Category Archives: Writing Project

Thank Someone – Writing from the 2012 NWP Annual Meeting #nwpam12

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This morning, Tanya Baker asked us to use the writing time we shared together1 during the plenary session to write a note of thanks to a writing, teaching, or other kind of mentor. Below is what I wrote. Not edited or polished, but worth sharing. I hope you’ll take five minutes soon to write about someone you’re thankful for. Better yet – send that writing to those folks.

Being thankful. I have so many people I could thank in these seven minutes of writing together, seven minutes of 1,000 writers writing in a quiet hotel ballroom. Throats clearing. Keyboards clacking. Error blips blipping from unsilenced machines. But I’ll stick to these NWP people for right now.

I thank Cindy, who brought me to the party. And Richard Sterling, for helping to make it the place it was when I arrived. And Jim Gray, for wondering about doing learning differently, who built the ship in the first place. And Sharon Washington, who inherited a tricky gig, and seems to be rocking right on.

But Cindy again, who made me make the thing happen for other people, made me a part of the best experience of my professional life. She made me work to build those experiences for others. Which shaped everything that came after.

I thank Paul Oh for believing in a young geek and wondering if I might could help build other experiences. And Christina Cantrill, who helped me realize that the most frustrating questions were likely the best ones, the most important ones to be asking. I thank the NWP Tech Liaisons who showed me the ropes, who were taking their risks in their classrooms and sharing them in public. Another Paul. And Chris, and Gail and Patrick, and Andrea and Chad and Kevin and Peter and Meenoo and so many others who learned on purpose in public together. And then there was Troy, who took a chance on presenting with me at my first NWP Annual Meeting.

I thank all the program associates who made sure there were snacks, and rooms, and paper and sticky notes and crayons and scissors and whatever else I needed to do the work – both as participant and as facilitator. And coffee. They made sure there was always coffee. Nicole and Izzy and Kate and Bob and all the others. That’s essential, and probably no one ever says thank you. I thank whoever helped me juggle a cancelled flight into a 90 minute van ride from one airport to another to make sure that I arrived on time.

I thank the office peeps, folks like Tanya and Elyse, who continue to build exciting opportunities and keep inviting folks like me to participate in them. And people like Grant and those folks who published work I and others did.

I thank the NWP who, at a time when so many are closing doors and shutting out teachers and saying no, continue to say, “Yes. We’re here. You matter. Let’s do this thing. Together.”

But I have to thank Cindy again, because she brought me here. She extended the hand of the NWP on behalf gf the NWP, and changed my professional life, and the lives of all the teachers I’ve been privileged to work with.

So many other names that didn’t emerge in this text, but who make me better.

I still don’t know how to do this work well. But I know that I know how to get better at it. I know how to ask good questions, and struggle with them. I know that the struggle won’t end, but that it’s worth doing. And that’s the National Writing Project.

So, thanks, NWP. Let’s keep those invitations going. There’s plenty more to do, and plenty of room here to do it.

  1. Writing Project teachers always write together. Before we do anything. I mean anything. It’s important. [↩]
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The Podcast: On Sunsets and Arguments

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In today’s podcast, actually recorded yesterday, I respond to a response to a response to a piece in The Atlantic that is about writing in school.

Basically, I try to explain that we’ve got some silly false binaries in our heads when it comes to writing instruction.  At the heart of it, writing is about learning how to pay attention.  (At least sometimes.)

Pay attention during the podcast and tell me what you think.

Direct Link to Audio

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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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#DML2012 – On Love and Infrastructure

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I’ve been continually struck at DML with the notions of connectedness and participation.  It makes sense that these would be sticky ideas here, and dominant ones.  The conference opened with the announcement of the Connected Learning Research Network and a talk from John Seely Brown that dealt heavily with notions of participatory culture.

But in our rush to make and play and tinker and connect and engage in learning that matters in institutions that might not, I feel like I’m missing the love.

No, that’s not quite right.  Actually, I’m finding notions of love everywhere I look.  But perhaps that’s because I’m focused on looking for it, and you know how it goes – when you look for something, when you look really hard, you can find it anywhere.

I keep coming back to this interview that Fred Rogers gave to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.  You should watch the entire series, but here, at 5 minutes and 17 seconds into this particular segment, Mr. Rogers give his definition of teaching and talks about what he was trying to do with his television show:

His words here stick hard with me – I cannot divorce his concept of love and teaching from my way of thinking about teaching now.  And the Internet, or a school, or a community center, or a museum, or any institution of and about learning, can and should provide examples of teachers in love with what they love in front of others as a way of communicating that love, and helping students to find and communicate their own.

And I see resonance with that in the talk of the new DML Connected Learning Research Network, especially in Mimi Ito’s description:

In a nutshell, connected learning is learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational and economic opportunity. Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose.

In talking with her briefly the other night about some mentoring work she’s hoping to do, work to connect passionate mentors to interested learners, I wondered more about issues of scale that have been raised at the conference, about what can scale, and what cannot.

And while I’m not sure that love, itself, can scale, I wonder if finding love maybe can.  Certainly people have limited capacity, and can only love so many so deeply, but computers can help us to find each other.  Networks can help us to find each other.  Institutions can help us to find each other.  Then we can do the human pieces better.

And finding each other, then looking after each other, is well worth doing1.

In this morning’s panel on technical and social innovation, I saw too much emphasis on systems designed around outputs.  I think that’s a large problem in education – we look heavily at what comes out of a system, but not so much on what we put into it.  I’d argue quite strongly, with anyone who’ll listen, that we need to look quite closely and intentionally on what goes into a system, and on what sorts of inputs are privileged in our infrastructures.  And how we inject love and care and compassion and concern into infrastructure is very, very important.  It’s not considered enough, if at all, and these things rarely show up on measures of output.

So how do you build love and care into your systems and infrastructures and learning environments and experiences?  How are you doing so in a way that doesn’t over simplify the complex backgrounds of the people and communities you’re learning from and with?  How are you looking for ways to increase the love and care in your systems?

What are you loving in front of your students and colleagues?  What would they say gets loved in your spaces?

  1. Certainly, too, it’s worth wondering about people who aren’t getting found, or served, or looked after, by institutions of love and learning.  How do we make sure that we focus on entry points so that those who wish to be found can be, and those who don’t want to be found can do that, too.  I’ll say more on entry points, infrastructure and inputs in a future post. [↩]
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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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The Podcast: Two Fall Projects

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In today’s podcast, I talk about a couple of projects that are keeping me pretty busy this fall – finishing my thesis and building a course for P2PU’s new School of Ed with some friends from the NWP.  Oddly, they go together.  Which is a good thing.  Keep your fingers crossed.  And, as always, would love to hear your thoughts in response to mine.  This time, I could definitely use the help.

Direct Link to Audio

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

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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.

  1. Er.  Facilitating.  Teaching.  Guiding.  Whatever.  The participants and I will experience it together.  And we’ll all take turns. [↩]
  2. 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. [↩]
  3. Remember – a targeted audience of non-language arts teachers. [↩]
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#ISTE11: NWP’s Inaugural Hack Jam

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Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity to attend the first ever National Writing Project Hack Jam, an exploration of the opportunities to fiddle with text and writing and code on the Internet.  It was a useful event for me, as we were able to think and play with ideas about what “hacking” means right now, and how it’s about reading and writing and thinking.

Masterfully facilitated by Chad Sansing and Meenoo Rami, the event took us to some interesting places and conversation.  Here’s my recap.

We started the day in table groups with a box of Monopoly and a simple task – hack the game.  Chad and Meenoo explained that our task was to fiddle with the rules until we found a game that was better than the one we were handed – and so Sandy and Gail and I tinkered our way through a version of Monopoly that was all about freebies.  Other groups fiddled to make the game about tossing pieces and giving to charity.  It was good1.

But the point of the hacking was to give us an opportunity to explore that games and systems have rules – rules that were made by people.  And we can mess with those rules if we understand the underlying principles involved.  That’s powerful learning – and applies not just to board games, but to school, and to work, and to civic engagement and to computer systems or the Internet.

Hacking matters.  Douglas Rushkoff would say that we need to Program or Be Programmed, but I’d fiddle with that statement and say instead that we need to hack or be hacked.  Someone made the rules and systems of the Internet, power structures, as John Spencer called them during out conversation yesterday.  And, as others have said before, we’ve got to help our students fiddle with them, understand them, and, hopefully, change them.

We moved from that work into a visual exploration of our definition of hacker – folks focused on several things, but I was reminded of MacGyver, and thought of duct tape and wrenches and making things out of what we’ve available.  Purposeful play.

This led to some interesting conversation that I think was my key takeaway from the day2.  Paul Allison, who is always thoughtful, wrote this during the workshop:

My first thought is that hacking sounds like an important idea, but really? Do we need another word that takes teachers out of the mainstream “common core” standards conversation? Does hacking get my students more college-ready? Like gaming, isn’t hacking just another thing that pushes the risk-takers into the margins, and makes risk-adverse teachers run? How do we find a way to be more inclusive in our language and processes? Is it just a language thing? What else might we call hacking?

Later on, Paul continues3:

So part of why we hack has to do with understanding our sources more deeply, and this is absolutely an academic concern. But don’t we need words like “analytical reading” and carefully sourced research? Right so what else might we call hacking? It’s about creativity, but it’s also about making new things by really understanding the old, and this is a traditional, academic exercise.

I’m looking for language that will encourage the risk-adverse teacher to join with us in these enterprises.

And that’s what I leave thinking about.  Hacking matters.  Academic reading and writing matter.  And they’re not unrelated things.  Groups like the National Writing Project know an awful lots about good reading and writing practice, and are exploring thoughtfully things like gaming and hacking – but can they do so in a way that doesn’t scare off the “risk-adverse teacher,” as Paul asks?

I think we need the National Writing Project and folks like them to help navigate these spaces, and to explore them thoughtfully with teachers – and to help folks recognize that reading and writing and thinking and gaming and hacking are related – but in a way that doesn’t lead to further fragmentation and paradox.  I think we need teachers to play, like we played in the Hack Jam, with the rules and ideas that affect them.

Yes, let’s teach kids to hack.  Both the Internet and Shakespeare.  Minecraft and Fitzgerald.  Wordle and essay.  Picture and paragraph.  Logarithm and link. Tweets and Tennyson.  Second Life and the State Legislature.  It’s a big world.

Worth doing.  If you get the chance to attend a future NWP Hack Jam – you should go. I’ll see you there.

  1. Because it was a National Writing Project event, there were snacks.  Good ones. [↩]
  2. And I know I’ve buried the lead, but that’s okay. [↩]
  3. Read the whole piece.  It’s good and I can’t stop thinking about it. [↩]
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Shifted Learning Interview

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Last Friday, I had the good fortune to spend some time talking writing and learning with John and Julia on the Shifted Learning Podcast.  We discussed writing process, tools and the National Writing Project, among other things.  It was a good visit, and I thought I’d pass along the audio.1

You might also be interested in their podcast archive.  Some good stuff in there, and I very much like Julia and John’s interview style.

Enjoy.

Direct Link to the Audio

  1. As I listened back to the conversation, I began to wonder if it might be time to start a semi-regular podcast about writing.  Any interest out there?  Let me know in the comments. [↩]
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