Month: March 2013

72/365 Say More, Talk Less

We talk a lot in classrooms. We talk a lot in schools. We talk a lot in education.

We talk a lot.

Sit in any traditional classroom in America and you’re likely to hear much talking. Traditionally, this will be the teacher. Oftentimes, it will be in lecture mode. If you (and the students) are lucky, the class you are watching will feature a lecture from the teacher and then time for the students to practice…alone…no talking.

If fortune turns his back on you, the lecture will last the entire class period with the expectation that notes are taken the whole way through.

In the schools we need, we say more and talk less.

Improvisational theater gives us an appropriate structure for considering this approach – economy of dialogue. In her book, “When I Say This…,” “Do You Mean That?” Cherie Kerr explains, “What this means is the improv player can say only what is absolutely necessary during any scene in any show.”

An economic approach to talk in the classroom, well-deployed can increase the value of what’s being said. If a student no longer has to filter out the excess speech, it stands to reason those words he does hear will have greater value.

From a practical perspective, respecting the economy of dialogue also helps to adhere to Dan Meyer’s directive, “Be less helpful.” With fewer words to instruct them, students will find themselves the chief technicians of their learning, needing to parse out the meaning of the judiciously offered information from the teacher.

This only speaks to one segment of the classroom population – the teacher – but the rule applies to students as well.

When we ask students, “Why?” after they’ve answered a question or offered an opinion, we are creating a semantic implication that there is a right answer for which we are looking. Sometimes, there is. Much of the time, there is not. What we are after when we ask follow-up questions in class is more information from our students. We literally want them to say more to help us understand their thinking and help themselves to play out their nascent ideas.

If this is what we mean, then this is what we should say. In the cases where students have offered information and our instincts tell us there is more to be mined in their minds, rather than narrowing the scope of what they might say next, we can simply invite them to “Say more.”

You will note a discrepancy between the application of this principle to teachers and its application to students. It is true, teachers are being asked to talk less while asking students to “say more” and thereby talk more. As it turns out, this is intentional.

By and large, I’ve not noticed a dearth of teacher words in the classrooms I’ve seen. Students, on the other hand, are given little practice using those voices teachers are so quick to purport wanting to give to their students.

First, let us ask students to say more, get comfortable with playing with ideas out loud and finding the meanings they intend to make. After that, once teachers have practice themselves, let us begin teaching economy of dialogue.

71/365 Communication is Key (and We Can Do It Better)

Speak about mobile technologies in most any school setting and you’re likely to find frenetic conversation about the role of these technologies in facilitating learning. You’ll find educators trading app recommendations, discussing the productivity possible through mobile phones, tablets, and the like. They discuss notetaking, the dissemination of class resources, and the opportunities of all kinds of assessment.

Indeed, this makes much sense. A 2013 Pew Internet & American Life report found that 78 percent of 12-17 year olds have cell phones. Increasingly, those are smartphones. While access to these technologies are not universal across geographies and economic statuses, the trend is clear. More and more, students are walking around with computers in their pockets.

Strangely, and largely absent from that conversation is one key capability of these machines – communication. Not communication of what they’ve created to new audiences, but simple person-to-person communication of messages.

The schools we need must carefully consider communication ecosystems and how they can be leveraged.

The most common form of school communication to leverage possibilities is no doubt the school website. In a study published in 2008, Reenay Rogers and Vivian Wright reported that parents in their study “indicated using the computer to check the school website for homework information (50.0%) and important school dates (55.6%).” As websites were the prime tools to develop from the Internet, it’s not surprising these are the tools most utilized by parents.

If a school is going to do one thing to communicate with parents via technology, websites are certainly the most useful tool of the moment.

Considering communication between school, students, and parents from an ecosystem perspective, though, means taking account and advantage of all tools.

To begin this, we must think about the messages we send and the medium best suited for those messages. Websites allow for the posting of grades, events, and news stories. Phone calls, allow for longer synchronous conversations and are, unfortunately, most frequently deployed in reference to disciplinary action. Email, which 35.8 percent of Rogers and Wright’s parents reported taking advantage of, allows for asynchronous communication. Like phone calls, emails are often reserved for more lengthy and content-dense conversations. Also like phone calls, they are frequently dispatched when disciplinary issues have reached a critical mass.

The result, most parents are likely to come to view teacher-initiated communications specific to their children as harbingers of bad news.

While these are legitimate uses of these resources, they can be supplemented easily with other available tools to create thick relationships between schools, the students in their charge and students’ parents.

Text messages are a strong point of entry. A 2011 comScore report found a 59 percent drop in web email usage among 12-17 year olds. On the other hand, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported 75 persent of teens in the same age group reported using texting to communicate in 2011. If schools and teachers want eyes on their messages, they must send them to the correct locations.

Texting allows faster access to students and parents, it is also an immediate tool for reporting the positive news that rarely makes it into emails. Imagine the impact on a student who’s just arrived home at the end of the day to find a text message that says, “I was impressed by your level of participation in history class today as well as the depth of your answers. Keep up the good work.” Now, imagine if a similar version of that message is texted to that student’s parent or guardian at the end of the work day.

Such a leveraging of communication tools would surely improve home/school relationships.

This is only one example of how schools and teachers can take on an ecosystems approach to communications, and it is based on the tools of the moment. As those tools shift, approaches must adapt as well. Rather than focusing on tools, here are some questions to consider when thinking about these ecosystems:

What do we want to communicate with students and parents – the positive, the negative, or as complete a picture as possible?

What beliefs or norms will such an approach challenge, and how can we plan for resistance to these challenges?

What tools are our students and parents predominantly using for communication, how can we shift into utilizing those tools?

Given the speed with which these patterns and tools change, how can we plan to review our approach so that our communications are adapting as nimbly as preferences are changing?

These are likely to be difficult conversations. Changing the way we do things is often difficult. Embarking on this process, it may be helpful to remember the importance of improving communication. In a 2002 synthesis of the impact of school community communications, Anne Henderson and Karen Mapp found, “Family involvement that is linked to student learning has a greater effect on achievement than more general forms of involvement.”

70/365 Audience Must be Curated

The advent of the “read/write” web was a boon to the conversation about voice in classrooms around the country. All of a sudden, all a teacher needed to ask a student to do was click “publish,” and whatever that student had created would zoom across the world to a real audience.

This was a striking departure from the time-worn tradition of teacher assigns, student completes, teacher grades, repeat.

Here, we were faced with the possibility that student work would make it to billions of eyeballs and earholes. Their work mattered.

Or, so the common line of thinking goes.

Audience, as it turns out, is more complicated than simply saying something (even if it is said with volume and nuance). Multitudes of trees are falling in forests, and people are there to hear them. Now, the question is do they make a sound when they are trying to get attention over the din of all the other trees falling.

In the schools we need, audience will be curated.

A few years ago, I asked students to select a problem in the world they thought needed solving and identify something (no matter how small) they could do to affect positive change in that problem. This was no groundbreaking assignment. It was akin to the traditional research paper.

One key difference was the realization of the possibility of audience and the need to curate it effectively. Students were choosign topics as varied as child slavery, litter in the city, and substance abuse. Even if they posted to the open class blog, there was no reason to believe they would happen into what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger refer to as communities of practice.

The first step in our discussion of audience curation was the inclusion of metadata in their posts. We examined the idea of tags on their blog posts as they conducted their research and how those tags increased their visibility to outside audiences. Next, we talked about links. Because the students were accumulating many sources from many places, they were sitting on piles of data to back up their claims. Whereas the traditional paper would have them including parenthetical citations and works cited pages, we discussed the power of hyperlinks in helping their audience get to the material they were referencing as well as increasing their visibility in Internet searches.

While these steps helped the students think about how they were crafting their messages for audience, it remained passive. It rested on the hope someone might be looking for what they were saying. The next step was jumping in to the conversation. If they were talking activism, they needed to go where the activists were. I asked them to find online communities that had already formed around their topic and to go and take part in the conversations that were going on in those communities. It was a step toward what Lave & Wenger refer to as “legitimate peripheral participation.”

Aside from communities, students started to find other bloggers in their research who were posting on related topics. Here too, was an opportunity to curate audience. We discussed how they might craft comments on these external bloggers’ posts in ways that would establish their voices as credible and important. If they could do this, we reasoned, they would increase the rate of those bloggers following comments back to the students’ blogs. And, it worked. Every day, students would share with the class that someone they’d been following and commenting on had left a comment on their posts – often with questions. This had the added benefit of legitimizing the participation. They were in it.

Some of this may sound familiar to those who have had their classes send letters to the editor of the local paper commenting on a community issue. It has pieces of that exercise, but it is not that exercise. By giving students the space to have a conversation over time, to curate an online presence, and cull a body of knowledge to establish a novice-level expertise, this takes a long view on establishing deeper knowledge and seeing learning as relational.

Audience curation takes time and space. It means having conversations that ask what you want to say and to whom you want to say it. It also means students being prepared to respond to challenges to their thinking that may not care so much that they are students, but that they are thinkers engaging in real-world knowledge construction. Game must be upped.

The thing that’s beautiful about all this is its contagious nature. If one assignment or project finds a real audience, then students and teachers will want to find ways for the next assignment or project to have one as well.

69/365 I am Filled with Hope by the Future of Education

My sister Kirstie is studying to be a health teacher at SIU-E. A few weeks ago, she sent me the text message below. I am already an incredibly proud big brother. My sisters and my brother are the three most amazing people I know. That said, my pride in Kirstie’s words, her learning and her commitment to helping those coming after her has its own space in my heart. In a week where cynicism and coursework have ruled most days, returning to this text has been helpful.

Today I was teaching yoga at Glenwood middle school to a few of the girls pe classes, and I had them do an activity to help with positive thinking and so I told them to write a list of 5 things they like about themselves. A good amount of the girls didn’t have too much trouble, but there were far too many of them that thought it was difficult. The saddest piece of paper I found had only the word “none” written on it. I think that the positive reinforcement needs to start at home, but why can’t our schools help children love themselves too? I believe in what you’re doing Zachary, I hope you do make a difference for every student and help make school a better place for everyone. Middle school is tough, but it shouldn’t be so hard that a 12 year old can’t name one thing they like about him or herself.

I am sad that my little sister has to feel and build her understanding of the places where the world falls down, but I feel much better knowing she’s out there helping to pull it back up.

68/365 Volume, Alone, is not Enough for Student Voice

Volume knob

A familiar trope in the education world is that of voice. Specifically, teachers are concerned with what they can do with voice, and the conversation positions them as wizards. Teachers can give voice, silence voice, encourage voice, privilege voice. If there’s an active verb lying around, it’s entirely likely a teacher can use it to affect student voice.

Most frequently, though, teachers speak of voice as a gift – “I really want to work to give my students voice.” This is to speak of voice as though its allocation resides within the domain of the teacher and students enter classrooms voiceless and hoping to be awarded their voices through the benevolence of teachers. Those claiming to give students voice treat students’ interactions with their friends, family, and communities as though they are not authentic uses of voice. They do the same of any online space where these students might contribute content ranging from reviews to status updates.

This said, when we speak of “student voice,” we are usually speaking of sharing, and not just sharing anything. We are speaking of sharing the work we assign to students in more open ways than the traditional teacher-student assessment transaction. What’s more, the goal is usually to position that work (authentic or not) so that students are sharing their school voices as loudly and vociferously as they are sharing the voices of their every day lives.

Volume is good.

In the moments when projects are seen as authentic and relevant to students’ lives, and they raise their voices digitally or otherwise, the increased volume can be a beautiful thing.

What must be done, what is incumbant upon teachers, is more than drawing out increasing volume. Along with volume, we must teach students the value of nuance when they speak in spaces physical and digital.

Here, too often, the schools we have depart from the schools we need. In the afterglow of students sharing loudly the learning they’ve accomplished and what they’ve created, it is all too easy to miss the opportunity to ask if what has been voiced has been voiced well.

We do not remember Martin Luther King, Jr. by saying, “Wow, he talked a lot, and it was loud.” It is in the nuance of voice that we can find great value. How can we help students to think of what they have to say as Hemingway did and knead and fold their words to hold more meaning than they’d considered possible?

1. To bring nuance to voice, the work must be worth doing. A rough draft can be coaxed out of the most reluctant students, so too, can a few edits before submission. To work toward a well-crafted and considered use of voice, students must be presented with work that draws upon their curiosities, challenges them to find answers, and then calls on them to create something of value.

2. A nuanced voice also comes with practice and the chance to do something more than once. Some science teachers will ask their students to conduct one experiment within a year and then present their results at a school science fair. In such instances, a student’s voice cannot be expected to have great nuance. This would come with the opportunity to design, conduct and share multiple experiments throughout the year. This is how practitioners within fields refine their own voices, by using them on real things over and over.

3. Some audience required. As much as practicing in front of a mirror or its textual equivalent can be helpful, nothing beats an audience who isn’t yourself. Through practice sharing voice with audiences, students gather practice with the real thing. Feedback will come whether asked for or not, and it needn’t nessicarily come from others. Simply by sharing their voices with others, students will hear their own feedback, understand where volume has been mistaken for nuance, and (assuming authenticity of purpose) work to add that nuance to accomplish the task at hand. As they grow, the feedback of others can be added and helpful. This can be pairing in class, larger groups, whole-class presentations, public forums, etc. The key, is audience and the chance to hear where nuance fades so that it might be shored up.

Argument of where the voice originates aside, volume will be inherent in student voice. In many cases, increased volume is cause for celebration. This volume must not be the end of the lesson. To prepare students to operate adroitly as citizens, they must have nuances in what they voice and expect it from others.

Learning Grounds Ep. 014: Ken Libby and the education conversation we’re not having

In this episode of Learning Grounds, Zac talks with doctoral student and researcher Ken Libby about the education conversation that’s not being had right now, what we could look at as good in education and how we could re-frame the conversation to improve teacher practice.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

66/365 Stop Hacking Things (If that’s What We’re Doing at All)

Image from the movie Hackers
My first hackers

Remember about a week ago when we could talk about “innovation” and be cool? Those were the days.

I’m not sure what the half-life of a buzzword in education is these days, but I’m thinking, as private companies start to catch up with the markets opened up by new media in education and their marketing departments start to push out more glossy 1-pagers at conferences, the life of an edubuzzword is likely to be diminished.

The next word on the chopping blog…er…block is likely to be hack. Look at the next conference program you’re handed and chances are some panel or another will be hacking curriculum, professional development, assessment, recess, technology, school lunches…

It’s as though education has been given a shiny new ax and been set free on language to hack as we please.

I don’t mind all this hacking. I’ve been known to profess doing a bit of it myself. What concerns me is that we might not be hacking when we say we’re hacking, and we might not be hacking what we say we’re hacking.

Such uses are bound to dillute the terms as we’ve diluted 2.0, read/write, next generation, and 21st century before.

I suppose, in an era when pundits, politicians, and other leading personalities bandy language around as though it has no meaning, such a carte blanch approach is to be expected.

I also understand the arbitrary nature of language. The word tree and an actual tree have no inherent connection. But, this fragility of vesiles should mean greater care in our use of them, not less.

Yes, hacking is a simple term, and no great harm will come from its dilution into its mass application outside of context and thoughtful use. When we do this to words, we dimish what they can do.

21st century barely made it to its namesake with any of its spirit intact. At this rate, we’ll be making the case for 45th century skills by 2025.

Hacking is a thing, and hackers do a thing. Saying we are hacking a subsection of education like classroom management when we mean questioning classroom management approaches, researching proven effective practices of classroom management, and developing plans for the implementation of those practices of classroom management misleads others about what we hope to accomplish and makes it more difficult to call hacking hacking when we truly intend to do it.

Language will change, and we will always ask words to do new things. Applying those words because doing so is in fashion is not engaging the full set of tools with which we are equipped. It is not even a race to the bottom. It is a race to the popular.

65/365 Talking about Tools Needs More Space Than Gateway Posts

This post from edtechteacher came through twitter the other day, and I clicked on it for a number of reasons. I’m teaching a class on social media right now, so that was a draw. I’m working with student teachers and on the lookout for new tools that will help them with tech in their practice, so that was a draw. I own an iPad and want to feel like I’m getting the most out of my investment, so that was a draw.

The biggest draw? It was what I call a gateway post. I knew from the post title it was going to be bulleted (or some version thereof), it was going to have shiny tools, and it wasn’t going to bog me down in things like theory and considerations of the tools’ deeper implications for learning. (Such a drag, right?)

As I was reading, I noted David Bill was online, so I sent him the link. He scanned it, and a deeper conversation of this type of gateway posts entailed. Here are some problems and possible answers/next questions that came out of the conversation:

Issue 1: David made a good point that this post dredges up worries about the foisting of iPads on classrooms without teacher input or training.

If we know anything about the “new” and the “shiny” in education (tech or not), we know that it’s done with little input beyond a committee’s decision and compulsory trainings for the teachers who are going to have to pick up the New Shiny in the next teaching cycle. Sadly, these trainings are rarely based on teacher questions or welcoming of those questions.

Issue 2: The iPads/tablets are coming. They just are. Whether through mechanisms described above or more democratic means, more teachers are going to see these machines in their classrooms.

If I’m a teacher who knows iPads are headed to my classroom and I’m not comfortable with that thought, this post can be a strong gateway to helping me figure out what I can do in the first few weeks/months to make the machines do things that are helpful for students. That can make the difference between games, word processing, and wikipedia being the only tools used on the tablets and kids starting to see the machines a über-mobile creation tools.

Issue 3: We can’t stop there. Gateway posts can have a terminal effect. Teachers with little time or space in their schedules to play with new ideas will thereby not play with new ideas. They will bookmark the tool page or put the tools mentioned into the same lesson plans they’ve been using for years and that will be that, because tech will seem like “Another thing I’ll never get to.

Gateway posts need follow-up posts. Individual tools need their own space like this piece on Evernote from LifeHacker. Tools need to be situated in the ways they have helped practitioners expand their practices. Context, goals, affordances, constraints, reflections, next steps can inspire conversations and thoughtfulness that is missing in gateway posts.

So, I’ve challenged David to take each of the tools mentioned in the edtechteacher post and give each its own post on his blog, to help teachers see more deeply into their possible implementation and to start the better forms of the conversations.

Gateway posts have their place. They act as resplendent repositories of resources to which we can turn in professional development sessions, lesson planning, conference presentations, etc. They should not be the norm of our expectations for conversations around how we can think about the New Shiny in classrooms, schools and other learning spaces.

64/365 We Must Align What We Say We Believe with What We Do In Education

A teacher friend was explaining a new tool she’d incorporated into her classroom. Designed around classroom management, the tool allows points to be awarded to a virtual environment when the teacher notes positive behaviors valued by the community. Likewise, points can be deducted when behaviors contrary to the community’s goals are noted in students.

Listening, it was difficult not to question how this system of merits and demerits aligned with my philosophy of teaching and learning. While I understood the reduction my friend had seen around misbehaviors and disruptions of learning since implementing the system, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the kind of classroom she was wanting to foster.

We must constantly ask ourselves what we believe and how what we believe aligns with what we are doing.

Most teachers, whether they come to the classroom by traditional schools of education or through alternative programs, are asked at some point to write their philosophy of education. It is the document that asks a teacher to sit down and finish the education version of the answer to “What truths do you hold to be self-evident?”

For many, this document is written for a class, discussed throughout the semester its written, dusted off for review prior to job interviews, and then rarely seen or heard from again.

While there are likely several contributing factors – little time to reflect, less focus on theory once a teacher is in the classroom, little discussion of theory in the teacher’s lounge – the most likely is that we believe we are enacting our philosphy as we laid it out simply by teaching.

If we said what we believe about education, then it seems likely that espoused belief would be embedded in our lesson plans, in our communications with students, in the tools we adopt in our practice.

And yet, it isn’t the case.

Strong, reflective, learning-based teaching requires a constant holding up the mirror of what we believe about teaching and learning to the things we do on a daily basis to and for students.

This is made all the more important by the ease with which those practices completely misaligned with our beliefs can be adopted because we are moving at the speed of life required of adults charged with the intellectual, social and civil growth of a roomful of children. The thing that looks like it will get us to our goals the easiest can become the thing we adopt because we haven’t the time to ask, “Is this the kind of teacher I want to be, and does this join with what I believe teaching should be?” Rather, we haven’t taken the time.

After considering how this new classroom management tool rubbed against my philosophy of education, I asked my friend how she saw this system as aligned with her own thinking. After some conversation that included reiterating its positive results in student focus, I asked what her plan was for moving from the extrinsic motivation fostered by the system to a more intrisically-motivated positive classroom culture.

She admitted she’d not thought that far ahead and that she would think on it more.

I was clear that I wasn’t trying to argue against her system. That was a conversation for another day. In that moment, I was curious as to how this new practice embodied the kind of teacher she wanted to be for her students.

I am convinced that many of the things we see teachers enacting in their practice that we find contemptable and dubious are not the acts of contemptable and dubious teachers, but are the ad hoc habits gathered up in the day-to-day act of doing the work in the limited time and with the limited resources available.

I am equally convinced that given the time and space, teachers would change many of these practices if asked to consider how what they are doing aligns with what they believe to be of core importance in teaching and learning.

63/365 More on the ‘Learning Grounds’ Episode Featuring Jolon McNeil

Episode 13 of the Learning Grounds podcast featured my friend and community organizer Jolon McNeil who is working with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. Specifically, the project is looking to disassemble the state’s school-to-prison pipeline and making some good arguments about suspensions and expulsions along the way.

Jolon and I also let the conversation drift to reform efforts in general as they stand in New Orleans. Particularly poignant for me was Jolon’s response to my question, “What stories aren’t making it out of New Orleans?”

I’m posting the video for a couple reasons. First, Jolon makes reference to some elements that need to be seen to be understood. More importantly, this episode of the podcast was one of my favorites so far, and I think what Jolon has to say about communities, schools, and the way some reform efforts forget the relationship of the two is worth hearing/seeing.

I’ve posted the raw file (no editing), so apologies for the warts-and-all nature of it.