Annual Post

The start of school us upon us again.  Teachers are back tomorrow and students enter the building Thursday.  The start of school each year brings with it a renewed sense of hope and promise.   At the beginning of school I return to the following post (third year in a row) by Will Richardson "What Did You Create Today?"  No matter what your goals are for the upcoming school year, let's hope our students reflect on and work towards addressing the following:

What did you make today that was meaningful?

What did you learn about the world?

Who are you working with?

What surprised you?

What did your teachers make with you?

What did you teach others?

What unanswered questions are you struggling with?

How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?

What’s something your teachers learned today?

What did you share with the world?

What do you want to know more about?

What did you love about today?

What made you laugh?

Worth Reading...

Passing along posts worth checking out on the eve of another school year.


1. Graphic Novel Depicts John Lewis' 'March' Toward Justice (Dirks)- graphic novel about the life of John Lewis 

The comic book tells the story of Rosa Parks' symbolic refusal ― but it also gives a detailed account of how to protest non-violently. It was a lesson Lewis took to heart when he staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville in the late '50s.

2. Schools That Practice Learning Literacy (Warlick)- ideas about addressing literacy and learning literacy

According to a 2010 Bowker report, 2009 saw 1,829 new books published in the U.S. about agriculture.  5,131 new books were published about computers, approximately 9,000 each about business and education. 14,281 brand new books were published about history – new knowledge about history.  As we gain more access to information and to each other, the new knowledge that we generate as a society not only astounds us, but it is forcing us to redefine what it means to be educated.  We have rapidly moved from a world of information scarcity to information abundance, and an education is no longer measured by what you can remember, but what you can learn and what you can do with what you’ve learned.

Teachers, who teach solely from their university experience do a disservice to their learners.  Teachers should model themselves as habitual and resourceful learners, and skilled artisans of what they’ve learned.  We must walk into our classrooms out of today, not from the day that they graduated.

3. Who Will Be Considered Literate in the 21st Century (Moore)- changing idea of what it means to be literate in an English classroom

Today, those who can code are the new scribes and the World Wide Web allows rapid sharing of skills and ideas. Parents and teachers do not necessarily personally need coding skills but should create the opportunities, wherever possible, to assist students pursue their passions, especially when our society will increasingly need their skills to solve our most pressing challenges.

4. You can find the most eye-opening things online. So why don't you? (Burkeman)- breaking out of an echo chamber on the web

But the offline archetype of the imaginary cosmopolitan is the person who feels proud to live in a diverse city or neighbourhood – while being forced to concede that his or her actual social circle is suspiciously full of people of the same ethnicity, social class or age range. (Does this describe you? Me too.) On the web, Zuckerman argues in his recent book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans In The Age Of Connection, this phenomenon is amplified. We feel connected to distant corners of the globe – which makes it easier to ignore the fact that what we actuallyspend our time doing is chatting to the same kinds of people about the same kinds of stuff.

5. Work + Play = Freespace (Bowles)- notes from an experimental center in San Francisco

When a group of young people in San Francisco took over a 14,000-square-foot warehouse at Seventh and Market streets for June and July, they did what a lot of young entrepreneurs do with their spaces - made up a cool name (Freespace), got a bunch of 3-D printers and covered the walls in whiteboard paint.

But then they did something different: They turned the space into a pop-up community center, not only for laptop-toting entrepreneurs, but also for the homeless, high school students and artists - with events ranging from hackathons to parties to crafts programs for homeless teens.

Creative Workshop

Sharing some select excerpts from David Sherwin's Creative Workshop.

Well-seasoned designers understand understand that resilience in the face of repeated failure is the only path to success.  Improving as a designer requires us to consciously choose to explore novel territory as part of our daily work.

As  architect Matthew Frederick notes, "Being process-oriented , not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.  Being aware of your working process as a designer and reshaping it to fit the problem presented to you is a lifelong process.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty.  I only think about how to solve the problem.  But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design

Things in the world move too fast for words. Sometimes they just need to be observed.  Sitting still, being present and noting people's behavior while withholding judgement:  These under-appreciated skills can have a powerful influence on our work.  They bring forth observations that give design a foundation in what we know, not just what we want or hope to uncover through the process of making.

If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think.

Precious Time

I meant to post this last week but life got in the way.  Last week I was part of a summer institute for 20 teachers.  We worked together to build challenge-based learning experiences for students.  The cohort, made up of educators from both middle and high school, was formed to spend the year engaged in a form of instructional prototyping.  Experiences structuring classrooms around "real-life" challenges or dictated by determining a human need would be shared within the cohort and across department or grade level PLCs.  The cohort spent the first two days of the week long summer institute working with a representative from Apple to deconstruct the nuances of challenge-based learning.  The remaining three days were spent developing viable challenges.

Throughout the week teachers organically formed connections with other group members to build cross-curricular challenges.  However, teachers splintered off from their initial pairings to connect with others and in one case a challenge has been formed spanning the middle and high schools.  From the perspective of a facilitator the most noticeable aspect of the week was the intensive level of  collaboration between teachers.  Teachers used every once of time to share ideas and develop potential experiences for students. 

Last week posed an interesting conflict to what is viewed during the year.  There is lack of time to having sustained conversations.  Professional development, staff or department meetings and even PLCs are small moments within a day, week or month.  The virtual world and the development of personal learning networks has changed to concept of professional development.  Still personal and intimate exchanges are needed and within a school building or district bind teachers together in ways that could become lost amidst the daily school routine.  The same could be said of students as well.  How often do we provide sustained uninterrupted time for students to brainstorm, reflect, discuss, debate and experiment.  The bell to bell movement of students through a building and departmental approach to learning detracts from a collective sense of scholarship. 

Looking ahead a challenge for this upcoming year is to experiment with providing educators and students extended time to work.  How do we create "think tanks" within our schools and even explode the concept of Google 20% time to change the way we view collaboration?

Late Addition to Worth Reading...

Just came across this. Thanks to @maryannreilly for this post

"I so appreciate the thinking that informs Imagination Playground: Provide kids with open space and portable blocks and observe how they make their own play space and what gets enacted and invented within that made space. If I had a school, I'd invest in this type of product along with lots and lots of blocks, sand, water, paints, musical instruments (especially different types of drums and sticks), and other stuff children can find and use to make things.- Mary Ann Reilly"

Worth Reading...

Sharing some good reads I have come across recently

1. As Demographics Shift, Kids' Books Stay Stubbornly White (Blair)

When it comes to diversity, children's books are sorely lacking; instead of presenting a representative range of faces, they're overwhelmingly white. How bad is the disconnect?

2. Money and Morals Sharing the Stage With Shakespeare (Grimes)

What Shakespeare understood, Professor Sandel insisted, was the transformative power of money. When it enters into social relations it changes things. When economists asked the citizens of a Swiss village if they would accept being designated a nuclear-waste storage site, 51 percent said yes. When the question was posed again, this time with the promise of a cash reward for living with the waste, the yea votes plummeted, to 25 percent. The money, they said, made them feel that they were being bribed to perform a civic duty.  

3. Change the Frame: Two Ways to Rethink Education for Reform (Reich)

I'm convinced by the arguments of Mimi Ito and her various colleagues associated with MacArthur's Connected Learning movement that in the future, learning will take place from cradle to grave--in schools, online, in museums, libraries, makerspaces, and all kinds of other "third spaces" for learning that we have yet to imagine. Young people need access not just to schools but to ecologies of learning that envelop students in learning opportunities.

4.  High-Tech Sensors Help Old Port City Leap Into Smart Future (Frayer)

What they've been flocking to see is mostly invisible: 12,000 sensors buried under the asphalt, affixed to street lamps and atop city buses. The sensors measure everything from air pollution to where there are free parking spaces. They can even tell garbage collectors which dumpsters are full, and automatically dim street lights when no one is around.

5. Diana Rhoten on Sparking Student Interests with Informal Learning 

  

6. How Building a Car Can Drive Deeper Learning (Is School Enough?)

Free to Learn

Sharing a few highlights from Peter Gray's Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. 

Lack of free play may not kill the physical body, as would lack of food, air, or water, but it kills the spirit and stunts mental growth

Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or “quality time” or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away. The things that children learn through their own initiatives, in free play, cannot be taught in other ways

Not only has the school day grown longer and less playful, but school has intruded ever more into home and family life. Assigned homework has increased, eating into time that would otherwise be available for play

Looked at in another way, five to eight times as many young people today have scores above the cutoff for likely diagnosis of a clinically significant anxiety disorder or major depression than fifty or more years ago. These increases are at least as great, if not greater, for elementary and high school students as for college students

In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and abide by rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates

The intense drive that children have to play with other children, therefore, is a powerful force for them to learn how to attend to others’ wishes and negotiate differences

But regardless of the lectures that students might hear in school about the value of helping others, school works against such behavior. By design, it teaches selfishness. The forced competitiveness, the constant grading and ranking of students, contain the implicit lesson that each student’s job is to look out for himself or herself and to do better than others

Under normal conditions, children develop their abilities to cooperate and help one another in free, self-directed, social play, where they learn to resolve their differences and take into account one another’s needs in order to keep the game going

Self-education also requires space—space to roam, to get away, to explore. That space should, ideally, encompass the range of terrains relevant to the culture in which one is developing