Category Archives: Inquiry

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

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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?

  1. 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. [↩]
  2. And we should really, really be doing that. [↩]
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You’re Sharing The Data, Right?

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We held a processing session for several of our DLC teacher researchers today. One of them, an early elementary teacher, said this in mid-presentation as she was discussing the impact of helping her students to monitor their own reading process:

So many times, we give assessments but we don’t take the time to give (our students) the data. Giving them the data gives them control over changing it.”

Yes. It does. Think quantified self. And I’m wondering just when it is that we give students the information that we take from them.

In an ideal situation, we wouldn’t ever not return some information whenever we require an assessment of our students. And it’s probably not that hard to ensure that the information gets back to students.

And yet. When I asked an executive at a major assessment company if he was working to give students access to the information that they collect about them, he looked at me like I’d just asked him if squirrels could talk.

So there’s work to do.

I hope you’re sharing the information that you’re collecting about students with the students you’re working with. And I hope you’re asking vendors how they’re doing that, too.

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Talking Teacher Research

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Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit with friends and colleagues over at Connectedlearning.tv about some of the thinking and work we’ve been doing to help support teacher research in our school district.  Here’s an archive of the recording of that conversation:

I enjoyed the conversation and left with plenty more thinking and work to do on bringing thoughtful and purposeful inquiry into the teaching and learning worlds I inhabit.  Perhaps you will, too.

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You Should Probably Just Grade Less

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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?

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Centering on Essential Lenses

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(Cross-posted from the Center for Make/Hack/Play, a new project we’ll be working on.  Find the Center for Make/Hack/Play on Twitter and Facebook.)

photo: alexkerhead

Lenses are powerful tools.  With the right lens on your camera, you can see things very close up, or incredibly distant.  The right lenses can help you bring light to dark places, or shelter the darkness from too much intruding light.  Turn the lens on your microscope or telescope the right way, and what was blurry becomes much easier to see.

Lenses are good for focusing on what matters in a given situation, challenge, or opportunity.  But you need several in your camera bag if you want to see the most of the world and capture it for yourself or others.

Beyond cameras, the metaphorical lenses or frames that we apply to our experiences can help us to better understand them, or to give us new ways of seeing what’s happening to or around us.  There are three lenses that seem essential for any learner’s toolbag, be that learner a student in a classroom, or one who frames the learning of others.  Helping to build and shape and develop these lenses is essential for lifelong learning in the 21st Century.  Or the 20th.  Or the 22nd.

How you see is shaped by how you look.  And we say folks should look with lenses like these.

1. Making

There’s a copy of Make Magazine on my desk right now as I write this, as much as talisman as anything else.  I’m not a big DIY guy around the house.  To be honest, my lawn sprinklers are in serious need of attention right now, and I am in over my head.  I pity the portion of my yard that suffers while I figure that out. It’s a slow journey for me as a suburban homeowner to adapt my environment to my needs.

But I’ve always believe that making things is essential to the craft of teaching and learning.  Students learn more and better and fuller and richer when they are making something to demonstrate their learning.  Or making something to share their learning.  Or making something to help them understand their learning.  Or . . . well, you get it, don’t you?

Learning happens when we make things.  We make sense of new situations.  We make knowledge by processing our experiences.  We make tools to help us do things we might not yet be able to do.  Making matters.

2. Hacking

Hacking too often gets a bad rap, because we’ve lost the sense of the word.  The original definition of a hack was a fiddle that improved a process or a program.  A hacker was someone who made such changes.  Hackers were revered in technology communities, because they took what was there and made it better.  The first hackers tweaked some code and made their software or hardware do something that it couldn’t do before.  Later, the term grew to include people who fiddled for nefarious purposes.

But the original meaning of hacking is worth reclaiming.  Hackers are the folks you want on your side when something’s not working like you want it to.  Hackers improve things.

Learning happens when we hack things, too, because we must understand what our situation is, and how we can fiddle with it, in order to improve it.

3. Playing

While there are many definitions of “play,” our favorite is the definition of play as the search for freedom within constraints.  When a system, be it law, or culture, or “the rules” of whatever you find yourself in, blocks something, playing with that system results in your discovery of freedom or agency.  That playing might require you to make something, or to hack something.  But good play certainly requires that you understand what and who you’re playing with, and perhaps even the nature of the game.  If you don’t like the game, perhaps you can tinker your way into a better one.

Playing with information or structures or situations can lead to powerful learning.

Centering, Then

And maybe the best sort of way to spend your time as a learner is through making, or hacking, or playing.  Or maybe all three.  And along the way, you might rediscover the parts of yourself that have gone to sleep.  Or have never been awake.  Those are the parts that you can use to make and hack and play wherever you happen to be.

These lenses can lead to agency.  And that’s worth shooting for.  That’s a life skill that’s bigger than science or geography or math or language arts.  Applying and being aware of agency to and in whatever you’re doing, agency informed by your abilities to make and hack and play, leads to you being more fully in control of your situation.

That’s powerful learning.  So enter the Center for Make/Hack/Play, an ethospace informed by and seeking to inform others of the value of making, hacking and playing.  A place where it’s all about the agency of the learner and the art and habits of active learning.

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some ideas for applying making, hacking, and playing lenses and principles to the work that should happen in schools and classrooms and learning organizations.  We hope to offer workshops and work with schools and teachers and the community to build and sustain spaces for this kind of learning.  While some of this learning requires specialized tools and equipment and classrooms, not all of it does.  The principles of making, hacking and playing can thrive in any learning situation.  And maybe they should.

So that’s worth figuring out.  That’s worth doing.  So let’s begin.

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In Search of Agency

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It sure seems like a lot of things just happen to people. You know, beyond our control and all. We’re well-intentioned, and rocking along, and all of a sudden, but on a pretty regular basis, something just happens.

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. [↩]
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Three Things I’m Thinking About Right Now

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1.  Looking forward to attending my first #DML2012 conference.  Should be a fascinating opportunity to learn from and with folks who are thinking about learning.  Also, as I’m mostly facilitating others’ learning lately, it’s nice to attend an event in a primarily learning role1.

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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#Educon 2.4: Talking Teacher Research

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Later today, I’m honored to be joining my friends and colleagues Jon Becker and Meredith Stewart as we facilitate a session at Educon 2.4 on teacher research and professional development. Specifically, on how we can be critical, in a good way, in our choice and craft of professional development. Here’s the session description:

#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?

My favorite part is that we’ll be talking about what a teacher research study designed by the participants of the Educon session might look like. If you’re around at 11:00am Mountain/1pm Eastern, we’d love to have you join us for the conversation. Here’s the session information on the Educon website. A stream should be available from that page.

Join us.

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Schooling That Isn’t School-y

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I sat in on a meeting today of the organizers of our school district’s Innovation Academy, a summer STEM enrichment program that’s a partnership between the district and IBM.1

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.

 

  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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