Tinkering in the Humanities

A plasma-cutter-wielding English teacher should be a common sight at all schools in the future. I have spent the last few weeks engaged in a thinking (and visiting) odyssey that has demanded that I consider how tinkering and maker science can be applied to the Humanities. And while I certainly don’t have the answer, the process of discovery sure has been fun.

Yesterday’s episode starred a visit to The Crucible and class in MIG welding and plasma cutting. After what seemed like an extraordinarily brief instruction period on both spark and flame producing tools, our instructor set us lose to build a box. I was terrified. My mind raced to the number of injuries I could sustain through my own ignorance and I was nearly paralyzed. Finally I realized I had a reputation to protect with my colleagues and the spirit of my father (my tinkering mentor) to honor and off I went to the plasma cutter. All photos of my first crack at this include a ridiculous grin plastered across my face. I was in love. But there was still the MIG welding to tackle and those welder’s mask sure made things dark and hard to see. By the end of the two hours, I was pumped up. Proud of my pathetic looking box, proud of myself for accomplishing such a task and tackling my fear and convinced that my going through that experience was vital to me as a teacher realizing that my students may feel like this everyday and wondering how I can help them take that step off the ledge.

Our visits took us to Benicia where a terrific teacher named Nicci Nunes had created a 21^st Technology class for her students who were in a continuation program. Looking for ways to connect to her at-risk students, she quickly realized the importance of creating opportunities for small successes early for her students. Whether it was a spooky ghost or spider with simple LEDs, she saw that this built persistence in her students who had no reason to trust themselves or the world around them. She also modeled that persistence for her students when she created a maker space from Donors Choose and grant writing, acquiring everything from a 3-D printer to circuit kits. Beyond my admiration for Nicci’s own persistence, there was an important lesson to learn. While her students fear risk, much like I did, our students do as well. Where her students had poverty and a myriad of other problems to overcome, we have pummeled our students with expectations from the minute they start schooling. There is no comparison between the challenges that these students and our students face, but I think the results may be similar. How many of our students have convinced themselves that they simply cannot do something? How many of our students no longer want to try? How many of our students feel that they cannot live up to the demands of the adults around them? I need to find what those early successes look like in my English classroom. What barriers can I reduce to enable those tiny successes and build persistence for my students?

Our next stop, the Nueva School, builds this tinkering mindset throughout their school using the Design Thinking model. By implementing this beginning in first grade, their students arrive in high school fearless, realizing that iteration, prototyping and feedback are implicit in learning with a heightened sense of empathy and the spirit of a designer.

So how do you begin this plan when you don’t have the luxury of first graders at your school working through the Design Thinking process to help ease the pains and increase the gains of their classmate with a broken leg? Our visit to the Stanford D.School continued my belief that part of it is truly about space. We need to create a space that fosters collaboration and urges students to write, draw, think. At the D School, all of the furniture and white boards are on rollers and there are diagrams in each space on how to “reset” when students are finished. The acknowledgement that each group will work differently and the empowerment of manipulating their own space are positive steps towards an independent, innovative thinking mindset. The next step and most challenging is the scaffolding of the behavior and expectations. Building failure and prototyping into the thinking of students who just desperately want to finish a task so they can cross it off their list and move on to the next one on their ever-burgeoning to-do list must be a cross-disciplinary effort. As Nicci Nunes said, “We need to change the rules of school.” 

Visiting the OEDK at Rice showed me what was possible as their students were prototyping products that were helping infants with sleep apnea and were adopted by USAID. But we need to start that thinking now so that when our students add an increasingly complex skill set and knowledge base they can hit the ground designing.

I want my students to have that euphoria and sense of accomplishment I felt yesterday when I handled fire and cut through metal. And while I think I am close to that experience with my students in our Global Action Project, I know I have not quite cracked the code on how to implement this in my more traditional 10^th grade English. Time for more tinkering. 

Fog Blog (post)

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     Nothing lends itself to a bit of reflection more than a rainy and foggy day while you are on vacation. The musty smells of the cottage that are so quaint when the sun is out and the breeze moves through the house, force the brain into contemplation of the past as the clouds refuse to clear.  So often, the frenetic pace of the end of the school year and the resulting collapse at its completion precludes reflection of the courses that were just completed. Similarly, the start of the school year always leans towards completion rather than contemplation.

     Looking back on the second year of the Global Action Project, there is no doubt that I am pleased with the progress that course has made, but I am also a bit disappointed that the course did not coalesce the way I had envisioned and that elements were not scaffolded as carefully as I had wanted throughout the year.  Like most teachers, I am never satisfied with the final product.

Here are my hopes for GAP 3.0:

Begin with an entry activity: Suzie Boss visited our school and gave a terrific workshop on PBL. She put me on the spot asking what the entry activity was for the Global Action Project and I had to admit, I did not have one. I simply thought my enthusiasm for the course and my vision of where the course would go was sufficient. With this is mind, I am considering either having the students carry heavy buckets of water around with them all day at school or examine their daily budgets to see if they could live on the salary commiserate with those who survive at the Bottom of the Pyramid. There is an additional option of having them check their slavery footprint, but I worry that this may be a bit incendiary so early on.

Incorporate more reflection: While there is no doubt that I think reflection is important, I push it to the way side for two reasons: time and sincerity. To truly have the students engage in reflection, I have to push them beyond the compulsory and often rushed practice of what I call “puking on paper.” I need to structure, prod, and push back in order for them to realize that I am serious about this activity. I also struggle with the format for this. Blogging seems to really have been tainted for them in some respects and could be a bit too public for the type of person insight I hope they offer. I tried fancy Moleskin journals one year, but so many of the students now prefer to type that it didn't work out either.

Utilize online resources: I have always wanted to make a subscription to FastCo part of the required reading for the course, but just didn’t know how to manage it. The magazine is well-designed and has lots of articles that the students can examine to help them see how people are innovating and thinking about the world.  Additionally, there is always a section on social entrepreneurism sharing a story of someone’s work from around the world. This, in addition to TED talks and other online resources such as NYT Fixes, presents an opportunity and a challenge. I want the materials to be fresh and relevant. I want to work with the students on how they move through evaluating the types of materials they will be reading for the rest of their adult lives, but at the same time, how do you stay current, keep up, vet and structure assignments for ever-changing materials. Also, how do you engage students in reading these materials without asking them to simply summarize the articles?

Break down steps in the design thinking process: Surprisingly in the end of the year surveys, the students responded that they found the design-thinking process helpful. This was not what I anticipated as throughout the year, they shared that the process was too long and confusing. With this validation, I plan on breaking down a few more steps of the process for them. First, during the discovery stage, the process calls for identifying one’s biases. While this seems obvious to an adult, it is a rather new exercise for students. One of the research methods used is to fill out an empathy map, that too seems relatively obvious, but needs to be exercised a few times in order for students to see how helpful something of this nature can be. Finally, I am still searching for a way to keep the students from jumping to a conclusion and to honor the process. Brainstorming and visual organizers are still challenging the patience of a busy student.

Create more opportunities for pitches: While I did manage to incorporate more chances for students to pitch and present their ideas, including video taping them and asking them to review their performances, there presentations during the final symposium could still be better.  Just finishing Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human, I am even more convinced of the importance of “selling” for students. Pink presents a convincing argument regarding why our students will all be in sales in the future and that we all spend a remarkable amount of time “persuading, convincing and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got.” But these “sales” also involve listening and leaving people in a better position once your transaction has been completed. In the world of social entrepreneurism, this is key. Students need to be able to listen to the needs of the people they hope to serve and then determine a way to improve their situation in life.  Pink’s advocacy for “attunement, buoyancy, and clarity” are perfect 21^st Century skills as well as the skills of a social entrepreneur. Another interesting clarification on the pitch that Pink offers is this: “The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.” The goal is not necessarily to teach students how to sell someone on their idea, but to be better about understanding those they are working with in order to find a solution or innovation that serves them all.

So these are the goals for GAP 3.0. I am always so grateful every August to have another crack at things in hopes of making the course better and the experience more meaningful for the students. But I will leave my thoughts here as the sun has started to peak out from the clouds and the cool air outside is beckoning: summer is not quite over. 

I'll Be the One

     I was recently reminded of a poem I read in a terrific book called The Book of Hopes and Dreams for Girls and Young Women. Produced by the wonderful Laurel School, it is a collection of thoughts from famous women and students whose goal is to empower girls and young women. Here is a poem from the book written by Rebecca Allen when she was in third grade:

HELP OUT!

Be the one.

Be in charge.

Take a risk.

Be a peacemaker.

Help out.

Be nice to the poor.

Because I believe in you.

You can do it.

But what about me?

Me Rebecca Allen?

Well.

I’ll be the one.

I’ll be in charge.

I’ll take a risk.

I’ll be a peacemaker.

I’ll help out.

I’ll be nice to the poor.

Because I can do it.

I believe in myself.

I’am a super helper.

And I will save the world with my super goodness.

Thinking back on it now, Rebecca Allen must be in college or beyond and I wonder what she has done with her super goodness. I love this poem because of the unbridled optimism of youth and the clear identification that helping and being a part of making the world a better place is something that is practically innate in humans. Look at how many terrific concepts we want for our students that are built into Rebecca’s words: take a risk, be in charge, help out. She ends stating she believes in herself and that she has super goodness: don’t we want that for every child? Finally, she shows the concept so relevant to design thinking and innovative thinking of bias towards action. There is no doubt that Rebecca is ready to go and wants to approach the problems of the world right now. I read this and wonder how well-served Rebecca was in our current educational model and if we nourished her super goodness or drowned it in a sea of AP classes and standardized tests.

Yong Zhao in his recent sessions at the ISACS conference said, “the American dream keeps getting less and less interesting.” As he gave an overview of the argument presented in his book, World Class Learners:Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, he made a convincing argument for changing how we approach education. As the theme of the conference was “Thinking Outside the Box,” it was easy to get on the innovation bandwagon. Zhao and many others referenced the rise of the creative class, while Zhao also supported the entrepreneurial class as well, as proposed by Richard Florida ten years ago. Many referenced how the jobs our students will hold have not even been created yet. But I have heard that all before and I was keenly interested in the skills Zhao was suggesting we should be nurturing in the classroom. We should be helping students have a bias towards action: when they see a problem they should not wait for others to solve it. Our students need to have the creativity to solve the problem and simply copying someone else’s idea just won’t work. They need the guts to put it into action and the resilience to revise and attack the problem again when things don’t work out. This also reminded me of Paul Tough’s work on some of the intangible qualities we should be fostering in our students with a big one being grit.

Walking to our morning assembly the other day, my colleague was noticeably frustrated. While not necessarily an unusual state for a high school teacher, I asked him what the problem was and he nearly exploded about how our students cannot think. He was working on a history unit and had given them the opportunity to ask questions before they got started on their work together. All he heard was crickets. “How could they have no questions? How could they not be curious about anything?” He fumed. The simple answer is that our students were simply waiting for the information. They are consumers, not creators and they do not hesitate to remind us of this distinction with their daily actions in our classrooms.

But who can blame them? We have done this to them, apologetically. Our students will not be able to learn the skills of the entrepreneur that Zhao endorses until we exhibit and model those skills ourselves. How often as teachers do we exhibit these characteristics: global competency, creativity, alertness to opportunity, empathy, risk-taking, foresight, ambition, innovation, risk-taking, persistence (Zhao 82)? If we say that collaboration is a 21^st century skill, how often do our students see their teacher’s modeling it? If we want them to think creatively and want them to be innovative, how often do we exhibit these qualities?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eveliosanchez/7567324630/lightbox/

I can certainly say for myself that while I hope to instill these attributes and skills in my students, day in and day out, I do not model them. There may be moments of creativity, but my concept of empathy is asking them how their day is and moving on, not realizing the thousand different forces that pull on them in the same number of directions. I really don’t take risks when I rely on the same standby approach of peppering my students with questions about Hamlet, act by act, scene by scene, line by line. As for collaboration, teachers seem to be notoriously the worst at this in independent schools. We claim our allegiance to it, have a meeting and then walk back into our rooms and do as we please.

So I fully support Zhao’s call for a change that allows our students to learn the skills of the innovator and entrepreneur while still gaining the content knowledge necessary. His belief in project-oriented learning makes sense and I truly value his emphasis on multiple revisions, a sustained and disciplined process and peer review, but it will take a sustained effort for me as an educator to keep working to change my own behaviors to not only create this experience for my students (to help them become creators, not consumers) but to model this concept of a teacherpreneur.

I wonder how all of the Rebecca Allens of the world are doing. If we managed to test the risk taker right out of her, or was she able to sustain her spirit of super goodness through her trip through our, often-times, well-intentioned educational system. I worry we did not give her the skills to be effective super helper, but I share her enthusiasm and her belief in me that I can be the one, I can take a risk.

Extreme Project Makeover: The Big Reveal

As the bus pulls away and the beleaguered family sees their new home for the first time, invariably the tears start streaming down the faces of all involved. From the tirelessly working mom who never thought she would catch a break to the volunteer who finally felt he had done something worthy with his time, the feeling of fulfillment is a human need not to be denied and is often greeted with a rush of emotion. The Global Action Project Symposium on May 15th, 2012 was no different. At 8:45pm on a day that included a full day of class, coaching a playoff lacrosse game and now two hours of presentations, I was as surprised as anyone else when my eyes welled up with tears listening to a student talk about her hero Malalai Joya, an Afghani political activist, and how her social enterprise was created to be a refuge for women in that embattled nation to seek safety and eventually become independent. She eloquently described how her organization, appropriately called Newstart, was not concerned with immediate scalability, but their strength was through “The women we reach, the women they reach, the children they teach.” She and her partner had truly learned the lessons we worked on throughout the year about the success rates of grassroots organizations, about the plight of women detailed in Nicholas Kristof’s Half the Sky as well as the concepts of sustainability. As I listened to her work and her infectious enthusiasm, I allowed myself to think that she may launch something like this someday.

And so the makeover of The Sudan Project was complete. Instead of just focusing on the plight of the Sudanese, we expanded our worldview with an emphasis on the plight of women, examined our own personal causes (even writing a mission statement), learned about social enterprise with Jacqueline Novogratz and strengthened our work with documentary filmmaking. The students bought in 100%. Whether it was the variety, the personal element, or the empowering feeling, their enthusiasm rarely waned throughout the year. The constant interjections of what others were doing around the world gave them hope where the inundation of the Sudan information for an entire year truly weighed down the students in past years. The problem in Sudan is just so big and so profound that it was hard to be optimistic.

While project-based learning remains a minor form of torture for a Type-A teacher, there was no doubt of the student investment the afternoon before the final symposium. As one group was practicing in the presentation room, there were groups scattered throughout the halls practicing, talking, coaching, negotiating. Making sure that their ideas were clearly communicated to the audience mattered to them. Our Assistant Head of School made an interesting comment to me later; he said he knew the work was authentic because while there were good presentations, there were others that needed revision and polish. He said this was clearly a sign that even though I tried to guide the groups, the final decisions were truly their own. Four years in to the Sudan Project, the Cuba Project and now the Global Action Project, I still get nervous when the students present to a wider audience, but each time, it reaffirms my belief that this experience is so much more valuable to them than most others we provide in a traditional school setting.

Moving forward, I am fortunate enough to teach this class again next year and we need to be better. I want to be more mindful in my implementation of design thinking skills from the beginning of our work together. Students do not like process and they certainly don’t want to be patient enough to work through stages such as inspiration, ideation, iteration and implementation. I don’t blame them; in a world where they have a million assignments to keep track of, sports practice, play rehearsal and tutoring sessions, there is no time to give to thinking in any form, more less something as divergent as design thinking. Students commented that when we did use this process, it felt like a waste of time; I noticed that with few exceptions, students kept one of the first ideas they had and then worked around any weaknesses rather than reinvent or even revise. Additionally, I hope to use the community better. Our business plans were weak because their teacher knows very little about business, but there are plenty of people in the community that can help. Additionally, I hope to get our feet on the ground and see some of the work people in the St. Louis area are doing. The more people I can put in front of the students the better for everyone.

So as Ty Pennington and his crew pull out of town each week, they leave many happy people in their wake and know they are off to have the same experience with a new group in a new place. School years are the same in many of ways: there are new groups in your room and new personalities to learn, but the work continues to be meaningful for all participants. That seems to happen when you know you are building something together.




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For the Love of TED

Like many people, I have become enamored with TED Talks and try to share that passion with my students when possible. I had the great fortune of attending a TEDx event last year and that has only fueled my desire to visit the mother ship…a “real” TED Conference. Naively, I thought I could use some professional development funds and head on my way to total intellectual indulgence. My discovery of the price of tickets was a blast back to reality: this was definitely not in the budget. But all was not lost when I discovered that TED was looking to tailor some of their talks to the education world and wanted ten educators to pioneer the way. Now, I am certainly not claiming to have anything brilliant to say, but I just had to try as this would by my only way to TED. Despite the outcome, the process alone has been enriching. The first challenge is to determine what you have to say to such a crowd: a TED audience that can afford such high ticket prices as well as a teachers and students. (Your talk is to focus on something that can be used in the classroom by teachers as a help to a lesson they are presenting to their class.) Talk about a lesson on audience! Secondly there is the internal fight in your brain that battles between how cool it would be to be selected and the doubt that creeps in about why would anyone want to hear you talk unless a grade is attached and attendance is enforced. But despite these hesitations, I pushed forth and made a video. This, too, guaranteed humility. I videoed my class without their knowledge and those students who I thought were so attentive were up to some serious high-jinx when I wasn’t looking. Additionally, there is the usual cringing that comes along when watching yourself on tape and the ubiquitous words such as “so” or “right?” when checking for understanding. Please note, it did not take long for me to discover that I never waited for an answer when I said, “right?” I simply nodded to myself and proceeded with my lesson. Finally, there was the introduction of the video where I desperately tried to communicate my passion and focus directly to the camera lens and I realized that without audience, I am nothing. Probably the biggest thought I take away from this experience is that the teachers I like to work with think like me and realize that we are not the definitive experts on anything. We are good listeners and observers who weave together information, thoughts and ideas we have gathered over the years in order to create an experience for our students that we hope is meaningful: our audience.

I'll Take a Risk

I suppose this is an exercise in mimetic teaching: my act of teaching this class actually mimics the process, stress, uncertainty and risk I am asking my students to take later this year. In addition, I have to convince them to stay patient and come along for the ride while the vision of our class develops. Needless to say, this is highly uncomfortable for my inner-German.

My new class is called the Global Action Project and it is a year-long endeavor to teach students how to be social entrepreneurs. We weave the elements of social awareness, leadership, business principles, documentary filmmaking, public speaking, and leadership throughout three trimesters culminating in students designing and publicly sharing their enterprises to a board of adults from our community: terrifying.

This is my first true attempt at PBL and I went all-in. I am trying to give the students choices early on with various assessments to allow them to get used to so much academic freedom. Our school, like many, simply does not have the processes in place to allow students to make choices, though I am thrilled to report we are moving more and more in the right direction on this, recognizing the power of differentiation. My colleagues have truly come to realize that the old model of “you have to do it this way because all students before you have done it this way” is on the way out and in this digital age, students will be able to find a place for themselves where they can use their strengths.

So where are we the first week of September? For the most part, I think students were hooked with the summer reading (a choice between Sold, A Long Way Gone, The Bookseller of Kabul or The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind). They were asked to research an issue raised in the book and determine if the author fairly represented that issue. We have started our work with documentaries and examined our preconceived notion that documentaries are always “true” and unbiased. The students are working on their first film, a 5x5 project inspired by Dean Shareski. At the same time, we are four chapters into The Blue Sweater, studying Jacqueline Novogratz’s personal experience and looking at themes of leadership as well as the challenges presented by working in the Developing World. And today, we start Me to We in an effort for students to start searching for their own passion.

While is seems like we are making progress, the discomfort and uneasiness remains. It all fits together in my head, but that doesn’t mean the dots connect in theirs. As with many classes, I have some eager folks and some reticent ones. Some of my colleagues who I have shared my doubts with remind me that the first year of any course can be difficult and it will always get better the second year. This is too important to me to take that risk. I have 19 students in here that have the chance to make this a better world. So I try to calm my nerves by reading the poem over my desk. It was written by a third grader (years ago) from the Laurel School.

Help Out!
Be the one.
Be in charge.
Take a risk.
Be a peacemaker.
Help out.
Be nice to the poor.
Because I believe in you.
You can do it.
But what about me?
Me Rebecca Allen?
Well.
I’ll be the one.
I’ll be in charge.
I’ll take a risk.
I’ll be a peacemaker.
I’ll help out.
I’ll be nice to the poor.
Because I can do it.
I believe in myself.
I’m a super helper.
And I will save the world with my super goodness.
Global actionproject

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W, the Blog Post

Not sure I ever anticipated writing a blog post inspired by an AARP article and even more alarming, an interview with George W. Bush. Having spent quite a few days at my parents’ house over the holidays, reading material can be limited: Missouri Conservationist, AOPA (for pilots) and the AARP magazine are a few of the titles available. So the interview with George W. Bush beckoned as I was reading it on the heels of reading George Packer’s review of Decision Points. There was one theme that was consistent throughout the interview and the review that struck me, when asked about reinvention in the AARP interview, the former president responded: “It's a word that doesn't fit into my vocabulary. Reinvention means you're kind of re-creating somebody. Well, I'm the same person, in terms of values. My priorities — my faith, my family, my friends, the values of personal responsibility and universality of freedom, and ‘to whom much is given, much is required’ — haven't changed.” The phrase “haven’t changed” is alarming to me. Shouldn’t we all change, evolve, learn and grow?

More concerning is this continued lack of regret. Politics aside, all self-reflective people have regrets. They don’t need to keep you up at night, but it is simply part of the process of looking back on something and wanting to do it differently or better. Packer points out, “Bush once told an elementary-school class in Crawford, Texas, ‘Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult. But I find that I know who I am. I know what I believe in.’” So the former president simply made decisions as defined by who he was? That leads to the question of how much time did he spend reflecting on his own beliefs: according to many, not much. All of this is a complicated and way too long justification for self-reflection (a perfect theme as the New Year approaches) on the part of teachers and students. But even more a challenge to us as educators to helps students learn the process of reflection. I fear we are producing a generation, like our former president, of students who move forward at a break-neck speed with little pause for reflection.

As we start our blogging project for the second year, I find myself constantly asking students to write with more of their own voice. I tell them I can find magazines and websites that will tell me about their topics, the value of their blog is that I can hear their thoughts on these sundry topics. I realize that most of them will not turn into Tavi Gevinson, the 14 year-old fashion blogger who is now being invited to sit in the front row of many a runway, but I hope for my students the same self-awareness that Tavi is developing: expressing her thoughts and developing her own views. In her article “Tavi Says,” Lizzie Widdicombe describes how the young blogger “has turned down offers to appear on ‘Oprah,’ the ‘Tonight Show,’ and morning news shows. ‘It’s so cheesy,’ she said. ‘The Good Morning America’ audience—I guess that’s just not a crowd whose eyes I want on me.’” This is the self-awareness I hope for others and a focus on what she views as important. When I say these things to my students, many look at me shocked: who would want to hear their voice? And thus begins the process of reflection and even regret. I want them to think about what is valuable in their voice and I want them to realize that once something is put down, it can be revised, improved, completely overhauled. This is the value of our work in the classroom and our imperative as educators. Our future president needs us.image by macropoulos