And we are helpless in the face of all this happening stuff. Right? #

Of course not, but when it comes to teaching and learning, I have come to see that way more often than I’m comfortable with, teachers and students alike just let their schooling happen to them rather than acknowledging that they have control over what and how and even when they learn. Even in the face of mandates and political pressure. Even then. #

But folks feel helpless more than I think they actually are.  Learning, or school, or whatever, seems to happen to them, rather than the other way around.  It’s supposed to be the other way around.  Folks are supposed to own their actions and habits and the way they spend their time.  And our culture too often supports passivity and compliance. #

I feel like folks forget they are the agents of their experiences.  We have agency.  Power. Control.  Maybe not over everything that happens.  Certainly not all.  But over more than we realize more often than not. #

So how might we work to build agency in teachers and learners?  Let me simplify that question – how can we help folks develop the ability to recognize the constraints of a situation and to begin to play with them? #

As I delve more into elements of play and hacking, and even maker culture, it seems to me that there’s fertile ground there.  Play, if you recall, is the ability to move freely within constraints.  Hacking is the ability to see the system – and a problem with it – and work to improve it.  Making is creating.  It’s fiddling with the constraints of lots of different systems.  Yarn.  Blocks.  Food.  Circuits.  Classrooms.  Textbooks.  Laws.  Whatever. #

Hacking and making and playing are how you figure out where the constraints are, and how you might be able to fiddle with them.  As well as what happens when you do.  These skills/habits/attitudes/frames of thinking are useful when thinking about developing agency. #

That was where I got to in my wondering and thinking when it was time for Michelle and Kyle and I to think about what we’re going to work on next.  And then I got a whiteboard pen in hand.  And we did this¹: #

Enter hacking/making/playing. Or, more specifically, Hack/Make/Play.  It’ll be a multiple day and ongoing PD experience that we do in the district.  In conversation with other folks. If school’s but one node in the learning networks of children, well, we want to play nicely with the other nodes.  And we want to use our time with teachers to help them make things.  To help them understand how to identify building blocks.  And to help them figure out when and how to take things apart and put them back together differently. #

Building on others’ successes in maker and hacking spaces, and on the idea that learning is, to some extent, playing with information, deconstructing and reconstructing it, we would like to create some professional learning experiences that would help people to begin to feel equipped, and to a more important extent, empowered, or permissioned, or whatever the word is for “it’s okay to do this”-ed in order to build those senses of agency for teachers and students and anyone involved in learning. #

Right now, it’s just notes on a board.  And messy ones.  We started thinking about a week-long camp.  But that wasn’t right.  We want lots of entry points into this kind of thinking.  Lots of ways to engage and get involved.  So the “days” I spell out are probably not going to happen sequentially.  We don’t know yet.  But I do think that each of them is a kind of entry point.  Hacking the Web seems an important way of thinking.  Making stuff another.  Hacking curriculum?  Well, you get the idea. #

The essential question at the bottom is, I think, the big piece – “How do I approach a system to determine where my agency lies?”  If you’re able to play, you can see the constraints.  To see them, you’ve got to know how and where to look.  Hacking, making and playing seem to be useful ways to answer that question.  Not the only ways – not everyone needs to play with Picocrickets, or build toy cars.  Heck, the knitting circles I’m familiar with in our district likely embody the ethos we’re aiming for.  Everyone needs to be making something. #

Over the next several weeks, we’ll begin to flesh it out and look for the connective tissue that will hold various groups of hackers, makers, and players around our district together.  In some cases, we’ll probably start new groups.  In others, we might help existing groups to find one another.  I don’t know.  But I do know that something I said earlier in this post is worth saying again – there’s fertile ground here.  Hackers and makers and gamers are really good at learning. #

You might already be farming spaces like these – so I’m asking: Where do we go next? #

1. I should not be allowed to use whiteboards without some serious remedial handwriting work.

#

• So we need APIs that’ll help us pull our data out of the tools we use and put it into the tools that we use so that we can build dashboards of useful data
• input information, not output information – but maybe some of both – descriptive tools – not prescriptive ones this is important and I need to write about it
• inputs rather than outputs; experiences rather than tests
• describing the learning by the institution – not so much on the student¹

We need to be looking much more at the connections, relationships, and spirit of inquiry that goes into the system, and focusing less on optimizing measures and pathways that sort kids, schools, and teachers based on output metrics. #

I think the emphasis on educational outputs, i.e. test scores and not much else, is pretty wrongheaded. And it leads to the degradation of the educational environments that we should be building up. But we knock them down instead, in the name of what we get out of them. #

One of the more interesting elements of John Seely Brown’s keynote at DML was his discussion of how gamers build dashboards, or collections of vital, real time information, to help them complete complex elements of the game. He referenced World of Warcraft, in particular, but I suspect this is true of many games and the gamers that play them. Certainly, this is true for me as a learner and as a grownup – I collect the necessary data that I need when I’m learning about something or making a decision about it. Brown suggested that such dashboards for learning might be things that students need to make². #

And I began to wonder what the dashboards for learning might need to look like. Certainly, the value isn’t in the dashboard so much as it is in the making of the thing – identifying what one needs to know in order to do the thing he or she wants to accomplish. And so the creation of a good dashboard for learning is certainly dependent on the availability of the necessary raw materials that someone would need to cobble together to build such a dashboard for learning. #

So I went looking for those raw materials. And it’s pretty clear to me that students, in general, don’t have those sorts of materials readily available. Even if schools wanted to encourage students to make these sorts of dashboards for learning, they couldn’t do so³. #

I found two places in my daily life that have useful dashboard for learning stats available. Here they are: #

#

The first is from this blog’s WordPress Dashboard – a pretty simple collection of information. The second is from my Amazon account – which is a bit deceptive. I’m not reading 39 Clues – my daughter Ani is, but I think it’s interesting that I’ve got a limited look at what Amazon sees when they look at me. #

I know it’s limited because Amazon certainly knows an awful lot more about me than they let me look back at. They know what I highlight. What page I’m on in every book I’ve used. How long I spend on each page. How often I flip back and forth. What I do on their website after I’ve read a particular book or books. And much, much more. I can get to a few of those items. Not most. #

If only they’d share some of that information back with me. Imagine if schools had that sort of information about students’ reading habits? Suppose the books themselves could tell the teacher if they were being read⁴? #

And if students could examine their own reading habits and limitations, and fiddle around with the data their devices and systems were collecting on them, then perhaps those dashboards for learning wouldn’t be so hard to create after all. #

Dan Meyer said something the other day about dashboards via Twitter⁵. I responded that, certainly, portfolios could be dashboards for learning. He replied that portfolios aren’t so “heads up,” or words to that effect. And he was right. Portfolios are too output heavy, and not useful for quick glances along the learning way. #

But building portfolios, now that’s a fine way of figuring out if you’ve learned anything. #

So the question for textbooks, then, is this – how can a text provide data about its use to those who use it? How can students own and manage and fiddle with that data to track/monitor/explore their learning? And how can we create spaces within our books for students to make sense of their learning? How can our students’ inputs be privileged in the texts that we make, use and create at school? #

Dan sketches out, here, how a math text might look when spaces for inputs are considered thoughtfully. I wonder about how teachers and students can meaningfully share annotations via their texts. I wonder what tools could provide this sort of input information easily – Instapaper, I’m thinking, or Evernote, have fabulous collections of data about their users. I use those tools daily to help me learn things. How could they make my data available to me in more useful ways? What sorts of infrastructures would need to exist for that data to be useful in a dashboard for learning? #

And, of course, I wonder about the other inputs that are worth wondering about. What am I not considering in terms of inputs? How are you considering inputs in your work? #

1. This was in reference to comments by Gever Tulley that much of assessment in his school is done by the staff and about the experiences they’ve created – did they accomplish what they wanted them to, etc. – and there’s less emphasis on what each individual student learned. The students themselves are focused on what they’ve learned. There’s some control left for them in their learning.
2. And the making resonated with me – it’s less about the actual dashboard, and more about owning a process through laying hands on the data and the pieces and building something out of them.
3. Maybe I was wrong about this – are there data sources that I’m not thinking about?
4. Certainly, students would figure out ways to game these systems, but tracking inputs could be a fine way to see what a student was doing – and where they were stuck, or confused, or frustrated, or what have you. There’s potential there. There’s also danger there – tracking data and privacy concerns are important and worthy of consideration.
5. I looked, quickly, but couldn’t find the exact tweet. My apologies.

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I’ve written before about some of what I think needs to happen when it comes to textbooks at schools. And my colleague, Kyle, is working very hard with our curriculum staff to prototype some of what our new curricular resources might look like. But I thought it would make sense to share some thoughts here, as grist for the mill of conversations in Maryland. #

I’m hoping that folks’ll at least take some time to make sure they’re working from shared definitions when it comes to words like “textbooks” and “resources.” Might not hurt to define “curriculum.” The problem with those words, and others that are likely to come up in the conversation, is that “everyone knows what they mean.” But they know that differently. Shared definitions matter. #

I’d humbly offer this definition for textbook – “A collection of information organized around thoughtful principles intended to provide support to instruction.” It’s not the best definition – I’m sure there are better¹ – but before you go too far into a conversation about moving beyond something, it’d be good to have a sense of what it is that you’re going to move beyond. #

I might drop “book” from the word, but I’m divided on that, as I’ve learned it’s hard enough for people to consider that video or audio are “texts.”² The book part really bugs people. That said, a “book” has never been a codex. That’s the delivery technology. #

In your conversations this weekend, try to separate the delivery technology – the way the information gets to the people – from the information you’re trying to send. If you argue that “the Internet is the textbook,” then you have failed to separate delivery from information. You can’t completely separate the two – the way something comes to you affects what you get, of course – but try to at least be aware of the two elements. And take advantage of the right delivery tools to allow for the types of stuff you want to see your textbooks do. #

Also try to refrain from overgeneralization. “Textbooks are dead,” might feel good to say, or to retweet, but is a foolish statement. No, BYOD solutions aren’t the only answer. Student 1:1 environments aren’t the only answer. There is no one size fits all answer to the problems you are trying to solve. Platform and device neutrality and Web standards are pieces of the puzzle you’re trying to solve. So is on-demand printing. Or sometimes mass printing. Paper is not the enemy, nor are screens the savior. #

Don’t be afraid of relying on expertise. Expertise, after all, is what you’re looking for in a textbook. The reason for textbooks is to bring a collection of human expertise on something together. But do not let that expertise lie in a publisher’s office alone. #

The best textbooks moving forward are likely those that start with small building blocks from publishers, OER repositories, classrooms, websites, movie studios, and pretty much any other source for interesting information, and they become textbooks when they are hung onto a curriculum frame by a local school district. This might be done by a committee of teachers, or a small group of curriculum coordinators in a front office somewhere, but what important is that it’s not done by a salesperson seeking to please a state official in Texas or California. #

The shift that I hope is coming in instructional sources is the local creation and curation of this stuff, followed by the local distribution of it to students. Some of this local curation work will be scalable and useful to other places – that is one advantage, for both business and school interests, of the Common Core State Standards. But lots of it won’t. #

If textbook companies want to sell us things for and in the rest of the 21st Century, they should be selling the building blocks of content. Small pieces. They should be selling expertise and guidance in how to create these local curriculum creation teams. They might sell the platforms that help us to put the pieces together and distribute them to our communities. Discovery actually does this now – and could lead in this area. #

But no publisher can sell us monolithic books written for imaginary populations of lowest common denominators. That’s why folks are so angry with and about textbooks – in the race to create One Book to lead them all, our publishers gave us stuff that wasn’t super-duper for anybody. And we bought it. #

We’ve got to better the textbook. Not move beyond it. #

Looking forward to seeing what folks come up with during the conversation. I suspect I’ll have more to say on the matter. #

1. Wikipedia’s isn’t bad.
2. Wikipedia even has trouble differentiating between the format and the content in their definition of “book.” But the entry on the term still might be useful. So, too, would “text.”

#

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. #

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. That was masterfully facilitated at ISTE 2011 by Chad and Meenoo.
4. The writing some of the participants shared during that session, I thought, is worth more of my time.
5. 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.

#

But in our rush to make and play and tinker and connect and engage in learning that matters in institutions that might not, I feel like I’m missing the love. #

No, that’s not quite right.  Actually, I’m finding notions of love everywhere I look.  But perhaps that’s because I’m focused on looking for it, and you know how it goes – when you look for something, when you look really hard, you can find it anywhere. #

I keep coming back to this interview that Fred Rogers gave to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.  You should watch the entire series, but here, at 5 minutes and 17 seconds into this particular segment, Mr. Rogers give his definition of teaching and talks about what he was trying to do with his television show: #

#

His words here stick hard with me – I cannot divorce his concept of love and teaching from my way of thinking about teaching now.  And the Internet, or a school, or a community center, or a museum, or any institution of and about learning, can and should provide examples of teachers in love with what they love in front of others as a way of communicating that love, and helping students to find and communicate their own. #

And I see resonance with that in the talk of the new DML Connected Learning Research Network, especially in Mimi Ito’s description: #

In a nutshell, connected learning is learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational and economic opportunity. Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose. #

And while I’m not sure that love, itself, can scale, I wonder if finding love maybe can.  Certainly people have limited capacity, and can only love so many so deeply, but computers can help us to find each other.  Networks can help us to find each other.  Institutions can help us to find each other.  Then we can do the human pieces better. #

And finding each other, then looking after each other, is well worth doing¹. #

In this morning’s panel on technical and social innovation, I saw too much emphasis on systems designed around outputs.  I think that’s a large problem in education – we look heavily at what comes out of a system, but not so much on what we put into it.  I’d argue quite strongly, with anyone who’ll listen, that we need to look quite closely and intentionally on what goes into a system, and on what sorts of inputs are privileged in our infrastructures.  And how we inject love and care and compassion and concern into infrastructure is very, very important.  It’s not considered enough, if at all, and these things rarely show up on measures of output. #

So how do you build love and care into your systems and infrastructures and learning environments and experiences?  How are you doing so in a way that doesn’t over simplify the complex backgrounds of the people and communities you’re learning from and with?  How are you looking for ways to increase the love and care in your systems? #

What are you loving in front of your students and colleagues?  What would they say gets loved in your spaces? #

1. Certainly, too, it’s worth wondering about people who aren’t getting found, or served, or looked after, by institutions of love and learning.  How do we make sure that we focus on entry points so that those who wish to be found can be, and those who don’t want to be found can do that, too.  I’ll say more on entry points, infrastructure and inputs in a future post.

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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. #

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. #

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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2.  I’m honored to be a participant/facilitator for a session at this conference.  It’s called “Tapping into the Mutiplicity of Composition” and is a panel featuring several teachers who are making interesting things with students in the service of teaching writing and composition.  That should be a fascinating conversation. And, of course, we’ll be writing together.  Never a bad thing to do. #

To support the conversation, we’ve built a couple of Pinterest boards as ways of creating galleries that show some of the texts that students are making in the panelists’ classrooms.  A second board focuses on the testimonies of the panelists as a way of providing some background that might not surface during our conversations.  The agenda for that session is taking shape and will be finally finalized soon.  At a time when so much of the “interesting learning” that is taking place for students is taking place beyond the classroom, and sometimes in spite of it, I wonder about the role of schools moving forward into new learning landscapes.  I hope that schools see the potential in other ways of learning that haven’t been privileged in our classrooms.  I wonder how to bring the fringe learning into those spaces.  I know that the National Writing Project has a role to play in these conversations². #

3.  I’m struggling to write about some of my adventures in building cultures of play and love both in my school district as well as in my classroom.  I hope to get chunks of that thinking out here on the blog over the next few days.  My lens for this conference is basically “How do we promote cultures of learning and playfulness and care and concern for each other?”  Important. #

1. Which isn’t to say that I don’t approach teaching as a learning opportunity – but that sometimes the logistics of facilitation interfere with my ability to process what I’m learning as it’s happening.
2. Disclosure – the NWP has supported my attendance at this event.  I’m grateful for that.

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And while she’s sleeping off a cupcake-induced late afternoon nap, I had the chance to catch up on today’s paper¹. And read this. #

And, yes, I watched the video. It was painful. On multiple levels. #

This is just to say, mostly as a reminder to me, that when a father resorts to a public airing of grievances concerning his concerns over his daughter’s behavior, using the behavior he claims to despise, then he doesn’t win. #

Or help. #

And while it’s certainly not my place, nor am I able, to judge the father/daughter relationship here, I feel certain that this video, or the actions it captures, will not do much to improve the general state of relations between fathers and daughters. #

There are people on both sides of a relationship. Even if the people are children. Still people. And all people should be treated a little better than that video represents. #

And perhaps children sometimes are harder on their parents than the parents deserve. As the world flies to a place of ever-publicness, and the perpetual ease of slinging shots at each other through the public sphere will only grow, let’s be careful with what we’re slinging. #

Teagan, isolated from the birthday party, feverish and lethargic, down with a cold and quarantined upstairs with an iPad and TV, reminded me today that she, not quite five, like all of my daughters, will never live in a world where the world isn’t ever-pulsing in a device a finger’s touch away. Part of my job, as a parent, is to create for them moments of boredom in a world of Everything-All-The-Time. #

Boredom just happened in my youth. Connections were harder. The reverse is true for her. Her world will happen faster than mine. Time for sitting still and wondering will be something we will have to fight for more and more. #

I wish that father and his daughter had some more of that time. I think it might’ve made a difference. I hope they find some soon away from the Facebooks and the YouTubes. #

So, Quinn, and Ani, and Teagan, whatever is coming for us as father and daughters, let’s work very hard, all of us, to make sure it isn’t that. Let’s take time to talk and pause and be sure to honor each other, and to keep what might be better said offline offline. #

Okay? #

1. That I only ever read electronically, so it won’t be “the paper” for much longer, I’m guessing.

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#edchat
#RSCON3
#140edu
#TEDx______
#edcamp____ #

Many of the educators who participate(d) in the events listed above and others like them report that the events are/were perfectly wonderful; amazing even. Apparently, this social media-aided PD is more powerful than any PD they’ve ever done; better than any grad school course they’ve taken. And, it may very well be. #

But, many of the folks who take part in events like these have been at it for a couple/few years now. And, we’ve become pretty good at sharing what they’re learning and even doing. Theres value in talking about and sharing ideas and actions, but that only gets us so far. Furthermore, many knowledge claims are made about how awesome these ideas are. Students are learning more! Students are so much more engaged! etc. #

So, then, what are the warrants for these knowledge claims? What evidence is there that all of these new forms of professional learning are making a difference for kids? #

Think of it this way: imagine parents of a student in your classroom wants to know if the new stuff you’ve tried with their kid this year worked. How would you respond? What evidence would you offer? Imagine a principal considering awarding you professional development credits for participation in these events. How would you convince the principal that these professional learning experiences are legitimate? #

Join us. #

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The DLC will be embedding a teacher research group within the Innovation Academy and its planning in order to see if the work they’re doing, and that students and district staff are enthusiastic about, has something to teach us about how we can make positive change in the classroom. #

During the meeting, two statements really caught my ear and got me thinking about the work ahead. #

The first was a statement, made during the meeting and repeated by several folks in the conversation, that the goal of Innovation Academy was to create an environment that didn’t feel anything like school.  Both our district staff and our business partners felt this was important.  I find that both makes sense to me and is, well, rather odd.  That we’ve a shared understanding of school as something that isn’t conducive to learning is troubling, but I get where they’re coming from. #

The other thing that caught my ear was a mention, in passing, by one of the IBM partners that during last year’s camp, he noticed that the younger students involved in the camp, Kindergarteners, were plenty able to think in creative and nontraditional ways.  That’s not quite how he said it, though.  He actually said that sometimes, the youngest students were the best able to be engaged in the work of the camp². #

If, of course, we are trying to build learning experiences that are not at all like school, then it makes sense that our least schooled students would be the best at them.  Of course, it’s also possible that the Kindergartners at Camp Innovation are students who’ve not yet had their imaginations stamped out by school. #

I’m eager to begin the observational work of documenting what makes the Innovation Academy exciting and engaging for students and staff.  And also I’m looking forward to teacher researchers teasing out if they can fiddle with their classrooms in ways that make school less school-y. #

There is something worth going after in the space between the school-y and the not so school-y.  I hope it’s a piece of the possible future of public schools. #

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1. Last year, the project was called Camp Innovation.  Names change.  I like the camp metaphor, but it wasn’t my call.
2. And now academy.

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