Category Archives: Professional Development

Love in a Time of Schooling

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You ever have one of those days where you’re in a hurry to get out the door? Maybe you’re eager to take your son or daughter out on an amazing adventure. You’ve got zoo tickets, or there’s a baseball game, or a carnival or a new museum’s opening. And you’re tight on time, so you’ve got to get out the door? And someone can’t find their shoes?

So in your rush to get to the amazing thing you’ve got planned, what you actually have ended up communicating to your child – the person you’re doing this amazing thing for and with – is that they’re slow and forgetful and not so good at leaving the house on time? Because you’ve just got so much to do?1

Yeah. I think we do that at school, too, both literally and figuratively. In our race to the top to make sure that we leave no child behind with our innovative instruction, we sometimes forget the children are partners in the work – not folks to be acted upon. We make them feel small. We forget to be with them, and we end up doing some pretty mean things to them.

With the best, unfortunately, of intentions.

I mention that tonight because tomorrow I’ll be facilitating a workshop I’m calling “Love in a Time of Schooling.” Here’s the description of the session:

In a time when school often feels like it is being done to our students, rather than for and with them, there is value in considering some of the emotional aspects of the learning environments we are creating for our students. In classrooms and schools, looking after each other is an essential element of good teaching and learning. In short, we need to consider love and its place in our classrooms and lessons, our infrastructures and physical spaces. In this session, we will explore different ways of thinking about care for our fellow teachers and students, as well as consider ways to love, share love, and bring love in to modern schooling.

See, I think we mean very well as we’re working to impart important knowledge to our students, but we’re losing the true reason for all that knowledge work – we care for our students, and want them to be good and thoughtful people – and we’re in such a hurry to do that right, that we forget to build relationships.

This isn’t, by the way, something that we mean to do. Or that we just do to students, but I think that it’s certainly a problem. And some of what freaks me out about the latest and greatest from our ed-tech innovators and entrepreneurs is that they believe that they can further automate and teacher-proof the learning process. When exactly what we need to be doing instead is to be caring better for our students. And you don’t care with software. Or with an assessment. You care through being in a caring relationship with your students. If you’re an administrator, you care through being in a caring relationship with your staff. You model care, you demonstrate care, you engage in dialogue that suggests you care. And you help to point out the caring you see in and from others.

And so tomorrow, that’s what I want to explore. How, in a time of intense pressures, do we help to build schools and classrooms and departments of caring while helping to instill caring in our students? Seems to me that’s worth wondering about. As I’ve been prepping for the workshop, I’ve dug deep into The Challenge to Care in Schools by Nel Noddings. If you’ve not read it, it’s worth your time. Here’s a collection of quotes, if you’d like to get the flavor of the book.

I’m not an expert at care or caring or love. But I’m a student of plenty of folks who are, and I enjoy spending time with the ideas because they help me to be a better carer. These are lessons that resonate at work, at home, and in my interactions with the world. And they’re hard lessons to learn. But so worth the time. Caring isn’t content so much as it is stance. Relationship. Frame.

One of the best things about this workshop is that we’ll be at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, using their space as a mirror and a lens to explore how a space might be designed in a caring way. We’ll then turn our eyes to our own classrooms and organizations to consider how we promote caring relationships in our work.

I hope you’re finding ways to care and to instill love and care in your work. Would love to hear about your efforts in the comments.

  1. I am certainly guilty of this. I suspect I’m not the only one. [↩]
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Off to NCTE

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I’m sitting at the airport this morning waiting for a flight to Las Vegas for the NCTE 2012 Annual Convention. I’m eager to be in conversation and community with friends and colleagues.

And I’m also excited to find my conference schedule a little lighter than in recent trips, which means I get to do something I don’t do as often as I’d like – I get to listen. While there, I’ll be listening specifically for folks reactions to Common Core implementation, the coming assessments, and how devices are or aren’t making their way into schools and classrooms.

What else should I be listening for? To whom should as be listening? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

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So Let’s Start An #eduhistory Book Club, Then?

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For a long time now, I’ve tried to hold a few hunches at the forefront of my brain when I’m reading and writing:

  1. The world of today isn’t as different from the world of yesterday as we think it is.
  2. The messes we find ourselves in right now are better addressed when we consider that they’re not necessarily new messes.
  3. We keep making the same mistakes because we don’t know our history.

You get the idea.

I was working on an article with some colleagues about a year ago when I realized that my hunches were more than hunches.  They were certainly true for my own disciplines of language arts and technology.

The more I dig back, too, into history, or, at least, the stuff that was written in the past on many of the issues facing us as educators right now, the more I’m certain that time spent reading the work of before is worth doing.  And every twenty minutes, someone publishes a “revolutionary” look at the world and how to fix it that completely ignores history.  We don’t know our history.  And it’s killing us.

I’m thinking it’s time to start a book club.  Well, at least a reading club.  Lots of what I suspect we’d read aren’t complete books.

So I’m pretty sure that my main objectives for a project like this would be basically encouraging educators and folks who impact education to better understand their history.  In my reading and writing and thinking, I’ve come to discover that people1 are pretty much ignorant of anything educationally relevant that happened more than ten or twenty minutes ago.  And we keep having the same conversations.  And forgetting the outcomes.  Then doing it again.

So to that end, I think it’d be interesting to start with texts that are from at least twenty years or so ago – that seems to be a magical, and completely arbitrary, number, but one that’s at least an interesting place to start.  Texts like these:

I’ve got more, and there’re plenty of places to draw these texts from, but you get the idea, I think.  The Web is littered with our predecessors’ work.  Somebody should dust it off and take a peek every once in a while.

The logistical questions are basically, what and how and when?  I think it’d be valuable to set some reading tasks, some deadlines, and offer a place or way to talk – might be a Twitterchat, or a Google Hangout discussion forum, some blog posts with comments or common tags – but just basically try to build a small group of folks who wanted to read these things together and talk about them.  Might be interesting to bring some “experts” in modern stuff to talk about their reactions to the texts as guests, too.  We’ll see how that shapes up.

So.  There’s the basic skeleton of what I’d like to do.  I’d want book club participants to read with questions like these in mind:

  • What are the lessons from yesterday?  Did we apply them?  What did we lose or forget along the way from the text’s time to now?
  • What parallels can we draw to now?  What’re the essential bits of importantness that we should return to the world by blogging/writing/tdalking about them?
  • Can yesterday’s lessons help us call “bologna”2 on some of the reformy stuff happening right now?

Audrey Watters has graciously agreed to co-host a Hangout or two as we figure out what this might look like.

If you’d like to play along, here are two things you can do:

  1. Grab a copy of the Committee of Ten Report.  That’ll be our first text.  Start reading and annotating and taking notes. If the whole thing’s too much for you, I’d encourage you to start with the opening overview and then pick the report from the discipline that you’re most interested in.
  2. In the comments, please let me know if you’re interested, and share any suggestions that you might have for texts or topics or logistical details.  I’d humbly suggest we tag anything related to this book club idea as #eduhistory.  But you might have a better idea.

Audrey and I are comparing calendars for a Google Hangout for our first live discussion.  Look for an update once we have that nailed down.  I hope you’ll consider reading and writing and thinking with us.

  1. Myself included. [↩]
  2. Or baloney.  Or something stronger, if you’d like. [↩]
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Make/Hack/Play Session at the 2012 K12Online Conference

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I’ve been a big fan of the K12Online Conference since it began in 2006 and have had the good fortune to be involved in some way with most years’ event.  This year’s conference is chock full of interesting sessions, and I’m pleased to share with you that I’ve got a session in this year’s conference.  The session is an introduction to some of the Make/Hack/Play work.  Head on over to the conference to watch the short presentation.

While you’re there, I’d also encourage you to check out Karen Fasimpaur’s keynote on resources and rethinking curriculum.  Some interesting ideas in there.

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Talking Teacher Research

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

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

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You Should Probably Just Grade Less

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I have the pleasure of getting to pop in to the 2012 CSUWP Summer Institute this week and next, helping in a variety of small roles. Yesterday, I was present for a discussion of Because Digital Writing Matters, a common text for the SI that I think is worth your time to read if you’ve not yet had the opportunity.

I was there as someone who knows a bit about digital writing, and so a question was posed to me by a teacher in the group. She’s working on an inquiry project about how technology can be useful to streamline grading. I believe her question was something like “How can I streamline my grading practice using technology.” She was hoping I could suggest some things she might try.

I don’t think she liked my answer.

I suggested that she might want to remove the words “using technology” from the question, as most of the things that I think would streamline a teacher’s practice when it comes to grading are things that have very little to do with technology.

For starters, I think teachers, in general, grade too many things. So one way to streamline would be to “grade” less. And that doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t ask students to write, and write often. But we don’t need to grade everything that comes to us. In fact, we should grade very little of it. Heck, and I know this’ll sound a bit weird, but we shouldn’t even read all the writing we ask students to do.

One of the choices that a writer makes, and that a student writer should get to make, too, is when and how and where and with whom we share our writing. Reading and grading everything doesn’t help there. Nor is it manageable for the teacher. I find that we’ve built an expectation into school that teachers are there to write lots of notes in margins and markup student writing.

We’ve built the wrong expectations.

In an #engchat conversation a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that we should take Peter Elbow’s suggestion to read and respond less like evaluators and more like interested readers. I suggested that a copy of Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers would be worth reading.

Another thing that I suggested, before thinking about technology options, is that we need to make sure the assignments we are asking of students are the right things to be asking them to do. And, we need to build structures that support our students reading and writing and making things in partnership with each other.

Then I think I did suggest that many tools of the Web can help to make the work of putting writing in to each others’ hands and eyeballs easier than ever. But that only matters if you’re thinking about how you want students to spend their time. I’m eager to help this teacher in her inquiry work – the question, with or without the last two words, is a good one and worth her time.

Were I thinking about it, I probably would’ve recommended Dave’s recent posts about contract grading. While he’s teaching at the university level, I think they provide some useful ideas for thinking about assessment.

Too often, when we reach for technology, we do so in the service of something that isn’t just a technology issue. When a grading load is unreasonable. that’s likely not a technology problem. Taking a look at the whole picture is sometimes necessary before moving to suggestions of new tools or platforms. Then we can look for tools or apps or whatever that will help us do what needs doing. The problem is, taking that look takes longer than handing out a list of apps or websites.

So guess which thing happens?

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Centering on Essential Lenses

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

photo: alexkerhead

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

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

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

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

1. Making

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

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

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

2. Hacking

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

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

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

3. Playing

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

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

Centering, Then

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

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

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

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

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

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In Search of Agency

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

And we are helpless in the face of all this happening stuff. Right?

Of course not, but when it comes to teaching and learning, I have come to see that way more often than I’m comfortable with, teachers and students alike just let their schooling happen to them rather than acknowledging that they have control over what and how and even when they learn. Even in the face of mandates and political pressure. Even then.

But folks feel helpless more than I think they actually are.  Learning, or school, or whatever, seems to happen to them, rather than the other way around.  It’s supposed to be the other way around.  Folks are supposed to own their actions and habits and the way they spend their time.  And our culture too often supports passivity and compliance.

I feel like folks forget they are the agents of their experiences.  We have agency.  Power. Control.  Maybe not over everything that happens.  Certainly not all.  But over more than we realize more often than not.

So how might we work to build agency in teachers and learners?  Let me simplify that question – how can we help folks develop the ability to recognize the constraints of a situation and to begin to play with them?

As I delve more into elements of play and hacking, and even maker culture, it seems to me that there’s fertile ground there.  Play, if you recall, is the ability to move freely within constraints.  Hacking is the ability to see the system – and a problem with it – and work to improve it.  Making is creating.  It’s fiddling with the constraints of lots of different systems.  Yarn.  Blocks.  Food.  Circuits.  Classrooms.  Textbooks.  Laws.  Whatever.

Hacking and making and playing are how you figure out where the constraints are, and how you might be able to fiddle with them.  As well as what happens when you do.  These skills/habits/attitudes/frames of thinking are useful when thinking about developing agency.

That was where I got to in my wondering and thinking when it was time for Michelle and Kyle and I to think about what we’re going to work on next.  And then I got a whiteboard pen in hand.  And we did this1:

Enter hacking/making/playing. Or, more specifically, Hack/Make/Play.  It’ll be a multiple day and ongoing PD experience that we do in the district.  In conversation with other folks. If school’s but one node in the learning networks of children, well, we want to play nicely with the other nodes.  And we want to use our time with teachers to help them make things.  To help them understand how to identify building blocks.  And to help them figure out when and how to take things apart and put them back together differently.

Building on others’ successes in maker and hacking spaces, and on the idea that learning is, to some extent, playing with information, deconstructing and reconstructing it, we would like to create some professional learning experiences that would help people to begin to feel equipped, and to a more important extent, empowered, or permissioned, or whatever the word is for “it’s okay to do this”-ed in order to build those senses of agency for teachers and students and anyone involved in learning.

Right now, it’s just notes on a board.  And messy ones.  We started thinking about a week-long camp.  But that wasn’t right.  We want lots of entry points into this kind of thinking.  Lots of ways to engage and get involved.  So the “days” I spell out are probably not going to happen sequentially.  We don’t know yet.  But I do think that each of them is a kind of entry point.  Hacking the Web seems an important way of thinking.  Making stuff another.  Hacking curriculum?  Well, you get the idea.

The essential question at the bottom is, I think, the big piece – “How do I approach a system to determine where my agency lies?”  If you’re able to play, you can see the constraints.  To see them, you’ve got to know how and where to look.  Hacking, making and playing seem to be useful ways to answer that question.  Not the only ways – not everyone needs to play with Picocrickets, or build toy cars.  Heck, the knitting circles I’m familiar with in our district likely embody the ethos we’re aiming for.  Everyone needs to be making something.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll begin to flesh it out and look for the connective tissue that will hold various groups of hackers, makers, and players around our district together.  In some cases, we’ll probably start new groups.  In others, we might help existing groups to find one another.  I don’t know.  But I do know that something I said earlier in this post is worth saying again – there’s fertile ground here.  Hackers and makers and gamers are really good at learning.

You might already be farming spaces like these – so I’m asking: Where do we go next?

  1. I should not be allowed to use whiteboards without some serious remedial handwriting work. [↩]
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#DML2012 – The Experience of Listening. Was (Too Often) All.

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One of my takeaways from the DML 2012 conference is that the messages of connected learning have not quite caught up yet with the practices of academic conferences.

It’s a common complaint – both that I hear and that I sometimes make – that the learning spaces that we want for children should at least attempt to be modeled by the conferences/meetings where we go to talk about and explore learning possibilities. And while I get that there’s a culture or cultures to academia, and that much of the DML community is rooted in research and dissemination practices that are fairly formal, well, I’m struck that the medium and the messages of the event seemed to be in slight conflict. Even on the mothership, the interesting stuff was still rather on the edge.

Having run conferences and meetups and managed the learning of others’ both grown ups and children, I understand that it is a most difficult undertaking, so I should say right here that I found the DML event nothing short of wicked good. I learned a bunch and will be processing some powerful learning for a while to come. And yet. I’d gently suggest to the organizers of DML 2013 a few small points.

The first being a softball. I’m sure that everyone noticed that the space where the conference was held seemed far smaller than the people of DML. I think the folks there were the right folks – it was a fascinating mix of students and teachers and professors and researchers and makers and geeks.1 But the way the conference was set up – or at least my version of it2 – the sessions were overcrowded and packed into too small rooms and I couldn’t get to many of the things I wanted to see. Even when I could get a seat in a room – and to do so I had to stake out a space early – there were two or three other concurrent sessions I didn’t want to miss.

Here’s the tricky thing. At an event where the messages from the community and presenters and panelists were all about experiencing powerful participatory learning, well, we sure were expected, by design and practice and custom, to sit still and listen a lot. Certainly, we were listening to fascinating stories of promise and practice and learning and teaching and exploration and study and wonder – but we were listeners, and that’s a very particular kind of experience.

I listened to Super Awesome Sylvia talk about making things that mattered. And I really enjoyed hearing from her, particularly when she raised the differences between her learning at home and at school. But might we have made something together?

I listened to Jess Klein explain the potential of a HackJam. I love the tools and mindsets that Mozilla is building in that space. Having experienced a HackJam3, I know they are transformative. They are a Big Deal. Might we have done that together? At least a little bit? Perhaps this happened and I missed it.

I came to one session where a presenter began to read from a paper – the same paper excerpted in the conference program – on the power of media for engaging students. The presenter read from the paper that was provided to me already.

Even in our session on the multiplicity of composition – a session that we intentionally attempted to do differently than a talking head panel – we struggled to make it an active learning experience4. I don’t know if we were struggling against the Internet access in the hotel, or the expectations of the audience, or the limits of our imagination. Or maybe something else.

There’s work to do.

I thought the idea of the Mozilla Science Fair – an hour and a half long reception showcasing many of the institutions and organizations doing important learning work – was a great idea. But an hour or so of crowded tables meant we got short looks into thoughtful work. Those same twenty or so tables should’ve been parceled out over the entire event, with five at a time running engaging events modeling their fascinating and engaging practices. There was a big empty space in the conference area that cried out for us to use it for playing and making and exploring and doing together.5

How can we collectively do a better job of modeling the structures, habits, and aptitudes we want to see of learning and learners, particularly when DML learns together? And what can we do with the listening we’ve done to improve the experiences that are to come? Yeah, I’m saying “we” and “DML,” because, like Chad, I’m willing to say that I am engaged by this group of thoughtful people. I’d feel lucky to be counted as a member of the DML community. I so want them/us to do well.

And there’s room to grow.

  1. That said, I didn’t see lots of IT folk there – but perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough. Or maybe operations types aren’t the crowd of DML. Oh. That’d be sad if it were true. [↩]
  2. Everyone, you know, has their own conference experience, a collection of what they saw, with whom they spoke, and a variety of other factors. No two people have the same experience, of course. I may well have had the “bad” one. [↩]
  3. That was masterfully facilitated at ISTE 2011 by Chad and Meenoo. [↩]
  4. The writing some of the participants shared during that session, I thought, is worth more of my time. [↩]
  5. The impromptu Occupy Badges session – a spillout of the overcrowded session on Badges – was a good example of what might’ve happened in that space. [↩]
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Three Things I’m Thinking About Right Now

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

2.  I’m honored to be a participant/facilitator for a session at this conference.  It’s called “Tapping into the Mutiplicity of Composition” and is a panel featuring several teachers who are making interesting things with students in the service of teaching writing and composition.  That should be a fascinating conversation. And, of course, we’ll be writing together.  Never a bad thing to do.

To support the conversation, we’ve built a couple of Pinterest boards as ways of creating galleries that show some of the texts that students are making in the panelists’ classrooms.  A second board focuses on the testimonies of the panelists as a way of providing some background that might not surface during our conversations.  The agenda for that session is taking shape and will be finally finalized soon.  At a time when so much of the “interesting learning” that is taking place for students is taking place beyond the classroom, and sometimes in spite of it, I wonder about the role of schools moving forward into new learning landscapes.  I hope that schools see the potential in other ways of learning that haven’t been privileged in our classrooms.  I wonder how to bring the fringe learning into those spaces.  I know that the National Writing Project has a role to play in these conversations2.

3.  I’m struggling to write about some of my adventures in building cultures of play and love both in my school district as well as in my classroom.  I hope to get chunks of that thinking out here on the blog over the next few days.  My lens for this conference is basically “How do we promote cultures of learning and playfulness and care and concern for each other?”  Important.

  1. Which isn’t to say that I don’t approach teaching as a learning opportunity – but that sometimes the logistics of facilitation interfere with my ability to process what I’m learning as it’s happening. [↩]
  2. Disclosure – the NWP has supported my attendance at this event.  I’m grateful for that. [↩]
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