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

TEDxYSE Made My Head Hurt: In a Good Way

As we sat in the darkened auditorium at Sidwell Friends School, a young woman looking younger than her 17 years approached us and simply said, “Hi, my name is Heather. I will be speaking today and I wanted to give you a copy of my work.” With that she returned to her seat and we were left to wonder who Heather was and what she would speak about. We had no idea that her speech would be so compelling and her story so heart wrenching and hopeful all at the same time. This was clearly the power of TED.

While I had seen TED Talks online, attending an actual event is an entirely different story: you can see the care the organizers take to make sure that all of the pieces fit together, the emcee is compelling and the speakers hold together to create a day-long narrative. But more specifically, I was fascinated by the TED Talk format. It seems to be such a useful exercise for all of us, especially students, to have to conceptualize what we want to say, communicate it, oftentimes with fairly abstract images, and weave a compelling tale in such a short period of time. As most of the presenters were under the age of 25 years old, I was truly impressed with the polish of their talks and it made me think of Christian Long's project with his 10th graders last year.

But I was even more struck by their courage to share their passion so publicly. Heather was an abused child who survived the foster care system and was adopted. She now spends her time writing stories for other children in her same situation in an effort to offer them hope in addition to providing gifts for them during the holidays and even more inspirational, creating scrapbooks with foster children to help them start building new memories. I had lunch with Rebecca Kantar and her family. Rebecca is a founding member of Minga, a group of teenagers working to fight sexual exploitation. This is just the beginning of her ideas; at lunch, the descriptions of the projects she is working on, while being a freshman at Harvard, are staggering.

So in addition to being in awe of Heather, Rebecca and the many others who spoke on Saturday, I can’t help but think that much of their ability to take action does have to do with technology and our relatively new ability to be interconnected globally. These social entrepreneurs have let nothing stand in the way of their passion to help others and they have all brilliantly harnessed the power of technology to further their work.

So I left with my head spinning, knowing that I needed to keep looking for ways to make what we do in the classroom real for my students; giving them real problems to solve and real responsibilities in their own learning process. I left with the metaphor that Rebecca began her talk with: “Leadership is like eating a cupcake: it gets messy but has so much to offer.” Not only do I need to be willing to take the risks of leadership, I need to help my students to do so as well.

Building a Growth Mindset

The presentation started with a slide of a baby sporting a Harley headrag and smoking pot. The speaker says, “Baby’s aren’t born non-learners; they aren’t born with a fixed mindset.” A powerful image to support Carol Dweck’s 45-minute argument that we have the power to help all students move or maintain a growth mindset and it is incumbent upon us as educators to make sure that our classrooms are places carefully constructed to nurture that thinking. Enter, The Architecture of Learning by Kevin D. Washburn. While Dweck clearly outlines why and what we should encourage in young people, Washburn gives a detailed blueprint on how to create that in the classroom.

One of the elements of Washburn’s work that I find most compelling is his insistence that we are more intentional in anchoring students’ learning in what they already know. He states, “As stimuli enter the brain, neural networks search for patterns. When patterns are recognized, the brain recalls relevant prior experiences and merges new stimuli with known concepts to construct meaning and understanding” (91). While I think Elementary level teachers base their practice on this strategy, something happens on the way to high school where we just assume that students will either do this for themselves or it is no longer necessary for these connections to exist in order for them to comprehend the material. We would be fools to think that students would naturally make connections in their mind between something they already know and Shakespeare. I think this is also how our students fall into fixed mindsets. Without the understanding that they can build new pathways in their brains by connecting to things they already know, many students see things in a fixed manner: something is already determined.

Dweck explained a study she and her colleagues completed which monitored brain function in students as they took a test, got the results and were shown the correct answers. Her research showed that fixed mindset students stopped paying attention once the grade was displayed; growth mindset students stayed focused through the grade to find out the correct answers. Often as she is talking to students about nurturing a growth mindset she tells them, “you are growing neurons.” Washburn cites James E. Zull on the same topic; “We cannot understand anything unless we create internal neuronal networks that reflect some set of physical relationships that accurately map the relationships in the concept” (37). We need to help students build those networks and students need to understand the process of their learning. The Architecture of Learning outlines these steps: “Experience provides the new data that will be used to construct new knowledge. Comprehension provides the content and structure of the developing knowledge. Elaboration emphasizes the organization of component of comprehension by relating similar previous experiences. Application engages the brain in recall of the labeled and sorted data” (33).

Supporting a growth mindset is about praising effort and process. Washburn provides the perfect framework for educators to build experiences for students where they can struggle, deal with confusion, work towards a goal and be passionate about their work: “Authentic learning requires a motivated learner” (45). Authentic learning is a growth mindset.

Challenging Preconceived Notions: Differentiation and Assessment

I am the product of Duepner and Mittler and if you were to apply all stereotypes and generalities about the descendants of such strong German lines, you wouldn’t be too far off base judging me. My colleagues have asked me to apply or restrain my “Inner German” in various circumstances and, with all things, it hinders or aides from time to time. My recent week of examining assessment with Dean Shareski, Andrew Churches and completing the book by Rick Wormeli, Fair Isn’t Always Equal, has challenged my “Inner German” more than the competition in the World Cup’s Group D.

Andrew Churches and Dean Shareski both mentioned in their sessions that grading is one of the most polarizing conversations you could have with a group of teachers. It seems that we all have a preconceived idea of what grading should be (Churches suggests that is almost solely based in how we were graded) and we rarely move too far away from our model. Well, my immersion in this topic may be just enough to get me to move away from some of my previously strongly held beliefs.

The first issue will seem completely obvious to folks and I boldly am professing my ignorance as an educator. It is the premise that grading and assessment need to reflect mastery. It seems that discussions of this sort always lend themselves to sports analogies, but while my teams are judged by their win and loss record, the final destination is the State tournament and we will be remembered for our performance there. If we lose a few games along the way, it is very clearly wiped cleaned by our exhibition of mastery in the final contest and a resulting championship. Wormeli says “ In differentiated classrooms we grade on a trend, emphasizing patterns of progress over time. We don’t hold a student’s past performances against him or her” (159). This is a challenge to my thinking because it removes the absolute of what the numbers declare. Wormeli suggests that the solution is trusting ourselves as educators and professionals to assess the progress of our students. My fear with this thinking is that it will take the rigor out of the classroom. But Wormeli and others argue that it will allow you to push your students further in the pursuit of mastery and that the use of well-constructed rubrics are a huge help as well. So now I examine grades not as a reflection of your behavior as a citizen of our classroom and your ability to produce certain results on a certain day, but as a reflection of each students trend toward mastery.

Here are a few other topics that came up:
· Don’t penalize for late work
· Don’t ever put in a zero
· Don’t offer extra credit
· Don’t penalize grades for absences or behavior issues
· Don’t grade homework
· Do tier assessments
· Do engage students’ creativity and problem solving skills: climb higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy
· Do allow students the freedom of choice
· Do create better assessment tools
· Do give lots of formative assessment opportunities followed by “Knowledge of Correct Results with Specific Actions to Reduce the Gap” (Churches)
· Do have students spend time reflecting on their own progress as learners

Each of these has a much longer explanation with plenty of research to support it and are not all as alarming as they may seem. But the bottom line for me is that it has forced me to be a “Reflective Practitioner,” as Dean Shareski mentioned, and truly ask myself why I grade, what I grade, how I grade and what is truly the best for judging mastery and helping students understand themselves as learners.

Keeping the Village Connected

I am lucky enough to work at a school that is involved in the Take2Video project. Essentially, schools are provided with high-def documentary footage of either Sudan or Cuba and are charged with the responsibility of creating something of note. Last year my co-teacher and I embarked on this journey with the footage of Sudan and while watching our students create an amazing documentary had an experience that truly defined our thoughts on education in the 21st century. This year, we are back for round two with the Cuba footage. Here is where the story begins.

One group of students is working on a documentary about the cars of Cuba and needed to know if the cars they were using were American, thus supporting the argument they were building about the effects of the embargo on all aspects of Cuban life. Since they knew very little of cars, as did I, I offered my father’s assistance. My dad grew up in the age where young men bought cars and worked on them in the driveway, where they took pride in figuring out how things worked and making masterpieces out of nothing. (I hesitate to mention to my father that he might have more in common with Cubans than he realizes.) So the students sent me 25 screen shots of various vehicles and in less than an hour, my father had responded with their make, model and year. Viola!

Those that choose to argue against technology, often point to the faceless interactions that it provides and how people truly are not connected. This recent example of our being able to tap into my father’s expertise and his willingness and availability to answer our questions, almost immediately, clearly argue against this. In this case, with this project and this task, technology allowed three people who may never have come in contact to connect. I can’t think of a more worthwhile purpose.

In the several weeks since Educon 2.2, I have spent quite a bit of time trying to frame what I have learned and puzzle it all together. Jim Heynderickx made some great observations in his conversation, “Many to Many—How Entire School Communities Can Collaborate.” I have to credit his session with helping me brainstorm ways to get more and more people connected inside and outside of our school. I really enjoyed his idea of having multiple generations of students networking and collaborating. I know many of them do this unofficially on Facebook, but I would rather turn that power toward the task of inquiry just as we did with the cars of Cuba.

So I guess this is a long-winded response to those who say that technology eats away at our humanity, I would argue the opposite, and that it helps keep the village together.

*Image from Take2Video, Karin Muller

Making Connections Meaningful

College football bowl season is drawing to an end, and while some are breathing a sigh of relief, I am saddened as it marks the beginning of seven dismal months until it starts up again. While I bristle when I hear coaches say that they coach young men how to succeed in life, certainly football and life and some similarities, I will acknowledge that all sports have lessons to teach. The best lesson I can see is that in an age where teenagers are accused of being completely self-involved (see The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement), team sports are an area where they are forced to cooperate if they truly want to succeed. Essentially, they have to give up their own sense of self and join the whole in order to secure the big prize, often a championship of some sort, that they could not garner as an individual. (One could easily argue that this is still a form of self-promotion.)

Christakis and Fowler make some interesting observations about individuals’ desires to be part of something rather than alone in their book Connected. They suggest that humans are truly social beings and that “the function of loneliness is to promote reconnection” (56). So we don’t really want to go it alone and here we have contrasting messages. Teenagers want to be the center of attention, but they want to be a part of a network as well. Of course that answer seems clear enough, you can’t be the center of attention if there is no one there to pay attention to you.

Examining this concept of team and taking this desire to be networked brings me to my current quandary. I had the great opportunity this week to give a presentation at the truly amazing St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. Their faculty is clearly top-notch and with all of these presentations, I certainly take away more than I offer. But after presenting many of my ideas on how to integrate technology into the teaching of English, there were some pointed questions. One was about assessment; one was what do you take out (both of these are age old) and the third, (another dinosaur of a question, but still just as relevant today as years before) how do you deal with group projects. Needless to say, I really had no answers to any of these questions, and I took a stab at each. But the cooperative question truly stuck in my mind due to this book Connected as well as the fact that this is why we try to sell technology to teachers. We preach that we can truly generate an authentic audience and better collaboration through the use of these web 2.0 tools and other technology. Terrific, still doesn’t solve the age-old problem of one kid doesn’t do the work and another does. Christakis and Fowler have a label for these collaborators and free loaders and they suggest that a network often doesn’t work without a punisher (220). Now it has been suggested that I have a heavy hand in my classroom, but I really am not interested in taking on the title of punisher in each of the collaborative projects I create for the classroom. (I think the title of grader is certainly more than enough.) So how do we create these group projects so that they don’t need a punisher. The only answer I can see is to create a situation where the students feel like they need each other. They have to see that the only way they can achieve the goal, and the goal has to be attractive enough to all involved that they want to pursue it, is by working together. Just like a team, you can only win the championship when all of the disparate parts are working in tandem, we have to create the same environment in these group projects. Whether it is a combination of skill sets (you need linemen and quarterbacks) or a multiplicity of voices, it needs to be clear that the goal cannot be reached alone.

So how do we translate all of this into group projects in the classroom? First we need to examine all of the projects we have previously deemed necessary as group projects. We as educators seem sold on the value of collaboration, but bristle at the idea of doing it ourselves. So why would students be any different, yet they flock to each other on Facebook. The challenge continues that we must harness the power and desire for a network into projects we deem valuable in the classroom if only for the purpose of teaching the simple lesson that individuals can achieve far more as a collective group than by themselves. As Christakis and Fowler put it, “All of these challenges require us to recognize that although human beings are individually powerful, we must act together to achieve what we could not accomplish on our own…The miracle of social networks in the modern world is that they unite us with other human beings and give us the capacity to cooperate on a scale so much larger than the one experienced in our ancient past” (304). Through this we can thwart the constant bemoaning of teenagers (and adults) of what can I do, I am only one person. Tell that to the Obama campaign or to the protesters of the Iranian elections this summer: One person did quite a bit.