Tag: core values

86/365 We Must Practice a New Research

Time used to be that you knew what research meant when a teacher announced to the class that they’d be conducting it. The library would be reserved (God only knows what would happen if more than one group of students were in there at once). The librarian could be counted upon to deliver the perfunctory “Here’s How We Use the Library” speech. And, the class would be released to find the handful of books related to their respective topics.

For those in high school who took an old school approach, research also means a plethora of notecards – source cards, quote cards, outline cards. Cards galore.

It was a simpler time, a calmer time, and, quite frankly, a better time for notecard manufacturers.

Say research now, and any myriad of scenarios run through students’ heads. Maybe a library is involved. Maybe they turn to their phones. Maybe it’s a computer lab or laptop cart. Perhaps it’s both. If it’s the latter, an Internet connection is handy, but the options only open from there. Will students use the simplified per-for-use services? Will they Google? Will they plagiarize? Will the teacher catch on?

The possibilities are endless.

Research is different now.

The schools we need see research questions as “what” and “how”.

To accomplish this, they must work to make sure teachers know how to find felicitous answers in any landscape. This doesn’t mean another seminar on how to use the latest subscribtion database. Teachers are as likely to pay attention to the intricacies set out for them as students are. Helping schools be centers of research means helping teachers develop the habits of practice that help them to make informed and efficient decisions within an information landscape.

All of this should be driven by the same things we hope for students – inquiry and projects worth completing.

Schools working to become learning organizations are asking questions. Their teachers have ideas and questions as to what need be done to improve the teaching and learning of the space, and they are asked to do generative work that moves practices forward.

Teachers as researchers in the now are much more likely to be better teachers of researchers at the same time.

Presented with the staid practices of notecard-based research or any derivatives thereof, students are likely to notice (and rightly so) that they’re being presented with strategies that ask them to devolve what are likely highly complex methods for tracking down information.

Instead, we must realize we are beyond being beholden to what can be found from a single source. Hypertextual sources mean students are able to track from one source to another to another ad infinitum. Anyone who’s jumped down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia knows this to be true.

The “how” and “what” question is ever more important.

In helping students to be researchers, teachers must pose and invite inquiry around some key questions:

What information is relevant to what I want to know?
What information is irrelevant to what I want to know?
How will I know the difference?
What kinds of places might hold interesting knowledge about my questions?
Whom might I want to access to better understand my interests?

Some key components about these questions should jump out immediately. In a super-informed space, it isn’t only about what information can be found, it is important to consider which information is both relevant as well as interesting. When we were counting on the five books from the library, we needn’t discern between what is interesting and what wasn’t. It was a seller’s market and we took notes on every mundane fact we could find to be able to reach our page requirement.

Contemporary researchers are flush with relevant and irrelevant as well as interesting and uninteresting information. Teaching to make the distinction is key.

Books also held us to their author’s page-contained views on a topic or a journalist’s one-off article on an event. Contemporary researchers have access to people as well as ideas. In asking whom they might want to contact, students are more likely to consider how they might leverage social technologies to communicate with sources in real time. From email to twitter, students can publish a report Friday that includes information from an interview Wednesday.

Research today must ask better questions with respect to the “how” of the questions we’re asking. It must also allow teachers to practice the kinds of information-gathering and synthesis they’re asking of students. Such an ecosystem is one driven not only to ask complex questions, but to craft complex answers as well.

84/365 Collaboration Requires (formal) Space

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.

2/365 Some Ideas Worth Building a School Around

A few forevers ago, a post on P2PU’s Researchers’ Homestead flashed across my screen, I pulled down its attached document and saved it in a folder literally called “ETC” full of PDFs I save for someday.

I got around to it yesterday, and I have to say this chapter from Collaborative Learning, Reasoning, & Technology started to move some furniture in my head. The chapter, “Fostering Knowledge-Creating Communities” by Katerine Bielaczyc and Allan Collins threw around some ideas with which I’m familiar with such as “communities of practice.”

Newly interesting (and responsible for the aforementioned mental furniture shuffling) were Bielaczyc and Collins’ seven “characteristics of knowledge-creating communities.” Coming from a school built around core values that were embodied in most all choices – curricular and not – made regarding learning, I’ve been on the lookout for other core values that strike me as meaty enough to feed a school’s mission. These seven might fit the bill:

  1. Sharing Ideas – “Knowledge sharing leads to knowledge creation, because invention involves bringing together different ideas into a coherent new idea.”
  2. Multiple Perspectives – “Rather than separating different ideas, it is critical to solicit different ideas within the community, so that all may be considered in devising new solutions.”
  3. Experimentation
  4. Specialization
  5. Cognitive Conflict and Discussions – “Therefore, it is important that people discuss and argue about ideas without rancor or blame. Arguments must be resolved by logic and evidence, rather than by authority. Ideas are sought from many different sources, particularly ideas that challenge prevailing wisdom.”
  6. Reflection
  7. Synthesis – “When a community is faced with a problem, the solution does not usually come from a single source. Rather it is cobbled together from past ideas and ways of doing things, from different people’s suggestions, from the artifacts and technologies in place, and from ideas and ways of doing things that exist in other communities.”

I’m still working my way through the piece, but can see how these seven could drive structural and curricular decisions within a learning organization. I see how they could help prepare students to be participatory citizens.