Redesigning PBL Curriculum for Collaboration & Service

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After five years of successful, exciting work with my Digital Journalism 1 -3 curricula, I was ready to take on some challenges to improve learning and engage with more opportunities for authentic learning. Many years ago over a beer in Prague, my friend Suzie Boss challenged me to include meaningful service opportunities for students through this course. Additionally, last year my students were more diverse than ever, and in individualizing the course to best meet their needs, I lost track of collaboration as a core driver of the course. Time to revise!

Over the past year, I had focused on crafting inquiry-based, ideally project-based curriculum for my AP Literature & Composition and IB Language & Literature Standard Level courses both alone and with a team of colleagues respectively. PBL to address external standards clarified for me – more and more, I found ways to craft narrow skill and content outcomes through broad, rich project-based units of study. It was a great year of professional learning.

This summer, I redesigned Digital Journalism with a central focus on teamwork. I am 75% happy with the current product in this respect. Teams work together to plan coverage, help each other reach deadlines, workshop each other’s media and writing, and celebrate each other’s successes. Additionally, both teams and the class as a whole are working together to create all of our rubrics based on news examples from all over the English-speaking world, a practice I’ve leaned on since my first Masters research, and which leads to co-constructed understanding of task demands. I presented this new curriculum at my CFG last week, and got solid feedback that should lead to further improvements, especially in terms of offering authentic, inclusive teamwork for a very diverse group of learners from 9-12.

Suggestions after our Issaquah protocol were:

  • Find a truly authentic goal for each team to share in. This is a bedeviler, as our student newspaper is a club project, and because of our schedule, IBDP students cannot take the course (which means most of the editorial board are out). I am pursuing other publishing opportunities and perhaps subeditor structures to pump up the authenticity.
  • Add roles to the teamwork, especially those that occur in journalism. Hopefully, this can marry with the above and be a win.
  • Connect with professionals through the lens of teamwork – what roles are necessary, and how do they contribute toward producing quality journalism?
  • Ask students clearly what they hope to get from the course and use this information to organize teams. Just a simple, great idea. Not sure why I haven’t done this!

But wait, there’s more!

The second part of the redesign involves service opportunities, built into our investigation unit and final exam. Last year, I got multiple points of feedback that stated there was too much time to work on assignments – surprise! So, students will either complete two investigations in the final unit or one investigation followed by a service project to address or ameliorate a problem uncovered in the first investigation. Alternatively, this project can serve as the basis for the final exam which is a choice menu of smaller projects. I’m excited about the possibilities, but time will tell how this pans out.

Between my new AP Seminar course co-taught with my excellent colleague Rob Friesen, continuing work on expanding and embedding the Global Citizen Diploma at our Upper School, promoting inquiry- and project based learning and curricula school wide, supporting professional development among my colleagues in giving feedback amongst other skills, working with my CFG as an empowering PLC, providing invigorating outdoor education with a great team in our Whitewater Kayaking Club, and rocking some solid teaching five days a week, there’s not much time for other focuses. However, my first goal this year is improving my classbuilding and teambuilding approach in every class, every day. As Rob says, “Iron sharpens iron.” To maximize learning, kids need to work together effectively and to leverage each others’ strengths. If you see that in my new Digital Journalism curriculum, please leave a comment and let me know!

FOMO – New Media are Designed for the Fear of Missing Out

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As I’ve been participating in Infomagical, an attempt to MOOC-up a week-long learning experience in information literacy on the part of the fine podcast Note to Self, their recent episode on FOMO has sprung back into my consciousness. Infomagical has been fairly cool, but a few comments – gems in a podcast that otherwise wavers between interesting and so hipster-navel gazing as to be maddening – are worth sharing.

First, FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, is a phenomenon that self-replicates and feeds on the impulses woven into social media – to shape our public personas into fabulous brands, to feel anxiety over some lack that can only be pursued, purchased, photographed, shared. FOMO is an echo of instant nostalgia.

Caterina Fake claims in the course of this podcast that we need media literacy to remember how to be human in the face of technology. The tech has a bias – she worries about us “productizing” ourselves as we “peacock” through social media. I couldn’t agree more. Media literacy is an essential piece of education, but it isn’t really in style (so sadly – this was a GREAT organization). As a former student told me last year, “now that I am literate, I just can’t stop seeing.”

Media literacy prepares us to recognize persuasion, to examine subtext and purpose, to expect untold stories and describe them, to become creators ourselves. As we engage in dialogues (multilogues?) through social media, guarding our humanity against the relentless “desire” of design requires the active engagement of a media literate public.

What Does Ketchup Have to do with Diversity?

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Where do you keep your ketchup? If you run out, what do you reach for? Chances are, if you keep your ketchup in the fridge, you are white or northern, and if you are not white or from the south (of America, to be clear), you keep it in the cupboard. This Reply All podcast begins with a “Yes, Yes, No” segment on the “Manosphere,” which is throw-up-in-your-mouth worthy, as concepts go. Listen, or skip ahead until the Leslie Miley story about diversity – or the lack thereof – at Twitter.

The point about ketchup is this: if you keep your ketchup in the fridge and run out, you are likely to reach for other condiments you keep in the fridge, like mayonnaise or mustard. If you keep ketchup in the cupboard and run out, you are likely to reach for a condiment that you keep in the cupboard, like malt vinegar (or mustard, I suppose). Diversity offers ways of problem solving in ways that we can’t anticipate in monocultural or monolithic organizational cultures. Even a diverse culture may lose out on problem solving options native to someone with a background not represented in the decision making space.

Diversity is a moral imperative in schools not just for obvious reasons, but also because diverse learning environments are necessary to prepare students for life in a broad, diverse world! This podcast makes the argument better than I can, so give a listen.

Honoring Anxiety – Acknowledging Reality to Improve School Culture

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In this brilliant podcast episode of “On Being“, Krista Tippett interviews Brother David Steindl-Rast on gratitude. Brother Steindl-Rast is eloquent on gratitude, but also on all that we may not be grateful for, like violence and environmental destruction, and his thoughts on being born as the beginning of our struggle with anxiety, to go forward is to live, to retreat from fear is to die – indeed before ever living, struck me. He says for this purpose we must validate our anxiety, recognize it as real, and as based on reality. In a humanity that is choosing to destroy our own ecosystems of survival and networks of connection that, as Brother Steindl-Rast points out, put food on our plate, this anxiety is valid.

Such resonance – our anxieties are valid. In the context of a school, imagine all of the anxieties on offer every day for each member of the community. Will my daughter reach a competitive university like her father and I did? Is my child being bullied? A bully? What if they find out I am here on scholarship? Will the principal observe this lesson today, and will she understand what she sees here? Nobody else in this room is dressed like me. I’ve been away on business too long and missed another play. I don’t have anything for show and tell.

Obviously, that list could go on.

A colleague recently described the anxiety high school/upper school parents in affluent schools feel about university entrances as “guarding the family jewels,” and it helped me to conceptualize that anxiety as one of preserving capital – cultural or otherwise. I recognize that parents in high poverty areas like those in which I have previously taught have many different anxieties – will the child return home if she attends university? Is that a reasonable fear? And what Brother Steindl-Rast shares is that yes, this is a valid anxiety, and that acknowledging this should protect against reactions from fear, like pressuring a child until he cracks and has a real psychological break before reaching majority age, or blowing up a relationship with a child to protect oneself against the pain of another brilliant kid leaving the reservation forever.

I wonder how many schools open conversations about these anxieties and validate them? How many ameliorate the problem at hand with platitudes and then roll eyes in the office after 5 pm? That’s a hard conversation, even just the easy bit about Penn State being a great place to be educated, even though it’s not in Princeton, NJ. Honoring anxiety about an ever crowded and seemingly chaotic world that could strip a standard of living from our children acknowledges how little control we actually have. I wonder: Would that reduce fear and stress in the long run?

I think it’s worth a try.

Innovation Kickoff!

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Today, in fact right now, our Upper School faculty are engaged in the classic Marshmallow Challenge to kick off a year of innovation. The always-modeling-best-practices Elizabeth Wargo (@wargoelizabeth on Twitter) organized this mini-project to get people moving in the morning, excited about the day, and working together from the get-go. //instagram.com/p/roVKM4sxr1/embed/ I was tasked with using hashtags and social media, as well as WordPress blogging to later share as a PBL option for archiving and sharing. I used #zispbl and #marshmallowchallenge through Instagram linked to my Twitter account, adding in Twitter usernames of colleagues featured in photos and videos.

What do I love about this? As mentioned above, modeling best practices. This is a kick off, and will lead into a Speed Geeking session in which we share the various methods in which faculty recorded, archived, and shared this session. Perhaps obviously, this is an initial reflection – time has just been called! People are very into their towers. Jason Welker (@jasonwelker on Twitter) is measuring the towers, logging group numbers, tower heights, and time to completion into a Google form to track and graph data. Alison Callaghan has photos and notes in Microsoft OneNote, Geoff Peake has video and photos, Christine Jordan has audio going onto SoundCloud via her phone.  All are options, depending on the desired outcome, and can be mixed and matched.

Liz Wargo also retweeted one of my videos, sharing with Suzie Boss, PBL expert and all around great person who will be joining us in October for 10 days of workshopping on PBL. The same tweet was retweeted by an #edtech robot because I slapped that common hashtag on one video, which is an interesting example of how hashtags work, extending the conversation and aggregating information. Additionally, Carmen Crenshaw-Hovey, one of our do-it-all folks around the Upper School, liked and commented on my Instagram posts. Once again, social media has the potential to share learning experiences in ways we may not anticipate and to involve more of the community beyond the classroom.

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Liz is debriefing now and launching into the rest of the day while linking to our summer reading, Bringing Innovation to Schools by the aforementioned Suzie Boss. Now break, then Speed Geeking. Soon, I will share this post with colleagues and discuss how blogging for reflection and blog-as-digital portfolio for archiving might work for teachers and students. One final learning piece for me: if a Twitter username is used in Instagram posts shared to Twitter, those posts drop the @ and are not usable in Twitter. Weird. Play nicely!

Ok. For now, The End…

//instagram.com/p/roUQgKMxrH/embed/

//instagram.com/p/roUsecsxrh/embed/

Reconstructing Legacy: A Visit to a “Steve Jobs School” in Sneek, Netherlands

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Maurice de Hond gets attention – in conversation, at a dinner table, and in national and international media. After a few minutes in de Hond’s company, the forces of both his personality and intellect assert themselves.

Steve Jobs School, Sneek
Steve Jobs School, Sneek

No wonder then that de Hond has taken on nothing short of the structure of public education in the Netherlands as a project in founding “Steve Jobs Schools” throughout his country.

Steve Jobs Schools have ambitious plans to change the structure of the school day and year, allowing students to meet required curricular outcomes via virtual school spaces, apps, and coaching from a team of teachers in and out of school. Currently, the schools must adhere to Dutch regulations requiring a uniform length for the school day,  but they have been able to consider 10% of the school year “virtual”, according to de Hond, ostensibly reducing the amount of time students are required to attend school in person.

We visited one of several Steve Jobs schools operating since August, 2013. A full day trip, a group of international school teachers traveled from Amsterdam to Sneek by bus, regaled with Dutch history and geography, and informed about the history of this project by de Hond as we went.

Kids still work in analog at the Steve Jobs School
Kids still work in analog at the Steve Jobs School

Once we arrived at the school in Sneek, a small, nicely designed school in what appeared to be an economically diverse area, we were free to wander and speak with anyone we wished. I witnessed lots of normal behavior for any school: students read books, filled out worksheets, had conversations, played on and off the iPad, got shushed by teachers, got coached by teachers, and gawked a bit at their visitors.

I also saw plenty that was interesting. Students have an individualized learning plan with goals created by the teacher, parent, and student working in concert. Students learn language, math, and science in classrooms during 20 minute blocks, then retire to a central common area to work. In these classrooms, kids of all ages appear to be learning together. Students come and go independently, reminded by their iPad’s calendar when to move. This was all pretty impressive.

In the common room, the teacher in charge worked with two assistants to keep kids on task and to help out when needed. This teacher reported enjoying his new job a great deal, stating that it was both more fun and fulfilling than his prior position because he could help each student individually via their “Learning Talks” and goal setting.

Rainy day recess turned into a little Despicable Me viewing.
Rainy day recess turned into a little Despicable Me viewing, which gave me pause.

Clearly, the Steve Jobs Schools are a response to the current lockstep curriculum of the Netherlands, in which inspectors enter a certain class on a certain day, expecting to see everyone working on the same page of the same book. EDIT: Maurice de Hond shared via email that these inspections are less rigid than I described here, stating that ” of course the tests are forcing many in a rigid system.” As an option to what could be a stifling academic environment for some learners, de Hond’s project makes good sense.

But these schools are fledglings, with a palpable sense of running on enthusiasm inherent to such a new, attention-grabbing enterprise. Teachers are working long hours compared to their previous jobs, and the personalization level they hope to reach is not currently in operation – eventually, they plan to have each child’s iPad set up around her goals. Currently, the set-up is the same for all the kids. Ever greater personalization will lead to more hours, I imagine, particularly if the school is responsible for organizing such a set-up, rather than transferring responsibility to the child.

Additionally, succumbing to the fantasy that being busy is the same thing as learning can be intoxicating, at least as alluring as the classic teacher fantasy of controlling learning. Watching a child swipe randomly minute after minute across number and mathematical operator symbols to arrive at an answer was unnerving. I saw many abacus apps, and a good deal of app jumping. However, I also saw kids using blocks and good old analog manipulatives, sand tables and books. In this quick, drop-in tour, my biggest take-away was that this was a school, working like a school, with a good deal of learning and some healthy mucking about taking place simultaneously.

11th Century Learning.
11th 17th Century Learning. Thanks to Maurice for the correction!

At lunch following the visit and on the ride home, de Hond shared his vision of education freely and his hopes for his organization, O4NT (Education for a New Era). We visited the Sneek school because it is currently the most compete realization of the organization’s vision for Steve Jobs Schools, but a handful of others exist, employing recommended strategies to varying degrees. De Hond didn’t express an interest to force schools to conform to a standardized approach, but he can see a time in the future when some adherence to basic norms – once more well-established than they are now – is necessary.

I went into the Steve Jobs Schools fairly skeptical of what I might see – personalization as a playlist of worksheets or more old things done in new ways. However, this iteration of Dutch schooling as an innovation on the past and on existing regulations has potential to offer variety for students turned off by traditional schooling.

Future challenges exist. Is this model exciting enough to help teachers and students maintain their energy and enthusiasm long term? Can O4NT keep personalization and community relevance at the fore while demanding some sort of brand standardization for Steve Jobs Schools, or will this lead to stronger echoes of the existing system of education? Once finely-tuned, what relationship will the O4NT suite of virtual school apps have with Steve Jobs Schools, and to what degree will such apps drive educational, curricular, or pedagogical decision making?

New approaches in education are few and far between, with much that is new or reform-minded providing little more than a fresh glaze over last century’s progressive-isms (many of which featured great ideas). De Hond and his Steve Jobs Schools are executing some thoughtful concepts and forging a clearly welcome path through the community of Sneek, engaging kids in the process. And de Hond seems to bring enough energy to the project to keep it steaming along for some time.

The Sorting Hat

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The function of a school should play into the manner of feedback provided to students. Grades are shorthand for feedback, but what I think most educators recognize is that grades are more of a communication shorthand between the school and stakeholders like parents or universities. We say grades are a representation of learning, or symbolic of learning achievement, but unless they are differentiated student-by-student, they resemble the Sorting Hat.

In fact, there is great hunger for a Sorting Hat. Doesn’t everyone want to be a Gryffindor, or perhaps, if Type B, a Ravenclaw? We need an accurate sorting tool, and apparently, some people are willing to go 122 questions deep to find the answer.

Conversations about grading today reminded me that if grades are demanded, they should represent individual progress toward personally meaningful and important goals as co-determined between teacher and student, or between teacher-student-family, or between teacher-student-family-community. Grades that follow well-designed rubrics, but that require a fixed mark today miss the point of learning – that it is a journey.

If a student is not mastering content today, it doesn’t mean she won’t tomorrow, or next year. Breaking learning down into manageable chunks is essential and requires expert teaching. Students should ideally be free to explore their interests, but in a negotiated educational community, like public schooling, having fixed marks for successful outcomes is fair.

What is unfair is to decide arbitrarily that today is the day, and your performance today is what will determine your grade label with no recourse for improvement, and that your label will likely correlate to future labels, and that the aggregate of your childhood labels will directly impact your future educational and professional opportunities (class advantage and disadvantage notwithstanding).

Grades suck – this much I have known for some time. Grades are a major warping factor in all facets of school and of learning communities.

If we must have grades, embracing them as signifiers of individual learning rather than as labels to help Princeton discard 9/10 of its applicant pool automatically seems essential. No school has a mission to “Sort the wheat from the chaff, and let the hollow husks of 2.2 GPAs lay rotting in the fields.”

I don’t want to be in the business of judging kids; grades for sorting are just that, even when operated under “best practices”. Grades for individual learning progress opens the door through which to escape the sorting hat.

On Quiet

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I just love this piece in today’s Gray Lady. In it, the demands of quiet for thinking are discussed, with some examples – the framers of the US Constitution apparently covered the street in front of Independence Hall with dirt so as not to be disturbed by cart wheels, which differ from this surprise cartwheel.

Noise elicits a physiological response that we cannot control. Noise can be stimulating for an extrovert like me, but is can be an endless jangle to our nerves as well. For focus, nothing beats some quiet. For the past three years, working in a shared office at school, I have been wearing earphones for quiet, which is hilarious and sad. This piece makes it clear that real silence is essential for truly uninterrupted thought.

Additionally, controlling the interruptions of digital technology and all of the noise that surrounds them, real and imagined, is implied and examined in the piece. In our 1 to 1 school, pop-ups and flags are constant interruptions to our students’ concentration, but they will be there for the foreseeable future. I’m glad we now have a silent room in our school for study and work. After a summer of study at Columbia University, I re-experienced silence, and remembered it’s powerful effect on concentration.

Silence. I am a fan.

What Can You Drop Today?

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I never seem to lose much weight during the holidays; in fact, I have been known to pad on a few extra pounds, even kilos. When it’s time for resolutions to drop weight, the difficulty begins. When there is so much good, what do I choose to give up?

This is like most institutions or organizations, I’m sure, which layer on Good Ideas like paint. It’s hard to argue against a good idea. Think of student learning! This new process will streamline our processes. This will replace that.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Thanks to Mark Dilworth for the quote

But I have experienced precious little replacing. Instead, we add, add, add, until Good Ideas compete and swirl like currents in an estuary, each contorting the next. Some Good Ideas become Not So Good Ideas. Some Good Ideas become forgotten, obscured, or lost. In the wash, values can shift without our notice.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the power of a Good Idea like Yokohama International School’s “Global Citizen Diploma.” Things to love about this Good Idea include a foundation on digital portfolios, a liberal focus across skills in the outdoors and arts and so on, and service, to name a few. I dare say that any student who completed the demands of this program would be prepared for university success at least.

But this Good Idea also relies on a minimum score in the International Baccalaureate Diploma of 38. I have no question that this works well within the existing structure of this fine school, making the IB and its vagaries like CAS blend into a system that speaks of the school’s values more specifically.

As I imagine what this would look like in my own school, I wonder what Good Ideas that others have worked hard to develop and that members of the community have bought into would have to drop away or suffer a death by starvation? Duke of Edinburgh? Advanced Placement courses? Our cool Mission 10 projects? Our existing service learning structures? The degree to which a new Good Idea integrates into existing structures is important to grasp, as is the impact on those existing structures. So often, one contorts the other, leading to change intended or otherwise.

Perhaps, if the idea is good enough, it can supplant something like the IBDP. This, of course, takes courage and buy-in, but why not? Credentialing organizations beget only further credentials. IBDP > BA/BS > MA/MS > certifications/PhD/specializations. A portfolio of citizenship and engagement in the world should be an easy extension into showing evidence of and reflecting upon progress toward learning goals. Legacy echoes like IB/AP can drop away in favor of a richer learning environment centered on the student.

I may be wrong, but that sounds like a pretty Good Idea.