Tag: learning

7 Jan 21 – Have Them Write

Whatever other tools and resources and lesson plans we are using right now, we must have students write. Before class conversations. Before pretending we can just move back to in-person learning or beyond watching white supremacists parade the Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol, have them write.

There will be time for biology, calculus, Spanish II, world history and the lot. Yes, we’ve already lost so much time, so it won’t make much difference to give 10 minutes to providing space for students to pause and put whatever they’ve been holding down on paper.

And, while they’re writing, let’s write with them. Use the time to put down some pieces of the load we’ve been carrying.

It doesn’t need to be graded, shared, discussed, or edited. It needs to be written. Each word put to the page is a brick removed from the walls we and our students have built to keep the world out and ourselves safe this past year.

We are foolish to think they or we will be able to do school until we’ve laid down what we’re carrying.

And, yes, we can have morning meetings, advisory, crew, and whatever other support mechanisms we’ve built. They will be a salve as we return to communities of learning and teaching. Even then, have them write first. Have them take the time to unjumble their thoughts and emotions in a way that doesn’t require sharing with anyone.

And then, tomorrow, have them write some more.

In which a district administrator and a classroom teacher have a civil conversation

Had a meeting with a middle school teacher today. He and his team were asking for a specific app to be moved into our self service directory for their middle school students. The app proports to help students develop their vocabulary skills, so it got funneled to me in the chain of command.

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash

To be honest, this app has been a thorn in my side since I started the job. It’s not horrible, but it’s not great. When I’d been forwarded the initial request, I’d responded that I was pretty sure it was already in self service and, for what it’s worth, that I was reticent to recommend students using any app during class time which took away from real reading and writing.

It turned out, I was wrong.

It turned out, I was wrong. Not about the reading and writing, but about the app already being in self service. The last time I had this conversation, we were able to allow apps to be accessible at a school level. Now, we are not. This meant I would be approving access not just for one school, but for all middle schools.

What I’d considered as one kettle of fish had turned into a whole other of said kettles.

Thus, the meeting with the teacher. We started with him suggesting I talk through my thoughts on the app and then he’d fill in with his team’s plan. I laid out my concerns and he said, “Yes, we think exactly the same thing.” Then, he explained the team only wanted the app so students had something to use outside of class to think through vocabulary. Remember, it’s not horrible, and in the face of so many possible app which are horrible, the team was attempting to stem the tide of horrible.

“I mean, we’re professionals.”

“We want them to be doing real reading and writing as much as possible too,” he said, “I mean, we’re professionals.”

He didn’t say it defensively or as a form of semantic brinksmanship. He simply mentioned he and his team’s professionalism as a reason they too would not want their students using this app during class time or as a way to supplant real reading and writing.

I told him I understood exactly and had assumed as much. I then explained how our infrastructure had changed, shifting their ask from one of a single school to one of all middle schools. “Oh…” he said, “I understand.”

I explained that I had to consider inclusion of the app as possibly being interpreted as at least a tacit endorsement – something that particularly worried me when considering novice teachers who might be looking for anything to get them through their first few years. I went on to explain I’d approved the inclusion of the app and I’d be writing and sharing a blog post from the department blog outlining guidance and my reservations for other middle school teachers in the district.

He had told me early in the conversation that this app wasn’t a hill he was interested in dying on, and my explanation was meant as a signal the same was true for me.

I wish it didn’t strike me as so odd how civil and respectful our entire conversation was. Since taking a role in district leadership, my default expectation for the tenor of such conversations has shifted to one of combativeness. I work “downtown” after all or I’m from “the district” or “central office.”

I wonder if this teacher entered into the conversation with the same sort of expectations. Did he think I was going to issue a summary judgement or simply pretend to listen to his concerns and then make the same decision I’d planned on when starting the meeting? Perhaps.

That makes me a bit downhearted. When I talk to folks about what I do, I have and always will explain my job is to support students and teachers. I can only be successful at helping all of our students become fully literate citizens if I can also support all of the adults in our system get the learning and resources they need.

Understanding all of those needs means having as many conversations as possible like the one I had today.

The Joys of a Teacher Exit Ticket (27/365)

It’s an academic coda to a lesson where everyone played their part. It’s turning getting to the last page of a novel and realizing the plot is resolving itself in a way that is both exactly what you wanted as well as nothing you’d ever expected. It’s getting home from a first date and receiving the perfect text message. It’s finding out a meal you loved comes with a complimentary dessert.

I love a good exit ticket.

That love is why I spend so much time thinking about authentic, helpful, meaningful uses of this after dinner mint of learning.

It is also why I’ve started thinking about what teacher exit tickets might look like. I’m not saying exit tickets from professional development (though those are good too). Teacher exit tickets are in concert with student exit tickets, but they are the questions teachers must answer about what has happened over the course of a lesson. When schedules drown out professional reflection, teacher exit tickets can be moments where we get our heads above the water and survey the ocean around us.

Specifically, two questions stick with me as shaping thoughtful practice and looking for student progress:

  • What were students in this space curious about?
  • What did students leave knowing or able to do that they couldn’t do at the beginning of class?

For each, there is the implied, “And how do I know?”

A teacher exit ticket can act as the link between today’s enacted lesson plan and tomorrow’s aspirations. We know what we’re setting out to do at the top of a school day, but we rarely take the time to allow what actually ended up happening to directly and thoughtfully affect what happens tomorrow. Teacher exit tickets allow for this connective tissue to form.

What other questions would be wise to consider as teacher exit tickets? Add them to the comments below.

How We Tell Students Stories of Gender (26/365)

yin-2730344_640

I don’t follow sports. I can tell you the name of the Eagles’s backup quarterback, but I’ll be completely unaware when he’s replaced by the guy who is their usual quarterback. I know there are divisions and conferences. I know baseball has leagues, but I can’t tell you which team is in which. When watching the Super Bowl with friends Sunday, I knew the play immediately following a touchdown could result in two different point amounts being awarded, but I had no idea which plays got to which points. I cannot tell you how many points a field goal is worth.

I was supposed to get this information at some point in the growing up process. I graduated high school in the only state in the Union that requires four years of physical education. I remember when I realized I was missing a piece of being a guy when Mr. Allen set up stations during the basketball unit of P.E. and explained that Station 1 was where we practiced layups and every other guy around me knew what he was talking about and what to do. I was clueless.

At this point in life, I’ve done some things – some very cool things of which I am very proud. Still, I can feel the moment in conversations with new groups of other men where the conversation is about to turn to sports and I’m either going to have to admit I know nothing about sports or stay as quiet as possible while nodding along until the topic changes.

I hate this expectation.

I hate the other half of the expectation as well.

I hate the fact that I can throw out that I’m a queer man and it will absolve me of others’ expectations I’ll be able to hang in conversations about sports. It’s playing into a stereotype suggesting being queer means I’m not going to understand or have any interest in sports. Outing myself as queer and outing myself as sports illiterate feeds a social construct I’m not here for.

This is the story I bring with me when I look at assessment results along gender lines within our district and nationally. On average, our boys’ reading and writing scores are below our girls’. It starts in elementary schools, and leads me to wonder what stories we’re telling and perpetuating about boys as readers and writers. When sitting with teams of teachers I am often asking how they make sure boys see the men in their lives as textually literate. What strategic ways are they working to make sure boys see reading and writing as ungendered?

I worry in similar ways, at the other end of the spectrum, about the gendered stories we tell about math and science. What is it we are doing to uncouple these disciplines from male and masculine perceptions? Setting aside for the moment the pernicious structural and institutional biases at play in tech and STEM workplaces, how are we stealing identities of scientist and mathematician away from girls? Where are they seeing the women in their lives as capable and engaged science-positive members of society?

So, if we are to tell these stories better with a fuller set of voices, how might we proceed?

  • Avoid assuming someone’s already told the story. Whether it was Mr. Allen assuming all the boys in our class knew what a layup is or how to shoot one or assuming all girls in a class understand that just because their math teacher is male that doesn’t mean math is for men, examining and addressing our assumptions is a first step to broadening the learning narratives our students hear.
  • Prompt students to listen to how others tell the same stories. This means practices highlighted by people like Sunil Singh in this post. Singh mentions math teacher Peter Harrison who “used to give out these insanely hard math problem sets. However, he encouraged students to get help from any teacher in the school — or even outside the school. You just couldn’t ask him.” What might be the power of taking ourselves out of the narrative in order that students might write their own?
  • Remember language matters. In my own work with teachers and students I’ve been striving to eliminate a simple phrase from my lexicon – you guys. While I realize the shorthand is largely accepted as gender neutral in intent, I can’t believe it is neutral in how it is heard. Every time we say, “you guys” when we mean everyone, we are challenging anyone who doesn’t identify as a guy to find their way into the conversation. Once or twice it might not matter, but I’m imagining the deleterious effects of a lifetime of having to instantaneously recode your identity to find your place in a conversation.
  • Tell fuller stories. One of the most powerful takeaways I had from C.J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School was the normative language we use throughout seemingly benign examples we offer students each day. How culturally-representative are the names we use in math word problems? How heteronormative are the texts we ask students to read?
  • Open the conversation for adults. My guess would be, if you sat down with your school or district and looked at the results from any assessment, you’d see some trends along gender lines. Fiats and banners about equality will not solve this. Instead, faculty meetings require the space to have honest conversations and to ask which systems and structures might be telling students unintended stories of gendered expectations.

Tonight’s Conversation about Curiosity (22/365)

Tonight, I’ll be moderating the EduCon opening panel at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Stephanie Sandifer, Antero Garcia, Rafranz Davis, and Milton Chen will join me for a conversation about curiosity with special consideration of how it relates to schools and education.

My hope is for the panel to be a true conversation. With such a varied and experienced group of folks, I’m more worried about how to get out of the way than anything else.
Below are some of the questions I’m considering. Please add your suggestions in the comments.
  • Is curiosity always good?
  • What are you actively curious about at the moment?
  • What key components of curiosity that traditional public education gets right?
  • How might a re-framing of how we think about curiosity along the lines of gender and sex bring equality to those narratives?
  • What are simple moments in regular practice where we could be leveraging the power of curiosity and are not?
  • What might be the effect of streaming and bingeability on the curiosity of children and adults?
  • If curiosity is free and cultivating it is free, why are we less likely to see students living in poverty be encouraged to follow their curiosity than their peers in the middle and upper classes?
  • Jal Mehta’s recent piece “A Pernicious Myth: Basics Before Deeper Learning” makes an argument for giving students bigger tasks or what David Perkins calls “the whole game” what would it actually take to move people in your various systems to embrace such a philosophy?
  • Considering the story of William Kamkwamba as recounted in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, as well as some remarks from this same panel a few years ago, is there an argument to be made that limitations are fertilizer for curiosity?
  • What’s to be done in encouraging teacher curiosity? Are their things you’d argue are most important for teachers to be curious about? What practical steps can schools and school systems take to make this happen?
  • How do we navigate our and our students’ curiosities about darker or prickly topics?
  • How do you keep your curiosity from becoming complacent?

We’re Producing a Season of Television to Help Our Teachers Learn (21/365)

I got to work on one of my favorite projects of the school year Tuesday. Our district is in the second year of implementation of a new set of elementary literacy curriculum resources. This would be enough pressure. Now, add the fact we have 26 elementary schools spread across 13 communities and 411 sq. miles.

Getting folks on a page around deepening their practice is exceedingly difficult. Scheduling professional learning classes after school works for some schools if they’re nearby and creates a hardship for others who might have to drive 30 minutes immediately after teaching.

That’s why, this year, we’re taking a new approach to professional learning, communication, and information sharing. We launched a television show. The fourth Tuesday of each month, we stream a live television show using Youtube live. The show itself is about an hour in length and teachers who sign up for credit then complete an assignment related to the episode’s theme.

In August, we started with an episode dedicated to routines and procedures at the beginning of the school year. Yesterday’s episode was about using mid-year data to form a body of evidence to meet students’ needs. Each episode features news and updates from the curriculum office, a listing of upcoming classes, and teachers from the district.

This month’s episode included a 1-on-1 interview with one of our district assessment coordinators, a taped segment from a kindergarten classroom leveraging student inquiry, and a panel discussion featuring a second-grade teacher, a third-grade teacher, their principal, and the school’s literacy teacher. For 25 minutes we all discussed the practical ways the school works to build a body of evidence for each student’s learning and how they respond to identified needs.

Participants logged in from across the district, including those featured in the tweet below. No one had to get in their car, and those who had scheduling conflicts can watch the episode later. What’s more, we work to catalog each resource mentioned within an episode and link it in the show notes. We’ve started to see resources from one edge of the district pop up in classrooms three towns away.

What’s more, we’re creating artifacts that can be utilized long after each episode airs. Principals looking for resources to use in staff meetings can pull one of the taped segments with accompanying reflection questions. They can zero in on a piece of the panel conversation to push their teachers’ thinking.

Come time for new teacher orientation next year, we’ll have an archive amounting to a full season of television to share with teachers new to the district.

The approach is not perfect. We’re certainly learning from each episode. But, we’re also hearing from teachers across our schools telling us they’re watching with their teams, streaming in their pajamas, and – in today’s case – gathering as a school to have conversations and learn from their peers.

My Best Moment of the Week: Picking Line Leader (5/365)

people standing in line on a paved lotMy best moment from this week happened this morning. I was in one of our district’s kindergarten classrooms as the school day began. As the students entered the room, they were greeted by their teacher, but something was different from every other classroom entrance routine I’ve seen this year. The students entered, put up their things in the cubbies and then made choices as to what they were going to do to start the learning for the day. They were all over the classroom, all practicing their reading, all talking. It was beautiful. And, as much as that was lovely, it wasn’t the best moment.

The best moment was when the teacher picked the popsicle stick from her cup to announce the day’s line leader. For the uninitiated (or those who have forgotten), line leader is a pretty big deal in elementary school. If you’ve got a lifelong thirst for power, it probably started with your first term as line leader.

Whereas every other teacher I’ve ever seen select the day’s line leader has simply picked a name, said the name, and moved on, this teacher did so much more.

“The name I’ve picked has one syllable,” she announced. The students, at this point assembled on the carpet, hushed for a moment as they thought. Then, without prompting, one student popped to his feet. Then a girl joined him. Finally, another boy stood. I realized, these were the three students in the room with single-syllable names.

Okay. That would be enough. She wasn’t done.

The teacher asked the class if the students were correct. As a class, they practiced saying each student’s name, checking to see if it was, in fact, a single syllable. Each was.

The teacher then asked the students to look at the alphabet on the back wall with each student’s name listed below its first initial. She went through each of the three students, asking the class, what letter their names were under. The class answered.

“Okay,” the teacher said, “this name has three letters.”

After a second or two, several students started voicing their guesses. They were correct.

She wasn’t done. One of the standing student’s names had 5 letters. “How many letters does her name have,” the teacher asked the class.

“Five!”

“Correct. Is that more or less than three?”

A longer pause, “MORE!”

She did the same thing with the third student, asking if his name of four letters was more or less than a name of three. The students all knew and each answer was a celebration.

The entire thing was a celebration, and it only took three minutes. In those three minutes, this teacher was able to ask her students to practice at least five different skills of varying difficulties, but all essential to kindergarten learning. She didn’t say, “Let’s practice syllabication,” or “Now we’re going to think about numbers.” She just gave them small, contextualized opportunities to put into practice the skills they’d learned together earlier in the year.

This otherwise perfunctory task was seen as an opportunity for learning. It was a master stroke by a professional focused on squeezing the fun and the learning out of each moment.

Why We Don’t Ask if We’re a Learning Organization

You may be a learner, you may use a learning device. Does that matter if you’re not part of a learning organization?

My guess is no.

Today, I participated in Ben Wilkoff’s session at Future Ready: A Technovation Institute. The conversation was geared around some deeper thinking of what we mean and imply when we invoke the “1:1” ration in talking about learners and devices.

Midway through, Ben asked us to think about what is needed to support learners in tech-rich environments and what is needed to support devices as tools for deeper learning in those environments.

My answer kept coming back to the place where my thinking’s been living these last few weeks – learning organizations. Being a part of such an organization is necessary for both learners and devices to move beyond the shiny of new tech in learning.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Sure, classrooms, schools, and districts purport to be learning organizations in that they are organizations designed to facilitate the learning of those in their charge or care – namely, students. And, yes, this is a good goal. It is certainly better than being teaching organizations or education organizations. To hit lightly on being a learning organization is to at least imply that your goal is the learning of those within your system.

What I’d posit is necessary for the ongoing support of learners and the view of technology as tools for learning is that the classroom, school, or district is, itself, a learning organization. Better phrased, is any of these an organization that learns? Dice that apart. A school that is comprised of teachers who are learners may find itself ahead of other schools where teachers don’t engage their curiosity or agency to satisfy that agency.

Such a school still cannot go as far if it does not attempt, as an institution to learn from its mistakes, to move forward as a whole, and to be better as a learning body. This is part of what Chris and I mean when we write “Be One School.”

To be a learning organization classrooms, schools, and districts – either by dictate or consensus – would identify a driving, commonly held curiosity and then move toward investigating that curiosity together.

Whenever I’ve had the chance to talk to the leadership of any organization of which I’ve been a part, I’ve asked one question, “What are the three things you hope we’re working toward this year?” For whatever reason, I’ve yet to pose that question to a leader and get a coherent answer. Maybe they don’t know, maybe they’re being politic, or maybe they’re resistant to make their own goals the goals of all.

Imagine, though, what could happen if a superintendent, principal, or teacher engaged in a process of identifying those wicked problems to be investigated throughout the year. Shared ownership of these problems and shared learning toward their solutions would be a powerfully unifying experience.

From Theory to Practice:

  • If your organization has a leadership team or committee, pull them together and ask what big issues they would like to grapple with in the coming year. Make updates on learning a standing item on each meeting agenda.
  • In the classroom, select the big buckets of learning (usually disciplines) and have students work through their big questions for each bucket. Keep track of answers and new questions as the year progresses.
  • If you’re at the very beginning of this work and need to build cohesion, build a simple question into your formal conversations, “What is something you’re trying to figure out right now?” Keep track of the answers you get and see how you might be able to use common threads to plan events, learning sessions, and communications toward common cause.

Citizen-Focused Schools

Civics

Someone today acknowledged the fact that an audience of folks had likely heard many keynote presentations over the last decade or so warning, proclaiming, and evangelizing on the need to change schools to better meet the shifting demands of the modern workforce. This was a lead in to the question of what the assembled educators should do about it and what they might ask employers to help them focus the work of school.

For my money, it’s all the wrong question. As much as I want every student I’ve ever known to find gainful, satisfying employment, shooting for a successful workforce aims below the best possibility of what American schools can be.

In an election season jacked up on discourse and discord, we see the highlights of how worker-focused schools are set to fail our country if they do not become citizen-focused schools.

Workers who know how to collaborate, innovate, adapt, and design are still less powerful than citizens who know how to organize, advocate, and investigate.

Rather than asking employers what schools can do to produce students to fit their needs, we should be speaking to politicians, public servants, and civic leaders asking what it takes to get their attention, what effective advocacy looks like, and what problems are on the horizon for communities and cities that our students will need to be ready to tackle.

Chasing jobs that don’t yet exist and may only exist for a moment is a fool’s errand not worthy of our children. Learning how to craft a society that realizes the best ideals of our democracy, our republic, and our grand experiment is not only a worthy goal, but a necessary one as well.

From Theory to Practice:

  • As you wrap up your school year or plan for the start of next year, make citizenship and the kinds of citizens your school community is working to create a central conversation. Keep in mind this is a conversation for all subject areas, not just social studies. Citizen scientists, public health, and a mathematically literate public are just as important as those who volunteer and show up at the polls.
  • Invite civic leaders in to build out the conversation. Ask anyone from the city manager to the mayor to local congressional leaders to come speak across classes on where any given subject area intersects with their work.
  • Think about the civic centers your schools can become. Host candidate forums. Ask leaders to come in and participate in town halls. Keep voter registration forms on the counter of your office and linked on your homepage. Make participatory citizenship part of the DNA of learning and teaching.

The Search (and Price) of Intelligent Algorithms

Search

Sometimes, when I want to know what it’s like not to be me, I’ll jump into incognito mode on Chrome and search for something, anything – just to see what a newborn baby might find on his first search.

If there’s a notable difference, it’s that I’m searching alone. None of the content from my friends (as Google knows them) is present. None of the recommendations take into effect what past me has gone searching for. I’m asking a question of the entire web, not the web as Google curates it for me.

Still, Google lets me search. It doesn’t require I feed its data monster with my specific personal information. I am free to wander the Internet as anonymously as possible for anyone with a static IP address.

When I turn to sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, though, doors are closed. While Google will let me get by only paying with the what of my searching, these sites raise the price – they want to know who.

All of this rests on the idea that computer algorithms are strong in their ability to furnish me with answers. The more they know about the questions I’m asking, the better their ability to anticipate and queue up answers most relevant to me. That’s Me, specifically, not someone like me. Insomuch as is possible for a machine, these lines of code are personalizing the answers for which I’m searching in my learning.

But these algorithms are doing more than that. They are deciding what I don’t see. They are narrowing the Internet I experience. Because search engines and other sites that track my behavior online track what they take to be my habits, the options I see when I go looking for information are the answers I’m anticipated to need or want. And, there’s a trade off. I often find what I’m looking for, but I hardly ever stumble upon something randomly interesting. Imagine traveling the world an avoiding all the places you hadn’t seen or heard about before.

These are the answers algorithms provide.

What’s more, while these lines of code are narrowing the world and people I experience online, they’re failing to help me ask better questions. When I’m led to ask questions online, it’s because of breadcrumbs left by other people on the chance I might want to make a turn. Think of a Wikipedia entry as an example. A well written page includes loads of links to what a computer might read as randomly selected. Even when able to identify parts of speech, it is the human element that decides Prince Adam deserves a link on the entry for Skeletor while leaving Keldor as plain text.

Algorithms suck at curiosity. They don’t anticipate it well, and they rarely engender it in users. Any program that ushers a user through a series of pre-conceived questions is avoiding actual questioning. To keep the travel metaphor going, these experiences are like riding It’s a Small World rather than actually traveling to each of the countries depicted. And, no matter how well such applications anticipate your reaction to a given set of stimuli, whatever is put in front of you next isn’t computer generated, it was programmed by someone who decided where your unknowing should go next.

While the secret soup that makes search engines and other sites pull up the answers to my questions is imperfectly good, I have to remember that it comes at the cost of my information (anonymous or not) and experiencing the world in a way someone like me is “supposed” to see it. This is more limited than I know.

For however good these systems are at finding my answers, they are nowhere near as capable of helping me generate questions as a conversation with a friend or reading a thoughtful editorial. While they are able to learn, they are certainly not curious.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.