• Day 1: Orientation
• Day 2: Survey
• Day 3: In-Class Essay

Day 1: Orientation

Full day of orientation for all middle school students. Lots of running around, crossing out administrative t’s and dotting technical i’s. Some of the teachers complained that this used to get done in a half-day. I must admit I, too, was exhausted by the end of the day, but I also appreciated that it gave me a chance to acquaint myself with this new 7th grade in a more warm and informal way than I would present myself in class. I generally felt that my advisees sized me up in a positive way by the end of the day, and that can only help me as I make my way as a teacher this year.

Day 2: Survey

Assigned seats. I distributed a survey that asked for 1) e-mail contact information, 2) which books they chose to read and do assignments for as part of this class over the summer, and 3) how they would rate themselves as a student in several categories. I then spent a good portion of class reading to them what they should consider when they rate themselves in these categories:

Reading

• Do you like to read? Do you consider yourself a reader?
• How difficult is the reading level of the books you read for pleasure?
• Is it easy for you to get “into” a book? Do you find yourself fully immersed into the story when you read? Does your imagination get fired up when you read?
• Do you easily remember details of characters and plot after you read?
• Does reading a good book make you think about deeper issues? Or do you just read for stories?
• Is it easy for you to sense what the theme of a book is? Do you sometimes find yourself “talking back” to the book or author?
• Do you sometimes admire how a book is written? Do you notice, for example, an author’s style or voice, their use of language?

Writing

• Are you good at writing essays?
• Can you explain yourself well on paper?
• Are you good at making clear and persuasive arguments?
• When you write, do you tend to ramble, or do you deliberately try to be clear and organized?
• Do you have interesting insights about what you’re reading?
• Do you know how to support literary points with evidence from the book?
• Are you annoyed when someone makes a point that is illogical, irrelevant, or insubstantial?
• Do you have a sensitive ear for language?
• Does your academic writing sound mechanical and stilted or natural and flowing?

Vocabulary

• Do you read a lot?
• Do you know a lot of words?
• Are you good at memorizing?
• When you learn a word, do you try to use it in conversation?
• When you learn new vocabulary, do you tend to forget it quickly or do the words stay with you?

Grammar

• Given a word, can you identify what part of speech it normally is? (noun, verb, adjective, adverb)
• Given a basic sentence, can you easily identify the parts of speech of the words in that sentence?
• When you write for classes, do you generally avoid mechanical errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and syntax?
• After you write a first draft, do you sometimes find that what you’ve written doesn’t make sense when you read it aloud?

Projects

• Do you consider yourself a creative person?
• Do you like doing school projects?
• Do you consider yourself a self-motivated person? In other words, given a task, do you generally pursue that task diligently without the need for reminders and prodding?
• Do you try to learn how to do things outside of school?
• When you make something, do you care how polished or beautiful it is? Do you pay attention to aesthetic issues? Are you meticulous and attentive to little details?
• When you read, do you sometimes come up with ideas on how you can translate that book into other mediums (film, song, musical, animation, etc.)?
• Are you comfortable presenting in front of others?

Behavior

• Do you have trouble sitting still in class?
• Do you have trouble staying on-task in class? Are you easily distracted?
• Do you tend not to participate in class discussions and activities?
• Do you tend to over-participate sometimes? That is, do you have a tendency to interrupt others or in other ways demand attention out-of-turn?
• Have you sometimes antagonized your classmates in the past because of your behavior in class?

I asked students to rate themselves from 1-10 in these categories, with a 5 rating being what they consider average among their peers. I also let them know these ratings do not have any bearing on their grade; that they are purely subjective measures meant to give me a sense of their own confidence and self-assessment in these areas. I also encouraged them to write down any notes to me that they thought were relevant or clarifying; I was surprised how many took up that suggestion.

I think I’ll keep this exercise. Not only did it give me some preliminary insight into my students, but it also indirectly communicated my objectives and expectations for the class.

After I collected the surveys and the summer writing assignments, I presented a brief slide show that just listed the items students needed to bring to class the next day: something to write with, loose-leaf paper, and a composition book. I also asked students to check their e-mail that night as their homework.

I then put a tripod in the middle of the class (I now have students sitting in a U facing the front of the class) and took a series of photographs of the students around the room that I could overlap together in a panorama. Doing this gives me something to put on the empty wide bulletin board outside in the hallway, and it gives me a visual prompt that I can use to help me memorize my students’ names.

I had a lot more time left over than I anticipated, and I ended up blowing some hot air about the year’s theme and class expectations. Note to self: don’t expect to students to come up with questions about the class. At this stage, they’re willing to be just passive consumers.

After class, I noted which students brought in their summer writing assignments and tweaked the names on my roster. I started a spreadsheet to record the results of the survey, and then went online to sign into my blog on edublogs.org where I invited all my students to sign in to become co-authors of the blog (that was the e-mail message they were to check).

Day 3: In-Class Essay

Yes, that’s right. I started the year with a 30-minute in-class essay. I told students they could sit anywhere and collected the composition books they were to bring in. I passed back the summer writing assignments I collected the day before and then passed out these instructions:

in-class summer reading essay

It basically says that I want a 5-paragraph book report on the book that each student chose to do their summer reading writing assignments for. Students were allowed to use their writing assignments as open notes for this essay.

So what’s with the shock and awe strategy? Well, I really dread grading all these summer reading writing assignments; they’re tedious to read and assess. There is also always the question of how much of the summer work truly reflects the student’s individual ability and insight. So this year, I’m trying this. It’s non-critical essay; I’m not asking for much literary analysis, just a summary of the book’s narrative arc. And I’ll give the option to students that if they don’t like their grade on the essay, they can request I grade their writing assignments instead.

At the end of class, I requested that students bring in the one summer reading book they were all required to read (The Bean Trees for the 7th graders, The Lord of the Flies for the 8th graders) and check their e-mail and the class blog on Sunday.

After class, I noted who brought in composition books like they were supposed to and also noted who still hadn’t turned in their summer writing assignments. This year I’ve made it a goal to make more specific my comments about each individual student, and so I’m making more of an effort to keep a running written record of my mental notes of my students.

On Saturday, I made up mass e-mail groups for each of my classes, created a Facebook group for my classes, and polished the Google Sites web sites for my 7th and 8th graders. I then sent out mass invitations to the Google Sites web sites and the Facebook group to all my students and posted a blog post suggesting students subscribe to the blog by RSS or e-mail. After a little equivocation, I decided to bite to bullet and pay to become a supporter for a year; the extra features and control are worth it. It’s also worth setting up a Feedburner feed for the site, if only to allow students to subscribe to the blog by e-mail (I’ve found students just don’t use RSS readers).

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:

1. Substitution: just changing the tool, not the praxis
2. Augmentation: supplementing current practices with technological opportunities like the internet
3. Modification: letting the use of technology tweak classroom practices and attitudes
4. 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:

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

PRAYER. (I)

by George Herbert

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
        Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
        The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
        Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
        The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
        Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
        Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
        The land of spices, something understood.

September 11

by Teresa Cader

after George Herbert

Understanding something isn’t prayer, necessarily.

Cinnamon croissants, hot pretzels speared under glass,

cafe latte behind hostility’s headlines. God

in the details: man well-dressed, reversed thunder

from a milky-breathed baby. Engines pitted against

time, take-off code from the air traffic control tower,

radar plumbing the atmosphere. Slumped in blue jean

bell-bottoms, teens nodding to heavy metal on ear phones.

Hard not to hear. Journey of strangers locked in a tube.

Annals of the absurd faithful, prepared to meet the stars

in a biff of pressured air. Softness of cruising, bliss

of landing, love waiting in the wings, the cockpit.

In ordinary hearts, a slivered wish. Muted joy

at unfastening seatbelts. Paraphrased as relief.

Flying from ice pole to desert to birders’ paradise

in privileged pilgrimage, the best cuts of wool.

Storing luggage in the overheads, not knowing

the six days world would be transposed in one hour.

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):

1. Social anchor: or the hub of community life, open 24/7, available not only to kids but to adults
2. 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
3. Idea generator: a place to invent, create, and engage in blue-sky thinking
4. Idea harvester: a place to prototype, test, and develop those very ideas into reality
5. Player in the community’s economic network: and then a place to make those ideas marketable and valuable and available to the larger community
6. 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.

So this is going to be a long post with four sections of observations:

• the respect I saw for students
• the commitment I saw in the faculty
• the results I saw in the classroom
• and the support of the technology infrastructure

The Kids are All Right

One thing you could not help but notice throughout the entire conference was the student leadership on display. Kids weren’t standing around, waiting for adults to give them a task. They didn’t even constantly consult a teacher if they encountered some obstacle or unexpected situation. They were really in change, from taking registration, to setting up video streams of sessions, to leading tours, to handling tech support, to directing baffled adult attendees. They were in the loop, confident, and articulate.

Even outside of conference duties, students were constantly given non-trivial responsibilities as part of normal school. I witnessed one math class where a sunny junior practically taught the class, standing in front, calling on her peers, giving guidance through problems. I found out during a physics lab that each group of two or three students were working on a different experiment so that they could each present their findings in front of everyone else and postulate on the significance of their conclusions — like real scientists. I found one group of students in drama class rehearsing their lines for a skit they were to perform for fifth graders. Several faculty members recounted instances where the students taught them how to use the technology available in their classrooms.

That kind of trust extended in smaller (and I would say, more meaningful) ways: not hovering over laptops, having no hallway monitors, asking students to take public transportation to go on field trips around the city. Students were allowed to vandalize their school-issue lab coats, put stickers on their school-issue laptops, lounge in empty classrooms during lunch, and engage in IM chats during class.

Several students readily proffered that some of this trust was seeded with the highly selective admissions process. It’s nice to be able to pick your population, certainly. But I was personally blown away by how collegially and productively these kids worked in small-group project after small-group project. Surely they must have been trained and taught to get to that point; culture goes so far, but if you’d like to keep it a certain way, you need to establish institutional anchors and reinforcers to constantly communicate the values you prioritize.

And indeed, as Chris Lehmann exhorted in his session, the culture was very purposefully designed. He pointed out in his session one of the key ingredients: the advisory. Every teacher is in charge of an advisory group, and that advisory group remains the same year after year — all the way up till graduation. Advisories meet twice a week in 45 minute blocks — just like a regular class. I can imagine that they provide a kind of homeyness for students — a place of stability and reflection, a regular little haven to decompress from academic rigor or hallway politics — but they are also the epicenter of a kind of compassionate accountability, where the student learns to take responsibility for his or her learning.

According to the kids, some of the advisors allow the advisory period to be mostly a kind of study hall and others will actually teach classes on values and productivity. What seems key to me is that a good chunk of regular time for advisory allows for regular pow-wow time for each student with an adult advocate. It facilitates the consideration of each student as an individual. When a student seems to be slipping through the cracks, I’m told, the next step is for the advisor to pull in the principal for a heart-to-heart intervention. Every student is expected to succeed.

Advisories also manage and launch student time at the Franklin Institute (for freshmen) and ILP (Independent Learning Project). The freshmen Franklin Institute experience sounds like a training ground for project-based learning and collaboration. And though ILP was described to me as a kind of internship, I love how open-ended it actually seems to be. Some go out and enter books into the Free Library’s database, others work with tots in a daycare center, and still others are working on a research project. Obvious pedagogical value does not seem to be the object; pursuit of personal interest and going out into the community does. That’s cool.

Kool-Aid Teachers

I didn’t get to converse as much with the teachers, but from the vibe I got, they all seemed to have earnest buy-in to what the school was all about. And I didn’t get the sense that Chris Lehmann was a cult leader, neither, but that a strong social contract was drawn up among the faculty, which translated into the students.

It helps that the school was starting from scratch, and it developed a mission that was clear and simple. It starts with three simple questions:

1. How do we learn?
2. What can we create?
3. What does it mean to lead?

which is answered in five core values:

• inquiry
• research
• collaboration
• presentation
• reflection

in a project-based curriculum.

What then impressed me was that every class also shared the same broad rubric, assessing every project, from papers to labs, with the following criteria:

In fact, the primary classes in every grade share the same broad essential questions:

• 9th grade: Identity
  • Who am I?
  • How do I interact with the environment?
  • How does the environment affect me?
• 10th grade: Systems
  • How are systems created and defined?
  • How do systems shape the world?
  • What is the role of the individual in systems?
• 11th grade: Change
  • What causes systemic and individual change?
  • What is the role of the individual in creating and sustaining change?
  • What is the relationship between the self and a changing world?

The core values, the rubric, and the essential questions for the respective grade are posted up on every classroom.

And guess where all this comes from? Every week there’s a mandatory two-hour faculty meeting. Can you imagine that? Two hours of uninterrupted time with everybody locked in and willing to work. That’s serious buy-in. And don’t forget the face-time every teacher gets with the kids in their advisory — that’s systems feedback right there.

It’s not surprising, then, what results and should result: true interdisciplinary overlap, alignment to mission, real system problem-solving about individual problems (including individual kids), blue-sky thinking and doing. Give a bunch of idealistic young teachers some real time and they’ll push each other to be better.

Cool Shit

So let me tell you about some of what I saw inside individual classrooms.

I saw a physics classroom that didn’t use a textbook (in fact, the only textbook I saw in the entire school was in a Health class), but virtually built one by having small groups of students work on individual lab experiments. Data is collected for these experiments in student laptops through sensors plugged into the laptops. Students then graph out the data, interpret their results, and present their conclusions to the rest of the class. The discussion from these presentations leads to student-led, teacher-guided theorizing about physics principles.

“What if you get stuck? What if you can’t make heads or tails of your lab?” someone asked. Our student tour guide xeroxed out copies of a handout the physics teacher made for her students. It’s a sequence of twenty things to try if you get stuck. Part of the homework is to go down the list and try them, and then come to class prepared to report where in the sequence you had problems. Here’s the list:

1. Read the problem
2. Rewrite the problem in your own words.
3. Draw a picture of what you think is happening.
4. Make a list of the information provided using full words (NO ABBREVIATIONS). (Example: the velocity of the car at the beginning is 0 meters every second: you must be clear on WHEN this information is true).
5. Label the information on the picture you drew. (In your picture, write v[car] = 0 m/s at the beginning)
6. Make a list of other situations that you have encountered that are similar.
7. Identify the important objects (draw a system schema).
8. Draw a force diagram, using only objects you identified in step 7.
9. Explain what your force diagram means about what the object is doing.
10. Write down what object you are interested in.
11. Seriously, write down what you are focusing on.
12. Make a prediction about what the object will be doing in the future.
13. Explain why you think your prediction is true.
14. Write down what you think the problem is asking you to do IN A COMPLETE SENTENCE in your own words.
15. Write down any relationships you know that include the quantity you are trying to find (is there an equation that includes this)?
16. For each equation/relationship, write down the situations in which you can use that equation (when there is no acceleration, when there IS acceleration, etc.)
17. Determine which equation is appropriate for the situation described in this problem.
18. Write down the information you need in order to use the equation you selected in 17.
19. If you know the information you need, use it in the equation. If you DO NOT know the information you need, repeat steps 14-18 for each piece of information you are missing.
20. Write down your answer IN A COMPLETE SENTENCE with UNITS and make sure your sentence does what you wrote down in 14 and makes sense with 2.

I saw a math class in which a student got in front of the whiteboard, wrote down the first problem of last night’s homework, and then started calling on her peers to describe how they solved the problem. Oh I wish I copied down what the problem was because it was ingenious. It went something like, “A teacher has a grading system where he gives x amount of points for blah blah blah…” and so on, but the problem was like: “Make up a story that describes the equation 4x = 2y-5.” My heart leapt with joy.

Incidentally, there was a student checking her chat on her laptop the entire time, but nobody cared.

I saw a history class that began with reviewing the news by checking web sites on the SmartBoard. And then the discussion really took off when it went to the homework assignment: attend a public meeting. A few students went to a School Reform Commission meeting and ranted on about how nothing of substance was discussed. (They brought this up later in the form of a question during a keynote panel discussion in the conference.) The teacher then had her class do a version of speed-dating where they had to explain in two minutes to a partner what happened at the meeting they attended, and then move on to the next partner.

This same history teacher described in a conference session how she also gave an assignment where on Inauguration Day, students had to do a man-on-the-street interview and ask a stranger what the inauguration meant to them. They could write up some copy and take a picture or record some audio or video — whatever they did they had to post their work on the web and tag it with a pre-determined tag. Some of the students even did this assignment in D.C. All the work was gathered together on one web site (which I currently can’t find).

I saw an English class where the teacher randomly picked a seat in the class and then gave the student in that seat an HGC — High Grade Compliment. He sat directly in front of that student, made direct eye contact, gathered his thoughts, and gave a lengthy, substantial, heart-felt compliment about how great he thought that kid was.

In that same English class, students peer-reviewed their recent major project, a Pecha Kucha-style slide presentation of 20 slides for about seven minutes (20 seconds per slide). Inasmuch as I was impressed at the research and substance within the presentations, I was further wowed by how pointed but helpful the peer feedback was. We were watching drafts shared on SlideShare but the class seemed genuinely concerned that their final presentations needed to be of a certain quality before they posted their final official drafts online for the whole world to see. One presentation in particular, a funny and slightly blue argument against dropping out of school, provoked a lively discussion about the appropriateness of off-color language and audience.

I saw students at an engineering electives class plot out parabolas on their laptops, plug their laptops into the SmartBoard projector, and then trace their plotted parabolas onto tracing paper so that they had a template which they could use to make parabolic mirrors to try to increase the efficiency of solar panels.

I saw plenty of examples of real authentic assessments. Instead of unit tests filled with multiple-choice questions and in-class essays, students did “benchmark projects.” That English Powerpoint project was one. Another one was a physics project where students had to ride public transportation and then do a write-up and poster about the forces that affected their ride. Benchmark projects could be papers, web sites, skits, oral presentations, and other applied work — but they aren’t tests of memorized knowledge.

One more thing. In my conversation with a Spanish teacher, he mentioned that he had only been at SLA for one year. He wasn’t technologically savvy, he didn’t know much about computers and was a little overwhelmed by all the web sites and gadgets and software that was available and ubiquitous in the school. “But that’s why I wanted to come here,” he said.

It Just Works

Every student has a Macbook.

It was issued freshmen year; the first graduating class may very well take theirs with them to college. Students get to take it home, write on it, put stickers on it, put their own software and bit-torrented music on it. They give it back in the summer for software updates. If it breaks, they get a loaner while it gets fixed.

There’s a firewall in the school, just as there’s a firewall in every school in the District of Philadelphia, so kids can’t go on Facebook (or even, I think, Youtube), but they can chat and surf the web during class. They can listen to music while they do their journal entries for English class. Every now and then, though, a teacher may say, “Okay, everyone close your laptops. Let’s just sit and think about this for a minute.” And if your grade drops, the school has the ability to limit your application use (no chatting or iTunes).

Students all have network fileserver space where they can store and submit work to teachers — it shows up as an extra hard drive on their laptops. They can plug in sensors and SmartBoard projectors into their laptops. Everyone uses the same software to plot graphs, manipulate data, make presentations, edit videos. I guess the summer updates ensure that.

Every teacher uses Moodle to organize their course, post handouts, set up forums. A few teachers have even posted their grades online. The new generation of Moodle doesn’t really impress me much; it’s still slow, and it still looks like a pain to use. What is useful for the teachers, though, is that many of them require students to turn in their work to Moodle.

The school has a Drupal web site, which I didn’t get to look too closely at. It looks like students have posted blog entries into it.

Not everything is super-high-tech. A lot of teachers had little widgets on their Macbooks like little stopwatches for activities, or a random number generator for the HGC. I still saw writing being done on paper, poster boards with fairly crude hand drawings, problems on white boards not SmartBoards. That’s positive, in my book.

What’s truly envious is that for a school so integrated into technology, things don’t regularly grind into a halt, and most people seem to feel that things run fine. It just works.

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.

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.

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?