If You Already Know “The Answer,” Don’t Pretend You’ve a Problem

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Bud Hunt

Yesterday, I was catching up on the journal articles, reports, white papers, and the other stuff that’d piled up in my analog “read later” stack.¹ One article, which I quickly skimmed and then returned to my shelf of back issues, bugged me a bit.

Not the article itself. It was a research summary of some work done to promote technology use with practicing teachers. The professional development project was similar to some of our Digital Learning Collaborative work, and appeared to validate some of our decisions. But one of the appendices – there are four, if I recall correctly – has returned to my front brain a few times since yesterday’s scan.

The appendix was a template for creating problem-based STEM exercises for students. And an offhand comment in the thing has really, really bugged me. I don’t have access to the document right now, so I’m working from memory, but in the section of the document labeled “Solution,” which came after “Problem,” was the statement, “If more than one solution seems possible, then likely the problem was poorly constructed.”

What terrible advice.

Better advice would be the opposite. Something like “If only one solution seems possible, then likely you’re working with a really uninteresting problem, and should scrap the entire activity.” Or maybe, “If you believe you have every possible answer to this problem worked out, you should stop lying to yourself.” Or, “Just go ahead and give them a worksheet. It’d be faster.”

Seems to me that whenever you’re actually asking students to contemplate real, authentic problems and scenarios², then it’ll be pretty difficult to know the “answer” to them. And if you do know the answer, then perhaps you should just tell the students what you know, quickly, and move on to the next problem.

And you certainly shouldn’t be in the business of only offering problems to students that you’ve already decided don’t need further attention.

Right?

I caught up rather quickly, as I’ve discovered that my past self isn’t always the best at determining what my then future and current present self is going to want to spend time with. [↩]
And we should really, really be doing that. [↩]

Data Dashboards

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Bud Hunt

In a district meeting I’m a participant in, we’re reading the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution. It’s an interesting book, and the main thesis is that change isn’t about doing everything, it’s about breaking the essential stuff you want to get done into bites that people can handle, then building structures and cultures around those bite-sized pieces, helping the folks you work with understand how to measure and take score of their efforts and how they contribute to a larger goal. It’s not a radical idea, but it does make sense, and the execution is the hardest part. I like the book and am looking forward to our continuing conversations (and hopefully action) about the text.

One of the biggest and most interesting elements of the book, to me at least, is the idea that you must trust the people in your organization to be able to track their own progress in what they do. Specifically, the authors suggest that while leadership should set the large goal (the “wildly important goal” in the language of the book), the participants in the work should be tracking and measuring their own small pieces of that goal. And, I’m sorry, but let’s dig into the weeds of how the book says to do that, because it’s going to be helpful.

The authors argue that there are two types of measures that folks can use to assess their progress. They call them “lag measures” and “lead measures.” Lag measures are the ones that we often think about when we’re talking about goals:

A lag measure is the measurement of a result you are trying to achieve. We call them lag measures because by the time you get the data the result has already happened, they are always lagging. . . . Lead measures are different; they foretell the result. They have two primary characteristics. First, a lead measure is predictive, meaning that if the lead measure changes, you can predict that the lag measure will also change. Second, a lead measure is influenceable; it can be directly influenced by the team. That is, the team can make a lead measure happen without a significant dependence on another team. (pp. 64-65)

In school terms, a lag measure is a state test score, or an end of year report card. But a lead measure might be a habit or practice that you implement or work on throughout the year, taking score every now and again. More on this in a minute. The book specifically mentions schools and schooling, and I thought this was a good way to say it:

For example, it’s easy for schoolteachers to measure the reading levels of students with a standardized test. Often, they obsess over these lag measures. However, it’s harder to come up with lead measures that predict how students will do on the text. The school might hire tutors or reserve more time for uninterrupted reading. In any case, the school is likely to do better if it tracks data on time spent reading or in tutoring (lead measures) rather than hope and pray that the reading scores (lag measures) will rise of their own accord. (p. 66)

The tracking of lead measures is so important, the authors argue, because they’re how you move in a new direction. Figure out what to observe, and the observation and tracking of it can change a course, or improve a result down the road. That’s, again, pretty basic thinking, but it’s right, and the hard part is building the habits and the follow through to do that. In fact, it’s so hard, that the authors argue that one of the four disciplines is to “keep a compelling scoreboard” of those lead measures so that folks can pay attention to their change process. They phrase it this way:

The third discipline is to make sure everyone knows the score at all times, so that they can tell whether or not they are winning. (p. 80)

The scoreboard is a tool for engagement:

Simply put, people disengage when they don’t know the score. When they can see at a glance whether or not they are winning they become profoundly engaged. (p. 80)

More important than having the scoreboard, though, is that the people playing the game¹ need to be in charge of that scoreboard. They need to be trusted to use it. And the trust is sometimes hard to build from manager to employee, or teacher to student. Or district person to school person:

“So, how can I tell if they’re doing these things?” the manager asked.

“You won’t. Your people will track themselves.”

“How do I know it’s accurate?” the manager asked. “What if they lie?”

We bet he could trust them. (p.71-72)

As I read about these measures, and started to think about what lead measures we might want to focus on, which is tricky, because we’re still, as a team, trying to determine our wildly important goal², I realized that we don’t, in general, give our students much trust when it comes to how we ask them to pay attention to their learning.

We collect an awful lot of data about our students. The third party tools that we buy for them to use as intervention, remediation, and sometimes textbook, collect lots of information about them, too. But when do they get that information back in a way that could help them to manage their own learning better?

Could we build some tools that would help to foster metacognition and habits of attention that would help our students learn better? Could we build them some compelling scoreboards and tools that they might use to get better at learning? Can we help them build their own?

That’s a powerful idea for me right now. And there are certainly others thinking about this. Audrey Watters has written multiple thoughtful posts about the intersection of the Quantified Self movement and learning, and I’d encourage you to read her work. And, as I asked in a post a short while back, I’d encourage you to be thinking about how your students interact with the data you collect with and about them.

Maybe, too, you should be helping them to determine their own data dashboards to help them reach their own “wildly important goals.”

Right?

A metaphor that might be a bit stressed here, but stay with me [↩]
“Do learning better,” isn’t terribly specific. Nor is my current favorite: “Learn more better.” Teacher version: “Teach more better.” [↩]

Follow Up to Today’s (Well, Okay, Yesterday’s) Blogging Conversation

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Bud Hunt

It was a real treat to get to spend an hour in conversation with some of my blogging and writing teachers on Thursday. We were assembled at Connected Learning TV by Jabiz to talk about student blogging. I hope we get to have round two soon – there was plenty more to talk about. Here’s the recording:

And a few further thoughts. If I had to give my stump speech for blogging, the talking points would look something like this:

Blogging should be a habit, not a unit. Multiple blogging units for students as they move through an institution makes for a really creepy digital graveyard of barely begun texts. Better to build the habit early on and practice as you go. Therefore . . .
Blogging should be buiit into the infrastructure of the learning institution, not up to the whims of a particular teacher or teachers.
Blogs can be really interesting containers – you can put pretty much any digital stuff into a blog that you’d ever want to – but they should also be playful playgroundy spaces. Blogs are much better as places of play rather than places of expectation.
Of course, the thing about toys and choices is that sometimes you’ve got to be able to choose not to play at all. Otherwise, you’re not really playing. Well, you are, but you’re playing a game that isn’t blogging. It’s called school. And that game isn’t always all that fun to play.

I said during the webinar that I felt like the infrastructure that we build, support and maintain should feel more like an invitation than an obligation. We should make spaces and places on the Web where we’d actually like to spend time, and we should be working to bring other folks in to the party. I think that’s the kind of work that Jim and Alan do. They play in public and invite others to play along. I think that Jabiz does that in his classroom.

Maybe I’ve been forgetting to do that lately.

You Should Probably Just Grade Less

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I have the pleasure of getting to pop in to the 2012 CSUWP Summer Institute this week and next, helping in a variety of small roles. Yesterday, I was present for a discussion of Because Digital Writing Matters, a common text for the SI that I think is worth your time to read if you’ve not yet had the opportunity.

I was there as someone who knows a bit about digital writing, and so a question was posed to me by a teacher in the group. She’s working on an inquiry project about how technology can be useful to streamline grading. I believe her question was something like “How can I streamline my grading practice using technology.” She was hoping I could suggest some things she might try.

I don’t think she liked my answer.

I suggested that she might want to remove the words “using technology” from the question, as most of the things that I think would streamline a teacher’s practice when it comes to grading are things that have very little to do with technology.

For starters, I think teachers, in general, grade too many things. So one way to streamline would be to “grade” less. And that doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t ask students to write, and write often. But we don’t need to grade everything that comes to us. In fact, we should grade very little of it. Heck, and I know this’ll sound a bit weird, but we shouldn’t even read all the writing we ask students to do.

One of the choices that a writer makes, and that a student writer should get to make, too, is when and how and where and with whom we share our writing. Reading and grading everything doesn’t help there. Nor is it manageable for the teacher. I find that we’ve built an expectation into school that teachers are there to write lots of notes in margins and markup student writing.

We’ve built the wrong expectations.

In an #engchat conversation a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that we should take Peter Elbow’s suggestion to read and respond less like evaluators and more like interested readers. I suggested that a copy of Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers would be worth reading.

Another thing that I suggested, before thinking about technology options, is that we need to make sure the assignments we are asking of students are the right things to be asking them to do. And, we need to build structures that support our students reading and writing and making things in partnership with each other.

Then I think I did suggest that many tools of the Web can help to make the work of putting writing in to each others’ hands and eyeballs easier than ever. But that only matters if you’re thinking about how you want students to spend their time. I’m eager to help this teacher in her inquiry work – the question, with or without the last two words, is a good one and worth her time.

Were I thinking about it, I probably would’ve recommended Dave’s recent posts about contract grading. While he’s teaching at the university level, I think they provide some useful ideas for thinking about assessment.

Too often, when we reach for technology, we do so in the service of something that isn’t just a technology issue. When a grading load is unreasonable. that’s likely not a technology problem. Taking a look at the whole picture is sometimes necessary before moving to suggestions of new tools or platforms. Then we can look for tools or apps or whatever that will help us do what needs doing. The problem is, taking that look takes longer than handing out a list of apps or websites.

So guess which thing happens?

#DML2012 – The Experience of Listening. Was (Too Often) All.

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Bud Hunt

One of my takeaways from the DML 2012 conference is that the messages of connected learning have not quite caught up yet with the practices of academic conferences.

It’s a common complaint – both that I hear and that I sometimes make – that the learning spaces that we want for children should at least attempt to be modeled by the conferences/meetings where we go to talk about and explore learning possibilities. And while I get that there’s a culture or cultures to academia, and that much of the DML community is rooted in research and dissemination practices that are fairly formal, well, I’m struck that the medium and the messages of the event seemed to be in slight conflict. Even on the mothership, the interesting stuff was still rather on the edge.

Having run conferences and meetups and managed the learning of others’ both grown ups and children, I understand that it is a most difficult undertaking, so I should say right here that I found the DML event nothing short of wicked good. I learned a bunch and will be processing some powerful learning for a while to come. And yet. I’d gently suggest to the organizers of DML 2013 a few small points.

The first being a softball. I’m sure that everyone noticed that the space where the conference was held seemed far smaller than the people of DML. I think the folks there were the right folks – it was a fascinating mix of students and teachers and professors and researchers and makers and geeks.¹ But the way the conference was set up – or at least my version of it² – the sessions were overcrowded and packed into too small rooms and I couldn’t get to many of the things I wanted to see. Even when I could get a seat in a room – and to do so I had to stake out a space early – there were two or three other concurrent sessions I didn’t want to miss.

Here’s the tricky thing. At an event where the messages from the community and presenters and panelists were all about experiencing powerful participatory learning, well, we sure were expected, by design and practice and custom, to sit still and listen a lot. Certainly, we were listening to fascinating stories of promise and practice and learning and teaching and exploration and study and wonder – but we were listeners, and that’s a very particular kind of experience.

I listened to Super Awesome Sylvia talk about making things that mattered. And I really enjoyed hearing from her, particularly when she raised the differences between her learning at home and at school. But might we have made something together?

I listened to Jess Klein explain the potential of a HackJam. I love the tools and mindsets that Mozilla is building in that space. Having experienced a HackJam³, I know they are transformative. They are a Big Deal. Might we have done that together? At least a little bit? Perhaps this happened and I missed it.

I came to one session where a presenter began to read from a paper – the same paper excerpted in the conference program – on the power of media for engaging students. The presenter read from the paper that was provided to me already.

Even in our session on the multiplicity of composition – a session that we intentionally attempted to do differently than a talking head panel – we struggled to make it an active learning experience⁴. I don’t know if we were struggling against the Internet access in the hotel, or the expectations of the audience, or the limits of our imagination. Or maybe something else.

There’s work to do.

I thought the idea of the Mozilla Science Fair – an hour and a half long reception showcasing many of the institutions and organizations doing important learning work – was a great idea. But an hour or so of crowded tables meant we got short looks into thoughtful work. Those same twenty or so tables should’ve been parceled out over the entire event, with five at a time running engaging events modeling their fascinating and engaging practices. There was a big empty space in the conference area that cried out for us to use it for playing and making and exploring and doing together.⁵

How can we collectively do a better job of modeling the structures, habits, and aptitudes we want to see of learning and learners, particularly when DML learns together? And what can we do with the listening we’ve done to improve the experiences that are to come? Yeah, I’m saying “we” and “DML,” because, like Chad, I’m willing to say that I am engaged by this group of thoughtful people. I’d feel lucky to be counted as a member of the DML community. I so want them/us to do well.

And there’s room to grow.

That said, I didn’t see lots of IT folk there – but perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough. Or maybe operations types aren’t the crowd of DML. Oh. That’d be sad if it were true. [↩]
Everyone, you know, has their own conference experience, a collection of what they saw, with whom they spoke, and a variety of other factors. No two people have the same experience, of course. I may well have had the “bad” one. [↩]
That was masterfully facilitated at ISTE 2011 by Chad and Meenoo. [↩]
The writing some of the participants shared during that session, I thought, is worth more of my time. [↩]
The impromptu Occupy Badges session – a spillout of the overcrowded session on Badges – was a good example of what might’ve happened in that space. [↩]

Play Is Hard Work, Part 1

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Bud Hunt

In a series of posts, of which this is the first, I’d like to try to write my way through my thinking about play and love and culture and how I’ve been exploring those concepts lately. In this post, I will attempt to give some background. Future posts in this series will attempt to move from that background into how that thinking, or at least my awareness of it, is coming to life in my work and experiences.

I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop at this year’s ITSC event in Portland that feels to me like an important shift in my work. The session, which I wrote a description of in a hurry several months ago, but knew could be important, was an attempt to capture some of my thinking about the use of play to build culture. I’m calling it “Play is Hard Work.” Here’s how I described it when I hastily wrote that description:

Play should be the cornerstone of much of what we do with technology for teaching and learning. Heck, play should comprise a considerable chunk of all of our learning time. But what does play look like in a digital environment? How can we create playful spaces around serious topics? And are play and fun the same things?
In this session, we’ll privilege habits over tools and explore play and playfulness with whatever gadgets, gizmos and whatnots we have in our classrooms.

That description was just about right – but it missed something. I realized as I was trying to build the session that I didn’t have the language, or the framework, to talk about what I meant by “play” and “playfulness.”

The dictionary helped. Some. Many online dictionaries have more than twenty different definitions of play, but this one, from the Definr definition, is most certainly the closest to what I was trying to get at:

Play, then, is finding freedom in the face of constraint. Yes. That’s getting towards the essence of what I find important in the term¹.

Those definitions helped, but they weren’t enough. I wanted to help folks have some experiences like the ones that we are having every week in our school district IT department – but I also wanted to connect what I saw/see happening in that culture to what I want to see happening in school culture in general. I’d like folks to be more playful in most areas of their work and not work. I’d like to play more as a parent, as a teacher, as a person.

And I think other people should be more playful, too.

But I don’t mean that everything is “fun.” I think assuming that play must be fun is a bad, and likely dangerous, assumption. I think you can play with really serious ideas and concepts. I think you can play with hurt, in an attempt to restore community. And it took months of reading and wondering and asking for me to find the language I needed to structure the workshop – I needed Michelle to hand me a book that has been her go to for a long time on the subject². Thankfully, she did.

I needed some of the language of improv. My friend Zac has been living this language for a while in his teaching and his theater work, but I didn’t see it until I really started to look.

At school, or at least at teacher school, I remember that many folks told me that it was essential to build community in my classroom. But it was always described in such a way that the idea was that you built it, and then you moved on to whatever it was you really wanted to do with your class – teach them English, or science, or whatever.

I’m more and more certain that you’re never actually done building community. Community and culture are not just peripheral to teaching and learning – they’re how the teaching and the learning actually happen. Some call this rhizomatic learning, or connectivism, but whatever you call it, teaching and learning are about building community. Community of people, of ideas, of experience and activity. Icky-feeling places, places we’d rather not be, don’t tend to be spaces where much learning happens³. Maslow comes to mind – we can’t learn until we’re safe. Playful cultures have to be safe cultures. And safe cultures can be playful ones.

And the cultures and communities that you build around classroom cultures matter, too. That’s something that I’ve been learning as a participant observer in my school district’s IT department. Over the last two years, we’ve been going through a major culture shift, masterfully facilitated by my boss, Joe McBreen.

He came to a place where everyone worked really hard and mostly alone.⁴ He recognized that we needed to know each other to be better at our work.

Through a process of huddles, short weekly meetings centered on us as people and learners together, and not on our work, and creating learning opportunities for our department to be and to learn together, he began to shape our culture into more than it was, and to create for us a need to do our work together. We are more playful as a unit, and it’s showing it the work we are doing elsewhere.

That story, and how I tried to create something similar in a room full of strangers, and why that matters, are the subjects of future posts in this series.

Oddly, other definitions contradict that one that I find so essential. And others still add flavor to the word. It’s amazing, or troubling, that such a small word has so much baggage. [↩]
You should buy the book. It’s a quick read – I read it in an hour – but it gave me the language I needed to talk about play and playfulness. [↩]
Of course, I think I’ve known this for a long time, but I’m at a place where I’m seeing implications beyond classrooms, and it’s never a bad idea to try to sketch this stuff out. [↩]
I don’t say this to knock the department as it was – it was good in lots of ways. There was room to grow, though, which is one reason I went there almost five years ago now. [↩]

Digging Out My Sash

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I took a quick peek at the Mozilla Open Badges project a little while back, and liked what I saw.

It’s an attempt to create an open infrastructure for badges around the Web. I like the technical pieces that allow anyone to offer any badge to anyone else in a consistent way. It makes sense to build tools that work for everybody, and that are open. I like that.

And I thought I was something I’d want to explore later, as I’m always looking for ways to help make the professional development I’m doing to make sense to other people. Maybe, I thought, a badge could help¹. I put that idea on a side burner.

Then yesterday happened, and I’m going to have to pay a great deal of attention to the project. In a hurry.

That’s because this year’s Digital Media & Learning Competition is all about the badges.

It was fascinating to listen to the announcement² and to follow along as the tweets came rolling in. It was, and is, also fascinating to consider the possibilities opened up through the use of badges to build portfolios of experiences and skillsets, to show the world what students, of all ages, can learn and do.

Except. Hang on a second.

I’m writing this post when I should be working on my thesis. The thesis is the last thing I’ve got to do in order to earn my ~~badge~~ Master’s degree in English Education. But it seems like there’s an awful lot of important questions wrapped inside assumptions in DML’s competition announcement. Felt right to at least try to get them down.

The Twitter stream of commentary, a piece of which was captured earlier by Audrey, was chock full o’ questions and concerns. Alex and plenty of other folks have all written thoughtfully about the announcement. It was clear to me, as I watched the announcement follow up panel, that the group, as a whole, didn’t have a consistent idea about what badges were/are/for/might do. I heard each of these possibilities:

Badges as credentialing

Badges, I heard, might be used as a way of denoting that someone has a particular skillset in a field in which there might not be a current credentialling method. Makes sense, and is the most straight forward use of a badge. Think Boy Scouts. Girl Scouts. Medal of Honor.

Badges as awarding credit

This one seems mostly similar to the previous function of credentialling, but it’s not. Quite. Earning a badge that counts as credit would require that a credit-granting institution³ would accept the badge in lieu of another requirement. Put enough badges together, and you get a really advanced badge. Or a diploma. Or a degree. So, not only can you do something in the eyes of an institution, but will another institution believe them and let you take a pass on their test of competency?

Badges as a way of honoring non-school learning

I’ve written before about how I find some of the most interesting learning taking place on the edge of school and home, in semi-school spaces. After school clubs. Fringe projects. And I want that learning to “count,” in the sense that I don’t think that teachers should have to fight so hard for those types of learning experiences. But I wonder if the best way to honor that learning is to make sure it stays out of school. If, as I heard a panelist say during the announcement, school is so ineffective and terrible at learning, then shouldn’t we try to fix school? Might we want to move some of the good semi-school learning into the classroom?⁴

If badges are an attempt to rebuild school, well, that might be a fascinating idea. Or a terrible one.

Badges as motivation

Students will be more inclined to go after a particular type of learning, I heard, if there were a motivator to push or pull the student along.⁵ That’s a dangerous reason to even consider a badge, I think, as I know enough about motivation to know that, as soon as the badges go away, the learning stops. Not good. Uh uh. Don’t pursue this one.

Badges as assessment

Actually, the badges wouldn’t be the assessments – just proof of their successful completion. And that’s where this starts to get tricky for me. For one thing, I don’t think enough folks understand that a badge involves assessment of one sort or another. And it’s the assessments and experiences that we want to fiddle with in school.

Badges as curriculum design

If badges can count as far as credit in traditional schools and universities, then badge program designers are now curriculum designers. What I didn’t hear at the announcement, but hope to hear about soon, is how folks might think about the Common Core SS, the current consortia developing the next generation of school assessments, and their thinking about badges.

Those were the purposes I heard in the time I was listening. And that’s complex stuff.

Other folks, I’m sure, who are smarter and more articulate than I am, will soon start talking about this work and what it means for power relationships between traditional schooling and other institutions.⁶ But what I’m not hearing people talk about, or suggest that they understand, is what it is that it means to “count.” I mean count in two senses of the word – both the mathematical meaning of seeing how many of something that you have, but also the way a student asks when they’re handed an assignment – will this count? Does it matter?

And, at school, we’ve done a bad thing by tying “counting” or “mattering” to “grading.”

If all badges do is fiddle with the object that students are taught to worship, rather than working to eliminate idol worship altogether, then there’s not much sense in exploring them.

If badges transform all grades that matter into “pass/fail” situations, well, that might be something. To match what students can do with their academic credentials as measured by actual performance tasks would be a good thing⁷.

But, if the DML competition encourages thinking and writing and exploration and action around ideas like the idea that any accountability system, or accreditation system, is ultimately a subjective system, made by people, however we design it, then I say, let’s rock. But let’s do so carefully.

Badges are not magical. They do not cure cancer. They are unable to stop large (or small) scale forest fires. Badges, particularly digital ones, cannot be eaten. The digital kind can’t even be burned for fuel. Badges do not make children smarter, or hard work less difficult.

But they’re certainly worth talking about, if they might lead to productive change. And, if they’re going to make a grand entrance in teaching and learning, at school and in the community, then I hope to goodness that teachers are paying attention.

Give us a way to show scope and sequence, or perhaps a “brand” for our teachers in a way that would be postiive. I wasn’t sure, and still am not. [↩]
I only caught the second half, but I think that was the really fascinating bit. [↩]
school, university, etc. [↩]
Or, can that learning only happen on the fringes? If that’s the case, then I want more fringe. [↩]
Cathy explains that idea further here, in point four of a definition of badges. [↩]
As I was about to post this, I ran across this post from Alex. And while I don’t have a place to stick this quotation properly in the text, I wanted to save it and share it with you, so here it is: What I believe we must resist is mistaking real motivation and meaningful learning for increasing our value as a human commodity in the marketplace. I’m fairly sure that education doesn’t make us “better” humans. I don’t even think learning can make us “more” human (whatever that might be), though it could expand our experience in interesting ways. The one thing we have to prevent is schooling making us feelless human. [↩]
Parents and plenty of other people would have trouble, for a time, as ranking their children to other people’s children might be more difficult, but that would pass. [↩]

September 12th, 2001. A Wednesday.

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Bud Hunt

September 12th. That’s the day everything changed.¹

A few weeks previously, I had begun my teaching career as a graduate student teaching freshman composition in room 110 of the Natural Resources Building at Colorado State University. I remember room 110 very well because it was where, six years previously, I took my first English class as an undergraduate at the school. Introduction to Literature. ²

As an undergraduate, it was my job, I thought, to unpack the secrets of the stories and novels and plays that we read together. And I wrote. Lots. Every week, I produced two typed pages of thinking and reflection and wondering about what I was reading and why it mattered. This was college. It was important.

And back in room 110, with my class of college freshfolk, I was in charge of helping them to unlock the mysteries of the College Essay, the texts that they were expected to produce early and often in their college careers. These 18 and 19 year olds were looking to me, a 23 year old grad student, to provide them with the keys to college literacy. Or, they had to take the class, and I was in their way. Either way, there we were, from 10:00 to 10:50 every MWF.

September 11th was a Tuesday. I remember because that made September 12th a Wednesday. At 10:00am, I was supposed to “teach.” And no one said otherwise.

I made one of the most important discoveries of my teaching career that day³, when I decided that class would be optional. It made sense to go. People, I thought, were counting on me to make sense of this. And that couldn’t be done.

But there was something I could do.

I emailed the class that no one had to be there, but that I would be there. Attendance, for a change, would not be taken.

I didn’t expect anyone to show up. But they came. Not all, but most.

And I started class. Sitting on a table in the front of the room, I reminded folks that no one had to stay that morning. I would not advance the syllabus. Instead, we were together, and something monumental had happened. What, I wondered, did folks want to talk about?

And I don’t actually remember the specifics. I remember that there was lots of misinformation and rumor in the air that morning, and that mostly, as someone who had read several articles, watched some CNN, and had spent the previous afternoon in the newsroom of the student paper, where I had worked as an undergraduate, and would work again that Spring, and pulled everything I could off the AP wire as it was released, I was likely the “expert” in the room.

Like that makes any sense.

But I dispelled rumor where I could, suggested sources for folks to explore if they wanted to know more. I mentioned the school’s counseling program for students. And it was quiet. Not silent, but much quieter than a usual day of argument and conversation. We were together, but we weren’t really talking all that much.

I guess it was just normal, or whatever on September 12th could approximate normalcy in the wake of the events of the day before, and normal, on September 12th, 2001, felt pretty good. It was enough.

On Friday, September 14th, we resumed talk of what makes good summary, and how to use others’ ideas in the services of our own, and all the things that you talk about in a college writing class.

We kept going.

And now, as we look back and consider all that’s happened in the world in the last ten years, and how that day changed this country, and me, and most other folks I know in some way, I get the feeling that keeping going is a pretty good way to honor that day.

By all means, take a deep breath and a look back. Think about what happened and what that changed or what that didn’t change. Reach out if you need or want an ear. Look after yourself. Consider what’s worth doing and what’s worth remembering and what’s worth working to restore. But then, one last deep breath.

There’s much to do.

Let’s keep going.

Sure. September 11th. I woke to the phone ringing and was told to turn on the news. I’d been married for all of three months and what I saw on TV didn’t make sense. Still doesn’t sometimes. [↩]
I sat next to What’s Her Name, who took good notes and who, three years later, I would date. Once. And screw that up royally by inviting a friend over to watch television with us. As I drove her home, I backed into a car in the street behind my apartment. It did not go well. A second date was dodged. By her. Repeatedly. I didn’t understand what happened there, either, until much later. [↩]
The discovery, for me, was in two parts – first, that the world doesn’t stop when you start your class. Be of the world and in the world as often as you’re about and/or removed from the world. The second part is about modeling and how teachers, in some sense, are always on. We are always being seen as teachers. So might was well act like one, even if, at 23 then, and 33 now, I don’t always have a clue as to what that means or should look like. ”What would a teacher do?” is a question I approach as I prepare for any class or learning experience. And it’s one I’ll always struggle with. But in this case, a teacher would dig in. Check facts. Explore sources. A teacher would seek to be sure his students were okay. A teacher would pause and reflect. So that’s what we did. [↩]

On Skinned Knees & Lessons Learned

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Bud Hunt

It’s skinned knee season in our home, with two girls riding bikes of the two and four-wheeled variety, and a third toddling along just behind – ready for far more than she’s capable of.

And I’m not one to stop someone who’s trying to make progress, even if that progress might be dangerous.

So we’ve been through lots and lots of boxes of Band-Aids for hurts both real and imagined. And we’re quick to wash out wounds and make sure that we keep them looked after.

But no matter how well we wash and watch, some of them are going to leave permanent marks. Like the time Ani discovered that you can’t make a ninety-degree turn on a bike. Or the time that Teagan realized, in a most unfortunate way, that you cannot stop a tricycle like Fred Flintstone could stop his car.¹ Quinn forgets, sometimes, about “down.” She’s still kind of new.

Each of those moments hurts. But hurt can have an upside. In fact, some would tell you that hurt, or pain, has an evolutionary advantage. It tells us when we hit a limit of some kind.

And those marks will help them remember the stories of the injuries one day. They’ll proudly show the little scars and blemishes that never quite go back to normal and explain that they rode a bike early, or took a chance on a curb or wrestled with a cat or went head over handlebars in a moment of panic.

But hurt, like fear, well, it just hurts. And to know someone you love is hurting is the worst kind of pain, a pain of helplessness and empathy and doubt.

Oh, how I wish I had a suit of Nerf and armor that I could force my children to wear when they go out into the world, or want to wrestle that cat. To be able to ensure the safety of my children, be they walking to school or traversing a steep hiking trail along the edge of a narrow cliff, would make my sleep come much easier.

But I don’t. And the marks and memories would be hard to accumulate from inside an impenetrable shell of foam. I also suspect it’d be mighty difficult to hear with all that Nerf so close to one’s ears.

There are plenty of days I want to say “Today, let’s stay here, where cars and cats and cliffs and sticks and stones and words can’t hurt us.” But I can’t. Because that’d be parental malpractice. As a dad, it’s my job to listen and bandage and help my children to be brave, to not stop when it’d be a whole lot easier and may well hurt a great deal less and be more safe to just stay still. Being brave? It’s important. And I hate it. Oh, there are days I very much dislike that job.

As a teacher, that’s my job, too.

I hope you’ve got a kit full of peroxide and Band-Aids with you as you take your charges out into the world. I hope you, and they, are being very brave.

Of course, Teagan would have no clue who Fred Flintstone is. Or was. Whatever. But I do find it interesting that “Flintstone” is in my Web browser’s dictionary. [↩]

Connective Children. Nothing New?

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Bud Hunt

This afternoon, Mary Ann and WIll were talking a bit about Kindergarten standards. I butted in.¹

And Mary Ann and I, and some others, worked our way into a ~~conversation~~ ~~back and forth~~ ~~talking at one another~~ chat about a post of Mary Ann’s. You should read the post². As I read it, I was struck by the notion of connectedness – and the implication that it was about online. Now, the Gee concept she references³, and I’m about to requote, does state that:

An affinity space is a place where informal learning takes place. According to James Paul Gee, affinity spaces are locations (physical or virtual) where groups of people are drawn together because they share a particular common, strong interest or are engaged in a common activity.[1] Often but not always occurring online, affinity spaces encourage the sharing knowledge or participating in a specific area, but informal learning is another outcome.

But even though these spaces don’t have to be online, I got the sense from the post that the online-ness of connected children’s experiences might be the unique thing.

And I want to push back on the assumption that connected of today is somehow significantly different than the connected of yesterday. Just as I wonder about the importance of the Internet in the notion of connective writing, so, too, would I wonder about the necessity of the Internet for the creation of the modern connected child.

That’s not to say that it’s not a factor, that speed and access are not better than they’ve ever been⁴. But I want to push against the idea that they’re new. That wanting to know what’s going on somewhere else as quickly as possible is a trait of only the 21st Century. That seeking an audience for one’s efforts is a notion of those of us born after 1985. That being in conversation with someone from a different place didn’t happen prior to Skype.

Easier? Perhaps. Likely, even. Faster? Often. But new?

I don’t think so⁵. And when I say that I wonder about connectivity, or connectedness, this is what I’m talking about. Certainly important. I want my children, and their schools, to be about connectedness through the tools of today. But what makes them differently different than all the children that’ve come before?

But I’m not so sure that’s new⁶.

That’s one thing Twitter’s good for – having open conversation – both so that you can model what that might look like as well as allow folks to intrude. And, yeah. I know I just wrote this. And am now praising Twitter. It’s a contradictory night. [↩]
And most of what she writes. She’s wise. [↩]
By way of Wikipedia [↩]
Too many nots there – of course it’s faster and better than ever. But that’s mostly been the case for the last several hundred years. [↩]
I may well be wrong. I argue with myself about it. Frequently. [↩]
I’m grateful for Pam Moran’s gentle suggestion that I should pause to write this up. She was right. [↩]

Bud the Teacher

Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning

Category Archives: Democratic Classroom