Sunday, October 27, 2013

Week 8: Reflection

1. What resources/ideas did I share this week? One of the things I always find the most effective to share with others is my own personal experiences with something.  It's not always the case that we are discussing something where I feel an experience I have had would directly contribute to making a point or supporting a point of view, but when it does, it seems that others appreciate what I have to share.  I know this is the case with me as well - when I am learning about something new, and someone can tell me a story about it with a personal experience that really paints a vivid picture in my mind about how that can look in a classroom, that really stays with me.

2. What did I intend to be the impact of my resources on others' learning? I had hoped that by sharing my personal experience about how I brought the process of inquiry into my own classroom, and the impact it had, that they would have a better idea about how this kind of learning can really look in action.  It seems that often when discussing inquiry learning, people still take away the idea that we the teachers are posing the questions and it is the students who have to find answers to them.  Real inquiry means the students are asking the questions that guide their own learning.

3. What actual impact could I discern? It seems like people responded to this in my comments, expressing interest and enthusiasm that this is working well even with older students who are not necessarily used to it.

4. What will I do differently next week? Of course, I'd like to be able to say I have the perfect classroom experience story to fit every situation.  Sharing these not only can help others, but it helps me to reflect on what I am doing, and then question it to see if I can take it further.  However, I don't always have a good story, and often our topics of discussion are things I have only passing or very mundane experiences with - nothing particularly insightful or visionary! But what I want to do more of is thinking about how it could look if I really took the initiative to apply it.

5. What resources did others share that made a difference to my learning? Barbra always gets me to thinking about what we really want from good leadership, and this week her post made me realize that even our leaders are not always empowered to feel like true visionaries - to a certain extent, many are made to feel their destinies, and those of their teachers and students, are chained to test scores, and that's unfortunate. Andrea shared a couple of resources I really liked.  One was 11 ways to make an inquiry-based classroom, and the other was a Pinterest board on math inquiry learning. Although I am the first to admit I am often scared by math, I really enjoy reading blogs by math teachers who have a passion for teaching math, and are willing to do innovative things - I'm always interested in her posts.  Many of the ideas on the math Pinterest board were simple - I think she was looking for bigger ideas - but they could be applied to lots of things.  I appreciate easy to use, flexible resources like that.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Week 8:What are the importance of inquiry and questioning in your discipline? How do/can you nurture student passion in your classroom?

I like how Thomas and Seely Brown back up in these two chapters and lay the foundation for the differences between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, then tie these together with new ways of learning.  The Polanyi quote, "We know more than we can tell," is an apt way to phrase this difference.

There was one point where they were discussing the story about Thomas teaching the college honors seminar, and having the problem that his students could not express what they were passionate about, and had never been asked about this.  I see this often myself at the middle and high school level - kids are unable to express an idea about something they really care about.  Sometimes I will get tentative stabs at this, such as "I like dogs," but it's clearly something we do not spend enough time empowering kids with from a young age.  I think if we did, it might still be unnameable, but it would also be such an obvious part of their personality that we would be able to guess it easily. The point is, getting older students to tap into this as a source of learning and inquiry is difficult - they are out of practice, and since they have not been asked before, they no longer associate that passion in any way with school or academics.

In a story last year about Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, they quote him as saying, "The culture of schooling as we know it is radically at odds with the culture of learning that produces innovators." Seely Brown and Thomas also bring up this contradiction of culture of schooling vs. culture of learning.  It's unfortunate, but almost any educator can tell you exactly what that statement means.  We can tell you the kinds of environments where we know kids are excited, enthusiastic, and open to inquiry and discovery - it happens naturally for young children almost anytime they are given a little freedom to explore, experiment, and create.  However, the structures we set up in school (many ingrained in us from preservice texts, and even before (anticipatory set anyone?), often have schools doing things that take away those very opportunities.

A couple of years ago, I started to simply turn my social studies lessons upside down so we could practice inquiry. My 8th graders had not had much practice.  At the beginning of a lesson, I'd show them something - usually a picture, a piece of art, an article, a short video, an illustrated map - something.  I'd tell them what it was, as in naming it, and maybe giving it a little context, and then they had 5 minutes to write down all of the questions they had about it.  Initially, this was a difficult exercise for them - they would not have many questions.  When we talked about some of their questions, sometimes another student would shout an answer, even though none was obvious.  There was one boy who I knew was very sharp, but routinely would only write down about 3 questions.  After the 3rd time we did it, I asked him why he had so few questions in 5 minutes.  He said he didn't want to write down very many because he was just waiting for me to assign an essay paper on all of them if he had a bunch!  What an eye opener for me!  Apparently, without any ill-intent to squash inquiry, I had done just that!

I've continued to use this process ever since, and I have to say, by the end of the year - even mid-year - my students are extremely good at asking questions.  They also learn to categorize questions.  Level one questions are those to which it will be relatively easy to find an answer - a couple of Google searches. Level 2 questions are a little more complex - there is an answer, but it will require some further research in order to get more context and bring together a variety of sources.  Level 3 questions don't lend themselves to just one answer, or to easy answers.  They are questions that often people have opinions about, rather than answers.

By learning to get comfortable with questioning, and then with analyzing their inquiry, this makes approaching their discovery process a lot easier to tackle.

Have I quit assigning essays? No! However, instead of saying at the beginning that everyone will write one, I now wait and see where their inquiry goes.  If they are culminating in something that really lends itself to an essay, I'll suggest it, and they very often can see the sense in presenting their findings this way by that stage. But I'm also open to other ideas for presenting. Although we are only two months into school, this year my 8th graders have already each written one significant essay, and some have written two.  That does not count the many blog posts and web pages they have written.  I feel like the quality of writing I'm getting now is much better - but they are writing because it seems a natural next step in their process. Teaching this way has the added benefit of being much more interesting for me - it's common during an initial inquiry session that I get as much into the questioning and discussion as they do!

Resources:
Swallow, E. (2012, April 25). Creating Innovators: Why America's Education System Is Obsolete. Forbes. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericaswallow/2012/04/25/creating-innovators/

Thomas, D., & SeelyBrown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, Ky.: CreateSpace?].

Wagner, T. (2008). The global achievement gap: why even our best schools don't teach the new survival skills our children need--and what we can do about it. New York: Basic Books.

Ways not to kill classroom creativity. (n.d.). Ways not to kill classroom creativity. Retrieved October 23, 2013, from http://www.goshen.edu/art/ed/creativitykillers.html?utm_content=bufferce375&utm_source=buff


Sunday, October 20, 2013

Week 7 Reflection

1. What resources/ideas did I share this week?  This week I used resources from the text, A New Culture of Learning, as well as a blog post by another educator regarding teachers who choose to join the collective or remain isolated.  I also shared an interesting article that was not education specific, but spoke to the idea that as a society, our participation in collectives is making us smarter, due to the increased amount of content we are producing, rather than simply consuming.

2. What did I intend to be the impact of my resources on others' learning?  By sharing these resources, and reflecting on my own participation in collectives, I hoped to show how impactful this participation can be - as it has on my own career.  Since I began this participation, I have been more motivated in my own career and learning than at any other time.  I am going in new directions that I could not have anticipated even five years ago, and would never have gone had I not done this.  The impact on me has been huge, and I wanted others to know how powerful this is.

3. What actual impact could I discern? Based on the comments I received, I think that many in this class are experiencing different phases of this same growth that I have over the past few years.  Not many are untouched by this.

4. What will I do differently next week?  I will continue to look for resources that expand my thinking, even as I reflect on my own learning.  It seems there is a lot of reflection going on out in the blogosphere and other places where people are summing up this shift in how we work, play, and learn. It verifies my own gut feelings about this shift, and also helps me to learn about new ways people are interacting online.

5. What resources did others share that made a difference in my learning? Jonathan shared a link to BSSD's open content curriculum, which I was really happy that he shared! They have been doing an interesting re-make of their curriculum over the past couple of years, and it is great to have it as a resource as we work through the same process. Ginger put up an excellent post, which made me think about some of the "forced" groupings we are often put into - people expect magic to happen just because we have been told to collaborate and we all presumably have the same goals, but these rarely elicit the kind of true innovative thinking that our chosen collectives do.  How can we get teachers to collaborate, and yet not force these kinds of situations upon them?

Friday, October 18, 2013

Week 7: What are your thoughts about “learning in the collective”?

I'm already incredibly biased on this point: I have had the benefit for learning from the collective for several years now - via my online PLC.  By finding, reading, and commenting on blogs of like-minded educators, as well as following a community of innovative educators on Twitter, my practice has been impacted in more ways than any other period in my career preceding that time.  Some people say one of the bad things about the internet is that it encourages people to limit their consumption of information to sources that back up what they already believe.  Although this is true to a certain extent, what is not noted in particular point of view is that many people are not only consuming - they are also contributing.  As members of the "collective" do this, it's inevitable that new thinking emerges. Of course I will follow "like-minded" educators, because I am interested in using the collective primarily for learning, not arguing.  Like-minded does not mean identical - obviously we all have our own experiences and untried ideas to bring to the table for discussion.  As a whole, these experiences and ideas are more than the experiences and ideas of one.

Why is it that we seem to learn so much more in the collective?  Obviously we are participating because we are passionate about the topic at hand - that's a given.  However, Thomas and Seely Brown offer another perspective when talking about collectives in general, as well as ones that may gather around a special interest forum or site.  "There are no tests or lectures. There is no public influencing of private minds.  Yet learning happens all the time. And because there is no targeted goal or learning objective, [the site] can be used and shaped in ways that meet the needs of the collective -," (Thomas, Seely Brown, 2012).

In a Wired article, "Why even the worst bloggers are making us smarter", author Clive Thompson says, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think.  Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." He talks about how online networks perpetuate more writing by individuals, and as a result, we are now more producers of knowledge than the consumers of knowledge we were before the internet.

Hitting a little closer to home, educator/blogger George Couros recently posted, "Isolation is now a choice educators make." He promotes the idea that teacher blogging is not only a powerful reflective practice, but also a way to share ideas and improve by making our practice more transparent.

When I began participating in collectives, I also began blogging.  Through my network I was learning about a lot of new things, and coming up with a lot of ideas.  I'd try things out, and share what happened through my blog.  It helped me to be exactly as Couros suggests, more reflective - even within that activity I could generate some new questions and ideas for me to ponder.  I had a choice - I could sit on those questions and ideas I came up with alone, or they could lead me to new collectives where I could learn even more from others - the second option was easy, in part because as Thomson and Seely Brown mention, it was fun! It was a topic I was passionate about, I wanted to learn more about it, and I enjoyed it!

Now I wonder, why would teachers choose isolation? For younger teachers having grown up in the generation of the availability of the internet collective, taking part in it is something that comes naturally to them - though this does not necessarily mean they will choose to take part in one that helps them to learn more about their practice.  But for educators who did not grow up within this culture, have many made the shift?

Resources:
Thomas, D., & SeelyBrown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, Ky.: CreateSpace?.

Couros, G. (2013, October 7). Isolation is now a choice educators make. | The Principal of Change. The Principal of Change | Stories of learning and leading. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/4156

Thompson, C. (2013, September 17). Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.wired.com . Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/how-successful-networks-nurture-good-ideas/all/

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Week 6 Reflections

1. What resources/ideas did I share this week? I think sharing my mentoring story was a good idea because it tied in with the idea of play, and I also knew it was something people could pull all kinds of ideas and insights from.  Based on the comments I received, that's pretty much what happened.  I was also eager to share the new Phantomation website, because MIT has come up with another winner, and it's classroom-ready!

2. What did I intend to be the impact of my resources on others' learning?  I wanted people to see that games like Phantomation are really great in a classroom.  The beauty of these types of games is that they are not teaching any specific skill, but through the complex problem solving required to play, the possibility for students to learn so many things (that we can't necessarily measure) is wide open.  This is the type of thinking (and collaboration) that our students need to practice often.  It's the side benefit of play that we value so much.

3. What actual impact could I discern?  From the comments I received, it seems like people thought it was a good activity for kids to spend time on.  One commenter wondered whether kids needed to master basic skills first before jumping into activities like this, or if they could master them through this kind of play.  I like when people have to really ponder that, and I think once you see it in action (like in my story), the evidence is pretty clear.

4. What will I do differently next week?  I know now that I really need to be making an impact with my mentee - activities like this show her that she does not need to know all of the answers herself in order for her kids to engage in this kind of learning. Can I do it again? Pressure is on!

5. What resources did others share that made a difference in my learning? Barbra keeps to her themes, and continues to find ways to show how important leadership and vision is in any kind of endeavor a school undertakes - even play. This week was no different, and I appreciate her drawing ideas back to that - it's a realistic approach. Heather's post reminded me of the importance of exploratory play across the curriculum.  I had been thinking about this week with technology in mind.  She reminded me that with math manipulatives, this is just as important.  Too often, we give kids manipulatives, and then tell them the right way to use them, without letting them explore patterns and relationships on their own. Andrea's post reminded me of the frustrations of looking for good educational gaming software.  I have been down that road so many times, and I've learned that sometimes when we are really looking hard for something, we may be narrowing our search too much - it's good to start thinking differently about what could solve your problem - and still use technology!

Friday, October 11, 2013

Week 6: What does play have to do with embracing change and how does this impact you as a professional?

According to A New Culture of Learning , "In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it." (Thomas, Seely Brown, 2011).  We usually attribute the actions of "play" to young children, and also tend to assume that the need for constant play declines as we grow older.  My hunch is, it doesn't actually decline, but the demands on our time for other more pressing things simply crowd out the time we used to spend in play.

The key element of play - especially the unstructured play of children - is that they make up the parameters and rules as they go along.  They begin their play with some basic ideas in place, and as their imagination takes them along they adjust, adapt, and expand their play to accommodate their new ideas.  Interestingly enough, this is exactly the process that adults who we consider to be innovators use.

I think it's timely, and appropriate that organizations like the Lego Foundation are actively trying to help revamp education systems by incorporating play. Randa Grob-Zakhary, CEO of the Lego Foundation says, “A lot of work [in education] is focused on how can we better teach and more quickly teach reading and math--literacy and numeracy,” she says, speaking with Co.Exist at the United Nations' Global Compact summit in New York City last month. “There’s still a very big gap in defining how can we better equip our children with creative and critical thinking skills to equip them to face tomorrow’s challenges.”

And now, a little mentoring story...
Today was my day to spend 30 minutes with my mentee in her 3rd grade classroom.  I was modeling a lesson in using a new gaming software with her kids.  I explained to her first about the software.  It's called Phantomation, and it's a new project from the labs at MIT.  The object of the game is for the player to create animations using the built in animation software PlaySketch, which will scare the living beings through the mansion so that they are not captured by the lurking phantoms. PlaySketch is an actual professional animation software, which uses key framing and real time animation to possess objects.  MIT labs has worked it into the game.  The game is being used as research by MIT to determine if these new animation techniques make animation programming easier to learn.

There are only some very basic instructions included in the game - one or two sentences on an intro page. I sat the students at the computers and reviewed the term animation - most knew what it meant or was related to, and could give examples.  I then very briefly explained the object of the game, and that they would be making objects animate to help them.  I told them to play with it to figure it out, and that they could help each other, but gave no specific directions. For the first five minutes there was a lot of protesting and whining.  It was not immediately obvious what to do, so they wanted help right away.  I just encouraged them to keep playing around with it.  The heavy protests continued (my mentee was getting nervous!), but then around the 8 minute mark, one of the kids shouted, "I figured out how to make it move!".  Over the next few minutes there followed a series of similar discoveries.  By 15 minutes in there were small groups huddling up, moving to another screen, re-arranging into different groups, and a general flurry of activity.  Other than offering the occasional, "ask each other questions," or, "Why don't you ask *student* about that," I said nothing about the game, and gave no instructions. I stayed out of their flow of group conferencing.  At the end of the 30 minutes, all students had a basic command of the game, and more than half had moved up several levels.

The reason I chose this particular activity for my mentee to see, was because I wanted to show her the opportunities for constructivist, collaborative learning that technology offers. I wanted her to see how students become so quickly engaged in the problem solving, and how they collaborate without a thought when it comes to solving problems, and how in these situations, the group so naturally values the critical thinkers. The parameters of the game changed frequently, and in learning new ways to beat the game, they also quickly adapted to the changes in the game. Additionaly, I wanted her to see that her role in these things was best if it was minimal.  Kids learn too early to use their teacher as a crutch, and we happily oblige. If she remains a bystander, the learning is about them, and not about her. I also wanted her to see that some of the best options for this often look like play, and feel like play to kids. I think the message came through!

Funny story in contrasts - at the end of the 30 minute session the students had recess.  The same students, who only 5 minutes prior had been eagerly discussing solving problems with key frames and timers, quickly dissolved into an intense argument about who was the caboose in the line!

It was funny, but led me to question, which of the two situations I witnessed in that 5 minute time frame more accurately reflects what we think of when we hear the saying "kids will be kids"?  Which one should? In both scenarios, they were simply reacting as kids do within the expectations of the environment they were placed in. What kind of expectations and environments do we put them in for most of the day?

This gets to the heart of how change impacts me as a professional.  I want my students to be able to think in ways that help them adapt to and thrive with change.  If I want that, I have to be willing to be that way myself, and I have to be willing to let them experience those kinds of learning situations in the classroom.

Resources:
Thomas, D., & SeelyBrown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, Ky.: CreateSpace?.

Leber, J. (2013, October 2). Can Playing With Lego Make You More Creative? | Co.Exist | ideas + impact. Co.Exist | ideas + impact. Retrieved October 11, 2013, from http://www.fastcoexist.com/3018877/can-playing-with-legos-make-you-more-creative?partner=newsletter&utm_content=buffer0c641

GAMBIT: Load Game: Phantomation. (summer 2012). Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Retrieved October 10, 2013, from http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/phantomation

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Week 5: Reflections

1. What resources/ideas did I share this week?
I feel like I did a lot of rambling this week, but really that's just the equivalent of my think-aloud process.  Some people use talking for that, I do it in writing. I think the "Assessing ourselves to death" article was good for me, because it spurs me to think outside of the box.

What did I intend to be the impact of my resources on others' learning?
After re-reading that article this week, it helped me to synthesize the ideas in the reading.  I hope others got a chance to look it over and do the same.  I know we all like to go back and point out how this or that was different when we were kids. But this week what I was really dwelling on was how much it is the same - even with technology!

2. What actual impact could I discern?
Andrea commented that after reading my post she realized that she was still teaching in a way that re-emphasized the mechanistic view.  What bothers me is that this is something I still do as well - more often than I like.  I have made a concentrated effort during the past 5 years to move away from this, but find myself feeling corralled by the curriculum.  There are always ways around this - you can "teach to" the curriculum, but stills set up your learning environment from the point of inquiry and discovery.  However, at times I find myself looking at it and slipping back into traditional planning habits - ones that will inevitably lead to me being the one who decides the direction, focus, and goals of the learning that will take place. Thinking different takes practice and persistence!

3. What will I do differently next week?
I was actually satisfied and stimulated by the way the readings kind of guided my thinking this week.  Using the reading as a leaping off point to look for more resources that give me a wider, or even a counter perspective is a good for pushing me to dig deeper. I'll make a point of doing it again next week.

4. What resources did others share that made a difference to my learning?
Heather shared an article from November Learning that I enjoyed.  Although I don't read his stuff often, like Alfie Kohn and other educational "agitators", they are good for pushing you a little to make you really consider other sides of the discussion.

Friday, October 4, 2013

Week 5: How does the culture of your current teaching environment differ from the learning environment you experienced as a student?

As a student, the environment I learned in was what Thomas and Seely Brown refer to as a "teacher-based" environment. The bulk of my k-12 education took place in the 70's, and the practices in education at that time were, on the surface, largely unchanged from what they had always been. The teacher dispensed information, we regurgitated it back and were assessed on how accurately we were able to do that.  No brand new thinking was required or encouraged, but we were rewarded (through grades, advancement, and graduation) for expressing our thinking in the prescribed ways. Behavior also played a large role in our assessment.  If we also exhibited certain behaviors, such as turning in homework in a timely manner and maintaining regular attendance, that also figured prominently in our assessments.

As a teacher, I'd like to be able to say our environment has changed significantly, but unfortunately, I can't say that.  Overall, the environment for teaching and learning in my school operates in the same basic ways that it did 40 years ago.  What has changed visibly, is how that work is done. Teachers often use digital devices to project information, encourage students to do research on the internet instead of in the library, and homework is often completed in some form electronically. These changes have made the act of teaching far more efficient, and to some degree have done so for learning as well.

According to Thomas and Seely Brown, in a mechanistic perspective of education, "the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardization is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. The processes that necessarily occur to reach the goal, therefore, are considered of little consequence in and of themselves. They are valued only for the results they provide."

There is a lot of lip service being given to new ways of teaching and learning, and the phrase "21st Century Education" is one we hear often.  Everyone seems to recognize the importance of this, but as we can clearly see, technology is being applied, not in ways that move environments to a learning-based approach, but in ways that re-emphasize, even amplify the mechanistic view. We want to harness new technologies, but often this is encouraged in ways that reiterate the importance of the teacher-led approach (IWB's, digital worksheets). We want to encourage inquiry, project-based learning, and innovation, but then impose testing of "standards" as a way to measure learning. Our actions (policies) counter what we preach.

I think the authors' second description of culture - one that grows organically - is obviously a more appropriate match with the ideals of a 21st century education.  Understanding how to use technology, not merely as a tool of efficiency, but also as a means to construct knowledge, will be the skill set most valued in shifting the culture and environment of schools.  Unfortunately, this is still at odds with our fervent quest to test that knowledge. We are faced with the problem of a tool that does not fit the task.

Resources:
Carlo, M. D. (2012, October 4). Assessing Ourselves To Death. Shanker Blog. Retrieved October 4, 2013, from http://shankerblog.org/?p=6835

homas, D., & SeelyBrown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, Ky.: CreateSpace.

Boss, S. (2012, April 3). 21st-Century Learning Creates New Roles for Students -- and Parents | Edutopia. Edutopia | K-12 Education & Learning Innovations with Proven Strategies that Work. Retrieved October 4, 2013, from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/21st-century-learning-students-parents-suzie-boss