App-etizer: This American Life

Posted on December 27, 2011 by boadams1

During my sabbatical, when I was working as “the 40-year-old intern” at Unboundary, Alex asked me if I listened to This American Life on NPR. Even as a big fan of NPR, I had never heard of This American Life. Alex sent me a link to an episode, and I stored the link in a note-taking app.

Months later, I am now a regular listener and huge fan of This American Life. On November 5, 2011, my family adopted a rescue dog from Lookout Mountain, TN. As best as we can tell, Lucy is a cross between some kind of hound and some kind of pointer – maybe a German Short Hair. On November 6, my morning routine changed appreciably, as Lucy likes to walk near 5:30 a.m. each day.

I love walking with Lucy. Nevertheless, I was a bit reticent to give up the time that I use in the morning to read and write. So, Lucy and I walk with Ira Glass many mornings. After hooking up Lucy to her leash, I use the This American Life app to select an episode to which to listen during our walk.

The show has become a great “school” for me, and I am learning a great deal about P.I. Moms, Amusement Parks, Middle Schools, etc. What’s more, I am connecting a great deal of what I hear to other things about which I am thinking. For example, in a recent listen about a library program that puts students through a simulation of Reagan’s decision to invade Grenada, I was able to think considerably about the spectrum of project-based learning that exists. Additionally, I am also thinking a lot about the communication format of podcasting. That might be my next creative communication venture. How interesting it could be for a tribe of reporters at our school newspaper to post a series of podcasts…This Wildcat Life.

On to walk. Lucy and Ira are calling.

Tilling some soil and playing with links – some rough draft blogging to think out loud

Posted on December 22, 2011 by boadams1

Third graders at The Kincaid School in Texas are cultivating their learning in a community garden of global connectedness:

At my school the 3rd grade teachers have established a terrific blogging program for our 3rd graders. Not only do our students blog openly but they also visit and comment on other blogs. This year, a comment that a 3rd grader made on the blog of an author of a book his class was reading started a process that ended up with the author having a Skype call with the student’s 3rd grade class. [empasis added]

– Larry Kahn, http://plpnetwork.com/2011/12/21/meet-our-team-larry-kahn/

Bravo to these third grade teachers and their students for growing positive digital footprints among an authentic audience of beyond-school readers and thinkers. Such connectedness and the powerful learning that can come from such harvest are under-surface themes of @jgough’s latest post, “Integrated Studies: Gardening, Obesity, Open Source Learning.” Moreover, @whatedsaid placed the exclamation mark on the themes with her post, “What does it mean to be educated?”

Most students want to grow something meaningful by planting seeds, watering and fertilizing the sprouts, and sharing the harvest of their labors. As the students in Edna’s video proclaim – to be educated means to seize opportunities to make a positive difference in this world. We teachers should make sure that we are facilitating that “playing in the soil” at least as much as we are asking students to read from a recipe book. In my opinion, students should be doing the gardening and recipe creating much more than just following others’ recipes. Students deserve to be creators, not just consumers. In so doing, they just might learn better to feed themselves as lifelong gardeners and inventors…I mean learners – lifelong learners.

An integrated, PBL course idea – Past, Present, and Future of USA Schooling

Posted on December 10, 2011 by boadams1

I wonder…

Why don’t we devote more time and attention in school to studying schools? What if there were a course akin to “Past, Present, and Future of USA Schooling?” Could mixed-aged classrooms take on various design challenges for improving schools? Could such design challenges lead to learners studying the present state of schools in the U.S.? Could such a course create a “need to know” about the history of schooling in the U.S.? Could such a course integrate lessons that would typically be relegated and segregated to English, math, language, science, and history?

What might happen to the rate and effectiveness of school change-and-growth if we approached the issue in such a way?

Like ripples in a pond, students could better understand the WHYS and HOWS and WHATS of one’s own school. How does a school decide on curriculum? How does a school educate its own faculty? How does a school business office work? What are the issues that my school faces in terms of sustainability and campus planning?

Then, the next ripple in the pond may be to understand the school landscape in one’s own city and/or state. Schools from various states could collaborate on building a collective understanding of schooling in the U.S. How did charters develop? Why has homeschooling grown so much in the last decade? Imagine the collective database, resources, and growing understanding. Imagine guiding students to employing such scientific methods to the understanding of one’s own school, as well as to schools in more general terms.

From such a foundation, what might the next generation of school leaders achieve?!

“This is so next level!” Video Team-Teaching in #Synergy

Posted on December 8, 2011 by boadams1

Twenty-four, eighth-grade synergists are working in six discreet groups – their projects originated from the data-mining of over 300 observation-journal blog posts that they collected. The projects are:

Graffiti (is it art, vandalism, both? how can we use it for good?)
Nancy Creek (what can we know and understand about the creek that runs through our campus?)
Crusade for Cleanliness (how could organizational-flow changes enhance the stewardship in our dining hall?)
Obesity (how can we improve the alarming issue of obesity in American youth?)
Sleep (what impact on school do our sleep habits create?)
Habitat for Humanity Spring Fling (how could a school fair raise money and awareness for homelessness?)

Because Jill Gough, one of the two Synergy facilitator-coaches, was presenting at the Learning Forward Annual Conference on Monday, Dec. 5, she was in Anaheim, CA. The other facilitator-coach, Bo Adams, was in Atlanta, GA. Having grown accustomed to and convinced of the viability of team-teaching in such a project-based course, Bo and Jill felt some anxiety about having only one facilitator present to serve best the six groups during this critical phase of their project development.

[In your mind’s ear, cue that quintessential cartoon superhero intro theme.] Never fear…video conferencing is here!

As we think about preparing students for a work world that will most likely include significant use of such tools as iChat, Facetime, Skype, and other video “conferencers,” then it seems natural to practice such work processes. Perhaps students already use such tools socially, but school could help coach the use of such tools for more formal, business-like purposes. Additionally, we should all be thinking more about how we can invite various co-teachers into our classrooms – to break down the walls that seem to preserve the arcane model of one adult per group of classroom students. Practice leads to enhanced proficiency. On Monday, Dec. 5, Synergy engaged in some additional practice of tearing down those 20th century classroom walls. Who knows who else we might next invite to teach with us…from the exterior of our learning space’s four physical walls.

As one student-learner can be heard exclaiming in the video: “This is so next level!”

[This post is cross-published at Experiments in Learning by Doing.]