Category: Best Practices

The North Star of Great Learning

Moving the RockThis summer a group of educators in my school district did a book study of Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education by Grant Lichtman. I was not an original member of the book study, but when that group came to an end, they decided they wanted to keep meeting, and that they wanted to grow the group – so, I was invited to become a member. That group is called the Innovation Task Force. Since I felt a bit behind the other members, I decided to read the Moving the Rock. I picked it up and read it in just a couple of days (I could have finished it in a day if I let myself!).

When discussing the first of his seven levers, Lichtman used the phrase the “North Star of Great Learning.” In the book, he suggests that defining that North Star is one of the first ways that we can create the demand for better schools. So, what is our North Star? As a way to help define what that may look like at our school, we spent a portion of our first staff meeting talking about what great learning looks like. We began our meeting with the following image:

Learning
Thanks to Susan Drumm for creating this image.

We asked each teacher to respond with a single word. We then created a word cloud from the ideas that were shared by our staff. This is what we came up with:

Opening Day Word Cloud

I think that’s a pretty impactful list of words to describe what great learning looks like, and it definitely helps us as a building chart the plan for what deeper learning should look like in our building. It seems that if this is what we believe, it should serve as the foundation of the North Star of Great Learning.

BestPracticesModel_HSE21_standalonegraphic_2017_05_24As a district, we also have our Instructional Framework, Called the HSE21 Best Practices for Teaching and Learning (it can be found to the right). As I look at this framework, and compare it to the words that we as a staff selected to define great learning, they seem very well aligned.

I wonder at times though, how often we reflect on what is happening in our classrooms on a daily basis compared to what our beliefs about great learning actually are. Is our practice meeting what we say that we want great learning to look like? I wonder if we were to ask our students about learning in our classrooms what they might say about our daily practices.

I’ve often heard leaders talk about the idea of cognitive dissonance, that idea of being a little bit uncomfortable with what you are doing. Of being ok with others questioning our practice. Of understanding that we are all here to create the best possible learning environment for our students (and sometimes that will not be the easiest path for the adults!). Of understanding that if you are completely comfortable in all you are doing, you probably aren’t growing that much.

During our last meeting as the Innovation Task Force, one of the colleagues in the group shared that instead of thinking about how to prepare our students for when they graduate from high school, maybe a better thing to think about is how do we prepare them for life at 22. When we think about graduating from high school as our end goal for students, we let ourselves off the hook for helping them be ready for what they need to know in those first couple of years AFTER they graduate from high school.

Raise your hand if there were things that you didn’t understand about the world when you graduated high school. I can assure you that my hand is up too! Creating a transformational learning environment will help our students to see that learning is something that can happen anytime and anywhere, not something that is done to them while they are sitting in a classroom.

Just like the mind shift that it takes to transfer our classrooms from the traditional learning environments that most of us grew up in towards transformational learning environments who implement the 4 Cs on a daily basis (Creative Thinking, Collaboration, Creativity, and Communication), we have to shift our thinking about what it is that we are truly preparing students for.

The next chance you get, ask your students about the favorite things that they have done in your classroom so far this year, or ask them to tell you what great learning should look like. Reflect on the things they share with you. Create more learning opportunities like that! Then, share their responses in the comments below. I’d love to hear from our students.

Relationships matter

I think you all know how much I value relationships in the classroom. I’m a firm believer in the idea that no significant learning can happen without a meaningful relationship. Earlier this week, I was listening to one of the episodes of the podcast “We’re Doing It Wrong”, and it was a reaffirmation of that belief.

In the podcast, the host Joseph Pazar (a middle school math teacher) was interviewing the authors of Angels and Superheroes, Jack Jose and Krista Taylor. The conversation covered a wide variety of topics including relationships, behavior, and student misbehavior (I included a link to the podcast below).

I’m guessing that you’ve all heard the great TED Talk from Rita Pierson, “Every kid needs a champion” (if you haven’t, take 8 minutes right now and watch!), and in that talk, she shares the wisdom that kids don’t learn from people they don’t like. Krista Taylor takes it a bit further. She says:

Students need to like you,

I heard that quote and then rewound to relisten to that section of the podcast. Leading up to this comment, Taylor shared that most teachers don’t go into teaching because they want their students to get a good test score. More likely, they go into teaching because they want to:

  • Work with students
  • Build the whole child
  • Have social emotional learning happening
  • Raise responsible citizens
  • Raise students who care about each other and their community.

To accomplish any of these goals, and so many others that might come to mind for you when you pause to think about why you became a teacher, it takes meaningful relationships! Meaningful relationships aren’t built just because you make class fun, they don’t happen naturally for most kids. True relationships take work! So, how can we go about building those real relationships with our kids? Here are a few ideas for ways to build relationships:

  • Get curious and ask questions – Find out what they like to do when they aren’t at school. Engage with them on their interests, even if it isn’t an interest of yours!
  • Take your students outside of the classroom – I loved my 6th grade class and teachers. I remember doing a camping trip on the property behind our school one night. I remember walking from school into the neighborhood next door where one of my teachers lived to have a picnic. Those were powerful events to build relationships with my teachers and with my classmates! I can’t tell you much about what we did during class time, but I definitely remember those fun moments outside of the classroom. And I still think fondly of both of those teachers.
  • Listen to your students concerns and pause to re-examine ourselves – the reality is that implicit biases creep into all of us! And the more tense a situation may be, the worse our decision making process becomes. When students share concerns about something you are doing in the room, hear them out and reflect. It’s tempting to defend our actions, but if it’s bothering one brave soul enough that they tell you, there may be a few more who feel the same, but aren’t brave enough to share!

As the conversation in the “We’re Doing It Wrong” podcast went on, Jack Jose shared that when we work to build relationships, we also have to:

“Trust that the child in front of you wants to behave, wants to succeed, wants to do well… then, work with that child to get past those gaps so that they can be successful”

If we think back to what we’ve learned from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, misbehavior from a student is a form of communication. It lets us know that some need is not being met. Most likely, the missing need is a feeling of belongingness. When we don’t fulfill that need, they continue to misbehave. Our punishments might redirect that need in the short term, but it will not solve the overarching need that is creating the misbehavior.

Let’s think about a typical situation, and how we might respond:

A student in your class is often off task. He talks to his neighbors and generally goofs around. Occasionally, that student will raise his hand to answer the question, so we call on him, excited that he wants to participate. We praise his answer to the question hopeful that it will instill a greater desire for participation. The next day, he comes in, goofs around, and causes a disruption. You schedule a conference with his parents. On the day of the conference, you and the parents gather with the child around the table and share that the student is “so bright” and capable of so much more. In the meeting the student commits to doing better. The next day in class, you see a little improvement, but later that week the behavior returns to what you were seeing prior to the conference.

Now, let’s look at this from the perspective of the student who is misbehaving:

  • The student has a need for the feeling of belonging. During class he gets to talk with the friends he likes, they laugh at him and make him feel good.
  • He cherry picks the questions that you ask to only respond to the ones he feels confident in because he knows that he will get it right, then he gets your praise for being bright, fulfilling yet another need. And do we really know that he’s that smart if the child is cherry picking the questions he wants to answer?
  • He creates a situation where there are several adults (most of whom he likes and trusts) around a table telling him how bright he is.
  • He returns to class and goofs around again because that fulfills his need to belong with the other kids.

Our traditional methods do not fulfill the needs that this child has – only a true and meaningful relationship will allow that child to have the sense of belonging he needs to help stop the misbehavior. Keeping that kid in the room, making them do the work, holding them to a high standard is not “letting them off.” In actuality, kicking them out of class or sending them to the office is letting them off because now they don’t have to do the work, they will get one on one attention – the secretary will talk to them about what happened, maybe the counselor will too, another teacher might talk to them, and they get one on one attention from the principal or assistant principal. These all give the student attention, and may allow him a sense of belonging with those people, but it doesn’t lead to that sense of belonging in the classroom where he needs it most!

A more powerful method – have the student complete a reflection form on what they’ve done and have them return to class when they are finished. Maybe that’s done in the back of the classroom, maybe it’s done in another teacher’s classroom, or maybe it’s done in the hallway. By sending them out we all get a break from one another which allows us to re-regulate, the kids reflect on the situation and process that, and then when they walk back into the classroom, they will most likely be ready to learn. The child sees that misbehavior isn’t going to lead to his needs being met, and they will trust that you will treat them fairly, and that trust helps give a sense of belonging.

What are your thoughts? How does relationship building help you? What are some of the ways you build relationships? Share out your best strategies so that we all can have some new ideas!

We’re Doing It Wrong Podcast: http://www.weredoingitwrong.com/podcast/6-angels-and-superheroes

 

Teaching in the technology age

Out of curiosity, how many of you remember when the first iPhone came out? Did any of you have one? In case you have forgotten, that first iPhone looked like this:

iPhone 10th anniversary

In case you have also forgotten, that beauty of a phone was released to the public in 2007. Now I must admit, I did not have the original iPhone. If you recall, when the iPhone first came out it was only available on AT&T, and I still had a contract with Verizon – that meant I had to wait. But I remember friends who rushed out to get that first iPhone. And they were blown away by how amazing it was.

So why am I bringing up the release of the iPhone? If you haven’t been paying attention to the birthdates of your students, you may not have noticed it, but most of our 5th and 6th graders here at RSI were born in 2007 or later. Think about that. Most of our students have never lived in a world that didn’t have an iPhone! The kids we are teaching truly are digital natives. They have had the entire world at their fingertips their entire lifetime.

We are born without knowledgeLet’s contrast that just a bit with human history. I’ve recently been reading Walter Isaacson’s fascinating biography Benjamin Franklin. There were a lot of things that I knew about Franklin, his role as an inventor/scientist, his time as a member of the Continental Congress, and that he’s a writer and printer. I don’t know that I fully realized what a world traveler he was. I also did not quite realize just how curious he was – throughout his life he found wonder in the world around him, and spent time trying to learn more.

One of the things that being alive in the 1700s allowed Franklin, and his contemporaries, was time alone with their thoughts. There weren’t distractions like television, radio, podcasts, phones. I mean, when he wanted guidance from back home while working on the treaty for the Revolutionary War, he had to hand write a letter, sometimes multiple drafts, send it on a ship back to America, and wait, typically for several months, for a response. Think about how much time he had to just wait and think!

Now, when do your best ideas strike you? If you’re anything like me (and brain research says that most humans probably are), it happens in your moments of rest and solitude. I can’t tell you how many times a great idea comes to me in the shower, only to be lost by the time I get out and have a way to write it down. The truth is, there is constant thinking happening in our minds. Sometimes it’s self-talk, sometimes it’s planning, but other times it’s when we get our best ideas. How often do you spend hours laboring over something, not quite sure how to make it perfect, only to become frustrated and walk away? Then, in a free moment, it suddenly clicks and the solution you’ve been looking for is right there.

Our students don’t have enough opportunities to just wonder, to think, to get bored and then allow creativity to get them out of their boredom. Most digital natives are not used to that feeling. They are used to getting what they want when they want it. And as such, they need to be better trained to find their creativity and curiosity.

What does that mean for us in the classrooms? Sometimes we as educators get caught up in the idea of “I have to cover…” so we rush in, we swoop them up when they might get a little stuck, we solve the problem for them instead of allowing them the time and space to solve the problem on their own.

Our students, in their long term though, need to be able to work through problems and solve them. The reality is that there are a lot of things that the devices they have grown up with can do for them, but there are also things that those devices can’t do. In his book What School Could Be, Ted Dintersmith spends time in the first chapter talking about the digital revolution and the rapid growth in computing power. While computers are getting exponentially faster every year, and at some point, computers most likely will surpass the average speed of the human brain, they haven’t yet been able to do the creative problem solving that humans can do. Computers can only solve problems that they have the information and programming for. Dintersmith shares that “Children need to learn how to leverage machine intelligence, not replicate its capacity to perform low-level tasks!” The ideas that allow them to learn this skill only comes from time spent wondering or practicing creativity.

When you try to think about ways to integrate curiosity and wonder, take the topics you are learning about in your classroom. Create provocations for students to wonder about that tie to what you are learning about. Allow the learning in your classroom go sideways just a little bit because of the “What if…” questions that students ask. When we feed into their wonder, we tell them it’s ok to be curious.

Then, provide them with opportunities to be creative! On Wednesdays, our media center has become the hub of creative activity with makerspace activities going on. This feeds the creative mind and soul! It helps our kids to understand that technology is not always the answer! Allow every child to see themselves as creative in some way! Not only does it turn on that part of the brain, it’s a lot of fun for you too!

 

What are your thoughts? How have you integrated creativity and curiosity in your classroom? What have you learned from your students when you take that time to dive into their wonders? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Change requires connectivity

The innovatorsLast summer, I read the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. As a brief description, the book was about the work of the many different people who played a role in the development of the computer and internet. For most of us, when we think of innovation, we think of people like Franklin, Edison, Bell, Morse, Jobs, or Gates, but in the case of the digital revolution, most of the work was not the creation of any one person. Instead it was the work of many who connected, collaborated, and iterated. Someone like Steve Jobs is seen as the creator of the iPhone, but really he took several technologies that already existed and combined them into a form factor that connected with a market.

Creativity IncThis past spring, I read the book Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, and wrote a book about the steps that they take in order to build a highly functioning, creative environment that is able to churn out movies that people love (think Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. Finding Nemo, and more). One of my big takeaways from this book is that the amazing work that occurs at Pixar happens because of 2 things: teamwork; and a willingness to accept feedback from those around you, whether positive or negative, and understand that it’s being shared in the hopes of creating something better.

Now, as many of you know, this blog is geared toward education. You may be wondering what the creation of the digital revolution or the work that occurs at Pixar have to do with what happens in our schools on a daily basis. I’m hoping to make that connection here today!

The connection that I can make between The Innovators and Creativity, Inc. has to do with the collaborative networks that existed between the creators. As an educator, each of you is a creator EVERY DAY. You create the experiences that happen in your classroom. You decide on what the room looks like, you decide if the lights are on or off, you decide if there is music or not, you decide how the desks are arranged when kids walk in. Each of these little decisions plays a role on the learning environment, and those are just the decisions you make BEFORE the students walk in. Think about all the decisions you make during the lesson! None of you are ever allowed to tell me that you “aren’t creative” because you create EVERY SINGLE DAY!!!

Think for a moment about your existence as an educator. You work close to several other amazing teachers every day, but there’s one thing I know about teaching because sometimes I did it when I was still in my classroom: it’s easy to shut the door, do your own thing, and not worry about what’s happening around you. Education is one of the careers where we often live in silos – our classrooms, our content area, our team, our grade level, or our campus.

But there’s one thing that books like The Innovators and Creativity, Inc. hopefully remind us: innovation doesn’t happen inside of a vacuum, it happens with collaboration, teamwork, and connections.  With all the amazing educators and schools, we still at times fail to create those critical connections for collaboration that lead to real innovation in education.

This is why I see such value in what happens during our Professional Learning Community (PLC) time. It’s an opportunity for you to come together with your colleagues, to analyze the data your seeing, to talk about what’s working in classrooms, and then to be able to test out whether or not that works in your own room. It’s a chance for you as a team to take risks, to walk out on a ledge as a team, and try something new because as a team you feel it will benefit the students in your room. We all know there’s safety in numbers! We need to see PLC time not as something that’s done to us, but as a form of self and team-directed professional development with regular opportunities to collaborate and communicate.

But if we want to create the amazing innovative environments that our students need in order to learn and grow, we have to be ready and willing to connect on an even grander scale. If you are looking for other ways to learn and grow, there are lots of informal options out there. Things like Twitter chats, EdCamps, and blogs are free and easy way to seek out like-minded educators who are doing amazing things in their classroom. Or there are more formal ways to learn about innovation in the classroom. I recently learned of the Deeper Learning Network (click here to check out their website) that shares tons of resources for innovative ideas in you classroom. Some of the things you can find information about include: Project-Based Learning, Blended Learning, Inquiry-Based Learning, Authentic Assessment, and so much more!

Now, some of you may be wondering why we need to change. Well, the reality is that thanks to the work of the innovative people that are discussed in Isaacson’s book, many of our students are used to on demand learning, are used to making choices in what they want to learn, and how they learn. The digital revolution has changed the game for learners, which means we have to find ways to change the game as teachers to meet their needs. I think we all would agree that our students today are different than the students that were in our schools just 5 years ago. They are digital natives, and many know how to find what they want to know when they want to know it.

If we as educators don’t adapt to the new style of learning, our learners are going to leave us behind. If they don’t see the relevance of what they are doing, if they don’t get choice and voice in their learning, they will not engage. I continue to believe that the HSE21 Best Practice Model is our North Star that gets us to the learning environments that will work for our students. And the best way for each of us to learn and grow towards those best practices is through meaningful collaboration. As one of my favorite professors at IU repeated almost every day “Learning is social” and we are all learners too!

BestPracticesModel_HSE21_standalonegraphic_2017_05_24

Continue to seek out ways to collaborate. Take a moment to be vulnerable and ask a PLC team member to come observe one of your lessons to give you feedback. If someone asks you for feedback, be willing to give it. We ask our students to be vulnerable and a little uncomfortable every day because that’s where the learning and growth takes place. Why can’t we expect the same of ourselves?

What are some of the things you do to continue to grow? Is there a preferred method for learning from others that works best for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Running through the sprinkler

As I sit writing this, it’s Sunday afternoon. Sunday’s in my family are often about getting work done – chores around the house, prepping for school, groceries, etc. To fit with that norm for our family, today was no different. This morning my wife Diane, an amazing kindergarten teacher, needed to go over to school to do some prep for her week. I needed to mow the lawn and then get to the grocery store. The kids had no real responsibilities, so they were going to stay home with me. I knew that if I left them inside, even though they said they were going to read, it would turn into a Netflix binge of Dinotrux, or Glitter Force, or something of that nature. I wanted them to be active, so I convinced them to come outside and play while I was mowing.

As I did the front yard, they had out their big wheels, their stilts, and their pogo stick. They were working on creating an obstacle course in the driveway when I finished the front lawn and grabbed the sprinkler to try to deal with a couple of brown spots. As I starting working on the side yard, Lainey came running up to me and asked “Can we run through the sprinkler?”

I started to say no, I mean they had just gotten dressed, we had to run to the grocery store after I mowed, and Lainey was going to a birthday party for the afternoon. But then I looked at the excitement in her face – how could I say no?

IMG_5242.JPGFor the next thirty minutes, while I mowed the rest of the lawn, Lainey and Brody were in heaven with that childhood joy that goes with running through a sprinkler. I may have even let myself get sprayed because I was jealous of the obvious fun they were having.

Seeing the joy on their faces as they played in the sprinkler got me thinking about classroom conditions. How often, when you scan your room, do you see the look of joy that would accompany a kid running through the sprinkler? When I reflect on my own teaching practices, it probably happened far less than I would have wanted it to.

Last week I participated in an online, free, open to anyone PD called Hive Summit. It was put on by Michael Matera, the author of Explore Like a Pirate, and the front man for the #XPlap community. The gist of the Hive Summit was to bring together amazing educators to share little tidbits of knowledge in short, easily digestible conversations between Michael and various guests to provide ideas to help us start the school year off with a bang!

The last session of the Hive Summit brought in Dave Burgess, author of Teach Like a Pirate, and easily one of the most engaging presenters I have ever seen. Towards the end of the conversation, Michael asked Dave for some practical things that we can do right away. Dave started talking about the beginning of the school year. He suggested that we should “Invest time in the front end to build a community, to build rapport, and to create a place that kids are desperate to come back to the next day.” We don’t accomplish what Dave is suggesting by spending lots of time on procedures. Those can come later. We need to hook them, get them excited, get them wanting to be in your classroom, get them banging down the doors to come to school!

Dave went on to share a couple of his favorite activities to accomplish those goals. The first is the Play-Doh lesson. Students walk in to a container of Play-Doh on a paper plate in the center of their desk, and when ready, they are asked to create something out of the Play-Doh. The goal is to create something that is in some way representative of them. Let them know up front that when time is up, you are going to come around, show the class their object, ask a couple of questions about it, and then have them share their name. Let them know in advance that they will not have to stand up or come to the front of the room, and the process will take less than 30 seconds. Letting kids know what to expect will alleviate some stress that comes with any type of getting to know you activity. Give students 10 minutes of work time, and while they are working, walk around and chat with them in an informal way.

This is great because it gets your students creating right away. We live in a world where information is at our fingertips, and knowing things doesn’t make you successful. In today’s world, it’s about what people can do or make. When we show kids that’s what we value right off the bat, they will be more likely to continue to do and make things when asked.

Another activity that Dave loves is the plane crash on a deserted island lesson. 10 people are stranded on an island, and when a rescue helicopter shows up, it only has room for 5 people. Students are given a list of the different people, split into small groups, and asked to work together to come to a consensus on who should be rescued, and who has to be left behind (click here for a shared google doc with the instructions and list of people). Again, this activity immediately gets kids to collaborate, connect, and create to solve the problem.

Activities like this allow kids to engage right away, and think about how much more excited your kids will be about tasks like this instead of a more traditional lesson. All of us bring our own special skill set to the classroom, and we all have the ability to create learning environments that kids will be excited to return to day after day. You get to decide if the lights are on or off when students enter. You get to decide what shows up on your screen or board. You get to decide what is sitting on your students’ desks when they come in. When we pause in our lesson planning to think about those hooks at the start of our lesson, we’re able to create more of those “Running Through Sprinkler” kind of moments for our kids.

If you are looking for more ideas for amazing engagement strategies, check out Teach Like a Pirate (I linked to it on Amazon above), or if you’d like, I’ll loan you my copy (as long as you don’t mind my highlights and notes in the margins). If you feel overwhelmed by a book, look for Dave Burgess on YouTube or Twitter, or check out the #tlap Twitter chat on Mondays at 9:00 pm eastern. There are lots of small resources that will help you create lessons that engage students on the sprinkler level!

Let me know if you’re planning to try something new to create a sprinkler moment in your class! I’d love to see it, or talk to your students about it. I think we all want joyful classrooms! How will you bring that joy to your room?

IMG_1266

Innovation Exchange 2018

This past week I had the opportunity to participate in an awesome professional development experience put on by 2 amazing school districts – Hamilton Southeastern Schools (my home district) and Noblesville Schools. Each day was filled with a morning keynote, followed by tons of choices in concurrent sessions. Anytime I attend something of this nature, I feel it’s successful if I can take at least one idea from each session that I can implement into my practices. As I look at my own notes today, I have so many more ideas than that, but I want to share a few of my key takeaways.

Our opening keynote came from Mark Wagner, President & CEO of EdTech Team. During his keynote he asked us the question “What do you want to learn?” and then challenged us to think about whether or not we were spending time asking our kids this same question. While we have standards to meet, that doesn’t have to be done always based on our expert decisions as the teacher. Wagner argued quite convincingly that learning will be more meaningful for our students if we share with them our goals, what we need them to learn, and then ask them how they want to learn those skills. Wagner encouraged us to think of the changing role of educators, and rather than seeing ourselves as the keepers of knowledge, who then dispense that knowledge to our students, we should start thinking of our role as that of a connector.

Within our own community, there are people who have skills and experiences that are much greater than any of us could ever hope to be able to share with our students. Our job, in part, is to connect our students to the experts they need in order to learn the skills they want to learn.

more than I should

During the second day I had the privilege to listen to Luke Reks, a recent graduate of Noblesville High School. Luke shared with us his experiences in the Innovations class he participated in during his sophomore through senior years of high school. In that time, Luke connected with filmmakers, CEOs, and philanthropists. As part of his learning, he interned on the set of a low budget film starring James Franco and was able to network with Hollywood producers and directors. In a partnership with one of his classmates, Luke is now working to build a school in Africa that will serve youth, bringing them access to learning, and including the Innovations model of learning within its curriculum. Luke reminded me that opportunities are everywhere for our students. As teachers, sometimes we just have to get out of the way of the passions of our learners, and they will take their learning much further than anywhere we can hope to take them.

Also on the second day of the conference, Kerry Gallagher was the keynote speaker. After listening to her keynote, I made it a point to attend one of her concurrent sessions as well. Her keynote was on the effects of technology on our brain, while her concurrent session talked about best practices related to screen time. The information shared in both was based on research from sources that I know and trust – Common Sense Media and the American Association of Pediatrics to name just a couple. There are many people who spend time talking about the bad aspects of screens, and there’s plenty of research and opinion that support the drawbacks of screen time, but as educators, we have to also remember a couple of important things about technology. First, technology is an opportunity that provides our students access to resources, tools, and experts that would never be available to them without the use of technology.  Along with that, Gallagher reminded us that increasingly our students will need to be able to interact with people through the screens in front of them.  Google, Airbnb, Uber, and other transformative companies require their employees to be able to interact with customers through screens.  How are we teaching our students to interact appropriately?

If a student’s first time to interact with a screen is as a preteen using an iPhone with unlimited access to the rest of the world, they won’t have the tools to be able to use that power responsibly. This has me thinking about the importance of digital citizenship lessons for even our earliest learners. As a district that is 1:1 in all grades, kindergarten – 12th grade, we can’t wait until kids are in the middle grades to begin talking about appropriate ways to interact through screens. We can use developmentally appropriate apps to help our students learn those skills beginning at the earliest levels.

Overall, there were so many great takeaways from the 2 days, these are just a few of the highlights for me. Did you attend? What were your main takeaways? Do the thoughts above have you reflecting on your own practices? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Student apathy: #IMMOOC Week 3

During a recent #IMMOOC YouTube Live event, the topic of student apathy came up among the presenters. For any educator who has tried to do something innovative in their classroom, you probably know what this looks like – that student that is really good at “playing school”, but when you give them a task that is innovative, they just struggle to even get started. These are the kids that might ask you for a worksheet in place of the innovative student inquiry project that you are beginning to work on. John Spencer started talking about his take on students who show apathy about those innovative tasks. While I didn’t capture his quote exactly, I tweeted out the general idea of what he shared:

Spencer is a former middle school English teacher, and currently a professor working on training our future teachers to come into the classroom ready to teach in innovative ways. In the book that Spencer co-wrote with AJ Juliani, Launch, Spencer introduces the design cycle he used in his classroom to help his students become creative thinkers and problem solvers.

For those of you who have read my blog in the past few years, you know that I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the skills that our students will need in order to be successful in the future. In the current model of education that still exists in a lot of classrooms, there can be a lot of focus on assigning and grading.

When we focus narrowly on assigning and grading, we can miss out on the learning

The problem, as Katie Martin points out above, is that when we keep our focus on assigning and grading, we lose sight of actual learning. Think back to your most impactful learning experiences – it could be anything that you are passionate about – for me I think back to learning how to ride a bike. I didn’t learn to ride my bike because my mom wrote out strict lesson plans with specific standards to meet. Instead I learned through time spent on my bike. Nobody told me that I had to know how to pedal the correct way before I could give it a shot. Did I fall down? YES! Did I get back up again? YES! I wanted to be just like the other kids on my street who could ride their bikes.

Going back to that tweet that I shared at the top of this post, I am really intrigued by that idea of fear of uncertainty, of failure, of being outside their normal. This seems like a pretty normal human reaction. Part of the joy of learning to ride a bike is that little bit of fear, mixed with a bit of excitement, that runs through our body as we get ready to pick our feet up off the ground. So how do we get our students past whatever it is that’s holding them back? My best suggestion is through scaffolding.

When we try something that’s new and innovative, we need to be prepared for those students who might struggle to get started. When you’re planning, be thinking about what might be struggles, and then prep for that. Are you asking students to come up with inquiry questions? Have some question stems ready to help them get started. Are you wanting students to research a topic that interest them? Have some general topics that you know your kids are in to as well as locations to go to find information to help them start on a path.

One thing though – some students in your class will be ready to dive right in. Make sure that you don’t provide too many scaffolds for everyone – make sure that students do have some choices that they can make themselves. Save the extra scaffolds for the students who really need them. If you provide too many scaffolds for all, you will end up with work that all looks and sounds the same. That’s not inquiry, that’s not project based learning, that’s a recipe. And when we have a recipe, that means that some students might feel too boxed in, and not enough opportunity for creativity.

I recently saw a tweet from Alice Keeler that I thought summed up the stages that some of our students might go through as we try to move towards a more student-centered model:

With the appropriate steps to help our students who are afraid to go out on a limb, we might be able to get our students through those 7 stages more quickly.  All the better for you and for them!

What are your thoughts? Are there things that you have tried that have helped your hesitant students get going on an inquiry project? Have you had successes that I don’t mention here? Share your thoughts with all of us!

Compliance or empowerment: #IMMOOC Week 2

Are your systems designed for people to

I recently had a post titled Why are we teaching the stuff we’re teaching? The post was based primarily on a single quote from Will Richardson about the fact that we’re aware of all the things that our students are interested in, but today, what we have to focus on is our geometry lesson that we know most of our students won’t be likely to ever use. Reading the quote above got me thinking about that post again. In that post, I was looking at what we can do about our teaching to make sure that we are finding ways to make learning relevant to our students. Today, I’m thinking more about the things that teachers do in their classroom and making sure that the things we ask of them are relevant in the eyes of teachers.

This year in my school, we began the school year with two slogans we wanted to focus on:

  • The Power of Why
  • The Power of Yet

We encouraged our teachers to think about why they did the things they did, and also to focus on having a growth mindset. When we met our students on the first day of school, we encouraged them to do the same. Throughout the year I’ve had conversations with teachers and students about these two ideas – why do we do the things that we do, and what does it mean to have a growth mindset about whatever we are learning or doing.

Even though we have encouraged these ideas, I still think there are things that happen in classrooms that we can’t really identify why we are doing it. And not knowing why we are doing something takes away from the potential value.

For several years now, many of the teachers in my school have had the standards and objectives for their lessons posted on the board, or in their agenda PowerPoints, or however they communicate to their students what they will be doing today. For some teachers, I think the main reason that it’s put there is because the Teacher Effectiveness Rubric that we are all assessed on has a section about lesson objectives, so they include it because that’s what the rubric says to do. That’s all about compliance.

Here’s the thing though. If the only reason you’re doing something is because it’s what you’re supposed to do, how is it serving the learning in your classroom? In her book Learner Centered Innovation, Katie Martin points out that putting the standards and objectives on the board is not just about checking some box. As Martin reminds us in her book: “The reason “they” make teachers put the standards and learning objectives on the board is because when students know what they are supposed to be learning or where they are headed, that knowledge impacts student engagement and achievement.”

So, why are you placing the standards and objectives on your board? Is it about checking some box, or is it done in service of the learning and growth of your students? If we do things with our learners in mind, and we think carefully about how those choices will impact the learning of our students, we can use our actions to guide coaching conversations with our students so that they better understand the reason behind what we do.

In Martin’s book, she talks about the idea of an Innovation Ecosystem, where teachers should feel trusted to learn, improve, and innovate in order to better serve our kids. I hope that through my actions, through the things I say and do around my building, that the staff in my school understand that I hope we all see our school as an innovation ecosystem. I hope the teachers in my school don’t feel bogged down by compliance-based tasks, but rather feel empowered to push the innovative envelope in order to create amazing learning opportunities for our students.

It is my hope that as I continue with my learning throughout this round of #IMMOOC, I learn new ways to help the teachers in my building feel that empowerment! And to the teachers in my building that may not currently feel empowered, and feel that you are bogged down by compliance, please remember that we all have the power of why. If we don’t know why we are doing something, we aren’t going to do it well. Feel free to ask why when something doesn’t square with what you believe is best for your students. Hopefully we can work together to create a solution to those problems.

I’m curious what you do to make sure that there is an Innovation Ecosystem in your school? Or, do you have ideas about how we can create a better innovation ecosystem within our schools? Share your thoughts with all of us in the comments below!

Sparking curiosity #IMMOOC Week 1

When school is

Ever since seeing the animated version of Ken Robinson’s “Changing education paradigms” TED Talk, I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we do in school. I’ve definitely noticed, and at times have been a part, of the factory model version of school. In this model, kids come in, we give them what we believe they need, and then we move them along to the next level. I feel the biggest shift in my beliefs about education began around the time my oldest child was born. Throughout my career, I have run into the occasional student who made comments like “I hate school,” or “School’s boring.” Early in my career, the typical response to these types of statements might have been something along the lines of “Well, you have to be here, so you need to make the most of it.” I put the onus on the students – it was their responsibility to do school, and if they didn’t like it, well too bad.

After our daughter was born, I started to notice things in a new light. It wasn’t just the kids who were disconnected socially or the kids who were doing poorly in class that were saying that they didn’t like school, or that they thought it was boring. I started noticing kids who were really bright, kids who seemed to have great relationships with their classmates, who even seemed to like me and their other teachers, that just went through the motions in the classroom. They did what they had to in order to keep the adults in their lives happy, but they would never have thought of doing anything that was above and beyond. And those kids told me about how much they didn’t like school, they shared how boring they thought some of the things we did in class were, and I began to think that if there were kids who were so on top of things and did well in class who hated school, maybe this wasn’t a student issue, but rather a teacher issue. Maybe this had to do with what I was doing in my classroom.

As a science teacher, I noticed that kids were pumped for the days we were doing hands on learning. If we were in the lab, the curiosity was there, and energy was flowing! I began trying to find more opportunities for students to be active in their learning and found that some of those more passive learners were much more excited to come into the classroom. This seemed like a win to me.

Maya Angelou has a great quote – “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” For a long time, I viewed the role of the teacher as the gatekeeper of information. I was the keeper of the knowledge in my classroom, and students got what I thought they needed when it was time. But the results were poor. Students were bored, disengaged, and there was no desire to learn. Many just went through the motions.

As my mindset shifted, I began to seek out more opportunities for students to make choices in their learning. I began integrating technology as a learning tool, checking out iPad carts and using tech to enhance learning opportunities.  Little did I know that I was on the leading edge of innovative thinking in the classroom.

No longer do students need access to teacher for content, but they desperately need teachers to guide them as they develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to be lifelong learners

Currently, I’m reading Learner Centered Innovation by Katie Martin.  In it she says that “Our job is not to provide the answers that can be found in a textbook or in a webpage but to create the conditions that inspire learners to continue to wonder and figure out how to learn and solve problems and seek more questions.” The most important piece of the puzzle in this process is not the technology, or access to it, but rather teachers who can help to spark that curiosity in their students. Those teachers need to be able to find the wonder that exists in all kids, and then fan the flames to help them turn that wonder into amazing learning opportunities.

I look forward to continuing to share my learning from this awesome book from Martin, it will probably be the basis of my posts over the next few weeks.  But I’m curious… What have you noticed about learning when you create opportunities for your students to explore their wonders in connection with your material? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

Developing wonder

I was recently having a conversation with a teacher. We were talking about her efforts to integrate more creative, outside the box style of learning activities in her class. She knows that for future success, her students don’t need to simply be able to regurgitate facts – Google can do that for anyone. It’s about what students can do with that knowledge, and she’s struggling with how to get there. You see, some of her students just don’t seem to be able to “think” in a creative way. They seem to prefer to have an activity with direct questions and correct answers. If given a choice between a creative activity that forces thinking in depth of knowledge level 3 or 4 or a worksheet with depth of knowledge level 1, her students would choose the worksheet.

This teacher however, understands that things that are depth of knowledge level 1 may not be what students ultimately need to be successful in the future.  Check out this short video that will show why:

If you search for Siri, Alexa, or Google Home homework help, you will find videos of students going down their worksheet and asking their “smart speaker” the problems they have to solve, and then copying down the answer. If there are other kids who have figured this out, you can guess that your students have too. Personally, I don’t have any problem with students using the tools around them to help them with their homework – I mean, what do most of us do with a question we don’t immediately know the answer to? But I recently read a quote from Yong Zhao, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas gave me pause and made me think about the types of questions we’re asking students:

If all children are asked to master the same knowledge and skills, those whose time costs less will be much more competitive than those with higher costs. There are many more poor and hungry people in the developing world willing to work for a fraction of what workers in developed countries need. To be globally competitive, developed countries must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries.

In this quote, Zhao was talking about the standardization of curriculum and teaching methods, and the fact that our standardization fails our students in the long term. You see, when our students from a developed country move into the workforce, they will be too expensive for the jobs that take a low level of thinking. The students from developed nations need to be able to do things with their knowledge, and developing those skills can’t be done from DOK 1 questions on a worksheet. WorksheetsIf a student can turn to Google, Siri, Alexa, or whatever smart tool comes out next to find the answer to your question, then maybe we aren’t asking the right questions.

So here’s the challenge for this teacher. She knows that students will get more out of learning opportunities that push into higher level thinking. She knows that activities that require more creativity are inherently more “sticky” when it comes to student learning. But her students are have not been successful in doing this so far this year. Does that mean we give up? My answer would be no – just as with anything else, we have to keep trying.

Compliance-PinkThe students in our school in general are very compliant. Compliant students sometimes struggle with creative tasks because they want specific directions to follow. They may not remember what it feels like to be creative or curious. Years of compliance in the school setting seems to suck creativity and curiosity out of our students. I think that sometimes students lose that ability to be creative and curious because they have grown accustomed to the amount of scaffolding that we provide for learning activities. That scaffolding can begin to feel a bit like a cage, and students forget how to get out.

I’m not sure how many of you have had the opportunity to be around a kindergarten classroom. I get to visit one on occasion because my wife is a kindergarten teacher. When I walk into the room and listen to what’s going on, all the students have questions, and comments, and wonders. All those students feel creative and love to color, draw, paint, write, tell stories, and so much more! When I talk to the fifth and sixth grade students in my own building, many of them have a hard time identifying their own curiosities, their own interests, their own what ifs.

So how do we bring a little bit of that creativity and curiosity back to our students? One suggestion that seems promising is the idea of a Wonder Day. In a recent blog post by John Spencer (you can access it here) he talks about the idea of a Wonder Day where students spend the day immersed in research on something they are curious about, with an end goal of a multimedia presentation – it could be a blog post, podcast, video, or whatever other multimedia format that the students choose.

If you’d like to see a short intro of what a wonder day project might look like, here’s a 2 minute intro from John Spencer.

And if you’re not sure when you’d have the time for something like this, I love the suggestion that I’ve seen elsewhere that one of the best times to try something new and innovative is when the schedule is a little wacky. In my school, next week is the week of ISTEP, our annual state assessment. Because of the test, we run on a different schedule on each of the test days. I would encourage teachers to think about a time like this as the ideal time to try something new. If it doesn’t work for you to try during your testing window, then maybe you try it right before or after an upcoming break, or on the day of a school assembly, or just because it’s a Tuesday!

Our students need to be able to think. They need to identify their curiosity because, as Ken Robinson shares in his book Creative Schools, “Human achievement in every field is driven by people’s desire to explore, to test and prod, to see what happens, to question how things work, and to wonder why and ask, what if?” If we have the goal of students who are college and career ready, we have to help them develop that wonder.

Less curious

What do you think? Have you seen similar issues to the teacher above? What’s worked for you to spark that curiosity in your students? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Or, if you decide to try a Wonder Day – or something like it – share you experience with us! We’d love to hear about it!