Month: September 2011

Things I Know 223 of 365: Everybody has an agenda

Education isn’t part of my agenda. It is my agenda.

– Kenny Guinn

In 1980, Hugh Mehan published a study of children participating in “circle time” in their classroom. Throughout the study, Mehan placed a wireless microphone on the back of students for one hour each morning to document their interactions.

Up to that point, Mehan wrote, classroom community had been studied from the teacher’s perspective. He wanted to se what was going on with everyone else.

Students like teacher, have objectives that they would like to meet during the course of a given classroom event, a school day, a school year. And like teachers, students employ others and their surroundings as contexts for achieving these objectives. The simultaneous presence of students’ and teachers’ agendas suggests that the classroom be viewed as a social activity in which teachers and students mutually influence each other and collaboratively assemble its social order.

In his published findings, Mehan reported interactions between a triad of girls who were talking to one another during circle time while the teacher was attempting to divvy up classroom jobs.

It all happened simultaneously.

Hair combing, securing snacks, discussing play dynamics, they all happened at the same time.

Mehan writes, “All this indicates an ability to monitor and participate in several activities simultaneously, a skill that cognitive scientists have called ‘parallel processing.’”

By teachers in any ordinary classroom, the actions of Carolyn, Leola and Ysidro would be taken as insubordinate. Not telling-the-teacher-off insubordinate, but certainly working-against-the-teacher’s-agenda insubordinate.

They don’t have to be.

Mehan’s point, and the deeper implication of the study is when teachers see “off-task” behavior, it doesn’t necessarily mean the students are off-task. They are on the tasks they deem important. And Mehan claims also on-task with the items on the teacher’s agenda.

This isn’t an argument that children should be allowed to do whatever they want or that their agendas should trump any agenda set forth by the teacher. There’s literature about that, sure, but this isn’t about that.

Instead, it’s about realizing everyone in the classroom has an agenda, and to each individual that agenda is personal and important.

Mehan writes the study’s findings shed light on the fact “that participants to interaction, including socializing interaction, mutually influence each other.”

Yes.

And.

The study serves as a reminder that teachers face the task (perhaps their first agenda item) of persuading each student in a class that the teacher’s agenda is worthy of student attention and perhaps even adoption.

It’s a tough sell all around.

Citation:

Hugh Mehan, “The Competent Student,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Vol. 11 (1980), 131-152.

Things I Know 222 of 365: I want to build stuff

Teachers would have to be knowledgeable about experience, academic knowledge, and learning, knowing these territories as well as mountain guides knew theirs.

– David K. Cohen

I haven’t built anything in a while.

My friend Vanessa is in the Technology in Education program here. Each of her classes is shaped around a semester-long project in which she and her classmates work together to complete a project in which they build an education object for use or consumption in the bigger world.

My semester is shaping up to be consumptive.

I’ve read a couple hundred pages of scholarly work in the last few weeks and written a few briefs analyzing and reacting to what I’ve read. My brain is exploding with ideas, questions and intense moments of “Oo, I want to try that right now!” As I said in my last post, it’s pushed me to put all this thinking down on the record for when I’m able to put it into practice – a sort of daily diary or my reading diet.

Vanessa’s is shaping up to be iterative.

She’s pitched projects, formed groups and started building wireframes of the project she’s heading up. She’s working on leveraging funding for the pieces of the project that exist outside her wheelhouse and finding a home for it in the wide world when all’s said and done.

I just finished reading “Teaching Practice: Plus Que Ca Change…” by David Cohen from Contributing to Educational Change: Perspectives on Research and Practice. Cohen examines Deweyian educational reforms and why they appear to have stalled or gone sour since the 1950s. In his analysis, Cohen writes, “…teachers must take on a large agenda: helping students abandon the safety of rote learning, instruct them in framing and teasing hypotheses, and build a climate of tolerance for others’ ideas and a curiosity about unusual answers, among other things.”

Various pieces of Cohen’s list of necessities for “adventurous teaching” are in place, but I wonder where the building and teasing of hypotheses will come in.

Vanessa’s cohort is building real things. They’ll be creating, failing, taking apart and re-building all semester.

I’m curious as to how much of that I’ll be doing outside of the sterile protection of case studies.
Ideally we’d be building the institutions we all had in mind when we applied in the same way a student would learn math and design by building structures with authentic purposes.

At heart, I realize the difference between Vanessa’s program and my own. If any of the groups in her classes fails, it is to the detriment of their portfolios. If those in my cohort were to fail at any type of authentic adventurous learning, the impact would extend beyond our own personal failures.

Still, we got in the door. And, for almost a decade, I’ve been trusted to experiment and iterate responsibly with my classroom as a playground without harming the students in my charge.

Let us build schools or systems of professional development. Start by letting us ask the questions that lead to the problems. Then, guide us in forming both the structures and understandings surrounding the solutions of those problems.

Some of this comes from the stagnation I feel in not creating unit plans or working to help run a school this semester.

All of it helps me to understand how it feels for students of any level when we ask them to put down what is real in their world’s and trust us when we promise that what we ask them to do will be important in the future.

Things I Know 221 of 365: My brain’s all stormy

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.
– JoHann Wolfgang von Goethe

Up until about four weeks ago, I was keeping a sticky note on my laptop with a running list of post topics I wanted to tackle in this yearlong endeavor to document what I know as I know it now.
About two weeks ago, that list started another life in Evernote as I attempted to design a workflow that would sync across my devices.
A few stray thoughts started piling up in the journal I’ve been keeping for the last few years. Crossing a few pages, they’re tangential verbal doodles on this or that topic about which I’d like to firm up my thinking in some sort of public space.
Early last week, I found myself making a bulleted list of four ideas for TIK on a paper towel in a friend’s kitchen.
Yesterday, I wrote an idea on the back of a receipt.
Today, across three chapters or journal articles I’m reading for classes, I’ve jotted down half a dozen post ideas.
This is all to say, my brain is stormy.
It’s frustrating and wonderful.
A few minutes ago, one of my SLA students who’s now in her freshman year of college asked me if it was weird to be a student instead of a teacher.
I told her not really.
Over the last eight years in the classroom, I worked hard to maintain a reflective practice and to build a habit of learning and information grazing that would continue to push me to think about what it was I thought about teaching and learning and how they relate to education.
This space, this next nine months of my life are going to be a whole other kind of heffalump.
What was a piece of my day sandwiched between unit design and grading has become that which consumes my day.
I am a consumer of information on a scale at which life would not allow over the last few years. There wasn’t space in either my brain or my day to eat as many ideas as I have over the last 48 hours.
While I love it, I’m also realizing the requirements of shift this new new environ of intellect brings about.
As the head of a classroom, the ideas with which I was playing spread out over days or weeks. Expounding on project design for my students meant I was able to speak to it over the entirety of the process. “Here’s my idea,” I could say and follow it up with, “here’s the plan,” then, “here’s how it’s going,” and finally, “here’s what happened and what I would do differently.”
For all of the demands inside and outside of the classroom, I was able to ruminate on ideas to a different extent.
Starting now, I need to switch gears.
The ideas are coming at me at light speed now. If I’m not diligent at marking them and my thoughts on them down as they arise, I’ll miss them.
Not yet in this archiving of my mental stance on ideas has it been so key to keep track of what I know (or what I think I know).
Time to cull the paper towels, receipts, Evernotes, journal entries and the like. I’m sitting at the onset of a perfect storm. It would be a shame not to get pictures for later.

Things I Know 220 of 365: There’s history here

20110906-105626.jpg

My first trip to Philadelphia to interview at SLA, I arrived a day before the interview. I wanted to walk around a bit and get to know the city that might be my home.
Walking around without yet having my bearings, I turned a corner and there was Independence Hall. Right there.
My first inclination was to turn to the strangers walking down the street next to me and shout, “Do you know what that is? Do you know what happened there? And they just left it out in the open for everyone to see. That building is where we took some of our first steps to being what we are!”
A moment’s glance revealed that these folks were more concerned with their current conversation (which I assumed to be ahistorical) than they were with recognizing the past Winthrop which their presents were being presented.
I get that same feeling, still, when I visit home in Springfield and am confronted with all things Lincoln.
However imperfect, these places hold my attention as fixed moments in time when the impossible was made possible.
I hadn’t had such a moment hear in Cambridge.
Even sitting in Harvard Yard last week, watching tours of prospective students on tiptoe rubbing the boots of John Harvard’s statue, it didn’t occur to me.
I was in the middle of moving and course shopping and figuring out where to eat.
My present was cluttered.
This morning, it is dark, cloudy and drizzling in Cambridge.
The high temperature is not expected to head north of 65 degrees.
I decided to walk to campus. The walk is almost exactly the same distance I walked each day from my house to SLA.
As I rounded Memorial Hall, among the throngs of other students making their ways to class, the bell of Memorial Church sounded the hour.
I stopped.
I stopped to be in and of a moment.
No matter the work being done here now, no matter the imperfections of the system, I am of this place now.
However tacitly, I am connected to its thread of history.
Christian advised me to keep the “wide eyes” as long as I can.
I think I’ll do that.

Things I Know 219 of 365: A good start is asking what we’re orchestrating class to do

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

– Chris Bangle

Wednesday, we had out first class meeting of Professor Elmore’s A-341 Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement.

Much of the class was directed toward establishing class norms and getting a general sense of whom we were learning with. While I loved it (we were moving around, meeting one another, having purposeful conversations and reporting out), it was one question that stuck with me as the defining moment of the class.

In describing what would drive our teacher observations for the class, Elmore asked, “If you were a student in this classroom and you did what the teacher asked you to do, what would you know how to do?”

The simplicity of the question reminded me of why I’d been drawn to apply to the course during shopping.

What’s more, Elmore wasn’t asking us to make judgements about the legitimacy of any of what we observed. He was asking us to observe.

Admittedly, this will be difficult for me. I’d imagine it will be difficult for everyone in the class.

I like the idea. I like the shift in focus from what the teacher is doing to the student experience.

As Elmore pointed out, the process starts not from a standpoint of “Here’s what should be going on here!” but one of “What’s going on here?” And, it starts from moving to the perspective of the student.

Starting out in the classroom, I asked myself, “Would I want to do the assignment I’ve just created?” It was a simplistic question.

Moving forward, I’d collected student responses to hundreds of assignments and had a better idea of the varying perspectives in my classroom. As a result, I felt I was designing assignments more likely to pique my students interest.

It wasn’t until moving to SLA and working with the unit planning template of Wiggins and McTigh’s Understanding by Design that I was asked to unpack where I wanted my students to head in what they were able to know, do and understand as a result of their time in the classroom.

Sparks of Elmore’s question could be seen in my review of student work, assessing how closely the students had come to reaching my goals for the unit.

This isn’t quite the essence of the question.

The question asks for a more complex and paradoxically more simplified observation.

When designing the flow of a given class period, what knowledge or abilities was I helping my students to have at that class’s end?

I wonder how classes would change if all teachers stepped into their classrooms tomorrow, mindful of that question.

Moving forward with the course, I’m curious to see and hear the variety of responses my classmates and I have to that question as we observe the same classes.

Things I Know 218 of 365: ‘College- and career-ready’ is backwards thinking

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

– Carl Sagan

I mentioned a few days ago that I took issue with a couple of the questions asked at our new-student orientation. Not took issue in the torches and pitchforks, storm the castle, sense, but issue just the same.

One of the facts shared with us was the percent of students in the new class who are the first in their families to earn a bachelor’s degree (16%).

To set that in perspective, we were then told that only 27.2% of people in the United States of have a bachelor’s degree. To this, there was an audible “hmmmm.”

When we started discussing things at my table, I was interested in how readily we accepted the notion that a bachelor’s was to be expected, the mark of success or making it or acceptance.

I wondered who else in the tent wondered at the idea that what was likely expected for somewhere near 84% of us was out of reach, had slipped through the fingers or was uninteresting to 72.8% of those in the country.

It started me thinking on where I stand regarding college education.

I read Will’s post to his kids his acceptance of their choices later in life if they choose not to go to college, and I remember thinking how much care his words contained.

It didn’t get me going as to whether or not I would write a similar post if I had kids.

But of course I have had kids. For only 180-days at a time, but they were in my charge just the same.

And it’s interesting how what I wanted for that first class at Sarasota Middle shifted by the time I saw my last classes at SLA.

I hadn’t known enough kids when I started teaching to realize that college wasn’t the path for everyone.

I only knew me and knew that it had always been my path.

With that limited understanding, I applied my logic to my students through my teaching practice. I taught them as though the preparation of school could and should only be geared toward preparing students for college.

In doing so, I underserved and under appreciated those students who were learning and growing into remarkable adults, but who weren’t on a trajectory that would lead them to a bachelor’s degree.

Somehow, they and I were failing. I couldn’t see the flaw in my logic because I didn’t know what I was doing.

By the time I was helping to counsel my last group of kids at SLA, I knew better (though not nearly completely) how to see my students and listen to understand where they were interested in heading.

Yes, the vast majority were on their way to 4-year colleges, and many of them will secure degrees beyond whatever paper I finally settle with as a the terminus for my education.

For those who needed something different, whose paths called for what was other than dorm living, ENG 101 and lecture hall classes, I’d started hearing them and realizing they were heading to lives by way of roads I’d never seen.

That was tough.

Still is.

Yes, I know the financial impact a college degree can have on a person’s lifelong earning potential.

I’ve also seen the emotional and financial impact a degree earned out of obligation and not desire can have on a person’s lifelong living potential.

Much attention is being paid as of late to whether or not our students are college and career ready by the time they graduate from high school.

It seems to me, that perhaps we should be paying attention to making more and more diverse colleges and careers so that they have at least a possible shot of being student ready.

Things I Know 217 of 365: Textbooks are killing me

A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

– Edith Hamilton

It’s been a while since I’ve bought a textbook.

For the online master’s, the textbooks were part of my scholarship. They showed up at my door, pre-paid and ordered for me.

All publications of Person or one of its imprints, the texts amounted to free books to gather dust on my nightstand as they were remarkably outdated when compared to the research I could find and access online.

This semester has turned that model on its head.

In an attempt to savvy it up, I tried to find as many workarounds as possible.

I made my way to the COOP, Harvard’s central student bookstore (a B&N-owned property) to see how deeply into my pockets I’d be reaching to study this semester.

With only three of my courses confirmed, the tab came in over $200, and I noted the likely fourth class called for 6 more texts. Altogether, books were about $300. That was minus the recommended texts for my stats class in which the professor advised us he’d be supplying us with all the handouts we could need. Had I acquired the recommended, we’re looking at a total of approximately $400.

But the fun doesn’t stop there.

Three of the four courses (stats is the winner, again) also require course packs of journal articles and selected chapters for the semester. Those three totaled $200.

If I’d purchased all the texts, my outlay for reading materials would have been around $600 for the semester.

I should stop here and note some things:

  1. I realize students in other disciplines are spending much more on many more texts.
  2. I appreciate and accept the need for reading materials for class. I’m not advocating a text-free approach to classes.
  3. I get that this is the way things are done, and thereby, part and parcel of higher education.

Since collecting all of these texts, I’ve been thinking of how we might shape a new model of for texts that might lower the materials cost of higher education and thereby make it more accessible who find it cost prohibitive.

Certainly, I realize tuition far out-paces course materials as an item on students’ higher ed budgets.

Still, every bit helps.

Some steps I took:

  • I downloaded Amazon’s student app and used it in the COOP to scan course texts for their Amazon.com partners. Where the Amazon texts were less expensive, I added them to my cart. (This was the case in all but two instances.)
  • When I got home, I compared the items in my Amazon cart with used versions available through amazon. Whenever possible, I chose the used version.
  • I took advantage of amazon’s offer of 6 months of free Amazon Prime membership for students. This secures free 2-day shipping and other as of yet unknown “deals.” (When selecting used texts, I only purchased those qualifying for Amazon Prime.)
  • When it was possible, I purchased the Kindle version of texts. I’ll be reading them on my iPad, but I’d take advantage of the new Kindle Cloud feature if I didn’t have a Kindle or iPad.
  • I opted against texts that were recommended but not required (with the exception of the APA style guide).

As a result, my possible costs of $600 ended up at around $450. That’s a chunk of rent or more than a month’s worth of groceries.

Still, though, the course packs linger as a confounding problem. The readings are required and weeding through each course’s syllabus to find out which texts are in the course pack/available online would be a tremendous time suck. This is not to mention the fact that packs are purchased in all-or-nothing style.

I know the answer lies somewhere in movements like the Flat World Knowledge project and other open-source options, but they’re not quite there.

Teachers and professors know what they want their students reading, and I’d imagine the course packs are a result of culling the available scholarship for specific texts. As such, any project attempting to replace the usual way of doing things is going to struggle to reach critical mass until it can offer all or nearly all of what’s available to those with appropriately-sized budgets.

So, there’s the conundrum with which I’m dealing.

It seems to me there’s a better way, that the tools and channels already exist to cut this as a burden to students.

Someone have this million-dollar idea.

Things I Know 216 of 365: Some rituals I’m ok leaving in the past

Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.

– Ken Kesey

I love rituals.

Big fan.

Huge.

Today I witnessed one I hadn’t expected or had possibly even forgotten – moving in.

This wasn’t just any moving in, this was moving in for an entire city.

By design or by fate, I’m willing to wager the bulk of Boston’s collegiate population moved in to their new places today.

Coming from out of town, hopping to a new place from across town or returning home after a summer of frolicking, the emigration was everywhere.

For a little over a week, I’ve been without a home.

Not unlike many of my classmates or what appeared to be much of the Boston metro area, I was at the mercy of the Sept. 1 start to my lease when the summer’s subletters moved out and we got to move in.

Since departing my house in Philadelphia at the end of June, I’ve been living out of two suitcases. I’ve couch hopped from Philly to Springfield, IL to Los Angeles to Denver to Brookline, MA.

And, I’m done with it.

When the apartment I’d arranged before leaving the East Coast fell through when I was in California, I took to Craigslist and selected a place I’d never seen and roommates I’d never met (save for one telephone call).

Many of the moments from the next 9 months will be happy and gentle reminders of my studenthood, chances to glimpse back at experiences I haven’t focused on for a decade.

This, this moving in, couch hopping, roommate navigating, this is a piece of college life I have not missed and could have done without.

Over dinner tonight, my friend Vanessa summed it up, “I’m 30, and this is where I am.”

She’s also left her “adult” life for grad school.

I added to her statement, “And, I’ve chosen this.”

It’s late, and I’ve been helping folks move all day.

Tomorrow, I’ll be refreshed and once again excited about the adventure I’m on.

For now, I’m going to revel in this exhaustion and rawness of emotion that only moving can elicit.

Things I Know 215 of 365: I did some (course) shopping

We used to build civilizations.  Now we build shopping malls.

– Bill Bryson

Rather than jumping directly into registration, HGSE does something called course shopping in the days leading up to enrollment.

Each professor teaching a course in the fall hosts a 40-minute introductory session of the course in which syllabi are handed out and general questions are answered.

Though I was fairly certain I knew which courses I’d be taking this semester, course shopping was an invaluable experience.

For one, it eliminated the feeling of walking blindly into the whole process. One of the questions I asked of exiting students last semester during the open house was about the pedagogy of the professors on the whole.

I was told then (and rightly so) that pedagogical approaches varied as professors varied and that I would get a better idea from course shopping.

It’s quite true.

Initially, I thought this interest in pedagogy came from my identification as a teacher. I’m starting to see it comes from a different place. My questions and concerns around pedagogy rest in my needs as a student.

I wanted to know how my professors would be teaching and what they believed about classroom practice not because I was measuring them up as fellow teachers, but because I will be learning from them and wanted assurances of how they would see and treat me as a student.

This marks not only a shift in identity, but a better understanding of the agency which I am afforded as a graduate student.

I’d love to see course shopping in middle and high school classrooms. I’m curious as to how it would shift teaching practice if teachers were teaching students who chose to be in their classrooms and if students were in seats they’d chosen for themselves.

I’d venture to guess the naked emperors in the profession would be swiftly identified.

At the end of the day, I wanted to enroll in every class I shopped. To head off being overwhelmed by decisions, I stopped shopping once I’d built a schedule that was balanced and could meet my needs. I’ve got a course that will push me in uncomfortable intellectual places, a course that will wake up my math brain, a course that will invite deep debate and a course that will ask me to invest in new habits of mind.

In chronological order, my schedule will be:

Monday 4-7: A-341 Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement w/ Professor Richard Elmore

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-1: S-012 Empirical Methods: Introduction to Statistics for Research w/ Professor Terry Tivnan

Tuesday 4-7: A-326 School Reform: Curricular and Instructional Leadership w/ Professor Katherine Merseth

Wednesday 2-4 (w/ weekly 90-min. sections): A-107 The Ecology of Education: Culture, Communities and Change in Schools w/ Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

And, it should go without saying, any times not listed above will be spent in a corner, reading for those courses.