21k12

1. Hello everyone. Sorry to be offline for a few days, longer than ever, but I am just back from three great days in Tucson, visiting, as a Head of School candidate, St. Gregory College Prep. Wish me luck; it is a great school! Next week might have to be a slow week too for the blog, as I have more interview visits to Boston and Seattle. And the numbers are growing for the blog; October 16 saw a new record 92 visitors in a day, and the overall number of unique visitors is now 687. A little shout-out to the students at Stockton’s Franklin High School, four of whom posted really great responses, and, it would seem, some several dozen of whom visited the site.

2. Although the topic of this blog is 21st century schooling, it is obviously an exercise in form as well as content, and if you are interested, as I am, in the blog form, I strongly direct you to Andrew Sullivan’s article on blogging in the current Atlantic Monthly. It is brilliant; to quote: “Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” I love this.

And this, in which Andrew (whom I knew a tiny bit during college) explains the intimacy of the blog: “And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality. The faux intimacy of the Web experience, the closeness of the e-mail and the instant message, seeps through. You feel as if you know bloggers as they go through their lives, experience the same things you are experiencing, and share the moment. When readers of my blog bump into me in person, they invariably address me as Andrew.” Here’s hoping my blog readers will address me as Jonathan!

3. The new issue of the Atlantic also has an awesome article about DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee. There is so much to admire about Michelle, (and for this fellow educational leader, so much to envy!). I admire and aspire to her fast paced vigor, and have mixed feelings but find myself attracted to her multi-blackberrying style (it is an iphone for me): always on the move, but always electronically plugged into communications from all directions. Clearly she is not perfect, and I think she has been brusque with her public constituents that independent schools could not tolerate. But her “relentless pursuit” approach to excellence is really great. (Did everyone catch McCain and Obama arguing, in the third debate, about which of their educational plans was more favored by Rhee? When have you ever seen Presidential candidates battling for the favor of a school superintendent?)

4. Love the article this week in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review! Seriously, when does the process of performance review really add a lot of value, and how often are we all engaged in it pro-forma just to say we have done it, or because we know we have to? Does it really build trust and collaboration between supervisors and subordinates? The author, a UCLA management professor, calls for a switch to“Performance previews instead of reviews. In contrast to one-side-accountable reviews, performance previews are reciprocally accountable discussions about how boss and employee are going to work together even more effectively than they did in the past. Previews weld fates together. The boss’s skin is now in the game.” Bring it on.

4. Still excited about the CWRA, the College and Work Readiness Assessment, and I was delighted to receive an email from a director there, Chris Jackson, who tells me he has been reading this blog. In Tucson this week I found myself touting it again and again: boards and other constituents have every right to demand we become more accountable and more transparent in schools, that we employ in greater data-driven decisionmaking. See the Rhee article above for one example of this. But that said, we have to be choosy about what data we collect: we know that what gets measured gets done, so let’s make sure we measure what we want to do. I don’t want kids to DO multiple choice choosing for the rest of their lives, so I am not sure I want to measure that with too great a significance. I do know I want kids solving complex problems for the rest of their lives, (god knows there are plenty of complex problems to be solved!), and this is what CWRA measures! For another take on CWRA, read this piece written by my friend Mark Desjardins, the head at a CWRA flagship school, Holland Hall. Chris is looking for advice on how to spread the good word about CWRA more widely; if you have suggestions, let me know and I will pass them along.

5. Very nice entry in the excellent dialogue blog between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitz ; this one from Diane, who nicely addresses two important topics. First, she brings those of who are enthusiasts for hands-on learning back to earth a bit, appropriately, reminding us there is still a whole lot of important knowledge to be gained from books and traditional study. She is right– there is much we cannot learn by hands-on activities about literature, history, and science! But, I will still insist, that we can teach this “book-learning” more effectively than we are doing so in most cases. We can borrow from Wiggins, Graff, and others to insist that we frame the learning students pursue from books with the essential questions and the key problems in the field which we are studying. This will guide their reading in a far more effective way, and though not literally hands-0n, will mimic physically active learning by engaging students in active minds-on learning.

Ravitch goes on to confront educational initiatives that are business-model driven, such as paying teachers for student test scores, concluding on this note: “Now that our economy has been plunged into crisis by bad economic and business decisions, we must recognize that education is a distinct profession, like medicine and the law. It has its own ideals and values. It cannot, should not, be run “like a business.” Or it will fail “like a business.”” (And remember, Diane Ravitch is the conservative in the running dialogue of this blog entitled Bridging Differences).

6. Nice, succinct, teacher-friendly piece here from the Creative Educator on 8 principles for effective project design. We all know, some of all too well, that well-intentioned project based learning can sprawl out from under our control into a time-sucking mess. Indeed, many teachers I think try it, and then back away. These tips will help. My favorites: be very focused on giving students clear timelines for the project, and ensure students embark with a clear and meaningful problem on which to focus.

7. Some great things at the Angela Maiers blog, which rightfully is a Bloggers Choice nominee in the Best of Educational Blogs category (maybe next year for this blog!). She has here a helpful summary of a recent Alan November presentation, including his succinct three key 21st century skills: ability to do quality research on-line; effective global communication skills; and the ability to be self-directed. And listen to his recommendations for doing so: they are great. 1. Turn every classroom into a global communication center, connecting children to authentic audiences worldwide; 2. Build student independence rather than dependence; and 3. Stop blocking and teach students digital literacy.

925

Good morning, I am here today in Stockton, California, at a 2500 student public high school here, Franklin High School.  I am visiting in the school’s 15 year old, 500 student IB (International Baccalaureate) program.  Regular readers know I am greatly interested in and attracted to IB, and I did two weeks of training in IB this past summer in New Mexico.   The administration here welcome me warmly, and I have been assigned to shadow a junior whom the IB coordinator (justifiably) raved about, whom we will call “Penny” today. 

Thank you, Franklin folks, for welcoming me today.  If you are reading this, I warmly invite and encourage you to post a response, using the comment line at the bottom right of this entry: use it to respond to something I have written, or to share with me and other readers what you think is best about teaching and learning at Franklin, or what you think are the most important aspects of 21st century schooling. 

Our day is beginning now in US History.   The teacher is setting up groups, and when he says one of the assignments is to look at the review questions for a textbook assignment, he tells the students to look for the bad questions, and says that it is terrible how poorly some of these review questions are written: “you students are much smarter than the textbook writers,” he says.  “Make up your own, better questions.”   He also tells us he hopes to share some snippets from recent Presidential debates, but the network might block the sites; he says it is frustrating how much of the internet is blocked by  “the district.”    

Students form up groups, and are reviewing  a bill of rights handout; there are ten statements, and students need to evaluate as a group whether each is is constitutionally protected.  Number 1, for instance, is “A man wants to purchase a 12 gauge shotgun for protection.”   Groups vary around the room: some are really conversing, but in others they are sort of settling in individually.   The statements are good introduction, but some are not quite complicated enough to elicit good debate.   Nonetheless, I like that the learning here is starting with problems (are these actions protected?), and then the students are working in groups to solve.    As the students struggle with one (“A town does not like the religious beliefs of a certain group, so it forbids them from building a house of worship”), they call the teacher over for guidance on the breadth of the first amendment, and he helps guide them to appreciate the significance of the 14th amendment.  A minute later, looking now across the room, the teacher is working with a small group, talking about religious schools and public schools, and how the religious schools seem to have much more money available to them: he is speaking here about schools, and fairness, and equity,  topics that connect to these kids, that hit them where they live, and they are really interested.   The teacher comes back over to talk with me, and expresses some frustration about the lack of resources and technological support: the campus has no wifi and no laptops, the desktops don’t easily load the DVD resources they do have, and they can’t get support, and many of the websites they want to visit are blocked by the district.  It is terrific, all the things he wants to do with these students, and we should all wish for greater resource support for his initiatives. 

Penny looks at the handout sample quiz, and tells me that their real tests are nothing like this worksheet– instead, she tells me,  “we just get a little prompt and have to write and write and write!”  One such sample exam included the following “little prompts”:  “1. Explain the powers of the president.  Compare the specific constitutional powers with those that have been assumed by presidents over history.  Explain the powers of the president as commander-in-chief and the limits on this power by the Congress.   2. Discuss the following topics: Executive abuse of power, executive privilege, line-item veto, executive agreement, executive order, war powers act, use of force resolution, war powers resolution.  Answer the following: Is the President’s right to safeguard certain information, using ‘executive privilege,’ confidentiality power, entirely immune from judicial review.  3. Explain why the top appointed positions in the executive branch are not part of the civil system.  Describe two ways the federal bureaucracy helps to shape laws passed by congress.”    Nice, open ended writing prompts– and good practice for the essays of the IB.  Another exam the teacher shows me offers a real case study in the first amendment; this government and history class does a lot of teaching and learning via case study.  The case study here sets up a scenario of a township establishing daily prayer in schools, and a suit has been filed against it.  The case, and assignment, concludes: “the district says that the “will of the people” should be upheld because if the majority is denied the right to control policy, the whole political system will disintegrate… explain how and why the court will rule.”   Nice; very IB. 

Walking over to French class now, Penny tells me about her ambitions for college and plans for law school.  She tells me with great enthusiasm about her summer, during which she took an engineering course at the University of Stockton (full scholarship) and even better, a two week law course at Stanford Law School, for which she also received a full scholarship and, during the mock trial, was awarded a prize for best student attorney!   Her eyes gleam with well-deserved pride as she tells me about this fine accomplishment.    I ask her about how she was alerted to these opportunities, and she said the IB program here really does a great job to connect the kids to these things, and has them take the PSAT every year, which helps link them to the opportunities.    Penny’s parents are immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico; her mother is in housekeeping and her father in truck driving and invests in properties.  Penny takes care to point out that though they do not have a college education (her mother did start college in Mexico, but didn’t finish), “they are really smart, and have worked really hard to be successful.”  

In French class here we have thirty students, all but three of them girls.  I ask Penny for why she thinks the class is so disproportionate, and she tells me maybe it is because “French is the language of romance, and the girls are more interested in that.”    She also tells me that more kids take Spanish because it seems more relevant here in California, but her ambitions are to go East for college, where, she says,  French will be more common.   Besides, she tells me, and I love this, she is already fluent in Spanish, (at home she speaks only Spanish), and she might test out for Spanish anyway: this way,  she says proudly, she will graduate tri-lingual (!).  

Our French teacher is now reviewing vocabulary for Le Petit Prince; it is fun to see her explain terms using only French, but gesticulating and acting things out.  We know that vocabulary requires explicit instruction, and this is a nice demonstration.  For une armure, she refers to Charlemagne and to ferre, and taps her arm and says clink, clink.    Penny leans over to me and says “she is so funny, she will do anything to help us learn the terms.”   The French classroom has a nice nod to international-mindedness, a requirement of IB.  The department is called World Languages, and the “Power Standards” of the department are stated as Five Goals: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities.  There is a map of the world with French speaking countries shaded in green.    The students have done some reading aloud from Le Petit Prince, and now the teacher is discussing key topics and themes from the story– in a somewhat mono-modal, sage on the stage manner.  Penny explains that the first three years of French instruction is pretty much directed instruction in language skills, but in the fourth year it becomes much more about discussion and debate, all in French; the 12th graders this morning had a debate about poverty in France, for example, and the teacher recorded student oral reports about poverty as part of their mandatory IB “internal assessments” (IA’s). 

Onto Math, PreCalculus.  About 33 students at desks in row, and a teacher presenting at a smart board, quite adeptly. About a dozen desktops line the back of the room, but no laptops.   The lecture is about the determination of rational roots, which seem very abstracted from real-world applications.   The teacher is now nicely demonstrating the usage of the graphing calculator, using a neat projection tool I haven’t seen before: it displays on the smartboard a huge vertical graphing calculator on the left, which you can actually use on the smart board, punching the buttons and having the real response, and on the right of the smart board is displayed an enlarged version of the calculator screen– it is a great visual tool for teaching graphing calculators.    Penny shares with me her course outline for this Math class, which is a two-sided sheet explaining class rules: it is very clear, very direct, and very emphatic in its stress on rule-following and consequences for not doing so, but there is no communication about course goals, essential or guiding questions, or what the teacher intends for students to take-away from the course. 

The math teacher is very effective in manipulating the smartboard, moving from problem to problem,; she is demonstrating answer strategies while asking students in the room to work out the problems themselves simultaneously.

{I am still thinking a lot about problem-based learning, which I wrote about in the previous posting, and which is a term I am using to try to capture a broader category of instruction than does the more commonly used “project based learning,” which I would deem a subset of problem-based learning.  I am so taken with something Ted McCain wrote in Teaching for Tomorrow: that we need a fundamental shift in orientation from the normal teaching approach.  Normally we teach subject matter first, and then assign students problems to test/assess their acquisition of that learning.  But it makes so much more sense, it so much more a real-world analogue, to give the problems first, and then “teach” by facilitating students as they work to address the problem.    I enjoyed lecturing myself as a teacher– (mostly history and social studies, for about 8 years);  in retrospect I enjoyed lecturing way too much– it was so much fun for me that I didn’t focus enough on how much fun it was for students, and even more importantly, ( thought not un-relatedly), I didn’t focus on how much my students were learning as I lectured.  

But as much as I did enjoy delivering those lectures, what I recall loving most of all was another mode of instruction: exam preparation.  I would give my students 12-15 challenging essay questions in advance, and tell them that the exam itself would feature 4 or 5 of them, of which they would have to answer 3 or 4.   One example I seem to recall from a US History course went something like this: “‘The history of the United States from the American Revolution to the present is a history of significant progress in the expansion of liberty for all people,’ Agree or disagree, with at least four examples.”   But after giving out these questions, I arranged for times that students could gather, sometimes at school, sometimes at a student’s home, sometimes at a cafe.  I would bring, usually, my signature “bagel box,” and for the next 2-4 hours, students worked in groups figuring out their answers, while I facilitated and supported, answering questions but usually only with another question, or a suggestion of a pathway to the student’s answering it better himself.   I loved this role.  

Now, I don’t remember ever having an experience quite like this in high school myself; I cannot remember ever really having an effective high school study group session,( and I don’t remember very many times at all in which we had good problem-guided learning of any kind, with one exception discussed in the paragraph below).  My college, though,  had a fairly unusual semester schedule, which strikes many as weird, but which I have often defended, and only now am I re-thinking why I liked it so much.  The schedule entailed 12 weeks of regularly scheduled classes, followed by not a day or two for “reading,” or exam prep,  but instead a full two-week “reading period,” followed by two weeks for exams; hence often you had a complete three plus weeks of no scheduled course meetings in which to prepare.   I know that I did often 75 or even 90% of my learning in these three weeks.  I mean, I went to lectures, usually (sometimes only sporadically), but I rarely kept up with the reading during those the 12 weeks of regular classes.   I have often criticized myself for this lassitude, but in retrospect it makes so much more sense– the regular semester just wasn’t a good model of instruction, and it didn’t work for me.  What did work for my learning, because (I know recognize) it was problem-based learning, was reading period.  The university library hosted (to my amazement, as a freshman!) bound volumes of previous years’ final exams for each course; I got into a habit of going on the first day of reading period to the library to copy those previous final exams, and then spent the next three weeks diligently, even vigorously, attacking those questions.  Sometimes this happened in very stimulating study groups.  This approach had the right mix for me of motivation and direction; instead of spending my learning time listening to and observing someone push information toward me, now I was the actor, I had the initiative, I was the doer, on a mission: to answer these questions and solve these problems.    But why did this have to occur only in the three weeks of exam preparation: why couldn’t the entire semester been better structured to support this? 

I said above there was an exception, in my high school learning: I did have problem based learning in the example of about half a dozen terrific research paper assignments.    In tenth grade it was a twenty page paper for our English class, on topics we selected from the general subject of India.  ( I wrote about the mentorship of Nehru by Gandhi).  In 11th grade it was an American Lit. assignment comparing several works of fiction (I took on the “political novel,” comparing The Last Hurrah to All the King’s Men.)  Best of all happened in 12th grade, and was certainly the class that was head and shoulders above any other high school class I had the good fortune to enjoy: a Historical Methods class, in which we learned to conduct historical research by primary source, with the topic of study being the 1960s.  Now, I certainly was fascinated by the sixties, and thrilled to have the chance to study it in depth, but I learned so much in this course not just due to my selecting a topic of interest, but because we conducted original research upon it.   I remember a paper I wrote on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, for which I interviewed personally several participants, which was thrilling to me and I worked so hard on this; a second paper was a study of a key figure in the Defense Department during the LBJ Vietnam buildup, and I poured through primary sources as I prepared a 25 page paper, gleefully trashing weekend after weekend, skipping out on party after party, to spend dozens of hours in a nearby University library doing my research.}

Now onto English class, and The Grapes of Wrath; as we walk over, Penny tells me her appreciation for IB and its preparation of her for college.  She says she has to work a lot, but it is worth it.   Our energetic English teacher welcomes me warmly, and tells me she is trying something entirely new in class today, which I, of course, tell her is great– I am all for innovation and experimentation in the classroom.  The omnipresent smartboard is in full use here, with a sample of writing displayed, and the teacher says to the class “if we had this given to us on an IB exam, how would we proceed with a ‘close read?'”  One student volunteers there is an inner conflict in the passage, and the teacher says good, but explain and defend.  Another student volunteers there is an opportunity for “a philosophical reading here.”   A third is interested in in the role of burning and fire imagery here, and what that might suggest for understanding the novel.   Students here are doing the work– and our teacher keeps putting it to them, asking questions, pursuing followup, allowing for extended quiet moments  for student thinking.  She won’t step in to do it for them.    “Why would Steinbeck design it this way?” she asks.  “What is he emphasizing?   How does burning have anything to do with change?”    Question, question, question; I love it.   Students really working the fire– it destroys, it is urgent, it is instinctual.    Listen to her: “Let’s anchor our ideas in the actual words.  Remember, a close read uncovers in specific passages ideas about the entire work.”   I like how this is tied to IB expectations and the exam; maybe you could call it teaching to the test but I think the IB test is so high quality I don’t mind teaching to it.  Nice praise and enthusiasm: “Beautiful, Excellent!”   One student says that a phoenix rises from the ashes, and the teacher says we know about that from Harry Potter, don’t we, and there is a round of laughter– always connect, always connect learning to previous knowledge, even if it is from “popular culture,” and this teacher hits that mark here.  She just now makes another reference to Bugs Bunny, nice.  “Nice, great, love it!”   

Today we will do a lesson in empathy– “does anyone know what empathy means?”  She assigns the kids over the weekend to find a story, unrelated to Steinbeck, about the Dustbowl, and read it and come to class ready to share it.   Penny says this is what you do in college– independent research.   “This is magnificent you guys, you are so lucky, how fun is this, you get to go find new stories to better understand the main story we are reading!”   Now the teacher is telling her own personal story of her grandparents being “Oakies,” and the journey here, and a terrible crisis of a grandmother in labor and a 13 year old teenager sent for help; the whole class perks up (even more than before), more attentive, more interested: this is an emotionally compelling story, personally related to their learning, and about a teenager in an emergency which all these kids relate to: this is excellent teaching.  “The mom is going to die if this boy messes up,” a student observes, with real empathy.  The students here are all imagining and envisioning the circumstances; the teacher explains that this is empathy they are feeling.    Brain research tells us that you have to tap into student emotions, their feelings, in order to help them encode.  Teacher: “I want you to understand this is not a book in a vacuum, this is a real story from a real time with real experiences being depicted, and I want you to connect with that by finding other stories of the Dust Bowl and the migration to California.”   She hands out a second homework assignment requiring a close reading of the tale of the turtle in Grapes of Wrath. 

Onto a discussion of “muckrackers.”  What was Steinbeck muckraking? Who else were muckrackers?  Upton Sinclair’s Jungle is the first example, and our teacher tells the story of the novel in a very emotionally compelling way– nice storytelling teaching.   “Someone explain to me the haves and the have-nots.”  Kids taking good stabs at this, and the teacher pushes them further.   She then ties it to the current day– is this still the case?   From Upton Sinclair she takes us to Michael Moore’s films.   Columbine comes up, and our teacher marvelously connects the event to her personal experience; she tells the students she learned of and watched the news of Columbine right here in this very classroom we are in today as a freshman student at this school; she goes on to say she also watched news of 9/11 in this same classroom as a senior.  I love this connectedness.    Now she is onto situating Steinbeck as a muckracker.   Wonderful tying now of Wrath, and a quote from Steinbeck, to the “theme of the year: why art matters?”  I can’t believe the class is almost over– it has flown by.   The teacher can’t either; she asks “how many cupcakes would it take to keep you here over the lunch period to continue our discussion of Steinbeck?”  Really lovely enthusiasm.   More connectedness: we are in Stockton, a major agricultural center here in the valley, with many migrant workers here in town experiencing some truly Steinbeckian experiences, and the teacher is helping the students make that link.  Teacher: “How are things going to change?  What can we do to make a difference?”  Students venture forth very personal, very passionate comments about how to effect change.  The teacher then ties this conversation back to IB Global Lesson day– which today is Poverty in the world.   Really great stuff.  “Yes, yes,” our teacher calls;  “Yes, Yes” the students respond.   Charming. 

At lunch, I accompany Penny to the Christian club she is President of; it is called New Life.  Today they are hosting a traveling group which is promoting peaceful schools in the name of Rachel, the first girl who died at Columbine.  The school has had an assembly already with this group (we missed it) and now is having an after-session with the Christian group; there is a cross they travel with onto which they ask students to drape icons of their life.   Penny leads the group of 25 in a very lovely prayer, praying among other things that we learn today.  The group then has a somewhat desultory conversation about the meaning of Christ in their lives. 

Onto Chemistry.   The smartboard has displayed a S.O.D. for today, and we are learning about heat capacity.  Another young teacher; Penny told me earlier that several of her teachers are very new to the school and very young, and she says surprised, really good.    The Science Lab building has marvelous large windows for most classrooms onto the hallways, which could make for great classroom transparency, except that in several cases the windows are boarded over with signs or posters blocking the view.    What does this mean?  What is heat capacity?  the teacher asks.  Now he is putting a problem on the board, and answering it, with a little interaction from the students.  After his presentation of one problem, he sets up another, asking the students to do it themselves (!).   He quickly presents the answer.   A shift; he then moves onto a new activity, dividing the class into two groups and assigning one to be pro-microwave ovens, and the other anti.  They move their chairs to a big circle to ready for the debate.   I love this format, and I really think group work is great; Marzano, who endorses strongly group work in Instructional Strategies That Really Work, says that group size needs to be tightly managed, and that effectiveness tails off in groups over five or six; these groups are 8 and 15, and I am not sure they are as effective as the teacher might wish; by observation it is easy to see how the group of eight really has most students’ attention but that the larger group, well, doesn’t.   But it is a great activity.   He says that he likes to do these debates with real-world issues he kids can relate to, which is a nice point.   The teacher comes to chat; he has nice energy, and is to be commended taking on this responsibility, having only just graduated from college in June (!).   The debate commences:  the Pro side offers reasoning that it will cost less than gas to use microwaves, and you are less likely to get burned by the microwave than by a gas fire stove.  Now he turns to the Anti-side.  “Microwave food sucks.”  “Every time you stick food into that hunk of metal, you are making your food get deformed.”   Student energy rises considerably during the debate; there are smiles everywhere, clamoring for attention, eagerness to participate.  The format is working to engage kids, surely; there is only a little more to be done to enhance the content.  A good start. 

And now Physics: Penny tells me she “recently we did a lab where we were supposed to create an egg-holder which could protect eggs from breaking.”  The room has posters about a “mythbusters” assignment with four questions:  What myths are being tested?  What different experiments do they design to test myths?  Was it necessary to change or modify any experiments during testing?  Were the myths confirmed, plausible, or busted? 

Penny and I speak about rigor: The hardest assignment Penny had last year was a history research paper, 3 pages long and bibliography, following a very specific format.   Penny wrote her paper on the effect of the Industrial Revolution on Women, for which she also had do a presentation orally.  She tells me it was really valuable for her to do the oral presentation; she finds that a really great way to express herself and her thinking.   She also had a challenging assignment last year doing a three page paper on potassium.   The students here at this table are also telling me about their upcoming IB EE papers, (Extended Essay, 4000 words), one of the jewels in the IB crown.  They are both excited and daunted by this requirement; one students says he is developing his topic from the subject of WWII, and Penny says she wants to work on the intersection of US government and world politics. 

Today is a review day in Physics; he asked the students to review their notes in anticipation of an upcoming test, and to identify questions they have.  Now, today, he is wide open: what do you got?    A student asks an acceleration question, and he jumps into it.  Next is a collision of different masses question, and he says if it helps you to answer the problem, draw out a diagram; I have terrible artistic skills but I still draw it out,” which is a nice endorsement of what is sometimes an under-utilized teaching technique, non-linguistic representation.    I like it when a student asks a good question about negative velocity, and the teacher puts it right back to the class, asking them to think about it: he resisted the temptation to tell, to provide the answer, and left it to the students to do the learning work.  As I have seen elsewhere here today, this teacher seems highly proficient with the smartboard, and manipulates its effects frequently to good effect.  

A very nice day; thank you again, Franklin High School! 

Jonathan 

1.  Nice article this week in EdWeek about the initiatives being undertaken in many states to develop new curricula in 21st century skills development.     The article discusses what is meant by this, pointing out that in this new century a higher order of thinking and problem-solving is required: in critical reading, stronger communicating, and the use of technology.   One state calls teaching these skills “future ready” preparation.   I particularly liked reference to “global literacy” and “problem-solving with a global context” being included in the mix here.  

Hello College Prep: 

Good morning, it is great to be here at College Prep.   I am warmly greeted by school Head Murray Cohen, and am now beginning my day in a Spanish Class.    If you are following along, welcome– this is live blog, so it flows chronologically from bottom to top, with each new entry headed by the time it was posted.   This is my school visit/student shadow number 11.  

Good morning!   Thanks for visiting; I have upcoming visits Thursday to Oakland’s College Preparatory School; Friday to Stockton’s public high school, Franklin, and its IB program; and Monday to International High School in San Francisco.  

Here today at a brand new high school, the facility having only opened weeks ago, in Las Vegas, NV.   Well funded, the Adelson School is a K-12 with three divisions, and is headed by an old friend Paul Schiffman.    He was given great support in building a new Jewish middle school and high school to complement a long-standing Jewish elementary school. 

Too many of our students are bored in school too much of the time; too many of our students who aren’t entirely bored are still only skimming the surface of true engagement. We worry, rightly, about our completely disengaged students, those who are failing or getting along with only a minimum of effort and mastery. We have to worry, however, about another set of students– those who are doing just fine by our standards, maybe even earning a 4.0, but who are just playing the game of school. They are effective at doing what we ask of them, but they are not developing the deeper skills necessary for our new century– and what we are asking of them may be just wasting their time. Robert Fried opens his 2005 book, The Game of School, with this declaration: “Far too much of the time our children spend in school is wasted… 90-95 of the time is a waste.”

Sure, our good students do what they are supposed to do. “But unless they view such activities as important, as having meaning to them in their lives right now, they aren’t truly learning, in the sense of developing their minds and hearts as young people eager to embrace the world.” After a lovely series of examples of what should be happening in schools, authentic learning, he comes back to the problem: “We should worry if our young people are beginning to confuse, or to blend in their minds, the idea of obeying the teacher with learning.”

What we want for kids in their learning looks like this: “they should be hooked by an intense curiosity, drawn by an enhanced sensory awareness of the natural world around them, driven by the importance of acting as explorers and scientists, motivated by an irrepressible urge to share what they’ve discovered. Curiosity, sensory awareness, self-enhancement, talk. “

The best chapter in this book, which almost would do better as a stand-alone substitute, is entitled “Humanizing ‘School Talk’ in Pursuit of Authentic Learning.” (I would have killed the first three words in this chapter title.)

The chapter begins with a discussion of that always vexing topic, classroom management. He asks us to redefine the concept, and I think he is onto something. We need to manage those who we are extrinsically motivating, but if we can reorganize a classroom to facilitate students’ own initiative in their learning, the dynamic is very different. “To define each teacher’s goal as ‘creating a mutually respectful learning partnership’ rather than as ‘successfully managing the students’ is to do more than engage in wordplay. It is rather to frame the relationships between teachers and students as one in which they are (or are aiming to be) on the same side in a struggle against ignorance, poor skills, low esteem, insecurity, prejudice, and the paralysis of low expectations– to view teachers and students as allies in the struggle for human dignity, self-respect, cooperation and high achievement. Or, to put the goal in terms of productive contexts, it is to have students and teachers view each other as partners in pursuit of excitement, enjoyment, collaboration, satisfaction, and success in learning.” He does add a note– it is OK to be a strict teacher-ally: to fill the room with your presence, to ensure the kids know you are in charge, that you see everything, that they can rely on you.

Fried begins his discussion of the topic of Instruction with his acknowledging a “common fault shared with many teachers– I get too much pleasure from talking to students about what I think I know something about.” Wow!– this captures so much– and I relate to closely to this “fault.” I loved teaching what I thought I knew, and I LOVED having a captive audience who had the obligation to listen to my every word. I thought of it as my opportunity to be a political pundit (I taught US politics and government), sounding off on my opinions of current events. Now, this wasn’t my only teaching mode, but it was one of them, and just like Fried says-although it was great for me, great pleasure, it was not the best learning for my students.

Fried goes on: “I hold onto the illusion that what I have to say is most important and that the best way for others to gain from my wisdom is to listen and take heed. This is a serious potential weakness, for my talking preempts the airwaves and demands attention from an entire class of learners who might have better ways to use this time. Even as I avoid the trick of warning students, “Listen up, because some of what I say may end up on a test,” my ego is gratified when I observe students write notes as as speak.”

Better than telling, much better, is that old adage from many an English composition class: instruction should be sharing and showing, not telling. Fried goes to his anthropology 101, and takes influence from the way the !Kung people teach: “One virtually never sees an instance of ‘teaching’ taking place outside the situation where the behavior to be learned is relevant… The best answer for teachers is to replicate, to the maximum extent feasible, the ‘classroom’ of the hunter-gatherers. And that is what I observe from the most talented teachers. They are in constant motion, working with students singly, in pairs, and in small groups; briefly addressing the group as a whole; inviting, explaining, modeling, gently correcting, and sincerely affirming. They find ways for kids to help instruct others. There may not be much dancing and chanting, but more of the senses are at play than merely those involved in listening and writing.”

The book feels padded in places, and redundant in others, but it is a passionate plea to take the project of learning seriously, and commit ourselves as educators to challenging our students to learn, richly and deeply, their subjects.

In last night’s Presidential debate, Tom Brokaw asked the candidates whether they’d “fund a Manhattan like project that develops [the equivalent of] a nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy or should we fund a 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?” Great question: my answer is the latter, and I think those of us who are educational leaders need to provide homes for many of these “100,000 garages” in our schools. Much of the focus on “greening” our schools is spent of recycling and the reduction of energy consumption, but I think we need to recognize that an educational program in which kids have the opportunity and support to innovate may be the most “green” program of all.

This blog is dedicated to examining the essential 21st century aptitudes, and there is a growing recognition that the capacity to innovate may be the single greatest of them. In a previous post we looked at Estrin’s Closing the Innovation Gap (which I suggested would be better titled Widening the Innovation Window.) Today it is the more felicitously titled Innovation Nation, by Jazz musician and Harvard Business School innovation guru John Kao, (dubbed Mr. Creativity by the Economist.)

Much of the book makes the case for the centrality of innovation in the 21st economy, a point I will stipulate here. Instead, I am going to identify ten of his observations and recommendations regarding educating for innovation.

1. “It has been well, and painfully, documented in opinion polls that most US high school students would rather take out the trash, clean their bedrooms, or wash dishes than study math or science.”

2. Innovation is about more than just science and high tech. Kao defines it as “the ability of individuals, companies, and entire nations to continuously create their desired future. Innovation depends on harvesting knowledge from a range of disciplines besides science and technology, among them design, social science, and the arts. It is about new ways of doing and seeing things as mcuh as it is about the breakthough idea.”

3. Kao cites Finland as a model for its innovation success, and for its commitment to education, where schools are rarely larger than 500 students and teachers hold very high esteem.

4. “Educators have to establish an ongoing linkage between learning and purpose.”

5. I appreciate Kao’s attention to the IB curriculum as one well suited to develop excellence in high school thinking skills; he says in IB “there is greater focus on testing students’ mastery of material.” That said, his example of IB learning in action is atrocious: “your first assignment– memorize the map of Europe tonight and show up tomorrow ready to draw every country, along with ten capitals, ten rivers, and ten bodies of water.” Now, I want students to have a better sens of geography, certainly, and I can’t say that this kind of assignment is always a mistake, but to choose it as the examplar of IB schooling misses the point. Memorization of a bunch of geographical facts that can be attained at any moment via Google is not good learning– analyzing why the cities are where they are, and why certain wars have occurred, or how economies have developed differently, due to the location of rivers and bodies of water: that is the kind of thinking IB demands.

6. “We need to develop rigorous curricula that excite and challenge our children at every level… NCLB, with its focus on mandatory testing, has only worsened the problem… One of the problems of education innovation is that results need to be measured, yet measurement can be a core piece of the problem. [Quoting Sternberg] ‘The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of standardized testing is one of the most effective, if unintentional, ways we have created for suppressing creativity.'”

7. Kao cites a 2005 report, Education in China: Lessons for US Educators, which makes the following suggestions: “Make American high school curricula more globally attuned; foster global student exchanges; increase language study.”

8. “If teenagers don’t see the point of being in school, if they don’t understand how their schoolwork connects to what they care about or what they will be doing in the outside real world, they’re not likely to stay around long enough to graduate… Changes in the structure of the school day– fewer but longer instruction period, for example, instead of the current succession of hour-long classes, could help make schools ‘stickier.'” Kao then goes on to cite the example of one of my favorite schools in the world, a school I have been to often, Oakland’s Park Day School: “At this innovative school, a seventh grade math teacher introduces students to the notion of a minimum wage and the cost of living to help teach statistics.”

9. “Many schools are actively seeking curricula and textbooks that develop students’ critical-thinking abilities, as opposed to the tendency in far too many US schools to bury students in quickly forgotten details [jm: such as Europe’s ten largest rivers!]. A teacher of tenth-grade science class in Michigan, for example, assigned students to select a consumer product, describe its impact on the environment, and then come up with a way to change the product’s design and/or manufacture to make it greener while retaining its consumer appeal.”

10. And finally, Kao leans on the excellent thinking of Silivon Valley gury John Seely Brown. “Brown argues that the rapid pace of change means that students must have the capacity to learn independently, work comfortably on cross-disciplinary teams, and know how to use multiple methods for thinking through problems– mathematical, linguistic, artistic, and so on… He advocates very different learning environments, such as the classroom as architecture or design studio. ‘All work in progress is made in public.. every student can see what every other student is doing; every student witnesses the strategies that others use.. and ther is public critque, typically by the master and perhaps several outside practicioners.’ Education environments need not necessarily be physical. JSB reckons that today’s high school and college-age generation may have a deep love of learning and problem-solving that comes alive especially in the conjunction with video and computer games, not the classroom. Success in these games, he avers, requires ‘extremely good pattern recognition, sense-making in confusing environments, and multitasking… Continuous decision-making in conditions of uncertainty is the essential skill.'”

Finally, let’s step outside the topic of education for innovation and instead take a look at promoting innovation in education. Regular readers know that I have a great interest in supporting schools where innovation in teaching thrives and is the norm. Many of the points made here are not entirely pertinent to schooling, but I am intrigued by his discussion of Building Dream Spaces. I really want to support transparency, open-ness, and collaboration in our schools, believing that this is the path to better innovative school cultures. Kao discusses Mayor Blooomberg’s New York City Hall, where his desk in the center of a big open floor, nicknamed the “bullpen.” Similar to an air-traffic control center, or trading floor, it is a “bustling, open set of desks where everyone has a line of sight to everyone else.” Can this happen in schools? I love the idea that I could re-structure the administrative offices in my next school, where there are no offices (you’d have to have a conference room or two when privacy is required), and the administrative team shares a big open floor, working off of laptops and cell phones, in a constant stream of collaborative communication. Frank Boyden, legendary 66 year long Deerfield Academy Headmaster, set his desk in the midst of the school’s main entry hall, and did all his business there amidst the hub-bub. I want to be Mayor Bloomberg, with a desk amongst a true leadership team.

Here today at New Technology High School in Sacramento, a 5 year old charter school which was written up in May’s Educational Leadership issue on Reshaping High Schools.  I arrive at about 9, and students are happily milling in the courtyard, readying for the day;  I am warmly welcomed by the administrators.   They enjoy a late start Monday, so teachers can have professional time from 7:45 to 9:15.

New Tech teachers and students: welcome to the blog; thanks for hosting me today.  I invite and encourage you to respond to this by clicking on the comment line at the bottom right of this entry.  You can write your reaction to something I have written, or you can share what you think is best about  student learning at New Tech, or you can write about what you think 21st education should be.  

I am with a sophomore today, “Carol,” and we are beginning here in World Studies, a integrated World History and Literature double class, with two teachers and 40 students.   As I walk in, all students are on desktop computers, working in their journals. 

I see a “graphic organizer” (student’s term for it) sheet that students are using to compare world revolutions, honing and sharpening their critical thinking by identifying similarities and differences, comparing and contrasting.   The revolutions, from left to right, are the Glorious, American, French, Mexican, and Chinese Revolutions, and I love the worldly focus– that it is not just US and French.   From top down, the chart asks “Causes of Revolution,” “Ideas used to Justify Revolution,” and “Outcomes.”  

The teacher has told me this is a very project-based class (the whole school’s philosophy is Project Based), and now a group of four, following Carol’s lead, is working on a project organizing sheet– dedicated not to the content of the project, but to the process, things like “action items, persons responsible, next steps, due dates”.   These students are learning as much about (and accountable for) good group project process as they are the content of the topic– which is great preparation for their future.    The students are relying on each other for the project’s success, and speaking in strong terms to each other about their responsibilities.  Carol says “you could have texted me” if you needed help over the weekend.    Ten groups are focused on the task, all over the room, and the teachers are circulating, “signing off” on the project organizer sheet.   On one wall are a series of paper sheets, stating from left to right: “Initiation,” “Planning,” Research,” “Analysis,” “Construction,” “Delivery,” and “Wrap-Up.”     Carol seems to be just flying around the room, working at a pace I have rarely seen at schools, a pace you’d see in a newspaper newsroom maybe, but not so often in a high school classroom.  

Carol’s computer displays her very impressive (this is a sophomore) six page, single-spaced paper complete with pictures, maps, and links, analyzing the causes of the very recent “revolution” in South Africa, in which Mbeki was deposed in a revolt of the ANC.   Love how current and contemporary this is– all the students were given a choice among a list of contemporary political turmoils, including Venezuela, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and North Korea.    Her paper opens with a paragraph summarizing recent events in South Africa, then reviewing each of the five historical world revolutions (above), and then she explains which of these is the best parallel to contemporary SA.    Carol is speaking to her seat-mate: “Do you know how long the French Revolution was, it was heck of long!”   The students have had to integrate into their analysis 15 vocabulary words, such as “upheaval, intervention, interim, null, conciliate, dispensing, prerogative.”  Marzano tells us research has demonstrated strong evidence that vocabulary needs to be taught with serious purpose, and it is great to see that here.  Carol has chosen the Chinese revolution as her parallel, “because there are a bunch of small groups fighting each other for what were the best goals for their country.”  She goes on to identify each of the South African groups and what their goals are.  

We are writing this paper as if it is a textbook chapter, so at the end of the paper she has to write 30 “review questions,” like the ones you see in a textbook; twenty of the questions are to be lower level, Carol explains to me, and ten are higher thinking questions.   How excellent, instilling in these kids the skill of thinking about what would be the key questions of their topic.  Example lower level questions she is writing: “Why did the French people revolt?”  “What caused the social divisions in Mexico?” “What were the English people and the Parliament afraid of?”  “What are the people of South Africa blaming the migrants for?”  Her essay/higher thinking questions: “Do you agree that China relates the most clearly to the crisis in South Africa?”  “If you were a citizen in South Africa, would you be upset with the number of migrants entering your country?” “Do you think it was necessary for William to lead England to war against France?”  “Do you think a revolution in South Africa is necessary?”  These papers will be collected, at year-end, and the best selected for a school-published world history textbook, one these kids will have written (!)– which makes this work more authentic, more personal, more relevant.  Carol points out a Modern World textbook on the desk next to the computer, but tells me quickly “honestly I haven’t even read anything in it.”    Instead she has used the internet for all her research.   Isn’t this an awesome inversion: instead of students learning history by reading a textbook, they are learning it by writing one, complete with pictures, maps, and review questions.   

Looking around the room, I see forty students engaged, at work, focused.   Yes, they chitchat a bit with seat-mates, half about their work, occasionally other things, but this is what happens in any professional environment and is good for kids.   Carol is multi-tasking with the student next to her, who is looking at his online grade report and seeing what his current status is, and worrying about what it means for his relations with his parents and rewards from them.    Carol is advising him how to improve his grades and get more credit for his work.  

One teacher has gathered around him all the students working on North Korea and Venezuela, and is giving them an impromptu, just-in-time, immediately pertinent, discussion review of these country’s politics.   The kids are engaged (because they are writing about these countries right now), and dialing in to the teacher: He is asking about North Korea: “Is this government working?”  “Who is benefiting from this government?”   Venezuela now: “What type of leader is Chavez?”  “Why do you say he is a dictator?”  “What does he call himself?”  “Was he elected or did he gain power from violence?”  “Who was he supposed to benefit?” The poor.  “How?”  Discussion here of land reform.   “Who did it hurt?” Another student: “Didn’t he also take over the oil?”  Teacher explains meaning of “nationalizing the oil companies.”    Now: “what revolutions does this compare to?”  The teacher is referring to, and directing students to, their graphic organizer (which this school seems full of!) for the assignment, requiring kids to identify the sources used, the knowledge of the current country, their “understanding” of the situation, and requiring they provide “images” which represent the issues affecting the political event they are studying (good non-graphic representation!). 

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Leadership class now.   Teacher is having the kids manage a school-election process this week for a new school mascot– what this is going to entail is that some students put together the packet of information with the images and copied so it is all over campus, and then others will create a poster and flyer for all the information that is going to happen for this mascot election.   One table will do a timeline for the week, another table will be in charge of a poster of what we are voting on, this other group will create a poster for each of five options.    The room is great– lots of posters: Gandhi, Einstein, MLK, Kahlo, Paris, an Iceberg, Halfdome, Everest.  Students  are now hard at work all around the room.   Busy, engaged. 

“Carl” comes over to tell me his secretary/VP of the student council, he is a senior, and has had the role for a long time.   He tells me the school is best in its “familial environment;” he is friendly with teachers, that it is a “home” for me where he feels very comfortable.   He feels he will have connections here forever, and he thinks this is different from what happens elsewhere.    “You have to be actually engaged here, you have to be really at work.”  “In a lecture there is no reason to be engaged, like in history, you have no reason to engage unless you already have a predisposition to like history.  But here you are given a problem to solve, and everyone responds to a problem, makes you much more engaged.”   He goes on: “It is also much more social, which all humans require, to be social, and you work together socially to solve problems.”    Carl wants to go into educational policy, he tells me: “it interests me, my background is that my dad is into anthropology, my mom is a teacher, but I had sworn to myself I didn’t want to go into education until I came here to New Tech, and it totally changed me and made me really interested in educational policy.”   He is an ambassador for this school, and tells me of a time he spoke with policymakers from New Orleans and was appalled by what they said.    He thinks he will get a teaching credential, teach, and go into policy, or maybe become a journalist, teach, and then educational policy.   “I want to do the kind of stuff that New Tech foundation does, and go into politics eventually, not because I like politics but you need political and governmental support to make these changes happen: work with non-profit organizations and learn different approaches, then go into a policymaking role where I can really influence schools.”     

Carl tells me he is a “poster child” for New Tech.  When he was choosing schools, he wasn’t sure what to do, but what really influenced him is that his parents didn’t want him to go here, strongly advised him against it, which was what put him over the edge to want to come here.  They didn’t because they thought he wouldn’t thrive here because he is a traditional, rote learner, great at memorizing things, and this school didn’t cater to that kind of learning.    So they feared this would be a bad match for his learning style.    In the first quarter of his freshman year, he told his parents they weren’t giving him enough responsibility and he has been much more independent since.  “This school gives me a sense of self-awareness, more so than that of many adults I know.   It gives you that self-awareness because you really have to work with others, really depend on them and they on you, and you have to learn how to manage that, how much you can take on, how much work you can do.”    “This is the only place I have ever seen, ever, that you will get a teenager asking for more work, more things to do.”   Something that really interests me about this alternate mode, project-based learning is how good it is for kids who might have done just fine at a traditional school (doing school, playing the game of school), who would have worked hard and earned a 3.8, but wouldn’t have ever really stretched, wouldn’t have grown as much, wouldn’t have been as prepared for the collaboration and problemsolving the 21st century requires.   Carl seems a great example of this.    

I ask Carl about the hardest project he has had– and he starts laughing, with great energy as he begins telling me about his Grapes of Wrath junior year project.   They had to turn the Grapes of Wrath into an e-book book for LEP high school students in Half-Moon Bay, migrant family children– providing a two page summary spread for each of the 31 chapters; containing 50 vocabulary words and 50 historical facts; and providing an illustration for every chapter, and talking about a symbol or concept in every chapter. This makes it a total of 62 pages, for a group of three.    A “grueling project,” he says.  They then sent the e-books to another school where a teacher’s friend works with LEP students.  Carl tells me he wrote his on adobe in-design, but others used powerpoint or flash.   I admire greatly the way in which an English project has a real-world actual application, the collaboration required, and the technology integration.  When I asked the teacher about the genesis of this excellent project, she says it began when she was telling her friend, the Half Moon Bay teacher, about teaching her students the famous Steinbeck novel about migrant farm workers. Her friend responded that she greatly wished she could teach the novel to her students, from migrant farm working families themselves, but there was no way their English was good enough.  

Looking now a local newspaper article about this school posted on the wall.   The headline reads “It’s Not Geek High,” and it opens “High school has never looked so cool.  There are no bells to ring in these clean and uncluttered hallways.  No hall passes are needed either.  The classrooms are spacious and bright with natural light.”   The school is affiliated with the New Tech Foundation.    The article tells of a time a “Geo-Literacy” class prepared a presentation for the Sacramento Mayor on the West Nile virus– talk about authenticity. “The mayor needs to know everything about the virus including how it is transmitted, the symptoms, and what’s being doing for mosquito abatement.  Maps of the affected areas are important as well. The information is comprehensive, the presentations creative. Students are creating everything from West Nile raps to powerpoint presentations… This is where high school meets the real world.  New Tech offers few electives and no AP courses… The goal for all New Tech students is to hit the ground running after high school.  Life after graduation is an on-going dialog for staff and students.  A recent visitor to the school (and there are many), asked a panel of students what their plans were after graduation, and every single one of them had a plan.” 

The Leadership classroom has a poster for its mission statement: “We as the leadership class will represent the student body as a whole, excluding no one student above another.   Therefore we resolve to communicate responsibly with each other and the student body, to involve students through encouraging school spirit, actively seeking out the opinions of others, and free thinking.   We will do this by working together as a leadership class in order to support the students, we will do this by being proactive not reactive, taking initiative and respecting all inside and outside opinions.  So that in the end school is more enjoyable for students and staff.  As a leadership class it is important to be the best we can be in order to better ourselves and others.  So that all will remember New Tech is not merely a school, it is a lifestyle.  Be Fierce! ”  An adjacent poster says “It’s Leadership; it’s like the military, they don’t care if you’re tired.” 

It’s fun to be here and see their energy around picking a school mascot, something they haven’t gotten to yet, the principal tells me, because they have been so busy and because they don’t have sports teams.    The options being considered here are Argonauts, Timberwolves, Purple Pride, and the Purple Pack.    While making a poster, a student tells me she likes it here because it is “more professional.”  I ask her what she means by that, and she explains that “there are no bells here.  You do projects, you have to do presentations, and you have to dress up to do the presentations.  It is more like the real world.”   

Students are finishing their projects, many of them gliding seamlessly from the desktop computers on which they are doing photoshop mascot designs to tables where they are painting posters.  Stacked on one table are a bunch of manuals for community emergency responder training, which I assume is another activity of this class.  

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After lunch, we have a thirty minute advisory period.  Today’s topic is what do we value–what is important to us.    The kids are split off into randomly assigned pairs, so as to widen their social circles.   First discussion question: What is the most important thing you have done in your life this year, 2008?  A student near me mentions their internship this summer at Sacramento Shakespeare, which was great because he fulfilled his internship requirement for graduation and because he learned a lot about acting and set construction.    Next:  What are the hardest and easiest emotions for you to express and why?   This question is harder– students near me venture sadness for hardest.    Next: What is something few people know about you?   Next : What do you value in a friend? Trust is most commonly mentioned.  What is something you’d like to do better?  What is a motto you try to live by?  “Life’s too short to fit in.”  “Hakuna Matata.”  What are five words a friend would use to describe you? My adjacent junior: “Collected, funny, confident, calm, athletic.”   Next: What is the greatest challenge you are facing? “Auditioning for a play– having to sing YMCA for it.”  Another student: “My sister is moving today to Texas, and taking my nephews with her, and it is hard to see them go and not knowing when I’ll see them again… And my ex dumped me.  This weekend sucked.”  Next: What do you like most about yourself?  What do you value most in life?  “Friends and family.” 

This is what is called a Super-Advisory; it meets once a week for half an hour, and is multi-grade levels, an intermingling of students from all four grades.  The other four days a week, students meet in advisory, which is just by grade level, in groups that stay together and have the same advisor for all four years of high school. 

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Onto Geometry class; everyone goes immediately to a desktop computer, and begins doing their daily “warmup” on “geocad.” It is about forty students here, with two teachers.   The warm-up requires they copy in their notes certain mathematical statements (2=2; 2+3=2+3; 2+3=3+2; 5=5), and provide a reason for the statement using their own words and the formal terms in their textbooks.  

Now the group is split into two; one goes with a teacher for “workshop,” the other stays for a project.   For this project, due next week, the students have to use Autocad to construct a puzzle, and the teacher explains quite carefully that he will be the “consultant” for groups working on their puzzle, and he explains the role of a consultant.   First, we spend time talking about what puzzle we are going to create.  My group here is going to do a word-search on the autosketch program.  The assignment reads as follows:  “Dear GeoCadd students: This year, the New Tech journalism staff is set to publish our first series of school newsletters.   The publication staff and teachers have discussed having a puzzle section for the publication.   The students of GeoCadd have been given the commission to develop a series of solitary puzzles like Sudoku or a crossword and solutions to be published for the periodic newsletter.  Puzzle and solutions submitted will be judged by the publication staff and your fellow students in a gallery walk format.    Submissions will be judged based on the quality of: 1. Instruction and Strategy Guide; 2. Solution using Statement-Reason proof; 3. CADD design of the puzzle meeting publication criteria (see rubric); 4. 20 copies of the sample puzzle for judging (presentation day).   Your team must be ready to have your entry judged on Oct. 15th, 2008, in order to be considered for publication.   We look forward to all the puzzles that will make our new publication more enjoyable!” 

Our group of three is working on this, in autosketch, and employing some excellent trial and error technique.  They have designed a box for their word search, and now putting in lots of letters trying to make it take the format they are intending.   I go around the room and check out the other projects they have already done, on display on the walls.   “Sketch-a-House” required them to become familiar Sketch-up, and conceptualize a home, build it using sketch-up, and calculate the square footage.    “Zednellim building project” has them conceptualize a high rise building using basic shapes in Sketchup, learn basic area formulas for these shapes and use them to calculate the total area of their building.    “Plot the Dot” introduces them to AutoSketch and has them work with a lot on a sloping hill, divide this lot into several smaller lots, and calculate the true lengths of the sides of their lots using the Pythagorean theorem.   “Equal Access” has them in a situation where they design access ramps for the disabled to get from one level to the next, and learn and apply trigonemetric ratios to meet required lengths and angles for their ramps.   

A poster on display throughout the campus is headed “Habits of Mind.”   For 9th grade, we have “1. Persisting, 2. Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision, 3. Managing Impulsivity, 4. Gathering Data through all the Senses.”   For 10th: “1. Listening with Understanding & Empathy, 2. Creating, Imagining, Innovating, 3. Thinking Flexibly, 4. Responding with Wonderment & Awe.”  For 11th: “1. Thinking about Thinking, 2. Taking Reasonable Risks, 3. Striving for Accuracy, 4. Finding Humor.”   For 12th: “1. Questioning and Posing Problems, 2. Thinking Independently, 3. Apply Past Knowledge to New Situations, 4. Remaining Open to Continuous Learning.” 

For the puzzle assignment, the students have a VERY comprehensive and detailed rubric.   It is broken into 40% for Math Content, with reference to particular content standards; 20% for work ethic and final project; 20% for CADD content; 5% for Written proficiency; and 5% for Oral proficiency.     Each subsection has great amount of specifics.   Our teacher, who is the “consultant” today, is checking in on students, and acting the role of a “boss” with professional employees, trying to treat students as their future supervisors will treat them, so they will be better prepared for that. 

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Now Biology.   We begin with a check-in– “how was Thursday and Friday [with the sub]?”   Students exclaim: “He was anti-computers!”  Would seem that students are expectant of regular computer use, which I like.   The teacher was away with students last week at “Forestry Challenge” in which the NT team here placed sixth out of 29 schools.    The room displays hand-written posters that resemble posters I have seen in every other room, and which clearly are the result of some school philosophy.  They are in pairs, one headed Need to Know, and the other one Knows.   For example, one Need to Know lists “partners? What’s a blueprint? What materials are provided?  How can we compare a cell to a city? What are organelles?”  The Knows next to it says: “Deliverables: 2 analogies, 1 set of cell models.  Presentation October 21st, 3 internal deadlines.” 

Students log onto their PeBL account, which all NT students use; it is headed with a logo and the saying Collaborative Learning Environment: New Technology Foundation.  They get tabs for “my school calendar,” “my mail,” “School,” and “My Classes.”  Carol click into her classes, and then to her biology entry document and downloads and saves a document into her personal files– all very easily, while multitasking in a funny conversation with her neighbor about people they like and don’t like.   Carol is looking for the rubric to download, but can’t find it– “look, there is no target.”   Just as in Geometry/CADD class, there is for this multi-day lab project a so-called “entry document,” in this case a letter to the students from Genentech corporation (on corporate letterhead stationery), laying out this work-group’s project.   Carol knows immediately what she is to do next: to prepare from this assignment her Knows and Need to Knows, and she opens a word document and begins note-taking on these topics.   The teacher reinforces: “Make sure you do good Know/Need to Know lists.”   The Genenetech entry doc. conveys to students that the company would like to “find a better way to simplify the cell components and its functions in a variety of analogies. You will need to complete the following: 1. Create a blueprint/map of the cell. 2. Create a blueprint/map of the city you will compare to the cell. 3. Choose an object to compare to the cell. 4. Make a blueprint/map of this. 5. Create a powerpoint with the functions and components as assessed in the rubric. 6. Presentation of the powerpoint.  These powerpoints will be used in our training sessions for general knowledge and understanding of the animal cell.” 

I speak to the teacher, quickly.   He says this project was originated by a teacher colleague here, and he has developed it a great deal since.  He tells me the “letter format” (Genentech) is a tool they use to make projects more authentic, but he then says that he doesn’t use the “letter” entry very often.  More often he opens with a powerpoint with an “authentic problem” which students then have to work together to solve.    He gives me an example from the previous unit of study, where he presented a forest burn authentic problem, and then students had to work together for several weeks on a restoration plan for the forest burn.   Each of four students took a different role in the project, one a hydrologist, one a park ranger, one a forester, one something else, and they then collaborated, each from his or her vantage point of expertise.    Love it. 

Our teacher uses several different Call and Response techniques for drawing class attention.  One is a callout “Se Puede,” the response being “Si, Se Puede!”  Students are volunteering the “Need to Knows” for this biology project: “What kind of presentation? How are we going to create a blueprint? What’s a blueprint? Graded by groups or individual? What’s Human Genetic info? Diagrams? What can we use for analogies?”   The kids ask about workshops, and teacher explains very clearly and emphatically that he will present as many workshops as the students request.    I am getting a clarification about this school’s format: workshops are the term here for teacher presentations, but the structure, which I love, is that teachers only provide workshops as needed, in response to student demand, when they are pertinent and relevant.  Again, a brilliant inversion; how often we see teachers present abstract information, at the teacher’s initiative, disconnected from what students are doing and without student appreciation of the value of the teacher presentation.    Instead, teachers here only present because students are requesting the information, for their immediate use, and with their clear recognition of the purpose.   Really excellent.   The teacher now begins answering some of the questions on the Need to Know, and very nicely provides samples of student work in this project from previous years. 

The teacher explains how groups will be chosen: “you all will fill out a job application, and then all applications will be anonymized.  All students will read all job applications.  We will then go down the results of yesterday’s test, and begin with the highest scoring performer, who will select his partner from the pool of job applications, and then go on down the list.”   What an interesting way to make students more thoughtful about the importance of job applications and to better prepare them for completing them.   It also gives students the other kind of experience, managerial experience, training them how to select employees from a stack of applications.  This is cool.  “The job you are applying for,” he explains, “is a cell biologist at Genotype.”     He explains then both the education required, and the salaries provided, for a cell biologist (BA and MA, $115,000).   The teacher tells me that this format of lab partner choosing (by job application) is his own design, and that for the next lab, students will apply by preparing and submitting a resume. 

I watch Carol as she completes her job application, typing into a template she downloaded from her on-line course calendar.    After the routine information, she focuses on her employment history, which the teacher suggests they complete with their experience in part-time work, volunteering, and chores.   Completing this is their homework tonight; some students email it to themselves, others download it onto a jump drive. 

1. A shoutout to you my readers: thanks for visiting. Thursday, the day I was at Tesseract and the day after I was at Head-Royce, we set a new record for hits in a day: 70! Keep on coming; Monday I am live-blogging at New Technology HS in Sacramento, and Friday at a new school in Las Vegas: The Adelson School.

2. Love this blog, from an Iowan educator, Angela Maiers. In one recent posting she answered a reader’s question:Is Sitting Still a 21st century Skill? What a great question. No, it is not! Ms. Maiers respectfully answers the question by suggesting the parent seek to communicate with the teacher, and appropriately seek first to understand, and then to be understood. The discussion that follows makes good distinctions: there are times that there needs be an expectation of quietness. But, there is no good case for requiring students of any age to sit still for any great length of time. Rather, there is a growing amount of evidence that standing and moving helps students maintain focus and remember more effectively. Requiring students to sit still derives from a transference model of education– just as it is hard to pour milk into a moving glass, so it is hard to pour learning into a moving child. But that is not how children learn, they learn by doing, by acting, by practicing. Yes, students need to be respectful of others’ learning, they sometimes need to be quiet and need to take care they are not distracting others. But we should celebrate differentiation by letting those who need to stand or move do so, and we should honor brain research by requiring all students to move as they learn with some regularity.

3. Alecia Magnifico, a friend and former colleague, now is a doctoral student at U. of Michigan. She recently wrote me to say that she is studying how students can learn by game-playing, and directed me to two sites: one called games, learning, and society, and one a blog called epistemic games. Together, they are looking at how games of all kinds, including but not limited to video/computer games, can help students do the following:

1. Develop complex, academic language in and out of schools, something our current educational system fails to do for many students.
2. Think innovatively and creatively in science and technology.
3. Become “tech-savvy” consumers and producers of knowledge with technology.

Sounds great to me; games engage kids and require great cognitive development for success. I wrote back to Alecia to tell her that among my very favorite teaching experiences was teaching 12th graders International Relations. Kissinger’s magnum opus Diplomacy was our textbook, and we read a review of the book by Simon Schama, published in the New Yorker, in which Schama told us that Kissinger’s faculty office at Harvard in the sixties always hosted an on-going board game, Diplomacy. Schama went on to tightly link the game and how one successfully played it to the principles of Kissinger’s book and diplomatic theory. Our class played the game daily, beginning each 55 minute class with ten to fifteen minutes of play, and those students were on fire. They loved the game, and quickly drew their own insights about IR from it, and they were that much more eager to learn IR history and policy in order to enhance their gamemanship. Let’s all of us educators talk more and experiment more regarding the appropriate role of game-playing in school.

4. The New York Times recently published an article about the conference of college admissions officers. Harvard Admissions Dean William Fitzsimmons previewed a soon-to-be published report on the appropriate role for the SAT in college admissions, and said, to much applause, that average SAT scores should not be indicators of the educational quality of an institution. What is called for instead is that colleges and universities become intentional, thoughtful, deliberate about how they use SAT and ACT scores in their admissions process. Don’t use them for minimum threshold cut-offs, don’t use them for National Merit qualifying, don’t underestimate the impact of expensive test prep opportunities that only a select elite has available to them. Let me build on the article and report to say we have to go further and find new ways to evaluate student readiness for university in the way Tufts Dean Robert Sternberg calls for: the skills and qualities of resilience, responsibility, reasoning, of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity. The 21st century requires critical thinking, problem-solving, and innovation skills: let’s select for these things, and not narrowly limit our criteria to SAT testing!

2:30
Humanities class; we open with a puppet performance by three students.   It is a creation myth, the dramatization, with a dialogue between a god figure and the earth itself. After the 5 minute presentation by three students, the teacher asks them to tell the story of their play, and explicate it.  Students are now writing in their journals– usually these are “warm-ups,” but today, coming mid-way through class, they are “cool-downs.” Regular readers know I am a big fan of taking class time for students to write and consolidate their thoughts in their own words, and that one brain research book likes this practice so much they call the activity “dend-writes.” This is the assignment: “What are differences you noticed between the myth your group performed and Greek mythology (either Prometheus or other stories you remember reading from summer reading.)”

The student sitting next to me asks about my project and then tells me she learns best when she gets to research things herself, look up information, do the digging, and then puts thing in her own words. She adds that “hands-on” things really help too.

Now, our teacher is using the white board to organize the ideas, setting up a chart of comparing the myths of the Greeks and the “others.” Identifying similarities and differences is research supported best practice for learning; here the ideas are nicely coming from the students, who are doing the thinking here. Students have also been distributed graphic organizer sheets for organizing their notes in analyzing the myths. One student observes that in Greek myth man has been provided intelligence and independence, but in the myths of others the purpose of man is to serve the gods. Lots of good thinking here– in Greek myth we find a deeper sense of tragedy, in Greek myth there is more ongoing interaction of Gods and men than in other myth. “You guys rocked this activity,” the teacher tell us–“Kudos to you, you identified on your own all of the essential components.” Nice, specific, concrete, praise and reinforcement. She goes on to tell us this chart can serve as a brainstorming pool of ideas to draw upon for their upcoming compare and contrast essays. The teacher suggests they choose how to do their pre-writing: you could use a Venn Diagram, or a chart like this one today, you could do a traditional outline: I like that the students can choose what works for them best, and I like her helping students recognize and appreciate there are multiple pathways to a solution. And of course, the emphasis on non-linguistic representation is great.

Now students have laptops open, and are beginning to take notes from the teacher’s powerpoint presentation, but before she begins, she coaches students on some particular note-taking techniques. This is great, that she does so, and something that needs to happen much more often in high school classrooms generally. She is using the projector to display on the whiteboard, and the presentation is nicely interactive. One slide says “What sorts of things do myths explain? What might they teach us?” Rather than telling us, she has us think about it first, and then offer their ideas. A nice little reference to the “essential questions” which they are pursuing in this course, which I appreciate, the Wigginsian conceptual reference. The teacher is showing us a framework for two column note-taking; again, a good, pro-active measure to teach explicitly techniques for note-taking (another best practice instructional technique endorsed by Marzano).

1:30
After lunch, in advisory. The ninth graders, in two advisories, have joined together here for this 20 minute advisory time. First, we are going over posters prepared by students after a solo hike, with lots of fun and silly quotes. One poster is headed: “I love my advisory because” and the various comments are “we are close.” “Everyone is cool.” “There are a bunch of great people.” Another poster states atop it “Favorite part of retreat”: “the people.” “Meeting everyone.” “Endurance courses and trusting people.” “Getting to know people.”

Now we are planning a dance and a Halloween Haunted House. Students respond with great enthusiasm to the prospect of building a haunted house for the middle school students. A vacant laboratory classroom is designated; tarps will be purchased for room dividers. Students are excited; they are already buzzing with ideas as they imagine their ideas for the project.

1230
Something very evident on the campus here is that the classrooms, which face an interior courtyard on two floors, all have large floor to ceiling windows adjacent to the doorway. Hence, when walking through, every classroom is on display with full visibility. I love this transparency; Tony Wagner, in his Global Achievement Gap, calls for a cultural transformation where classrooms are more like theaters rather than closets. Think of of analogous professions: surgeons operate underneath viewing platforms; lawyers must argue cases in public courtrooms. Doing so doesn’t compromise the “autonomy” of these professionals, but it does, appropriately uplift both the accountability and the sharing of best practices in these professions.

My guiding student has a study hall period, called here PAT: “Personal Academic Time.” So, I am sitting in on an eighth grade Spanish class for a time here. The teacher is using a digital project to display an outline on the whiteboard, and is using marker pens to fill in the outline with classroom discussion about Dia de los muertos.

Now I jump over to an 8th grade Science Lab– a beehive of activity over here. Working in groups, moving around the room, often standing at their tables rather than sitting, enthusiastically exclaiming their observations, they are entirely engaged by the project at hand. I ask a student what the project is, and explains they are creating, in large ziplocks, the “perfect snack.” Boxes of yummy looking Captain Crunch, M&M’s, Reese’s Puffs, Cheez-its, and Nut stand on tables all across the lab; students are measuring out weights on pocket scales to come up with the right proportions and to arrive at a tasty snack that has between 350 and 400 calories, at least 6 grams of protein, and at least two grams of fiber. To calculate the necessary ratio of snacks which in combination will generate the perfect “healthy” snack, they are using calculators and running equations with sharpened pencils.

They are allowed to eat as they measure, probably partially accounting for all the energy in this room at 12:15– never underestimate the significance of continuing to fuel student learning and activity. This is certainly an activity that they can tap into personally– few things are more deliciously sensuous to an 8th grader than snack foods, and everyone has an opinion about which snacks are best. That is a formula for relevance: topics that appeal to all senses, (these snacks come in shiny boxes, smell great, crunch, and look to this hungry observer like they taste great) and that are easy to opine and argue about!

I ask the teacher for the source of this fine lesson; she tells me she invented it entirely herself. Nice. At class-time completion, the teacher does a debrief. First question: what surprised you as you went about this exercise? Great question; she waits for answers.

11:15
Mandarin class, with a native speaker in attractive Chinese dress. This class keeps shifting gears, frequently, which I think is great, avoiding any feeling of monotony. In just the last twenty minutes the students have: read together a sentence on the board; listened as the teacher modeled this same sentence at different speeds; worked through a sheet of symbols and drawings to reinforce new vocabulary and syllables; jumped up and moved around to do quick role-playing interactive conversational scenes; engaged with the teacher with quick one on one conversations; and responded all together in a quick vocabulary run-down. The students are praised for their work today. Now the students are provided a website to download Chinese software onto their laptops– a nice use of technology.

10:45
Good morning, and welcome to my first out-of-state shadowblog. (If you are following along, please know that Live-blogs read from bottom to top, chronologically; each new section is headed by the time it was posted). Today it is Tesseract School in Phoenix; I am accompanying a ninth grader here at this one-month-old high school. One month: this is a brand new high school program, opening this year with about 20 ninth graders, built on top of a longstanding K-8 school. Perfect, being here, for one of this project’s goals is to pay particular attention to the innovations at new, young, and start-up high schools. Bay School is only in its fourth year this year, and CART in its seventh, so this is the third under-ten-year-old school I am visiting.

I arrived at campus at about 9, but have been visiting first with founding upper school head Chris LaBonte, with whom I worked closely for four years at my previous school. We walked and talked– he has a lot to say about what they are doing here, and manifests/radiates great pride in this new high school (and about the middle school program which shares the site with the new high school). He showed me the student lounge, which originally had another designated use, but he insisted students have that space; he welcomed the students to decorate it themselves, but also explained to them that nobody cleans it but the kids, and the day it must be straightened by a teacher is the day it is locked to the students. It was very orderly; these students are taking their responsibility.

Chris also told me of the balancing act he does to maintain the students’ good will and and friendliness toward him with his disciplinary obligations, and that maintaining the former while fulfilling the latter is his goal. So far, so good. I ask how he is accomplishing this, and he pointed to two things: borrowing a tip from his spouse, a therapist, he says he seeks to be always highly emotive and positive in every interaction with students, and second, he strives to be relentless honest with kids.

Moving around the campus we see the high school student rock band, jamming loudly. Chris tells me this was an important initiative his, and that the teachers here have been very supportive, even with the noise. In another classroom, some ninth graders are in drama-video class, all with MacBooks open, editing their video productions, while others are moving around campus freely, shooting scenes they have scripted– all of them displaying a fine sense of purpose and focus.