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

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.

The Visual Literacy Imperative

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

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?

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

Lausanne Eng Tech Presentation

View more presentations from lmittler.

The Runaway Mindset

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.