#beyondthetextbook – Considering Inputs

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I’ve been meaning to write more about the idea, expressed by many at DML, myself included, that we need to be paying lots more attention to our inputs in education, rather than our outputs. I wrote a note to myself near the end of the conference so I wouldn’t forget:

So we need APIs that’ll help us pull our data out of the tools we use and put it into the tools that we use so that we can build dashboards of useful data

input information, not output information – but maybe some of both – descriptive tools – not prescriptive ones this is important and I need to write about it

inputs rather than outputs; experiences rather than tests

describing the learning by the institution – not so much on the student¹

Mimi Ito, responding to Doug and my ideas, said it like this in a really solid summary of the entire DML 2012 Conference:

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

The continuing comments on my last post, as well as some of the thinking I saved to do for later, are helping me to make more sense of the notion of focusing on inputs, at least how that might relate to the #beyondthetestbook conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not #beyondthetextbook. #betterthetextbook

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Bud Hunt

A big bunch of friends, associates, colleagues, and interesting strangers will be sitting in a conference room in Maryland this weekend, talking about the future of textbooks. This is market research, but hopefully semi-public and sharable to others. I suspect it’ll be an interesting conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brushing Back Cobwebs

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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.

Which is really Seth Godin’s post about writing poorly in public, I guess. [↩]
In other ways, much more difficult. [↩]

When Badges Backfire

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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 recognize this is a cynical-sounding viewpoint. I would enjoy being proven wrong here. [↩]
I also recognize that using a game metaphor here might be a bad idea – because plenty of the folks who are eager to see badges in play would also like to turn school into a big game. That school, in many ways, already is a big game, just not a very engaging one, is another conversation for a different day. [↩]

Ruminations on Implications: Notes from the Thesis

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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:

What does reading and writing for school-related purposes look like in school-sponsored online writing spaces?
Who is doing the writing in these spaces? The reading?
Are the new tools and affordances of online digital writing, tools like hyperlinks, and affordances like immediate publication and world-wide audience, a factor in these spaces? If so, how?

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:

Students and teachers aren’t talking to each other, for the most part, via the blog engine. I suspect they are talking in class, but they’re not writing back and forth in these spaces. Three quarters of the posts I saw during the period of the study contained no comments. Of the ones that held comments, only another large handful could be considered any sort of conversation – back and forth between the author of the post and the commenter(s). If these students are writing because they expect an audience, well, then they’re still waiting.
Because no one’s responding, there’s a sense that no one’s reading. Multiple times, I saw little snippets of text, clearly put up as tests, or left behind as mistakes, that weren’t taken down or adjusted. Why bother, if no one’s looking – or it doesn’t seem like anyone is?
The kind of writing that’s being asked of students in these spaces? Well, it’s interesting – I can break it down into three types – daily summaries, written collectively by elementary school classes; reflective essays about various topics; and responses to teacher questions. Lots of it is writing that doesn’t require a blog. And it’s writing that involves very, very, very little source material. Very few quotes. Very few links. And the links, when they’re present, are not embedded in the text. They lie naked and open in the text. And that seems problematic to me⁴
The writing that staff are doing is a little bit better⁵ – like students, they’re writing reflective essays, and sharing lots of newslettery information. But I can’t be sure, from this data set, if the folks they want to reach are being reached through this vehicle.

In short, the blog engine seems to me, in this data set, at least, an ~~utter failure~~ underutilized tool.

And perhaps that’s an okay place to stop for right this moment.

And, yeah, I suppose that means that I’ve a significant bias about blogs and the power of blogging that, if I haven’t yet, I need to be sure to disclose somewhere in the thesis. [↩]
Oddly, in my world, and perhaps in yours, the word “blogging” has come to mean anything written in a Web browser that isn’t an email, no matter where it ends up. Isn’t that interesting? I might be a blog snob, but that bugs me. And it probably shouldn’t. It’s less of a problem for me than it used to be – I don’t correct people now when they say that. I used to. [↩]
That’s not one of my research questions. So what? [↩]
But, again, I may well be a blog snob. But if the potential of the “writing of the 21st Century” is that it happens online and organically and is connected to other texts and blah blah blah – suppose it’s not. Is that *bad* or *problematic* or just unfortunate? Or is it just so? As I’m in the middle of arguing that we need to make sure students have the tools to do this sort of work, a body of data that suggests, nah, it’s not so important,” is a little bit problematic. [↩]
Oops – judgement again. Might need a better word than, ahem, “better.” [↩]

Digging Out My Sash

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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.

Give us a way to show scope and sequence, or perhaps a “brand” for our teachers in a way that would be postiive. I wasn’t sure, and still am not. [↩]
I only caught the second half, but I think that was the really fascinating bit. [↩]
school, university, etc. [↩]
Or, can that learning only happen on the fringes? If that’s the case, then I want more fringe. [↩]
Cathy explains that idea further here, in point four of a definition of badges. [↩]
As I was about to post this, I ran across this post from Alex. And while I don’t have a place to stick this quotation properly in the text, I wanted to save it and share it with you, so here it is: What I believe we must resist is mistaking real motivation and meaningful learning for increasing our value as a human commodity in the marketplace. I’m fairly sure that education doesn’t make us “better” humans. I don’t even think learning can make us “more” human (whatever that might be), though it could expand our experience in interesting ways. The one thing we have to prevent is schooling making us feelless human. [↩]
Parents and plenty of other people would have trouble, for a time, as ranking their children to other people’s children might be more difficult, but that would pass. [↩]

“Pummeled by a Deluge”

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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.

Because you just needed one more awkward meal metaphor in there, didn’t you? [↩]
At least sometimes. [↩]

So I’m Going To Be Teaching This Class. And Could Use Your Help.

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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.

Er. Facilitating. Teaching. Guiding. Whatever. The participants and I will experience it together. And we’ll all take turns. [↩]
Yes, technically, this is a rather large section. Pretty much the entire language arts section. But we’ll hone in on the specifics of writing for the disciplines other than language arts. [↩]
Remember – a targeted audience of non-language arts teachers. [↩]

Fuzzy Thinking: Fragmenting Us in Pursuit of, Well, Us.

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Bud Hunt

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.

Actually, in most Google + conversations about sharing – it’s a new space, and folks are figuring it out by comparing it to what they’ve known before. I get that. [↩]
The organizing principle of Google + – one that one doesn’t have to use – but, because it’s there, people do. Tools and they way they’re structured affect our use of them. [↩]
And certainly more useful, although I don’t think I said so at the time. [↩]
Okay. That one might not fit – but it does in my head somewhere, so I’m leaving it in. For now. [↩]
Or at least, strive to be. I’m working on this one. [↩]

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