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.
I was reminded tonight of Karl’s post about writing poorly in public.1 I’ve been stuck lately, and not in a good way. The words haven’t been coming as I’d like for them to.
Which is a bit of a fib. I’ve also not been making the time for them these last couple of weeks. I’ve been in need of a break, or so my body has been telling me, and so I’ve not forced myself to follow old habits and sit patiently at the keyboard and bang away until I’m not disgusted by what I see.
I’ve been reading instead. It’s been good to give myself the break from writing. Reading, in some ways, is much easier than writing2, and through my reading, I can let ideas sit on the back burner of my brain, stewing and simmering into something. But, eventually, and maybe that’s now, I’ve got to do something with what’s stewing back there.
So here we are.
Later tonight, I’m going to put the finishing touches on a draft for a proposal for a series of teacher researcher badges for the DML Teacher Badges Competition. Why?
That’s a question I’ve been wondering pretty heavily about since the first badges competition was announced earlier this fall.
And I’m still not sure. But it seems to me that this is one of those times where I’d rather figure out the value of something by fiddling with it rather than flinging rocks from a safe distance. The more I hear how folks want to use badges, the less I’m convinced they’re transformative. New bottles. Old wine. Vinegar, even.
But suppose I’m wrong.
One of several things that worries me about the DML focus on badges is that it’s entirely possible that a badge will backfire. Badly.
If a badge’s purpose is to motivate folks who are doing interesting work on the fringe of school or teaching and learning, well, that’s very tricky business for a couple of reasons.
It’s possible, likely even, that the folks already doing the work on the fringe don’t need the motivation. They are, of course, already doing the work. And the institutionalization of the fringe work may well kill the work that you were trying to cultivate. It might be that the fringe was what made the work, ahem, work.
And so the badge saps the motivation from those who were already motivated and kills the thing they were motivated to do before the badge came along. That’s before it may, or likely may not, bring new folks to the work to witness its horrible death1.
That wouldn’t really help.
But, because I believe badges are here to stay, and they’ll likely be with us for some time, and I hope in my better moments that my cynical self is ultimately wrong about them, then it makes sense to take advantage of the opportunity. The trick, in supporting badges, then, is to think about badges that wouldn’t actually be motivational enough to start folks doing the work, but would be handy to have for other reasons. Credentialing, perhaps, or community discovery. And you’d want to focus those badges on work that can live in the mainstream, and won’t die when brought from the fringe.
If you’re counting on a badge to serve as a motivator, a reason to get students into the game, then I’m thinking you’re miscounting. But, if you’re wanting to use a badge much in the same way as Pac-Man uses power pellets, or Sonic uses rings, or Mario gold coins, then you may well be on to something. Don’t let the badge be the carrot. Let it serve as a map or a pointer. Don’t let the badge sell the game – but let it add to the gameplay.2
And make sure that the organizations that are supporting the badges are the ones that you want pointing the way.
In my next post, I’m going to lay out why I believe that the National Writing Project, or some organization like them, should be pushing hard to propose a teacher inquiry or practitioner research badge. They’re they right people to do so, and teacher research is certainly worth of more attention in our schools. And teacher researchers could use tools like badges to help them find one another.
But that’s not the best reason to badge teacher researchers. I’ll tell you about that in the next post.
In the meantime, what other stuff might you add to the list of useful badges?
I’m taking a break from writing up the implications portion of my thesis by coming over here to write some more. I’m beginning to get to the place in my research that I have some definite things to say about what I found out. But I’m having some trouble saying them. Not because I know what they are – but, I think, because of what I’m using to write. Word is not where I go to think. It’s where I go to comply. When I need to think about something, I come here, to a WordPress window in my browser1.
So maybe I’ll just try to do a little bit of freewriting here and see how it goes. Here’s what I think I know right now as it relates to my research.
To start with, here are my research questions:
While it’s certainly not a definitive collection of all the writing that’s happening in my school district, I’m going to take a guess and say that the three weeks of blog posts from the beginning of this school year that I’ve looked at in the course of my study are a good-sized sample of the public writing happening in my school district.
And, to start with, there’s just not enough of it. In three weeks, I can count on both hands the number of classrooms doing public writing in this space. And that leaves me with three fingers left to count other things.
Are students and teachers blogging or writing online2 in other spaces? Certainly. One of the limitations of my study, one that I knew would be a problem for some of what I was wondering about, was that I am limited to public stuff. If I wanted a fuller picture of what the writing that’s happening online in my school district looks like, I need to interrogate our district’s Moodle. I need to peer into our district implementation of Google Docs. On Thursday, a teacher in our district started sharing a Google Docs collection with me from one of his classes. He was excited about the number of texts they were producing together. I’ve not yet opened the folder – but I’ve watched a hundred or so documents enter into my document list. Sometimes in real time, I’ve seen them drop into place.
Writing is happening. But why not here?3
Here’s what I know about the writiing that I am seeing:
I took a quick peek at the Mozilla Open Badges project a little while back, and liked what I saw.
It’s an attempt to create an open infrastructure for badges around the Web. I like the technical pieces that allow anyone to offer any badge to anyone else in a consistent way. It makes sense to build tools that work for everybody, and that are open. I like that.
And I thought I was something I’d want to explore later, as I’m always looking for ways to help make the professional development I’m doing to make sense to other people. Maybe, I thought, a badge could help1. I put that idea on a side burner.
Then yesterday happened, and I’m going to have to pay a great deal of attention to the project. In a hurry.
That’s because this year’s Digital Media & Learning Competition is all about the badges.
It was fascinating to listen to the announcement2 and to follow along as the tweets came rolling in. It was, and is, also fascinating to consider the possibilities opened up through the use of badges to build portfolios of experiences and skillsets, to show the world what students, of all ages, can learn and do.
Except. Hang on a second.
I’m writing this post when I should be working on my thesis. The thesis is the last thing I’ve got to do in order to earn my badge Master’s degree in English Education. But it seems like there’s an awful lot of important questions wrapped inside assumptions in DML’s competition announcement. Felt right to at least try to get them down.
The Twitter stream of commentary, a piece of which was captured earlier by Audrey, was chock full o’ questions and concerns. Alex and plenty of other folks have all written thoughtfully about the announcement. It was clear to me, as I watched the announcement follow up panel, that the group, as a whole, didn’t have a consistent idea about what badges were/are/for/might do. I heard each of these possibilities:
Badges as credentialing
Badges, I heard, might be used as a way of denoting that someone has a particular skillset in a field in which there might not be a current credentialling method. Makes sense, and is the most straight forward use of a badge. Think Boy Scouts. Girl Scouts. Medal of Honor.
Badges as awarding credit
This one seems mostly similar to the previous function of credentialling, but it’s not. Quite. Earning a badge that counts as credit would require that a credit-granting institution3 would accept the badge in lieu of another requirement. Put enough badges together, and you get a really advanced badge. Or a diploma. Or a degree. So, not only can you do something in the eyes of an institution, but will another institution believe them and let you take a pass on their test of competency?
Badges as a way of honoring non-school learning
I’ve written before about how I find some of the most interesting learning taking place on the edge of school and home, in semi-school spaces. After school clubs. Fringe projects. And I want that learning to “count,” in the sense that I don’t think that teachers should have to fight so hard for those types of learning experiences. But I wonder if the best way to honor that learning is to make sure it stays out of school. If, as I heard a panelist say during the announcement, school is so ineffective and terrible at learning, then shouldn’t we try to fix school? Might we want to move some of the good semi-school learning into the classroom?4
If badges are an attempt to rebuild school, well, that might be a fascinating idea. Or a terrible one.
Badges as motivation
Students will be more inclined to go after a particular type of learning, I heard, if there were a motivator to push or pull the student along.5 That’s a dangerous reason to even consider a badge, I think, as I know enough about motivation to know that, as soon as the badges go away, the learning stops. Not good. Uh uh. Don’t pursue this one.
Badges as assessment
Actually, the badges wouldn’t be the assessments – just proof of their successful completion. And that’s where this starts to get tricky for me. For one thing, I don’t think enough folks understand that a badge involves assessment of one sort or another. And it’s the assessments and experiences that we want to fiddle with in school.
Badges as curriculum design
If badges can count as far as credit in traditional schools and universities, then badge program designers are now curriculum designers. What I didn’t hear at the announcement, but hope to hear about soon, is how folks might think about the Common Core SS, the current consortia developing the next generation of school assessments, and their thinking about badges.
Those were the purposes I heard in the time I was listening. And that’s complex stuff.
Other folks, I’m sure, who are smarter and more articulate than I am, will soon start talking about this work and what it means for power relationships between traditional schooling and other institutions.6 But what I’m not hearing people talk about, or suggest that they understand, is what it is that it means to “count.” I mean count in two senses of the word – both the mathematical meaning of seeing how many of something that you have, but also the way a student asks when they’re handed an assignment – will this count? Does it matter?
And, at school, we’ve done a bad thing by tying “counting” or “mattering” to “grading.”
If all badges do is fiddle with the object that students are taught to worship, rather than working to eliminate idol worship altogether, then there’s not much sense in exploring them.
If badges transform all grades that matter into “pass/fail” situations, well, that might be something. To match what students can do with their academic credentials as measured by actual performance tasks would be a good thing7.
But, if the DML competition encourages thinking and writing and exploration and action around ideas like the idea that any accountability system, or accreditation system, is ultimately a subjective system, made by people, however we design it, then I say, let’s rock. But let’s do so carefully.
Badges are not magical. They do not cure cancer. They are unable to stop large (or small) scale forest fires. Badges, particularly digital ones, cannot be eaten. The digital kind can’t even be burned for fuel. Badges do not make children smarter, or hard work less difficult.
But they’re certainly worth talking about, if they might lead to productive change. And, if they’re going to make a grand entrance in teaching and learning, at school and in the community, then I hope to goodness that teachers are paying attention.
Rebecca Blood, a lifetime ago in Internet time, wrote of weblogs:
We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions.
And when I read Dean yesterday talking of owning one’s space to share one’s words, and then Tony’s post about the value of Twitter, I am reminded that I lean on Dean’s side of this conversation. Twitter is to relationships as wheel decals are to roller skates. Nice to have and to use, but far from essential.
Twitter is the spice that flavors what you’re putting on the table. It might be the after dinner snack. It may well be the connective tissue that flavors the stew1. But it’s not the meal. It’s part of the deluge2, and we must push against it, building spaces where we can be thoughtful.
I like new frontiers. That’s why I’m excited to be participating in Karen’s attempt to create a School of Ed at P2P University this fall. It should be a neat opportunity to fiddle with what it means to do PD.
I couldn’t be more excited to be facilitating a course we’re calling “Common Core & Writing: Deeper Learning for All.” I pitched the course as “a course on writing to learn for non-English teachers” and that’s almost exactly what I’ll be teaching1. Better yet – some of my friends from the National Writing Project will be helping me to develop the course.
The six week course, which will begin mid-October, is going to begin with a deep look at the Common Core State Standards, and particularly the section of the standards that addresses the role of writing across the curriculum.2 Then,’ we’ll tackle writing in the classroom from two distinct lenses:
1. Writing to Learn – the habits and bits of writing that you do to make sense of whatever it is that you’re learning and exploring.
2. Writing for the Disciplines – the writing that’s specific to content areas other than language arts. How do historians write for each other? Scientists? Mathematicians? And why does that matter? How can we help our students to write in these ways?
As a final project, participants in the course will use this protocol from the NWP to help them develop some writing assignments for their own classrooms that should result in some thoughtful writing for and with students. We should all get some good ideas.
As I’m developing the collection of resources, I know that NWP’s Digital Is will be an important text for the group. And I’m also reminded of Peter Elbow and Donald Murray and their essential contributions to writing as process and writing as something that teachers just, you know, do.
But I could use your help.
Here’s a Google Doc where I’m beginning to draft a collection of readings and resources for the folks3 who I hope will take this course.
I’d sure be grateful if you’d offer your favorites and help keep me honest by pointing participants to actual examples of the two areas I outlined above.
And of course, this entire experience is, for me, first draft thinking. I’d be open to your ideas, suggestions, and feedback as I’m working to construct an experience that’s ultimately useful to teachers and results in increased use of writing in their practice.
Thanks in advance. And perhaps I’ll see you in class? Sign up opens soon.
No fewer than three times today, my brain was tickled into considering the question that I’ve buried at the end of this hurried post. Let me recap:
1. In a few Google+ conversations about sharing1, I’ve seen folks state that the advantage of things like circles2, is that they can help you to narrowcast rather than broadcast noise.
2. During #edchat today, I caught a rather odd notion that we should be taking care to separate our professional conduct from our academic conduct. I still don’t know what that means. Strikes me as silly. More on that in a sec.
3. The prompt of this evening’s #edchat was this:
Tech won’t change a teacher’s basic pedagogical practices. How do we promote needed change in methodology?
I wondered aloud in response that perhaps it’d be more important3 if we instead asked what was worth doing, and what wasn’t – basically, what was the change that needed to happen?
And I didn’t see a good answer. But, I couldn’t stick around to see the chat, so perhaps it surfaced and I missed it.
In each of the above cases, the problem of lots of little purposes, rather than a few big ideas, arises. In the first example, an assumption that I’m interested in one piece of you, rather, than, perhaps, the person that you’re working to be, is present. In the second, the idea that our professional selves and our academic selves should be distinct and separate selves – that ourselves as teachers should so differ from ourselves as learners that we need to tell the difference – emerged. And in the third, we’re skipping the essential questions to focus on the sidelines. Let’s get to the changing before we know what’s worth fiddling with.4
Before I ramble too much on this, at a time when I can tell my brain’s only beginning to emerge from vacation, I’ll pause with a question, probably a poorly worded one, but perhaps you can help me fumble to better language -
Is it better to have lots of selves and goals for lots of situations, to fragment ourselves intentionally in the pursuit of the right self for the right situation, or is it better to have a few guiding principles that transcend our selves and help us to be better us-es in all of our spaces?
I say the latter’s the way to go. Be kind in all spaces.5 Always be curious. Share what you learn as you’re able. I’m sure there are more principles that I could tease out across the contexts and shards of my self.
Certainly, a first draft and fuzzy response to something I want to come back and play with later. And I see at least a couple of problems with my own leaning. Let’s tease them out in the comments.
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.