In Search of Agency

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Bud Hunt

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?

I should not be allowed to use whiteboards without some serious remedial handwriting work. [↩]

Three Things I’m Thinking About Right Now

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Bud Hunt

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.

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. [↩]
Disclosure – the NWP has supported my attendance at this event. I’m grateful for that. [↩]

#Educon 2.4: Talking Teacher Research

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Bud Hunt

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.

Schooling That Isn’t School-y

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Bud Hunt

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.

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

#DMLBadges for Teachers: We Missed Here, Too

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Bud Hunt

Justin Reich and I recently submitted a proposal to the DML Teacher Mastery and Feedback Badges Competition. And, like my recent submission to the DML Conference, it wasn’t accepted.

But that’s cool. I was curious about the process and I learned a bunch about the problems and opportunities of badges and badging. In case you were curious, below is the full text of the application. You can read the winning Stage 1 proposals on the DML Competition Website.

Teacher inquiry has long been recognized as a valuable way for teachers and students to critically examine their learning and pedagogy. We define teacher inquiry, sometimes called teacher action research, as a process by which teachers identify a problem of practice, gather data about that problem, systematically analyze that data, prepare a public presentation (lecture, workshop, published article) about their findings, and then adopt a series of action steps to improve instruction. In countries with very successful national curricula, such as Japan and Singapore, systematic teacher inquiry practices such as lesson study are central to efforts to improve educational systems and help individual teachers develop as practitioners.

In the decentralized education ecosystem of the United States, teacher action research has been adopted less systematically, but it remains a promising and powerful approach. For instance, the DataWise program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has had tremendous success in helping schools and teachers adopt a structured cycle of inquiry in order to use assessment data to improve instructional practice. We propose the development of a badge recognition system for teacher recognition activities. Such a system would both encourage teachers to engage in these effective professional learning practices and to provide teachers and districts with a map through the complex landscape of teacher action research.

Several structural factors in American schools limit the degree to which teacher have opportunities to practice teacher inquiry and teacher action research. In particular, most districts structure professional learning time around a series of “early release” or professional development days. Often, these days are filled with lecture-based teacher professional development which teachers often find to be both useless and boring (teacher professional development is one of the truly shameful elements of our national education system). Teachers are rewarded for their seat time in these professional learning opportunities with Professional Development Points or Continuing Education Units, which are required for recertification, tenure, salary steps, or other rewards in the system. These structures and schedules are not well suited for nurturing teacher action research, which requires a more flexible allocation of time and energy. Generating questions, data collection, data analysis, preparing reflections, and adopting refined practices cannot be broken up into arbitrary chunks of time throughout the year, as these activities need to be tied in with the classroom lessons, projects, and activities that a teacher is trying to improve.

In an attempt to change this dynamic, the St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado created the Digital Learning Collaborative in the Fall of 2009. The DLC introduces intentional institutional subversion through a model that re-centers teachers as both learners and researchers and incorporates a two-year approach. Attachment 1 gives more background on the DLC. Through a partnership with the Colorado State University Writing Project, and informed by the teacher inquiry work of the National Writing Project, these teacher researchers in the DLC are emerging as experts in residence in their schools, not as outsiders, but as insiders invested in the schools and students they serve. The DLC by design allows for the research of its members to spread throughout the district and, through the use of the Web, beyond.

As these teacher researchers, and others like them, move from novice to more experienced roles, they have value to add to their communities as practitioner researchers who are well equipped to ask difficult questions and seek out answers from the communities they serve. But how do teacher researchers develop the skills that they need to possess to engage in thoughtful inquiry? And, how do others know that these teacher researchers are well equipped to serve in that role within organizations they might join later?

Badges, we believe, can help.

We envision that open badges might have two specific roles to play within the teacher researcher community, both outlined below.

1. Teacher Researcher Badges as Instructional Pathfinders

The role of teacher researcher is not too terribly different from the role of a teacher. Like researchers, teachers are expected to make good use of the data around them in order to better understand a situation, in this case, a studentʼs learning. A teacher researcher has a more formal and specific role to play with regards to how he or she interacts with the data to dig for deeper understanding. Badges can help to identify the skills involved in conducting teacher research and provide an instructional path for prospective teacher researchers to follow as they begin to explore and apply the ideas of teacher research. For prospective teacher researchers, a badge or series of badges might function much in the same way as Pac-Man uses power pellets, or Sonic uses rings, or Mario gold coins. The badge serves not just as a carrot or a prize, but as a map.

We propose that within teacher research there are at least five specific skills that might benefit from badging:

1. Asking thoughtful questions
2. Intentional Data Collection
3. Systematic Data Analysis
4. Publishing Findings
5. Improving Instructional Practice

By providing teachers with a structure for exploring teacher action research with badging, we provide teacher-researchers with a map for using teacher inquiry to improve practice. Since professional development structures in schools are not designed to support teacher action research, we believe that a badging system could help teachers use their own more flexible prep periods or team and department to make progress towards these goals. In total, the five badges would represent a sixth badged identity – that of teacher researcher.

Several organizations seem likely candidates to participate in the infrastructure to award these kinds of badges. Districts like St. Vrain could be responsible for awarding badges to their own faculty who participate in projects like the DLC professional development program. Consultants or other professional development organizations, such as those providing training on the DataWise method, would also likely be willing to serve as distribution nodes in a badge network.

2. Teacher Researcher Badges as Signals to Organizations

All learning organizations need more thoughtful, reflective practitioners who carefully study their own practice. Teacher Research Badges can serve to signal to organizations the presence of these teacher researchers in the organization or within the larger community granular detail about the kinds of professional learning that teachers have explored, and are much better suited to helping teachers spotlight their teacher action research.

Moreover, Teacher Researcher Badges could be used to build bridges across districts and demonstrate a national or international “teacher researcher community,” one where teacher researchers could discover and support one another.

The democratization of education reform requires that teachers and students are engaged and informed voices for the practices, habits, and mindsets that are essential to an informed citizenry. Teacher research is a powerful force for institutional subversion that can lead to a better learning environment and experiences for all. Badges that help to cultivate and mentor the next generations of institutional subverters can lead to thoughtful and inquiry-grounded innovation that can be nurtured through an organization and shared beyond.

The Podcast: A Culture of Inquiry?

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Bud Hunt

In this edition of the podcast, I explore some of my frustrations lately regarding some pushback I’m seeing as I facilitate some teacher research in my school district. I also wander through some first draft thinking on why that pushback exists.

I welcome your comments and suggestions, as always.

Direct Link to Audio

#dml2012: (Not Accepted.)^3 But I Still Like It.

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Last night, I got word that my proposal for the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference was not accepted. While I am a bit disappointed that the session wasn’t accepted, I know I’m in good company – according to my rejection notice¹, they have a 30% acceptance rate, so lots of good stuff got left behind. I suspect what made it in will be pretty interesting. But I liked the language of the proposal, and thought it might be of interest to others, so I’m posting it below exactly as I submitted it.

Practitioner Inquiry in the Digital Learning Collaborative: Teacher Research for Reform from Within

Educational reform efforts are often conducted on schools and teachers, rather than with and through them. Teachers are asked to conduct scripted lessons nested within scripted curriculum. Too often, genuine inquiry, an essential skill and mindset for students and teachers, is given lipservice rather than real attention and focus in the classroom.

In at attempt to change this dynamic while also creating a new way of thinking about teaching with technology, the St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado created the Digital Learning Collaborative in the Fall of 2009. The DLC is an attempt to introduce intentional institutional subversion through a model that recenters teachers as both learners and researchers. With their students as partners, teachers in the DLC engage in a two-year professional development program. In year one, teachers are encouraged to explore, in small teams, technologies that they are curious about in an attempt to better understand them. In year two, they bring those technologies into their classrooms and use a teacher research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, _Inquiry as Stance_, 2009) model to explore the impact of that technology on student achievement. With students as partners in this inquiry, teachers in the DLC have explored the effects of computerized assessment, the use of iPods as visual vocabulary tools, and online networking and writing environments, among others. Through a partnership with the Colorado State University Writing Project, and informed by the teacher inquiry work of the National Writing Project, these teacher researchers in the DLC are emerging as experts in residence in their schools, not as outsiders, but as insiders invested in the schools and students they serve. The DLC by design allows for the research of its members to spread throughout the district and, through the use of the Web, beyond.

In this workshop, we will explore the DLC model, as well as engage participants in an exploration of the inquiry produced in projects like these. We will also explore the opportunities and challenges that such a model for professional development presents and consider the impact practitioner inquiry, and also intentional institutional subversion can have on an organization. Participants will leave with a better understanding of how teacher research, and teacher researchers, have much to offer conversations on education reform while they are working to improve their practice. Participants will also consider the implications of teacher research on a school through some scenario explorations, and explore how teachers in the DLC can become colleagues from a distance as the power of the Internet can bring us into each others’ inquiry work as partners and responders.

The democratization of education reform requires that teachers and students are engaged and informed voices for the practices, habits, and mindsets that are essential to an informed citizenry. Teacher research is a powerful force for institutional subversion that can lead to a better learning environment and experiences for all. Through the DLC, and groups like it, thoughtful and inquiry-grounded innovation can be nurtured through an organization and shared beyond.

Which I got three times, I’m guessing due to a glitch somewhere. That stung a bit. [↩]

Getting Unstuck

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I had a productive phone conversation yesterday with a colleague in the district. She’s on one of our DLC teams and is a fine and thoughtful preschool teacher, the kind of teacher I want for my children, and she wanted to talk through some of her ideas for the teacher research project that she’s working on. It’s “due” in the Spring, and she’s having trouble coming up with a good idea for her research.

Actually, that’s not true.

Her “problem” is that she has several really good and interesting areas where she might turn her attention and skills as a teacher researcher, but all of them are appealing to her. She talked through three ideas that sounded fairly fleshed out and interesting, and two or three more that might workout, but are less developed. I wanted her to tackle all of them. And I think she did, too. But she was stuck because, really, she could ultimately only spend the time and energy on one of them.

I think she mostly needed to say that out loud, and to have me reinforce it. I look forward to the one she picks.

It came up in the conversation that she’d noticed that I was stuck lately in my own writing and exploration, as you might have noticed, too, Dear Reader. It’s been rather quiet here on the blog, and all the other spaces where I’m writing in public lately. It’s been rather quiet in the spaces where I write for just me, too.

This fall’s been a busy one, and I’ve had a pretty full plate. But that’s not really why I’ve been quiet. See, I’ve been stuck, too.

Maybe I’ve been distracted by all stuff I’ve been doing to see what it is that was worth doing, or maybe it’s that I’m just tired. Or maybe it’s just that time of year for me, a time of quiet.

Or maybe, on my worst days perhaps certainly, I’m losing my way. Maybe I’m losing hope. But I try to work through that. Being without hope, in the long term, isn’t a productive place to be.

I gave that teacher a little suggestion as we ended our conversation yesterday, and I’m thinking I might take my own advice. She was having trouble getting started because she didn’t know what project to choose. I’m stuck because I don’t know where I want to go next, either. What I suggested to her was that perhaps she might start writing her way through her topics and questions, and that, along the way, she might discover what it was that was worth her doing and seeing through. I know that’s helped me in the past, and, in fact, is pretty much why I write in spaces like this.

She responded that she might not know who’d want to read about that, or if what she’d be writing about would be obvious to everyone else¹.

That pushed me to one more suggestion. I’m certainly interested in what she’s up to, and I’d like to hear from her when she thinks she’s something to say. So, I told her, write to me. Just do it in public. She’s going to try.

And that helped. Both her and me. I think.

I forgot for a while. One of the ways that I’ve always gotten myself unstuck is to try to write with one person in mind. Writing for one person is better than writing for a universe of people. Writing for one person might make sense.²
So I’m writing today for just one or two people that might be interested in this update. And I’m going to try to come to the blog for a while with one or two people in mind and see where that gets me.

Because, for so many reasons, I can’t stay stuck for long. Just can’t. So maybe this will help.

It’s certainly worth a try.

In her case, as in most cases, that’s certainly not true. She has things to say that no one else can. I bet you do, too. [↩]
When I wrote music, something I wish I were doing more of, and have been thinking about starting again lately, I found that the best songs I had within me were written in the second person. Maybe there’s something to that here, or at least right now. Or maybe this is a self-indulgent post. For the moment, to get unstuck, I’m quite content whichever it happens to be. [↩]

We Didn’t Choose the Title

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I’m pleased to share with you that a piece that Michelle and I wrote about our work to create our school district’s Digital Learning Collaborative is in this month’s Journal of Staff Development. Here’s a copy of the article, called “Teaching 2.0: Teams Keep Teachers and Students Plugged Into Technology.”

I think it’s a good overview of the work that we’re up to here. We would love to know about intersections with your work.

Wait, I Wrote a Thesis?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Earlier today, I received final approval of the final draft of my thesis, “Wait, Am I Blogging?”: An Examination of School-Sponsored Online Writing Spaces, which I defended back in October.

Successfully¹.

So. I’ll have a Master of Arts after graduation in December. I started graduate school in the Fall of 2001. Just finished. It was a good trip, with plenty of side trips and time off the trail.

This process has reminded me that, as with most of the writing I do, when the text is “finished,” meaning it’s time to hand it in or pass it along or hit “submit,” the value in the work is the process more often than the words that process leaves behind.

That said, several folks along the way said they might like to see the finished project. So here you go. Thanks, Internet Friends, for all your help and support.

Seriously.

With distinction, according to my committee. I was honored. Still am. [↩]

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Bud the Teacher

Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning

Category Archives: Inquiry