Not So Distant Future

Today we visited two very different schools and learned an incredible amount of things from both of them.   Poway is a high school of 3,000 in the surburbs, somewhat similar to the Westlake area, outside of San Diego. 

We talked to them about their senior project which is a culminating experience to the senior year, and which students work on with their social studies and English teachers.  Students are connected with a business mentorship in the community as part of this.

Poway also has a unique teaching internship, where they pair upperclassmen with teacher mentors at their own campus.  The students learn about assessment and lesson design, and work with ninth and tenth grade students as classroom assistants.  The principals teach the course.  It’s slightly similar to our teen teaching program.

Another unique program was their wellness program, which is funded mainly by grants.  They have a student support center where students can go to talk to the counselors, hang out with peers if they don’t have a “home” on campus, and you could see that it was a really important aspect of their campus.

They have a really excellent digital graphics, digital animation, and digital film program, as well as an excellent librarian who is also into wikis and blogs, etc.

We have made a lot of connections at these campuses that we can draw on as we work on new courses or want to share ideas or learn new things.  Sometimes we have been sharing ideas as well as learning new things, so it’s been a really valuable experience. 

The second site we visited this afternoon was High Tech High School, which is a charter school in
San Diego.   It was somewhat mind-blowing in that it is all project –based learning across the curriculum.  Students are taught by teams of teachers who share the time with students. 

Students were actively moving from room to room as they worked on projects—there were students in the hall using power tools to build projects, mounting their art on the walls as they finished it, and many many cross-discipline connections.  For example, the art teacher was working with the engineering teacher and physics teacher to design a project “box” about a physics topic that would fit in the frames of their windows.   Students were finishing them and actually hanging them up in the windows as we were leaving today.

When you asked students to explain a concept, they were able to explain all of what they were creating in great detail and explain the science behind it.

The architecture and design of the building was also really interesting which you can see from the photos. The design of High Tech really challenged our thinking.

There is a lot to process about all the different things we’ve seen, but this is a quick snapshot.  One school was much more traditional than the other, but we got so many valuable ideas from both.

Yesterday we visited Harvard Westlake and attended a few classes as well.  Their campus is unbelievably beautiful, situated on top of a hill overlooking the city.

Their schedule is somewhat similar to ours, but they attend classes only four days.

One of the most striking things there was a beautiful art gallery, and they also use it to showcase a local artist often.   It convinced all of us even more of the value of having an art gallery.   The gallery also has a mounted flat screen for video art, which was a nice feature.  

The school offers a digital film course, and they gave us some dvds of their films.  They invite a different person from feature films to speak at the campus each year when the student projects are completed, which is another idea we could emulate.

They also did a wonderful job of portraying their school in their handouts, literary magazine, digital film festival, etc. There is much more that I want to share, but not enough time to write about it…so that will be my “school snapshot” for now.

A few things that stood out from our visits yesterday (this is quick because we have to get to the airport early this morning!)–

–Gunn has “departmental” secretaries–a group of teachers over several departments share an assistant who is stationed at a location where students or teachers can access their help.  They also have an assistant who sets up the labs for the science teachers (and both Palo Alto and Gunn have beautiful lab spaces for that).

–Looping–Gunn “groups” 9-10 graders in their English classes and 11-12 graders, and the students move through four semesters in varying order, but they are mixed grade level classes.  Interesting….though I’m guessing it makes for difficult scheduling, but they said they like the benefit of the mixed levels in terms of student discussion.

–Both Palo Alto and Gunn have a lot more electives than we do, but they are content area electives, like History of the Cold War, or Women Authors, or Escape Literature, etc.  They both have 7 period days, so that makes that possible.  California has no state requirements for graduation credits, other than what the University of California system requires, which guides most schools like theirs.

–They use both Macs and Pc’s at both campuses, across the board.

–They both have teacher driven inservice planning–they have unusual schedules and one hour of the afternoon each week has a slot for department meetings or teacher inservice.  Palo Alto has a list of “class offerings” for teachers on those days over a variety of subjects they previously identified.

More impressions later, and Vicky is posting on the Site Visit Committee’s site too.

Today we are going to Harvard Westlake, a private school in Los Angeles–check out their website to see what we’ll be seeing!

  We’ve made it to San Jose, the home of innovation, (after flying with a few Academy award attendees to L.A. yesterday).   We’re off to visit the first two high schools on our trip this morning, Palo Alto and Gunn, and then we hope to visit Stanford’s campus this afternoon.   It’s chilly and rainy in San Jose.  There was lots of good conversation and reading on the flight.   We’ll be posting photos on flickr as we go, so check out the sidebar to see more of our trip.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/185472365/in/set-72157594172818697/

Tomorrow is the day–a group of us from the district are setting out for California to visit six high schools (Palo Alto, Gunn, Harvard-Westlake, Poway, High Tech High, and Mt. Carmel) over three and a half days, and also will be meeting with a staff member from Escondido Charter School for dinner.  In addition, I’ll be visiting two newly remodeled/built school libraries, Canyon Crest Academy and San Dieguito.

We’ll be talking to the schools about innovative ways they provide professional development time to teachers, innovative courses offered, online courses, facility design, mentorships and college partnerships, technology use, senior projects, and more.

A couple of the campuses issue laptops to students, and I’ll be interested in knowing how that works as well.

We’ll be blogging and posting photos all along the way here and on our vision committee blog(www.trends.edublogs.org) and at Joel’s technology blog (www.techxas.edublogs.org).

We are taking along a few geeky gadgets to try too (given the group that is going, is that surprising?)  Joel has secured a temporary trial of a MacBook Pro so we may try to do some video blogs as we go.  And our district technology coordinator  has  two Samsung miniature tablet laptops for us to try.  We’re also taking our digital recorder (an Olympus ws-100) to record conversations or brainstorming — it’ll allow us to make a podcast if we want to.  

All that aside, I’m very excited about this process and what ideas we’ll be able to bring back and share.  Next post….California?

This international project from Clarence Fisher at the blog Remote Access is fascinating. 

 Students from four countries are participating in what he calls an “international assembly line” on a research question.  Students in  schools in Kuala Lumpur and Columbia are providing one part of the project and then students in Canada and the United States will complete it and put the multi-media together.   They are using a wiki to plan the project.

I should add that these are middle school students participating in this global learning opportunity.

   I’ve noticed more students using Cha-Cha lately, which is a search engine with a twist.

You can search yourself, or search “with a guide.”  When you search with a guide, a chat window comes up and the guide immediately starts completing the search.  As they find results they post them on the screen, and you can chat with them as they look or clarify your search.

It’s easy to use, though I found the results faster myself than with the guide.  But I think perhaps students like the idea of having the live help during their search.  I’ll be interested to see if this tool takes off.

Welcome to our second “Friday blogging” day on our campus, where we ask our staff or outside contributers to rush on down and spend a few minutes reading and commenting!

Feel free to join in….

Note:  (If you are visiting the blog from elsewhere, the Chipotle blogging is a campus joke, by the way, based on a much-welcome donation of burritos).

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/150465821/

Will Richardson talked about friction points caused by new technologies and the rapid pace of change.   When I heard Lawrence Lessig talk at U.T. about copyright, he was talking about how innovators created this new system of copyright because the law wasn’t changing fast enough to meet the web 2.0 environment.

As I sat there listening to Lawrence Lessig in the auditorium at U.T., I noticed how many students in the audience had their laptops open, listening, taking notes, but also browsing, chatting,  and checking email, and it really hit home.  Colleges are already dealing with this in their classrooms and we will be soon.

The largest friction point for me is how is my job and teaching going to change and will it be valued, and if so how?  I earnestly believe that it will be valued, that students need guides and support and that what we all do is critical to that.  But it can be unnerving to contemplate.   And yet seeing all those students with laptops in the lecture hall, made me believe ever more strongly, schools have to be getting ready for this, because it creates a pretty different paradigm for our classrooms and libraries.   (And the changes aren’t all about technology, but about our students’ culture and world–the changes are about people.)

     And I wonder as we face these “friction” points of change, how we can soften our practices and ourselves and say “yes, and….” instead of “yes, but…”  (Avish Parashar writes that, “‘Yes and’ is a conversation; ‘yes but’ is an argument.”)  

How we can soften our practices and support one another because we will all need that support, from the techie types to the nontechie types, because change can be difficult and frustrating.  There are roadblocks of all kinds–technological, student behaviors, financial, infrastructure and people who will say “no”.

The process of change is tremendously difficult in every field, as all of us know.  Hundreds if not thousands of books have been published about dealing with change, and I would say it is one of the most difficult challenges.

But everyone is good at something and we all contribute value,  and so we can use our contributions to continue to build a powerful learning community.   But we have to remember to say “yes” to ourselves first, and then “yes” to others we work with and “yes” to being open to exploration–not to change our core beliefs necessarily, but to support each other as we go through our own learning adventures, and to support our students in theirs. 

Two books I can recommend on this topic–Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, and Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges. 

As Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Your thoughts?

photo credit: “Be the Change” http://www.flickr.com/photos/damodhar/227559318/

Janice Friesen (who I met online but lives here in Austin) has some interesting observations on her blog Texas Malahini about how our students think differently than previous generations.  

She observes that:

“My mother’s generation thinks that it is OK not to know something and that there is a lot that is unknowable. They do not value asking questions. They are VERY protective of their private information. My son’s generation thinks that EVERYTHING is knowable and that there are no secrets really. In any conversation when there is a question they go right to Google. They wear their lives on their sleeves and assume that it is not a big deal (just look at My Space).”

She goes on to talk about how they use phones differently and how they view facts differently than in the past.  

“My mother’s generation thinks that public information MUST be accurate and correct. . . My son’s generation is moving too fast to care about how accurate public information is. It is OK to say what you think and to change your mind. ”

I was especially struck by that statement.  Will Richardson showed how in Wikipedia that there can be as many as 500 edits to articles in merely two minutes.  Two minutes.  I tell students Wikipedia is like a river–it is there but it is ever changing, so that any time they dip their foot in that river, it might be(and probably will be) different.  How do we or our students cope with information when it is that fluid?  How will this play out in the long run? 

  Unlike in books, what’s online is a record, permanent, but also temporary unless we store it.  Where will our records of all these conversations be in the future?  Will they, unlike books, be erased or lost in the flood of information?   Or does it make it a larger “small world” where all the information links back together and the significant works and ideas rise back to the top, like six degrees of separation?

What skills do we need to be teaching our students to operate in an information environment like this?     One that keeps floating to the top of my mind is the ability to critically evaluate something.   Another is some way to filter and focus because distractions are everywhere. 

Other ideas on skills we need to teach our students, or comments on how you see student thinking changing?

photo credit:  “flicked book” http://www.flickr.com/photos/idleberry/109839101/