Month: October 2011

Things I Know 242 of 365: Now is a teachable moment

The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic,and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.

– Gene Sharp

My brain has been playing the “What if…” game with #occupywallstreet since I learned about the movement as things were getting underway.

It isn’t a game of “What if the movement succeeds?” or “What if things get out of hand and go terribly wrong?”

It has been a game of “What if I were teaching right now?”

When I was in high school, Mrs. Henning-Buhr taught a class called Literature of the 60s and 70s. It was amazing.

In order to understand the texts of the time, we first had to learn the history of the time – a history we didn’t know existed as our American history class barely made it past WWII.

That semester was when I learned about The Chicago 8, Kent State, the 1968 Democratic Convention, Vietnam, and so much more

Though I know she had them, I don’t remember Mrs. Henning-Buhr ever pushing her views of the events on us one way or the other.

She gave us the space to examine the history and draw our own conclusions. Some of the richest debates of my high school career happened in that class as I listened to the evangelical Christians and the stoners argue what was “right” after both groups read the same texts.

I don’t want to be in the classroom right now in order to influence kids’ thinking one way or another about what’s going on in urban centers all over the country.

I want to be in the classroom right now to encourage kids to think one way or another.

In between sleeping and being a student, I’ve been clipping artifacts I’d use if I were designing a unit around #occupywallstreet.

First, I’d show this e-mail that showed up in my inbox yesterday declaring Netflix’s decision to stay, well, Netflix. We’d talk about it’s purpose and brainstorm whatever questions we could around what process led to that e-mail.

Then, we’d read this piece from the New York Daily News reporting FOX’s resurrection of Family Guy years after the show had been canceled. Our questions about the process would take their place alongside our questions about netflix.

Next, we’d read this piece by Cord Jefferson over at GOOD who took the time to sample and analyze the trends present at the #occupywallst tumblr. Again, questions.

Next, we’d take a look at John Titlow’s piece on ReadWriteWeb about Google handing oner a Wikileaks volunteer’s gmail data sans search warrant. If you’re not seeing the trend here, you’re not paying attention. More questions would line the walls.

Finally, we’d take a look at this note my friend David posted to his Facebook wall as an open letter to the Wall Street occupants. Again with the questions.

From there, we would devise a plan for finding answers to our questions. As more resources were uncovered, we’d tag, share or tweet them. Then again, maybe we’d come up with something better. As we amassed information in answer to our questions, we’d realize the need for someplace to put it all – a place to share the learning.

Every other day or so, we’d take a look at our answers, pause and attempt to draw some sort of connection between everything we’d found and begin to devise hypotheses of cause and effect. We’d write, record and talk – sharing everything and inviting comments from the world.

We would make meaning of history as it happened around us.

Not for the politics of it, but for the history, it is incumbent upon us to teach what is happening.

If our students join in, we must make certain they know why.

If they rally against, we must help them find their reasons.

If they propose a better way, we must help them inform their understanding.

#occupythought

Things I Know 241 of 365: We’ve been talking about this for a while

There is no book I know of that shows so well what a free and humane education can be like, nor is there a more eloquent description of its philosophy.

– Herbert Kohl on The Lives of Children

For A-107 this week, we read a few chapters from George Dennison’s The Lives of Children. Dennison writes about the pedagogy and practice of The First Street School. I’ve read the book before as part of my teacher preparation, but haven’t visited it since then.

I’m glad I did.

It reminded me how beautiful the relationships between caring adults attending to the needs of children caring teachers attending to the needs and personhoods of students can be.

It also left me a bit saddened.

Dennison was writing 50 years ago about what schools can be and how we can most humanely treat children. He was writing half a century ago and still we have stories of school-regulated caste systems based on test performance. And so, I thought it important to type up and stow away some of the bits and pieces of Dennison that resonated most with me as I read. I’ll archive them in the cloud and pull them out when I need to be reminded of what we can do and how we can care for kids.

The closer one comes to the faces of life, the less exemplary they seem, but the more human and the richer. (p. 5)

Learning, in its essentials, is not a distinct and separate process. It is a function of growth. (p. 5)

We might cease thinking of school as a place, and learn to believe that is is basically relationships: between children and adults, adults and adults, children and other children. (p. 7)

We did not give report cards. We knew each child, knew his capacities and his problems, and the vagaries of his growth. This knowledge could not be recorded on little cards. The parents found – again – that they approved of this. It diminished the blind anxieties of life, for grades ha never meant much to them anyway except some dim sense of problem, or some dim sense reassurance that things were all right. (p. 8)

They had discovered each other – and had discovered themselves – in more richly human terms. (p. 11)

Motivated, of course, means eager, alive, curious, responsive, trusting, persistent; and its not as good a word as any of these. (p. 13)

Rousseau: The most useful rule of education is this: do not save time, but lost it. (p. 13)

Now what is so precious about a curriculum (which no one assimilates anyway), or a schedule of classes (which piles boredom upon failure and failure upon boredom) that these things should supersede the actual needs of the child? (p. 17)

…by accepting her needs precisely as needs, we diminished them; in supporting her powers, in all their uniqueness, we allowed them to grow. (p. 18)

But let me replace the word “freedom” with more specific terms: 1) we trusted that some true organic bond existed between the wishes of the children and their actual needs, and 2) we acceded to their wishes (though certainly not to all of them), and thus encouraged their childish desiring to take on the qualities of decision-making. (p. 21)

We read of statistics and percentages, and are told that learning is the result of teaching, which it never is and never was. We hear of new trends in curriculum and in the training of teachers, and of developments in programmed instruction – of everything, in short, but the one true object of all this activity: the children themselves. (p. 33)

School was not a parenthesis inserted within life, but was actually an intensified part of life. (p. 33)

Why is it, then that so many children fail? Let me put it bluntly: it is because our system of public education is a horrendous, life-destroying mess. (p. 74)

It can be stated axiomatically that the schoolchild’s chief expense of energy is self-defense against the environment. When this culminates in impairment of growth – and it almost always does – it is quite hopeless to reverse at the trend by teaching phonics instead of Look-Say. The environment itself must be changed. (p. 80)

Would growth be possible – indeed, would there be a world at all – if the intake of the young were restricted to those things deliberately offered them by adults? (p. 83)

We cannot raise children to be free men by treating them like little robots; we cannot produce adult democrats by putting children in lock step and placing all decisions in the hands of authorities (p. 88)

I know that in the course of our lessons I committed errors and God knows how many omissions, yet this physical base was so important and so reliable that it provided all kinds of leeway. It took the sting (though not the seriousness) out of my rebukes, it expressed a concern I could not have put into words, it gave a reality and continuity to sessions which were sometimes of the most ephemeral content. If one single formula were capable of curing the ills of our present methods of education, it would be this physical formula: bring the bodies back. (p. 169)

Dennison, G. (1999) The lives of children: The story of the First Street School. New York, NY: Boynton/Cook

Things I Know 240 of 365: I wrote with the world

The world and I wrote a paper Friday.

By midnight tonight, I’m to submit my Theory of Learning for A-341 Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement. I’d been resisting the writing of the paper. After railing against the silver-bullet approach to education, sitting down to distill my beliefs into a single theory lived in a hypocritical room of my brain.

The temptation was strong to submit a Word doc containing only a link to this space, but that steps outside the bounds of the assignment requirements.

Two weeks ago, I asked 5 people to take a look at the first few pages of a rough draft of the paper. I’d written it up in Google Docs and shared it out.

Friday, I needed to get down to business. I wasn’t going to face a long weekend with an assignment hanging over my head the entire time.

I sent out this tweet and started writing:

Before long, other folks from wherever had jumped into the doc and started lurking. A few left comments on my friends’ comments. My friends, either from the doc or via e-mail, responded to the comments.

I kept typing.

Dan Callahan, who’s about as fine a teacher and person as you’re likely to meet, retweeted:

Google Docs let me know as more people joined me in the doc.

I kept typing.

As I neared the end, this message popped up in the doc’s chat window:

On the other side of the world, a teacher I didn’t know was reading my thinking as I cobbled thoughts together. Even more, she was moved to interact. We talked about our experiences in modeling and eliciting passion from students and shared a bit about our backgrounds. I learned her name is Jo:

I told her the doc would remain live as long as Google let it be so and that the copy would be posted here. I offered to brainstorm with her and her teaching partner if they’d like – to continue connecting.

And then she left.

I kept typing.

The difference at that point was huge.

I’d been putting together a theory of learning based on the ideas that:

  • Students learn best when they are in an ethic of care.
  • Students learn best when they know something about what they are learning.
  • Students learn best when the learning situation has real stakes and is challenging.
  • Students learn best when the learning is playful.

I’d been professing all of this to complete an assignment that initially spoke only to the second tenet. I knew a little bit of where I spoke.

The rest, as a student, I created.

As soon as I invited my friends, those whose minds and passions inform my thinking, I chose to surround myself in an ethic of care. In the initial stages of the rough draft, my sister Rachel watched from Missouri as I typed in Somerville. She offered encouragement and asked prodding questions. What I was saying mattered to someone other than me.

Each time Bud or Ben or Debbie pushed back, my learning was more playful. Every comment in the spirit of “What about X?” was an intellectual chess move asking me to refine my process and play with my thinking more deeply.

As soon as Jo entered the chat and asked if she could use a piece of thinking that was being created as she typed, the stakes became real for me. What was otherwise to languish as another artifact of academia destined for the eyes of a professor and teaching assistant was transformed into a guide of practice that would, in some way, affect the learning of children half a world away.

Unless a teacher is completely out of touch with his students, an assignment is likely to connect to students’ previous learning and fulfill my second tenet.

The other three, though, they take work. I write this as a teacher and a student – that work makes all the difference.

Things I Know 239 of 365: My idea is good, and I like yours better

The focus of Improv leads to conversers being present, meaning they exist in the here and now. The acceptance in Improv leads to the speakers’ connection, meaning each becomes part of a co-creation team. The distance between the communicators is thereby no longer a gap to be closed. It becomes a connector, filling the space between bodies like a see-saw connects the two riders on either end. Each is dependent on the other for flow and movement. This synchronicity of focus and acceptance is what results in full body listening.

– Izzy Gesell

We sat in the breakout section of one of my courses yesterday. Once per week, small sets of students from the course sit with Teaching Fellows from the class to look into the readings and ideas of the week more completely than we’re able to in a larger lecture class. For an hour-and-a-half, we delve more deeply. Not quite a study group, the time still pushes my thinking.

Thus far, it’s been a way for me to better hear the plurality of views in the room.

Yesterday’s was the first of of the student-led sections. In pairs, we each have a week during which we’re responsible for leading 45 minutes of the conversation.

Yesterday’s leaders reminded me of one of the more difficult rules of improvisation, “My idea is good, and I like yours better.”

We each took three notecards.

On each card we wrote a quotation from or question inspired by the readings.

When everyone was ready, someone in the group started by stating their question and throwing the corresponding card into the center of the table (whether what was written on the card was relevant or not).

Whoever responded did so and threw one of their cards into the center of the table.

Conversation continued according to this system.

If there was a lull, someone would read a fresh question from the cards remaining in their hands.

If you ran out of cards, yours became a job of listening.

Often, people had selected quotations that could easily shift and be re-purposed to fit into the flow of the conversation.

Sometimes, though, the cards and what people wanted to say were out of sync. In these moments, folks were faced with a choice.

Enter, the rule of improv.

In grad school, like any other school (or any meeting of more than one person, really) conversations are often peppered with unrelated remarks. Though I’m as guilty as the next person of occasionally moving things to my point rather than appreciating and building off of others’. It’s a tough skill and not something completely in line with rugged individualism.

Yesterday’s process required us to make some choices. We were forced to evaluate which of our thoughts was worth sacrificing in exchange for access to the contribution – “My idea is good, and I like yours better.”

In an improv scene, two people enter a scene, often with only a single word as a suggestion, with the purpose of building of a narrative that looks effortless. In good improv, Person A will speak a line and Person B will edit whatever was about to come out of his mouth and speak to build on the idea of Person A.

In great improv, the whole process takes a fraction of the second and the audience has no idea.

It’s not a negating of a person’s idea, but a shifting of purpose. I could cling to my idea or I could work to build up another person’s equally valid proposition. If it’s about good ideas and the building of understanding, my plan can easily be abandoned so long as we’re building something.

And, if there’s a fire to my idea and what I’ve written on my cards is imbued with passion and inquiry – then I spend that card as is.

This is something we could do well to teach the children in our care, the adults at our sides and, most importantly ourselves.

Things I Know 238 of 365: Small schools’ve got moxy

Results showed that smaller, more personal learning environments and strong, caring bonds between students and adults can increase graduation rates dramatically.

– Bill Gates, Jr.

Growing up, I never thought of myself as attending a small school. We were country, sure, but the 50-some members of my graduating class and I were never cognizant of our small school status.

Though the Shadow Secretary of Education has lost patience with small schools, I’m still in this fight.

In the end of whatever the fight may be, it’s the small schools that will be around anyway.

Small schools are scrappy. Small schools are nimble. And, small schools see kids. In the interest of avoiding any claims I’m making a molly coddler’s case, we’ll ignore the idea of seeing kids as being key to strong and effective schools.

Let’s don our navy blazers with brass buttons and talk all business-like for a few moments.

Small businesses are scrappy. They run on lean budgets and are driven by market forces to find the niche demands of clients.

Nestled away in a side street here in Cambridge, is a shop the shape of a hallway that sells goods of India – fine textiles and curios among other things.

And they’ve been their for years, connected to and dependent on the other shops around them, offering something their peers cannot – filling a unique need.

Small schools do this too. Built around a magnet program, a unique pedagogy or a partnership with a local institution, small schools can build an infrastructure of school choice and specialization unmatched by lumbering industrial schools.

Small schools do not lumber.

They are nimble.

Howard Hughes’ infamous Spruce Goose flew only once and then at only 70’ for less than a mile. After that:

A full-time crew of 300 workers, all sworn to secrecy, maintained the plane in flying condition in a climate-controlled hangar. The crew was reduced to 50 workers in 1962, and then disbanded after Hughes’ death in 1976.

Such is the case of most industrial schools. Built in times of great conflict, many flew only once, if that, and then never as high as was hoped.

In each of the small public schools I’ve taught in, moves to adjust to the needs of both students and teachers were quick, exact and effective.

A student causing problems across classes was discussed among a teaching team, suggestions were made, and a plan was put in place. Rather than falling deeper and deeper into the chasm of neglect present in many industrial school, students were caught early and supports were put in place.

When school-wide reading strategies were the identified need, teachers read the same texts together, discussed what they found and began implementing – comparing results along the way. The resulting shared language around curriculum found its genesis in the examined texts, but was shaped by the school community to build a coded language of literacy owned by all faculty.

Busy meeting the needs of all wings and factions, industrial schools are constantly preparing for takeoff, let alone worrying about how they might turn, should the course be wrong once they’re aloft.

Small schools are imperfect. Resources are often at a scarcity. Faculty members often juggle several roles.

Still, their scrappiness, nimbleness and ability to more clearly see the children in their care make them better places for learning.

In an network of small public schools, proponents of school choice who often bemoan the lack of options would find the answers and educational affordances for which they are searching.

Let’s build those.

Things I Know 237 of 365: The DoE is circumventing democracy

We have to educate our way to a better economy.

– Sec. Arne Duncan

In the latest round of circumventing the United States Congress, the U.S. Department of Education rolled out a new competition Friday that mirrors the cock fight tactics of Race to the Top.

In competing for a portion of $185 million in funding, states will have to show their colleges’ teacher preparation programs graduate teachers whose students score well on state testing. They’ll also need to tighten up teacher licensing requirements and kill off poor performing teacher preparation programs.

The move is wholly undemocratic and circumvents the checks and balances meant to stabilize the country. The DOE’s anti-policy plays on the needs of states, colleges and universities to find alternative sources of revenue as we double dip into another recession.

The move is akin to educational bum fights.

States and institutions that might otherwise be thoughtful in their adoption of policy will have little choice but to make moves they would otherwise abhor or at least question.

More frustratingly, the competition supposes we have all agreed student scores on state standardized tests are to be the measure of a teacher’s effectiveness. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten made just such an argument in her response to the competition:

At the same time that the validity of using standardized tests as the ultimate measure of performance is being widely questioned, the U.S. Department of Education appears to be putting its foot on the accelerator by calling for yet another use for tests.

If this is to be the policy of the land, if this is to be the shape of the advent of completely nationalization of the K-12+ education system, then let it be more worthy of the country’s finest ideals.

Let there be debate.

Let it be fierce and thoughtful.

Let there be ideas from all sides presented to live or die on their merit.

Let it be the law of the land and the procedures of creating that law that governs our path.

To do otherwise and sidestep the system, to sidestep democracy, is to abdicate your right to complain or claim shock when those with whom you disagree choose the same path.

Things I Know 236 of 365: They haven’t built an app that can hold my math notes!

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

– John Louis von Neumann

The proper iPad app for taking notes in math doesn’t yet exist. I’ve been researching the available options for the last few months. I’ve tried Evernote and PaperDesk. I’ve used Notes and checked out NotesPlus. Still nothing does what I want it to.

For notes in every other class, for study group messages, annotating readings and finding ancillary sources, I’ve a great workflow. Evernote, GoodReader, Google Docs and Safari all get the job done quite nicely.

For math, though, I’m still stuck.

It occurred to me yesterday that the problem might lie in the fact that every app I’ve investigated thus far is imitating rather than innovating. Every one of them wants to be paper — plus a little something extra.

They all start from the paradigm of an actual pad of paper and ask, “What have people always wanted their notebooks and legal pads to do?” From there, each app works to add on. Maybe the additions create a watered down legal pad or maybe the iPad only looks like a notebook. Either way nothing yet strikes me as approaching the problem from a new way.

I saw this video yesterday and thought, “My iPad can’t do that.” I know I can install iMovie and import images, but the kind of free-form playing Vi Hart showcases in her video isn’t possible on my iPad. It should be, though, right?

I, along with any other math student working on an iPad, should have an infinite white board at our disposal with the ability to call up the most complex calculator possible and then copy and paste the order of computations onto the white board so we can annotate what we’ve done. Think an infinite Prezi with the ability to bookmark according to dates and key terms. I want to teraform a white board into a world of mathematics, map it out and then use my iPad as the window through which I visit and manipulate the world. Think of it as Sims meets Presi meets the best parts of Super Mario Bros. 2.

For now, I have a spiral-bound notebook for my math notes. Every other class and meeting is synced to the cloud and the notes and annotated readings from each can be emailed or linked out to friends, classmates and study group members. My math notes will live and die with my notebook — until someone builds something better. No, not better. Different.

Things I Know 235 of 365: Bank of America might be losing my business

The lower- to middle-income groups will be most affected due not only to the fee but the higher minimum balances required to avoid the fees.

– John Kottmeyer

Adjunct professor at Samford University’s Brock School of Business

I’ve been a Bank of America customer since 2003, but that might be changing. It’s not me Bank of America should worry about; it’s all of my options.

A few weeks ago, I signed up for mint.com as a way to manage my money while I’m here at school. Mint, along with its free iPhone app, helps me keep track of my spending and sends me alerts when it notices increased spending in a specific area or I com close to exceeding my budgeted amount.

As part of mint’s services, I was also given recommendations for banking and credit options that would save me money in the long-run compared to my current accounts.

Because BoA has branches or ATMs in almost any location I travel, I skipped the recommendation window and carried on with my budgeting.

Today, a change.org alert arrived in my inbox.

Seems my bank is going to start charging me a monthly fee for using my debit card. Admittedly, $5/month isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but the fee runs contrary to my principles and shows a lack of technological trend understanding on the part of the bank.

According to the BBC, BoA received $20 billion in the banking bailout as well as $18 billion in guarantees against bad assets. I don’t know the exact math, but I’m guessing my portion of that bailout more than covers my $5/mo. fees for the rest of my natural life.

This is to say nothing of the fact that charging new loophole fees in the face of federal regulations designed to stop banks from charging predatory fees is bad PR. Charging businesses for running credit/debit transactions as well as customers for using debit cards makes it easy to paint BoA as greedy, uncaring and unscrupulous. I don’t know that this is the case, but the new fee doesn’t make it difficult to connect the dots.

Ethics and PR aside, the fee has me worried that BoA has no eye on the future of transactions. In five years (as a generous estimate) my debit card won’t exist. My transactions, whether they take place in a physical or virtual space, will happen through my phone. My personal QR code or whatever comes after QR codes will be my method of payment. My wallet will be where I carry my license and maybe a business card. Companies like levelup and Starbucks are already setting the stage for the transition.

Creating a fee scheme around a card destined for extinction is shortsighted and a waste of corporate momentum.

In a pre-digital world, such a move made sense. I needed to travel to a physical space to shut down my account and then another physical space to open a new account. My bank can be virtual. BoA can lose my business without my ever having to talk to another human being. Of course, I will talk to human beings, namely my friends and family as I share why I made the change, how easy it was and how much I’m projected to save over the next three years.

For now, my money is staying put and my accounts are open.

I’ve added my name to the change.org petition and I’m hopeful the right people at BoA are checking their e-mail. If not, my new bank is only a few clicks away.

I’ll let you know.

Things I Know 234 of 365: Testing is killing the curriculum

Too many professors feel right at home talking at students instead of fostering an engaging and interactive learning environment. Students are expected to sit there, take notes, and find some way to stay awake. The suck-it-up-and-endure-a-mind-numbing-lecture mindset is so ingrained in college, schools even assign room names like “Lecture Hall 4”.

– Liz Dwyer

A few months ago, a friend raised an argument to me, “We’re not teaching to the test.”

It was the first time in a while I’d heard someone make this particular case.

The temptation – the overwhelming urge – was to shout, “Of course you are! You are and you have been for years. Mountains of curricular history have been shifted so that exactly what you are doing is teaching to the test.”

Instead, I asked, “I see, then you’re teaching away from it, are you?”

According to Wayne Au of California State University, Fullerton, my initial response would have been the correct one.

In 2007, Au compared 49 studies of how standardized testing had shaped curriculum across 10 different states. He wanted to know what the trends were across studies of high-stakes testing and curricula.

According to Au, “The primary effect of high-stakes testing is that curricular content is narrowed to tested subjects, subject area knowledge is fragmented into test-related pieces, and teachers increase the use of teacher-centered pedagogies.”

Well, there you have it.

But Au found more.

As he began coding the data of his metasynthesis, he found the results breaking down into three categories:

  • subject matter content alignment/contraction vs. subject matter content alignment/expansion
  • form of knowledge changed/fractured vs. form of knowledge changed/integrated
  • pedagogic change to teacher-centered vs. pedagogic change to student-centered

After Au’s data was coded, he started to look for trends in studies that included two or three of the categories.

Were there trends in shifts toward teacher-centered lessons coupled with curriculum contraction.

He found them.

Most frequently, Au found content contraction coupled with a shift toward teacher-centered pedagogy. Teachers, the studies predominantly found, were contracting what they were teaching and teaching in such a way that they were positioning themselves as the sources and makers of knowledge in their classes.

In considering triplets where three of the coded data sets were present in 28 of the 49 studies, the most frequent trio was contracting curriculum, fragmented knowledge and teacher-centered pedagogy.

That sound you hear is the rolling over of John Dewey and Paolo Freiere in their graves.

Au’s reports that some curricula were actually expanding in connection to high-stakes testing was initially heartening. This was short-lived as he wrote that such expansion was often social studies teachers expanding their curriculum to take on those skills tested by English language arts assessments.

Au concludes his report claiming such constrictions were the end goal of policymakers from the outset.

The intent wasn’t to move the mountain. The intent was to chip away, re-shape and grind down the mountain of human knowledge so that students can carry around the pebbles of the human experience as mementos of what once was.

“Given the central findings of this study, however, a crucial

question is raised,” writes Au, “Are test-driven curriculum and teacher-centered instruction good or bad for teachers, students, schools, communities, and education in general?”