Tag Archives: 21stC

21st C teaching and learning

Update on TEDxKids@BC Excitement!

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On May 13, I posted about the excitement that a couple of eighth graders expressed about the possibility of engaging with TEDxKids@BC. One person commented on that post – Goran Kimovski, who is with TEDxKids@BC. THANK YOU, Mr. Kimovski. If nothing else even happens, I appreciate you taking time to comment, communicate, and excite! Such is a bedrock of learning, isn’t it?
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Over the past weekend, a veritable flurry of communication exchanges occurred among the two eighth-grade learners, Ms. Gough, and me (Ms. Gough and I are part of the Synergy 8 team with these two eighth graders). After about 13 prototypes of a formal communication to Mr. Kimovski, here is what the eighth graders sent…
Dear Mr. Kimovski,
    We would first like to thank you for responding to Mr. Adams’s blog post in such a quick and inviting manner. Secondly, we would like to submit a proposal for the TEDxKids conference. Please let us know what would be the best way to do that, whether it be sending our thoughts to you via email or submitting some sort of application. We’d love to talk to you via skype; anytime from 2:40 to 3:30 EST is fine on our end, what time works for you? Below is a summary of our ideas and thoughts for this conference.
    School that cultivates a love of learning:
– increased student discussion less teacher lecture
– improvement and retention rather than  learning for test and grades
– incorporating technology to reach all learners
    Over this academic year, we believe that we have grown as students and in our beliefs of what makes up good schooling and what school ideally should look like. Also, as participants of a prototype course, called Synergy, we had the opportunity to explore the concept of “ideal school” further. We would like the opportunity to let others know about what we, as students, feel about this important issue of education, and the evolution that’s necessary to better serve the needs of learners.
Thanks once again,
T. S. and S. Z.
If for no other reason (and there are many!), I am thankful for social networking media used for educational purposes. Connecting learners with passionate, critical topics for exploration and discovery and possibility…that’s what is required for innovation and improvement.
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What are you excited about? With whom are you connecting? With whom are you exchanging ideas and possibilities? Who is on your team to help push the change and improvement we desire in the world? How are you spreading ideas? What ideas are you catching that others are spreading?
Get connected. It’s about learning!

A Team of Learners Innovates Writing Workshop

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On rare occasions, I sometimes think it would just be easier to go start another school instead of working on teams of educators trying to innovate curriculum and instruction that has a long history and tradition. However, each and every day (seriously) something or someone brings me back from that relatively irrational cliff face. One of the great hallmarks of my current school – my place of work for the past 16 years – is our regular practice and willingness to analyze and consider ourselves. And I don’t mean admiring ourselves, although all people and institutions can fall into that trap periodically. No, I mean “considering ourselves” in the sense of examining our practices and asking if we can do better for the learners in our care. No matter how frustrating some issues of static inertia or dynamic change may seem, I believe we are genuinely into continuous improvement.

A few weeks ago, the chair of the English department came to see me. He said he had been thinking about what PBL (project-based learning, problem-based learning, passion-based learning, etc.) would look like in a 21st century English classroom. Now this man is a great thinker, so when he said he had been “thinking about,” I knew he had put some serious time, research, reflection, and conversation into the effort. In short, his idea for 21st century PBL in English involves the complexities and integrated nature of publishing. An idea with genius and endless potential!

What to do with the idea? Well, we work in PLCs (professional learning communities) in the Junior High. While not everyone is formally involved – YET! – it is our developing way of working…our ethos of working and learning together. So…the idea was taken to the JH English PLC and, specifically, the Writing Workshop team. Several members of this team had been thinking about potential innovations to the Writing Workshop course and its intersection with Synergy and Economics, which are two more courses in a triad of classes for our eighth graders. Now a confluence of thinking and thinkers used Steven Johnson’s “coffee house” to swirl and rift on some possible manifestations of publishing in the Writing Workshop course. What a blessing that we have four hours a week built into our work days in order to collaborate in this way. May we never take for granted that we have a developing infrastructure to get us anywhere we want to go!

Largely because we could collaborate in PLC meetings, a proposal was quickly drafted and presented to a few administrators. Largely because we have a dynamic vision statement for our work as a school, a foundation existed that practically inspired this type of curricular and instructional innovation and improvement. This week, we were able to send a letter to parents of rising eighth graders explaining that Writing Workshop would be innovating for 2011-12 in order to utilize topical or thematic electives. Here is the letter that was sent:

Today, rising eight-grade students will hear about the innovations in group homeroom, and they will be able to respond to a survey which requests their desired topic of elective focus. Now, they have a choice much greater than that which existed before in this course. Now, they will be able to develop an authentic audience through publishing work. Oh the places we could go!

Possibilities and realities enacted through the passions and determinations of a team of educators. How fortunate I am to work with these teachers! How fortunate I am to work with these learners! How fortunate I am to learn with these learners! It’s about learning!

TEDxKids@BC and a dollop of Synergy feedback!

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Assessment comes in so many shapes and sizes! Recently, I received some unexpected feedback about Synergy 8 – an interdisciplinary, community-issues, PBL class that Jill Gough and I created and piloted with eighth graders this past fall semester.

Earlier this week, as I was reading in my GOOGLE RSS feed reader (I use Feeddler on iPad), I discovered a call for speakers for TEDxKids@BC. Being a huge fan and supporter of TEDx and David Wees, I tweeted the blog-post-call-for-speakers. Thinking specifically of two or three Synergy “grads,” I called their attention to the tweet with a mention. Via direct messaging, two of the Synergy team members scheduled a face-to-face to discuss possibilities, and then one followed up with an email showing her initial brainstorming about a proposal to speak at TEDxKids@BC. I am pasting the email below, with permission:

Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2011 11:09 AM
To: Jill Gough; Bo Adams
Subject: tedx kids ideas:
tedx kids ideas:
What should school look like?
(use synergy experience as example)
– discussion and question centered
– students as teachers too
– self assessments
– improvement and retention vs. Grades
– technology integrated
– find out what students and teachers think school is and what it should be/what they want it to be
Class room environment:??? (don’t rly know, this might be a totally irrelevant or repetitive tangent…)
– respect
– student involvement instead of teacher lecturing (students as teachers too)
– using technology to appeal to all kinds of learners and learning styles
– teach how they learn, and what they want to know not just for test
– cultivate a love of learning and subject (may be far out there)
Bisous 🙂
Live, Laugh, Love
Sent from my iPhone
“Ideas worth spreading” indeed! Fourteen years old, this Synergy thinker is. Can you feel the ripples she might be causing in the way we think about education and school in the 21st century?! Whether she makes it all the way to a TEDxKids@BC talk this go-around or not, “BRAVA!” to her for taking the risk and forwarding her thinking. Ms. Gough and I are behind her all the way!

A Hiccup of IMAGINATION

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“Anyway,” said Old Wrinkly, “it might be just what this Tribe needs, a change in leadership style. Because the thing is, times are changing. We can’t get away with being bigger and more violent than everybody else any more. IMAGINATION. That’s what they need and what you’ve got. A Hero of the Future is going to have to be clever and cunning, not just a big lump with overdeveloped muscles. He’s going to have to stop everyone quarreling among themselves and get them to face the enemy together.”

As a minister-friend of mine is fond of saying, “That’ll preach.” The paragraph above comes from Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. My family fell in love with the movie this year, and my six-year old son is now reading the books. He reads to himself mostly, but he asks me to read a few pages each night. That paragraph on pages 63 and 64 really hit me. When I read it, I stopped for too long, and PJ had to spur me out of thinking to keep reading aloud. The movie and the children’s literature possess that amazing, rare quality of transcending the age of the viewers and readers – if you are paying attention, there is something profound for you…no matter what your age.

What a metaphor system exists in the story…in just that short paragraph about a Viking grandfather giving his grandson some advice about his different approach to an issue. For me, I am in the mindset to think of the dragon as school or education. We teachers and school leaders need to examine the 150 year old paradigm of school and re-think if the Prussian military model – the “overdeveloped muscles” – is the correct method for guiding the formalized learning of this iGeneration. Perhaps we need more IMAGINATION.

I certainly mean to point no fingers at anyone. When I point a finger, three point back at me. Maybe we could quit all the quarreling among ourselves and face the enemy together.

Last night, I attended the CFT Talks. The Center for Teaching hosted its Learning and the Brain Cohort for a TED-talk-style evening so that this team of teachers from Westminster and Drew Charter could share their action research projects. The event was superb and inspirational. On Twitter, you can trace the stream with the hashtag #CFTtalks. I learned so much from these “pracademics” who were meshing research and practice in their own learning-lab classrooms. At one point, two of the speakers shared two quotes:

“If students don’t learn the way we teach, why don’t we teach the way they learn?”

“If your job is to develop the mind, shouldn’t you know how the brain works?”

They spoke of “green light” and “red light” teachers. I hope you can see the summary of these terms by clicking on the image below (captured at event). In my mind, I saw the red light teachers as big, muscle bound Vikings who were trying to strong arm learning through something akin to force. I saw the green light teachers as Hiccup, the protagonist of How to Train Your Dragon – full of imagination and willingness to meet the learning dragon as a learner himself…mutually growing as a team that could synergistically thrive together. Maybe we all need a “hiccup” to cause us to draw up an unexpected breath and free the thing that defines us most as children…as the original-learner prototype – IMAGINATION. May we use it to address these changing times. May we inspire it and motivate it in our colleagues and students. May we learn together, as Old Wrinkly say, “the HARD WAY!” Together we can do this. Together we should do this. It’s about our children’s present and future. It’s about learning!

Reflecting from aFAAR

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In the Junior High, tis the season of conducting Student Course Feedback and, for some, it seems, completing Peer Visits – two of the five components of our Faculty Assessment and Annual Review (FAAR) process. Additionally, a third component of our formative assessment plan – Admin Observation – has been occurring all year. After seeing the note “re-review and process Synergy 8 SCF” on our respective to-do lists for months, Jill Gough and I have finally spent five meetings of second period reviewing and reflecting on our Synergy 8 student course feedback (SCF). Not only did we re-review the feedback to reconsider how things went during the first-semester course, but we also revisited the data in May so that we could pre-plan more effectively for the next iteration of Synergy 8. As we returned to the SCF and discussed the results, we remembered connections in the data that linked to things we read in our peer visit summaries and admin observation notes. We were reminded that student course feedback does not exist by itself. The components of our FAAR process are not intended to be isolated, siloed pieces of professional learning. They can be wonderfully integrated and whole. Also, they are not intended to be summative or evaluative – they are not judgmental pieces of professional evaluation. They are meant to be formative…lenses through which we can view our teaching and learning so as to grow and develop as educators…so that we can adjust our course.

What’s more, by reviewing and reflecting together, we enhanced our field of view and gained richer understanding from the blend of each other’s varied perspectives and reactions. During each of the five periods that we engaged in this collaborative work, we would independently review the data and write to the prompts on the narrative summary tool (“option #2”) for reflecting on one’s SCF – one reflective prompt at a time. Then, we would read and discuss each other’s responses. While this took more time than working through the reflection alone, we both believe we benefitted immensely from the writing, sharing, and dialoguing. We missed things in our individual reflections, but very little fell through any cracks by canvassing the feedback as a team of critical friends.

To share our system of feedback, we decided to use an online, cloud-storage, sharing tool called “Box.” By using Box, we could design some simple webdocs that literally show and archive the connections among the feedback and reflections. Box has a number of great features, including the ability to tag documents post comments. To view our Box-stored system of feedback, please visit the “Synergy 8 – FAAR” folder.

Soon, our next collective endeavor will be to prepare our 2011-12 Goals and Self-Assessment (a fourth component of FAAR). Because we co-facilitate Synergy 8, we intend to employ the critical friends process again as we continue to prepare for our next team of Synergy learners. The manner in which we reviewed and reflected on our system of feedback has set up and primed our ability and enthusiasm to enhance the Synergy experience for the upcoming school year.

In addition to our course-specific questions, we are also engaged in thinking about some critical learning questions for ourselves and our FAAR process (and they may be good questions for you, too):

  • Can you learn more deeply reviewing feedback with a colleague? How can we assist each other in learning more deeply?
  • Have can we build a common understanding of the needs of our learners?  How can we find a richer understanding of ourselves as teammates and co-facilitators?
  • Do you have a team of critical friends? What feedback are you collecting and considering so that you can grow?
  • Would you learn more by sharing the results of your feedback with another for reflection and co-interpretation?  How will we grow and learn together if we are not sharing our struggles and our successes?
  • What have we learned from this process that we can facilitate for our younger learners next semester? How can we model and implement a richer reflection and critical friends system as part of the course?
NOTE: This post is cross-posted at Jill Gough’s Experiments in Learning by Doing.