I committed to 28 days of writing this morning. Tomorrow, the students of Team Run DMC (long story, which may be told here within the next 28 days) will be portraying figures from US history (in costume, naturally) including George Washington and Abigail Adams, Dolores Huerta, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Carl Sagan. These luminaries are gathering for what I named (not really thinking through the implications, beyond the idea that it consisted of "great" figures from history) the All-time Greatest Panel, to discuss their responses to Barack Obama's 2015 State of the Union. 

So, it was possibly not the best day to start my 28 days. I stayed at school to arrange tables and chairs for the panel, print out "reserved" signs for the rows where 5th graders will be sitting who are attending the (11th grade) panel discussion, set out the name cards for each character, flip a coin to decide which of the two students representing each character will read the opening statement (as the coin skittered around my silent and unobserved office, using up valuable milliseconds, I started to wonder whether I was taking my commitment to randomness a little too far). I created note-taking sheets with prompts for a few students to fill out who will sit at a row of tables in the back. I set a ruler with a right-angle next to the note-taking sheet that asked for a diagram connecting speakers in the order they spoke, because I realized the diagram shape I'd made was too small (I took this technique from a socratic seminar method I once heard about - the name has "tables" in it). Then I laid out a couple sheets of blank paper at each character's spot, just behind their name card, then drove to Costco to buy bottles of water and pens, because it occurred to me that if this were a conference, everyone would have paper for taking notes, a ball point pen, and a bottle of water. 

All of which means that at this point, it's a little late and I'm pretty tired. However, it just so happens that I wrote up the strange saga of how this project reached this pretty pass over the weekend, and this gives me an excuse to shape it up and post it - which was what I'd intended to do when I started drafting it on Saturday. Here it goes:

How it began: The "Rock the Document" Project
In November, I found an ad in the Atlantic magazine for the Atlantic Magazine and College Board’s essay competition, for which students were supposed to write essays about various historical documents, selected by AP US History teachers as the documents they were most excited about discussing with their students. I read that, and had a dangerous thought: "there's a really good project here. I'm not sure what it is yet, but that's bound to come eventually." 

The plan I developed (using the term "plan" extremely loosely) was for students to host discussions about various documents at tables in what we would set up as an 18th century coffee house. I never made a prototype of this (either of the essay, or of whatever I’d require to host a discussion), so the project never made sense to me, or seemed especially interesting. So the weekend before we returned from Winter break, I realized the project had never coalesced into an idea I was excited about - and I hadn't written a prototype essay so I had no idea what it would be like to actually write an essay for the Atlantic Magazine and College Board's essay competition. In addition, though I'd read the list of documents from which students could choose, I hadn't picked over them one-by-one and determined what I thought of them.

On Sunday (Monday was a staff day, so I figured I still had plenty of time), I called my friend Dan, formerly a High Tech High teacher, still an authority on all things educational. You can see my notes from our conversation below.

Last year we published an anthology of student writing that we called We Chose Our Own Adventures. You can read all about the project here.

Here's what one student, Gabby Tam, wrote about her piece:

Recently we had to do a creative writing essay. At first I decided to stick with the topic and write a piece that was supposed to convince the public of the importance of keeping habitats to their natural environments. I worked on this piece for a good week and a half, adding more and more info to keep the piece interesting. Draft after draft it was coming along into a final piece but the day before the final draft was due, I read over it and I was bored. I asked my teacher if I could restart my whole piece but with an entirely different topic. My teacher gave me a topic that would be interesting to write about and with that idea the thoughts began to flow right onto the page. Within two hours I had the ideas down and my essay written. There wasn’t much that needed to be fixed thankfully and it was finished in time to be put into the book. The story I had written was very personalized and I believe it gave the readers a deeper understanding of myself. During exhibition I was chosen to read part of my story out loud, which was an honor. It was also nerve racking because I have never been a great reader and always hated being called aloud to read in class. I think this situation was different because it was something that I had wrote and it was easier to portray my reading in a voice that fit the feeling of my story.

Tom told me about this technique before I taught my first class, and I have yet to use it, but I like the sound of it.

Here's how it works.

1. Take a set of lecture notes, and split them into a series of questions that are sequential and anticipatory

2. Present the class with the questions in sequence. Everyone in class responds to the question in their notebooks and pair-shares.

3. Call on people to tell the group what their partner's response was, saying  "X, what did Y say?" Then ask "Y, was that right?"

4. Write important points on the board, and add to them.

I guess you could call this "constructivist lecturing", since you help the students to construct knowledge about what's being discussed - though the teacher remains the ultimate arbiter of fact. 

Today I introduced Kelly Gallagher's Real World Writing Purposes by, as Gallagher suggests, having my students look for examples of these in magazines (actually, Gallagher recommends newspapers, but what I had access to was a motley collection of magazines and journals including San Diego magazine, the New Yorker, N+1, and Lucky Peach, among others). 

As is often the case, I'm fairly confident that I learned more than anybody else. Specifically, I learned how far I am from being conversant in the "Real World Writing Purposes." I started one class by grandly declaring "Whatever you write will fall within one of these purposes." It took about three minutes for a student to point to a humor piece in the New Yorker and say "I can't figure out where this one fits." 

"Hmm," I replied. "It doesn't, really. I take back what I just said."

When I was studying jazz saxophone, one of the things my teachers had me do was learn "licks" or "clichés" (not meant perjoratively), that is, little collections of notes that other sax players had used before me, that you could call upon spontaneously within a solo in order to connect your more original ideas together. 

When I began teaching, my own teachers offered a few "licks" or "clichés" to bring to the classroom - starting with techniques to quickly get a group quiet. Since then, I've been unofficially collecting these "licks", and it occurred to me today that I should put my collection online. So here's what I've got so far:

Getting students to be quiet quickly:

1. Clap "Shave and a Haircut" - students respond by clapping "two bits"
2. Shout "Mama Se Mama Sa Mama Ku Sa" - students respond in kind (from Bobby Shaddox).
3. Say "point at the screen if you can hear me" (from Carol Cabrera).
4. Count down from 5 - "quiet in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1" (get quieter as you count down).
5. Say "Clap once if you can hear me… Clap twice if you can hear me…"
6. Variation on 5: Just say "Clap one time… Clap two times…" (from Sonya Ramirez).

Regulating noise:

1. Establish three consistent volume levels: Restaurant (everyone talking), Library (mostly silent, talk if you need to ask a peer for something), Outer space (total silence). You can tell students "OK, outer space for 5 minutes, then we'll shift to Library" (Bobby Shaddox and Allie Wong).

Calling on students to respond to questions:

1. Have a box of popsicle students that students have written their names on, pull out a popsicle stick to call on a student.
1. I often use these for students to read out what I've got onscreen in a presentation. I try not to use this to call on students to do something that's more cognitively challenging, because I don't want to freak kids out and I know sometimes this just leads people to freeze up. However, it's really important that kids get cold-called to do cognitively challenging stuff, so it's not always the same kids who do it! My way of handling this is to have kids pair-share before I pull a popsicle stick - that way, students aren't just saying what they are thinking, they're saying what "they and their partner" are thinking. 
2. Call on students in threes - in other words, if five people are raising their hand, say "Mike, then Sarah, then James" (from Michelle Clark). 

Prompts for responding to reading

1. Choose a "golden line" - that is, a line that really grabbed you. Then say why you chose it, or ask a question about it.

Questions to ask during critique

1. "Does the writing sound like the person who wrote it? (from Carol Cabrera).

Last year I wrote a description of interdisciplinary teaching for my syllabus, and I really like it. 

This year, I'm taking it out of the syllabus, in an effort to make the syllabus as lean and mean as possible. But I still like it, so I wanted to post it here:

A note on interdisciplinary teaching

interdisciplinary (adjective): of or relating to more than one branch of knowledge (New Oxford American Dictionary)

At High Tech High, we do interdisciplinary teaching and learning. What that means for you is that you'll do projects that span across more than one subject – such as a project co-taught by Dr. Patton (humanities) and Mr. Leader (biology).

We still divide ourselves into separate subjects, because each subject has a unique set of skills and ways of working, and to some extent, these are easiest to master in isolation. But we work across these subjects whenever possible, because 'subjects' are, at best, a convenient filing system for human knowledge and once you leave school, nothing you ever do will ever divide neatly into subjects ever again.

"How would a professional present this learning, and to whom?"

This happened a long time ago, but I'm going through my notebook and I want to get these ideas down. 

Wagner gave the keynote speech at the Deeper Learning Conference, and it was awesome and challenging. Here are some points that stuck with me. They're out of context, which may make them look glib, but they're worthwhile anyway:

"The world doesn't care how much kids know. What matters is what they can do with what they know. 

According to Wagner, skills are "necessary but not sufficient" in the emerging workplace - what's needed is the capacity to innovate. 

Wagner's 5 Ways School Limits Creativity (& Innovation)

1. Culture of schooling rewards individual achievement, which complicates incentives for collaboration
2. School compartmentalizes knowledge and rewards expertise
3. School rewards passive consumption
4. Penalizes failure and rewards compliance
5. Extrinsic reward & punishment

Wagner's three keys to education that encourages creativity

1. Play
2. Passion
3. Purpose

Also, "bring whimsy into every assignment"

And finally - how do we convince students and parents that this is how it should be?

We need to talk to parents about giving kids competitive advantage when they're seeking jobs. When they ask about SAT scores and college, that's what they're really asking. 

One of my students, Dean, has just painted a quote from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four on the walls of the classroom (I helped out by painting over the pencil marks in white). Here it is (it requires two photos, since it appears on two facing walls):

I could (and should at some point) say a lot about why I wanted this quote looming over everything that happens in the classroom, but for now I just wanted to show the photos, and to quote the two passages from Nineteen Eighty-Four in which it appears:

The first reference in the book:

The party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew thatOceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.

The second reference in the book:

O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.

'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'

'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.

'"Who controls the present controls the past,"' said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?'

Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?'

'No.'

'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'

'In records. It is written down.'

'In records. And----?'

'In the mind. In human memories.'

'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'

'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'

O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.

'On the contrary,' he said, 'YOU have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth."