Not So Distant Future

One of the things that I can tell is going to be interesting about our professional learning community we have formed at my campus is the diversity of teachers involved.  We have members from departments all over campus, from English to science to special education to band.   And it’s fascinating hearing their perspectives on teaching and learning and what it looks like to them.  

 It also strikes me that one thing that happens in schools is that we tend to talk to the people we already work with–reinforcing our own beliefs, but not necessarily ever challenging them.   One of the real values of finding ways for teachers to talk across grade levels and departments is that it does offer the opportunity for fresh ideas and differing viewpoints to emerge.

As our band teacher talked at our coffee about how he works with students, it was very illuminating and somewhat different than how other teachers tend to approach things.   For one thing, he doesn’t use the same pieces from year to year, so he’s always learning new pieces along with the students.  And the idea of ensemble is very important–because if one student isn’t prepared for practice, it hinders everyone in the ensemble.  Students don’t always see their work in the rest of school that way–as part of a group where their contribution and responsibility to others is significant.

What if we treated students in our libraries or classrooms this way?  Like an ensemble where every “player” was significant to creating the music of learning?   So that students know that their work and contributions affect everyone else in the room?

At our staff retreat last August, we stumbled through an outdoor team-building exercise where a group of us had to balance on a log, and reorganize the order we were lined up in.  But we could only communicate through making animal sounds or gesturing like the animal.   But even though not all of us knew one another well–we all were committed to helping ALL of us stay on the log and winning the challenge.

Do our classrooms function this way?  Do all the students involved help all of their peers ’stay on the log’?  Everyone stumbles from time to time–but what more power is there in a classroom if students know that everyone there would be trying to help them get back on track?

Similarly, what if instead of seeing themselves as competing departments (this is high school more than elementary)–teachers saw that they were all part of an ensemble, where all the players were necessary to creating and supporting the whole?

Dennis Littky talks in his book The Big Picture about the importance of advisories to personalizing school for students.   But I think even our classrooms can function this way.

It takes believing in our students, though, as our teacher Valerie Taylor pointed out.  She shared some research from a dissertation at U.T. by Brian Lawrence(or Laurence?), where he explored the perspectve of deficit thinking.  When we see students as incapable of something, we tend to approach them in certain ways because we are thinking of them as doing “without” something.  But if we approaching them by valuing what they do bring (essentialist thinking) then we are able to invite them in because we believe that everyone has something to contribute.

This is key to creating an ensemble in the classroom or with a group of students or with a group of teachers.     Our respect for the fact that every member of the ensemble has something to contribute is paramount.   When people know they matter, they show up, not just physically, but mentally and creatively as well.

So I’m wondering, what do we do to foster ensemble-thinking in our classrooms?

“They say knowledge is power.  We say the use of knowledge is power.”
Elliot Washor  in The Big Picture by Dennis Littkey

As a group of us have been meeting at our campus to form a professional learning community, we’ve been talking quite a bit about the notion of students as a pail having information “poured” into them, versus the notion of students actively constructing knowledge.

I think to librarians, this idea comes fairly naturally.   We know that we can’t “know” everything, but that the source of our power comes in knowing how to help students find information themselves, by ferreting out the knowledge they already have within them.   Finding the information sometimes becomes more of a collaboration, and that is ultimately the goal, for students to know how to drawn on the knowledge they have to make new connections and find more information.

It’s fascinating the different expectations with which students(and teachers) approach asking questions or receiving help.  Some students expect to be a partner in finding things, and will ask a question and then work with you to figure it out.  Other students are much more passive, and ask a question, but then follow you, while chatting with other students along the way, and not really paying much attention.   Some students will take charge once they get to a set of sites or to the bookshelves–once they’ve been pointed in the right direction they are ready to take charge and winnow through what is there and select what works for them.  Each encounter is different and part of the skill set a librarian has to have is being able to facilitate with many different kinds of learners.

In The Big Picture, Littkey points out that learning is very personal.  He also posits that the “real learning happens after” the encounter.  “It’s what you do with it, how you integrate it, how you talk to your family, friends, and classmates about it” that constitutes the learning process.

Once again, I’m led to wonder if we give students enough time for that “learning after” process.  I believe that we learn as things go on the “back burner” and we process them in the background, but in the rush for “new” lessons each day, do we allow enough room for reflection?

Similarly, in library-research related encounters, are students expected to complete something at the end of the period or the next day–or are they given a few days to let the concepts go on their “back burner” while they process it, talk about it, and share it-even if they are doing something else within the classroom?

Littkey asks some very pertinent questions at the end of the first chapter:

“How do you learn best?  How would you go about teaching your ‘own capacity to learn?’

What do you look like and feel like when you are really learning?”

It’s pertinent to understand that for ourselves so that we can apply it better in our own work with students.  If we really “get” that using the knowledge is where the key is, rather than having the knowledge, then how would we approach our teaching differently?

How are our online conversations part of our own learning?

I’ve been loosely participating in the 31 Day Comment Challenge, (which is an effort to focus on improving blog comments through various activities.)  

It’s been a little bit of a learning curve for me to figure out how to use coComment, which is the tool we are using, but by joining the 31 day challenge group, and then backtracking to blog post’s other participants have been commenting on, I’ve discovered a number of bloggers I had never read before and have been gradually widening my reading circle. 

And some of the activities, like yesterday’s Five on Five,  intrigue me in terms of doing them with students.   (The challenge is to respond to five blog posts in five minutes).  I think this activity would help break through the ice for those teachers or students “shy” about responding to blog posts, somewhat like a writing “fluency” activity that English teachers use.  (Though reasonably, maybe it should be Five in Ten, to be feasible!)  And of course, the point of commenting isn’t generally to comment just to comment, but sometimes it does take some steps to get students or teachers over that hurdle to try making a comment.

A teacher at our campus, Bill Martin, pondered this idea of helping students with commenting during a recent workshop we did.   He wondered how to help students move from commenting that was somewhat “parallel” where they engaged with the blog post, but not with the other comments, and how to help them engage in more of a conversation.   I think creating a challenge like the 31 day Comment Challenge (a simplified version possibly) to help students “practice” and develop their conversational abilities in writing might be a valuable way to ease them into blogging.

Reflections

As for reflections on my own blog, I notice that sometimes my posts aren’t invitational enough to comments, or don’t seem to be.   So I’ve been pondering how the way I write posts might enter into that.  (Although I don’t think this is the entire reason–many excellent bloggers don’t have a wealth of “commenters” but have many readers, of course!)     But I think about posts that sort of challenge an idea, or throw a question out, or challenge the accepted thinking, or generate controversy, and how those posts are written.

Clearly, the point of blogging isn’t purely to “receive” comments, but there is a lot of learning in the discussions and exchange that can happen.  So that is why I’ve been reflecting about this.    And as we start our blog for our new professional learning community, I want our blog to be a place where everyone involved feels like an active part of it and comfortable either posting or commenting, so I’ve been pondering the invitational-ness (is that a word) of the writing I do there.  

So some questions…

Are there particular writing styles that invoke comments?  If you read this blog and don’t comment, is there a reason?  I’d love to hear feedback.  

Is it because you prefer just reading?  Or that you don’t tend to comment on blogs in general?  Or don’t have time, but enjoy reading?  Or is it the style of some posts that don’t seem to require comment?  Or you think that you have nothing to add(though I’m sure each of you does!)     Or other reasons?   Even if you don’t usually comment here, I’d love to have input or reflection on your commenting habits, and perhaps relating to this blog in particular if you feel so moved. 

Our campus has a Vision committee which I’ve mentioned before, made up of parents, students, administrators and teachers.   Yesterday at our meeting, we were discussing the books Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner  and Horace’s Compromise by Theodore Sizer, and in discussing the two books together some interesting alchemy came up.

One of our parents delineated the five minds outlined by Gardner:  the Respectful Mind, Ethical Mind, Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, and Creative Mind.

As we started discussing the difficulty with synthesis and creativity if the curriculum is too “content” driven, one of the parents pointed out that how can we expect anyone (including both our teachers and our students) to be creative or synthesize or worry about a discipline when they don’t have the mental room to breathe in many of our rigorous-focused environments.    One of the teachers on our committee also talked about as a newer teacher, lack of that time to breathe meant she was more in survival mode her first few years of teaching than anything.

All of which brought up some thoughts for me–

1.  How are we supporting new teachers so that they have time to breathe?  We expect a lot of them–often new teachers come in with multiple assignments, as floaters from room to room, as part time coaches on the side, etc.   Even when providing mentoring, what else could we do to support them better?

2.  How are we supporting students so that they have time to breathe, and so they aren’t always rushing from thing to thing, from homework assignment to activity?  Could we have a homework/activity free week once in awhile?   Could we focus less on “content driven” curriculum where we try to “cover” things, and spend a little more time on one particular thing, delving more deeply into it?   As Theodore Sizer comments, ‘can we expect students to learn more while being taught less?’

3.  Are we passing our stress onto our students regarding testing?   Can we instead focus on passing them confidence, which helps create room for them to breathe?
4.  How do our school schedules reinforce this lack of “space” for thought?  And what can we do about that?
I wonder what we are saying to our students as future adults about how to live their lives when we foster environments that are driven by constant stress, overwork, overcommitment, and lack of creative time?

As one of the parents on our committee asked, “What do we value?  When you walk around our campus, what do we see?”

Look around your campus or classroom today.  What do you see?

A group at our campus is starting a professional learning community.

I’m cross posting the post below from the blog we have started, which we aren’t quite ready to share “prime time” but are using for our organizing thoughts, because I thought it would have interest outside of our campus.

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In our meeting this week, Jeff brought up the idea of curriculum AS relationship, and the importance of relationship as the foundation for reaching students.

In his book, The Passionate Learner, Robert L. Fried talks about the importance of that relationship and redefining curriculum.

He makes an interesting comment that he observed when struggling with the idea of “curriculum” and observing his students:

“The content of the lessons seems to pass through them, much of the time, like an indigestible substance.”

Throughout the chapter he talks about the collaboration that has to occur between teachers and students. 

“Curriculum for the passionate learner has everything to do with whether or not the relationships are right, whether teachers and learners feel that together they are shaping the learning that goes on.  This cooperation is necessary even when teachers feel pressure from external forces. . . .”

This is something we talked about in our meeting this week–how to make this happen even when feeling pressured by the demands of content driven testing systems and structures in our schools.  

Fried has an inspiring way of looking at it:

“When we view curriculum as a function of relationships, we bring it to our classrooms and lay it out, like a comfortable and useful garment.  We allow ourselves and our students to make it belong to us, to adjust it, to restyle it, to enliven it, to infuse it with meaning.  Such ownership increases the likelihood that young people will approach the knowledge and skills to be learned as active, critical, thoughtful investigators, rather than as passive recepters (or rejecters).”

He goes on to say,

“We are so accustomed to thinking of curriculum as “a body of knowledge” or a “grouping of concepts and theories” or as “the scope and sequence of instructional material,” that it is easy to forget that such definitions, absent an active partnership between teacher and students, are little more than words on a page.”

I like what he has to say because I think it goes even beyond just establishing a good relationship with students–but more something like collaborating with them on how the curriculum unfolds itself–something which makes them more involved and less of passive participants.  I’d be really interested in discussing what that would look like in practice.

This leads me to another question.   I was talking to one of my friends yesterday–a former teacher–and she asked if students were going to be part of our professional learning community itself.  It was a good question and something I hadn’t really considered.   Would that be a possibility?   Is there a way to invite some student participation in?  Would it be helpful to our group’s goals?

How can we enter into a different relationship with students regarding curriculum?  By the way, Fried’s chapter is well worth the read.

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writing, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it.
- William Bernbach

A lengthy debate has been going on at Clay Burell’s blog regarding the weight and value of writing in Language Arts education, the effects of technology, and the importance of other aspects of communication like verbal or visual.

I’ve been thinking about this in reference to the new Pew Internet Poll regarding student writing and technology ‘diversions’ like texting, etc.

In the Pew study, teens reported that:

“They are motivated to write when they can select topics that are relevant to their lives and interests, and report greater enjoyment of school writing when they have the opportunity to write creatively. Having teachers or other adults who challenge them, present them with interesting curricula and give them detailed feedback also serves as a motivator for teens. Teens also report writing for an audience motivates them to write and write well.”

Those findings are what we might expect–that when they are challenged, passionate, and have an audience, they feel more motivated to write well.   But they seem to understand that the technology cannot “give” them the ideas they need to communicate:

“Many teens feel that while technology can help them compose, edit and present their ideas, it cannot improve the quality of the ideas themselves.”

And the survey shows that teens are doing all sorts of writing–from creating powerpoint presentations(73%) to writing journals(both personal or for school) (65%).

Also interestingly, some students find that computers help them write better(witness the discussions on Clay’s blog) and some think they help them write less well:

“In comparison, three in ten teens who write on a computer for non-school purposes at least occasionally feel that computers help them do better writing—and twice as many (63%) feel that computers make no difference in their writing quality. A small minority of teens feel thatwriting on a computer makes them write less than they would otherwise (12% feel this way) or that they write more poorly as a result (6%).”

After looking at this survey, and thinking about the discussion on Clay’s blog, it’s no wonder there is a difference of opinion.  The end users themselves have a difference of opinion!

Another interesting finding of the survey which is important for those of us having students write blogs:

“Teen bloggers in particular engage in a wide range of writing outside of school. Bloggers are significantly more likely than non-bloggers to do short writing, journal writing, creative writing, write music or lyrics and write letters or notes to their friends.”

Personally I wonder if blogging provides the sense to students of an audience who is interested in their writing, which motivates them to engage in more writing of more kinds.  And that the sense of writing for an audience actually serves to improve them as writers, because they are making that transformation to “communicators”?

Which brings me back to the quote at the beginning of this post–that a communicator is concerned with what the reader gets from the writer(or the visual or the oral presentation).  

Our students need to be skilled communicators, whether they are communicating visually, orally, or in writing–they need to have mastered the craft well enough that they can focus on the reader/audience.  They need to have enough encounters with communicating that they become much more aware of audience.   And they need to have these encounters in a variety of ways.

One of the Pew findings, which wasn’t that surprising, is that most in school writing is done primarily in English classes, and that the writing done in other classes mainly consists of short paragraphs.   If we want students to grasp the finer points of communicating–if we want them to have finesse as communicators, then whether they are writing, speaking, Skyping, or presenting a visual, they need to practice enough across the curriculum that they internalize the skills they need.

Do we need to emphasize one skill over another?  Or do we need to do a better job of reaching across the curriculum to help students become more able to reach their audiences, no matter the subject, no matter the topic, and no matter the means of presentation?

             And a complete sidenote, but important to librarians:   One thing the Pew study discovered is that many teens are connecting and writing via libraries–60% use it from the library and 76% from school;  also the usage in libraries varies by socio-economic group (making libraries a real democratizing force for these students).

When I wrote my previous post, I didn’t know I’d soon have a perfect illustration of what learning looks like for younger students who have a natural joy for learning.

In The Passionate Learner, Robert L. Fried points out that in preschool or kindergarten learners:  “Curiosity is everywhere.  Questions abound.  Pride and delight in learning are everyday occurrences.  The children draw and paint seemingly without inhibition. . . . They wonder constantly about why things are the way they are.”

I had the opportunity to babysit my nephews, one in preschool, the other in elementary school, last night.   Upon arriving, I noticed my older nephew was sitting on the couch with some yarn, quickly weaving it together.  He was delighted to show me a basket that he had braided the yarn for and then woven together.   By the time we finished talking about it, he had woven another long strand together which he was eager to show me.

Meanwhile, my younger nephew pulled us out to the driveway and street, to show us his latest handiwork.   While he was outside, through some inspiration that we will never know(he’s 3), he had used his Easter chalk and written a trail of letters that spilled out of the driveway, and wound across the asphalt for quite a ways.   He proudly showed us and then carefully proceeded to read each of the 100 or so letters that he had drawn on his letter pathway.

Neither of the boys had been given an assignment to do this “work”, though they were using skills they were learning in school.   They had just taken what they were learning, applied their own creativity and passion for it, and created these wonderfully spontaneous works both out of their own desire to do it, and out of a desire to share.   As my younger nephew said, “I did this for all of you.”

This kind of spontaneous pursuit of something is what passionate learning is all about.  This is what it often looks like in younger children.

So I have a question for those of us who have older children or work with older children–do we really stop, take the time to look at each creation they have made, and enjoy their pride in its creation? 

But my other question is, do we leave time in their day for play?  When I am overharried, tired, overworked–do I stop to just wander and smell the roses?  Not often.   The same goes for our students–in this era of accountability, and piles of homework, and increasing pressure on college applications, testing, and the like–do our students even remember/know how to play and to create, just because they “want to?”    Do we ever give them time to do that or encourage their creative pursuits?  

Does the mass of students we face at the secondary level (150 a day or so…) impinge on our ability to do this with them?   How do we find ways to engage with them, celebrate successes with them, and tap into their passions?   It seems more personalized learning is a portion of that, rather than generically sending out the same content to all our learners, as though they are vessels.

There is so much creative energy to tap into here for educators, and it would add so much to our work with students to tap into it.   Technology is one pathway to that–because many tools allow for student creativity and diversity, but of course there are many non-technology related pathways to that too.

In The Passionate Learner, Fried writes about entryways into more passionate learning with students–(ways like having a day where students share “what I learn outside of school,” for example).  But he emphasizes that most importantly classrooms where students learn best seem built not around curriculum, but about a trusting and positive relationship with the teacher, a teacher who doesn’t view the students as buckets to be filled generically, but as students who are personal to them.   I know so many excellent teachers who feel this way about their students, and yet struggle with the balance between curriculum, AP courses, and the students as people.   Fried believes this balance is very important.   The value of students seeing us as individuals is also important to that balance–to see that we learn and play as well.

Fried encourages us to view curriculum as a function of relationships:

“When we view curriculum as a function of relationships, we bring it to our classrooms and lay it out, like a comfortable and useful garment.  We allow ourselves and our students to make it belong to us, to adjust it, to restyle it, to enliven it, to infuse it with meaning.  Such ownership increases the likelihood that young people will approach the knowledge and skills to be learned as active, critical, thoughtful investigators, rather than as passive receptors (or rejecters).”

When we invite our students in to our curriculum, how does that change things?   Are any of you doing that in your classrooms and what does that look like?    And how do we also invite our students’ passions in to our own classroom?

Because ultimately, don’t we want our students to rush home and begin weaving their own threads of meaning?

  I had a conversation today with a student about class rank, and the detrimental effects she’s felt as a result.   I won’t go into details here due to privacy for her concerns, but it made me once again wonder what we are doing to children in our high schools in this country.

We’ve created a high school to college system that too often reinforces the idea that numbers are more important than learning;  that scores are more important than wisdom and knowledge; and that stress and overwork are valued qualities and a way of life that our students should aspire to.  

We fret about students who are only concerned about their grades or class rank (or some parents who are), but we also have systems that place the highest values on those things.  There’s a legitimate reason that they have these concerns.  So, I think we need to truly ask ourselves as campuses, what end do we have in mind?  What do we want our students to learn about learning?

In his book The Passionate Learner, Robert L. Fried reminds us that  “every child is a passionate learner.  Children come into the world with a desire to learn that is as natural as the desire to eat and move and be loved. . . .”

He asks:  “So what has happened for so many children, along the way, to transform the joy of learning that every toddler displays into the resistance and ennui we see too often in the classroom?”

While his book points out the complex issues behind this question, I also wonder if we lose too much of the joy of learning in high schools in the pursuit of achievement records, not achievement in “learning”?  

Fried reminds us:

“William Butler Yeats, who was a school official as well as a poet, admonishes us that ‘education is not about filling a pail, it’s about lighting a fire.’  In a world where standards of pail filling seem to have overwhelmed efforts at fire lighting, Yeat’s injunction burns.”

How can we find ways to light that fire?   How can we reevaluate our systems so that they reinforce the importance of students as learners, not performers?   How can we re-envision our classrooms so that the end we have in mind is learning, not test results, when some of those tests (standardized tests, AP tests) drive us to emphasize facts, rather than wisdom?   This is something teachers struggle with every day, from campuses like ours in Texas to campuses in South Korea, where Clay Burell bemoans the focus of AP students in his own classes.

But we are the educators, and we do have the opportunity and I think the responsibility to our students to have these conversations on our campuses, with our students, our principals and parents, and with those outside of our campus like legislators or College Board.   We have the responsibility to speak up for children.

As Fried concludes,

“Let us adjust to and accommodate ‘the way things are’ in other matters if we must, but not in advocating for the right of every child to be cherished as a passionate learner. . . . Let us. . .vow first to do no harm, and promise to resist measures that deprive children of their natural enthusiasm and exuberance as learners, their impulse to ask questions, to figure things out, to wonder, to express, to investigate, to construct, to imagine.”

Don’t we have that responsibility to model a different possibility for our students?   Don’t we owe that to them?

Perhaps there should be an adage–what we celebrate, gets done.

The issue of celebration has been cropping up lately, both in discussions on campus and in my extended network.

When we are doing something well in our district classrooms or libraries, is that being celebrated within the district (as well as without?) 

We celebrate the visible things, like winning teams or competitions, academic test scores, etc.   But are we celebrating equally our daily academic successes?  Are we celebrating lessons that work, transformative uses of technology tools to deepen understanding, a classroom that has struggled and is now finding its way intellectually?

And if we are, are we celebrating it somewhere accessible to our students, parents, other teachers and the general public?   Are we celebrating the joy of teaching and learning?

In his presentation today at Learning 2.0–A Colorado Conversation, Dan Maas, CIO at Littleton Public Schools Schools, pointed out that in education, we typically reward success and punish struggle, when in fact, we should be rewarding struggle.  He believes that the struggle is what leads to the success, and consequently should be considered as consequential.

His point led me to wonder what it would look like for a school campus or a district to really feature learning–not the final end products of a project, or the awards, but the learning.   And what would it do for a school’s culture when  learning was celebrated?

I’m imagining a school newsletter or website or video interview with a teacher or student each month talking about learning and teaching–describing a particular success or struggle in the classroom.   I’m envisioning professionals sharing their thought process as they work through a difficult unit, and the things they consider as they do so.   I’m pondering what it would be like to hear a student analyze how they approach their own learning, or why some classroom activity was particularly powerful for their learning.   

Part of why people don’t understand what education is “like” or what teachers do, is because we don’t engage our public in the deeper conversations about what we do, particularly sometimes in our own districts.  Blogging helps with this a great deal, but only when a blog is really a significant piece in the district’s website.  

I also think this idea of celebrating both academic successes and struggles extends far beyond the “public face” of it.  It has to be an embedded belief in a school or district.   There has to be a level of trust so that people can share their struggles and so they know that the real classroom successes are valued beyond any one assessment score.

One of the best examples of this I can think of is when the Science Leadership Academy was struggling last year with their 1:1 laptop implementation.

Chris Lehmann wrote a blog post about the problem (students using chat too much) and how they were having honest, schoolwide(including with students) discussions about the problem, and how they were working it out.   Embedded in his blog posts were the beliefs I write about–a trust in both the students and teachers, a belief in the students as partners in the solution, and a trust that he could share their struggles openly and not be concerned that the district would impede their process at their campus.   The campus is built around these open types of conversations, it was clear.   We all learned by reading about their struggle and their process, but what we learned most of all is how this school is centered around learning as a core of its very being.

So, the other consequence of celebrating these struggles and successes is that our communities come to know that we are seriously engaged in what we do.   Imagine the increased trust that engenders with parents and community members when they know we are really about learning at a deep level.   And imagine what a better understanding the general public gains of what we do in all of our schools when we celebrate and share our stories about learning.