Away from my Desk

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."

School's back in session today - in fact, my prep period finishes in six minutes and then it's lunchtime, and I have about a million unfinished jobs - not to mention the fact that the school scanner seems to have a built-in roulette wheel, and once again I've scanned a student's comic and the scan looks TERRIBLE. 

But I'm feeling really, really good.

This morning I wrote "Welcome Back" on the top of my whiteboard. It's a small detail, but it's not something I would have done two weeks ago, and I'm conscious that I did it because I'm thinking about the sort of culture I want my class to have - and I want the "default setting" of my class to be kind, warm, and supportive. More to the point, that's how I want to be.

This post isn't about the pedagogical ideas I heard at the conference, though I'm thinking about it a lot after the Deeper Learning conference, and it isn't about authenticity in projects (though I'm desperate to start designing projects by going to local nonprofits and local government and finding out what kinds of challenges my students can help them with). 

This post is about returning to my roots. 

Nine months ago, I was an education researcher, writer, presenter, and teacher of teachers. Sometimes when people asked what I did, I said "teachers and school leaders outsource their reflection time to me." I looked at different models of 21st-century skills, I studied schools that didn't have school buildings, schools that didn't look like schools. My most frequent criticisms of "innovative schools" were comments like "The actual TEACHING that happens is pretty traditional." I cowrote a publication entitled 10 Ideas for 21st Century Education. Here's how it starts:

People make a lot of assumptions about education: lessons should last for about an hour. Mobile phones should be switched off during school. Pupils should learn in classrooms. And, fundamentally, pupils come to school to learn, and teachers come to school to teach. These assumptions are so common, because they match the way that most of us were educated

But this version of education was designed in and for a very different time, and there’s no reason to assume that it will meet the needs of today’s learners. In response to the challenges we face in the digital age, schools are starting to do education differently. Why restrict lesson times to an hour when half-day sessions allow pupils to delve really deeply into subject material? Many young people have smart phones, so why not allow them to be used as learning aids? Adults learn in the real world, why not let pupils? And, fundamentally, the best teachers are people who love learning, and the best way to make sure that you understand what you are learning is to teach. The schools that are taking this seriously are still in the minority. But across the world there is a growing global movement towards achieving the vision of 21st century education.

I won't take credit for those words (they were revised by several different people, several times, and i can't remember who actually wrote most of them) but when I read them today, I stand by them. However, something changed since "10 Ideas" was published: I started teaching. 

Today, a part of me wants to share this publication with my students - but another part of me says "Do I REALLY want to have a big discussion about cell phone use in the classroom? What about hour-long lessons? MY lessons last an hour! And going out in the real world is awesome, but it's such a hassle getting parent drivers..." And of course, my revolutionary attitudes about overturning teacher-student power structures are much less attractive now that I'm a member of the ruling class.

But my thinking has changed in another way: I keep finding out that other people have concerns about students that have never occurred to me before - a big one is making sure everyone has done a "fair" amount of work for the credit they're given (for example, if kids are making up work because they've been sick or travelling with their parents). I just don't care that much, and it seems too difficult to quantify to me (particularly because the amount of effort that a particular task takes a particular student is HIGHLY variable). 

Now, generally speaking it's important to talk to people with different priorities from your own. But when you're a new teacher, it's difficult to maintain your equilibrium and stay true to yourself, because you know that everyone around you has more experience than you, and you're doing a really, really complicated job that sucks up your weekend, so it gets difficult to think straight about big, foundational issues like "What do I care about? What's the purpose of my class? What do I want for my students? How do I know they're getting what I want them to get?"

There's a cliche about new teachers, that they come in idealistic, full of visions for how they're going to transform education, but once they're in the classroom they discover how crazy their fancy ideas were, and they hunker down to teach in the "real world". 

I think it's true that teachers tend to become more "traditional" than they plan to be (I certainly have) but it's not because that's the right way, it's because when you start teaching you are clutching for whatever structures you can find, and no matter how true it is that smart phones are the most extraordinary research tools ever to be subsidized by parents, knowing that fact will NEVER help you maintain control of a classroom. And control of a classroom precedes everything else: you cannot cede authority unless you have it to begin with.

This brings me to why I'm feeling so good: I went to the Deeper Learning conference during Spring Break, and it reminded me of what I believe about education and affirmed that my beliefs have a theoretical basis and some empirical data backing them up. It reminded me that when my ideas conflict with "how it's normally done", it's entirely possible that my ideas are right. 

I need this so much more as a teacher than I ever did in any other job. It's not easy to be true to yourself in this business, but events like Deeper Learning 2013 help.

As my students prepare to scan the drafts of their Absolutely True Comics and add lettering in photoshop, I find myself sending mixed messages. 

On the one hand, I'm urging students who don't yet have well-drawn drafts to pick up their pace, so they don't miss their deadline on Thursday. On the other hand, I'm assuring students who are receiving critique that if they conclude from their critique that they need to restart their draft from scratch, that's OK - and doing so won't set them back too much.

This is a peculiarity of project-based learning. One of its central tenets (at least, if you follow what one might call the "Ron Berger School" of PBL) is that in order to create "beautiful work" students need to be able to make drastic changes to their drafts based on critique, even to the point of starting fresh (at least in the first few rounds of critique). I believe this wholeheartedly - but I hadn't anticipated, until now, the strange position that puts me in. Essentially, my message is "hurry up and finish, but once you're finished, it's OK if you need to start from scratch." This leads to the obvious question "Well, if I have time to start again from scratch, and I already think my draft is going to be good enough, why do I need to hurry?"

I was talking about this with my director, and he pointed out that it's much quicker to redo something than it is to do it the first time - this is true, but not necessarily easy to communicate to anybody (teenage or adult) who is in the middle of a draft.

[Apologies for the bizarre numbering in this post - I can't get the numbers to behave normally, so there are lots of "ones"]

I started teaching high school with a classic university lecturer’s attitude to reading - that is, I had the following assumptions:

1. The skills required to intuit a teacher’s reason for assigning a reading, comprehend an dassigned text, and take notes that allow you both to “hold your thinking” as you read and to return to the text and find key information and ideas without reading the entire thing again, are either already in students’ possession, or can be acquired purely through the act of reading an assigned text.

1. Anything I assign will be read by my students because I have decreed it.

1. Sometimes the reading will be followed up in class, and sometimes it won’t - but either way, the reading’s intrinsic value will be obvious to students.

Of course, I couldn’t articulate these assumptions when I started teaching - it’s taken me until now even to recognize that I was burdened with them. At the time I just thought I was free from the hang-ups of high school teachers (I wouldn’t have even been able to articulate that notion at the time, but it’s painfully clear to me now). I distinctly remember assigning my first reading early in the semester: an excerpt from the first chapter of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, a guide to writing poetry, which I would have described as “accessible” before I started teaching high school. I now realize that it is “accessible to anyone with an undergraduate degree in the humanities who already likes poetry a bit, and lives in England” (the book is absolutely jammed with English pop culture references). After I’d handed out photocopies to everyone, a student asked “do you want annotations for this?” I had two immediate thoughts:

1. “What on earth is this student talking about?”

1. “This sounds like the sort of inauthentic task that leads to students taking notes in order to fulfil an extrinsic requirement rather than for their own use as a reader.”

So I told the student “You should definitely be taking notes, but I don’t care how you take them. Do it the way that works best for you.”

1. Sultan of Summaries
2. Duke/Duchess of Definitions (this role required either a dictionary or a laptop)
3. Prince/Princess of Predictions
4. Count/Countess of Connections

OK, that title's slightly mendacious. I'm hoping students will paint quotes on the walls of my classroom - I'll help. I'd like a combination of quotes I choose, and quotes they choose. Here are the quotes I've thought of so far:

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

-Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

-Alan Bennett, The History Boys

Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. 

-Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Always, an ever-finer form is waiting to be found through patient and sensitive trial and error [...] A concept is the result and comes at the end. 

-Peter Brook, The Quality of Mercy (he's talking about the rehearsal process, and coming up with a "concept" for a production.

In my class on teaching Reading and Writing that I take every Tuesday evening as part of my credentialling program, the following thought occurred to me, so I jotted it down:

In this job you're always neglecting something and someone, and you're always missing some trick that would make whatever you're doing smoother, richer, or more engaging.

It was good to recognize that when I feel this way it isn't an aberration, it really is in the nature of teaching.

This is more class work that I'm reposting. It is definitely a post strictly for you teachers out there - I can't imagine anyone else being interested. This is all about Double Entry Diaries, which I learned about from Cris Tovani's fantastic book, Do I Really Need to Teach Reading?

I want to talk about how I introduced double entry diaries to my class (you may know these as Cornell notes.

Here's what I did: I made a big (about my height) "double entry diary" on my whiteboard using blue tape. On the left I wrote "data (facts and ideas)", and on the right I wrote "questions, connections, and predictions". I had all my students make a double entry diary in their notebooks. For this first one I went heavy on the ceremony, instructing that they first fold their paper in half lengthwise, then carefully trace a vertical line up the crease.

At this point I started playing a podcast about the first paleoAmericans. I stopped it frequently, and had people come up with entries - I solicited lots of responses, so that one piece of "data" often had several questions, connections, and predictions attached to it. Because I wasn't the one reading, I was able to be "one of the note-takers". I think it would have felt very different had I been reading and then pausing to elicit notes from others.

For the most part, this introduction worked very well: students took to the structure very quickly, and the predictions drove interest in "what would come next". The problem was that it went very slowly, and if we listened for more than a few minutes, lots of key points got completely lost. I ended up listening over two days (one hour each) and it got tedious. It would have been better possibly to listen to it once in its entirety, taking notes, and then go back and listen to longer chunks at a time.

Overall, I really liked teaching reading through listening - it meant everyone was at the same pace and we were doing something communally, and it meant that everyone knewexactly where the notes were coming from - they didn't even need to flip to a particular page, because they'd all just heard the source material.

I'm currently taking Tom Ferenbacher's class on teaching Reading and Writing. I'm writing weekly reflections for this class on a wordpress blog, and I'll be reposting them here. Here's the first one - in theory it's about exit cards, but it touches on lots of different aspects of teaching reading.

This week I assigned my first-ever exit cards. This feels a bit shameful to admit, since they've been a fixture in my own credentialling classes ever since the Odyssey, but unfortunately it is the case.

I assigned the exit cards on Monday. I have declared Monday "Reading Monday", and decided that every Monday we will focus on a bit of text, and a reading strategy. This was my second "Reading Monday". My first had been the launch of the first novel we're reading as a class, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. We'd written a double-entry diary about the book's dedication, in order to generate interesting questions, build curiosity, and demonstrate how much you can find in a short, seemingly-innocuous set of words (you can read the class plan here).

For my second "Reading Monday", I wanted us to read a piece of non-fiction about American Indians (You can read my plan for the class here). This anticipated Tuesday's class, when I would launch our project, whose essential question is "Why is [the protagonist] Junior's life like it is?" During the previous week, students had been asking questions about schools on reservations on our blog, so I chose an article about a new Indian-run education department on a Lakota Sioux reservation. The article provided a different, more hopeful perspective on the potential for positive change to happen withinreservations (Alexie's attitude to reservation life is notoriously dyspeptic), as well as providing some insight into the history of education on reservations (in retrospect, I wish I'd directed students to key passages FIRST rather than having them read the whole article).

I used this session to introduce the students to "coding" - that is, using a set of five symbols to mark up a piece of non-fiction writing (you can see the symbols here - they are a modified version of a set of symbols I learned from Spencer Gooch). When the students came in, they were prompted to respond in their humanities notebooks to the prompt "what do you know about the reservation school in ATDPTI?") I don't know anything about their responses to this, as I didn't have time for any sharing-out (this semester, my classes are one-hour long). I'be been thinking about good ways to check in on students' writing to learn within the constraints of one-hour classes. One option is to read over students' shoulders as they write, but this only works for students who write pretty quickly, and I find it difficult to keep track of whose work I've read and whose I haven't). Another option is to collect notebooks at the end of the week. I'm increasingly learning towards doing this (apart from anything else, it will give students an extrinsic motivation for writing in their journals, which would, for some, be helpful). However, I'm balking because of the time this will take, and also because I'd like students to be reading over the weekend, and if they're reading, I'd like them to be holding their thinking in their notebooks!

So that was the "opener" writing to learn exercise. I then introduced coding (some students had used it in their classes last year, which meant I got a mix of nods and groans of familiarity). I'd printed out copies of the Lakota teachers article, and had students "code" on post-it notes that they could then put on a page in their notebooks and refer to in the future (problem with this is that it bulks up their notebooks and makes them unwieldy, and I post-its are not adhesive in the long term). However, I didn't want to print out 62 copies of the article, so this seemed like the best solution. I used a dot cam to model my own coding on the first page of the article. I then gave the students time to read and code, then get into pairs to share their coding with each other. I know that for a few students, getting in to pairs was critical to their understanding.

So now we get to the exit cards. On a post-it, I had the students respond to the following:

• How well do you feel you understand coding as a method?
• When do you think it might be a useful strategy for you?

I had them stick their post-its on the whiteboard, around the prompt. A couple observations about this:

• I think it was a mistake to let the exit cards be anonymous - I ended up with post-its that said "I don't really get this", but I had no idea WHO didn't get it. If I had names, I could have helped kids individually during team time at the end of the day.
• It seemed (and I'm only guessing, because they were anonymous) that the students who are most strategic about their learning immediately saw the potential for coding to help their writing, whereas students who had not developed the same resourcefulness saw coding as an artifice and a burden on them. I have noticed that in general, there is an inverse relationship between actual and perceived note-taking ability (that is, students whose note-taking is limited tend to think "I know how to take notes already, I don't need any extra structures", whereas students who take notes effectively already can tell that their note-taking needs improvement). I worry that the structure of the exit card prompt encouraged responses like "I don't think it's very useful" - that it put students' responses into a "consumer" frame, which is not a helpful place to be.
• Having them on a post-it meant that I could literally read through them during the break between classes - this was very helpful. If they'd had names on them, I could have separated out the notes that expressed confusion and made sure I caught up with those kids by the end of the day.
• I noted on the "sample writing to learn exercises" that "exit cards" are only one subgenre of "lesson reflections". I think it would have been good to include both a time for writing a lesson reflection in notebooks, and and exit card. However, I don't see how I can do this within a one-hour class. I noticed that in our reading on "Writing to Learn", Fisher, Frey and ElWardi recommend 10 minutes for writing to learn - meaning an opener and lesson reflection would take up one third of my class.
• Kids go a bit wild with post-its. I ended up needing to pick up post-it scraps, balled up post-its, post-its that had been pulled apart and artistically rearranged - I need to build in some clean-up time when we're using post-its (again with the stuff that takes time!)

Wow. Well, that was long. What I need to do in the future is to continue to experiment with opening and closing prompts (given the one-hour limit, I don't think middle check-ins will be helpful to me this semester) and see which are more and less generative.