iSummit
This summer I went to the annual iSummit conference, which was being hosted this year by St Agnes Academy/St Dominic School in Memphis, TN. This was the first iSummit I ever attended and, to be completely honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the conference was all about — my school applied and received a scholarship to the conference, and I was asked if I was willing and able to go.
It turns out that iSummit is a conference of independent schools implementing a 1-to-1 laptop program using Apple products. Every student in these schools, in other words, is given a standard-issue Macbook to do academic work in. Now, it was evident that there were a number of attendees that came from schools without such a program — but were open to or curious about such a possibility. Hence, I’m guessing, the scholarship I had handily received.
The conference began with a stirring presentation by Carol Anne McGuire, who talked of her experimentations into technology as a teacher, which eventually led to a very impressive project called Rock Our World. It was one of the more inspirational keynotes I’ve ever heard in a conference like this, and it was mostly due to Ms. McGuire’s humble and self-effacing personality. Her account of her journey made us all feel that we just needed to go out and do something and say heck to the naysayers, solving the problems and details when they come up.
A second keynote the following morning was given by Dr. James Kelley who stressed how innovations in technology were disrupting current ways of doing things — especially education. As Lucy Gray pointed out in one of her seminars (quoting Will Richardson), students are already utilizing these new technologies; we need to step in and guide them in using these tools ethically and effectively. A 21st century education, according to Dr. Kelley, requires us to familiarize ourselves with these tools of collaboration, creation, distribution, and access. One of the useful tidbits in his presentation was his delineation of teacher adoption and integration of technology:
- Substitution: just changing the tool, not the praxis
- Augmentation: supplementing current practices with technological opportunities like the internet
- Modification: letting the use of technology tweak classroom practices and attitudes
- Redefinition: letting the possibilities of technologies transform one’s mindset about learning and pedagogy
There was an interesting diversity of seminars over three days. There were a number of seminars that were how-to introductory courses to software applications like Garage Band, iMovie, and HyperStudio. Other seminars were brainstorming and sharing sessions about the opportunities and difficulties of using technology to teach; it was interesting, for instance, to see how Otto Benavides
had a very organized approach to teaching podcast creation (look under “Class Projects”). I went to one session about Professional Learning Networks with Lucy Gray from the University of Chicago, whose blog I follow in my feed because she constantly posts interesting links and articles that comes up in her own PLN. There was a whole track of seminars specifically geared to the tech admins and another track of seminars specifically geared to general administrators.
One of the more interesting sessions I went to was headed by Howard Levin about the oral history projects he has launched on Telling Stories.org. What struck me about his presentation was how bare-bones his endeavor was — students merely show up, ask questions, man the camera, and, later, transcribe the interview — but, at the same time, how richly authentic it was. It definitely echoed one of the takeaways from the keynote — that is, to start with something simple but profound and then scale and extend it up and out.
St. Agnes/St. Dominic had a very impressive distance learning auditorium which allowed convenient video conferencing sessions with large groups. I attended one session where we were in discussion with Dr. Toni Guglielmo from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who demoed for us how she could show artifacts from the LACMA collections as educational touchstones.
Of course, one of the major pulls for me to go to this conference was a chance to visit Memphis. I didn’t have enough time (or a car) to visit places like Sun Studios or Graceland, but I did get to explore a bit of downtown with some of my fellow conference-goers:
Dinner at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill:
Dry rub ribs at Rendezvous:
We even attended a minor league game, with the Memphis Redbirds beating the Albuquerque Isotopes 4-2:
Nice stadium. I like that little grassy knoll where people could picnic and watch the game at the same time.
The great folks at St. Agnes/St. Dominic even arranged for an Elvis impersonator to show up the first night. Here he is, wooing Amy Moody, who did so much to help me get to the conference:
The best thing about these conferences, of course, is the people you meet. I had a great time hanging out with other teachers, especially Lourdes from Oakland and Jen from Baton Rouge. Lourdes and I actually had an energizing discussion in the airport as we were waiting for our respective departing flights. She brought up this great anecdote about how Wayne Gretsky’s dad used to set up these complicated slalom courses in their backyard ice rink and then challenge his boy to run through them again and again, constantly changing their configuration.
It made me think of how we, as teachers, need to be wary of the pitfalls of the two competing ideologies in teaching. An unthinking progressive approach stresses stimulation at the expense of mastery while an unthinking traditional approach stresses a fluency without the contextual understanding to prevent it from being inflexible and irrelevant. It made me think of this video by Dr. Tae:
On the flight back home, I couldn’t help thinking of the Memphis Pyramid, a monumental structure built in the early 90′s promising to revitalize the city as a giant 80 acre, 32 story tall sports arena. It never was fully completed and, for the past three years, has pretty much been vacant, most of the sports teams migrating over to the FedEx Forum built shortly after and a hop and skip away. I couldn’t shake thinking of it as a cautionary tale against getting all gleamy-eyed over the one glittery gift that whispers it will solve all one’s problems. Teaching, like learning, is instead about scrapping and adapting, taking on new tricks and hopping around as the ground shifts from under you.
Like dealing with this guy, the best thing I’ve seen in several days:
Immigrants in Philadelphia Neighborhood Field Trip
Here’s a bunch of photos that students took on our field trip to Chinatown for the IPN project. This was the first year that I organized that particular leg of the trip.
Oedipus at the FDR
Wow. I never got around to posting these. These are photos from one of the Philadelphia Live Arts plays I saw last year: Oedipus at the FDR. As it’s name suggests, it’s Oedipus Rex done at the FDR skate park. It was interesting, to say the least.
A Prayer for September 11
It’s always difficult, both personally and pedagogically, to teach a lesson on a national day of mourning that is still so emotionally and politically immediate. You have to balance sensitivity with passion, educational relevance with memorial gravity. You take a hard look at what you know to find solace and understanding for yourself and then wonder if any of it can make a difference to others. And yet, to teach is to try. The seventh grade theme in English is “Adjusting to Place,” and what is September 11 but a place we all needed to adjust to?
So I chose, in my seventh grade classes, to discuss a poem by Teresa Cader, which was a response to George Herbert’s “Prayer,” written some 370 years prior. We began by reading Herbert’s poem and making general observations about its tone and structure: that it is religious, measured, that it had a kind of timeless quality, that it rhymed in a pattern. I talked about how architects will often design a building to provide a specific experience, and we brainstormed about how the middle school building that we were in had certain features that provided it with a unique feel.
Herbert’s poem is built like a cathedral. It has the classical structure of a sonnet, following established traditions of form and logic. Like a cathedral, it directs its audience upward in a prayer of praise to God. In fact, its thesis is the word “prayer,” the first word of the poem, followed by a series of appositive phrases cascading forth in theological and metaphorical riffs. Herbert exclaims, for example, that prayer is “the six daies world—transposing in an houre,” the glory and marvel of creation translated and compressed into a pilgrim’s ecstatic encounter with the numinous.
We read Cader’s poem, “September 11,” next. Students noticed immediately that it sounded more casual, more modern. It grouped lines in couplets, not rhymed quatrains, and had more quotidian descriptions that spilled over in frequent enjambments. Looking closer, they also noticed that words and phrases from Herbert’s poem were echoed throughout the poem, though now in a context so different that they were easily overlooked. Cader’s poem seemed to retain the spiritual intensity of Herbert’s but felt like it was a different building altogether — something more sparse and somber.
In fact, “September 11” picks up the last statement of Herbert’s poem— “[prayer is] something understood” —and responds to it directly: “Understanding something isn’t prayer, necessarily.” From there it uses, like Herbert’s poem, a series of a noun phrases to build a faceted description — but this time of a group of unsuspecting passengers boarding their plane at an airport. The rapturous “softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse” of Herbert’s prayer becomes the “softness of cruising, bliss of landing, love waiting in the wings,…. Muted joy at unfastening seatbelts” with its conspicuous absence of peace. Cader, in essence, takes Herbert’s sonnet, tears it down to its timbers, and from it builds her own church, a memorial. She takes the mundane (“six days”) world we all took for granted before 9/11 and points out how it got “transposed in one hour,” elevated into transcendence, into a prayer. Not a prayer one petitions, exults — or understands even, necessarily — but one that has taken what was and has indelibly translated it into a new reality.
I read the poem again, aloud. Students followed silently, respectfully, one poem faintly visible behind the page of the other.
Note: For the sake of convenience, I’ve included a copy of each poem after the jump, but you can also read the poems at these links:
“Prayer” by George Herbert and
“September 11” by Teresa Cader
Panel Discussion: What is the Purpose of School?
The first keynote of the conference was a panel discussion Friday night. It was held at the Franklin Insitute and moderated by Frederic Bertley.
There were seven panel speakers, whose bios you can read on the EduCon 2.1 wiki — with the exception of Diane whats-her-name (a legislator), who each gave a spiel on what they thought school ought to be about and then answered questions as a group from the audience.
Kendall Croilus, the business consultant, began by saying that the corporate world would like lifelong learners, specifically those who had:
- Creativity: the ability to innovate
- Collaboration, especially the ability to appreciate — and not just tolerate — cultural diversity, whether that diversity is expressed in race, class, geography, silos of expertise, or personality
- Courage, or confidence — especially in embracing change and challenging the status quo
I noted to myself that none of these things are explicitly in my curriculum objectives, although they are all things I value and wish I could teach better.
Jeff Han, the engineer, added two more C’s:
- Communication: the ability to articulate concepts and teach others
- Calibration, or being able to discern what is do-able, interesting, or valuable to pursue
Jeff was the least revolutionary person on the panel. He liked school growing up.
Joel Arquillos, the afterschool nonprofit dude, stressed another C:
- Community — both within the classroom itself and reaching out and inviting in the surrounding community at-large
Dr. Stephen Squyres, the scientist, stressed the potential for school to open students’ eyes to what was possible (the old “broaden horizons” bit) and allow people to understand how things really work. For the latter, he gave the example of the true nature of science being dynamic, incremental, self-adjusting, and mundane. He mentioned in passing that such understanding is necessary for an informed citizenry (the old “enlightened democracy” bit).
Dr. Molefi Asante, the academic, gave the most open/vague answer of all: that school is meant to provoke inquiry. His point was that the purpose of school may shift with the context of the age. He may have also been suggesting (it wasn’t entirely clear) that school should be guided by the interests of its students.
Diane whats-her-name (will the wiki just get updated and put up her name already?), the legislator, said that school ought to be “the great equalizer,” that it should level the playing field to allow for a true meritocracy.
I left Prakash Nair, the architect, for last because I found him to be the most radical, passionate, and specific advocate for reform. He suggested that the school of the future ought to serve the following functions (and that these functions should be evident in everything from its building architecture to its curriculum):
- Social anchor: or the hub of community life, open 24/7, available not only to kids but to adults
- Technology showcase: a place the purchases, tests, and introduces cutting-edge technology so that the innovation and change from such tools would disseminate throughout the community
- Idea generator: a place to invent, create, and engage in blue-sky thinking
- Idea harvester: a place to prototype, test, and develop those very ideas into reality
- Player in the community’s economic network: and then a place to make those ideas marketable and valuable and available to the larger community
- Builder of social capital: a place to become socialized into the shared culture of the larger community
I’ve always thought that the idea of the community school was a good one, but I wonder if Mr. Nair realizes that his idea for a school sounds like an Apple sweatshop. (I did dig the article he referenced, 30 Strategies for Education Innovation {pdf}).
Now you might realize by now that I was largely unimpressed with the discussion of the evening. It was a lot of the same warmed-over moaning that everyone’s heard for decades now. It was not surprising, then, that most of the Q&A discussion afterwards was filled with managerial bromides like “be true to your mission,” “think outside the box,” and “just do it” along with the occasional educational bromide thrown in for good measure: “it takes a village,” “educators are saints.”
When I thought about why I was so bothered, I gradually realized what I thought needed to be acknowledged: that school has been required to become the Swiss-Army knife of institutional influence for American minors — that it has been made to be the surrogate parent, church, and workplace for most people under 18.
As adults take on 40- to 80-hour workweeks away from their kids, as apprenticeships to trades vanish, as pews shrink and empty (or turn into spectator stadiums), as neighbors shutter themselves up into their homes and let local economies languish, as social clubs and civic organizations become passé, as libraries and museums lose their funding, more and more gets shoveled onto the plate of schools. We’re to handle the whole hierarchy of Maslow’s needs. Food? Safety? Shelter? Discipline? Socialization? Work? Values? Counsel? Community? Mentorship? Inspiration? Preparation for life as an employee, citizen, well-rounded human being?
Oh, and let’s not forget an education. There was hardly any mention of the ever-enormous amount of content we’re expected to cram in as we do all this. Not crap. Stuff anyone arguing in a bar should know (but likely doesn’t).
My point is this: modern society has been twisting and turning in ways profound to the development of kids into adults. The go-to guy for adjusting to all these changes is always the school. Not many people seem to question this. Educators are taking on the increasingly solitary duty of countering the default impulses of a first-world existence: conformity, distraction, cowardice, materialism, ignorance. As other institutions fall to the wayside or abandon their post, we’re the ones who have to hump their bags.
No doubt the educational system needs reform, but it’s not the only piece of the puzzle, and if you have a panel of really smart people from all walks of life, maybe you should ask them to think about that before they tell us what schools should do. That is a much more interesting discussion to me.
Tour of SLA
Educon 2.1 started, for me, on Friday with an extensive tour of Science Leadership Academy, a magnet school in Center City that has a partnership with the Franklin Institute. I’d have to say this tour through SLA was the highlight of the conference; it was the most inspirational, demonstrative, and challenging aspect of the entire weekend.
So this is going to be a long post with four sections of observations:
EduCon21
This past weekend my school gave me the Friday off to spend some time at EduCon 2.1, a small grassroots- Web 2.0- initiated conference dedicated to the future of school especially as it integrates technology. I kicked myself last year for not attending, especially since it’s held at Science Leadership Academy right here in good ole Philadelphia.
I plan within the next week to post my notes, experiences, observations at EduCon this year, but I’m slow so please bear with me. As I post new entries, I’ll update my links here on this page, so this page will serve as a reference for what I’ve written for this conference. (Or you can just subscribe to my feed :)).
Here are my planned posts:
- Tour of SLA
- Panel Discussion: What is the Purpose of School
- Session 1: The Best Educational Ideas in the World
- Breakout Lunch with Jeff Han
- Session 2: The On Button
- Session 3: Using Social Media to Define the New Humanities Classroom
- Panel Discussion: Making Change
- Session 4: Where Does It Live
- Session 5: Rethinking At-Risk Education
- Session 6: Writing the World
You may also check out the wiki dedicated to the conference. Most of the events and sessions were taped, streamed, and uploaded onto Mogulus, but those videos will only be hosted for half a year or so.
For more you can also try this Google search.
An Idea for Small Group Work
I don’t like giving small group work, but I do it because I think it’s important — and I think it’s energizing for students who have social strengths.
But asking kids with varying degrees of social aptitude and executive functionality to get together and accomplish something with relatively little supervision is a little crazy. Even when I assign a more structured collaboration — such as a jigsaw assignment where each student is responsible for an individual part which he or she then shares with a larger group — the quality of contributions varies so widely that it sometimes breeds outspoken frustration and resentment.
I find that the cliché about rock bands holds true for student small groups — that it’s nearly impossible to have a working democracy. Instead, the best groups have the leadership contained in one or two individuals who dictate the direction of the project to the other members of the group.
It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t exploit this model in project assignments. Say, for example, that the main grade for the project falls on one individual. But he or she gets to pick two people to work with — and then also gets assigned another person or two to round out the group. The majority of the group understands that they have largely a supporting role; let’s say the leader gets a say in grading their contribution.
I should say that in reflecting with some of my students today, they generally observed that a group of four is a little too unwieldy, and that they preferred it when the groups were only 2-3 people in size.
Picking Apart a Text
My 8th graders are currently at work on writing book reviews for the novels they read before winter break. In trying to teach how to evaluate a book (again), I am confronted (again) with, well, how one goes about evaluating a book.
I wrote in my last post about a basic comprehension of a book based on facts of character, plot, and setting. At this level, one is just composing a schematic of the story, inventorying the various components.
I asked my 8th graders to evaluate this level on the value of the writing. Are the characters cliché? Where does the plot flag? Is the author prone to florid descriptions and purple prose?
I labeled another level of consideration one of meaning.
The focus at this level, of course, is theme. I’ve had lots of past difficulty explaining the notion of theme to students. I’ve described it in the past as the “life lesson” of the story, but uncomfortably so, since it suggests that all stories are didactic in nature. This year, I lifted from John Truby the notion that the theme is the “moral vision” of the author as revealed in the text. I talk about how an author can have a fairly superficial purpose in writing a book, but that the text can still be representative of the author’s way of thinking and belie his or her worldview, his or her values.
I teach students to look for theme in the bird’s-eye view of the plot. What is the delta value? How has the situation (especially for the protagonist) changed at the end of the novel compared to the beginning of the novel? Is that change tragic or comic (or both)?
Often the most clarifying moment for the theme is the climax. I try to disabuse my students of thinking of the climax as the most exciting or dramatic moment of the story. I define the climax, instead, as the ultimate point of decision for the protagonist — the last character-defining point where the hero chooses one fate over others. The nature of this decision often provides the best clue as to the theme of the novel.
The subplots of the novel also often clarify or suggest further themes. Sometimes they even suggest subtexts.
Subtext. I also have had a hard time defining that term to my satisfaction. Still do. I’ve used the phrases “hidden themes” or “secret meanings,” but I never feel like students really come away with a strong sense of the term. Is it just a theme that’s hard to figure out? No, not really. Subtext suggests something that is below face value, something slyly outside of the straight mechanics of the story. It has a conspiratorial sense to it.
Subtext is more sensed than discovered; it’s something you have a hunch about rather than dig around for. I have, however, used an examination of motifs as a way to point to possible subtexts. It’s akin to the “deja vu” test in The Matrix.
The notion of subtext also bleeds into the last level of examination I’ve found: context. I don’t often talk much about books on this level with my middle school students. I tend to emphasize more New Criticism close reading skills, which are hard enough to get a handle on. I guess I’m also afraid to tempt students of the thinking that the secret to cracking the code of a book is by looking elsewhere to others.
Shame really, since one often doesn’t really appreciate a work’s significance unless you know it’s place in a larger conversation. Moreover, you often can’t get a sense of true critical literacy without tackling a text at this level. With my 8th grade book reviews, I suggest they look at three possible contexts within which to place the book: literary (genre), historical, and personal.
Within the literary context, you take a look at what other texts are like this text. You try to figure out how this book holds a unique place within a category of work. What are the book’s literary influences, and how it has influenced others in turn?
Within the historical context, you try to address the cultural outlook of the world at the time the book was published — and/or the book’s consideration of a specific historical moment within its story. It’s often helpful within this context to consider the dynamics of power between characters to get at, for example, a feminist reading of the novel.
The personal context considers a more psychological reading of the novel. How does an examination of the author’s life and worldview illuminate either the text’s intentionality or, perhaps, an against-the-grain reading?
