3/365 Let’s Have Students Perform without Nets

When I lived in Philadelphia, I became enamoured with story slams. Produced by First Person Arts, the monthly slams had three rules for those who signed up to participate:

  1. Keep your story to five minutes.
  2. Tell your story in the first person.
  3. No notes.

Around the same time, I discovered the Moth podcast featuring the Moth Theater’s best stories from their storytelling shows.

A similar rule featured in the Moth podcast – stories were told live and without notes. As someone who’s been performing in improvised theater for about 15 years, this rule never really struck me as exceptional.

As a classroom teacher who worked to help students scaffold their knowledge and prepare for presentations, it gives pause.

Today, I finished reading the article I mentioned in yesterday’s post. As the writers were describing some of the mechanisms deployed by teachers to foster knowledge-creating communities, the issue of notes appeared again.

No Notes Permitted

When students did research on a topic, such as Buddhism, they were not pennitted to use notes from their research when they were writing their entries in the Knowledge Forum database. This was designed to prevent students from copying out what they found in books into the database. Students had to synthesize their own understanding of the topic they were writing about and characterize in their own words what they bad learned. They were encouraged by the scaffolds in the system and by the teachers to develop their own theories and questions, and to pursue them through reading and discussions with other students and adults. The emphasis was on students creating their own understanding and expressing it in the tentative voice of a learner rather than repeating the words of an author.

Mostly, I noticed this section because it seemed strange to me and so I asked myself why.
Notetaking is a skill I’ve heard discussed ad nausseum in faculty meetings and various “So you wanna be a teacher” books. Pulling out key information, organizing it for easy retreival, and stowing it away in a tidy notebook are steps with which I’m intimately familiar as both a student and a teacher.

This suggestion, though, highlighted a key step that has been missing for me in both of those roles – leaving the notes behind. Much like improv or storytelling, presenting new knowledge and forming it into something useful loses its luster if you haven’t owned the ideas in real and personal ways. A student still reliant on the notes she’s taken isn’t yet the owner of this new knowledge. She’s leasing it.

Building an activity where students have to synthesize and apply their knew knowledge without access to or use of notes based on the old knowledge pushes them a little farther out on an intellectual limb. It will be scary, but I’d wager the learning will be deeper.
If you’d like to see my highlighted copy of the article, you can download it here (PDF).

Things I Know 363 of 365: ‘And over there, let’s build a lyceum’

I’ve just added another book to the to-read pile. Gary just suggested Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music by Tricia Tunstall. It came with this recommendation:

El Sistema is SO heavy on a million different levels. There are a bazillion lessons to take from it, not the least of which is that the compromises we make reflexively in the name of pragmatism, incrementalism or budget shortfalls are not only wrong, but unnecessary.

When Gingrich talks about learning the dignity of work, the first thing educators should ask is, “does their schoolwork have dignity?” Then we should look at efforts like El Sistema where a work ethic is developed while doing something complex, meaningful, beautiful and spiritually uplifting.

Don’t be thrown off by the prominence of Dudamel in the title. This book is about education, culture, children and transformation.

My interest is effectively piqued.

It’s also got me thinking of a course I’d like to see in every school in the country. For a working title, let’s call it Synthesis. The goal would be to give student the space and resources to develop deep understandings of the connections between the ideas they’re encountering in whatever other courses in which they’re enrolled.

It comes from frequent frustration last semester of not having a space to converse with other students on how the ideas from my different courses were melting together in my brain. I could write about it online and in papers for my professors’ eyes only, but I wanted discussion and, well, synthesis.

Each week of the course would require students to prepare a brief on their learning across courses in the previous week. The question guiding the brief: How did your classes intersect this week? From there, discussions would ensue with students introducing the nascent connections in their minds and asking for help from their peers in the massaging and upkeep of those connections.

Throughout the course, larger creations would also be asked for, wherein students pulled an over-arching idea that made up a decent amount of the connective tissue of his learning and presented the idea as he understood it to the rest of the class. Think of it as Aristotle’s Lyceum, but for credit.

Imagine the power in asking students to find and tease out connections between algebra, United States history, and biology. Imagine what listening to these discussions could do to inform teachers’ practice.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to imagine the structure and planning that would need to go into constructing such a shift of mind around thinking of learning as a continuous and connected act.