Month: February 2011

Things I Know 58 of 365: No one deserves the Academy Awards

It’s the young and hip Oscars!

– Anne Hathaway

This morning, I had a Skype meeting from my bed with folks from Philadelphia, Portland and D.C.

Later, between completing coursework for a master’s degree I’ll earn without ever seeing the faces of those teaching me or learning with me, I tweeted with Mary Worrell in The Netherlands.

Then I looked her up on Skype and we talked about curriculum while I ate a warm cinnamon roll.

After she’d gone to bed, I hit up Bryan Jackson in British Columbia to talk about the possibilities of having our student collaborate online.

The conversation with Bryan was a little stilted because I was working to help design some curricula for use in Denver at the same time.

I’m relaying all this not to sound cool (which I am not), but to explain the chortle I emitted when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak and Head of Disney/ABC Television Anne Sweeney interrupted the limping Oscar telecast to tell me they’d be doing the same thing for another 9 years.

I held my breath for a moment waiting for the tagline, “If you think our self-adulation reeks of being mercilessly out of touch with the shifting paradigm of new media, wait and see what we can do with the next decade.”

At some point, shows like the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Golden Globes were events offering the viewing public a portal into the world of celebrity.

When anyone can become a celebrity tomorrow, though, folks aren’t as interested in watching celebrities as joining them.

More people have seen “Charlie bit my finger – again!” than will ever see The King’s Speech. While Randy Newman was collecting his second Oscar in 20 nominations, Justin Bieber had (as of this writing) 769,366,327 aggregate views for his three videos in the Top 20 all-time most viewed Youtube videos. And, if the 13-year-who tried to explain Bieber Fever to me is to be believed, it’s all because Justin’s mom threw some movies of her son up on Youtube in the first place.

Though Harvey Weinstein was once a kingmaker, it’s looking a lot like anyone with an Internet connection can step right into his shoes.

Boat = Missed, ABC and Academy.

Saying you’ll be televising the Oscars on ABC through 2020 is like me saying in 2001 that I’d be teaching students out of textbooks for the next decade.

While tonight’s telecast might have motivated some people to head out to theaters to see the winning and nominated films, for a growing segment of the population (many of them in the demographic targeted by the selection of James Franco and Anne Hathaway as co-hosts tonight), it prompted the setting of sails for The Pirate Bay.

I’m worried I might be more with it than Hollywood.

If a public school English teacher can spend his Sunday talking to colleagues in six cities across three countries and just as many time zones, it’s possible the Academy needs to re-think what it means to be relevant.

Things I Know 57 of 365: I have been doing some reflecting

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

– Confucious

My Cognitive Curricula grad course has been a refresher on the voices present in a metacognitive approach to teaching and learning. Taking the time to look closely again at Carol Ann Tomlinson’s work within the realm of differentiated instruction was an opportunity to “sharpen the saw” as Stephen Covey says. While differentiation is something I have been practicing since stepping into the classroom, sections like Tomlinson’s “Grading in a differentiated classroom” asked me to stop and contemplate the nuance necessary when working toward full differentiation.

Specifically connected to grading, I plan to think more deeply about my use of rubrics in my classroom. Teaching in a project-based school, much of what my students create is assessed using a rubric. Too truly embrace Daniel Kain’s suggestion of problem-based learning, though, I anticipate the learning will become messier than can be contained in a rubric. Throughout this module, I have started questioning the freedom or restriction of freedom inherent in rubrics. If I am attempting to differentiate assignments, I start wondering if that differentiation could happen by drawing upon a more authentic form of assessment than rubrics.

As my students create complex and dynamic texts and other projects, I wonder if I am restricting my ability to truly appreciate what they have create by asking their works to fit into four or five assessment categories.

Moving forward as a result of my thinking in the course, I will start to think about how close and how far away Kain’s ideas of problem-based learning get to real and useful experiences with the knowledge my students are collecting and creating. As I create assignments, I will more closely consider the contrivances inherent in asking students to do things that are almost real versus things that are actually real. If I must draft artificial documents when asking my students to consider a problem, am I doing them a disservice? Should I not be helping them access real problems and real documents? This is how I will apply my learning from this block.

Intermingled with my reading of Tomlinson and Kain during the block was my examination of Sam Chaltain’s American Schools as well as Nel Noddings’s Caring. In some moments, all four texts worked in concert with one another – asking me to build greater choice into my pedagogy and increase the role of democracy in my classroom. At other times, though, these four texts stood at odds. My greatest growth happened when each text was in contention with the others. Tomlinson and Chaltain advocate greater choice and freedom, an anti-patrician approach to teaching. Not long after those messages wove themselves into my thinking, I encountered Noddings’s argument that caring for our students does not mean allowing choice in all things. Sometimes, Noddings says, we are at our most caring when we restrict choice and tell the “cared for” what they must do. She indirectly argues for a limited democracy in the classroom. Wrestling with this idea was a moment of growth for me during this block. I had to come to terms with my ideal of a democratic classroom and my ideal of living as a teacher who is governed by an ethic of care.

My endpoint – well, my way station – is to move toward a fully democratic classroom as much as possible, to limit that democracy when that is how caring must manifest itself and to work toward the wisdom of knowing which situations call for which approach.

A final piece of learning from the block, or perhaps a lingering question, is the desire to better understand the place of failure and its value in the classroom. Kain seems to write from a belief in doing all we can to prevent student failure. I teach from a belief that failure can lead to greater learning and understanding. I see my role as helping to uncover new information and understandings. Sometimes the thing covering that information and those understandings is failure. If we teach and prepare as Kain appears to be advocating, I worry we are robbing our students of the opportunity to fail and then succeed.

My implementation of the block’s content comes largely in the form of considering what constitutes authentic assessment in the differentiated and problem-based classroom. The learning in the block existed as I attempted to complicate my thinking by harmonizing the syncopation of ideas that arose from incorporating ancillary texts along with the course-required readings. The thinking that pushes me forward is the want of a deeper understanding of the role of failure as I base learning in problems and differentiate as much as I can. This is where I stand as I become more cognitive of my curriculum.

PD: Let’s Meetup

After after years of reading and talking about self-guided professional development and how online spaces can make it happen, I’m going to do something else.

I shelled out a little coin and created a meetup group.

Admittedly, scheduling the first meetup for the day after the group was created turned out to be a bit overzealous.

March 9, we’ll try again.

Our first topic of discussion, “forming and asking good questions in the classroom.”

The group has no requirements and asks only that attendees bring with them a link, tool or text they turn to in consideration of the meetup’s topic.

I don’t know why I or you haven’t started a TeachUp group before. Maybe others have, and I just haven’t heard about it.

Either way, knowing I’ve got some informal PD on the horizon with folks I largely don’t know but who share an affinity for wanting to be better teachers has me all tingly in that way only learning can.

If you’re in the Philly area, come join.

If you’re not in the Philly area, start your own.

And, if you’re a bit trepidatious about paying for a meetup account, just jump in our group – think of America as the Greater Philadelphia Area.

Things I Know 56 of 365: My job is to look closely

You can observe a lot just by watching.

– Yogi Berra

In his discussion of the use of Critical Friends Group protocols with student work, Sam Chaltain explains the process as a chance to look more closely at what students have created. Rather than looking for what the teacher was hoping would come from an assignment, CFG protocols take a step back to ask what the student was doing, creating and attempting in the completion of an assignment.

It turns out you don’t need a protocol to be reminded we need to look more closely.

SLA welcomed visitors today.

Touring classrooms, they happened upon one of my senior storytelling classes.

After a few minutes, one of the visitors approached me.

“I walked in and saw kids cutting pictures out of magazines and thought, ‘This isn’t good.'”

Admittedly, as my students played with form and function as they diagrammed their six-word stories and then created art pieces to display those diagrams, it did look like an Adirondacks summer camp exploded in my room.

“But then I looked closer,” my guest continued. “There’s some deep work going on here.”

That’s the key.

“I want to take this class,” another visitor commented after spending five minutes listening to a student explain how he was attempting to understand what he was asking words to do in his story.

Admittedly, the room didn’t look like the standard English classroom today. Still, I was able to stop and have a real conversation about modifiers and direct objects with a kid who traditionally turns in 1 in 10 homework assignments. He wanted to make something that showed how his story did what it did. To accomplish this task of helping others understand his creation, he was willing to discuss prepositional phrases, understood subjects and adverbs.

“They’re doing some difficult work,” my first visitor explained.

“I know,” I said, “Don’t tell them.”

It’s not that I’m attempting to fool my students into learning. Monday, we’ll start looking more closely and talking more clinically about what they’re learning.

I didn’t want word to get out how difficult the task ahead was because they were creating. The drive to create had overcome the drive to exclaim the difficulty of creation. I didn’t want to stand in the way of that.

I didn’t want to stand in the way, but I still needed to look closely.

As my students were using yarn, construction paper, magazines, markers and colored pencils to create stories, I was looking closely at their abilities to understand language, build complex thoughts, dissect narrative and understand the relative relationships of words.

Shhhhh.

I’ll be using the CFG protocols to get my peers’ feedback on student work soon. For now, my goal is to look closely as that work is completed and understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Rather than have them pause and take a test, my goal is to have them continue to create so I can continue to learn about their learning.

Things I Know 55 of 365: It’s good to be treated like a professional

Proposition 4: Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.

– National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

Sydney’s been giving me trouble the last couple of weeks. She’s a fine enough student. Her grades are decent. She her contributions to class discussion have been average with occasional sparks of insight. She has a fine circle of friends – no one in the upper reaches of the high school hierarchy, but fine enough kids.

Still, Sydney’s been rubbing me the wrong way.

She’ll make comments in the hallways that she isn’t happy with how I run class.

Whatever.

I decided to put an end to a project a couple weeks ago. The kids were making a go of it and working on it, but I didn’t see it going anywhere. So, I shut it down.

Sydney didn’t like it. She wrote about it on her Facebook wall. That, combined with some pretty critical conversations I overheard her having with other students in the hall, really ticked me off.

Then, when I was teaching the other day, Sydney just had to raise her hand and ask why the class needed to follow a direction I’d just given. She said it didn’t make sense and questioned the reasoning behind it.

Right there, in front of all my students, she questioned my authority as the educational leader of the classroom.

I’d made the choice because, in the end it would be easier for me to keep track of things, but I’m not beholden to explain anything to this child.

I ignored her and moved on.

A few minutes later – completely separate activity – Sydney’s hand is in the air again.

She wants to know why I’ve just announced I’ll be sending a portion of my class to a tutor down the block from now on.

I want to get up in her face and yell, “Because some of you are too hard to teach, and you make me look bad when I try. Teaching’s hard, so now you’re someone else’s problem.”

But, I don’t owe her anything.

The next day, I meet Sydney at the door and tell her to take her things to the little office next to my room for class.

During class, the group of students working with Sydney on a class project ask if they can go ask her for her notes. I tell them no and encourage them to stop thinking of Sydney as part of the class.

Later, I hear they still talked to her when they saw her in the hall.

I get an e-mail, two phone calls and 10 text messages from Sydney’s parents that night.

They want to know why I’ve moved Sydney out of class.

I write them a letter explaining Sydney hasn’t been using her time in school safely, particularly her classtime.

I manage all of four sentences and stick the letter in the mail.

Of course, never satisfied, Sydney’s parents call the school, talk to my principal, e-mail me (several times), call me (several times) and text me (several times). Not only that, they must have some sort of phone tree for parents who want to make asinine complaints, because I starting getting bombarded by way too many overprotective parents who “want to know what’s going on.”

Tuesday, I sent Sydney’s parents another letter letting them know I’d be conferencing with her today about how she wasn’t making the classroom environment a safe space with all her “Why this?” and “What about that?” comments. I also let them know I wasn’t particularly pleased she’d been talking with them about what should have been an internal classroom matter.

I mean, I’m the teacher. I know what’s best. Otherwise, how could I keep victory in the classroom?

Things I Know 54 of 365: I teach kids English

– Victor Hugo

I teach kids.

First and foremost, I teach kids.

It’s always in the front of my brain.

The stupendously great thing is I get to teach kids something I love.

In the important rhetoric around the idea that I teach kids, I want to make it clear that I teach kids a subject or a discipline or a an art.

Sometimes, it’s all three.

My only real run-in with diagramming sentences was in Dr. Jerry Balls’s Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammar course in college.

For most of the other students in the room, diagramming sentences was the hellacious experience I remember it being portrayed as in some episode of The Wonder Years.

For me, though, something else was there. In diagrams, I saw something beautiful. The way Mr. Curry had seen beauty as we worked through problems in calculus or Mr. Schutzenhoffer saw beauty in the molecular models of chemistry, I was seeing tangibly represented in the subject I identified most closely.

I wanted to talk about what I saw, the way what language was doing was being played out in what we were seeing.

Dr. Balls and my classmates wanted to finish the lesson.

He was teaching a subject.

The seniors in my storytelling class started today at SixWordStories.net.

“Read until you’re moved to create,” I said, “Then let me know when you need a marker.”

They started reading.

Around the room, I heard students reading key stories aloud.

Not surprisingly, the sexy stories were a pretty big hit.

Gradually, hands went up.

I took them markers.

“What do I do?”

“Write some six-word stories.”

And they started to write stories on their desktops – all over their desktops.

Missy covered her entire table and had to move to another to keep writing.

At some point, when the tables of the room were awash with stories – beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious stories – we watched a simple video I found as I was digging around the TALONS English wiki.

The video ended. “For the next step, you’ll be diagramming your stories. I can tell by the somewhat terrified looks on many of your faces that you haven’t the foggiest idea how to diagram a sentence. That’s ok. The Interwebs has millions of pages to help you out.”

A beat.

They began looking up the information they needed.

A few minutes later, they were taking their works of literary art and deconstructing them. We started to talk about how where the words were related to what the words were and how the story did or didn’t change when all the same words were in a space together but being asked to show how they were doing what they were doing.

Tomorrow, we’ll head to the final phase.

We’ll move our diagrammed stories (and I say our because I’m writing one as well) off of the tables and onto tangible objects and representations to be displayed around school. The subject of storytelling, the discipline of diagramming and the art of creation will be knotted together.

When students ask me why I chose English, I explain I love words. I love their power, their beauty, their arbitrary natures, their shifting meanings.

I know few, if any, of my students will major in English as they further their studies. I’m perfectly happy with that, so long as they can see English.

As much as I would not be doing my job if I didn’t work every moment to see my students, I would also be failing if I didn’t work to help them to see the transcendent beauty of my subject – to try on a new perspective.

Things I Know 53 of 365: The hypotheticals aren’t looking so good

Sixty kids in a class strikes me as a lot.

On average, I teach about 30 kids at a time. In moments when the controlled chaos gets to be a little out of control, 30 feels like it could be 60.

If 60 ever got out of control (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) I suppose that would start to feel like 120.

Last night, I was asked, “What do you think the GOP is thinking by decimating school budgets? I mean, do they really think that 60 kids in a class in Detroit will be anything other than civil war?”

I took the hypothetical bait and started playing out how I would teach in an chronically economically depressed inner-city school where the average class size was 60 students.

It didn’t take long.

In my hypotheticals (and I’m guessing in GOP lawmakers hypotheticals) I’m not in that classroom.

Education is the largest chunk of combined state and local budgets, and teachers are the largest chunk of that chunk.

If you want to save money, eliminate the teachers.

And if you want to back up your argument, trot out selected passages from Christensen, Johnson and Horn’s Disrupting Class. Not the whole book. Present only the pieces of their argument that sound like they back up your plan.

Cite budget deficits and slowly lay off the most junior of your teaching force. This will leave your most senior teachers with little patience and overflowing classrooms.

Some will stick it out, but many will decide things have gone too far and take an early retirement.

You won’t have to worry about much standing in the way of finding reasons to fire the hangers on as you already broke collective bargaining when you destroyed the last vestiges of a collective.

You’d think you’ve saddled yourself with an ugly mess at this point, but this is where the truly beautiful part comes in.

Again, you’ll have the benefit of bastardizing Christensen, Johnson and Horn.

For a fraction of a cost, say $25K each, you hire aides – half hall monitors, half data entry specialist – to oversee the computer labs with which you’ve outfitted your school buildings. Sixty kids to a room starts to sound like a low-ball estimate, so you start to schedule kids in shifts, using the computer rooms around the clock – constantly overseen by what we’ll label education accountants.

It looks like there’s a hole in the plan. All the capital outlay for those computers is going to set you back.

Don’t worry.

Some multi-billionaire benefactor will step in and his foundation will donate the proprietary technology to stock your learning centers.

It will be a happy coincidence the students in your learning centers develop an unquestioning brand loyalty to the corporation founded by your multi-billionaire benefactor in his previous life.

It will be another happy coincidence that the proprietary brand loyalty will quietly suffocate the open source movement that threatened the corporate donors who filled your re-election coffers.

So, you’ll have your closed system. You’ll eliminate your greatest cost, you’ll increase learning production, you’ll increase consumer production (the production of consumers), and you’ll find a place for most of the young people from your electorate.

Most of the young people.

See, what you will be creating is the “public option.”

You won’t be eliminating all teaching positions or schools. The private options will still exist.

You’ll send your kids there.

Your donors will send their kids there.

The best teachers from the old model (many of them likely the most seasoned) will fight tooth and nail to cling to the profession they love. They might disagree heartily with the new way of doing things. You don’t have to worry about that. They’re not a collective anymore, so their voices will be mere whispers on the wind.

So, your children and your donors’ children will be educated. The public option will fit the needs of your electorate. You’ll eliminate the majority of your budget deficit. And, all will be right with the world.

In the early days, you’ll hear grumblings from the disenfranchised about the morlocks and the eloi, but such hesitancy is to be expected in times of great innovation.

Things I Know 52 of 365: My classroom should be as democratic as twitter

A great democracy must be progressive, or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.

– President Theodore Roosevelt

Teachers dig Facebook. They like ning and twitter and youtube and social networking. I mean, they really really like ’em.

A TON of teachers who like these online affordances also like to build the case for their inclusion in classrooms and education.

Of the Ton,I get the feeling many, if not most, of them work in schools or districts where those online affordances are blocked, banned, outlawed and censored.

I’m not sure many of those teachers really want the access or understand the shift in pedagogy that use would imply.

I’ve been reading Sam Chaltain’s American Schools: The art of creating a democratic learning community. You should too.

Chaltain holds that American schools should be places of democracy, but are not. No whiner, he then works to outline what he sees to be the keys of democratizing classrooms.

Before I picked up the text, I had been reflecting on the role democracy plays in my own teaching. While I’d wager it’s greater than many, I still struggle moving from compliance to choice.

Most recently, I’ve struggled with accepting the idea that saying, “Pick one of these three options,” isn’t the same thing as choice – not true choice.

Chaltain quotes Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick:

[I]f the world takes our ideas and changes them – or accepts some and discards others – all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are, then we should humbly accept the audiences judgement.

When the Ton trumpet the use of the aforementioned online affordances in learning, they invariably speak of students’ abilities to choose, create, re-arrange, remix and “like” in the spaces they can inhabit online. In essence, they like that those online spaces would give their students the chance to do what the Heaths say sticky ideas do.

This leads me to question what’s been limiting those options in the physical spaces of their classrooms in the first place.

I know what’s been holding it back in my classroom – me.

No pedagogical prude, I attempt to take learning styles, intelligences and modalities into account as often as possible. I differentiate and modify and accommodate. In the end, I’m realizing much of the work in my classroom is still closer to conformity than I’d like. And perhaps, that’s limiting the contribution of those voices from whom I’m most waiting to hear.

“We should evoke contribution through freedom, not conformity,” Chaltain writes.

I agree.

To the extent that I work within a system that expects certain outcomes from my students, I agree. To the extent that I have a picture in my head of what my students can do once they leave my classroom, I agree.

It might be fear that leads me to the caveats above, but I don’t think it is.

There are pieces of being able to read and write that I know will prove detrimental if they are not within my students’ abilities when they leave my care. The democratic classroom I envision isn’t one without goals. It’s chock full o’ goals. Those goals are also balanced with choice.

When I write about improving choice in my classroom, I do not mean to imply the abdication of structure or goals. I mean to say I need to give greater and truer choices to my students in how they journey to those goals.

And to the Ton, I want to reference something Jerrid Kruse brought up tonight on twitter. He referenced his frustration with online ed discussions veering toward the tech and not the teaching. I don’t yet know if I agree with his claim that this happens in the majority of online conversations. I do know that it’s complicated my thinking.

If you’re clamoring for these online affordances backed by the argument of the democracy they bring to learning, have you done the hard, uncomfortable work of making your classrooms democratic so your students are better citizens when the tools show up (or don’t)?

Things I Know 51 of 365: There are 100 people in the world

Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.

– William Jennings Bryan

I’ve spent this weekend with my godmother and her family.

Karen and my mom met in science class on the first day of seventh grade. Family legend has it they were best friends from then on.

When explaining to people I’d be down in D.C. for a Bat Mitzvah, I’ve been asked for whom. After a few dozen rounds of “my godmother’s youngest daughter,” I switched to “my godsister.”

It slipped out so naturally, I didn’t realize right away that this wasn’t actually a thing. Or, at least, it hadn’t been until now.

If you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, these people are the family my parents chose for me when I was born.

There’s something pretty tremendous about that.

When I lived in Florida, Ricki, a journalist friend of mine, wrote a profile piece on a local resident who captained a wooden sailboat.

In appreciation for the profile piece, the captain invited Ricki and a few of her friends out on his boat.

The majority of the cruise featured the captain at the helm, me at his side and the three others sunbathing on the bow of the ship.

The captain had spent most of his life on the water, and I took my cue to sit and soak in his stories.

Now, many of them started with, “I can only tell you this because the girls are all up front,” and ended with a good-natured elbow to the ribs, but one thing has stuck with me – right to the stickiest part of my brain – as the other stories have faded away.

“There are 100 people in the world,” said the captain, “The rest are just extras.”

My understanding and interpretation of his words has vacillated and evolved in the intervening years. Always, though, the thought comforts me.

It’s easy to get lost in a world of nearly 7 billion souls or a city of 6 million or even a school of 500.

Remembering there are 100 people in my world, helps me to anchor in the tempest of data, friending, following, redditing, and stumbling upon.

I know 100 is a soft number, and I don’t have a catalog or list anywhere. I tried once to no avail. Knowing they are there proved more important than knowing exactly who they are.

Sometimes, I’ll meet someone I’m certain is a person in my world only to find central casting has sent them for a walk-on role. Sometimes, I’ve absent-mindedly ignored the first moments of what were to become some of my deepest and most lasting friendships.

Nel Noddings writes about the potentiality of being overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for everyone whom we come into contact. The 100 people in my world are the way I avoid that feeling and keep myself sublimely whelmed by the ethical imperative to care for others.

Though I’ve seen Karen and her family a handful of times in the last couple decades, I am reminded of their place as people in my world.

Something peaceful happens each time I am reminded of this.

Things I Know 50 of 365: Teaching is an act of faith

Faith without works is dead.

– James 2:17

I looked up “bat mitzvah” yesterday.

I’m headed to my first tonight and thought I should at least know what it means.

Loosely and in my googled understanding, “daughter of the commandments.”

Tonight, my godmother’s youngest daughter Katie will take on the task of upholding the commandments of her faith.

It is a beautiful and solemn thing. Though I am not Jewish, it is holy to me.

That certain things are sacred, I understand.

There are trusts and covenants that transcend human frailties.

The closest thing I have is being a teacher and working for the good of my students.

I realize it falls well short of the threads of history into which Katie is interweaving her life tonight, but it is what I have.

Whenever Chris talks to the parents of SLA, he thanks them. He thanks them for trusting us with their most precious possessions.

School is difficult. Learning is messy. Teaching is intense.

For all of the science and research and discussion, teaching is an act of faith.

TFA calls it grit.

Faith has more hope.

Faith, religious or otherwise, asks us to take up certain commandments.

For me, one of those commandments is seeing potential – seeing the best.

It’s the commandment Natalie Munroe broke when she posted her first blog entry denigrating or criticizing her students.

Munroe was wrong.

She hurt children.

We don’t talk about kids that way.

Somewhere in my mind tonight, as Katie reads from the Torah, I’ll be considering the commandments by which I teach. I’ll be thinking of how I can better act out my faith.