writing in the open spaces

About a year ago, I pasted a quote into Evernote by Chris Lehmann (probably from Educon 2011):

If we want our students to grow, we must do that ourselves. This weekend we believe differently. All of us have a stake in the game. Solutions must include us (and our students). We cannot solve problems by doing things TO students.

This morning, as I bumped into the quote again, I was reminded of a teacher I met this past weekend. We were discussing change and what kind of “change agents” we want to be. He paused, turned his head slightly, eyes widening: “I just realized,” he said. “I ask my students to take risks all the time….and yet I don’t put myself out there at all.”

He was referring to sharing and working online, being willing to reach out to others to learn and grow. He’d been satisfied, thus far, to be the director who told his students what to do without doing the work himself. He looked as if he had walked into a strange, new place with no idea how he had arrived.

I smiled. I’ve seen that look before. And it can be both scary and exciting.

During our session, this teacher had shared some amazing insights, and I was eager to find his space place online to learn more.

“I don’t have a space online,” he’d said. “But I guess that needs to change.”

We must model the kind of learning we want from our students. And we must also be willing to learn from them as they explore their interests and passions.

First, we must believe in the change. And then we live the belief.

This seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?

 

The phrase “letting go” bounces around in my head constantly and has for years. I first realized the importance of our ability to remain detached when I read William Glasser’s  Choice Theory back in the late ‘90s. For so many reasons and in so many ways, letting go simplifies our lives. But as much as I believe in the concept, it’s tough. Human nature is such that we believe we can mold people into who we want them to be. As teachers, we try criticizing, blaming, managing–none of this really works.

Everything that we do from birth until death is an attempt to successfully and effectively meet our needs for safety, love, power, fun, and freedom. Although we are driven to meet these needs, we do not know how to meet them responsibly – the ability to meet our needs in ways that don’t interfere with other people’s ability to meet their needs.

 

Photo from the recent #purposedpsi

CC BY-NC-SA ianguest

Quotation taken from Damian Bariexca’s #500words post: http://purposed.org.uk/2011/02/500words-damian-bariexca

 

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. T.S. Elliot, Little Gidding

As I sat in church Sunday, listening to the Homily on beginnings and endings and the coming of Advent, I thought, too, about teaching. Our school years certainly begin and end, giving us closure on one episode and an ability to re-do or start again. But I also thought about how difficult this shift in thinking about teaching and learning is for some. Letting go of traditional beliefs means an end to what we know, what is comfortable, and what made sense in our past.

As Carol Dweck says, people hold onto a mindset for a reason. At some point in their past it made sense in forming who they were and who they wanted to be. When we ask people to shift their mindsets about how people learn and what they should do in the classroom, that “end” can be difficult, almost painful. As Dweck says, it’s like letting go of yourself.

But beginnings can also hopeful if we approach them well. We need to look for examples of what is working, using those positive models to frame reasons for change. As the Heaths said in Switch: Knowledge alone doesn’t change behavior. “To create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.”

 

Reading this article about Amir Abo-Shaeer, the recent MacArthur award winner, took me back a few years. Amir has established an experienced-based learning program for his students.  Fast Company reports he runs the engineering Academy “like a business.”

“Students help write grants; they do PR, and they develop our website.” He calls his approach project-based learning and says the students learn both soft skills and business skills so they are ready “to join the world of work.”

“We are going to be left behind if we don’t see a paradigm shift,” says Abo-Shaeer. He therefore wants to see his project-based learning applied to all subjects and taught across the United States in order to meet the demands of “students as consumers of education.”

I applaud Amir for his work and insight into how students learn best– and what we can accomplish when we create the right design for learning.

Years ago, I taught high school journalism along with the standard English courses. Whenever I stopped to think about the difference in the two courses, I was struck with how much the journalism students gained from their real-life work. They wrote, published (yes, even back in the 1980s we used a Mac and published our newspaper at the local printer), and sold advertising. Working in teams, they learned to lead, collaborate, and share. We had real deadlines, and we stuck to them.

In contrast, my English classes, for the most part, sat in rows quietly, discussing the previous night’s reading or taking a quiz.Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned how to transfer what I had designed in my journalism classes to the rest of my day.

The journalism students tended to become better writers than my English students. They also approached their learning eagerly, often spending far more time working on our newspaper than our class guidelines required of them. Students engaged in debate about truth and fairness, they set goals, and they learned communication skills. Each student focused on his or her strength, whether advertising, photography, or writing, and yet, they all learned the skills. Heck we were even blogging back in 2004!

I guess  I am a slow learner because I finally realized I could apply similar principles to my English classes. And, as I’ve written before, much improved  learning came from this approach.

Amir has created a powerful program for his science and engineering students. His philosophy of education resonates with all of us who have worked to create project-based, authentic learning in our classes. And now he has been rewarded fully with a grant to teach other teachers.

This works.

image credit: By digitaljournal.com

 

Recent online conversations about rules and pencils have me thinking about my own teaching career.

My assigned summer reading before college was Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society. That was 1970.

Before I graduated, I had read John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, and Herbert Kohl. As I moved into the classroom, these people shaped me as a teacher. At least in my head.

Yet, the system often wore me down.

That’s not an excuse, though I know it sounds like one. Fitting a square peg in a round hole isn’t easy. So I struggled to find ways to move around the structure and give choice to my curriculum and flexibility to my teaching style.

But now as I look back, I see that I was afraid. I was fearful of breaking rules, coloring outside the lines, of teaching in ways I knew would most benefit my kids.

Mostly, I felt alone. That was before the internet. Before learning communities. Before transparency. It was difficult to find like-minded people who shared my philosophy or desire to practice differently.

And then my world changed.

In 1986 I bought my first computer. A few years later, I began to use computers with students. A Mac to layout our school newspaper, a PC with PowerPoint to enable kids to create presentations, the text-based world wide web that allowed me to chat with someone in Switzerland one day. My teaching didn’t change overnight, and moving to an independent school did give me more flexibility. But having access to technology and the internet is what truly affected my teaching practice.

Jump forward to 2004, and suddenly I was blogging. And finding community. And support.

You know the rest of the story…because it is also your story. The connections have allowed us to find each other. Networking has enabled us to garner support for our “radical” ideas (tell that to Ivan).

My last year in the classroom helped me change even more.

A conversation with my cousin this summer validated my feelings. Her children attended a high school that requires no set curriculum and no grades. This is my niece’s second year in college. And although she struggled somewhat to convince colleges of her merit (she had no traditional AP courses or typical transcript from a standard school), her personal interview and portfolio sold her colleges and gained her acceptance into her school of choice. Her recent Facebook status read: I LOVE my college.

Freedom to learn works. Illich said this in 1971:

educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring

Pretty amazing, huh?

We are better together. That’s the mission statement for Powerful Learning Practice, the folks I’m working with now. It’s like I’ve come full circle.

 

I once told Sheryl Nussbaum Beach I didn’t feel moved to change the world.

We were chatting about all things education–and how some folks are comfortable presenting to large crowds (I’m not), and some feel compelled to change the world of schooling (I wasn’t).

At the time, I felt that my personal line in the sand, which I drew in the sandbox of a classroom, was enough. I could individualize instruction, buy netbooks for my kids, create an inviting atmosphere, offer a variety of ways to assess children, and focus on what worked.

I became comfortable in my own small, corner of the world.

And then last spring, I found myself taking over conversations in department meetings, dinner parties, and family gatherings. Whenever the chats turned to school (and specifically social media), I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. My frustration with how we “do” schools bubbled over. During our last week of vacation, my uncle turned to me mid-rant and said, “Ok then, how do we fix it? How do we make schools better?”

I didn’t have all the answers, but I found myself listing everything that matters to me: giving students voice; empowering teachers to work together and reflect upon their practice; offering choice in curriculum and ways to learn; allowing charter schools (with proper direction and guidance) to flourish; changing the way we sort and rank students.

Ok, so I care. Changing the system seems overwhelming at times, but it’s worth it. Our kids deserve more from us.

These are the folks I’m following these days, watching and learning from them:

Coalition of Essential Schools

Big Picture Schools

Ideal Schools

IDEA

Not perfect, perhaps. But at least they are doing the work and not just talking about it. Who else should be highlighted?

 

The Zotero group started by Wendy Drexler is often where I look for research regarding issues that interest me. Today, I had a focused discussion with a friend on whether teachers’ personalities made them embrace or more resistant to change, especially related to using technology to enhance student learning.

(As an aside, I should say I support student-centered, inquiry-based teaching and believe the use of social media offers opportunity for collaborative, global learning. If classrooms are teacher-centered and the discussions are focused on gadgets and not pedagogy, then technology is often a waste of time and money.)

After I left her office, I wondered if there was any research supporting our discussion. Sure enough, I found this (unfortunately in a PDF), a study from 2004. Here are some highlights (my emphasis):

Research has found that the personal beliefs and dispositions of teachers may relate to or predict successful technology integration. Honey and Moeller (1990) assert that teacher philosophy (student-centered versus teacher-centered) affected one’s ability to effectively use technology in the classroom, in that student-centered teachers were more successful. MacArthur and Malouf (1991) determined in their case study that teacher beliefs and attitudes greatly influenced how computers were used in the classroom. Other personal variables, such as self-competence and willingness to change, have also been shown to be closely related to computer use among teachers (Marcinkiewicz, 1994). Albion (1999) states that teachers’ beliefs, specifically self-efficacy beliefs, “are an important, and measurable, component of the beliefs that influence technology integration” (p. 2).

As a result, a teacher who approaches technology professional development with an attitude that is open to change and is committed to spending time outside of training to further explore technology may be more likely to use technology in the classroom than one who attends training with ambivalence and a lack of time.

Now I realize that one study isn’t necessarily the answer. But all of this makes sense as we determine how to best help teachers develop their own professional development online through social media and in “unconferences” where the onus is on the individual to contribute and learn. For those waiting to be spoonfed or who are unwilling to change, the effort may not be worth the trouble.