O, I am slain!

For the Love of TED

2011-12-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

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

2011-09-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-12-31T08:48:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-14T17:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-07-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

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.

The Visual Literacy Imperative

2009-09-14T06:41:00.001-07:00

I’m not going to lie, I like Youtube. When my brain is fried, but I’m not quite ready to go to bed, there is nothing better that some video of a cat chasing a flashlight into a wall or a dog spinning around imitating the sound of the blender. Truly the world is a better place. With the arrival of the video function on the iPod Nano and the rise in popularity of the Flip camera, I can only hope that there will be more videos of squirrels drunk on fermented pumpkins.

But the proliferation of video has me keenly interested in how this affects our students’ view of the world. We already knew they demand more stimulation of their senses than previous generations, that they see the world in splashes of color and now clearly they see it constantly in motion. As an English teacher, how do I continue to engage learners with what must seem the most mundane of media: the printed word? Maybe even more importantly, how do I help these students understand the millions of images they are being bombarded with hourly?

First of all, I think we have to acknowledge that it is here to stay. Whether it is a simple project making a video of a scene from Shakespeare or shooting a video for the SAT Vocab contest, this is something these students like to do and it sticks in their brains. But now it is also incumbent upon us to help them understand what they are seeing. The iPod Nano comes with video effects from Thermal to Sepia to Motion Blur. In my mind, there is no difference between determining the result of an effect applied to a video and understanding the goal of an author when using a specific tone in his work. While they think it is easier to determine this visually, it is simply because they have more practice and exposure to visual media rather that words on a page. If they read as much as they watched television, surfed the net and went to movies, we would have rhetorical geniuses.

There is no doubt that we feel the pressure to add more and more to our classes everyday, and believe it or not, I am now advocating one more addition. We need to teach students visual literacy. To help them understand how they are being manipulated by images, but also how they can take control of those images to tell their own stories. Just as Mike Masnik wrote on Techdirt that technology has not been the end to writing, but has bolstered it, video will not be the end to books. Students will always need some place to look for ideas whether it is to react to them or mimic them. Books will thrive hand in hand with the visual age: It is our job to help students see that this is truly a perfect match.

The Big Green Monster

2009-08-25T18:39:00.001-07:00

Every Mother’s Day, my mom and I go to the nursery and pick out flowers for our gardens. This year, I decided to try my hand at vegetables as well. I bought two cherry tomato plants and some cilantro. Well, the cilantro died almost immediately, but my tomato plants chugged along until early in the summer before they started to take over my entire yard. Finally, in late July the tomatoes started to arrive and they haven’t slowed down since. I have picked literally hundreds of tiny tomatoes and that does count the ones my dogs have gotten away with. While this process must be rather entertaining for the neighbors, every afternoon I high hurdle over the fence that ineffectively protects the plant from the dogs and then crawl under the plant and paw through the leaves trying to find all the little red gems.

For the past few days, as I have been bobbing and weaving my way around the green monster, I have thought that this activity is the perfect metaphor for using technology in the classroom. The key to finding all of the tomatoes is looking at the leaves from literally 50 different directions. They hide under branches and leaves and every new way you hold your head looking at the plant, you literally stumble upon another handful of tomatoes. Similarly, through twitter networks and RSS feeds, teachers are literally looking in hundreds of different directions and every so often, they discover a new tool or strategy to implement in the classroom. Each day that I am out in my tomato patch, I smile thinking about what the neighbors must think and laugh at my dogs waiting patiently outside the fence hoping for a snack. I also relish the aerobic/pilates-like activity this has become and find the search as relaxing and enjoyable as the reward. My hope is that this holds true for folks in the classroom as well. Just like we hope for our students to enjoy the journey of learning as much as the results, I hope teachers enjoy the pursuit of new technologies as much as the actual reward of finding something new to implement in their classrooms.

Is Tech Where It’s At?

2009-08-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

I am staring out of a rainy window in Memphis having just finished the Lausanne Laptop Institute. Having done a reasonable amount of traveling lately, I have been overly exposed to the public and its ridiculous habits. Without going on a tirade about people’s absurd behavior when exiting a plane, I keep thinking of the constant cell phone conversations that I got to overhear in the past two weeks. They almost always started with “Where you at?” Well, despite the grating of terrible grammar, it does give me pause to think. After a summer of heavy reading and a couple presentations here at Luasanne, I can’t help but pause to think about where we are “at.”

One thing that has been perfectly clear to me is the success of the launch of our one to one program. Those that know me know that I was not for laptops in any form and was brought reluctantly into this whole process. But I must applaud Elizabeth Helfant and my colleagues who did some serious heavy lifting in the years prior so that once the magic day arrived, almost one year ago, it was as seamless and meaningful as possible.

Despite this success, I am still left wondering about and assessing the role of technology in education. Thomas Newkirk in his book Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones discusses the early mechanization of education where many thought of a good education as a factory churning out identical products. He quotes one expert of the time as saying, “Teachers cannot be permitted to follow caprice in method. When a method which is clearly superior to all other methods has been discovered, it alone can be employed. To neglect this function and to excuse one’s negligence by proclaiming the value of the freedom of the teacher was perhaps justifiable under our earlier empiricism, when supervisors were merely promoted teachers and on the scientific side knew little more about standards and methods than the rank and file” (18). He goes on to discuss how in the process of reforming education, too much attention was given to research and little was paid to the actual classroom teachers and their “wisdom of practice” (19). At first this may seem like a perfect argument for technology and a way to convince the reluctant adopters. But as a classroom teacher, I support the “wisdom of practice.” All of this makes me worry, even just for a minute, as so many of these experts that travel around and educate us about technology use in the classroom have been out of the classroom for years. Are we walking down the same slippery slope that Newkirk is describing?

David Warlick recently discussed the results of two polls he ran. The first stated that teachers could still be good teachers without the use of technology and the second claimed that a teacher that is not using technology in the classroom is not doing his job. How can these results possibly exist side by side? Where will these two points converge?

All of this is not a drawn out way to announce that I am abandoning the tech side of the world. That would be impossible: I just joined Facebook. It is simply a cautionary note that we not go blindly into this new world. I believe that technology makes the classroom a more dynamic student-centered learning environment. I simply hope that we stop, look at what we are doing, reassess and make sure that our original reasons are still sound or that our new ones are even more solid. I know that my students are engaged in the literature and the class and writing sooner and more often with the use of technology. In the absence of hard date and research, this will just have to do for now. Finally, this is also a pledge from me that I redouble my efforts to make sure that on the eve of this new school year, I am doing everything I can to make sure my classroom is the best place possible for the students who will reside there these next nine months.

Lausanne Presentation on English Tech Classroom

2009-07-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

Lausanne Eng Tech Presentation

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The Runaway Mindset

2009-07-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

When I was in fourth grade, you know this story better go somewhere fast if it starts like this, I wrote a story called “The Runaway Lima Bean” starring an adorable bean named Ferdinand who escapes the table and has a series of madcap adventures. It was an immediate hit and even published in a children’s magazine. My writing career was launched and just as quickly, ended. I was a one hit wonder like Bow Wow Wow and Vanilla Ice.

According to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, I had a fixed mindset. I had some ability in writing, but didn’t want to risk losing my fame, if you call it that, so I shut down and, despite everyone’s urgings, never wrote again. This guaranteed that I would not fail and have to face the fact that I did not have as much talent as I thought I did. The same thing is happening day-in and day-out in our classrooms. Teachers have mastered Hamlet and Dickens, quadratic equations and Pythagorean theorems, but don’t have the growth mindset that Dweck argues leads to even greater success.

In the world of literature, a growth mindset makes you’re a dynamic character while a fixed mindset makes you static. Dweck states, “ In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.” Her research reflected these differences most clearly when individuals faced setbacks. In the fixed mindset, if I submitted another story and was rejected it would prove to me that I was a failure with no talent: People may even be laughing at me. But in the growth mindset, while I would still be disappointed, I would seek information from others on what I could revise and how I could work to be better at writing: the growth mindset is about the challenge of solving the problem.

Malcom Gladwell in his May 11th New Yorker article titled, “How David Beats Goliath” takes this theory even further. While explaining how a less-talented team of twelve-year-olds could make it all the way to the championships, he states” The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort.” When speculating on why other teams aren’t quick to pick up on the benefit of the full-court press he adds, “because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.” It is just easier to have the talent than to hustle. Clearly Gladwell is suggesting that the growth mindset allows the underdog to beat the favorite with a fixed mindset.

Teachers’ approaches to technology in the classroom seem to fit perfectly into these two mindsets. The fixed mindset teachers who feel that they have full command of their material and their classrooms bristle at the thought of taking a risk that may counter this understanding. Planning a lesson with technology that fails would send the message that they were in fact not good at teaching. Growth mindset teachers thrive on the constant learning that educational technology provides. Trying something new and failing only offers them more information for improvement. Growth mindsets are about effort and constant learning: exactly what technology provides teachers and students alike. Educational technology offers a unique opportunity for all of us to build our growth mindsets.

While this may seem like an indictment, it should be thought of optimistically. Changing mindsets is a paradigm shift that does require work, but it opens up the world of possibilities. It also gives those of us with fixed mindsets permission to be imperfect, to try and fail, and go on with the number one reason we all became teachers: our love of learning. Dweck quotes a CEO in her book as saying, “I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.” This is the life of the teacher in the 21st Century. While we will never have full command of all the possibilities Educational Technology experts and Web 2.0 provide, it is our responsibility to keep up our efforts to learn and try new things. Isn’t this what we hope our students do?

Even with my new understanding , I haven’t rekindled my writing career, but I plan on using my newfound growth mindset to take on other tasks like surfing. A fixed mindset, and maybe even a practical one, might say that a Midwestern woman nearing forty should not be taking on the task of learning how to surf. A growth mindset simply says, just try.

Balance Happens

2009-04-12T17:08:00.000-07:00

Last November I attended a clinic during the NCAA Division I Women’s Field Hockey Final Four. It was sponsored by US Field Hockey and taught by the men’s and women’s National Team coaches, Nick Conway and Lee Bodimeade. We talked strategy all weekend and one of the first things that Nick said was, “At the start of the game, look at the defense of the opponent and decide how you are going to attack.” Seems simple. To me, it was a complete shift in thinking; when I started games, the first thing I looked at was the opponent’s offense and decided how I was going to defend them. A simple shift from defending to attacking and you view the world in an entirely new way.

This past weekend the same happened for me in the way I see the teaching of writing. For the past few weeks I have been involved in the English Companion Ning’s discussion of Maja Wilson’s book Rethinking Rubrics. The exchanges have been akin to an invigorating graduate school debate without the extra homework and inconvenient class times. In Chapter Three, Wilson writes:

“When our purpose in reading student work is to defend a grade, we do not apply any of our natural responses to text. Encouraged by the performance levels on the rubric to rank students against an external standard, our readings of student work are based firmly in a deficit model. We look for mistakes, inconsistencies, and unclear thinking to justify which square in the matrix we will circle” (30).

While this seems obvious, it was as big of a shift of defending to attacking in how I coach. When I look at student essays, I am looking for mistakes to correct and not potential to develop. Instead of approaching their work as a reader, I approach it as a corrector.

She goes on to say:

“The consequences of this skepticism are great. In our search for mistakes, we often miss potential. We should never assume that student papers will be perfect; our job is to help students realize what they cannot yet do. This involves a subtle but important shift in our view of the texts they create. It means that we articulate for them what they have succeeded in doing, explore the meaning in what they have written, and help them connect what is not yet there to what could be there” (30).

I now need to think how I can best achieve this shift, how I can balance my need to produce effective writers who can create complex sentences with proper agreement and punctuation with this newly introduced understanding of how I can be developing these writers as well. This becomes even more vital and intricate as so many new types of writing come into play. As I have been reading this book, much attention seemed to be paid to personal essays, but we have students creating wikis, blogs and participating in nings. How do I help them see the potential of their writing in these contexts as well? Sometimes that seems easier with the increased ability to provide instant feedback, sometimes harder since I can’t get my pen on their screens to point out the errors, but maybe this is where the balance happens.

Twon Over

2009-04-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I did it. I can’t believe it, but I did it. People kept pushing and I kept reading articles about how great this was, but I couldn’t pull the trigger, didn’t want to be a follower, couldn’t see the function. I want to go on record that I fought valiantly for almost two years until I finally crumbled…I joined Twitter. I have Lance Armstrong to thank for this. Once he announced his comeback and then crashed out of Vuelta Castilla y Leon breaking his collar bone, I found out I could follow his comeback and subsequent recovery via Twitter. I was sold. Sure I would like to tell you that I joined so that I could build my own PLN, but I would be lying. Now the happy side effect is that I am building my own PLN. Today solidified my understanding of what so many folks including Alec Couros, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis are talking about when they encourage educators to embrace this tool.

While I am new to Twitter, I was a pretty big fan of the Google Reader’s ability to help me keep track of quite a few blogs including Susanne Nobles’ blog “Still Learning.” I remember her discussing using a Ning to aid her class’ work with Othello but couldn’t find that link. Well, I sent Susanne a message via Twitter and had a response and the link in just a few hours. Being able to connect the dots that fast is amazing and keeps the momentum going on something that could have easily gotten bogged down or lost for me as I look to new tasks and projects.

So all of this didn’t just show me the power of this tool, but also the kindness of so many of the educators using it. I have been struck by this before as I have seen presenters ask for a “shout out” on Twitter and they have received a multitude of responses from all over the world in a matter of moments. Twitter is not simply a group of people announcing the most mundane of details about their lives, but a group of people sincerely willing to help and share whenever they can. Susanne Nobles didn’t know who I was or what I do, but she was perfectly willing to share. It is forcing me to think about the argument of those concerned that we spend so much time looking at screens that we don’t know how to connect with people. Well, I just got more connected and now I am a Twonvert.

TPCK is Alive

2009-02-11T07:21:00.000-08:00

Sandra Day O’Connor, Benjamin Zander, Greg Mortenson, Rosalind Wiseman--these are just a handful of speakers that I have been fortunate enough to hear speak at my school. In addition, we are so lucky to have countless professional development opportunities right on campus including Alec Couros, David Jakes, and the delightful Flat Classroom women Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay (I truly enjoyed reading about their recent Flat Classroom Summit in Qatar). This past week featured a day with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach that was a terrific way to frame the way we should be thinking as the words of 21st Century skills and literacies buzz in our minds and often make our heads spin. What I liked about the day was the way she essentially tried to reframe the way we approach things and, in the spirit of Benjamin Zander, forced us to think of all of the possibilities. Her emphasis on sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action as stages of what we should be developing with our classes is exciting and daunting, but she left us with plenty of examples of people who started small and made it big.

Alongside of these stages was an introduction to something called the TPCK model, which I affectionately call the Tupac model. This visualization is helpful in describing, and conceptualizing, the perfect storm that has to occur in teaching in the 21st Century. Before, a solid handle on your content was all you needed in an Independent school, add some pedagogy if you were teaching in a public school (a distinction I have never quite understood) and then recently, we have been asked to dabble in some technology. But as I have struggled to frame the role of technology every time I learn more, this model truly helps me see where I need to be aiming my work day after day.

Mishra and Koehler in their work “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge” state: “Though not all teachers have embraced these new technologies for a range of reasons—including a fear of change and lack of time and support—the fact that these technologies are here to stay cannot be doubted. Moreover, the rapid rate of evolution of these new digital technologies prevents them from becoming ‘transparent’ any time soon. Teachers will have to do more than simply learn to use currently available tools; they also will have to learn new techniques and skills as current technologies become obsolete. This is a very different context from earlier conceptualizations of teacher knowledge, in which technologies were standardized and relatively stable. The use of technology for pedagogy of specific subject matter could be expected to remain relatively static over time. Thus, teachers could focus on the variables related to content and pedagogy and be assured that technological contexts would not change too dramatically over their career as a teacher. This new context has foregrounded technology in ways that could not have been imagined a few years ago. Thus, knowledge of technology becomes an important aspect of overall teacher knowledge.”

In essence where teachers were asked to be experts in one area or maybe even two, they are now required to be proficient in all three areas of content, pedagogy and technology. Consequently, the stages of sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action in concert with the Tupac model has shifted my paradigm on how I view my daily work and has moved my insular classroom of academic rigor, to a broader classroom that may be even more rigorous due to the diverse thinking skills I will be demanding from my students.

The Breaking Point

2009-02-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

My colleague Scott and I teach a class called the Sudan Project. It is a year-long course with the goal being to take over forty hours of footage provided by photojournalist Karin Muller and create a documentary about Sudan and specifically the crisis in Darfur. We spent the first semester trying to lay some groundwork for the students covering the history of Sudan, the nature of the conflict, other geo-political conflicts, documentary film making and training them on the video editing software they need for producing this film. We’ve have our had ups and downs, but for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class with no blueprint, I have been fairly pleased with our progress…until today. Today was our first production meeting and the power of the mob ruled the day. Students were broken up into groups to produce ten mini-documentaries that will then be sifted through for the final product. As groups began reporting, we heard the start of grumbling: it took a long time to download the footage; the timecodes aren’t matching up with the shot lists; there is so much footage to look through; there is no way to do this task in sixteen school days. The frustration built as each group reported to such a point that when a young woman wanted to report the success she was having with aligning the shot list and the clips, students were literally shouting her down. Normally my colleague and I play a bit of good cop/bad cop, but in this case we both put the hammer down. When the students left disgruntled, we simply stared at each other and realized that this was really our first hurdle that the class had to overcome. Sure there were technical glitches with their documentaries from first semester, but the gravity of their job was finally hitting them. Their frustration and anger had two sources. One was the overwhelming work of sorting that few anticipated because they simply did not know the process: They were not used to the idea that there was no easy solution to this problem. The other was the realization that they were responsible to the people they were seeing in their film. As one student said, “I don’t want this to be a show on Animal Plant looking at some weird place. I want my audience to be able to connect with the humanity of these people.” I know that meaningful learning is born out of frustration and while I would not wish such discomfort on my students regularly, in the midst of my own aggravation, I was lucky to witness one person’s triumph.

Reflections on Readicide

2009-01-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

My colleagues joke about my “inner German,” but to be honest, my German is pretty much on the outside too. I don’t apologize for my love of order and my dedication to rules. If there is a rule, it should be enforced. We need structure: It is a building block of society. My students often don’t understand what this has to do with chewing gum, but they kindly acquiesce and consequently my trashcan is a pile of gum at the end of each day. This love of order also instructs how I teach English. There are ways for us to approach texts; we will have homework and we will analyze together. Kelly Gallagher’s new book Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What We Can Do about It challenges my inner German. His argument that in order to fuel the love of reading that is often lost in students sometime between third grade and seventh grade, we need to have unstructured reading time with texts that will not be closely examined. He wants students to experience the “flow” if reading. This much freedom would send me into a swivet. How will I know if my students are actually doing the reading? How will I hold them accountable? How could I possibly take classroom time to let students sit around and read and not feel like I am reverting to elementary school tactics? Despite this discomfort, I really think he has a point.

Right now I am trying to drag 43 reluctant 10th graders through A Tale of Two Cities. I think it would be easier to take them all to the dentist and then off to do some yardwork. They literally have looks of physical pain while we are doing this. And that leads me in two directions. First it is causing me to articulate my approach to this novel more carefully and secondly, seriously consider Gallagher’s suggestion. These students would not be in so much pain if they were better readers. Dickens’ is tough and, as Gallagher argues, they should not be tackling this text alone, but when this may be all they read, their skills are not improving. It is like trying to train a high school pole vaulter by setting the bar at the world record. They aren’t going to like the sport for long.

So Gallagher’s 50/50 suggestion makes sense to me. We need to find a balance between structure and the freedom to explore. And I hope my discomfort will lead to some newly engaged readers. I still will not be about to embrace this with 100% certainty. I look forward to the online discussion with others across the country. Locally, I would like to try to invite the other members of the 10th grade team into this challenge and perhaps create some Nings that are moderated by each of us. Each semester we can select a list of books that we have read and then moderate these groups throughout the entire 10th grade class. I can get to know some new students; the students can engage with each other across the classes and we can all read some books together.

Fear the Fear

2008-12-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

“Our greatest fear, in bringing computers into the classroom, is that we teachers and instructors and lecturers will lose control of the classroom, lose touch with the students, lose the ability to make a difference. The computer is ultimately disruptive.” Mark Pesce “Fluid Learning”

When I first read this about a week ago, I thought that Mark did a nice job representing the rest of the world, but it no way spoke for my school who was just finishing our first semester of 1:1. We were cruising our way into exams and everyone was feeling fine and then, disaster struck. On our first exam on the computer we had chaos with the exam login, monitoring software and, to hear some tell the tale, keys just started flying off of computers. Tablets were abandoned and we reverted to paper. Despite this return to an old stand bye, chaos continued. Scantrons were handed out; scantrons were aborted; questions were clarified; clarifications were altered. Things never really settled down for this doomed exam and our first semester of smooth sailing crumbled into distant memory. And then it was time to ask if we were willing to do it all again in just 48 hours on the next exam scheduled on tablets. The debate raged and fear took strong hold. Since our students test in their advisories, there were 28 rooms which could not simply be controlled without sending out an e-mail entitled “URGENT” and there was no question that we would be out of touch with our own students. But all of this forced us to look at a few things, primarily, if we walk the walk on exams. We state that our best classes in English are the ones dedicated to exam preparation when we pull everything together and watch the synapses fire in heads we long thought were lost to our passion.

Which brings me to my primary purpose in this post, what really is our roll if we give control and knowledge over to the computer? My answer: feedback. It is clear from Mark Pesce’s piece that education is changing and he makes a good argument for whether or not students should just outsource their collegiate education, picking and choosing the best opportunities and creating their own unique experience. Outside of the joys of dorm life (and dorm food) and the vast array of trouble one can get into on a college campus, I don’t know that you would miss anything going about it this way and you may end up with a superior education. But on the high school level, this answer is easy enough, feedback.

Malcom Gladwell’s article in a recent New Yorker entitled, “Most Likely to Succeed” discusses strategies for identifying individuals who will become exceptional teachers. He explains the amount of material that can be covered by a poor teacher compared to a strong teacher and suggests that students can lose almost one year of learning under the tutelage of a sub-par educator. Identifying, along with our President-elect, that our future in this world economically, geo-politically and environmentally, is directly linked to the improvement of our nation’s education system, Gladwell points out the vital nature of this search for strong teachers.

Discussing an educational talent scouting session, Gladwell examines the commentary by the dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, Bob Pianta who points out the positive attributes of successful teachers. According to Gladwell, “Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virgina group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success.” So no matter the new information that students are able to collect at lightning speed, they still need us to offer them the feedback and direction: To help them know they are going in the right direction, to redirect them when necessary and to simply provide them with the universal human need of acknowledgment. Despite the number of messages in their inboxes or comments on their Facebook walls, nothing replaces another human being affirming their value each day.

So maybe the first exam was a disaster, but our best work was achieved in the days that led up to that exam where we looked at each student and affirmed the connections and insights he came to over the past 14 weeks. And I am grateful that our school decided to try again. As I mentioned to one colleague, if people didn’t try a second time after crashing the first, we would never have the pleasure of airplane food. So far, so good on this exam, by the way. My friends are happily typing away dreaming of two weeks of video games and instant messaging and Facebook and soon as they turn in this last exam.

Lights, Camera, Original Title?

2008-12-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

Several years ago when I started having students take scenes from Hamlet and reinvent them in their own forms (inspired by the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliette), my project seemed pretty forward-looking and progressive. Nowadays, it is a run-of-the-mill tech project, but I continue to be pleased with the results. I come from a fairly traditional school of teaching English and when I first started, the thought of giving the students so many “unstructured” days of class almost made me hyperventilate. The chaos of having to help with so many projects where students could get themselves into tech binds that I could never reproduce if I tried, was enough to keep me up at night. But we did it. And it worked. Students who were only remotely engaged in our study of Hamlet, were now rehearsing lines, arguing about their meaning and creating visual concepts that reinforced the themes of their scenes. Additionally, it provided the opportunities for collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity which were almost completely overlooked in my classroom. I know that the students enjoy having a final product they can be proud of and many come back and ask if I have shown their film to the new classes.

Every year I tweak the project, but here are this year’s set of observations:
1. This year we attempted to use Final Cut Express rather than iMovie. While our students have tablets, their work on these films would be limited to the iMacs in my room. We had to add time to the project to instruct the students on the software and there were turf wars over computer time when groups who were sharing a machine both wanted to work on it. With Adobe Premiere on their tablets, is it better for them to be mobile in their film making or does the power of Final Cut Express trump mobility? Also, is there any benefit to the “studio” atmosphere that was created in my room over the past two weeks. The place is trashed, but good work was done.
2. I added a story board/preproduction report component this year. I wanted them to do more work on the front end and really think about what they were doing and why before they got their hands on a camera. I think this paid off with better shot selection and creativity, but I am still not happy with the amount of planning. Many of the students would not stick to the production schedule they created and still got behind. I also toyed with the idea of using storyboard software.
3. Production and post-production report: I have always had this writing component because I think it is vital for them to explain their choices, but some are better than others. I am thinking I need to give a more formalize rubric for this rather than just telling them the topics I want them to cover. Highlights from the reports are below.
4. Film education: I would love to find time to add some education on the influence of text, audio and visual tracks in film and how all of these combine to create meaning. While many of the students did some of these things intuitively, I think they could have benefitted from a closer look. I was pleased, however, with their cooperation and relative ease with my enforcement of proper copyright use of music. Once we actually figured out that since you own it on your ipod, it isn’t really yours to use however you want and worked through the complicated math of 10% of a song that is 3:20 isn’t really 32 seconds, things went pretty well.

Student comments from Production reports:
“Animal behavior is extremely different from human nature, humans are more developed and have a better understanding of common sense whereas wild animals are harsh and live under the precept of survival of the fittest. Therefore animals are almost desperate to survive that they will do anything to succeed. This idea connects with the play Hamlet because the characters in it are reckless enough to do whatever it takes to achieve what they want.”

“Darth Vader (Laertes): We decided to cast Laertes as a parallel to Vader because in many ways, Vader’s character mimics Laertes’. Both begin as generally “good” characters but allow their anger to overcome them, and both become minions of their respective leaders. Also, in the end, both turn “good” again, and confess their sins and try to repent. Playing into this, we decided to use Vader’s clothing to show his change of heart. During the duel and wounding of Hamlet, this character wears his signature mask, and talks in a deep, almost robotic voice. However, once he is mortally wounded, he takes off his evil helmet to signify his change of allegiances and talks with his normal voice.”

“Although we initially didn’t want music, we took Ms. Mittler’s suggestion that we could find appropriate pieces to enhance the mood. We choose part of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, ‘Eroica.’ It is in a minor key, which gives a more negative and suspicious feeling, and it is classical. To reinforce Hamlet’s emo style, we chose some hard-core ‘screamo’ from a song by Slayer called ‘Raining Blood.’”

Just what the world needs, another blogger!

2008-12-02T10:18:00.000-08:00

As I am in my nascent stages of being environmentally conscious (I call that recylcing, but I am really serious about it!), the last thing I wanted to do is clog up the "internets" with one more blog. But Steve Dembo's words of wisdom about blogging elicited from some of the best in the biz, inspired me to give piecing something together a chance. This is also inspired from an election season of being glued to the blogs monitoring every twitch of every canidate, but now facing some type of withdrawal. Thank God Sarah Palin isn't camera shy! Most importanly, this is fueled by a need to sort out this "Brave New World" of technology in the classroom and the 21st Century Skills Map for English. Our school recently went 1:1, which some of my students still think refers to a basketball defense and not how they learn, and I have been seeking ways to make sense of the changes. So I am going to try to take the advice of some of the experts, throw in some links, add some visuals here and there and try to develop a voice.