Making Learning Transparent

When we make our learning transparent, we become teachers--

George Siemens

For two years I have advocated for a culture shift at my school. I would like to see us more aggressively leverage our 1:1 computing model to build learning networks. I would also like to see a more open and collaborative environment.

Fortunately, change is in the wind. Administration has provided a copy of Tony Wagner’s Global Achievement Gap for every staff member in the school. It is assigned summer reading for all of us. When we return in two weeks, we are going to consider the prospect of a more student-centered curriculum.

Such a radical shift would call for much greater transparency than we have customarily experienced. In my own realm, I have unlocked all of my Moodle courses and licensed my materials under Creative Commons. I also have an open door policy for visitors . This school year I will advertise the policy more aggressively. However, I would like to see a more transparent environment throughout the school.

I am truly hopeful for learning culture change, but building architecture is a huge impediment. Except for our computer labs, the rooms themselves are pretty much bricked away from views. Teachers generally close the door and seal what goes on inside. I would love to have teachers feel more free to observe each other, but I'm afraid "classroom observations" are strongly associated with evaluations and judgments. Administrators (and other colleagues) should feel free to walk through classrooms unannounced in order to better understand what the learning experiences in the school. But for this to work, they would need to develop habits in transparency as well. At the very minimum input for new policites should be solicited and their rationale should be clearly explained. Better yet, wouldn't it be great if staff and students were welcome to "walk through" some policy discussions.

Are you up for a more tranpsparent learning culture?

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"Hidden Agenda the Boys Are Back" by kind permission of Robert Britz (Krause)

Experimenting with Assessments

Last school year, I taught six sections of American Government. And I had very positive results with the projects I designed for the class. These resulted in multi media products, presentations, self-reflections and other unconventional means of assessment. Nevertheless, most of the assessment for the class was dominated by a variety of conventional quizzes and tests.

I ended the school year determined to shake this habit. Somewhat cautious (or perhaps practical) by nature, rather than tackle the entire course in one fell swoop, I decided to address the first unit. My first impulse, as usual, was to over-complicate everything. I tried to correct this, but I'm sure I will create plenty of confusion on the first go-round.

Here are the main features:

* Students choose from a menu of assessments.

* Within the conventional testing choices there are options.

* A project assessment (two choices) is available instead of some of the testing.

* A pass/fail pathway is available to a top grade.

* Students can stick with conventional testing if they (or their parents choose).

* Students will track their own progress toward their grades.

Possible Strengths

- The variety of assessments should allow for more individualized personal assessment.

- This should work well as a pilot-- With three classes in the Fall I will generate lots of feedback.

- I think I have come up with a couple of interesting multimedia ideas that are valid tests of authentic knowledge.

Possible Weaknesses

- By only sticking a toe in the water of alternative assessment, I may actually generate little enthusiasm for the alternatives.

- It's still likely to be pretty confusing for students, I'm afraid.

- I want to try this out early in the semester so that I can build upon it if I choose, but the earliness may only compound the confusion.

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Please check out the plan. Feedback of any sort is welcome:

Unit One Assessment Options

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"Studying Hard" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Dean+Barb

Nature or Nurture? What Makes Some Teachers, Reactionaries?

The women and men who go into teaching tend, as a group, to be both extremely dedicated and extremely risk-averse. The stability of their profession is a very important part of its draw.
Susan Collins

Most folks in education have . . . a difficult time imagining what they've not experienced. So it's hard to imagine how things can be done differently, whereas in business you have to constantly innovate in order to survive.
Randy Moore ( The Global Achievement Gap, p.144)

A couple of years ago. I was attending an English Department meeting at the request of the chair. Department members were upset about changes being opposed from the top. I heard reasonable arguments against the reforms, but the passion against change was disproportionate to the issue. The intensity seemed rooted in something much deeper and emotional. I was perplexed by this and said something about the attitudes being "reactionary". Some looked shocked, even hurt, as though I had cursed them. "Reactionary" obviously clashed with political ideologies or disposition toward reforming something other than their own curricula!

Maybe, I took a cheap shot, but I think it was right on. And it is true for many intelligent, engaging, and interesting teachers, today, who are fiercely, even blindly resistant to the changes threatened by technology.

Recently, I was sitting with my current academic department and found myself in a bubbling cauldron of fury against technology: When does administration expect us to learn this stuff?. . . . These kids are forgetting how to communicate face-to-face. . . . I don't want to change!

After listening to this for a while, I made a few points as diplomatically as I could:

*Not choosing to leverage our technology in a 1:1 private school puts us at a competitive disadvantage.

*We are never going to be able to recapture for their students some golden yesteryear of school that our memories hold dear. Texting, Facebook, YouTube, et. al., are already part of the mainstream culture.

* We need to change so that we could help our students compete and succeed in tomorrow's higher education and work environments.

Next school year 20% of my assignment will be devoted to shifting our school curriculum to a more student-directed model........Sometimes I wonder if I won't be trudging down to the rock quarry with a ball-peen hammer. (Wish me luck....unless you stand with the reactionaries!).

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"Youth Escort" Flickr CC Photo by TheoJunior

Raising the Bar and Beating the Cheaters

This week, I had three separate and intense conversations with other teachers about students plagiarizing sources and copying each others' homework. It's rampant in my school. And what's most alarming to me is that it's not even covert. I see students openly swapping assignments with one another and talking about what's on a given teacher's test.

I am not getting all high and mighty here. Recently one of my student's openly plagiarized from IMDB on a video. The kids were assigned to critique a film they had watched independently. She read plagiarized stuff. When confronted with a zero, she asked me to "cut her some slack" because she had only plagiarized part of the script and besides she has asked a friend for help and he fed her plagiarized stuff. Unbelievable.

As far as I can tell, it's all about gaming the system. The energy is put into finding short cuts and defeating those who would control their lives. It becomes almost second nature (Sparks Notes for any book) and even good-natured. (Everyone does it, so it's ok).

While I hold out no possibility for ridding the educational system of slackers and cheaters (students or adults), I do think that project learning helps to make a lot of this nonsense irrelevant, by placing the focus back on learning something. I've now tried several different projects based on the principles of Apple's Challenge Based Learning. The following elements help to eliminate cheating:

* Set the bar high with a challenge (and keep it up there!)

* Put the students in control of the project.

* Let them set the goals

* Refrain from telling them they "can't" or "shouldn't" unless absolutely necessary.

* Encourage them to think outside of the box.

* Hold your breath and hold them to the goals they set for themselves.

Of course I still get some dead beats, but since the projects are multi-dimensional, cheating provides few short cuts. If they are interviewing experts, producing media, and making a presentation, who exactly are they going to cheat from? But they'll either become engaged or not....and gaming this system is just way too hard for a slacker. And for those who really got into it, the learning is very authentic.

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"Mannheim Track Meet" Flickr CC Photo by heraldpost

Getting Skeptical Teachers on Board the Tech Train

At the risk of stating the obvious, I feel the urge to share some thoughts about coaxing reluctant teachers on board the tech train before it leaves the station without them (or they derail the locomotive!).

This urge comes from two sets of interactions. Early this week I sat down for mentoring session with a terrific teacher to give her some suggestions and training for setting up a small social media project with her 9th graders. This was obviously a big step for her and sitting down with me meant that she would expose some of her confusion about basic tech operations tool. (I'm happy to report that both parties left the session quite pleased). Later this week I chatted for an hour with a visiting team of administrators from Little Rock. Their school is about to take the plunge into a 1:1 program, and the subject of bringing staff on board arose.

My reflections:

* Teachers are inclined to feel unappreciated and undervalued if tech is thrown at them as something they must urgently do to be relevant in their students' lives.

* Conversely, when presenting to co-workers it is important to express sincere appreciation for their talents and assure them that their devotion to their students will lead them to explore powerful methods for building student learning networks.

* Teachers need good modeling from school leaders. Those espousing change need to walk the walk. It's even more important that they don't become scolds.

* Teachers are used to (and many perhaps drawn to) terrific control in their classrooms. It's understandable that would feel very uncomfortable shifting their roles and allowing the students greater control over creating their own learning networks.

*After my experience leading the MHS in-service, I am more convinced than ever that the best way to coax teachers towards giving their students more control over building their networks is to show them how to develop their own personal learning networks with technology.

*A strong staff mentoring program is a must.

* Most teachers love to share their discoveries. We must not make them feel as though they should master everything at once.Let's give them the satisfaction of becoming proficient in the tools they need for a simple project or lesson that really connects with the kids.I'm for encouraging them to take one step at a time, giving them credit for doing so in the midst of a typically harried school year. Then we should urge them to pay their knowledge forward, since that, after all, is their vocation.

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"Tough Customer" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by James Jordan

Motivation

Motivation is a very tough thing to gauge. It certainly isn't a feature of standards and testing that so often serve as the marks that we are trying to hit in our schools. In fact, the tests themselves are supposed to be the motivators-- and I suppose they are.

But, without any question, motivation is critical to learning. And what the cbl experience reflected was that intensely motivated groups of learners became deep learners, engaged with activities that enriched their understanding of our course material (and the world) in ways that no one could possibly plan.

Jenna became so involved with her group web site that she claimed that family members were worried that she was becoming "addicted." Rosie's determination to set the bar high for her group's web design had everything to do with her group presentation and the public dimension of the group projects. The coolest thing about the cbls: The kind of motivation exhibited by Jenna and Rosie was typical of my other students, rather than extraordinary.

AP Government CBL - The Research

This is the 2nd post in a series on my cbl project with AP American Government. Their challenge: Develop and Authentic Medium for Improving Our Democracy.

As I indicated in "Questions and Challenges", after witnessing several bursts of creative thinking on the part of my AP cbl groups, I more or less lost track of their progress. After listening to their presentations and examining their self-assessments, I have drawn the following conclusions about their research:

Strengths
Each of the five groups made genuine efforts to "think outside of the box" (as they were urged to do) in seeking meaningful research for their projects. Here is such an example from each group:

1. An interview with the campaign manager of Michigan's Attorney General, who is now running furiously for Governor.

2. An interview with the campaign manager of Georgia's current governor.

3. Original survey research of students at neighboring schools.

4. An interview with a local judge.

5. An interview with A graduate student from the U. of Michigan's Gerald Ford School of Public Policy.

Weaknesses
I saw very little evidence of research on the technologies that might advance their goals of improving our democracy. The research in other words seemed a bit scatter shot. Furthermore, as I noted in two groups' evaluations, the development of their solutions seemed only negligibly connected to the results of their research.

Conclusions
I am somewhat ambivalent about the research component of projects. While this was certainly not the most impressive aspect of these student-centered projects, poor research did not impede the development of some really impressive solutions. The next time around, I will require a more complete documentation of group research (including completion deadlines?). But I also must accept that research for these kinds of authentic projects will not follow conventional-- research for its own sake-- forms. My next post will be on group presentations to the class. And as you will learn, each group reported and demonstrated that they had learned a great deal through the process of developing their projects.

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Screen Capture from AP cbl web site.

Embracing Failure

As I have reported from time to time in this space, I the centerpiece of my American Government students is "The Game" -- a legislative simulation played toward the end semester. Last year I developed a full fledged online edition, requiring each student to create a web site for the character she portrayed in the game. Going high tech produced a number of successes and failures which I reflected upon in Web 2.0 Simulation Post-Mortem.

My biggest error was unwittingly putting myself in the middle of far too much web activity. I allowed the game and project requirements bombard me with emails and force me to go back to the student web sites again and again. After launching the game with great enthusiasm in all three sections, I barely enjoyed any of the cool things that came out of it. Each night I would respond to numerous student emails and and check dozens of student web sites. Playing the game in three classes simultaneously proved to be overwhelming.

So, here I am again, launching three simulations, simultaneously. But I've learned from the school of hard knocks, instituting three major changes to shift or share more responsibility with the students.

1) Last year I asked students to email me the url of their web sites so that I could post them for the class. Pretty stupid. Utterly confusing and inefficient. This year I created a wiki and listed all the students' names on a page. I asked the students to request an invitation to the wiki which are easy to accept at the Wikispaces site. Students are then required to link their sites to the wiki. It took about five minutes in class to show them how.

2) I am recruiting students to evaluate each other's sites, determining whether the required "stuff" has been posted. This can be done through a blind process (students of one class will check the "characters' sites of another). I am awarding a bit of extra credit for the service. Having those eyes and ears poking through the sites will be a major relief. This year I should be able to look each site over once.

3) Students will complete a check list self-evaluation which they will submit at the end of the project. This is intended to improve responsibility and also relieve me from going on wild goose chases, looking online for artifacts that don't even exist because the student missed a deadline.

I suspect that I will be noting some new failures in my next post-mortem. But it's hard to keep moving forward without having some choice mistakes point you in the right direction.

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"epic fail :)" Flickr Creative Commons photo courtesy of anna

Watching the Hierarchy Disintegrate

George Siemens recently wrote a very thought-provoking piece called Struggling for a Metaphor for Change. I haves sampled from one portion of it where he lists "broad trends influencing our relationship to knowledge":

An expectancy of relevance and currency of knowledge, for a cycle of years and decades, has now been reduced to months and years for many disciplines. A picture released by an observer in a disaster zone (war, hurricane, earthquake) is worth many times more than the commentary of an expert. Knowledge can be woven, connected, and recombined in limitless ways…creating the possibility of personalized networks of knowledge. We have moved from hierarchical to network. It is end user driven.

What does this mean for us "teachers"? Well, obviously our usefulness has diminished as dispensers of information. The sooner we begin to see ourselves as network enablers or personal learning enhancers, the better. We also need to recognize that the formal lines that have structured the life of the classroom are fading. Academic "departments" make less sense. How relevant are the school schedules and school buildings themselves? I sometimes wonder if educators have become so consumed with activities only indirectly connected to learning that they have taken their eyes off the ball. Many schools are trying to wall off the students from social media and filter internet access in the most extreme ways. One way of looking at this is the old regime trying to maintain its hold on power (knowledge). And you know, the farther up the hierarchy you go in many instances, the less aware they often are about what happening down here on the ground.

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"Grass Network" Flickr Creative Commons photo by cperaza_ca

Leaving the Comfort Zone

Oh, yes, I am something of a control freak by trade and have been proud of it. As an athletic coach, I meticulously scheduled each minute of practice time. In the classroom, I can't say every minute of thirty-five years worth of instruction has been planned, but each day there was a plan; and I have never been one to spend the first ten minutes of class shooting the breeze about Dancing with the Stars or giving my class the last ten minutes to "study."

Last week, I let go of the wheel. Boy, did I let go. I launched my AP Gov's (seniors) challenge based learning project and a modified cbl in my sophomore government classes. Strangely, once again I felt like a coach, but a coach during a game, not practice. No clipboard or script for the action; just a game plan, a pep talk, and advice on the fly. It was exciting but a little nerve-wracking. I felt most confident when I explained to the students why we were taking a student-oriented project that emphasized new technologies. I also loved making suggestions and asking guiding questions. But I have to admit that I felt disoriented and anxious. I battled a nagging sense that the groups were "wasting time".

I detected genuine excitement among many of the seniors. On the other hand, some of the sophs were dialing me out, per usual. Of course, it's way to early to reach any conclusions.

As I jokingly told my AP class when I was laying the whole trip out: "Even if we go down in flames, you guys will give me lots to blog about."

Ain't that the truth. Stay tuned.
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"Comfort Zone 1" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by idrehn

Finding Authentic Audiences

The best education prof I had in grad school was Dr. Fred Goodman. Once he told us once that if classrooms were open to public audiences, that we'd see teachers with clipboards, stop watches, and whistles; just like football coaches. I could completely relate. I thought how conscious I was of using every second of practice time as a basketball coach and how casually some teachers treated the first two or three weeks of school with "easing students in." We've all had teachers who spent large portions of class time telling us about how they spent the weekend or what they watched on television. Would they do this if the class had to perform under the lights on Friday, night? Probably not.

I think public performance should have a prominent place in best teaching practices. As I've noted in Why Blog?, expressing my opinions in a public forum serves to refine my thinking and even hold my feet to the fire of innovation. I've certainly found in teaching an AP course, that knowing the students' scores will be a matter of public record, has a way of focusing one's mind as a teacher. Last spring, I started to set up online exhibition spaces for some of my students' best work and submit these links to our school's online community newsletter. I joined the "Authentic Audiences" challenge based learning group at the ADE Summer Institute, last July, inspiring the title of this post and allowing me to get others' ideas about this topic. I'm absolutely convinced that schools should be aggressively seeking audiences for students.

But what to do in the mean time? Well, I've decided to drop it in the students' laps. My AP Government challenge based learning project requires them to identify an audience and to create an "authentic medium" for reaching it. Cop out or break through? I'll know in a couple of months and get back to you, then!

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Flickr Creative Commons Photo of the Big House in Ann Arbor by jeffwilcox

Baker Manifesto (part 3)-- Bridging the Great Divide

In parts one and two I explained how I have come to embrace George Siemens' educational model of Connectivism. But my past blog posts,
have noted that many educators resist the technologies which make the best features of Connectivism possible. And too often tech evangelicals actually motivate the resistors to dig in. Consider the following blog exchange that debated whether cell phones should be allowed in the classroom:

Ira:
None of this is new. Socrates and Diogenes opposed literacy and writing on the same grounds you oppose phones - they disrupt the learning environment - the cognitive authority environment - preferred by the teacher. Monks opposed Gutenberg technology on similar grounds. Schools long fought the use of film and television, even typewriters. Today, educators continue to fight against utilizing the technologies of communication which define our age. An endless retrograde action which ensures that "ability" and "disability" remain traditionally defined and that power never changes hands.

Marcelle:
So what you are espousing is that the world bend to the student? That the teacher, with all their knowledge and experience, knows less about what a student will need to learn what the teacher knows? Sounds arrogant to me. You make it sound as if no learning can take place if the student can't have their mobile. What did students in America do before 2005?

The vehemence reflected in these views is not unusual when it comes to technology integration in schools. So how could such disparate views ever be reconciled in a school building?

I actually think that the Connectivism model itself goes far toward crossing this great divide. I was struggling with this issue when preparing a staff development proposal for my school administration, last winter. After Siemens reviewed my white paper, he pointed out,

We have different groupings of people when we take different perspectives. A "naysayer" in technology may be a "pathfinder in pedagogy". . . .The development of technology use (PD) and culture is important, as you state. It's worth drawing distinctions between the different roles we play in fostering change...and the stages we need to consider.

Connectivism holds out the prospect that each member of a learning network (for instance, a school faculty) could contribute at different points to a learning challenge (for instance, whether/how to use technology). Siemens hypothesizes that

A tipping point occurs when [an idea] has created a strong enough network to begin to influence the entire thought process.

He proposes "using . . . the IRIS Model for creating change around technology in organizations: "Innovation, Research, Implementation, Systemization."

I think that Connectivism not only offers a model of student instruction-- it is provides a process for changing a school's entire technology culture. I envision innovative pilot programs planting the seeds of change within a school or district. If the innovation is properly hooked into the network, change can occur within networked teachers, who can then help kids build their own learning networks. This is a pardigm shift to be sure, but it's one that can evolve if a collaborative environment is cultivated, allowing the school to become a vehicle for all members of the network to obtain and share knowledge from a virtually limitless number of connections.

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"Rio-Antirio Bridge" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Ava Babili

Searching for Authentic Learning in S-7

I am planning my challenge based social studies projects for the coming school year with several objects in mind. Paramount among them is striving for authentic learning.

Marilyn M. Lombardi (Duke University) says that researchers have distilled the authentic learning experience to ten design elements:

Real-world relevance
Students identification of tasks and subtasks
Sustained investigation
Multiple sources and perspectives
Collaboration
Reflection (metacognition)
Interdisciplinary perspective
Integrated assessment
Polished products
Multiple interpretations and outcomes

I think this is an exciting approach to curriculum, but I expect significant student resistance. They are conditioned to figuring out what the teacher wants, and some of the most motivated students simply want the teacher to tell them what to do, so they can do it and possibly exceed the teacher’s expectations. How will things go when I ask the students set their own expectations and complete their own assessments? Will they balk at collaboration? How much assistance will they need to critically assess their sources and develop probing questions for their investigations?

On the other hand, I think the “real world relevance of the challenge based projects may be highly motivating them. I’m sure that I will learn more than they will, next semester.You can naturally expect that my reflections on what happens in S-7 will show up at the Drive-thru in a couple of months.
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"Authentic" Flickr Creative Commons photo by ara_p

Project Based Learning (ADE Institute Reflection #2)

When I posted Larry's Queries a couple of weeks ago, I got some helpful feedback. But one area went unaddressed:

Trickle Down Wikinomics
I teach. . .Advanced Placement U.S. Government. . . . I usually require some kind of project . . . .This time, I was thinking of assigning some wiki projects around different portions of the Constitution. . . . But I am not sure how to utilize this kind of resource with the younger students. Any ideas?

The solution came to me at the ADE Institute where we immersed ourselves in Challenge Based Learning. This concept "applies what is known about the emerging learning styles of high school students and leverages the powerful new technologies that provide new opportunities to learn to provide an authentic learning process that challenges students to make a difference." The challenge begins with a "big idea and "cascades" through a process of
*forming an essential question
*devising a challenge
*asking guiding questions
*exploring activities / resources
*determining and articulating the solution
*taking action by implementing the solution
*reflecting, assessing, and publishing.

Pardon the above jargon, but suffice it to say that this will be a huge change for me because I will be placing open ended projects in my students hands. Instead of predetermining the type of outcome I desire from them (a wiki), I will let them arrive at the solution. I'm excited, because I think they could come up with some great things, but it makes me anxious because I know they and I will be venturing far out of our comfort zones.

At the ADE Summer Institute we formed groups and engaged in a compressed version of cbl. We did not have time to produce the greatest results, but the process itself was intellectually stimulating and gave me an idea of how engaging this type of collaboration can be.

You can expect to hear back from me in a couple of months at launch.

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Photo of Summer Institute cbl Group, by ADE '09, Kenneth Shelton