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.
I love the guitar. And James Taylor is masterful with one. But his new “guitar lessons” are a good reminder of a few things:
1. They might not be “teaching.” He’s showing what he does. Modeling of a sort. But you can’t find the value in something like that until you have some knowledge of what and why he’s doing what he’s doing. So beginners, don’t apply to the James Taylor School of Guitar – not because it’s not fascinating, but because you’ll have to be an advanced player to see what it is he’s up to.
2. If you’re teaching somebody something, you’re not really teaching it to them unless they can follow you. So be thoughtful about where your students are coming from before they got to you – and what you need to send them off with so they can make sense of the next class.
3. Sometimes, a master doing his thing can be wonderfully and usefully illustrative. The camera angles on his videos – designed to give us a really, really good view of what he’s up to with his fingers – are handy. Just look at that picture up at the top of this post – plenty of angles there. But I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years. His modeling is, for me, a useful teaching tool, because I know most of the stuff I need to know in order to make sense of what he’s doing. Your mileage may vary.
4. He’s teaching. But is anyone learning?1 Does that matter?
September 12th. That’s the day everything changed.1
A few weeks previously, I had begun my teaching career as a graduate student teaching freshman composition in room 110 of the Natural Resources Building at Colorado State University. I remember room 110 very well because it was where, six years previously, I took my first English class as an undergraduate at the school. Introduction to Literature. 2
As an undergraduate, it was my job, I thought, to unpack the secrets of the stories and novels and plays that we read together. And I wrote. Lots. Every week, I produced two typed pages of thinking and reflection and wondering about what I was reading and why it mattered. This was college. It was important.
And back in room 110, with my class of college freshfolk, I was in charge of helping them to unlock the mysteries of the College Essay, the texts that they were expected to produce early and often in their college careers. These 18 and 19 year olds were looking to me, a 23 year old grad student, to provide them with the keys to college literacy. Or, they had to take the class, and I was in their way. Either way, there we were, from 10:00 to 10:50 every MWF.
September 11th was a Tuesday. I remember because that made September 12th a Wednesday. At 10:00am, I was supposed to “teach.” And no one said otherwise.
I made one of the most important discoveries of my teaching career that day3, when I decided that class would be optional. It made sense to go. People, I thought, were counting on me to make sense of this. And that couldn’t be done.
But there was something I could do.
I emailed the class that no one had to be there, but that I would be there. Attendance, for a change, would not be taken.
I didn’t expect anyone to show up. But they came. Not all, but most.
And I started class. Sitting on a table in the front of the room, I reminded folks that no one had to stay that morning. I would not advance the syllabus. Instead, we were together, and something monumental had happened. What, I wondered, did folks want to talk about?
And I don’t actually remember the specifics. I remember that there was lots of misinformation and rumor in the air that morning, and that mostly, as someone who had read several articles, watched some CNN, and had spent the previous afternoon in the newsroom of the student paper, where I had worked as an undergraduate, and would work again that Spring, and pulled everything I could off the AP wire as it was released, I was likely the “expert” in the room.
Like that makes any sense.
But I dispelled rumor where I could, suggested sources for folks to explore if they wanted to know more. I mentioned the school’s counseling program for students. And it was quiet. Not silent, but much quieter than a usual day of argument and conversation. We were together, but we weren’t really talking all that much.
I guess it was just normal, or whatever on September 12th could approximate normalcy in the wake of the events of the day before, and normal, on September 12th, 2001, felt pretty good. It was enough.
On Friday, September 14th, we resumed talk of what makes good summary, and how to use others’ ideas in the services of our own, and all the things that you talk about in a college writing class.
We kept going.
And now, as we look back and consider all that’s happened in the world in the last ten years, and how that day changed this country, and me, and most other folks I know in some way, I get the feeling that keeping going is a pretty good way to honor that day.
By all means, take a deep breath and a look back. Think about what happened and what that changed or what that didn’t change. Reach out if you need or want an ear. Look after yourself. Consider what’s worth doing and what’s worth remembering and what’s worth working to restore. But then, one last deep breath.
There’s much to do.
Let’s keep going.
Tonight, we kicked off the first team leader meeting of the year for the new cohort of the Digital Learning Collaborative.
The DLC, if you didn’t know, is a two-year professional development program we’re in our third year of developing. Year one is a year for personal and professional learning. Year two, which we’ll kickoff later this month for a different cohort, is a year of teacher inquiry into what happens for students when we use technology in the classroom.
Last night, we attempted, with our teacher team leaders, to set the culture for what it means to learn as teachers in community. We reviewed some of our habits – making sure we have a plan for all of our monthly team meetings, how we use Google Docs to share those plans and to share notes we take when and as we meet, and making sure that we’re separating time for learning1 from time for collaboration and sharing. And, yes, that’s messy. Messy is okay.
But we spent the bulk of our time last night reading and thinking and talking to each other about a couple of pieces, written by Will Richardson, that explore connected and passion-based learning not just for students, but for teachers, too.
That led to some good conversation. I heard Kelly, a first grade teacher, when she asked about how we help connect students to passions that they might not realize they have, and how we can encourage students to explore areas of themselves and the world when they might not have any knowledge about, well, much of anything. I heard Rebekah, a high school math teacher, when she said that somewhere, students have learned that it’s cool to not like math.
I hope that folks heard me when I invoked Mr. Rogers, and his definition of teaching, the idea that what teachers do is that they love something, and they love it in front of their students. Passion, indeed.
I heard Mollie when she said that it was important for teachers and students to follow their passions, and that, in a time of scripts and pacing, we’d do well to make sure that we’re injecting student interests and differences into our work.
I heard others, too. It was a fine culture setting conversation.
We also talked about the power of reflective writing, and took some time to write together, as we will do during all of our meetings. While I cannot share their writing with you just now, know that we’ll be hearing more from these teacher leaders and their teams as they begin to dig into their learning this year.
It was a fine start.
It’s skinned knee season in our home, with two girls riding bikes of the two and four-wheeled variety, and a third toddling along just behind – ready for far more than she’s capable of.
And I’m not one to stop someone who’s trying to make progress, even if that progress might be dangerous.
So we’ve been through lots and lots of boxes of Band-Aids for hurts both real and imagined. And we’re quick to wash out wounds and make sure that we keep them looked after.
But no matter how well we wash and watch, some of them are going to leave permanent marks. Like the time Ani discovered that you can’t make a ninety-degree turn on a bike. Or the time that Teagan realized, in a most unfortunate way, that you cannot stop a tricycle like Fred Flintstone could stop his car.1 Quinn forgets, sometimes, about “down.” She’s still kind of new.
Each of those moments hurts. But hurt can have an upside. In fact, some would tell you that hurt, or pain, has an evolutionary advantage. It tells us when we hit a limit of some kind.
And those marks will help them remember the stories of the injuries one day. They’ll proudly show the little scars and blemishes that never quite go back to normal and explain that they rode a bike early, or took a chance on a curb or wrestled with a cat or went head over handlebars in a moment of panic.
But hurt, like fear, well, it just hurts. And to know someone you love is hurting is the worst kind of pain, a pain of helplessness and empathy and doubt.
Oh, how I wish I had a suit of Nerf and armor that I could force my children to wear when they go out into the world, or want to wrestle that cat. To be able to ensure the safety of my children, be they walking to school or traversing a steep hiking trail along the edge of a narrow cliff, would make my sleep come much easier.
But I don’t. And the marks and memories would be hard to accumulate from inside an impenetrable shell of foam. I also suspect it’d be mighty difficult to hear with all that Nerf so close to one’s ears.
There are plenty of days I want to say “Today, let’s stay here, where cars and cats and cliffs and sticks and stones and words can’t hurt us.” But I can’t. Because that’d be parental malpractice. As a dad, it’s my job to listen and bandage and help my children to be brave, to not stop when it’d be a whole lot easier and may well hurt a great deal less and be more safe to just stay still. Being brave? It’s important. And I hate it. Oh, there are days I very much dislike that job.
As a teacher, that’s my job, too.
I hope you’ve got a kit full of peroxide and Band-Aids with you as you take your charges out into the world. I hope you, and they, are being very brave.
This morning I had the opportunity to visit our school district’s Camp Innovation, a summer program for Kindergarten through second grade focused on engineering and exploration and inquiry. In partnership with IBM, our district developed this two-week summer experience. Here’s the formal description of the work:
Teams of students will work directly with IBM employees at the IBM facility, along with SVVSD educators and high school volunteers on important and relevant issues to building a Smarter Planet: transportation systems, water, cities/buildings, food, and energy. Each group will be facilitated by a SVVSD teacher, an IBM employee, and multiple SVVSD high school students who participate in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or IB (International Baccalaureate Diploma) programs. At the end of the two week camp, project exhibitions will be shared with community audiences to culminate the experience.
My informal discription? Students digging in, asking questions, and wondering about the world. Then doing something about it. It was fun to watch, even for a few minutes. Students and facilitators and volunteers were moving around, making things, discussing options, and clearly engaged in very important work.
Below is a video describing the inquiry cycle that the Camp Innovation team, a group masterfully facilitated by Paige Gordon, worked to build into every aspect of the students’ experience. As I was wandering and shooting pictures and exploring student creations and how they camp has transformed a wing of office space at IBM into a design and fab lab, I saw the cycle in action, on the walls, and in the work of the students. I’m looking forward to seeing the students’ final projects, which will be shared in a community event at the end of the week. Thankfully, the entire experience has been well-documented by our district communications team, specifically Matt Wiggins1, and you can get a feel for the camp and the events as those videos emerge ((You can catch them as they hit the Web if you’d like.)
One more thing – as I was exploring the students at work, other district administrators who were visiting were remarking that it was essential that we get ideas like “So what?” and “How are you going to personally get involved?” into our “regular, during the school year” classrooms.
And that’s a fine thing to remark on. I look forward to their, and our, continued efforts to mix design and tinkering and inquiry into the daily culture of our classrooms.
Here are more of the photos I took during my short visit. Take particular notice of the “Prototyping Lab,” a large space full of supplies. I’ll have more to say on the lab in a future post.
So I’m giving a short “setting the mood” talk today to a school that is up to some interesting work. They’ll be spending the next couple of days working through some play and exploration around many of the tools available to them to help them in the work of teaching and learning.
And I’m supposed to say something clever and upbeat to get them started. Which is a bit of a challenge.
Or, it was going to be, until I stumbled across a draft of a position paper by the National Association for the Education of Young Children on the role that technology can and should play in the learning and development of young children. I was prepared to be frustrated by their work, and I was so tickled to be wrong.
It’s a delightful read, painting a picture of what I believe learning can and should look like. That it’s a technology document is almost of secondary importance. I’d encourage you to give it a read. But I can give you the gist of the document in these three statements taken from the text1:
We can learn lots from the situations of discovery and exploration that are the best of our early learning spaces. Preschool. Kindergarten. A good library, theater, or museum. The joy of discovery and wonder and budding curiosity. The technologies that we use with children for learning should help us to amplify the best of us and to help us become better and wiser people. It matters less what technologies we employ than it does that we are working thoughtfully and purposefully to create spaces for good learning.
And I hope I can convey that to the folks I’m speaking with today.
UPDATE: Here are the slides from the talk.
I’m about to head off the grid for a week or two, with only brief glimpses of online things. It’s that time of year and I need a break – and I’m celebrating an anniversary with Ms. the Teacher – our tenth. A good time to pause and reflect – on many things.
But, before I go, I wanted to leave myself a note about something I wanted to think more about when I returned – and it’s this:
Larissa was responding to a question about it not being “normal” to find places, specifically schools, where love is the reigning paradigm1. She said, plainly and rightly, that maybe love should be the norm.
Awesome.
And that’s worth fighting for. That’s worth doing. I like that new normal. Bunches. And didn’t want to forget as I slip off into vacation mode.
So get started on that while I’m gone. Okay?
Engchat 2011 from Ben Grey on Vimeo.1
I had the opportunity to hear Paul Allison, one of my favorite teachers, talk at length about his work with Youth Voices yesterday. Usually, Paul’s asking about others’ work, or showcasing the work he’s doing – but not talking about the thinking behind the work. And I like it when he does so. I hope he’d do that more.
He said that the pedagogical and philosophical1 recipe for Youth Voices was something like:
I need to return to all three of those folks and dig back in to some of their thinking.
But he said something, off the cuff, that I thought was really important. He mentioned that he’d been in the Youth Voices work for eight years2, and that students who started in tenth grade were able, in eleventh and twelfth, to return to the space and pick up where they left off. They didn’t have to learn a new space, and their work from previous years was right there.
That’s powerful and important and worth unpacking a little bit. Teachers who are using interesting technology with their students find themselves too often in the setup and infrastructure business – and that’s fine sometimes. But not every time or every lesson or every year.
One of the reasons I went to work for an IT department was because I wanted to help make spaces that had a life beyond one classroom. A student shouldn’t create one blog to suit the needs of every teacher that asks for work to occur in such spaces. Students create short term tools for what should be long term work, and they find themselves create blogs every time they start to do interesting work. The assumption becomes that the work they’re doing in these temporary spaces is throwaway work. When the unit, semester, or year ends, the space dies and the student is asked to create the next one.
That’s not how it should work.
What I love about Paul’s work, and the work of other folks who are thinking about the long game of educational spaces where work lives and breathes and mingles with other work, is that they’re building what I call3 longitudinal Web presences. Spaces where the portfolio happens as the collection grows. Places where the stuff a student made yesterday and the stuff a student makes today will be around for a student to add to tomorrow. Places that don’t die every few months or are subject to Teacher A or B’s personal web tool preference.
When Karl or Michelle or I talk about digital learning ecologies, or Paul talks about Youth Voices, I think that’s what we’re talking about. Teachers shouldn’t have to be in the creation and infrastructure business all the time. Nor should they be helping kids to cram important work into temporary places.
If you’re a tech director or a CIO, I hope you’re thinking about how to create these spaces. I also hope you’re thinking about how to help students return to them over time and to think through what they’ve made and how it resonates, or doesn’t, as they expand their knowledge and experience. In St. Vrain, we’ve built a few tools that help with this, but we’re nowhere close to figuring it out.
We do, know, though, and have been charged by our school board, that we are stewards of the work our students produce. That’s an important word – the IT department is responsible for looking after the students’ work. We’ve got to make sure it’s well taken care of and preserved and saved until they leave our care. And that they can take it with them when they go.
That’s what a portfolio should be. That’s worth making. Thoughtfully.4 I continue to be inspired and pushed by the work of folks like Paul who are building places of learning that last on the Web.