What’s right about edublogging?

The question for today from Scott McLeod is “what’s right about edublogging?“  Just as yesterday we were asked the question, “what is wrong with the edublogosphere.”

It exists.

Maybe that’s not a good enough answer, though.

But I think how astonished, how bewildered, and how bewondered (and confused) I was at NECC 2009 last summer.  What an eye opener.  CMK 2009 was the same way, though I blogged less there. It was like drinking from a firehose.

I’ve been blogging for a long time, but not specifically about education — it’s going to take months (if not years) to go through my earliest entries and re-categorize them from something other than “general/early” so that people can find their way through this blog to the stuff they want to find.

But I think how vast this conversation is becoming.  I have close to 2000 entries, all told.  Plus I have a Twitter feed with a similar number of short entries.  Shelly Blake-Plock must be at a similar number, if not more — he’s way more active than I am.  David Warlick and Will Richardson are giants in this field, but there’s also Cool Cat Teacher and Karl Fisch and Ira Socol and … and…

It’s getting to the point where you can’t think about getting into this business without having a blog.  Or at least, you shouldn’t think about being in this business without reading a blog or two (or 3… 4… 5… 6…) as part of your regular professional development process.

A hundred years ago, this conversation couldn’t even have taken place. Radio couldn’t have done it 70 years ago.  It couldn’t have flourished even by telephone fifty years ago.  It couldn’t have happened by TV 30 years ago.  Or even by e-mail 20 years ago.

And yet there’s an emerging culture that believes teachers should be connected — that they should communicate beyond brick-and-mortar buildings, across disciplines, across state lines, across grade levels.  How cool is that?

Of course it’s right.

Design a School

Over the Thanksgiving break, I hung out with quite a few teenagers in an unofficial capacity.  And I was very careful to ask all of them a few questions:

• What would a school look like if you designed it?
• What would you learn there?
• How would the school be organized?

The answers I got were intriguing.  First of all, every teenager assumed I meant “build a school” instead of “design a school.”  All of them started with a description of the building: Modern.  And remarkably, every single building they described looked remarkably like a Modern, industrial school does now: hallways, classrooms, lots of glass and metal, stairwells, lockers, and so on.

When I dug a little deeper, though, and they understood that I was asking about “what would you do at a school that you, yourself, designed?” they immediately went off on a different tangent.  Now they were no longer concerned about architecture.

No, now they were concerned about how they would be controlled. One girl said that she wanted a school where the bad kids would be forced to go to detention, and ‘made to behave.’  Keep in mind, she goes to one of the best public schools in the country; the bad kids are not exactly shooting each other in the surrounding neighborhoods.  A boy with a strong interest in film-making said that he wanted to be forced to learn ‘whatever the curriculum said I should learn’.  And another girl thought it would be best if ‘I were made to learn whatever’s important in school.’

And as far as organization… well.  They thought there should be a principal, and some administrators, and every classroom would need a teacher… And there should be regular placement tests, to figure out where a student should be placed or allowed to learn…

In other words, the schools they ‘designed’ on their own thought process looked exactly like the schools we’ve been decrying and trying to reform for forty years. They had the same disciplinary models, the same physical structures, the same curriculum imposed from above.  Two students, both with an interest in film and cameras, more or less scrubbed movie-making and art from their school’s official curriculum.  Because, as one boy said, “that’s not what school is for.  Is it?”

Yet he was hard-pressed to explain what school was for, other than learning stuff like reading, writing, and literature.  All of these dozen or so kids were.  Discipline, rote curriculum, new and modern buildings, similar organization to today…. that was my takeaway from the exercise.  They were, all of them, literally unable to imagine another possibility than the system we have now.

So I see articles and screeds and rants about how to fix education, and I have to wonder: what do all these reformers and champions of education and politicians using the sorry state of American education have in mind?

Because the evidence is, the American educational system is so broken that no one currently enmeshed in it can imagine a reality other than the one we’ve got.  Which of course means that when something new DOES come along, the current establishment is going to get blindsided with all the force of the Black Death’s arrival in Genoa in AD 1347.

So go on, I dare you: ask the kids for yourselves.  Let me know what you find out.  The questions are at the top of the page.

1to1 vs. borrowed laptops

I’m teaching two classes this year in ancient history.

One class has kids with a variety of learning disabilities, but all have their own laptops.  The  other class has kids where some have their own laptops and others don’t.

The class where they all have their own understand much more clearly that their laptops are tools designed to boost their learning and communications skills.  Their parents bought them laptops specifically as leanring tools, and they treat them as such.  That’s not to say they don’t play games, or surf the net, or look for porn, but they think of their machines as learning tools and communication tools, rather than toys.

In the other class, about 60% have their own laptops.  Here there is much more of an attitude that these are toys rather than learning machines.  The use of games is much higher.  The number of occasions when they go ‘off-task’ to search for funny videos, or start playing music in class, is much higher.  The students that borrow laptops from the school in this class treat them as learning tools, and appear to be grateful to have them.  The students with their own machines seem to be much less aware of them as learning tools.

Has anyone else noticed a similar dichotomy?  How do you teach kids with computers who think of them as toys, to see them as learning machines?

CMK ’09: Dr. Lella Gandini

Dr. Gandini is the person I came to CMK to see.  I read a little bit about the Reggio Emilia approach; I love northern Italy; and I really wanted to understand this process of learning and teaching.  My comments will be in italics; her remarks will be in regular type.

The Fischbowl: Why Should Your District Continue?

I’d like you to pretend for a moment that you live in an alternate reality, one where right now, for the first time, someone is proposing universal schooling for all children between the ages of five and eighteen. Now, pitch me your proposal for your school district (or, for folks not in a school district, for your institution). Justify your existence. Tell me what your mission is, and why your institution (as constructed in our current reality) is the best solution to achieve that mission.

via The Fischbowl: Why Should Your District Continue?.

Karl Fisch writes this morning, why should your district continue?  It’s an excellent question, and one which I think the private schools in Connecticut should re-ask as “why should our school continue?” as he says in the excerpt above.  Justify the continued existence of your institution, or explain why it should be founded now.  What’s your purpose, and are you successful at it?

Here’s mine:

 

Mine would be a middle school or high school. I would start with a high-powered webserver, a laptop or netbook for every child, a high-quality printer, and a store-front classroom with a well-equipped science lab, a lounge, a movement lab (yoga/dance/martial arts), workspaces, and a gallery at the front. In other words, I’d give kids access to the world, and I’d make the school permeable to the larger world by placing downtown right outside the front door. And their work would be visible at the front of the school, all the time.

We’d have ten subjects instead of five: Western Humanities (English Language and grammar, Spanish and one other Romance Language), Eastern Humanities (Chinese, Chinese characters, literature & grammar), Mathematics, World Culture, Art, Music, Biology, Physics/Chemistry, Computer Programming, and Body (health, sex, athletics).

Each ‘classroom’ would have a guide, whose job would be partly as a teacher, an administrator and as a social networker. Her job would be to connect students in her space with competent adults in chosen fields, help assess students’ abilities, schedule group programming, and schedule labtime for other ‘schools’ in the same system within her ‘school’s’ laboratory.

The ‘campus bounds’ would be set as a neighborhood line, and kids would be able to travel through that area on errands, on drawing and interviewing assignments. All school work would end with public projects, either visible as written work on the school website, or as physical art in the school windows, or a concert/recital in the gallery.

Every two to four years, the students would work at the direction of a general contractor, electrician, plumber and architect to redesign and rebuild their space.

To graduate, a student would need to demonstrate spoken proficiency in three languages, writing in two, mathematics through trigonometry, drawing, a musical instrument, completion of a long-term science project, and a successful computer program.

There would be no grades.

Mine would be a middle school or high school. I would start with a high-powered webserver, a laptop or netbook for every child, a high-quality printer, and a store-front classroom with a well-equipped science lab, a lounge, a movement lab (yoga/dance/martial arts), workspaces, and a gallery at the front. In other words, I’d give kids access to the world, and I’d make the school permeable to the larger world by placing downtown right outside the front door. And their work would be visible at the front of the school, all the time.

We’d have ten subjects instead of five: Western Humanities (English Language and grammar, Spanish and one other Romance Language), Eastern Humanities (Chinese, Chinese characters, literature & grammar), Mathematics, World Culture, Art, Music, Biology, Physics/Chemistry, Computer Programming, and Body (health, sex, athletics).

Each ‘classroom’ would have a guide, whose job would be partly as a teacher, an administrator and as a social networker. Her job would be to connect students in her space with competent adults in chosen fields, help assess students’ abilities, schedule group programming, and schedule labtime for other ‘schools’ in the same system within her ‘school’s’ laboratory.

The ‘campus bounds’ would be set as a neighborhood line, and kids would be able to travel through that area on errands, on drawing and interviewing assignments. All school work would end with public projects, either visible as written work on the school website, or as physical art in the school windows, or a concert/recital in the gallery.

Every two to four years, the students would work at the direction of a general contractor, electrician, plumber and architect to redesign and rebuild their space.

To graduate, a student would need to demonstrate spoken proficiency in three languages, writing in two, mathematics through trigonometry, drawing, a musical instrument, completion of a long-term science project, and a successful computer program.

There would be no grades.  Each student would have a collected portfolio of recordings of concerts, conversations, math problems, plus a massive digital archive of blog entries, commentaries, and of course, a working computer program.

Questions to Conversation

Tonight on the way home from dinner, two students engaged me in conversation.  They had heard this morning about the missile test of North Korea, and both were New Yorkers… was their city safe? Were their families safe?  Could they expect to have a home to go home to in the event of an attack?

We spoke about some of the issues involved: the size of a potential nuclear weapon, the size of the retaliation from America, the size of the American military force in South Korea, the reasons why North Korea might want nuclear weapons.  Question led to question: what is the the size of the American army relative to China’ army? What’s the Yalu River? What happened during the Korean War?  Who did we fight then?  How many missing men are there from the Korean War?  So a lot of those guys must have been World War II veterans? Who was Douglas MacArthur? Was this the same Truman as President Truman? If a nuclear bomb hit here, what would happen?  Does the U.S. take over territory?  So a bunch of pineapple farmers overthrew the Hawaiian government??

When I first came to teach, I did this sort of thing all the time; I’d have deep conversations with kids that consisted mostly of questions at first, and then gradually became kids and me answering questions together, and then became kids contributing as equals to a conversation that could go pretty deep.  It feels like those conversations have gotten rarer over the years, though, and the last class that really cared about that sort of conversation about to graduate.  I’m not really sure how I feel about that.  I’m also not sure what’s been different about what I did then to engender such talk, against what I do now.  It’s a puzzlement.

Today in class I made a map of a typical manor in medieval Europe.  One of my students poses with the picture.

 

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Fake Curiosity

What if?
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

So I have this idea, which I think shakes my teaching philosophy to its core, and maybe yours as well — that we should teach middle school kids how to be curious.

See, somewhere along the way curiosity stopped being cool. I’m note sure what happened, but my seventh graders and to some extent my ninth graders have stopped being interested in what they’re learning. The goal is just to learn what the teachers tell them to learn, do the homework, get the worksheet done, and then… boom! Off to learn how to beat the current level on the video game. Or work on the novel. (One of my kids is working on a novel. The most non-into-school kid imaginable. Huh??)

So I asked my kids to pick a chapter. Something they found interesting. Something they liked. Something that interested them. Here are their picks. They’re all over the map: Japan, the Reformation, ancient Rome, the American civilizations like the Maya and the Azteca, and me with my interest in southern and eastern Africa. (Why? I’ve never been there.)

How do you fake curiosity? Well, curiosity is mostly manifested in questions. So rather than have them read the text and write answers to the questions, I had them read a part of the book they chose themselves, and ask the questions. Twenty five of them tonight. They also have to star or otherwise mark the three they regard as the ‘best’. We’ll talk about the criteria for ‘best questions’ tomorrow, but really there aren’t bad questions as long as the kid goes deep enough in answering it. Toyota says you should ask 5 Whys to get to the bottom of the real answer; maybe that’s the pattern I’ll adopt: “find 5 whys to support your answer. When you get an answer right away, anyway.”

In the next few days I’ll show them how to turn questions into Google key words, and one kid already has this idea that he’s going to use Answer.com or some such to ask his questions.

I’m less clear how to generate the next set of questions from this initial round, or how to get them involved in writing about what they’re learning, or how to assess them. But at the moment, we’re having more fun and learning more than we were when they were just filling out worksheets. And now I can focus on teaching them study and research skills to find out the answers to things which genuinely interest them. I hope.

Conference into Practice

Yesterday I heard Bob Greenleaf speak at The Fire and the Rose, a conference on resiliency and learning in students that I organized for CAIS.  I wish I had been able to go to all of the different sections of the presentation, but I was definitely overloaded, and missed out on more of the sessions than I got to attend.  I also presented one piece on spirituality with a colleague, Tom Hungerford from Westover School in Middlebury, where the conference was held.

Bob Greenleaf talked about the power of ritual to transform people’s lives; that it just takes 21 repetitions of something non-negotiable and necessary before that element becomes integrated into a person’s life so deeply that it becomes missed if it is removed.  He talked about the power of the family meeting to transform his family’s life.  So I tried that last night.  I bought a quart of ice cream and held an advisee meeting in my dorm.  Only the kids from my floor were invited, and they all came.  I waited until they were all there, and we had a meeting.  

I used the same questions that Bob did at his first family meeting.  What did you learn this week that you think will be useful for the rest of your lives?  What are you most proud of this week?  What are your issues, worries and concerns?  

It was AWESOME.  

Answering Amul

amul, a colleague and online friend from the world of freelance gaming by means of some convoluted connections, did a meme where you answered three questions for someone else, and then invited others to ask you for three questions. I asked him, he replied, and now I’m going to try to answer them. Feel free to ask me for three questions in turn.

Podcast advice

I’m loving creating podcasts for three reasons.