final Democratic primaries in Montana and South Dakota, NBC's Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert remarked, "I would love to teach an American History class in an inner-city high school tomorrow morning." (paraphrase)
Read the rest of my blog, Is History History in History Class?
I have been spending some time recently responding to a listserv discussion that has many brilliant, award winning teachers on it who are not sold on the idea that we really are going to have to change education to remain relevant; that *they* are going to have to change. I thought I would share my most recent letter.
One member writes-
I've been waiting and wondering when someone would take up the thread that Mark began during our "Here Comes Everybody" discussion, wherein he talked about how the printing press put scribes out of work and wondered whether or not technology would have a similar effect on teachers.
I am often asked as I travel to various places to present why I would spend so much time talking about technology knowing that with outsourcing and such that I am undermining job security in that computers could replace teachers. To that I respond, If you can be replaced by a computer then you probably should be! The truth is that technology will never replace teachers, however teachers who know how to use technology effectively to help their students connect and collaborate together online will replace those who do not.
Change is Here
The way we "do" school in the 21st Century will change. Teacher will be/is being redefined. (Lord knows it is time- while the rest of society has changed in its response to technology, education has
remained timeless the last 100 years.) What we have to do is ask ourselves what principled changes need to take place in order to remain relevant in the lives of the students we teach?
It Doesn't Change Some Things- It Changes Everything
With knowledge expanding at the rate it is and the world changing at a dizzying pace- to keep the status quo is to accept obsolescence. Teachers will need to accept the fact that even with all we have invested, the pace of change is going to demand us to unlearn and relearn. Every major technological innovation through time has demanded it of its users. Think of the world and how it functioned before electrification and the how it functioned after electrification- before television- after television (the way we fought wars and politics alone because of TV changed drastically)-- As Mark alludes to, technology doesn't change *some* things, it changes *everything*. Before TV, the thought of allowing someone to interrupt you constantly trying to sell you things you didn't want was unheard of- people were run out of town for such antics. But now it is part of our culture- to the tune of 500 channels-- which have figured out that by providing mediocre content (like reality TV) we will sit still and let them sell us things we do not really need and we will hum their jingles and use their products, all the while our culture becomes more and more superficial and kids lose out on developing deep, meaning (which they are so capable of grasping).
Incremental is becoming Exponential
Technology is and has changed society and the students we teach. The question isn't are you preparing for 21st Century teaching and learning- rather the 21st Century is here. The party has started. The kids have already arrived. We are 8 years into it.
Ask Them- They Know
Want to know how a 21st Century learner learns? Ask them. You will be amazed at what you hear and if you are smart- you'll act upon it. Sylvia Martinez says we are trying to solve this 21st C PD issue in schools with 6% of the population (teachers) when 94% of the population (kids) are better positioned to help us learn what we need to know to be successful. Turn your classrooms into learning ecologies- learn with and from your students. Get rid of top down, expert driven instruction methods and nurture self-directed discovery- both your own and theirs. Turn your passions into classroom curriculum. Get excited and mentor your kids integrating your passions with core content and foundational knowledge. Help them develop a love and understanding for culture and our rich heritage. Advocate hard to get the metrics we are using to measure classroom effectiveness changed- for we teach what we measure. Leverage NCLB to push for personalization of curriculum in an effort to meet AYP and all the various needs of your subgroup populations.
It Isn't "If", it is "When"
Technology WILL redefine schools- good or bad- it will/is happening. We are one node, one means, one stop in a 21st Century learners learning journey and options. We need to be having conversations about how to make sure that their time spent with us is preparing them for jobs that haven't been invented yet and enabling them in authentic ways to be a productive member of society now. As Dave Mathews says, "The future is no place for your better days."
And teachers need to be driving these discussions and this change- not policy makers. However, it will require you to redefine yourself. It will require you to unlearn and relearn which means an implementation dip in terms of personal power and knowledge-- but oh well, you are in this for kids remember? This will be messy, but you can't give away what you do not own. You have to own these tools and concepts before you can give them (empower) your students with them. However, once you do- get out of the way and let them show you all the ways to use them to learn that
you never dreamed possible.
Want to be amazed? Check out Laura (a 5th grader's blog) from a project I helped lead in WNY. How many of you can say you have the attention of 30,000 readers and that companies who are known for their giving acts are in regular contact with you? http://twentyfivedays.wordpres
We think as teachers -- oh ok blogs can help kids learn to write - they will supplement what I, the teacher does. When the kids think-- hmm blogs, you mean people can hear me? Watch what I can do with this- outside of school- in another node (space) of learning- my home.
Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach
Virginia Beach
Networked Learner
photo credit: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/careers/images/articles/stages_of_change.png
While I obviously haven't been blogging- I have been fast at it. I would say I have been busy, but Dean Shareski (our new convener for K12Online) has taught me we are all busy and I am not suppose to talk about how busy I am, but rather just talk about what I have been up to lately.
I keep a running "to-do" board above my desk. Lately, there have been too many things to fit them all. My life is full of meaning, exciting and that word I am not suppose to say (whispering ...busy). So busy in fact that I forgot to share about one of my most passionate interests.
ABPC 21st Century Learners- Year 3 Culminating
Anyone who has followed me knows that one true passion I have is the incredible work I am helping to deliver in Alabama around 21st Century literacies. On May 1 we had our culminating celebration for this year's 21st Century Learners journey.
What Was Different in Year 3?
In a word-- students. ABPC's leader, Cathy Gassenheimer felt this year's project with schools needed to have an clear connection to student achievement. We wanted to developmentally move teachers along the continuum of use and understanding of the transformative potential of 21st Century teaching and learning strategies to actually applying them in the classroom.
We created a student strand and added students as members of the team. Together we looked at how to change teaching to a self-directed process tied to student passion and rigor, as well are core curriculum standards.
During the culminating event students and other team members were led in a fishbowl exercise that turned out to be the most enlightening experience I have had so far in working towards 21st Century educational reform. Students were asked hard questions about how they learn best and evidence of those strategies used by teachers in classrooms. They were asked what do teachers need to change to be the kind of teachers that would help you learn best? Their answers were profound and I realized for the first time I think-- if we would just ask kids what they need, they know and would tell us. Wow. What a concept.
Here are some of the projects from Alabama this year:
WinterboroSchool
Our theme is: Taking Technology to the next level- The
competitive level.
their individual projects to the competitive level. We decided to
encourage and help our students to compete on the local and state level using
21st century skills we have introduced and use in the classroom throughout
the year. Winning at this level helped validate that we can compete in the
local and state arena using these newly acquired skills. The publicity
has also been great for the entire county. It has been a great
success. We will display our students’ medal winning projects along with
the bling bling they have won in the process.
West
Blocton
For our student project, we
created a wiki. On this wiki, the
students would choose a book to read that they wanted to carry on a
conversation about in the wiki. Then,
they would rate the book. Next, they
would write why they rated the book the way they did. The next few sentences had to include a
comprehension strategy that they used while reading the book. Whichever strategy they used, they had to
support it with text and tell what detail from the story made them use that
strategy. Then, they would write a
sentence to try to encourage others to read the book, even if they gave it a
low rating.
Finally, they would look at other responses other students had
made and carry on a conversation about their book.
Hewitt-Trussville Middle School
contains descriptions, examples, and uses for 21st tools in the
classroom. The wiki also contains information about project based
learning.
You can find out wiki at http://21centurylearners.wikispaces.com .
Challenger Middle School
Challenger 21st Century Team Group project:
Our professional development project is called "iTeach
2.0" and we invited the middle schools in our district to become a part of
iTeach 2.0. Each school sent two teachers to a workshop we sponsored to learn
about 21st century tools. We established a wiki for our team and participants
to use to share ideas. Our April face to face meeting was a type of fair where
each school shared a tool or project that they successfully used this semester.
Our computer will display screen shots from our wiki and our display board will
define data collected and cool tools explored during this year’s iTeach
workshops. Our wiki is http://iteach2-0.wikispaces.com .
We invited 18 students to commit their own time to work on a
project they would select. Twelve saw the project to completion. We gave three
basic guidelines: the students must develop their project around an issue that
affects teens, the project must help someone, and the project must be
communicated using technology tools. Our students brainstormed on their
own private wiki and were very passionate about teen issues! They decided that
they wanted to work on a project related to poverty. The students then researched
and decided that they wanted to adopt an impoverished school in another
country, which led them to
formed an Invisible Children Club to raise money.
The students created posters, a
website and a multi-media embedded PowerPoint to present to the student body.
They learned so much about war torn
Uganda and the
suffering of the children there. They have a basic knowledge of how this war
started. The amazing part is that we have not taught this information to our students.
They have taken a project with very few guidelines and have learned so much!
For this year, the project culminated in a fund-raiser, which raised $1778 in 3
days! This has become a project that encompasses many of the 21st century
skills. Our students are learning about society, geography/history,
communication, discernment, teamwork and many other skills. We will
display a computer with a timeline/info about their project work and their
presentation. We will have an additional computer with screen shots of
their webpage. Their website is http://www.freewebs.com/guluschoolproject/
George Hall Elementary
Collaboration is the main thesis for our project. This year
collaboration projects includes Skype interview with Janis Kearney, diarist for
Bill Clinton and author of "Cotton Fields of Dreams", Elluminate session with children from the
Dominican Republic and a weekly Skype collaboration with 5th grade students in
West Blocton Al. We continued the wiki field trip project using Scaling where
the students were proactive in the production of the projects to go online.
Blossomwood
Blossomwood
Elementary's team project for 2007-2008 has been to obtain more technology
resources for classrooms and adequately train teachers on how to use these
resources. Promethean ACTIV boards have been purchased for all classroom
units and teachers have attended both training at school and online training
from Promethean. Today, Blossomwood is displaying some sample classroom
flipcharts, as well as flipcharts that were used to train the faculty.
Clay-Chalkville High School
We will be presenting a Power Point presentation that highlights
some of the work that our teachers have created with their classes to enhance
student learning, as well as to promote communication between the classroom and
the home.
For instance, we have teachers that have created wikis with the
main purpose to keep the students and parents updated on assignments and
projects that are coming up. At the same
time, other teachers use blogs to allow the students become more involved in
the learning process.
Discovery Middle School
Middle School will showcase our journey from local to global connections through a
photostory. We will highlight our challenges and how we have overcome
them. We will also share our current projects that will lead us to
district wide integration of Web 2.0 tools.
Mt. Laurel Elementary
Sharing Web 2.0 Tools
Mt Laurel Elementary School is a K-3 school right outside of Birmingham. We are in our second year with the 21st Century Learning Team.
Our team's focus project was sharing Web 2.0 tools with our faculty. We conducted a survey to determine awareness and use of Web 2.0 tools and found that very few were aware of Web 2.0 tools, and even fewer were using them.
As a team we compiled a resource list of Web 2.0 tools. We held a meeting with our teachers and presented an awareness training to share the uses of each tool. We shared examples of how we had been using these tools and how students could benefit from using Web 2.0. We also encouraged them to let us help them set-up any of the tools they would think they would like to use in their classroom.
As of today, the number of teachers that are using Web 2.0 tools has changed by 60%, compared to when we initially took our survey. We now have grade levels participating in projects and teachers using these tools to create works with their students. We have teachers participating in book studies using Wiki’s, classes and parents blogging, podcasting galore, but most of all the awareness of the many tools that are available to each of them to enhance their class lessons and projects.
Cullman Middle School
Collaborative project-based teaching aligned to state content standards, reviewed by students. That is our lofty goal with this wiki. For 2008, we have selected 4 courses to focus on: Social Studies, grades 7 and 8 AND Computer Applications, grades 7 and 8
This project is designed in conjunction with the Alabama Best Practices Center's 21st Century Schools professional development. The project will be developed by a team of teachers and students from Cullman Middle School.
We hope that this will be a treasured resource for educators across the state, the country, and the world. Depending upon the success of the site, we hope to add additional areas of study in the future. We recognize the level of learning and retention of learning that project-based lessons hold for students, as well as the interest it adds to classes. On the outset, this seems like a project designed to aid teachers, and it will do that, but more importantly, this project will aid students in fostering a deeper interest in learning. With the Computer Applications courses, we are fortunate to be embarking upon new territory. At this time there are not specific standards for grade levels, only grade bands. This project will assist us in focusing on learning objectives and organizing those objectives in a sensible format. The student team will be comprised of students involved in
Cullman Middle School's SWAT (students willing to assist with technology) team. The teacher team will select a student team leader that will serve as a liaison to the teacher team.
Dean Road Elementary School
Our team sought to showcase the various ways we use the Smart Board to communicate more effectively among staff members and students. An immense part of our daily communication begins each day with our morning broadcast, WDRE, which features fourth and fifth grade students as broadcasters. Other grade levels are involved by reciting the pledge of allegiance and sharing the daily weather. All parts of the broadcast are viewed through the use of the Smart Board.
Not only do we begin our day with the Smart Board we also use this valuable learning tool in many other ways throughout the day. We display our morning messages, share interactive websites embedded in our daily lessons, and research an endless amount of information that can be easily displayed for all to see. This beneficial tool as helped foster communication through shared lessons created on the Smart Board software that assists teachers in planning and presenting the curriculum in a way that increases the students’ motivation to learn. The Smart Board, found in all classrooms, has become an irreplaceable learning tool that teachers and students just can’t seem to live without.
Fayetteville High School
The Fayetteville High School team has led a 21st Century Learners initiative for 10 schools throughout Talladega County. Modeled after the training sponsored by the ABPC, the FHS team, along with other teachers from Winterboro School, have served as mentors to over 20 teachers in their school system. The team will display the materials used for this project as well as evaluations from some of the participants in the program.
Wrights Mill Road Elementary
Tech-Know Expo
5th grade students brainstormed topics related to technology that interest them. Then, they volunteered to teach those topics they felt they were “Tech-sperts” in. The students prepared presentations for the younger grades and invited parents and members of the community to attend. Topics ranged from “Lights, Camera, Pinnacle in Action,” to iPod 101 and “How to Convince Your Parents to Let You Get A Cell Phone.” Students taught about blogging, making avatars, using Blabber, and the latest and greatest in text messaging.
I’ve been reading the “Bridging Differences” blog for a few months now and love it. These are two really smart, well-informed, thoughtful, and passionate educators engaged in one of the best examples of extended civil debate I’ve found online … and the hyperbole is justified.
A few days ago, Deborah Meier posted “Let’s Play with ‘Overarching’ Agreements,” in which she listed some points of potential agreement between Diane Ravitch and herself. Diane found most of the list agreeable (and so did I, if that matters for anything), but she did have a few specific objections which she discusses in her response post “Our Overarching Disagreements.”1 Both are worthy of the few minutes it takes to read them in full (as are most posts on that blog).
In brief, Ravitch has these main points:
- Schools are institutions of social conservation, not revolution
- Popular culture has no real place in schools
- Citizenship and “character-formation” are important goals for schools2
- A specific science syllabus should be developed (instead of the more general approach to teaching science that Meier proposes)
- External assessments are an important part of an effective public school system (though Ravitch agrees the current method is unhelpful)
Two of my reactions/thoughts are listed below3
Education and Popular Culture
Ravitch doesn’t see a place for pop culture in school. In her words:
Parents do not send their children to school to learn the vulgar language, misogynistic and homophobic attitudes, racism, violence, and crude behavior that are common on “the street,” but to learn language, values, and behavior that is better than what they encounter outside school. Kids have plenty of time to indulge in the highs and lows of popular culture without wasting precious time in school.
I wonder what Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You) would say here.4
On the one hand, his argument is that pop culture is becoming increasingly more complex and therefore not only worthy of our time but actually beneficial: it’s making us collectively smarter.5
On the other hand, if pop culture is doing its work just fine without any “official” sanction (i.e., people participate in pop culture because they want to, not because someone tells them to) then perhaps Ravitch is correct: in school, focus on those necessary things that students will not likely acquire on their own outside of school.
External Assessments
Ravitch also wants external assessment of schools, though she does want it put “into perspective” and used “more wisely.” I agree with her, but I still worry about who determines what that external assessment will look like.
To my mind, an external science test should be created by three cooperative groups: teachers who are well-versed in the syllabus; practicing scientists who have a real-world understanding of what and how science students should “know”; and an independent group of people experienced in effective methods for assessment (i.e., people who don’t think “multiple choice” is the best method to assess everything). The same goes for other disciplines, replacing “practicing scientists” with the appropriate corollary.
Either way, I heartily agree with her closing statement:
The question that must somehow be solved is how to provide public accountability while ditching the stupid and non-educative regime of sanctions and incentives that is now being fastened around the necks of American educators.
Footnotes:
- My annotated version
- I wondered: “whose character?”
- With a thanks to Diigo’s “Send to Blog” tool for doing much of the work.
- I’m working on a full post related to this text, which was a very interesting read … coming soon!
- Related to Ravitch’s concern with the “base” aspects of popular culture, the morality of pop culture is not the important or interesting aspect for Johnson.
