My biannual losing submission to NPR’s Three Minute Fiction follows. English teachers should write, so I do.
“Timestamp”
Timestamp:::
Hello? Hello. There’s, I don’t know. I’m going to try you again later.
Timestamp:::
I couldn’t – I think I tried you earlier. I’ve just lost track of time. I keep getting this machine. I just wish this was a conversation. It’s – I guess the machine tells you when this is.
Timestamp:::
I’m sorry.
I/
Timestamp:::
Listen: Maybe a story will help put this into perspective. Years ago, I think, we were in Gstaad and the wind came up suddenly. This was winter. Anyway, the wind came up suddenly and although it hadn’t snowed in what seemed like several days, the limbs of trees around our chalet stirred and flooded the air with crystalline glitter. I said the wind came up, but it came down, suddenly, with a rushing sound like a train passing through a local station, but then up again, maybe as cold pressed over warm air and rebounded. When the wind came down, then up, lifting the snow off every light surface, it stalled. Neither of us breathed for I don’t know how long and the air was solid. We were frozen in that moment in cut glass hanging in a windowsill framed in southern light. I don’t know, do you/
Timestamp:::
Look, that wasn’t Gstaad at all, but I think Les Gets or Vevey. Where are you? It’s funny. Not funny, but strange to dictate to you like this. Mediated. What time is it there? Jetlag. Jetlag is like a fat floppy bunny incubating my brain. I guess bunnies don’t incubate anything.
Maybe that actually makes more sense as a description for jetlag with the error about bunnies, but/
Timestamp:::
Your answering machine is demanding. How long is the time window for leaving a/
Timestamp:::
There was another time, maybe you remember, in the Alps, near one of those funny huts with beautiful shutters and boozy coffees in warm wooden rooms, above tree line. So much of the Alps is above tree line. Not like the Rockies, which are much higher, but which line their flanks with lodgepole and spruce. Anyway, the hut. I can’t remember when it was, exactly, but we were climbing on skis near a ridgeline when the snow came. Did I leave this story already? Did I tell you this? Perhaps you remember. Maybe I’d better/
Timestamp:::
I was remembering the alpine hut and snow falling over snow above tree line. The story doesn’t matter. It’s the dislocation of losing all definition. I could see you, clearly, above me. How far? Impossible to know, but I could see you. I couldn’t reach you, but we spoke, wondering – up? Down? Which way was which? We’d pick a few turns down and fall over slowly, simply lost within our inner ears, balance collapsing into itself without external cues. We had only the memory of the ascent to guide us back down, not even very far – 600 meters? But we doubted, slipped and slid, sure of the encroaching moment of weightlessness, when our skis would slip off into whiteness with nothing beneath/
Timestamp:::
I wonder with what voice your machine crows back the time of this call? Female, male, brash, muted? What time is it there? It doesn’t matter. I don’t even know what time it is here.
Timestamp:::
I was recently in the desert. It feels recent. Nighttime shocked with its cold, but the stars pierced the darkness and the Milky Way stretched overhead, at least from here to there, wherever you are, whatever the clock reads in that place.
* What ideas in the readings interested or resonated with you?
Seymour Papert’s seventh chapter of The Children’s Machine, “Instructionism vs. Constronstructionism” was incredible. Particularly, his argument that school overvalues abstract reasoning or thinking while undervaluing concrete thinking resonated deeply with me. As a teacher of text from literature to media, new and old, I often find myself talking about abstract reasoning based on abstract data sets like “Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” by e e cummings with reverence. At the same time, I brew a variety of British, American, and Belgian beers as a hobby. I meditate, and I snowboard, and I cycle. I enjoy working on engines. I’ve learned that precision and speed on a snowboard mirror my experience in yoga meditation. I like writing and brewing beer for similar reasons – both allow me to create something new, based on an existing form, and engage in a reflective cycle of improvement. I learn from all of these activities, and each involves some level of concrete and abstract thinking. I find each valuable. Linking to the Maker pieces, I greatly enjoyed them and believe in making as a way of being creative. In my secondary school experience, I found great solace in the photography darkroom, making photographs from my negatives tangibly in a way that Photoshop and a printer has not been able to replicate. This space in my day was essential. Schools should have maker spaces, absolutely, for kids to hang out, mess around, and geek out on low tech and high tech making.
* How could you apply these ideas to help others learn in your own work, family, or community?
This is a big question – how do I turn an externally moderated course like AP or IB Literature into a tangible maker experience, where the concrete meets the abstract? I don’t know. My AP Lit Badges have yielded one student-created dress based on a Tennyson poem, which was awesome. I have also created a choice menu for assessment outcomes for a choice novel or drama unit to end AP Lit. Still, my students are either in full embrace of the primacy of “the formal stage” from Piaget as the top of the hierarchy. Few make. Some create, certainly, but nobody is building beautiful cabinets, and my school has zero facilities for making anything other than music, art, and digital anything. We teach to AP/IB outcomes, and there’s no making. This is not a dig; this is reality. Certainly, my Digital Journalism course asks students to explore digital media through making digital media, which is a kind of making, but nothing so tangible as the Soulcraft laid out in this book that began to change the way I see my teaching practice. After reading “Big Ideas Need Love, Too,” a nagging question about, if not the value of making media, the lack of tangible making in my teaching became totally realized. I don’t want to be an agent of superficiality, driving kids to ever more banal forms of expression, turning them into little Alex Joneses. However, I believe in bringing kids to language and inquiry into their world through digital journalism. How else can I make this concrete, real, making? I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it.
In the annals of misunderstandings, maybe my favorite is the “Purple Haze” syndrome. Mishearing lyrics or poetry even has a terminology: mondegreen. I remember, hilariously, a friend making this mistake in real time; so awesome is the memory that I doubt its existence, like snipe hunting or cow tipping, a signifier masking misadventure.
Sometimes, even when we say what we mean, it gets misheard. Misunderstandings arise as language bubbles through emotional and physical filters like stress and our cochlea. Saying what we mean exactly, then, is essential, especially when we are instructing children or offering feedback.
A student came into my classroom yesterday, venting: “I just don’t know what she wants from me!” What is she hearing? What is being said? There’s almost no way of knowing.
I’m working on condensing a general use 6 Traits rubric to 4 traits based on feedback from my English department. People seem generally happy with it so far, though some colleagues found it too specific. I’ve been processing that, and I believe I have come to an understanding that specificity expresses expectations. An analytic rubric should express expectations for product. As such, an analytic rubric must be specific.
Additionally, being specific demands that we make decisions about what good products or outcomes are. Too often, the hidden curriculum of what a teacher likes or wishes for filters through a rubric, leading to grades in the end. Student gets grades, tries again next time. A solid analytic rubric communicates expectations, ideally in language the student understands and has practice with. The hidden curriculum or expectations will still exist somehow, but the student can be empowered to improve in a creative cycle through solid feedback and reflection based around a good analytic writing rubric, for example.
Even when expectations are clear, the student has to apply them and get to know the expectations personally, through their own writing (or other performance) and through their personally significant mental models. Until then, pieces of a complex rubric will be mini-mondegreens, limiting student learning and agency.
We’ve got to be specific and clear. We’ve got to be repetitive when it matters. We’ve got to engage in cycles of attempts and feedback. And we’ve got to give students experience with the expectations to internalize them meaningfully. Because even when we do, someone is going to hear something differently.
For whatever reason new, first time parents make decisions that seem, in retrospect, hilarious, my parents bought for me a white baby blanket, waffle fabric like old fashioned long underwear with a synthetic silken border. A melange of vomit and other bodily fluids, dirt, foodstuffs of all kinds, pet hair, and Play Dough slowly, almost generationally melded into a gray Earth tone no bleach could penetrate. White was their choice, but experience turned the blanket into the color of a November Ohio sky.
I have no actual memory of the synthetic silken portion of the blanket. According to my parents, I immediately set about tearing it off, so the frayed, soft edges of cotton are what I recall. I’m not surprised I hated the snaggy, slick feel of polyester silk; I hate synthetic fabrics still. Once altered and mine, the blanket became a constant companion and the basis of a narrative that still shapes not only how I learn, but how I interact with the world.
Somehow, the blanket became wedded to an imaginary, invisible friend named “Ghost.” Today, I can see that Ghost allowed me to weaves stories through my daily activities, processing in words and imagining worlds within worlds. When I first read Seymour Papert’s “Gears of My Childhood” essay introducing Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, I thought “Oh, it’s books for me.” Books and stories have been at the center of my life for as long as I can remember, but of course the stories came first – those read to me and invented by me.
Even today, watching my 4 1/2 year old daughter spin stories of play and possibility, I see the power of narrative to hammer experience into something comprehensible. In learning anything, I try, observe, reflect, and revise reflexively. Experience teaches, and narrative contextualizes the teaching intellectually and emotionally, in the way that we feel stories.
As I grew older, the blanket and I curled up on heating grates, couches, into corners, and in bed, endlessly reading. I read early, and continued reading. I’ve never really stopped. Growing up soaked in fiction led to an internalizing of narrative structures, and for better or worse, I recognize narratives unfurling in the world around me as a result. I explain ideas through stories. I see the inner narratives of people around me and their effects. I write stories. I am insufferable at the movies, often identifying the entire plot arc before the ice melts in my Coke and usually explaining my prediction to the groans of my wife.
Like Papert explains in his essay, the affective nature of narratives for me is anchoring and positive. Like Papert, nobody told me to read or love reading; in fact, people often begged me to stop or read less. When I write, I disappear somehow, absorbed. I still love imagining worlds, people, situations, reactions, causes and effects. The love that I have for narratives is engrossing. When I can build a narrative around an experience or through an experience of classroom learning, I succeed. When I can’t, I fail.
Through history, biological sciences, and some mathematics, I connected and made relationships with the subject matter, internalizing, revising, and building interpersonal narratives. When this process failed or was broken for me by teachers, I disconnected from the material intellectually and emotionally.
Beyond school and more importantly for my life today, my early experiences in the outdoors were regular and intense, leading to a very close relationship with the natural world. When I get to choose my leisure activities, they are outdoors or creative, like photography. Through these activities, I dream stories. I sit at night, quietly imagining the next time I run a rapid or snowboard through a tightly wooded glade, visualizing. Outside, I relax and my mind whirs through stories. Inside, like Wordsworth and his daffodils, I often drift off to a Colorado mountainside or a Slovenian river.
So why a blanket? Attachment to a material object is an attachment to memory, and my memory is story, image, and a marriage of the two. Imagining a friend based somehow on the blanket is my earliest memory of making stories, constructing narratives. The stories we tell ourselves are the foundation of our identity. I process the world through stories and conceptualize of complex relationships between ideas, objects, and people as narratives. Further, I see narratives in my mind’s eye, experiencing them, feeling them. The blanket is the genetic object behind my relationship to narratives.
Papert claims “Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.” My experience as a teacher and a learner supports this claim. I feel lucky to have a diverse and useful set of mental models for learning, but each gets processed reflectively through an internal narrative. From my earliest important material object to my career as an English teacher building literacy and writing skills with children, roots from this genesis of learning through narratives spread broadly, connecting it all into a (mostly) coherent whole.
That learning should be interest-based is, to me, obvious; I base the curriculum of several digital journalism courses solely upon students following their interests. Of course, as a teacher, I also do my damnedest daily to wallop kids with material they will not only not approach with interest, but be bored by in large percentages. Such is the lot of the literature teacher in a traditional sense (there’s room for change here, but I’m only scratching the surface). Still, plenty of stimulation from the readings and videos arose, and my short reflection is here, numbered by question:
What did you find most interesting or surprising in the readings?
What did you disagree with or have questions about?
1. I’ve written about Living and Learning With New Media before here and here. I love it, particularly the “hanging out, messing around, geeking out” heuristic. Providing the time, space, resources, and social opportunities for kids to work together or independently on chasing personal interests and to produce media (in my courses’ cases) based on it is my favorite part of my current job. Blending this heuristic with Mitchel Resnick’s brilliant creative spiral of Imagine Create-Play-Share-Reflect-Imagine provides the foundation for providing supportive learning environments for students to explore their own and shared creative processes.
2. However, what I found surprising, if not totally so, was how hard Joi Ito jumped up and down on school and his experience in it. Almost nobody goes broke in America these days by excoriating school; I also didn’t enjoy most of it, which is why I teach. Still, the degree to which academics beat up K-12 school is disconcerting to me and is a drumbeat that grows particularly tiresome, if not obviously hypocritical. (/soapbox)
1. Of course, as Joi Ito alludes to rightly in his talk, Mimi Ito loved books and structured her learning narrative around them – this works because reading is what school is largely based upon. A learner like Joi is destined to suffer if he is not a bibliophile. As Joi wrote on his blog, education should be more flexible and responsive, particularly by trusting the value of children’s interests – even when they are video games, etc, that stuffy adults almost reflexively distrust. But even as MOOCS start ruling the world, his experience echoes my own, in that as our interests get more and more focused and based on experience, we may also “find [ourselves] increasingly reaching out to formal education institutions for the rigor and depth that [we] need to explore [our] areas of interest.” Finally, I loved “Dubai & Knowing the Unknowable” because it was an excellent explanation of why I have spent so much of my life abroad. Learning has many forms, and most are valuable.
2. The power of pull – I love it. How do we embed literacy instruction and guidance to shepherd younger students toward positive centers of gravity and away from, for example, the pull of Reddit’s found porn communities? I can’t be part of fostering such interests, nor can I value them at all. What is the role of guiding and modeling positive ethics as we offer opportunities for exploration, via messing around and geeking out?
Think of the rule that you never enforce. Maybe it’s hats, or gum in the classroom, or cell phone use in the hallway, or eating outside the cafeteria, or using a black pen on Tuesdays, or whatever. There’s one, the bridge too far. The beginning of The Slide.
In general, I detest rules. It’s congenital. Of course, boundaries are the essence of society, and we must have them. I like setting my expectations at the upper limit, with a few ground floor expectations for consistency’s sake: Respect, Responsibility, Cooperation, Preparation, Engagement. I’m sure that’s a few too many; it could begin and end with Respect.
But the rules. Oh, the rules. At our one-to-one school, there was a laptop-free lunch several years ago. Then, we opened the top floor for the desperate. Then it spread downwards. Now, lunchtime is a battlefield of spell-casters and Gossip Girl-heads strewn prone throughout the campus, slackjawed, staring. Conversation, when it happens, revolves around which demon to slay, which is a step up from TV induced silence. Digital Natives, living in their Brave New World? Not exactly.
And there’s food strewn about, and litter, and hats, and halter-tops, and cell-phones, and a bunch of stuff that I don’t enforce regularly, mostly because, you know, come on, right? nobody is, and what a hassle, and are you kidding me? and so on. This is The Slide.
Straight-up – I am a guilty participant in The Slide, the loosening of rules and expectations, and witness first hand the bleeding over of one loosened rule into the transgression of many others. This is the essence of any society or institution: We’ve got to agree on a few boundaries, or the boundary I care most about will be transgressed, just as the ones I don’t care about are transgressed before me.
Schools often have too many rules. Those that we choose should be essential, and five or less in number (probably). We should model said behaviors. This is obvious. However, discarding the rules that we can live without is a foray into a dark barn of sacred cows, lit differently for each student and teacher by culture, background, and values, particularly in an international school. To halt The Slide, though, this is exactly where an institution must go, examining our shared values and laying them on the table for all to see.
Of course, it’s all theoretical for me. I have been nowhere that actually went through an open process of reexamining the detritus of the years, leftover rules and concepts to which some adhere and of which others know nothing at all. I wonder what it’s like. Tough as it may be, hard conversations about priorities and the inevitable give and take seem like a way to reset, or to halt The Slide.
Sometimes a notion creeps, advancing slowly in moments of clarity and surprise. Lately, a notion is banging down my door, tired of creeping, and it began during a talk by Simon Breakspear at the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum last November in Prague.
Homogenized education, homogenized haircuts!
Simon gave an inspiring talk to the group the day before, but due to some delayed flights, I missed it. The next day, we got more inspiration. PowerPoint slides flew fast and furious.
There was a bell curve, but we were all on the right side of it (the right side is the left, of course). There were photos of 19th Century schoolhouses, desks in a row, followed invariably by titters as we were asked if this looked like the classrooms of some people “we” knew in “our” schools. I recognized this rhetorical device. Pictures of candy replaced photos of assembly lines. This trope, too, was familiar. As if in a seance, or as if poised over the Ouija board, the specter of He Who Is So Often Channeled in such situations spoke to me, and he spoke in the form of an Idea Worth Spreading.
He, who is the second most recognizable two-named Sir of my lifetime; first is Sir Mix-a-lot (the hyphens make it one word), second, Sir Ken. For the love of Pete, he’s been animatedand knighted.
And so it went, until the slides about what “we” must do to maintain competitiveness with China and India popped up on the screen. I was aghast, looked around, found one or two pairs of eyeballs equally aghast. From where I sat, though, I couldn’t see my Indian and Chinese colleagues who were also being inspired. In the same room. At the same time. Who, after all, were “we”?
They’re the same candy. Wait, no…they’re different. We’re all individuals! Mass produced individuals! Thanks to sudeep1116 for the photo.
This trope, of course, plays like gangbusters to the Western audience. Fear of a rising China and/or East lies latent, economic distress compounds the concerns, appeals to “competitiveness” strike deeply. Unless you’re Chinese.
What bothered me most in that moment was how this “we” was woven, a roomful of career teachers and a young, charismatic, almost-totally-probably well-meaning ed reformer were “colleagues.” It struck me as odd that a career student of education would so demonize the classroom of the past, present, or future because some are so obviously poor places for learning. I’ve had a bad ski lesson. Should I no longer go to the mountains for skiing?
Of course students learn beautifully outside of classrooms, less so inside some classrooms. Of course education is flawed. Of course education is something we do together; “we” is apropos. Simon is one of us, somehow. But can we reduce the cliches, visual or otherwise? And can we, please, not pit us against them, if we can at all avoid it?
reformed teachers with their heads in the clouds. Both, I’m sure, love kids and want only the best for them, but in the second link is a perfect storm of edufluff. There are two word clouds and two bulleted lists, each in its own format. But this author, Angela Meiers, is not alone. Every day on Twitter I view and re-view blog posts sponsored from upon high (Education Week) and from individuals like myself pouring out thoughts into the ether. Many feature titles such as
17 Amazing Things To Do With an iPad!
The Problem With Disengagement
Finland – Utopia, or Simply Perfect?
Standardized Testing – What Are We Measuring?
The Opt Out Movement – Occupy Classrooms
Homeschooling: No Classrooms, No Limits!
Can Charters Succeed?
Small. Powerful. Words.
And so on.
When I sat whilst being inspired, quietly seething, I formulated vicious blog posts now sitting in draft format on my server, posts with titles like “Everyone Who Generalizes Sucks.” I sat on those ideas. My 180 Twitter followers might abandon me if I wrote what I felt. Twitter works that way, and so does Facebook, and most other media channels – the system indoctrinates its users into norms, simply and efficiently. Here I sit, typing into a blog read by my Mum (Love you Mum, and appreciate your readership!) and almost nobody else, and I actually censor myself. Seriously.
Any ed reformer wishing for a 19th C classroom pic should be required to use this AWESOME “Classroom Birching” image. The Id reels.
And the only way you get that discernment is by practicing. Is by saying, when I pick this am I right? When I put this in the world, did it resonate with the people I was trying to reach?
Further, he said:
So tell 10 people — there are 10 people who trust you enough to listen. And if you tell your thing to 10 people — if you send your e-book to 10 people — if you do your sermon to 10 people or show your product to 10 people and none of them want to tell their friends, and none of them are changed — then you failed. That you didn’t really understand what was good. But if some of them tell their friends, then they’ll tell their friends, and that’s how ideas spread. So it’s this 10 at a time — 10 by 10 by 10. How do you put an idea in the world that resonates enough with people if they trust you enough to hear it. That then it can go to the next step and the next step.
I think he’s right. So I challenged students to put the work they care about out into their social networks, to share in any ways they see fit, and to test their ideas in public. Seth goes on to say something interesting (albeit a bit confusing) about social networking, compelling about kids living out loud online, and revealing about his new work, The Icarus Deception. He said:
So if you and I had been sitting around just after the Dark Ages and heard the story of Icarus — what we would have heard is this: that Daedalus said to his son two things — one, put these wings on but don’t fly too close to the sun because it’s too hot up there and the wax will melt. But more important, Son, do not fly too low, do not fly too close to the sea, because the mist and the water will weigh down the wings and you will surely perish. And for me the most important message that I’ve come to after thinking about this for so many years is, we are flying too low. We built this universe, this technology, these connections, this society, and all we can do with it is make junk. All we can do with it is put on stupid entertainments. I’m not buying it.
Twitterverse, #education Twitterati, we are flying too low. I can’t continue to reflect the discourse when it is so repetitive. We’ve got to move beyond the packaged message as teachers, and recognize that sometimes, when messages feel familiar, it’s because that’s how they were designed. I want to write the education that I do, the teaching that I organize, the values that I hold. I am putting this out there, sharing with more than 10 friends, and we’ll see if it gets repeated. I’m trusting my voice, my knowledge, and my expertise. It’s time for pragmatics and ideals. I want to raise standards for behavior and turn ethics into action within and beyond my classroom. I don’t know how, but I know what I won’t do ever again:
Quietly digest nonsense
Use photos of 19th century classrooms or candy as a metaphor for “personalization,” which is a bullshit term anyway
Gratuitously abuse lists (OK, I’ll do this all the time, but feel weak as I do so)
Discuss boredom
Retweet a cliche
Embed a word cloud
Complain without a solution
Fetishize social media
Censor myself (editing and revising myself will remain active)
Write a top ten list
I will try to fill the big empty space with something that I care about. This is my notion: Do, then write. Share. And see what happens next.
These badges replaced an outside reading requirement and allowed for student choice of both material and assessment type, something difficult to accomplish in an externally moderated course like the AP or IB. While the badges may not have provided whee-fun! responses per se, the respect afforded by choice improved the classroom environment in what can sometimes be a bit of a slog through content and repetitive writing types.
Less than five students chose to read outside of class for their badge. Far and away the most popular badge was the Internet Enlightenment badge, and it led to great discussions with students about their social media presences. As an “edtech” wonk, the depth and breadth of these conversations was surprising; I couldn’t predict student responses. Kids obviously chose this badge for its ease, which is perfect, because it made them change their behavior online, or at least change their privacy settings.
One concept that repeated through the conversations was the idea of “parking” social media personas for later use in life. If a kid isn’t using Google+ today, she sees that she may in two years, so she wants to keep that space “clean.” Pretty informative perspective, really. Spaces like Facebook are useful in the same way that my daughters’ playroom is useful for containing the mess in our flat, but the girls will outgrow this space someday.
The coolest badge was clearly the Starving Artist. I received beautiful digital art from a student on one of my favorite novels, Siddartha by Herman Hesse. Students made paintings and drawings based on all sorts of novels, including Kafka on the Shore, which impressed me. One student even made a dress of white chiffon with a belt made of real chains spray-painted gold on the basis of her outstanding reading of “The Lady of Shallott” by Tennyson. This young lady arranged a model and blew my mind with the rigor and specificity of her analytic argument, connecting throughout to the text specifically. Her rationale is a stellar example of literary argument.
While she wasn’t happy with the final result of the dress, she made it, and it was cool. Additionally, she reflected specifically on what she would do differently next time. All of this made my day, but it’s the display of fine literary argumentation produced through the pursuit of the badge that makes me so happy. Self-selected, this assignment rang true and captured the student, leading to excellent, meaningful practice. This didn’t happen for every student, but it will in other assessment contexts. When it happens once, I’m stoked.
Other students extended the classroom into other directions, resulting in learning that I value, and that many of them valued. If the badges doesn’t advance toward our AP Lit goals, I’m okay with that. In terms of the partially successful requirement that these badges replaced, I’m happier with the greater proportion of success created by the badges so far.
Last week, I had a discussion with one of my Digital Journalism 2 students about using a rhetorical question as a lead or nut graph in opinion or feature writing. Generally, I hate the rhetorical question lead.
Why?
Because the answer to the question is the lead, or the nut. But I guess it works sometimes…
What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?
Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?
At the same time, I delivered a “challenge,” something I give the kids from time to time in order to guide the learning environment. It looked like this:
Challenge 2: Some of you are writing, some are doing photography, others video, some graphic design, others marketing; most of you are doing a number of task types. Choose one facet of what you have been or will be doing and find a GURU. Be prepared to share what you find.
Dude, What’s a Guru?
A Guru in this case is someone who does the task that you are doing or want to be doing – and someone who does it brilliantly! Bring an awesome example to share and discuss.
first draft to published in 48 hours. I provided a touch of feedback on organization, leading to a small expansion of two paragraphs. Otherwise, all her. Writing from models is powerful.
I was so impressed with the piece that I tweeted it as an example of writing from models. Within a few hours, someone even favorited the tweet.
This past week, I presented my Microsoft “Partners in Learning” Innovative Educator project at their Global Forum in Prague. Partners in Learning structures the presentations as a competition between educators, which in practice is much more about connecting with like-minded teachers than about “winning” among the competitors.
My project is my ongoing development of a curriculum in my digital journalism courses, particularly focused on podcasting as an example. When I applied for the program in January, I had no idea what I was applying for beyond a conference in Lisbon, Portugal. I won an Innovative Educator award in Switzerland and was invited to Lisbon. While I was there, my project was judged by the likes of Gavin Dykes and I received incredible feedback, opening my eyes to the possibilities of the presentation, essentially placing my young curriculum in the spotlight. I won second runner-up in the “Collaboration” category and was invited to the Global Forum.
The curriculum is unique, I think, giving time, space, and total choice of content to students in order to learn writing and communication skills. We cover news, opinion, feature, and investigative writing through writing for web publication, podcasting, and video production with student-selected content focuses and increasing freedom in setting deadlines throughout the year. Students also work in teams based on media choice in each nine weeks after the first quarter.
In short, it works: Kids began seeing themselves as writers and media creators, improving their communication skills and, for some of them, falling in love with journalism. Students asked for a second year of the course, so I created one, experimenting and revising this year as we go. What is amazing in this class is how students are working so hard to produce the student newspaper online, managing their peers, working together without guidance from me, and exploring areas such as editing, graphic design, marketing, SEO implementation, and many more.
In both classes, I provide feedback as necessary on individual pieces, conference with students on their work, lead discussions of ethics, and help students find examples of high-quality journalism to learn from. In fact, learning from excellent online media examples is a centerpiece of the curriculum. Students even write and revise rubrics based on these models.
So, that was what I presented in Prague. I was not recognized as a winner, but am proud of my curriculum and am happy with what my students are doing! I connected with many amazing educators from all over the globe and look forward to connecting our students to empower and publish student-created media. I also got feedback not from judges, but from other educators. Many people have suggested that my students might benefit from publishing to “real” audiences like professional websites or journals, or websites focused on specific causes like those in “Taking it Global.”
Interestingly, my core “soft” or foundational value is to create a space for students to explore content that they care about or are at least interested in. This is the main shift in my curriculum, as I see it. While some students explore, create, and publish about global issues like human rights, others do the same on Italian football or school events. I don’t judge, treating each topic as equal to honor student choices and interests. Also, I only assign one topic in the first year course, something timely to begin the exploration of opinion writing (and to model it myself, showing research skills in the process). I don’t want to assign sexy topics in order to facilitate publishing to existing publications.
A clear next step for these classes is to start sharing and promoting cool publication options beyond student blogs and the school newspaper in order to simply broaden the scope of possibility for sharing kids’ voices. I’m really excited about the possibility of connecting my students to peers in Hong Kong, Kenya, California, England, Hungary, and Slovakia. When I participated in Project Harmony’s Armenian School Connectivity Project in 2005, I saw great value in using online tools for cooperative PBL between continents. I wonder how the students might take advantage of such an opportunity on their own?
As always, I left this conference deeply grateful for my school’s resources and support for (hate this term) “entrepreneurial” curriculum and course development.The stories of teachers doing wonders in deeply impoverished village schools in Nigeria or the Philippines or El Salvador blew my mind; I’ve been there, of only briefly, teaching at the Babur School in Bazaar-Korgon, Kyrgyzstan from 1999-2001. Also, I was totally depressed to hear from a teacher in the US who was forced to take unpaid leave to attend this incredible professional development opportunity. I’m lucky. I am taking nothing for granted!
Were I to do this again, I’d focus on something like “Messy Learning – Students Constructing Skills and Knowledge Together” or “‘Time + Space + Choice =’ Our Media Classroom” (BTW, that piece is exactly awesome, and exactly what I’m trying to do (#validating)) or “Students as Managers: Creating Together” or something. I’d print freakin’ business cards, but I would not give stuff out. PSA: Please, teachers, easy on the printing of elaborate brochures. Let’s love the earth. I can help you build a blog with all that information and share the link.h
That’s it for the PIL stuff. Congratulations to all the winners – you rock. Apologies for the long and clunky reflection.
EduCommunicate 