Tag Archives: collaboration

89/365 Adopt Change at a School Zone Speed Limit

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As soon as it was taken up as a tentpole issue for the champions of “21st Century Skills,” collaborative effort was destined to wiggle its way into the goals of any school’s annual planning for at least the first two decades of the 21st century. By 2030, we’re likely to be championing “22nd Century Skills.” For now, though, let us focus on the century at hand.

In the rush to adopt a practice of collaboration, many schools have set decrees and adopted protocols to ensure collaboration in actions if not in spirit. Lest a school’s culture – its leaders, its teachers, its students – has decided to own the effort of collaboration, practice by decree is sure to be mired in “almost implimentation.”

The schools we need allow for a school zone speed limit to taking up a practice of collaboration.

For schools having difficulties initiating collaborative approaches, the danger lies not in doing something new or different, but in doing something much more quickly than is comfortable to those responsible for the work.

While we are firm believers in learning the work by doing the work, this does not mean doing all the work at once and expecting it is all done well.

A school zone speed limit adoption method takes on all the practical implications of asking drivers to slow down when traveling through a school zone. Moving at full speed in these areas will mean they are not likely to fully appreciate where they are doing, and they will be much more liable to interfere or endanger the travels of others who are attempting to move through the same space.

The same principles apply to full-speed adoption of collaboration. Asking people to jump in to a practice of collaboration with full integration of lesson planning, peer observation, brainstorming, curriculum planning, etc. makes it entirely unlikely this newly adopted approach will not notice the small but significant details important to improving collaborative practices.

They will go through the motions of collaborating, as the drive will likely still stop at a stop sign, speed zone or not. They will not, take or have the time to reflect on what happens when they change this or that element of their practice.

A school speed zone approach to adopting a new practice and adapting a system to this practice’s inclusion might include the following steps:

  • At the top of each school-wide meeting, asking all teachers to share with those around them a single sentence explaining something they are working on with their students.
  • Asking for a group of teachers to volunteer to sit in on at least one of their peers’ classes during a week and to welcome others to do the same in their own classes.
  • The creation of a common physical or online space where teachers are asked to share questions and ideas relevant to what they are teaching or planning to teach with immediate means for others to offer answers and suggestions.
  • The allocation of 5 minutes at the beginning of every faculty meeting for teachers to stand and share those things they saw that they identified as good in a peer’s classrooms since the previous meeting.

The list could continue forever. Indeed, as a learning organization feels more and more comfortable with collaborative practice and begin to speed up, the list is likely to lengthen exponentially. It should do.

Slowing down, focusing on a few key elements of practice will allow those being asked for mindfulnes to see and reflect on the shifting of the organization. They will have the ability to refine these new efforts and the practice will evolve.

We can surely get somewhere as quickly as possible. To do so often means sacrificing safety and ignoring our surroundings. It’s possible, but rarely worth it.

88/365 We Work Together Because We’re Better for It

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In a room filled with teachers of students from grades 6 to 12, the discussion is focused on the new direction for the school. On the table at the moment – the question of yearly themes and grade-level essential questions.

A teacher, not convinced of the need for either, raises her hand, “Why do we need themes? Why can’t we just trust that teachers will go in to their classrooms, do their very best for students, and help them learn?” The overarching constructs being debated sound look and sound a lot like further encroachment on the territory of teachers’ professional judgement.

“And,” the teacher added, “Isn’t me prescribing essential questions just more teacher-centered learning? What if these aren’t the questions my students have? Why can’t each student decide which questions are most interesting?” Again, the questions smack of contrivances and the undercutting of student interests.

Two responses are most key to this teacher’s questions. The first is general and free of considerations of the merits of her arguments. Surveying the room, every teacher, not the consultant who’s been brought in to facilitate the conversation should have an answer to this teacher’s questions. Each teacher should, to varying degrees of detail, be able to proffer an answer as to why this is the way forward for their faculty and students.

Without an ability to explain why what they are proposing is what they should be doing, this faculty, like many others, will not move forward. Rather, they will move everywhere. Without a clear philosophy of practice as described by Dewey in Experience & Education, this school (or any school) will not know why they are doing what they are doing, and they will not know whether they are doing it well.

Many contemporary schools are suffering both mission drift as well as theory drift. Some began with visionary leaders and teams who possessed clear, sound arguments for why they would do what they would do in a certain way toward the goal of teaching children. As time inevitably passes, more urgent matters erupt, and faculty change, that initial vision can become clouded or forgotten.

The hope, for this school at least, would be prior to ratifying any specific change of course, each member of the teaching community is asked to explain both what they want for the school and why they want it. If each teacher can do this, the future will look much brighter.

The second response is a direct answer to the questions posed. It has several parts. First, trusting teachers to do the very best they know is not in question. On an individual basis, some training may be necessary and some teachers may not be up to snuff. Themes, essential questions, and other boundary-crossing curricular elements mean creating pathways for teachers to do there very best together through the sharing, challenging, and iteration of ideas. Cross-classroom components build in space for teachers to do better by doing together. It staves off the siloed teaching of traditional classrooms and raises new questions.

Such elements also work to eliminate the false boundaries between “subjects” established by the traditional structures of schools. By working across classes to answer a question like “What is my role in my community?” students can come to realize there isn’t one answer, nor does any answer belong to a specific class or subject area. Citizenship, literacy, ethics, anything – these are themes and understandings that have implications across all areas of learning, and any question asked without considering all disciplines would be the lesser for its exclusion.

Finally, two pieces to the question of excluding student interests. First, to say teachers could work separately and each allow students to chase the answers to their individual questions rests on a key assumption. It requires an answer to the following: Does every teacher within this school have the practical and professional capacity to help each individual student in his or her care ask whatever questions of interest?

If the answer is yes, this school is unique in its capacity and should be captured for study. If the answer is the more likely “no,” then the students would be better served and the teachers’ stress greatly reduced by a team approach to drawing out curiosity and crafting experiences around it.

Secondly, there are issues we, as educators and professionals understand more deeply than our students. We have the “mature” knowledge as Dewey described it, and we should not free directing student learning in a throughout, goal-based way to help students become the citizens we need and intend. This rests on the assumption mentioned above, we must be intentional with our practice, and we must not fear nor be ashamed of our own expertise.

Working together need not sacrifice individuality. Providing for student choice does not mean abdicating a teacher’s responsibility to direct. There’s more complexity than an assumed dichotomy would suggest.

84/365 Collaboration Requires (formal) Space

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Collaboration, as anyone talking about the evolution of education will tell you, is a good thing. Some will argue collaboration to be a 21st century skill as though civilization would have had any chance at progressing to this point had people not been collaborating for various virtuous and nefarious purposes up to this point.

As we have stumbled upon collaboration again, perhaps we could be more purposeful in its execution.

Nary a school leader will voice opposition to the adoption of a collaborative mindset in their space. Indeed, ask a principal if they want their teachers to be collaborating with one another and you’re unlikely to find any who say no. You are equally likely to hear multitudinous reasons why it’s not happening. Chief among these is some variation on, “Well, I’ve done my best to encourage collaboration among my staff, but they don’t seem to want to collaborate with one another or to take the time to collaborate.”

This is not surprising.

In the schools we need, we must not only encourage collaboration, we must make space for it.

Those same principals who lament the lack of faculty interest in collaboration are rarely mindful of the space they’ve created for such culture shift in their schools.

Proclamation of a collaborative spirit must be accompanied by both physical and temporal space for the implementation of that spirit.

To a principal it can appear that their encouragement has fallen on deaf ears. To teachers, this is often not the case. They have heard the calls for working together to design, execute, and refine new teaching practices, but they are left wondering what, if anything, they can let go to make space for such efforts.

Without the leadership and permission of ending certain practices, then principals’ encouragement to begin collaborating will be heard as asking to do more with less.

To foster collaborative spaces, schools must consider re-designing schedules in ways that allow the breathing room for teachers to work together without the pressure to complete other prescribed tasks. In some cases, this will mean keeping time on the schedule clear of administrative minutiae. In others it will mean moving to privilege teacher time to remove unofficial encroachments on things like duty-free preps or lunch periods.

If collaborative time is to be privileged within a school, then it must be prioritized clearly and without conditions in a school’s schedule.

Similarly, collaborative physical spaces must be designated within schools. These are spaces where teachers know they can go to sit alongside their peers, share ideas, and gain helpful feedback on what they are creating. These are spaces where school’s resources are aggregated, shared, and celebrated to encourage their examination and remixing by anyone interested. For some, this may sound like a school library. For others, it might be a faculty lounge. For many, it may sound like no space that yet exists within their schools. For all, they should be spaces that help to serve as a physical hub of collaboration.

A final space necessary for collaboration is actually that which principals try to create before or in spite of these formal temporal and physical spaces. They hope that some sort of amorphous collaborative space will happen within schools and school days. Such collaborative seepage will happen, but it will not happen if collaboration is not privileged beyond the messaging of a school.

Professing a collaborative atmosphere is one thing. Having a collaborative atmosphere requires the ability to point to the times and spaces where collaboration has been given formal space to grow and leak into the culture of a school.

73/365 Schools Have Built-In Audiences

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While outside audiences must be curated, and it’s a skill rightly worth teaching, there are other considerations for audience in learning and how schools can leverage them more effectively. Most specifically, students are a built-in audience, and we could leverage better.

The schools we need realize audience is built in.

The easiest way to think about this is the English classroom. Students are assigned essays to write. Even the most traditional teacher is likely, from time to time, to ask students to share their work with one another during the editing process and peer edit. In technology deserts, this is usually the act of trading handwritten drafts, asking students to read what’s on the page and mark them up. It’s a start, and we can do better.

Simply trading papers leaves the editor with a lack of direction. She’s likely to read through, mark the most glaring punctuation errors, write “good job” and hand it back to her partner.

Without guidance, students aren’t likely to get the feedback they want or need from their pre-published audiences. They’re also not likely to reflect on what that desired feedback might be. Using a more structured approach like the writer’s memo described by Jeffrey Sommers in his article “Behind the Paper: Using the Student-Teacher Memo” asks both writer and audience to think about their focus in the feedback process and what will be most helpful to the writer.

Tools like the writer’s memo take better advantage of the in-school audience than the traditional trade-and-mark approach and ask students to reflect on what they’ve created as well.

Once student work has reached a published phase, we can take better advantage of built-in audiences as well. We can ask students to make the work useful to their audience rather than a simple exhibition of the skills they’ve been working on. The most misguided example of this is the use of social video sites for school projects.

In a math class, the teacher may ask her students to create a video explaining the concepts taught (and hopefully learned) during a unit of study. The students work alone or in groups to complete the assignment, upload their videos to the designated site, and the teacher reviews them, makes comments and sends them back. In some cases the teacher might take class time to highlight some of what she has deemed as the best productions.

These videos can be more useful.

This is surely not the last time these concepts will be taught in the school. The next year or next semester, other students will follow and need to learn these concepts. Too often the teacher will forget the video archive students have created and leave them to languish. Instead, leveraging built-in audience means realizing these new students can start their learning with the previous year’s videos and utilize the commenting function to activate the prior students as tutors or co-teachers of the content. Suddenly, the videos live on and the previous students are asked to re-activate knowledge in the service of this new audience.

A year is a long time to wait, and there’s no need. Sticking with our math video example, consider the power of teachers of subsequent math classes collaborating and the teacher of the higher-level math class asking what concepts the lower-level math class will be learning about first. Then, the higher-level students review the previous year’s content and craft learning tools to help the younger students. Given the spiraling of most math curricula, this return to more fundamental concepts is likely to shore up the higher-level students’ skills while providing lower-level students learning objects that are crafted in language divorced from the formality of textbooks.

As the Internet has opened the world up to our schools, the temptation has become to think of the world as our audience. Remembering the audience already in our classrooms and schools can help to deepen knowledge and work to create local learning communities.

26/365 A Great Way for Students to Prep for Quizzes

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In observing some of my student teachers this semester, I noticed they were approaching in-class quizzes in some pretty traditional ways. In debriefing the lessons after observing, I kept wanting to explain how my friend and colleague Matt Kay has his students review their reading and prepare for quizzes. Luckily, Matt’s a great guy and agreed to type up his practice so I could share it here.

When he mentions SATs, that stands for Student Assistant Teachers. At SLA, seniors who have room for an elective in their schedule can sign up to be SATs and work as assistant teachers alongside those teachers they’ve connected with during the course of their high school experience. It’s a beautiful piece of built-in mentorship, and Matt highlights its possibilities here.

From Matt:

My classes are divided into Small Learning Communities that I call “Pods.” Each one has 3-4 students. In the first quarter, they are chosen at random, but for each quarter after that, they are created with a purposeful mix of ability levels and social observations.
These pods meet up the day after any assigned reading. The students walk into class and sit immediately into their pods. They then have 10-12 minutes to discuss the previous night’s reading, and the notes that they have taken the night before. I have found that the struggling students are far more willing to ask each other questions than they are to ask during whole-group instruction. When this time is up, the students move to their seats and take the quiz.
Right now, my student assistants are making the quizzes. They are all factual questions that are not answered in spark notes or cliff notes. (I assess richer understandings in different ways). The SATs come to class with seven questions, and I pick five while the pods are meeting. The SATs give the questions, then they grade the quizzes.

Bringing the Phone Tree out of the Moth Balls

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Never having played sports in school (or ever, really), the phone tree, as I understood it being used by soccer moms, never really entered into my life. I got the concept, but never needed.

When talking to a music teacher a few weeks ago about how he was using technology to care for students, the phone tree became suddenly relevant.

After a marching band gig, the teacher had sent a mass text to all of his musicians thanking them for showing up and performing. A simple act this teacher hadn’t thought much about until I’d worked to underline the importance of the ethic of care in the classroom.

It was a simple act that, after the instruments had been packed away, reminded the students that what they did mattered to other people and that they were valued.

Nice.

It also got me thinking about a possiblity for phone trees in the classroom. Apps are great and I’m all for welcoming kids to bring tech into school spaces. Oftentimes, this transitions to a mandate or a platform requirement.

Enter, phone ring.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

  1. At a class’ opening, each student is linked to another. A to B, B to C, C to D, etc. until Z is linked back around to A in the end. (More of a phone ring, I’m realizing.)
  2. Working on anything – homework, projects, whatever – if C has a question she can’t quite figure out, she gets ahold of D via whatever means necessary. It can be text, IM, e-mail (gasp), phone call (double gasp). D and C work together find an answer.
  3. If they can’t, that’s cool. The ring continues. D says, “I think we need another brain,” and gets ahold of E. The ring continues.
  4. Knowing the system is in place, the teacher begins the next class asking if any questions or troubles made it around the ring since their last meeting. It’s a formative assessment gold mine.

Student are practicing social skills, it’s low-threat collaboration, it values the asking of questions. It’s low-cost and allows for the use of mobile technologies without requiring them or the installation of new functionalities.

P.S. In putting together the chain, I’d probably take personalities into consideration and try to build in as much student choice. The easiest way I’ve found is starting with a conversation of what it means to be connected to someone who supports your learning and then asking each student to write down the names of three students they know would support their learning if they were linked and one student who would probably derail their learning. After that, it’s up to teachers’ professional opinion to make matches that foster student growth.

Learning Grounds Episode 001: In which Megan discusses her learning, inclusion, and professional collaboration

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For the first episode of the podcast we spent a cup of coffee with Harvard Graduate School of Education student Megan. Over the course of a grandé, we discussed Megan’s drive to implement a truer inclusion program for special needs students as well as the difficulties of professional collaboration when new teachers meet existing systems.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Things I Know 293 of 365: The glacier of higher education is drifting toward collaborative learning

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If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.

- Wilson Mizner

I’m in the throws of finals at the moment. Today was spent reading the relevant four sources to be synthesized and analyzed in the essay final I’ll be writing tomorrow for one of classes. Contrary to my instincts, it won’t be available for viewing here until after the due date for submission has passed in keeping with the explicit instructions that we are allowed to discuss our ideas for the paper while we are planning and thinking about what we’ll write, but not once we’ve begun writing.

While I understand this guidance as keeping with the College’s policy of preserving “the status of the work as the student’s own genuine intellectual product,” I also wonder what effects such policies have on our abilities to build a fund of knowledge or work collaboratively.

Much of the work I’ve been doing over the course of this semester includes ideas around setting policy at the organizational and systems levels. This work has asked for definition of purpose and principles of design. It has asked for the articulation of beliefs as I would integrate them into organizations and systems under my supervision.

At the same time, the refinement of those principles and beliefs has largely been done individually.

There should be road testing.

Instead of my design principles, I’d love the chance to work within the context of a 70-student course to come to consensus on our design principles. Imagine the process of starting with 70 disperate ideas and the discussion surrounding their integration. Imagine the learning of the experience.

To be clear, this is the faulting of the system, not any individual. Much of the work done within higher education has to do with looking at the writings of those who have come before us and working to invent something just different enough so that we might call it unique. Given the plurality of ideas accessible in a globally networked world, such a process is intensely competitive.

In one of my courses this semester, we were asked to move toward a collaborative process. In teams, we were asked to set a research agenda and share our findings. Though not planned, this led to the sharing of resources across teams to the point that the course’s teaching team created and online space for teams to archive their research. Once allowed, the sharing was contagious. Not only was each piece of work created for that assignment each student’s own genuine intellectual property, it had the added benefit of drawing from the depth of a commons shaped by all the minds in the room.

This is an excellent start.

Still, we can do much more to foster individual thought built through communal knowledge.

The leading example of what is possible exists in Writing History in the Digital Age. Edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, Writing is “a born-digital edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series of its digitalculturebooks imprint.”

It signals a shift in how we can better leverage intellectual capital to build polycultural works.

What’s more, the research is coming to support such a shift. If you’ve got the time, look at the work Sarah Thorneycroft is doing to change academic publishing or consider Doug Belshaw’s transparent, conversational and deeply academic work on digital literacies.

While I’m frustrated by the lingering restrictions of classroom 1.0 I’m encountering in graduate school, I’m heartened by these bright spots highlighting ways in which networks can be leveraged to support both individual creation and communal refinement.

Things I Know 130 of 365: Professional development must be warts and all

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Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

- Freeman Thomas

A group of teachers cam to visit SLA Tuesday. Particularly enterprising, their school is heading to a project-based model next year, and they’ve been using this year to experiment. While not fully project-based, their classes have featured a few projects throughout the year, and they wanted to talk shop.

When I sat down, they were talking to Tim Best about rubrics and expectations.

They wanted to adopt a similar approach next year, and I had a question.

I asked if they had a plan for getting the more hesitant members of their faculty on board.

No matter who comes to visit SLA, they never bring the most recalcitrant members of their faculty with them. Those who come to visit are of like minds.

This group had no plan.

They asked if we had any suggestions.

I had one.

Be vulnerable.

Whenever I’ve been part of a faculty or heard stories of a faculty that was adopting a new approach or program, there was never a sense of vulnerability.

Every launch, unveiling or introduction has been orchestrated with the promise of perfect like some sort of Kevlar-covered pedagogy.

Nothing ever is.

No matter what these teachers say next year as they start to shift the way their school approaches teaching and learning, it will not be perfect.

My suggestion was for each of them to sit down with a group of their peers and workshop a unit plan, project description or rubric they’ve built this year.

When new initiatives are launched, all many teachers hear is “We’ve figured out the problem with our school. You’re teaching the children wrong, and we’re hear to fix you.”

Asking their peers to sit down to a curricular discussion that values the knowledge and experience of everyone involved can be a way for their school to make thoughtful change.

Even better, those conversations will bring new eyes to the process in a structured way so that this beta group can refine their practice with the help of their peers rather than burning out mid-year next year because everyone is looking to them to keep pushing things along.

Some school initiatives fail because they are either bad initiatives or bad fits for the schools adopting them. Other initiatives fail because they’re thrust upon a faculty with pomp and circumstances, but lacking dialogue and reflection.

By inviting their faculty to the table as colleagues, these teachers could have a good shot at eliminating 50 percent of the reasons they might fail.

I like those odds.

Things I Know 112 of 365: It’s not enough to have the door open when I teach

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An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it.

- Unknown

One of the few specific pieces of training for being a teacher I remember was a piece of cautionary advice – Don’t teach with your door closed.

As is often the case with this sort of advice, no one ever really filled in the gap of how to do the opposite of teaching with my door closed. Namely, I received no direct instruction in door-open teaching.

I often read about technology’s affordances for networking teachers with one another. It’s always seemed a bit like showing someone a telephone and wishing them luck on finding useful numbers.

Teaching with my door open is best when it is a combination of the personal and the virtual.

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a fellow SLA teacher linking to a Slate article about movie theaters’ resistance and attempted avoidance of the Food and Drug Administration’s draft rules requiring restaurants to post the nutrition information for the food they serve.

Movie theaters would rather not have their patrons realize each tablespoon of butter they just doused their popcorn with had nearly double the number of calories of a tablespoon of the butter back in their kitchens.

I tagged the article in delicious (long may it live) and stowed it away to use last week in my food class. The students and I read the article and engaged in some pretty fantastic conversation about the economics of movie theater food as well as the cultural implications of the event of going to the theater.

I’ve talked all over the place about this food course. Even before it started, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about it. I wasn’t bragging, I was just thinking and planning aloud, inviting anyone who read or heard what I was thinking to throw in some ideas.

Thus, the e-mail.

We read the article in Tuesday’s class, whetting our appetites for Friday’s convening.

I remembered about a month ago one of my science teacher friends explaining an experiment to me during my first year at SLA.

Students exposed popped microwave popcorn to a sodium hydroxide solution that corroded the organic matter.

One would imagine that would include everyone one would find in a handful of microwave popcorn.

No so.

I remembered this experiment because it had sounded interesting. Were I a teacher who claimed open-door teaching, but who really only carved a window into the door, I would just have told my students about the experiment.

While, I’m fairly eloquent, me telling can never replace them doing.

Friday’s class, everyone met in my room. Then, we walked down the hall to VK’s room where we donned safety goggles and completed the experiment.

First, we submersed the popcorn to a hydrochloric acid solution so the kids could see what happens in their stomachs.

Next came the sodium hydroxide or lye.

We watched as it ate through the corn and could feel the heat of the exothermic reaction.

When all was said and done, we were left with a white substance at the bottom of our beakers. This, VK explained, was the plastic used to coat microwave popcorn kernels in order to keep them from burning through the bag during the popping process.

More importantly, this was the plastic a person ingested with each handful of popcorn.

Not only had I kept the door open, I’d led the class out the door and down the hall to experience a perspective I wasn’t equipped to provide.

This Tuesday, we’ll return to the article and reflect on the experiment and try to cobble together an understanding of the role of popcorn at the intersection or science, culture and literature.

Had I propped my classroom door open and simply waited passively for technology to bring me something worthwhile for class, it never would have come.

What I wasn’t taught in my teacher preparation, but needed to experience for myself is that teaching with my door open works much better if I’m willing to walk through the door and see what’s out there that I can bring back to the classroom.