conversation – Autodizactic

On Whose Shoulders: Barn Raising

Today’s shoulders provided more than key ideas for inclusion in Building School 2.0, they were also key for the how of building Building School 2.0.

The barn raising in question is that described by Don McCormick and Michael Kahn in their article “Barn Raising: Collaborative group process in seminars.”

McCormick and Kahn present a possibility for running class discussions and seminars that run contrary to Person A making a point, Person B poking holes, and Person C poking holes in those holes, and so on ad nauseam. Instead, McCormick and Kahn write:

We would like to suggest:

The classroom battle is not a good way to teach thinking.
Even if it were, it makes idea-conversation so unpleasant that students do their best to avoid it, in college and afterwards.
It is a significant contribution to the building of a society of contention and enmity.
And, as an alternative, there is another way to talk about ideas which obviates those difficulties.

That alternative, barn raising. Finding an idea and agreeing as a community to do whatever we can to build on that ideas as a community. In classrooms, in faculty meetings, in any room where ideas are discussed – barn raising can change the game by changing the unexamined rules.

As Chris and I were writing, barn raising occurred time and again as an idea we wanted to situate in the context of the larger messages of the book and as a guiding principle for marrying my ideas to his and his to mine. We would not have gotten anywhere if we’d positioned ourselves as partners whose objectives were to tear down whatever wall of the text the other had just completed.

Here’s the other thing about barn raising – once you know about it, you can’t not see its place in conversations. Every meeting I’m in where we’re supposed to be coming up with ideas or working together to build something, I can’t help imagine how things might have gone if we were all amenable to building something. Instead – and you’ll see it – so many meetings operate on a theory of pulling down whatever ideas propped up next to yours. Nothing of merit tends to get built that way.

Passing the test of knowing how to talk to kids

Marcie Hull said something toward the beginning of our friendship that told me we would get along well.

When pointing to a couple at a restaurant during one of our first meals together, Marcie said, “He knows how to talk to kids.”

The he of the mixed-sex pair, was presumably the father of the 6 or 7 year old girl sitting between them.

I paused for a moment to eavesdrop on the conversation going on at the other table before asking Marcie what she meant.

I heard the man talking to the child in a voice that was warm, engaged, and likely very similar to the same voice he would use with the woman sitting with him or to a server that happened by.

I asked Marcie if what I was inferring had captured her meaning, and she said it had.

Since that conversation, this has become one of the litmus tests I use the first time I meet adults who work with children. Right or wrong, it is my brain deciphering how much those adults believe children are capable of.

The tone we reserve for babies and pets does not urge children to respond with aspiration.

It is a tone not of equals, but of esteem. Often, adults to who use this tone or register with children are also willing to have conversations with children to help them work through whatever they may misunderstand or question about a situation.

In his book How Children Learn, John Holt brings up this point again and again when describing encounters with children intent upon learning something. A child proffers a question and Holt proffers an answer in a tone he might also offer a colleague of similar age and experience.

His words (and the words I’ve seen Marcie use time and again when helping children work through difficult problems) are perhaps more intricate. They contain fewer assumptions of the shared language of mastery that can build up over time.

This is the tone we should use with our students, those who show up to learn alongside us each day.

They are, as Dewey implied, more immature in their learning, but not in their curiosity about the world.

The tone we reserve for babies and pets does not urge children to respond with aspiration.

I should make the distinction here between tone and content.

There are some who agree with what I’ve written so far with whom I deeply disagree. These are the people who talk to kids in the tone I’m describing, but bring that tone to bear encumbered by the expectations of adulthood. These adults forget the tempest of emotions they likely experienced during their youth and the vulnerability that comes with learning something new or complex like engineering or fitting in to new social situations. They forget they are the adults in the conversation and that the children with whom they are speaking are in their care.

These adults confusing speaking as an adult with speaking to an adult.

That’s unfair.

Working with a new class of ninth graders, Marcie speaks to them with a tone of esteem and respect, but her words also denote an underlying listening that is taking place between each thing she says. She is probing to find out how she can most effectively leverage her own experiences as a technologist, an artist, or a person against the learning taking place without becoming overwhelming.

Holt understood this too. He wrote about answering a child’s questions and accepting when the child wandered off, ready to mess about with something else. He wasn’t angered. He didn’t try to fill the space between them with more and more content as the figurative passing bell chimed. Not only was the tone he used respectful of the people he was interacting with, but he was respectful when they signaled they’d received the answers they needed. I think of this as the same way you or I would accept the signals from adult colleague when they noted they were ready to move on.

I know there are many ways to talk about this, from discussions of register to developmental tones. For me, what helps me keep my thinking centered, is Marcie’s plainly laid out knowing how to talk to kids.

It’s about time to show we’re #wellrED

Early February, I announced that Jose Vilson and I were starting a book group through GoodReads for folks whose lives are entangled with education. We saw a general lack of conversation around the tough issues we face in districts, schools, and classrooms, and thought maybe there was something we could do about that.

A little over a month later, and we’ve got about 50 members of the #wellrED group, and are about to start our conversations around Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children. Just looking at the group members, I know this is going to include some great dialogue. Folks from all over the US have signed on to think deeply and listen to understand other people’s thoughts around the book.

You should too.

Pick up a copy of Children today. You’ve got plenty of time to read the introduction and forward by the time we post this week’s questions Wednesday. Then, join us Thursday from 7:30-8:30 EST for an on-air Google hangout discussion of what we’ve read and/or join us for a twitter chat at the same time with the hashtag #wellrED.

Being connected gives us a chance to create the type of professional learning we’ve been looking for. Hopefully, this discussion is something you’ve been hoping for.

If you have any questions about any of the above information, leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to help you get connected.

147/365 So, what I hear you saying is…

Moving around a meeting room today examining the products of a group chalk talk activity, I notice someone has written, “‘So what I hear you saying…’ is a sign of active listening.”

I pause.

I write, “Does it always?”

At some point, when I was likely in middle school, my mom had a conversation with me about active listening. She told me this phrase, or one quite similar to it could be deployed in conversation to make sure we were on the right track.

From then on, I had the keys to the conversational kingdom.

People responded differently when I dropped this paraphrasing gem into conversations.

“Oh,” their faces seemed to say, “You really were listening to me.”

And I was…sort of.

Largely what I was doing was listening to the words they were saying so that I could cut out a few adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases and turn their last sentence or two back on them.

In an attempt to make them feel heard, I wasn’t really listening.

This paraphrasing technique forgoes the whole in favor of the part. It’s akin to hiring highly-qualified teachers without considering all the other factors that might contribute to students’ learning.

Real paraphrasing, if we were to attempt to check in with folks on the messages they’re sending might look more like this:

So, what I hear you saying is, “INSERT ABBREVIATED SENTENCES HERE.” Plus, you’re standing with your arms crossed, which I interpret as you not feeling comfortable speaking your whole truth. This is in addition to the fact that you checked the clock on the wall twice during your last statement. All of this, taken with your friendship with the chair of the committee that spearheaded the initiative that caused the problem we’re attempting to solve, leads me to believe…

It becomes apparent that repeating what we’ve just heard might not be the check-in we mean it to be – not the whole check-in, anyway.

Paraphrasing, pausing in a conversation to seek clarification so that everyone involved remains on the same page is a helpful and necessary piece of communication.

I worry, as with any other helpful tip, that doing a thing can start to pass for doing THE thing.

57/365 Investigating Ch. 3 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

In Ch. 3, Murray walks readers through the shift in thinking from the intelligentsia of the mid-to-late 60s. Before digging in to the one sentence that made it incredibly difficult for me to continue reading this chapter, let me outline some of the common cause I was able to muster from these pages.

Murray outlines what he describes as a certain way of thinking becoming unfashionable during the time period. Pre-1964 thinking was that those unhappy with their jobs should take matters into their own hands to change their position and, recognizing the difficulties inherent in that premise, the system was doing all it could to help them. Murray’s argument here was 1964 exposed the faulty nature of the second premise and thereby the impossibility of the first.

Where we find common ground is in his conversation of how the shift took place and the lack of conversation or dialogue – the lack of a difficult conversation – about what should be done and what was right.

There was no great debate in the interim, no moment at which the nation could observe itself changing its national policy. The change happened unannounced.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 45). Kindle Edition.

Somewhere in the last few years, the sentiment above shifted to reflect the lack of conversation or debate in how we set the fashionable education reforms that are currently en vogue.

Where Murray lost me, was with the following sentence:

Before 1964, blacks were unique. They constituted the only group suffering discrimination so pervasive and so persistent that laws for that group were broadly accepted as necessary.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 43). Kindle Edition.

I don’t know what to say about that belief or to that belief, so I’m going to let it sit in my brain for a while.

27/365 Let’s Have a Better Conversation

My friend Sam Chaltain is telling “A Different Story About Public Education,” and I get to help him. Not only that, a great many voices are part of this conversation.

For 10 weeks, Sam and other edu-thinkers will be considering one episode per week of a series called A Year at Mission Hill that documents a year in the life of a successful public school.

In true trans-media spirit, the series promises to be a convening of those who are asking questions and doing the great work of improving public schools. More than that, it’s a portal that invites involvement in both the better conversation and the great work.

EPISODE ONE:

For my part, Sam’s given me space on his EdWeek blog to consider contemporary research relating to each chapter and try to filter it through the lens of a classroom teacher who might be interested in using the the work of ivory towers to improve their practice. My first attempt is here.

If nothing else, follow A Year at Mission Hill because it promises to ask, “What’s going write in public education?” rather than operating from the deficit perspective that’s all too familiar for anyone who’s listening to the rhetoric surrounding our schools. Let’s celebrate the greatness that’s possible, and ask how to help it spread.

Things I Know 356 of 365: The network worked as it’s supposed to

This was the status that caught my eye:

An email showed up to tell me I’d been mentioned. (I want this service in real life.)

I in Central Illinois clicked through to see what Aaron in New Jersey said to start the conversation.

I jumped in to suggest some possible widgets or sidebar options for Aaron’s plan for 365 days of documented fitness training. He mentioned considering signing up for a marathon and triathalon to have specific goals and be able to compare results. Mary Beth in Philadelphia hopped back in to suggest we both try running a few miles and then heading to a yoga class. Aaron liked the idea, and then Heather from northwestern Illinois chimed in to second the running+yoga idea.

As all this was going on, Pete in New York tweeted some suggestions for embeddable apps for tracking training. I followed up with a suggestion for running the D.C. marathon in March and the Chicago marathon in October. We discussed it a bit more and I had to head out for lunch.

The whole conversation happened publically across 4 states and included hyperlinks for reference.

The cherry?

Hours later, when I opened Words with Friends on my phone, I had a chat message in one of my games. Michael in Colorado had seen the twitter conversation and said he was up for a shared workout plan.

Every once in a while, I’ll see a tweet or facebook update from someone asking for examples of social networking in the classroom. Those are fine. I’ve had many of them myself. What happened this morning, though, across the span of a few minutes, was an example of social networking in real life. In a conversation of 6 people, I’d met three of them face-to-face, but each had something positive to contribute to the conversation.

Things I Know 299 of 365: I had a great conversation with Dean

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I’ve been reading, watching, and listening as Dean Shareski has been documenting the Learning Project he’s been completing with his students. The idea was inspired by the 100 Hour Challenge from Ewan McIntosh complete with these rules:

Learn a skill, concept or idea you know very little or nothing about but that you’re interested in learning
Document the learning. Write about it, video tape, audio record, whatever.
Consider all the sources you use to learn. Collect those resources.
Take a early baseline snapshot of your understand at the beginning and another one at the end. Compare and analyze.

If you haven’t been watching it unfold, you should.

The idea of asking students what they were interested in learning and then giving them space to learn and reflect is pretty tremendous.

So, I set up some time to talk to Dean. I was curious to hear his thoughts on his learning as a practitioner going through this project and try to figure out how it meshed with my experiences from the semester. While I don’t deserve many of the kind things he said in the opening to it, Dean’s posted a podcast of our conversation here.

I love talking to Dean. He thinks. He asks questions. He gives space to think.

The problem is, we generally don’t get a chance to really talk unless we meet up at EduCon or ISTE. As I processed the conversation after we’d hung up last night, it occurred to me that I don’t do enough of this. As often as I read something and say, “I wish I could talk to her about what she wrote,” I don’t actually do that. I’m talking more than comments or posting replies here.

I’m about as connected as I can stand, and those last few inches of picking up the Skype and saying, “Let’s synchronize the conversation and see what happens” still seem too far to travel.

As strong as the weak ties can be, as networked as the world gets and as global as our passports turn out, we’ll always have to work to have the next conversation.

Things I Know 289 of 365: In teaching, the simple is complex

And so from that, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

– Will Wright

In working toward completion of a final learning task in which I design a learning organization, I’m re-visiting the reading from this unit of study.

In one 2002 Teaching and Teacher Education article from Judith Warren Little, I found this description of a comment made in a meeting of teachers. One teacher, Leigh, has asked her colleagues if the will all be implementing silent sustained reading uniformly across their classrooms. It stuck me that Little’s description of the conversation captures some of the richest conversations a teaching colleagues can have:

Leigh’s questions thus becomes the occasion for revealing differences in the teachers’ instructional preferences, and for negotiating what it will mean for the teachers to work together in “piloting” a new course. These are not mere matters of technique or procedure; fundamental issues of principle and purpose figure prominently in that negotiation. Further, these are no matters that could have been fully negotiated in advance. They arise in and through the work itself. As Leigh’s question is posed and modified, engaged or deflected, individuals find occasion to state their own preferences and intentions, locating themselves in a variety of ways in relation to the collective project of the group (piloting the course, developing this week’s curriculum), past and present relationships in the classroom (student choice), and the group’s way of being (decisions).

A classmate and I were talking today about the perceived disconnect between external perceptions of teaching and the internal complexity of the work. Little is describing four teachers faced with a simple question or whether they will all be practicing the same reading method uniformly in their classrooms, and she describes the complicated nature of the attempt to answer that question quite wonderfully. This is tough work.

Things I Know 151 of 365: Should and could are different

Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

– Anonymous (though I first heard it from my high school principal)

A difference exists between the things we can do and the things we should do.

Mostly, I think about the things we should do.

The things we can do are infinite. It just seems more beneficial to focus on those things.

Today, though, I did one of the things we can do, and it struck me that, perhaps, we should be doing it more.

Tomorrow is the end of the term for SLA seniors. For my class, this means their final projects are due tonight by midnight.

Those final projects consist of a close reading of a text of their choice through a literary lens of their choice.

We’ve been working all quarter on close reading and literary lenses, so one would hope these will be strong essays.

The first act of the semester was to have them write the kids write their rough drafts of their essays and turn them in on google docs. They thought of it as an assignment while I thought of it as the collection of baseline data.

I learned where we needed to focus and what pieces of the puzzle were missing.

The closing act of the semester was to revise and finalize that same essay – to fill in the gaps of the rough draft with what they learned in the quarter.

If English teachers are constantly telling their students to take time between drafts to let them breath, these drafts were the equivalent of a fine wine in a decanter.

The problem today in class was my inability to read every document while students were synchronously reading them in google docs. While I did a fair amount of commenting and conferencing, many of the docs missed out.

I had to take my work home with me.

At the same time, my students needed to be working.

When I checked my e-mail this afternoon, I had a message from a student asking for an edit.

She was one of the students I’d missed during class, so I felt even worse.

I logged in to the google doc ready to edit.

I suppose I could have typed my comments and suggestions to this student. I could have.

But they were complex comments about global revision that required some pretty intense explanation.

I decided to take advantage of what I could do.

I e-mailed the student asking for her phone number.

She sent it in her reply.

I called through google voice.

We talked for just under 10 minutes.

“Here is where I think you could really sharpen your analysis,” I said as I moved my cursor to particular place in the document, “Do you see where I’m talking about?”

“I do,” she said.

We went on like that.

“Now, look at the evidence you bring in here,” I said, “Is that necessary to the thesis?”

It wasn’t, and she knew it.

By the end of our conversation, my student had a clear understanding of what was necessary for the strengthening of the argument and for the completion of the project. She got it.

I ended it knowing I was going to get a produce submitted that was much stronger than I would have otherwise.

Those ten minutes improved the learning of my class, though they had no connection to the classroom.

I realize I broke several unspoken rules of teaching.

I talked with a student outside of school.

I talked with a student on the phone – well, google phone.

I gave up free time for teaching.

I brought my work home with me.

I did more than other teachers would have done.

Somewhere along the way, I worked outside of contract or expectation. In the middle of it, I thought to myself, “This is something my English teachers never could have done – even if they wanted to.”

And that’s the key. That’s the thing that must transform our craft and practice as teachers. It’s the thing traditional teaching contracts and pedagogy haven’t caught up to. If I can teacher anytime and anywhere, I should be.

If I can be positively impacting a student’s learning outside of the school day, I should be.

If I can be thinking about the school day in completely different terms, I should be.

Tonight I used about four different technologies to teach a lesson more completely and impactfully than I could have in my classroom during the regular day.

After that, I ran smack into the fact that our thinking about education hasn’t caught up with the opening gambit of what’s possible.

We should work on that.

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