At the Family Association meeting presentation Tuesday about our English curriculum, we enjoyed a spirited discussion about the vital importance of writing instruction.  We all agreed on the importance of developing strong skills in formal written expression: a mastery of technical competency in grammar, spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and the common forms of expository and persuasive writing.

At St. Gregory we regularly check in with our graduates, and we are always gratified that they report with frequency that they are finding themselves very successful as writers in college and beyond, and that they find themselves far better prepared than most of their peers from other schools.   One current example: Adam Gonzales, who is currently a freshman in university, is already writing for the University’s athletics website.    We feel very confident that our students who are the product of our seven year (6-12), or four year (9-12) program, emerge with terrific confidence in their written expression, comfortable in their expressive fluency, and highly proficient in their technical command of the written form.

At the end of the Family Association discussion, I offered a peroration to the discussion, summing up what I as Head of School believe to be our school’s educational values, goals and philosophy about the development of fine writers.    Afterwards, I was asked by many if I would write up my comments and share them more widely.  What follows is a slightly expanded, modified version of my spoken remarks. 

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It is important to remember that there are two, twin goals for any educational program of writing preparation, and they live in a dynamic tension which can, sometimes, in the short run, function as a zero-sum tension, such that overly emphasizing one, particularly in ways developmentally inappropriate, can result in the diminution of the other.

Our twin goals are both mastery of technical formalism in the written form and  fluency, a confident written expressiveness that conveys one’s unique, individual voice.  I could add to the latter not just confidence but a genuine enjoyment, even passion, for written expression.

Just as we rightly worry, even fear, that far too many secondary school graduates lack formal written proficiency, let’s not forget what should be a second source of great anxiety: many students emerge from middle and secondary school greatly lacking confidence and originality of voice, and indeed, many emerge simply hating to write.

If we overly emphasize to students during their middle school years the absolute importance of technical accuracy; if we hammer away at grammar and rigid essay form; if we cover up student writing in red ink; if we feel the need as pedagogues to mark every technical mistake students make; if we tell students (or allow them to infer!)  that the most important goal for their writing is that they make no formal mistakes; if we insist they follow a formula,  then we may very well be discouraging their efforts to find their voice, deterring their desire to experiment in written form, dampening their pleasure in the writing experience and diminishing their lasting affection for the craft.

Now, we most certainly do need to help students develop good form, and to do as an appropriate accompaniment as their expressiveness and fluency develop, and especially after their confidence in well founded in the upper grades.    We do this, inside and outside of the English department curriculum, in many ways.

One element is our emphasis on learning other languages; St. Gregory requires every student to take a second language, usually Spanish beginning in 6th grade, and then in 7th grade we require students take a third language: at least one year, and many go on for more, of Latin.   Learning other languages, and especially Latin, is a magnificent way to learn more about the formal structure of the English language.   In the middle school we administer MAP testing three times a year, which assesses students’ developing grammatical and writing understanding, and gives teachers reports to better enable them to intervene and differentiate.    In History and Science, students are regularly assigned very discrete, very structured writing assignments, and those teachers guide students carefully through organizing their writing for the very particular requirements of those projects, such that students come to better understand the importance of formatting a particular piece of writing to its particular function.

In English, of course, as and when appropriate, and without dampening enthusiasm, fluency, or voice, students are taught, guided, and held accountable for developing fine form and structure.  In English 8, as Mr. Mann explained in the presentation,  the Benchmarks of 8th grade include critical thinking skills, thesis-driven analysis/persuasive argumentation, the use of evidence, accuracy, clarity, and demonstrating insight.

It is easy to envision another school’s approach, which focuses very narrowly on formal, technical writing skills, and whose students might, at certain early and midway stations along the sixth through twelfth grade journey,  develop and display stronger technical skills.   But what we believe at St. Gregory is that the learning momentum of those students will slow, sadly and surely, if their voice, expressiveness, fluency, and joy is dampened and depressed, and that as our students emerge upwards into 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades, full of steam, and as we guide their writing in our small classes and with our high standards towards ever and ever greater form, fluency, and voice, they achieve and accomplish at graduation a very high summit of written expression and a lasting love of the craft.

We proudly graduate confident, competent writers: our current graduating class has a median SAT writing performance of 617, at the 86th percentile of performance nationally; in a recent administration of the CWRA, our seniors performed at the 97th percentile of a cross section of college freshman in an assessment of their writing effectiveness and critical thinking skills.  As we continue to carry forward our tradition, and reflect and review our program in our ongoing efforts to ensure its excellence, innovation, and forward development, we will do in a way which ensures we honor, perpetuate, and strengthen our commitment to these twin goals, formal mastery and expressive fluency.

Note: 0ne resource, replete with academic research supporting this approach, which has been extremely influential to myself and many English teachers over the past decade, is Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents. 

Now here are the results!   From a recent school newsletter:

As part of the One School, One City initiative, we’ve awarded 6 wonderful advisory project ideas with mini-grant funding raised from St. Gregory’s Family Association participation in the Shop & Give program. If you have not yet signed up with this program, please be sure to register at participating stores. The Family Association Shop & Give generated $1800 last year to support the following advisory projects:

Mr. Clashman’s advisory will establish a water harvesting system on Middle School campus by the administration building. They are partnering with a former alum and current U of A student who is helping with the logistics and design of the system. Their goal is to reduce our campus waste of water and aide in the beautification processes happening in the Middle School courtyards.

Mr. Decker’s advisory will be launching their project, “Building a Desert Community: One Seed at a Time.” They will partner with Tucson’s Audubon Society, Friend’s of Ft. Lowell Park, and other community members to begin growing native plants from seed here on campus. Students will research plants and raise them from seed until they plant them either here on campus or other places in our community.

Ms. Derickson and Ms. Clashman’s advisory will continue their work with the Ben’s Bells project by creating beads that will be used in the wind chimes that the non-profit distributes to spread a message of kindness in our community.

Mr. Herzog’s advisory will begin work on installing a 400 watt wind turbine (power generator) at the laptop charging ramada. Their goal is to increase St Gregory’s usage of eco-friendly energy sources while also building a unique, interesting installation on our campus.

Dr. Alex Shawn’s advisory has decided to Adopt A Roadway through Pima County. Our first clean up will be taking place next Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 11 am to 4 pm and we want to get as many Upper School students and their families as we can! We will provide snacks, water, sunscreen, and work gloves. People who wish to volunteer alongside their Upper School St. Gregory students should plan on bringing a refillable water bottle, and wearing jeans, closed-toed shoes, and a long sleeve shirt.

Related posts:

• Advisory Program: Vehicles for service learning, problem-solving, diversity education
• Advisory at St. Gregory: A Student Journalism Perspective, from the Gregorian Chant

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From time to time I post and share here pieces I have written as part of my role and responsibility as Head of St. Gregory.  The following letter, which I prepared and which is co-signed by our Board Chair, was sent last week to all St. Gregory families, inviting them to re-enroll for next school year, a year I sadly will not be able to be a part of, but a year in which I know great things will continue to occur and great advances will continue to be made. 

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February 1, 2012

Dear St. Gregory Families:

We write you to invite and encourage you to continue on next year as part of our St. Gregory community.

Adding value to a St. Gregory education is a very high priority of the school’s leadership, and we have made great strides forward we have made together.  You may or may not know that in the past two years:

• We became one of the first  1:1 laptop schools in Tucson,  and provided resources for WIFI expansion,  for netbooks for students not bringing their own, and for professional development for our faculty.
• Our new advisory program is strengthening the relationships of teachers and students, and providing stronger teacher-mentors, improved service learning programs,  and an enhanced sense of community; a student reporter for our school newspaper recently wrote:  “Student response to advisories has been overwhelmingly positive in nature. “
• We’ve added robotics programs in the Middle and Upper School, a new Science Olympiad competitive squad in the Upper School (which is a two time state-wide winner of the “rookie of the year” prize), a new Technology Design course, a TEDx speaker program, and several new innovation workshops for our students.
• We’ve implemented new technologically enhanced educational assessments in both the Upper School (CWRA & PLAN) and middle school  (MAP), which better enable us to determine how well our students are doing and how we can better improve and personalize their learning.
• We’ve revamped our PE curriculum in grades 6-9 to include a much stronger health education and life-long athletics curriculum, including featuring outside-guest teachers for Judo, Yoga, Ballroom Dancing, Bicycling, Healthy Skincare, Diet/Nutrition, and more.

But we are not slowing down: in just the past 8 months,

• We’ve installed a new fiber optics internet cable to ten-tuple our campus bandwidth.
• We’ve increased graduation requirements in Science, Math, and Social Studies.
• We’ve restored the School Counselor position to nearly Full Time.
• We’ve introduced new courses in many departments such as Creative Writing, Digital Performance and Production, Shakespearean Tragedy, and The American West: Borders and Frontiers.
• We’ve installed a new 3D printer in our Physics Lab as we continue to transform that space into a “Fab-Lab” for student innovation (Google “Fab-Lab Ted Talk” to learn more); Fast Company magazine recently called upon every high school in America to install 3D printers, and we are pleased to be among the first.
• Our new librarian is undertaking new informational literacy education initiatives for all grades.
• We’re expanding international education in several ways, including strengthening sister-school relationships in Mexico, seeking new study abroad opportunities for our students, and providing stronger services and support for our growing number of international students and families.

It is time again in our annual cycle to communicate our new tuition for the coming year, and we are pleased to share with you that the Board of Trustees has decided there will be no increase and that we will maintain tuition at the current level for next year.  Last year’s tuition increase was 1.3%, and the previous year saw no increase (0%), meaning over the current three year period we will have delivered an average increase of under 0.5%, (compared to the previous three year average increase of 3.8%).

Does this mean we have no need for additional revenue?  No.  We do—we do to support these initiatives and, even more importantly, to support better our teachers with improved compensation.  Did you know that our average faculty salary is in the low forties?

Although we are not raising tuition, we are continuing to ask for your assistance with a wide variety of ways you can help us enlarge our revenue:

• Making an Annual Giving donation, you greatly enable us to do better by our teachers and to reduce the need in the future to increase (non-tax deductible) tuition.
• Directing your 100% refundable tax credit donation, you strengthen our scholarship program and redirect funds which are then made available for faculty salaries and program improvements.
• Recommending St. Gregory to your circle of friends and acquaintances (consider using Facebook) helps us grow enrollment and strengthen our revenue.
• Connecting us to Arizona “C” Corporations, which might be able to make a corporate tax credit donation, to community foundations, which might be able to provide us a grant, or to Tucson  businesses, which might support our annual auction with a gift, are all very valuable and much appreciated.

Support in all these ways serves to strengthen our finances both immediately and in the long term, and, will assist us in every way.

The stronger and more united we are as a connected and philanthropic community, the more we will prosper in being able to serve our students and our teachers and the less we’ll need to raise tuition.

The state of our St. Gregory School is sound, and, more than that, it is poised to grow and advance in the years to come.   Thank you for being a part of our community and for the support you so generously provide.

If you wish to discuss any of these matters, we are very much available to you, as are our Director of Admissions, Christine Thornton, and our Heads of Middle and Upper School, Heather Faircloth and Susan Heintz,  please let us know if you’d like to make an appointment.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Martin               Shelly Silverman

Head of School                  Board Chair

“This was the best TED Talk ever.”

“My favorite yet!”

“I loved this!  It totally spoke to me.”

After a lapse of a few months, I found this morning a slot to share at all-school meeting a TED talk– and when I announced this, the room broke out into genuine applause.   This is a very charming and sweet connection I am sharing with my St. Gregory students, one I will miss greatly:  our shared “fandom” for TED talks.

After viewing, we had a great ten minute all-school conversation.   First we focused upon the content– what is the relationship of happiness and productivity, how do we “filter” our experience, what are the five techniques for developing a positive outlook and happiness attitude, and do we agree with these five?

The five techniques to shift your attitude, enhance your happiness, lift up your filter, and strengthen your productivity:

1. Express gratitude daily; deliberately choose to write or say thank you and express appreciation for what you have.
2. Journal.
3. Meditate.
4. Exercise.
5. Practice random acts of kindness.

Then we shifted to form: what made this talk so effective.  Humor of course was the most important element, but we also discussed the way the presenter himself modeled a positive affect, and the way he used a personal story at the outset to build a sense of connection with his audience.

Take the twelve minutes for viewing this one: It is a very funny talk with a very meaningful message.

As part of a continuing exploration here, I am happy to share this next example of and reflection upon “Open Computer” or “Open Internet” Testing at St. Gregory.  As I’ve written before, I think this assessment approach is a highly valuable one for promoting deeper learning, information literacy, and analytic and organizational skill development over memorization and regurgitation.  I think that many tests in most subjects can be, with the right intentional design, “open internet” and that they will be the better for it. 

Some argue against tests altogether, but I still love a good test, and taking the time to think through as a teacher what kind of questions can we ask which will continue to be meaningful assessments when Google and Wolfram Alpha are available is, I think, a highly productive exercise, and, of course, will generate a more authentic assessment experience far more well aligned with the real world of professionals for which we are preparing our students. 

Below is a report about another experiment with this approach from our Theater teacher and director, Lisa Bodden.

Comparing my approach to teaching this course with the last time I taught a similar version I realized that the major thing that has changed is the student’s access to technology. Did I still need the students to buy a heavy, although comprehensive, textbook? No, the information is available at their fingertips.

Did I need to order lengthy videos describing very limited topics and spend time plucking out the important details? No, YouTube is almost too easy and has a plethora of informative  videos, performances, and interviews with scholars and professionals.

Therefore, did I really need the students to regurgitate information or could I ask them to utilize  Internet resources and their class notes to compose essays based on questions that they helped craft?

The “answers” the students created in response to the essay prompts not only proved to me how well they understood the information, but also allowed them to maintain their individuality, voice, and opinion. I asked for historically specific information, but they could choose who and what on which to focus. The test went very well, in my view, and I will happily turn to this method again and again. Although this will not be my only method of assessment, I consider it a success.

1. Compare and contrast the tragedy and comedy of Ancient Greece using examples of playwrights and plays.
2. Chronologically identify and compare and contrast the three main tragedians, identify their backgrounds, contributions to theater history, and plays.
3. Explain Aristotle’s 6 elements of tragedy, how they worked at the time of conception and how they might work in today’s entertainments, give examples.
4. Identify and define two important performance festivals of Ancient Greece and compare and contrast them with two important performance festivals of today.
5. Identify the origins of theater and drama in Greece.
6. Explain what the Greek chorus was, who was involved, what they did, how they functioned,  and how did they affect plays of the time.

Surveying the students: How did this test compare to others you have taken for other classes?

I liked how it made us understand the topic  more.  I also found it harder than multiple choice because you had to analyze rather than know the info.

I really enjoyed the format of the test, where I could use open notes and write an essay on a certain topic. It was very helpful, and I felt as if I had a lot of more information than I would have had if I had just memorized the information.

I thought that this format was very effective, because this way its not so cut and dry right answer wrong answer, it’s more opinionated, which I like much more.

I liked the format of the test. I liked the way we got to look online for facts about a certain topic, then write an essay about it.

This test does not have multiple choice or terms that we had to define. This is more about testing your ability to find resources that you need, write a quality essay under pressure. I find I like the multiple choice and defining terms better.

I thought that this test was very good. It took all class, and was very easy to prove how much you knew. By using our notes it shows that we actually took them, and by using a bibliography, we were doing more than just theater history.  I really liked this test!!

In this class I think this was the correct format for a test. I also think that we would be able to take tests like this in subjects such as English and History, whereas classes like Math and Science you can’t. This test is the best way to judge or understanding of the topic because you see our opinion and how we see and understand it.

I liked this test because it allowed me to show what I know. With multiple choice tests, that’s not always obvious (it could just be a lucky guess or limited knowledge of something).  Short answer takes too much time and also isn’t the best option for full explanations. I also liked how we had some input on the test, because not only were the suggested questions helpful for studying, but it also forced me to think about the test long before the morning of.

This test provides more freedom than other tests, so students can show what they thought to the teachers.

Related Posts:

• Open Computer Testing at St. Gregory: Chemistry Class with Scott Morris, including an Annotated Sample Exam

The above is Jane’ s Ted-talk, highly recommended if you didn’t have the chance to see her speak today.  This talk topped the event, in my opinion: McGonigal really brings us close the emotional power of gaming, and connects better than anyone gaming to the real world and our goals for our students: motivation, meaning, relevance, social fabric, connectivity, collaboration.

There is no excuse for not taking her lead in examining the opportunities for this kind of blending: games which are integrated into our academic experiences, and gaming which inspire us to think again: what is so compelling about gaming, how does it provide flow and generate growth from stress, and how can learning and our own social experiences be enhanced by the lessons of gaming.

I want to add too: I am not a gamer per se, but I know I would grow, learn, and benefit from more gaming in my life.  But I will say that blogging and social media is an analogue for me: blogging is a positive stress, leads me to a social connection with others sharing my passion, gives me a sense of an epic win by the impact I am having on the world, gives me feedback on how I am doing and a sense of progression and productivity.   Blogging is my gaming, in a significant way (I intend to write more about this soon).

Key Ideas

We have achieved complete game play in the US among under 20 year olds: 95% plus.  Even two year olds.

10,000 hours of gaming are spent by the age of 21, as much time playing games as kids are in the classroom.

Can Games Teach us to save the real world? 

We don’t think of games as a way to get real things done.

“The opposite of play isn’t work– it’s depression.”

10 positive emotions derived from playing games:

Most game play today is social and cooperative.

We get to try something new– a sense of creative agency, as we play games in the virtual world around us.

Kids playing video games regularly tested higher on Torrance test of creativity.

Where do these positive emotions and creative agency associated with gaming come from?  EUSTRESS.    Nothing going on more in gaming positive stress: fierce determination, grit and perseverence, flow state, total immersion in something right at the edge of our ability.

We build relationships by playing games.  Young people who play games with their parents feel closer to their parents.   When we play games with each other we develop bonds and trust.   It strengthens the social fabric.

Students are learning best when they are failing 50% of the time.

Epic meaning: we want to be, all of us, of service, in heroic pursuits, of doing something meaningful.

Gamers go out into the world looking for ways to have meaning and purpose like they have in their gaming world.

Students learn better by taking test than studying for test: it has to do with the right amount of stress and learning from mistakes.

Links and Resources

My post about Reality is Broken and particularly her idea of the Jen Ratio.

Jennifer Lockett’s post about McGonigal.

Multi-player thumb wrestling site. 

Quest to Learn School in NYC

Scientific American article testing for learning

My post on Testing as Learning, Testing for Learning. 

When Scientists Fail, it is time to call in the gamers. 

Fold it: Solve puzzles for scientists.

Evoke: the Game for saving the world

Find the Future The Library Game

Action Items

Play multi-player thumb wrestling with your students!

Have your students play Evoke and experiment with Fold-it.

Discuss stress with students, and ask them: what level of stress feels right?  Promote a meta-cognition of eustress.

Play the Find the Future library game.

Use games as prompts for and to prime “real” academic assignments: to prompt a writing assignment or a mathematics project.

Conversation Starters

What is the opposite of play?  What is the role of play in schools?

Where and how in our schools do students, and can students, feel a sense of epic win?

What is the right level of stress for our students?  For ourselves as educators?

How can we “blend” gaming and conventional classroom activities?

Although it was disappointing we couldn’t view his slides, Eagleman’s presentation was a big lift for those of entirely enthusiastic about the new age of information we live in, and what it means for empowering our students to be digitally savvy, connected critical thinkers.   Eagleman calls himself a “cyber-optimist,” just as I am, and he offers valuable, neurologically founded, evidence and perspective on where learning needs to be going.

As an optimist, he is anything but gloomy about the way students brains are changing, but rather embracing this moment to change up what we are doing: to take learning online, to take it toward active, engaged, decisionmaking, critical thinking, mistake making and retooling, rich environments for our student.

Let’s not be daunted, let’s be inspired.   This is genuinely the most exciting moment to be an educator, and most exciting moment to be a learner, since Socrates was in taking inquiry more deeply with his fellow Athenians, and each and every day let’s ask ourselves: what can we do to realign what we are doing to take advantage of this moment?

Key Ideas

The conscious I is the smallest part of the mind: the conscious aware I is like a broom closet of the mansion that is the brain.

“In each of us, there is another who we do not know.” Jung.

We have to understand the conscious mind to help understand how to better steer kids toward the learning that matters.

Think though problems, synthesis, come up with solutions, creatively: what we need most for teaching and learning.

What does the unconscious mind have to do with creativity? 

The key to neural networks is that they make associations: everything is tied to something else.   The problem of the path of least resistance.  The unconscious mind is incredibly efficient: It seeks the swiftest, straightest, path to the answer, the path of least resistance, the simplest and plainest result that it can.

How do we get people off the path of least resistance?

The brain is constantly rewriting its own software.   The brain is so plastic and malleable.

We want to send people back to re-think things, to push back past the path of least resistance.   To be creative, you need to practice creativity.

“A man is a product of his thoughts”  Gandhi

There are several types of creativity: convergent and divergent thinking.

How many different uses can you come up for a brick?

Guided teaching: Example: Picture and apple in your head, think about what kind of apple, think about the texture of the skin, think about the stem, think about its size: I am guiding your thinking to enhance creativity.

Errors are the portal of discovery.   Guide your students to be wrong, multiple times, so they see

Help student make error and be OK about making errors.

Learning is an event.   Make decisions, touch things, teach others, practical, lived experience of learning.

Kids are growing up very differently today than they used to.

“They are different than we are.”

Because a generation y digital native is used to this new kind of world, online, connected, networked, multi-tasking– that’s what wires up their brain– does this make a child struggle to concentrate?    This is not ADHD– this is a normal response to a student who is used to multi-tasking/connectivity, and struggles to settle into a single, narrow focal point in our classrooms.

The pressure is on us to make more engaging, interactive, classrooms, where students make decisions and chart more of their own course with relevance and salience evident.

The onus is on us to figure out how to ask the question which encourages student to use google but not exclusively rely upon google.

Links and resources

Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, and her website on Brainology education for students.   Great resources.

Jennifer Lockett’s post on Eagleman’s talk.

My post on Open Computer Testing, using google  and wolfram-alpha on tests and assessments.

Actions

Teach students metacognition: start perhaps with the path of least resistance.

Clarify in class creativity assignments the difference of convergent and divergent thinking.

Practice guided thinking toward greater, more complex and rich, creativity.

Focus on the growth mindset from Dweck, and praise for effort, not talent.

Structure a class experience intentionally designed for student error, and student learning from error.

Welcome students to use google to answer your questions, and then ask questions that google can’t answer immediately, but can provide information that can be used for richer answers.

Conversation starters

What can we do to make this an active, multi-sensory learning?

What is the role of intentional error in lesson design?

What are our own mindsets, as educators: how do we strengthen our own growth mindsets?

What does it mean to provide our students more decision-making opportunities in our classrooms?

How can we reframe, rephrase our assessments, our test questions and assignments, so that we expect and require students to use google and the web to answer them, but still make them challenging, meaningful, assessments and questions.

The importance of regularly taking breaks in our absorption of content for processing and synthesis is great, and certainly all educators should advocate this for their students and practice it for themselves.

Focus is important, of course it is; but to be reductionist or simplistic about multi-tasking isn’t helpful.   There is an incredibly wide array of activities associated with what is labeled multi-tasking, and to generalize loses all this.

Writing while we listen, sharing and connecting ideas we are receiving to other ideas, considering the implications of what we are learning, managing multiple points of view or considering other ways of understanding ideas: these can be called multi-tasking or they can be called sophisticated thinking.   Athletes and performing artists multi-task brilliantly; it is an enormously valuable human quality of genius to be able to coordinate oneself  doing multiple things in a productive way, just as it is a sadness to not be able to recognize when we are diminishing our ability to enjoy or be successful when we are doing too much at once.

I am no extremist on this: Tony’s point of view bothers me, just as Cathy Davidson’s argument, to my mind, goes far too far the other direction.    Read my thoughts about Davidson’s defense of and advocacy for multi-tasking here:   What about when the goal is counting the basketball passes? Responding to Davidson’s Now You See It.

For a fuller treatment of this Tony Schwartz talk, please click over to read Jennifer Lockett’s post.

You could feel the room was less animated as this, the third of three challenging and provocative presentations, proceeded; saturation was setting in, and this was no fault of presenter Michael Horn’s.   This session did offer powerful analysis of the power of trends and the significance of the ongoing technological wave surfing over education, though Michael was more subdued as a speaker than his two predecessors.   His talk was also less directly centered on applicable take-aways to today’s classrooms than that of Jacobs and Bassett, but nonetheless offered very important prophecy and analysis.

I should add: motivation matters enormously, and I appreciate very much his attention to this;  it shows a deep caring for kids and their experience of our schools, and urges us to use always this as a foundation for our planning.

Horn’s both predicting and evangelizing for a digital revolution in our schools, but that is not to say his values are somehow technocratic.   It is because he recognizes all learners crave and benefit from feedback, that all learners desire to be more interactive with other learners, that all learners do best when they can track their progress and derive real satisfaction from their learning, that he believes the digital revolution will and should occur: because technology serves these humane and humanistic goals for learning brilliantly when blended with the best of classroom learning.

Resources, Links, Key Ideas

My previous posts on Michael Horn:

• Rethinking Student Motivation: PBL and computer learning suggestions from Christensen, Horn and Johnson
• The Digital Learning Council’s Digital Learning Now: A Response
• Disrupting Class: Thoughts on an Important new book

“We really have to understand what turns students on and fires them up.   This question of motivation is a problematic one.  Noone has cracked it at scale.”

Hiring a Milkshake: a simple explanatory post.

What jobs are students trying to do?

• They want to be successful and make progress.
• They want to have fun with their friends.

Project Based Learning very valuably allows students to make progress and feel satisfied.

Digital Learning offers more feedback and provides more sense of progress to students.

Unfortunately, instruction is too typically uncoupled from activities in which students can feel success.

Frequent assessments is a robust way to improve student motivation and learning.

Technology improves faster than our ability to use those improvements.

Resources for the Flipped Classroom

• http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/
• http://vodcasting.ning.com/
• http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/1534

Blended Learning requires putting the student in the center of learning with some degree of control.

Conspiracy Code Florida Virtual School

Competency Based learning

Jennifer Lockett’s blog post about the talk

Action Items

Invite your students into focus groups and ask: what are you hiring school to do for you?

Take one step to increase the amount of feedback you offer and provide more feedback loop opportunities, where students can use your feedback to improve their performance.

Experiment with Flipped Teaching and evaluate its utility.

Implement opportunities for students to learn at their own pace.

Explore Khan Academy and other online, self-paced, free and low-cost learning programs by which students can work at their own pace along with doing your classroom learning, and work to synthesize.

Conversation Starters

What are students “hiring” us for?

Why do students come to school every day?

How often are your students receiving meaningful feedback?

How often do you give feedback in loops, where students can take feedback and act on it toward mastery?

What if we reversed fixed time, variable learning, to fixed learning, variable time?  What would that look like at our school?

Visitors to the blog: Please use the comment option to offer your own resources, action items, or discussion questions. 

A bracing, challenging, informative talk from Heidi Hayes Jacob enlivened our afternoon.   What year are we preparing our students for?   I embedded below (after “more”) her Ted Talk; I hope you find these resources, suggested action items, and conversation starters and you reflect on her talk.

Resources, Links, & Key Points

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

Jennifer Lockett’s blog post about Jacobs’ talk.

Everyone agrees today that we are going to learn something.

A new pedagogy is emerging: more student self-navigation.

At the end of every proficiency you have as a goal for your student, there should be an adverb: “Independently.”

New Tools, New Literacies: Digital, Media, and Global

The tool we use impact learning:  Paper is over.

Every student should read and write a screenplay.

Edmodo

Curriculum 21 Learning Commons

Classroom 2.0

A New Kind of Learner Needs a New Kind of Teacher

Research means Search Again.

The Curriculum 21 Clearinghouse.

Gapminder World visualization tool.

Google Art Project

Museum Box

Digital Literacy is the thoughtful and deliberate development of web 2.0 applications. 

Media mediates experience.

What would Romeo’s Facebook page look like?  Blog Post. 

Real Time WWII Twitter Feed

Action Items

Learn Prezi and learn when it is is most usefully employed:  Prezi activates the mind: it is a good genre for activating ideas.

Move your curriculum maps/guides online to wiki formats.

Diversify student writing assignments: screenplays, blogs, etc.   Promote understanding of a wide variety of genres and the differentiation each requires.

Model as educators the use of different communication genres: blogging, tweeting, wiki-contributing, video-making, etc.

Decide one thing this year you are going to replace in your current curriculum.

Join a Professional Learning Network.

Use the Curriculum 21 “Clearinghouse.”

Make a plan for every one of your students make an app.

Conversation Starters

“How can we prepare our learners for their futures?”

“Who owns the learning?”

What are the new/key literacies?  What are we doing to facilitate student learning of them?

“What year are you preparing your learners for?”

How can we believe we are being current in our teaching if we are using printed materials and dated curriculum guides?

“Are students, how are students, processing information differently today than ten years ago?”

“How are you going to have your kids share what they are learning?”

Visitors to the blog: Please use the comment option to offer your own resources, action items, or discussion questions.