Book Review: The Third Teacher

Subtitled 79 Ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning, this book came up during my search for new materials about school design that I can use at my new job and in my new context. But it’s full of ideas about what schools can and could be in the future. The book is organized into eight chapters:

1. Basic Needs
2. Minds at Work
3. Bodies in Motion
4. Community Connections
5. Sustainable Schools
6. Realm of the Senses
7. Learning for All
8. Rewired Learning

I’ll admit, I’m not done with the book yet.  I keep skipping around, reading the ideas out of order, looking at the photographs of lavishly well-designed schools all over the world, from Brazil and Germany to Switzerland and British Columbia, Alabama to  Norway.

Some of the ideas could be implemented immediately, though, and I wanted to get them out to you, the readers, as quickly as possible.  By “as quickly as possible”, I mean that your students and you could do these every day, as a matter of standard action.

• Basic needs come first

1. 1. Monitor indoor air quality, temperature, and humidity with simple instruments.
   2. Choose cleaning products without Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), known carcinogens, are non-irritating to eyes and skin, pose no short-term or long-term health hazards, and that have neutral pH.
   3. Keep the curtains open.  Increasing daylight in classrooms cuts down on absenteeism, raises test scores, and increases desire to participate.
   4. Shuffle the deck. Change the locations of routine activities so children explore new surroundings in familiar circumstances.

• Minds at Work

1. 1. Get rid of the desk at the front.  Organize the placement of objects in the classroom so that there are many centers of learning, but that it isn’t all focused on the teacher.
   2. Reorganize the room frequently for different kinds of learning activities.
   3. Allow students time and space to choose what they want to do, so as to illuminate individual strengths.
   4. Display learning: give every student a place in the room to post their favorite work, and rotate frequently to show how their learning is progressing.
   5. Emulate museums: fill your classroom with a rich array of evocative objects.
   6. Bring the Outside, in.  Use visuals and objects that call the outside world to mind.

• Bodies in Motion

1. 1. Get up and move.  Primary school kids spend around 9 hours sitting. Stand up, move around.
   2. Make peace with fidgeting. It’s brain development.  Make it into conscious exercise.
   3. Make your classroom agile.  Reconfigure the space to different activities.
   4. Natural play spaces: class gardens, school ponds; reconnect kids with nature.
   5. Scale the wall: climbing builds kids motor skills and self-confidence. Make walls climbable.
   6. Free choice:  democracy grows with practice.  Give kids a say in school.

• Community Connections

1. 1. Engage students in school design.
   2. Get parents painting.  If parents pitch in to make the school a delightful place, it will be.

• Sustainable Schools

1. 1. Leapfrog LEED. It’s today’s top rating, but it’s tomorrow’s last place. Design better
   2. Let students lead.  Encourage students to convert to sustainable practice, and follow their lead.
   3. Rally the results. The savings from going green aren’t savings, they’re Return On Investment.

• Realm of the Senses

1. 1. Hire cooks for your lunchroom.  Cook from scratch, using local ingredients
   2. Farm to table.  Invest in CSAs (community supported agriculture), and farms will invest in schools.
   3. Spend now, save later. Good school lunch is costly; diabetes and obesity are costlier.
   4. Grow your own. Grow and prepare fruit and vegetables on school grounds.
   5. Think hands on.  Have a fab lab, a carpentry shop, whatever.  Kids learn by making with hands.
   6. Paint by function. Color spaces that support the mood of each space’s intended use.
   7. Slip off your shoes. Make your school safe to walk in, in bare feet or socks.
   8. Public gallery. Give students space to exhibit their work. Invite the public.

• Learning for All

1. 1. Adopt a younger mentor.  Pick a kid, ask him to be your guide on hopes and dreams.
   2. Recruit difference.  Hire people that are different from you or anyone else.
   3. Get accessibility-aware.  Consult with the differently abled as part of your design process.
   4. Domestic Classrooms. Kitchens, pantries and cupboards make schools feel like home

Well.  You get the idea.   What amazed me was how few ideas involved putting technology into the classroom.  Most of the ideas had nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with recognizing and encouraging kids’ natural curiosity, tactile awareness, physical capabilities, and social impulses, while shielding and guarding their resilient but relatively fragile bodies.

It also amazed me how many of the things were things that we as teachers could do ourselves. Sure, some of them were district- or principal- or board- level decisions.  But a great many of them (see the lists above) were things that we could do as teachers. And most of them were things we should do, as a natural part of our work.

Good luck in doing them.  I bet other teachers will look at most of them at first, and ask, “What on earth are you doing?”  But some of them, they might be doing themselves.

Head Sets Up Blog

I was just standing in my classroom when the bell rang, and then my headmaster was in the classroom with me. Pointing at me.

“You,” he said, more or less. “How do you set up a blog?”

So I went with him. He set up a blog in WordPress.com.  I watched, trying to contain my glee.

He doesn’t want me linking to it. At the moment, it’s private: not searchable, open only to a select group.  The teachers in the discipline committee and a few administrators, to start with.

But it’s done. He’s got a blog.

Apparently it’s Christmas: I got what I wanted.

Timed Essay: Followup

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I try to give my students a timed essay once a week. I constantly say to them, “This isn’t a test. It’s practice.” And it is. If you can’t sit down and write for twenty-five minutes straight without some sort of interruption about a topic you’re studying in a class, school eventually becomes very difficult. Finding ways to help students navigate that barrier becomes very useful.  Unfortunately, there are very few cures for a failure to write well besides practicing writing.

On the other hand, if you can help a kid reach a point of “flow” in their writing, so much the better.  That’s ultimately the goal, isn’t it?

Of course, there has to be follow up.  I don’t grade the essays in any way, but I used take the time to pick one or two bad sentences, and pull them apart.

Then I realized last night, as I was correcting papers, that I could open up the experience for everyone, and make it equal-opportunity.  Here’s one sentence from every kid in the class, followed by a ‘better’ model of writing.

Because I don’t have to write each sentence on the board ahead of analyzing it, I can run through a lot more sentences in a shorter period of time.  These slides were done quick-and-dirty, but I can certainly demonstrate all the usual techniques of proofreading this way, and use presentation software to show how to fix your writing in more effective ways.

As a class, we went through all eleven sentences in a 40-minute period — without photocopies, without a lot of confusion about which sentence we were on.  We were discussing the sentence projected onto the board. We were talking about the sentence visible to everyone, and only that one.

What I should do next time, of course, is what I didn’t do today — which is ask each student to rewrite the sentence in a way that made explicit what they believed the student was trying to say.

Alhambra Updated

Alhambra, take 2

Here’s my renewed version of Alhambra. Call it take 2, or Version 2.0, I don’t care.

Sylvia Martinez is talking about Generation YES!, her program for helping students partner with techers. Not teachers teaching students, but students assisting teachers to understand and learn technology more effectively and successfully.

1. In a learning community, everyone has something to gain, and something to share. Kids want to be helpful and want to build things for their teachers and for each other.  Teachers are overwhelmed if they are expected to do everything alone.

2. Student tech support.  If students run tech support, they learn how to run the tools, repair the machines, build websites, trouble-shoot in their classes, and design procedures that free up our IT personnel for higher-level tasks.

3. Train students to be developers and communicators.  Send them to present to parents, school boards, community.  They can train for cyber safety, they can explain to each other and to the wider world. Example: MediaSmart Day

4. Peer Mentoring.  Peers can train freshmen to do new things, remind sophomores, retrain or boost the quality of junior work.

School Redesign: Discussion & Assembly

There are some people who think that we’re going to be able to scrap schools as we do them now, and do them anew.  That’s not going to happen.  Every Monday for the next few weeks, I’m going to be taking a look at the list I generated in this post, about how to renovate a school’s physical spaces to take on the challenges of 21st century learning. Last week I examined the idea of performance and practice in the redesigned curriculum, so this week I’m going to look at how we get to the point of performance and presentation: discussion, research, and assembly. 

• Discussion groups

One of the things that we should expect of teachers is to be facilitators of conversations.  Students learn best in environments where they get to have a voice, and add their ideas and opinions to the communication.  Some of these discussions in new schools should be book groups — “come to Room 209 today for a round-table talk on The Killer Angels” while others could be discussions of films about to be screened or recently screened in the theaters, or discussions of performances of music, or science experiments. The whole idea is to create spaces where people are going to communicate, practice communicating, and engage with others.

Discussions and conversations don’t happen when everyone is sitting in the same kind of chair.  They happen when there are stools, couches, comfortable floors, chairs, sofas, arm chairs, wingchairs, shaker chairs, Chippendale chairs. There need to be coffee tables, dinner tables, side tables, end tables and more.  

• Research space

Conversation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Students are also going to need spaces for research, both in groups and alone. Some of this space will be traditional library areas, like reading rooms and stacks for the storage of hardcopy materials.  Some will be spaces with large screens, for reading and manipulating multiple bits of information and framing topics in both big-picture and little-detail ways. Maybe you could even teach math in the ways recommended in  A Mathematician’s Lament (and a link to the book on Amazon.com). 

Some students with advanced projects are going to need study carrels that they can make their own.  I had one writing my graduate thesis, and found that having a small room to retreat to, to leave Post-It® Notes on the wall, and my books open to the right pages, was really helpful.  Students in 8-12 may have need of such spaces of their own.  Maybe we should think about providing some.

• Social space (conversation, snack bar, etc.)

Conversation and research doesn’t just happen in formal settings.  Schools are going to need informal settings too.  The brain needs a rest, to think about other kinds of problems, to work through other kinds of issues, and to refuel.  Any new school should have spaces for eating and talking where conversations can take place in  a leisurely way.  

Think about the last time you had a good idea in a restaurant.  In a café.  In a bar (though I’m not suggesting alcoholizing our schools!).  In a snack bar.  In line at an ice cream stand.  These ventures should also be student-run, so that students get experience being waiters, cooks, and food service managers.  It’s real work; why shouldn’t they have practice at the managing of it, as well as the low-end service jobs they usually get outside of school? Why shouldn’t it be allowed for them to join the conversations that occur in their spaces?

• Project assembly

Most schools have an art room.  This new kind of school will need several. There need to be places for students to assemble the physical materials of their projects — poster boards and advertisements and science projects and wooden screens for their performances, digital labs and studio space for movie making, metal shops for fabricating props and tools.  Maybe they’ll even have a lab for 3-d printers.  They need painting studios, drawing studios, and yes, even musical composition labs.

• Galleries

Not every project is going to end with a performance or a presentation.  Many are going to end with a display, or a piece of art, or a film.  These pieces are going to need gallery space — places where the work can be set up, showed, displayed, screened, viewed, tested, critiqued, examined, re-examined, and inspire others.  This is normal, and it should be built into the experience of everyone who is in school — put together a gallery show, and show us what you’ve got.

So let’s consider.  Again, we’re looking at a school design that calls for presentation, conversation, and discussion.  The curriculum is explicitly directed at learning collaboration in multiple environments, working with a range of materials and sources, and doing research alone or in groups.  A radically different idea to how we do school now.

2¢ Worth » What I Wish For

Now here’s what I wish for.  A school that works like this — where at least part of the goings on of the school is run by the learners.  For instance, you set LCD displays around the school tied into a central low-end computer serving up images.  Encourage students to upload their own art work (or other images that reflect all levels of learning) and allow students and teachers to vote for them.  There would likely need to be some oversight, but that shouldn’t be too hard to incorporate.

The artwork recommended by the most learners gets displayed in a rotating fashion through the school and out, through the school’s web site and perhaps other venues in the community.

via 2¢ Worth » What I Wish For.

Brilliant idea.  Moreover, it forms a gallery of work, and it reflects what we do in reality.  If you’re a private school, as well, this kind of project and program can act as marketing and recruitment.  ”Look what our students do! Look what our students vote on as the best of their work!”

School Redesign: performance and practice

Every Monday for the next few weeks, I’m going to be taking a look at the list I generated in this post, about how to renovate a school’s physical spaces to take on the challenges of 21st century learning.  My goal is to describe the purpose of 2-3 rooms in one possible configuration of a new school environment.

The three I’m going to look at today are practice spaces, theater spaces, and presentation spaces.

Blog Comment: What Would We Build?

[It is] striking when you think about how little of this really transformative thinking is taking place when we think about schools. And how difficult it is to retrofit this thinking into existing spaces. [...] I think most of us in this conversation would say “no”, that we would create something very different. That given a blank slate, we would keep the best parts of the interpersonal relationships between adults and kids but throw out the schedules, the desks in rows, the grades, the workloads, the levels and more and “think fresh” about the learning process in the context of what’s available to us now. Still, I wonder what percentage of educators in general would really think differently about the role of schools and their roles as teachers and learners.

In Weblogg-ed: If we could start over, what would we build?

Will Richardson, over at Weblogg-ed, has been writing from time to time about the issue of how we would build/create/rethink learning environments in the 21st century, given the tools that we have at our disposal now.  And he also comes to the conclusion (as I do) that the schools we build in the future should look much different than the ones we have now.

But how is it that they should look?  It is very difficult to imagine new buildings (or lack of them) in the 21st century when we have been wedded to certain ideas about what schools look like.  The industrial form, with classrooms arranged off of long hallways, has been the model for at least fifty years. When I look at classrooms in older buildings, I see similar classroom ideas: large rooms for desks, with a teacher’s desk in one corner or at the head of the room, and a blackboard at one end.  And when I go back in my mind to college, to our 150-year-old academic building that had only nominally been renovated, I think — “Wow, the classrooms looked just like classrooms. Even then.”  A local historical society has a two-hundred year-old building in an old schoolhouse, and — guess what? — their classrooms look just like classrooms, too.

So we have at least a hundred fifty years of pedagogy, and more like two hundred, that think of schools as a hallway, an office, and schoolrooms.  To that model we’ve added a gymnasium, a laboratory or two, and maybe an auditorium… but the essential model still holds. 

We’re not going to be able to let go of this model easily.  Plus, from a green perspective it makes more sense to renovate and re-equip the schools we have, than to start over with brand new buildings.  There’s so much material, time, effort, energy, and physical infrastructure locked up in the buildings we do have.  Replacing them, especially when we include the cost of demolishing the old structures — for every school district in America — will be tremendously expensive, and we’ll have very little money for this kind of restructuring.

So let’s think about functions that we’ll want students to be in school to do, instead.  What do the classrooms have to do, that they don’t currently do, but that they could?

• Presentation spaces
• Theaters (black box vs. proscenium vs. theater in round)
• Discussion groups
• Research space
• Social space (conversation, snack bar, etc.)
• Project assembly
• Galleries
• Computer labs (Foreign Language, digital, multimedia)
• Liaison offices
• Continuing Project Centers
• Remediation Centers
• Testing Centers
• Community Space
• Science laboratories
• Physical Education centers
• Classrooms
• Art Labs
• Recording Studio
• Audio/Visual Stage & recording booth
• Tutoring space
• Guidance Office
• Learners’ Council 

I’ll be writing about two or three of these every Monday this summer, and build some guidelines about how to renovate classroom space to do these kinds of new projects, but I think it’s interesting that classrooms and tutoring space are still on the list.  We all know that face-time is tremendously valuable in learning, whether one-on-one or in groups.  And we’re still going to need space for that to occur.  

Yet here’s the two most important things that I think I came up with in brainstorming this list: the Learners’ Council and the Testing Center.

Learners’ Council

We all know that school governance has to change.  The model of a head of school who is answerable only to a school superintendent who is only answerable to a board of education (or a board of trustees) is stifling innovation.  It must either go, or be bypassed somehow.  The current financial crisis may be the best opportunity to abolish them.  In their place, though, each school needs a bottom-up deliberative body, with weekly open meetings.  This learner’s council needs to have financial authority to make spending decisions for the school, and it needs to consist of members of all the stakeholders in schools that exist today: parents, teachers, students, representatives of the town, alumni, local business leaders.  Their meetings need to occur at the school they control, they need to have open question-and-answer times, and the results of their deliberations must be filmed, blogged, and presented on YouTube or similar service.  They should have rotating, term-limited officers, too, like secretary, president, vice-president, and treasurer, and they should be governed by Roberts’ Rules of Order or a similar body of regulation.

Testing Center

You should be able to take a test in a subject when you’re ready to do so.  If we’re going to have high-stakes testing, then let’s allow students to set the time of their testing, not the state.  The multiple choice examinations should be computerized, and you should be able to take them at any time, on your own schedule, in the school’s testing center.  Your advisor in American history thinks you need to take an examination on the Civil War?  Fine.  Go to the testing center on Thursday (before your internship at the local biotech company), and take the test. Does it have an essay component, with a time limit? Fine.  The testing center’s computers allow you to write the test without having access to your cellphone, wikipedia or other outside materials.  You take the multiple choice section, and write the essay, under the guidance of a trained test administrator.  The tests are open-source, and questions come from a body of questions submitted and randomized by American history teachers from across the country.  Passing one of these tests can be scored and scaled against learners of all ages from all over the country, and it’s not based on some vague formula invented by the teacher the night before the test.  Hmmm.