Category: Post-A-Day

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).

2/365 Some Ideas Worth Building a School Around

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

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

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

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

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

1/365: How Letterpress Uses Funds of Knowledge

Along with all the tedium of life (classes, laundry, work), I’ve been focusing quite a bit lately on an important issue. Letterpress.
If you haven’t downloaded this word game for iPhone and iPad, take a break from reading this and then come back. At the least, make note that you intend to check it out when you’re done reading.
A word-based game, the objective is to spell words given a random assortment of letter tiles. Spell and submit a word and those tiles turn your color. Your opponent then attempts to spell some other word and turn the tiles his color. The game is over when all tiles have been claimed, and the winner is the player with the most tiles of his color.
It’s Words with Friends meets Othello.
I’m not obsessed with the game. Dedicated is the word I choose.
Here’s the thing, it’s a new game and the developer is constantly updating the dictionary the app uses to determine whether a submitted word is, in fact, a word.
This is oftentimes frustrating. It’s not complete. The app doesn’t know all words.
Jew = Word
Jewish = Not a Word
There are other examples.
I’m no word genius, but I know some things, and so this incomplete dictionary has frustrated me on more than one occasion. At least twice, in the throes of a fantastic game, I’ve put my phone down and walked away in frustration saying, “It is too a word!”
The whole experience has me thinking of Moll et al’s theory of funds of knowledge.
At its simplest, Moll proposes taking teachers as researchers into the homes of their students and asking the question, “What is the knowledge that’s created, valued, and used in this space?”
From there, these teacher anthropologists take what they’ve learned and draw on those funds of knowledge in crafting their lesson plans and shaping their teaching practice.
If the parallels here aren’t jumping out, let me be more direct.
Letterpress is operating like a traditional classroom. It presents the possible tools for making sense and succeeding. Within those boundaries, it allows players to construct meaning and submit those constructions for approval. This is what teachers do on a regular basis.
What also happens on a regular basis, though, is the construction of new ways of organizing and implementing tools to make meaning. Not yet realizing there’s a way of learning things, students may accidentally take risks and imagine new possibilities. Oftentimes, because of a rubric or the learning objective of the task at hand, those risks and that imagination are re-directed toward the intended goal – either frustrating the child or shutting down those paths to future learning.
Letterpress and traditional teaching depart in their approaches to the idea of upgrading. For Letterpress, developers realize they need to improve the user experience to make that experience worthwhile. Find the expectations and funds of knowledge of the user and make the game more inclusive.
For classrooms, the goal is often to upgrade the user or student. Keep the game the same and get students to develop a better understanding of the rules.
The difference?
When I put down Letterpress in frustration, I come back because there is the promise the experience will improve.
When students turn away from education and schools in frustration, we can’t say the same thing.

It’s Happening Again

Two years ago, I committed to writing a blog post a day – each focusing on a “thing I knew”.
At the end of the year, I had 365 posts documenting my thinking in that year. It is a snapshot of who I was during that year and what I was thinking.
After a year off, I’m back for 2013.
I’ll be writing a post a day. As of right now, I have no theme save to say I’ll be writing about what’s going on in my mind in the moment.
My hopes are that this year’s conversations will be as thoughtful and thought-provoking as two years ago.
Either way, I’m excited about starting on another journey of documentation.