At the recommendation of Gary Stager and Chris Lehmann, one of my summer reads is A Schoolmaster of the Great City by Angelo Patri. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. The book was written by Patri in 1917. It rings true, though, with much of what I worry about in our schools today. Patri faced the same problems and shares many of my passions. That’s both troublesome and reassuring. I’ll be seeking out more of his work. In the meantime, here are some of the lines that jumped out at me as I read today:
The antagonism between the children and teachers was far stronger than I had ever seen it before. The antagonism between the school and the neighborhood was intense. Both came from mutual distrust founded on mutual misunderstanding. The children were afraid of the teachers, and the teachers feared the children. (p. 14)
As each day went by, cautiously I put the problem of school discipline before them and they responded by taking over much of the responsibility for it themselves. (p. 15)
In this restless, uncertain sea of motion, noise, color and goings; of constant goings upstairs and downstairs, one learned to ‘go slow’ and watch and wait for his opportunity. (p. 19)
The rod idea was at work. Books, benches, crowded rooms, sitting still, listening; talking only when called upon to recite, teaching where the teachers did the thinking; these conditions have meant and always will mean an imposed discipline, an imposed routine, whereas real discipline is a personal thing, a part of the understanding soul. To replace discipline of teacher-responsibility by the discipline of child-responsibility is a long, slow process. (p. 27)
It was difficult to get teachers away from subject matter, from machinery, and toward children. How could it be otherwise? (p.30)
I wanted ideas expressed in color, movement, fun and not lines, ideas and not perfect papers, every one alike . . . . I wanted nature that would make the child’s heart warm with sympathy . . .that would make him laugh to feel the snow and the rain and the wind beating on his face. (p. 30)
The feeling for the things that I wanted was rather more definite than the knowledge of how to attain the desired results. (p. 30)(Karl - that quote was just for you. We all get stuck.)
(On teaching robins) ‘Suppose you meet the class under the big oak tree in the morning and look for robins. Watch them until you and the children know as much about them as one can learn by looking . . . . Then talk over what you’ve seen and learned. Let everybody say his say sometime or other. . . . Then when you have all the facts about him select those that are most worthwhile, and present them as the robin story. You’ll find you’ll need very little drill.’ (p. 32)
I felt that we had to win the parents as well as the taechers if the changes we were making, our emphasis on the ‘fads and frills’ of education, were to be accepted in the homes. (p. 33)
Many parents believe that this is education. . . . They fear freedom, they fear to let the child grow by himself. (p. 37)
I wanted opportunity for the masses, the best schools for the crowds, the best teachers for the heaviest load. I thought in terms of service, they in terms of tradition. (p. 41)
Plenty more good stuff within. I’d encourage you to read the book.
Today’s podcast is a short reflection on my learning experiences today, as well as some seriously first draft thinking about information and knowledge. As always, I hope the conversation continues.
The more I work as a professional developer and teacher of teachers, the more I am resolved that I will do my best to never create a resource for one situation that cannot be useful in another. There are too few of me and too many needs in my district to do otherwise.
I think, though, the careful consideration of audience and purpose that I engage in before creating a resource is a valuable one for all readers, writers, and creators. Perhaps there’s value, in a connective writing class, in spending some time on rhetorical analysis, specifically in the vein of thinking about multi-purposed work.
This isn’t a new statement for me to make, either here or in my classroom(s), as I’ve always operated under the assumption that the best writing happens when writers consider their audience and their purpose for writing, allowing them to determine the focus they should take in a particular piece. This idea (often called the rhetorical triangle, with each of the points defined slightly differently by the person(s) doing the defining) can and should be expanded to include all kinds of composition and writing, not just print texts. This leads me to the teaching point that I would want to include in my connective writing work:
As much as possible, all texts should have a life outside of the classroom.
This “extra-curricular life” can take multiple forms, and won’t make sense for all types of writing and creation, but I strongly believe that we should never create something that will die after a teacher has blessed or cursed it with a grade. I’ve always believed that, but the more I learn, the less I’m willing to suggest that such multi-purposed work should only happen at the end of a course, after all the practice work is completed. Project-based learning, too, embodies this philosophy, as projects should have a life outside of the classroom.
What does “extracurricular life,” or multi-purposed work, look like in a professional learning experience for teachers? One way I attempted to create a multi-purpose-able resource in CyberCamp was through the series of Works in Progress (WiP) presentations that we asked every participant to do. As I explained at the beginning of CyberCamp:
One of the values of CyberCamp is sharing. Talking about what we’re up to is a good way to better understand our own work, and the act of sharing it with a group is useful, too, because it allows your fellow CyberCampers to help you out, be it through good questions, suggestions, or becoming an extra set of eyes and ears in the world seeking resources to help you with your project.
Because sharing is so essential, we’ve set up time here at CyberCamp for everyone to have a 20 minute block of time in which to share their work. Each day, we’ll ask two of you to share what you’re working on and then we’ll give ten minutes to the CyberCampers to give you some constructive feedback. We’ll be talking more about what “constructive feedback” looks at CyberCamp, but know that you’ll be getting help - not criticism.
Again, because sharing is so essential to what we do, we’ll be adding an extra level of sharing to your process. We’ll literally be sharing your Work in Progress conversation with the world and archiving your presentation here on the blog using a tool called Ustream. This will allow you to share your work with, and to learn from, the world. While that can be scary, trust us when we tell you that your work is important and worthy of being shared.
Not to toot our own horn (or whistle, to stick with the camp metaphor), but it seems to me that a twenty minute investment of class time here (thirty minutes if you leave time for some feedback) leads to an excellent archive/snapshot of a work in progress, a chance to get very specific feedback, and a permanent record of the event that is available for further scrutiny, reflection and commenting. Not bad, as far as multi-purposing goes. Add in the fact that these presentations also become resources for other people working on similar projects as well as models of our activity for future CyberCamp experiences, and we’ve got some handy multi-purpose resources.
Other examples of multi-purposing in CyberCamp include our project proposals as well as our blog. Pretty much, any well-written blog (as a whole, not each entry) is a fine example of multi-purposed writing. But perhaps that’s another post.
One of the struggles, of course, with trying to build multi-purpose resources, or to find ways to ask learners to do so, at least one that I worry/wonder about, is making sure that I’m never putting the needs of future learners or secondary audiences ahead of the learners who are the “primary” audience for a particular activity/event/experience. Let me try to say that better - we can sometimes create problems for our class when we try to create opportunities with “outsiders,” particularly if we’re forcing a connection that maybe isn’t organically or authentically there. Connections just for connections’ sake are bad ideas, maybe even educational malpractice. The trick becomes figuring out where those lines and boundaries are, and when to say no to kind invitations to meet/Skype/join up with others who may or may not be in a similar place, educationally speaking.
Another struggle, I suspect, is figuring out how to contextualize those creations in a way as to make them as useful as possible. I’m beginning to practically understand why so many higher ed folks talk about learning objects and repositories and a slew of related issues, and struggle with those things, too.
At the risk of getting a little too meta, I’m going to be talking through my history of thinking about linking, or conective writing, today during CyberCamp as a part of our series of “Works in Progress” conversations. I’m inviting you, if you’re interested, mostly to help me model how a backchannel and uStream conversation can be of value to a face to face group, but selfishly, too, because I’m always interested in how others are thinking about these ideas. So, if you’re willing and able, join us at around 11:30am MST for a short uStream presentation. All the details are on our wiki.
Beginning today, I’m going to be co-facilitating my school district’s CyberCamp, a two-week summer institute focused on teachers building projects that help them to integrate technology into their classrooms. You won’t see me much here, but I do hope you’ll join us over at CyberCamp’s digital HQ as we do some intense learning and thinking and questioning together.
In fact, I’m counting on it.
One of my hopes for CyberCamp is that we are able to model how transparent and connected learning doesn’t have to be limited to a specific time, place and location, that teachers in my district can learn from you, and that you can learn from them. We’re all in this together, and that’s a good thing.
We’re putting so much of CyberCamp online in part to honor the wisdom and knowledge of our teachers, but also because we want to model the power of learning networks as professional learning communities. But that only works if people stop by and join with us in learning and sharing and thinking and questioning and . . . well, you get the point. If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, then you know that I think we’re all better when students and teachers all share and learn and take turns leading. Teaching and learning can be so isolating - but it doesn’t have to be that way. CyberCamp, I hope, is an attempt to demonstrate that.
So, I’m writing this post to formally invite you, whoever you are, to come and join in the fun. And the hard work. I’ve nothing to offer you except a great deal of learning. But if you do come and leave a comment or two when you can, our CyberCamp will be all the better for it. I thank you in advance, and hope to see you at CyberCamp.
Oh, and by the way - we don’t own this model of learning. There are plenty of folks trying this type of work - and I am grateful to them for sharing what they do as they do it. That said, I wanted to explicitly remind you that, if you like what you see here, feel free to take it and adapt it to your communities, to your needs. I pledge to you that I’ll happily come to your CyberCamp. In fact, I look forward to it.
Tomorrow night, the folks at Teacher Teaching Teachers will be having a conversation with the authors or the book I mentioned in my last podcast. How timely. Here’s the info:
Many of us are planning to useReinventing Project-Based Learning in our Writing Project Summer Institutes and elsewhere in our work with teachers. The researchers, teachers, and authors, Susie Boss and Jane Krauss will be joining us on Teachers Teaching Teachers tomorrow.
Suzie Boss Suzie is a veteran journalist who writes about teaching and learning in the 21st century. She and Jane have authored a book on using technology to empower teaching and learning called Reinventing Project-Based Learning. From interviewing and observing hundreds of teachers in both formal and informal contexts, she has seen how innovative approaches to education can engage learners and transform communities. The book is a unique educational resource that integrates interviews with leading experts, storytelling, and suggestions for putting research into practice. She has been an editor for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a freelance writer contributing to wide range of publications, and a community college instructor.
Jane Krauss
Jane is a long-time educator, curriculum writer, and expert in professional development. An innovative teacher and early adopter of instructional technologies, Jane and her elementary classroom were showcased in a video case study that thousands of teachers have used to learn about authentic, project-based learning. As former director of professional development for the International Society for Technology in Education and a consultant for Intel’s education initiative, she has helped educators around the world improve their practice. She recently co-authored a book with Suzie Boss on the effective use of technology in education, entitled Reinventing Project-Based Learning.
I suspect it’ll be a good conversation. You might want to join in live.
UPDATE (5/21/08): It seems that this video, certainly a controversial one, has been pulled from publication. Chris Lehmann wrote a much better post than I did on the subject. If you haven’t already, you should read it, and dig deep into his comments. If you know why the video’s disappearing around the ‘net, I’d love to know what you know.
Thanks to John Creighton for the link to this video. It’s well worth the six and a half minutes of your time if you haven’t already seen it.
I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year. This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence. We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.
The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online. One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work. My personal web presence should be like that, too. But I’m not sure that it is. I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people. There’s plenty of personalmixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year. (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important? Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole? Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?
I think, too, about what “web presence” means. Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing. Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.
These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate. This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment. I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back. My work this weekend will continue to influence that work. Lots to learn. Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with. We should all be so lucky.
Clay Burell’s challenged me (or tagged me, or whatever) to engage a meme that he’s passing along. I might. I’m bad about memes. I don’t mean to be. (And I am thinking about a good passion quilt image and will post one. Eventually. Thanks to all who tagged me.) But I did want to encourage you to read his post. Mostly because of this idea about teaching Lolita:
I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it - and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.
As a high school language arts teacher, I encouraged my students to pick many of their own books in consultation with me and other trusted adults. I would encourage you to do the same. But that’s another post.
But when you do decide to read a book together, I’d ask that you never insult the intelligence of your students, emotionally or intellectually, by hiding the world from them through picking “safe” books. Safe choices are pretty much always about you (or your administrator, or your school board) and not about your students. They live in the worlds being represented in literature. Many educators live in these worlds, too. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Instead, let’s challenge students to engage ideas and concepts that are weighty, essential and enthralling.
Let’s ask them to dream and to dare and to risk by talking about difficult ideas in safe places. Let’s ask them not to agree with the stance of a particular author or book or teacher or administrator or board policy, but instead to struggle through finding their own way. With help, of course.
Most good teaching is all about finding balance. Safe and scary. Old and new. Today and tomorrow. Child and adult. Easy and hard. Choice and “have to.” Too often in schools, we lean way hard on one side of the teeter totter and completely avoid the other side.
I recently finished reading Seymour Papert’s book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer, and I’ve got lots to say formally about it. But I only have a minute at the moment and I wanted to ask a question. In the book, Papert forwards the idea that we should have as big a body of knowledge about learning and how to learn as we do about teaching and how to teach. (He even postulates at one point that “learning theory” is much more about teaching than it is about actually learning. And I agreed with him. Too often, we think of education that is something that we can do to someone, rather than with someone. We certainly can’t do it for someone.)
Since I’d never actually heard of the word before I read the book, I’m guessing that it’s not a big term/idea in teaching and learning circles. But I don’t know - perhaps I’m out of the academic loop a bit. It seems that the term does surface in some academic arenas, and has for some time, but I can’t get a sense of its meaning in those contexts. I guess I’m writing right now to both ask about your knowledge of the term as well as to ask if you think it’s true that we spend way too much time thinking about teaching without taking the time to think about learning. Or, rather, are we too busy teaching to bother to learn? I’ve read plenty of posts that suggest as much, and in fact, I think I’ve said it myself. If that’s the case, what are we going to do about it?
Papert says it, at one point, this way:
…participants thought of themselves as teachers-in-training rather than as learners. Their awareness of being teachers was preventing them from giving themselves over fully to experiencing what they were doing as intellectually exciting and joyful in its own right, for what it could bring them as private individuals. The major obstacle in the way of teachers becoming learners is inhibition about learning. (p.72 - from this page of quotes, which are worth reading)
It’s frustrating that this isn’t a new idea, but that it’s still revolutionary. Read the book. I’ll give it a more formal review later. Short version: Two thumbs up. Mindstorms is on my nightstand, now, sitting on top of my XO, which is appropriate for so many reasons.
