Category Archives: Democratic Classroom

#ISTE11: NWP’s Inaugural Hack Jam

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Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity to attend the first ever National Writing Project Hack Jam, an exploration of the opportunities to fiddle with text and writing and code on the Internet.  It was a useful event for me, as we were able to think and play with ideas about what “hacking” means right now, and how it’s about reading and writing and thinking.

Masterfully facilitated by Chad Sansing and Meenoo Rami, the event took us to some interesting places and conversation.  Here’s my recap.

We started the day in table groups with a box of Monopoly and a simple task – hack the game.  Chad and Meenoo explained that our task was to fiddle with the rules until we found a game that was better than the one we were handed – and so Sandy and Gail and I tinkered our way through a version of Monopoly that was all about freebies.  Other groups fiddled to make the game about tossing pieces and giving to charity.  It was good1.

But the point of the hacking was to give us an opportunity to explore that games and systems have rules – rules that were made by people.  And we can mess with those rules if we understand the underlying principles involved.  That’s powerful learning – and applies not just to board games, but to school, and to work, and to civic engagement and to computer systems or the Internet.

Hacking matters.  Douglas Rushkoff would say that we need to Program or Be Programmed, but I’d fiddle with that statement and say instead that we need to hack or be hacked.  Someone made the rules and systems of the Internet, power structures, as John Spencer called them during out conversation yesterday.  And, as others have said before, we’ve got to help our students fiddle with them, understand them, and, hopefully, change them.

We moved from that work into a visual exploration of our definition of hacker – folks focused on several things, but I was reminded of MacGyver, and thought of duct tape and wrenches and making things out of what we’ve available.  Purposeful play.

This led to some interesting conversation that I think was my key takeaway from the day2.  Paul Allison, who is always thoughtful, wrote this during the workshop:

My first thought is that hacking sounds like an important idea, but really? Do we need another word that takes teachers out of the mainstream “common core” standards conversation? Does hacking get my students more college-ready? Like gaming, isn’t hacking just another thing that pushes the risk-takers into the margins, and makes risk-adverse teachers run? How do we find a way to be more inclusive in our language and processes? Is it just a language thing? What else might we call hacking?

Later on, Paul continues3:

So part of why we hack has to do with understanding our sources more deeply, and this is absolutely an academic concern. But don’t we need words like “analytical reading” and carefully sourced research? Right so what else might we call hacking? It’s about creativity, but it’s also about making new things by really understanding the old, and this is a traditional, academic exercise.

I’m looking for language that will encourage the risk-adverse teacher to join with us in these enterprises.

And that’s what I leave thinking about.  Hacking matters.  Academic reading and writing matter.  And they’re not unrelated things.  Groups like the National Writing Project know an awful lots about good reading and writing practice, and are exploring thoughtfully things like gaming and hacking – but can they do so in a way that doesn’t scare off the “risk-adverse teacher,” as Paul asks?

I think we need the National Writing Project and folks like them to help navigate these spaces, and to explore them thoughtfully with teachers – and to help folks recognize that reading and writing and thinking and gaming and hacking are related – but in a way that doesn’t lead to further fragmentation and paradox.  I think we need teachers to play, like we played in the Hack Jam, with the rules and ideas that affect them.

Yes, let’s teach kids to hack.  Both the Internet and Shakespeare.  Minecraft and Fitzgerald.  Wordle and essay.  Picture and paragraph.  Logarithm and link. Tweets and Tennyson.  Second Life and the State Legislature.  It’s a big world.

Worth doing.  If you get the chance to attend a future NWP Hack Jam – you should go. I’ll see you there.

  1. Because it was a National Writing Project event, there were snacks.  Good ones. [↩]
  2. And I know I’ve buried the lead, but that’s okay. [↩]
  3. Read the whole piece.  It’s good and I can’t stop thinking about it. [↩]
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Letting (Them) Go

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Richard Elmore:

I wonder, finally, what would happen if we simply opened the doors and let the students go; if we let them walk out of the dim light of the overhead projector into the sunlight; if we let them decide how, or whether, to engage this monolith? Would it be so terrible? Could it be worse than what they are currently experiencing? Would adults look at young people differently if they had to confront their children on the street, rather than locking them away in institutions? Would it force us to say more explicitly what a humane and healthy learning environment might look like? Should discussions of the future of school reform be less about the pet ideas of professional reformers and more about what we’re doing to young people in the institution called school?

via What Would Happen if We Let Them Go? – The Futures of School Reform – Education Week.

I wonder, often, about what might happen if we ended compulsory schooling.  Glad to know I’m not the only one.

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Patri: What we needed as children, children still need.

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Rediscovered these lines from Angelo Patri while in a conversation today.  Good to see them again:

What we needed as children was someone to show the way.  Someone who knew us and valued us.  Someone who would live with us and for us.

What we needed as children, children still need.

The teachers and I, conscious of the dangers that come to an active child from a random seeking to satisfy his desires, tried to make the people whose children were about us realize their responsibility while we ourselves did our share.  We knew the children needed the older folk. We knew that we had only limited means of gathering and holding these young people together.  All we had was the school and we were fast losing that except as a drill machine running eight hours a day during which time two schools1 in turn tried to master the prescribed book facts.

Slightly later in that section:

The school, after all, narrowing down to routine, was such a faraway place, far away from the actual lives of people.  How could we get close, so close to each other that we would be part of the people and they a part of us, and be “folksy” together?2

Our schools are communities.  Or should be.  Rich and vibrant and healthy ones.  It’s a really good and useful book, as I’ve noted before.  Might be time for a reread.

  1. Patri’s school at the time shared its facility with another. [↩]
  2. Both quotes from pages 80-81. [↩]
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An Open Letter to Congressman Cory Gardner – Restore Funding for the National Writing Project

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Dear Representative Gardner:

We’ve not yet met, although I’ve attempted to introduce myself to you several times via Twitter. My name’s Bud Hunt, and you represent me in the House of Representatives. I live in Fort Collins and am proud to share the state of Colorado with you. While I didn’t vote for you, I think you’re a smart guy who has promise.

That said, we need to talk.

See, sir, you’re really, fired up about eliminating waste right now. And that’s good. I’m not a fan of wastefulness in government or anywhere else. The thing is, sir, I don’t believe that you understand some of what you’re cutting.

I get it. You’re new. And want to have a meaningful impact in Congress. And two years, well that’s just not a lot of time. So you’ve got to strike fast and hard and you’re coming out strong for stopping “reckless” spending. Good on you.

But you, and many of your colleagues in the House, seem to believe that the National Writing Project is wasteful and reckless spending. For that matter, you also voted to eliminate funding for National Public Radio. Somehow, you’ve decided that those two programs are “wasteful and reckless.” And, Representative Gardner, that’s just not the case.

The National Writing Project has been making a powerful difference for students and teachers for over thirty years. For twenty of those years, the federal government has provided funding to support the important work of helping to ensure that thoughtful teaching and learning of writing is happening in our schools. many of my colleagues have been writing about the work of the NWP in light of the possibility that federal funding will cease and the work of the organization will radically change, if not outright end. You might want to take a minute and read some of the stories. They’ll make you a believer, I suspect.

If those don’t do the trick for you, then perhaps you can just skim the research on the NWP. I’ll give you a one sentence summary – the NWP works. For students. For teachers. It makes a positive difference in American education. Or it did. Until you helped to end its federal funding.

The thing is, Congressman, you pulled the plug on a thoughtful and long term investment in education. Killing an investment that is bearing good fruit is wasteful, sir. Maintaining that investment is prudent. Wise, even.

You, sir, know the importance of writing. You write lots. I recently read an editorial that you published on your Congressional website. In it, you wrote that

a vote against the CR is a vote against cutting wasteful government spending. It’s as simple – and as important – as that.

Excuse me, sir. But it’s not that simple. In your haste to make a difference and rein in “waste,” you’re hurting American students and American education. That’s not acceptable. I’d appreciate it if you’d pay better attention to what you’re doing.

Recently, on my website, I wrote:

I want to live in a country that honors the important work of teaching and learning. I want to live in a country where thoughtfulness about how we teach and learn is an essential piece of that work. I want a government that understands that you can use a little bit of money to make an awful lot of difference. Children who can read and write well are a precious national resource. Groups like the National Writing Project, groups that so thoughtfully help children and teachers to become better writers, deserve federal support.

So, yeah, I support the National Writing Project. I believe in teachers teaching teachers to make a difference for students. You?

Don’t you believe that modest investments in programs that make a positive impact on our children and schools are investments worth maintaining?

I suspect that you believe in American teachers and American students. I suspect that you believe that a strong education is essential to making sure that we have a strong economic foundation for our future. I know that you value writing and its place in students’ learning.

But your vote, and your rhetoric, is anything but simple. It’s wrong of you to suggest that spending federal dollars, dollars matched 100 percent by local matches in each of the 200 sites of the National Writing Project, is wasteful, when those dollars make a significant impact on children. Those dollars, sir, keep good teachers teaching at a time when half of our teachers don’t last beyond five years in the classroom. Those dollars, sir, help children realize their potential as writers and their teachers to realize their potential to have an impact beyond their own classrooms.

That wasn’t wasteful, Congressman. But you either didn’t notice, or weren’t willing to look.

I hope that you erred, sir. And I hope that you’ll stand with others to restore funding for the National Writing Project for the 2011 fiscal year and beyond. I look forward to your public commitment to the work of the National Writing Project and programs like it that responsibly serve as good stewards of one of our most precious natural resources – our children.

I’d be honored to introduce you to children and teachers in our neck of the woods who have been directly impacted by the work of the National Writing Project and our local affiliate, the Colorado State University Writing Project. When you meet with them, you’ll see the value that the work has.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll write with us, and we can overlook your error. We all make mistakes, Congressman. I’m willing to overlook this one, so long as you’re willing to correct it.

I look forward to that, Congressman. Soon.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to discuss the work of the National Writing Project further. I look forward to the opportunity. And I look forward to your response.

All the best,

Bud

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#EduConText Session 1: “I’m From the Education Department and Am Here to Help” and other bedtime stories: A conversation about how to make and influence policy with some who do.

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“I’m From the Education Department and Am Here to Help” and other bedtime stories: A conversation about how to make and influence policy with some who do.

When:Session One: Saturday 10:00am–11:30amWhere:Room Drama StudioWho:Jonathan Becker, Julia Fallon, Cathy Higgins, Doug Levin

Affiliation: Virginia Commonwealth University (Becker), Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, EdTech (Fallon), New Hampshire Department of Education, EdTech (Higgins), State Educational Technology Directors Association (Levin)Conversational Focus/Audience:All School Levels

Education policy, or any policy, for that matter, fascinates me.  It’s a complicated process to turn an idea into a law and a law into practice and practice into useful action.  And the ideas we start with often don’t come out of the policy process as the things we wanted.  It’s terribly, terribly hard.  And often tedious, which is why, I suspect, plenty of people have no interest in the work.1

But I’m pretty interested in this session, where four folks who fiddle with policy will be digging in.  I’ve written local policy, and worked hard to influence the process at the local, state, and federal levels.  I know that it’s not just being right that matters – it’s being intentional about plenty of other elements of the process.  Were I sitting in the room for this session, I’d be wondering things like:

  • How do you know which policy battles are worth fighting?
  • What kinds of things make sense in policy?  What don’t?
  • How do the rules of a policy-making body influence the way policy gets made?
  • When does it make sense to revise?  When is it wise to start fresh?

I might also look to those in attendance when I ask about these questions:

  • What policies have you helped to craft?  Did they end up as you had hoped?
  • How do the policymakers in your communities seek out your voice?
  • How do you make sure that your voice is heard in policy conversations?
  • How do you help your students to understand the policy environments that affect them?
  • How should teachers and students speak truth to power?  What place does that have in a policy conversation?

What would you ask if you were in that room?  What do you want that group to know about your experiences?  What questions should folks like me be asking?

What is #EduConText?

  1. That said, the description mentions a policy game.  Do you think there’s a board?  Action figures?  I’m intrigued. [↩]
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The Podcast: USDoE Listening Session at NCTE

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In this podcast, recorded on my last day at the NCTE Annual Convention, I share a recording of a listening session hosted by NCTE.  In the session, the U.S. Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach, Peter Cunningham, represents the Department.  He took questions for most of the session, and I found the conversation fascinating.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be in conversation with our government, and I hope that you are making efforts to be in conversation with your public officials.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the conversation.  I’ll share two short observations.  First, I found that there were many issues raised by the questioners in the audience.  Thoughtful ones, in many cases.  But it seems that what was heard was simply “we (meaning educators) want less testing.”  That’s a gross oversimplification of the issues expressed.  I do hope that the US Department of Education is listening just a little more carefully1

I’d also reiterate my eagerness to see the specifics of the National Ed Tech Plan implementation.  Right now, it’s a fine plan.  How will it be implemented?2

Direct link to the audio

  1. I think they are, but it’s sure hard to tell sometimes. [↩]
  2. Plans without timelines are visioning statements, and not action plans.  I hope this one becomes an action plan. [↩]
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Reports From Cyberspace – An Invitation

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Last year at NCTE, we began a conversation, Three Reports from Cyberspace. We thank Jeff Golub and Jim Strickland for organizing the session, and Helen Wierenga for being our responder. And, we thank all of you, because what happened during the session was, quite simply, amazing1.

Bud, Troy, and the entire audience were engaged in a continual conversation that moved from notes appearing on the screen, to questions from the audience, back to one of one of them answering on stage, and out to the wider world through Twitter and Etherpad. Sara’s thinking was with us in the room, even though she wasn’t physically present.  Over the course of the hour, we shared a number of examples from our own teaching and research that helped illuminate issues related to filtering, curriculum, assessment, and teaching in digital spaces. We were, in short, completely engaged in the conversation, in “multitasking” at its best. And that brings us to where we are now, preparing to offer more reports from cyberspace.

So, why write about that here, three weeks from the next session/conversation?

We do so as an invitation.

A conference session is a waypoint, a time and place to check in on where we’ve been, but more important, where we’re going.  So before we get to that waypoint, let’s take a moment to share our own reports from cyberspace as a way of starting this conversation.  Here is a link to an open Google Doc where we’ve left space for you to jot some thoughts as we move into our time together.  If you can join us for the session at NCTE, great.  But if not, and you’d still like to report or check in, feel free to do so.

Here are some prompts that will take us into our session.  Help yourself to whichever one(s) will be the most useful in your thinking and reporting:

  • What’s the state of your educational cyberspace at this moment in November 2010?  What’s good?  What’s scary?  What’s working?  What’s not?
  • What needs doing?  Fixing?  Raising up?
  • Where are you focusing your attention?
  • Where are we going with all of this Internet stuff?  What’s new?  What’s good?
  • Finally, what do you hope to leave our session with?  What’s next?  So what?

Please take a few minutes and share your reports from cyberspace. We suspect you have something to teach us, and we’re ready to learn.

If the reporting ends at the session, then we’ve failed. Conferences are notorious spaces, in that we all get together and get excited, but then the momentum seems to die. Help us figure out where to go and what to do next. In a time of increased standards and assessments, when everyone is an expert on matters of teaching and learning, and reading and writing, we need to tell our stories. It’s never been more important to be thoughtful out loud.

Troy Hicks, Bud Hunt, and Sara Kajder

PS – If you can’t make the session, but will be at NCTE, you’ll have another chance to join us immediately after this session at the Middle Level Get Together.  We’d love to see you, and hear your report(s), wherever you’ll choose to join us.

  1. I don’t use this word often.  But it was a really interesting conversation, both in content and in process. [↩]
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It’s Blurry. But It’s Still a Vision

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Lately, I’ve found myself, quite by accident, thinking a great deal about what an “online school” might look like, were I to have the opportunity to be involved in the creation of one.  I’m watching this process unfold in my school district, and it’s started some wheels a’turning.

And this is thinking that, while I’ve done peripherally off and on over the last several years1, has been persistently in my head these last few weeks.  So it seems reasonable to try to write some of it down before it slips away, or as an opportunity to bettter understand what’s going on in my head.  So I imagine this will be a few posts over the next few days, as I flesh out various ideas.  If you don’t want to head down this road with me, here are some links to other distractions that you might enjoy.

First draft thinking.  But thinking I like and find useful.

To begin with, any online school that’s worth building won’t be a district-branded school in a box.  You know what I mean when I talk school in a box, right?  One purchases the curriculum and coursework and so on2 and replaces the curriculum company’s logo with their district logo. This is relatively easy to do, and results in the ability of a school board to say “Hey.  Look.  We have an online school.” But doesn’t really result in a change to, well, pretty much anything, or any advantage to the home school district other than a slight financial one.3
So that’s not good enough.  And it feels, well, funky.  At least to me.  So that’s not doable, in my mind.  Not in totality.  But there are other ways.

In our school district, in the face of a change in state standards4, the curriculum team has been working with select teachers to map our standards into a curriculum framework.  The next step is to begin to map out what new common district assessments might look like and then to give examples of what exemplary work looks like and to build all of those standards, assessments and exemplars into a curriculum map that makes it pretty transparent about what’s up with teaching and learning in the district.5

That’s good.  But let’s try to tie in a few other district projects.  For one thing, there’s a real sense of excitement about the possibility of digital and/or open source textbooks here in the district.  Both the board and the curriculum team and others are beginning to realize that there’s a big opportunity to save some money and to create better materials at the same time through the curation of digital texts.6

I imagine that we could double our curriculum expertise here in St. Vrain, have folks work regularly on curating resources by hanging the good stuff from elsewhere on our curriculum map and writing the rest, and save money in the process.  The distribution model for what folks produce is a bit muddled7, but it’s doable.

Let’s suppose, though, that the aims of creating digital textbooks that are mapped to curriculum and building an online school weren’t disparate.  In fact, I think they’re complimentary.

Suppose, instead of going after a school in a box, you took the opportunity to think of an online school as a lab school, a place of possibility and “what if-edness” that you might use for R&D into new methods, practices, and opportunities for partnership.  Suppose the goal of such a school included being the development and testing ground for the digital resources that you wanted to build?  And furthermore, suppose that you hired teachers to both teach and curate curriculum, so rather than teach full time, or curate full time, they did both things together.

This would give you a space in which to create resources and to, with the aid of students, who would be partners in the work, fieldtest and improve them?

Hmm.

Doesn’t that have a nice sound to it?  I think such a school would need to be a high school to begin with, but that might be an irrational bias8.

And now that we’ve opened the door to cross-purposes, I’d like to explore a few other ones.  There are plenty more.  What might an office of professional development as a partner in an online school look like?  How might an online school be a school-within-a-school that lives across a school district?  What are the essential physical spaces in an online school?  How do you build community in such spaces?

But those’re posts for other evenings.  For now – might something like this make sense?  What places do you see that look like this – online schools with experimental purposes?  Lab schools?  Online?9

I’ve not yet mentioned that, as I wrote and wondered a little while back, it would be essential that there were democratic structures built into the school.  And, although I’m not sure I’ve said so, it would be essential in any online school, that there be advisors in place and an advisory period of some kind that made sense for all students.  Students are less likely to get lost when there’re always folks looking out for you.

More soon.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

  1. “You know,” I say to friends, smart ones, “We should really build a school.”  And then we explore the idea. [↩]
  2. and in some cases, the staff and even the administration [↩]
  3. I say slight because you’re looking to split the revenue returned to the district between a curriculum company and the operating costs of such a program. [↩]
  4. Twice.  Colorado adopted new ones recently, and then adopted Common Core over the summer.  It’s been a bit standards crazy lately, and the state is still figuring out what it’s done, as are many others. [↩]
  5. I really like the idea that the curriculum map, up to and including activities and common assessments, is available to anyone who wants to take a look.  Particularly for a public school district.  Here’s one that a district to the south is doing interesting things with. [↩]
  6. Folks like Bill are doing some good thinking in this area, so take a link break and head over to his post.  Go ahead.  I’ll be here when you’re done. [↩]
  7. Do we go all digital?  Print on demand?  Allow for folks to bring their own devices?  Some combination of the above? [↩]
  8. I was a high school teacher before I went to work as an educational geek full time [↩]
  9. I suspect that many of you have answers to some of the questions I’ve outlined, as well as a couple that I’m reserving for future posts.  I can’t say this more clearly – I’m very interested in hearing from you.  Would love to hear how you’ve answered some or all of these questions in your own online spaces and places.  Or maybe you have better questions.  I’ll take those, too.  Please. [↩]
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The Clock’s Ticking

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Right now, according to Sir Ken Robinson, my children are at the peak of their divergent thinking abilities.  And those will diminish as they advance in their schooling.  Uh oh.  So, how do we build schools that amplify, rather than eradicate, divergent thinking?

This is not an idle question. Watch the video and then help me answer it. Quickly.

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“You Must Decide How to Read.”

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From The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink:

This is an extraordinarily complex construct, because the sentence is a magical, shape-shifting monster. It blends figure and ground compactly; the gestalt has leaky boundaries limited only by your willingness to click. Note that you can kill the magic by making the links open in new windows (which reduces the experience to glorified citation, since you are insistently hogging the stage and forcing context to stay in the frame). What makes this magical is that you might never finish reading the story (or this article) at all. You might go down a bunny trail of exploring the culture and history of Bollywood. Traditionally, writers have understood that meaning is constructed by the reader, with the text (which includes the author’s projected identity) as the stimulus. But this construction has historically been a pretty passive act. By writing the sentence this way, I am making you an extraordinarily active meaning-constructor. In fact, you will construct your own text through your click-trail. Both reading and writing are always political and ideological acts, but here I’ve passed on a lot more of the burden of constructing political and ideological meaning onto you.

The reason this scares some people is rather Freudian: when an author hyperlinks, s/he instantly transforms the author-reader relationship from parent-child to adult-adult. You must decide how to read. Your mom does not live on the Web.

No.  She doesn’t.  So how do we scaffold the meaning making process just enough so that a student can move into it?

Or do we need to?

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