Think Like a Teacher

Authentic Task 1

Assignment Title: Design a Media-based Education Summit

Grade level/subject: any subject, grades 6+

Objectives: 

Students will design and plan an Education Summit to promote new thinking and consider new strategies to effectively educate American K-12 students in the 21st century.

Students will effectively evaluate, select, and balance agendas of multiple “voices”  in American Education.

Students will state specific reasons for selection of their program “voices.”

Students will create a visual/multimedia “activator” for the summit, including media clips, text explanations, and both visual and verbal content to inspire dialog across all constituencies involved in American education.

(Lesser/optional objective):  Students will brand their summit to attract sufficient advertising income and social media presence to combat competition from such stalwarts as Mad Men, The Onion,  or various YouTube channels.

Task requirements:

• At least thirty diverse voices related to American Education must be selected and included in the summit agenda
• “Voices” must be diverse in all aspects: geographic, socio-economic, political, profession/job/role, life stage, overt and covert agenda, etc.
• All research sources must be cited in an annotated bibliography explaining why they were selected
• Summit agenda/activities must be designed to elicit more than predictable stump speeches of the selected “voices”
• A self-designed rubric to EVALUATE the summit design must be included, along with self-evaluation using this same rubric
• Selection process for  “voices” must include social networking response opportunities

• Additional requirements as determined by the students

Due Date: Friday, September 24, 2010.

Alternate assignment: You may opt for an easier solution and simply post comments on multiple venues discussing and/or critiquing NBC’s  upcoming Education Nation programming/Facebook page/branding effort.  One option: Edutopia. You must present a cohesive “message” replicable as a stump speech on an ongoing basis. In other words, you must convincingly play the role of a potential “voice” for an education summit. Documentation/RSS feed/aggregation of all your comments must be your “deliverable.”

Turn in this assignment by tagging #edunatalternative wherever you wish and tweeting it with this tag.

Ready….set… GO!

First thing on a Monday, and the first tweet I see is Larry Ferlazzo’s response to today’s New York Times column on Scientifically Tested Tests. Even though my first magna-cup of killer coffee is still just steaming next to me, this one is worth a response. Larry is right that some of the suggestions from Williams College prof Susan Engel are “decent.” I would go so far as saying they are both logical and (sadly) innovative. Using a student’s own writing and using a flexible topic to draw on his/her own expertise in that piece is a terrific way to see student thinking skills, writing skills, and core achievement in language.  Larry is also right that one or two of the suggestions are a bit odd. If we were to “test” reading knowledge through a name-it-and-claim it author contest, the same teachers who teach to the test would make kids memorize lists of authors.

The column suggests two aspects of testing that can make it meaningful (my own emphasis and analogies added):

1.) Writing is a powerful and high-def way to see the details of a student’s accomplishments and understanding. As anyone involved with writing knows, writing is thinking. Writing about reading adds another layer of complexity by using one brain-rich process (writing) to discuss and reveal what is occurring in another (reading). Writing is thinking, and reading is a miracle of the human brain. Put the two together, whether in print, in electronic form, or in some mediated version, and you have a 1080p window into student learning and thinking.

2.)  That there exists a mutually agreed-upon “standard” for what defines  “well-educated children.”  Professor Engel assumes that everyone agrees on the standard she describes. I wonder whether they do. I read standards from states, professional organizations, and Common Core, and most of the time I say, ” Of course we want our kids to be able to do that.” But in the translation to assessing them, we risk either analyzing each standard down to the micron and thus trivializing it or losing the very global nature of thinking (and writing) through subdivision. The whole is greater than its parts, and perhaps this focus is what we have lost.

Larry wonders aloud how such high-altitude assessment can help inform teaching, and that is a good question. Having taught very, very bright kids for many years, I found one of the most stimulating and intellectually challenging parts of my job was analyzing what was going on in each child, his “strengths and needs,” when writing Gifted IEPs. Essentially, I was using global analysis–and a lot of writing, selected portfolio pieces, and regular observations in both my journals and students’ own journals to help describe where this child was now and needed to go next. The decisions were never solely mine. There was input from parents and from the students themselves, too. They were daunted by a 6 by 6 foot banner in my classroom that simply asked, “What do YOU think?,”and they took it very seriously.

But here is the rub: How do you take such a process of analyzing writing, selected student work, anecdotal input, and more, and make it consistent from student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school? How do you make it “scientific”? How do you enter it into a relational database for comparative analysis? How do you find TIME for such difficult depth? And in practical terms, how do you teach teachers and administrators to do it in  way that is meaningful to others beyond your classroom door? Such work requires analytical writing by the adults, a skill that, alas, they may not have learned well in school, either.

I keep coming back to writing as the 1080p view of accomplishment. Now, if we could start asking inspiring kids to write every day instead of once a marking period, perhaps we’d have taken a first step.

What does it look like to teach and learn globally? I have been thinking about this as I follow tweets from those in Shanghai for a ed conference this week, as TeachersFirst has joined as a partner in the free, online Global Education Conference in November, and even as I talk with friends who are planning or returning from travel to various overseas destinations. I am no world traveler, though I have been to the UK, Switzerland, and — foreign country within the U.S.– Alaska. But I don’t think the teaching globally thing requires world travel experience.

What teaching globally does require — at a minimum — is posing another layer of questions on top of everything that has become routine in our classrooms.  As we discuss the weather in elementary science and talk about changing seasons, how many of us  stop to ask about the opposite hemisphere where the seasons are reversed from ours? How do you suppose the approach of spring feels to those down under as we all talk about pumpkins and raking leaves? What would Halloween feel like in spring? Wait…do they even celebrate Halloween with costumes and gluttonous bags of candy? This might be the global layer of questions in first grade.

In middle school, we teachers are so aware of students’ perceptions of  “cool” and “lame” that we may forget to add the layer of questioning that neutralizes both cool and lame into global. It was cool that suffragettes fought for the right to vote (You mean they didn’t always have it? Lame and stupid.) Where do women live today without the right to vote? That question is not in the tested content, but it is in the global layer of questions for middle school.

In high school, who should pose the global layer of questions? If students heard them in elementary and middle school, could they take over?

Physics class has problems related to motion: calculate ways to make this object land precisely at this point. Launch the water balloon to hit the teacher-caricature squarely and demonstrate using formulas why your catapult had the right design to work. Ask something about this project to give it global dimension. Would this water balloon behave the same way in Tibet? What impact might altitude have? If you were trying to design a physics problem for kids in Iceland, what might you have to change? Would they think it was cool to try to splat the teacher? Does teen sense of humor vary between different cultures?

Now Hamlet. Does it matter that he is a Dane? Do you suppose Danes would have written a tragedy about an English prince? How did Shakespeare know about this prince, anyway? Did he make it up? Did Brits know about stuff on the continent then? What would people know now if they followed Lady Macbeth on Twitter– while she was washing her hands??  How would Shakespeare have used Tweets in his plays? 

Now History. Everybody knows about the Declaration of Independence, right? How much of China’s history do we know? Why do we expect them to know what the 4th of July is? Don’t they manufacture many of the things we use to celebrate it? Are Chinese kids upset that they can’t get at the same stuff on the Internet we can? Isn’t that freedom of speech? Wait–do they have it? Do they WANT it? When I don’t like something my parents say, I tell them. Do they? They say the Chinese want to be like us. Do they? Why would they? What part of us would they hate to be?

What if we asked each high school student to pose a global question in every subject every day, somehow connected to what happened in class that day but also to other places and people? What if they aggregated them where others could see – and generate their own? Is that what one layer of global learning might look like? What a marvelously purposeful digression.

I have been observing a three year old grandson play over the last couple of weeks. By far his biggest thrill are the oldest toys in the house: his father’s old Matchbox ® cars from decades ago. They are beaten up, some lack wheels, and all are woefully out of date. So how do old toys take on new tricks? They combine with 2010 On-Demand video and current songs or ride piggy back on top of an electronic airplane that generates its own sound effects (not as well as that little boy mouth does, though!). This three year old creates the equivalent of a toy mash-up. When I ask him it, he has a perfectly logical explanation.This three year old doesn’t know that play is learning, and learning play. He has figured out, however, how to combine any and all tools to create the perfect combo for his (imaginary) situation.

Isn’t this what we really hope teacher and students will do with the available “toys” in their classrooms? There is no need to throw out the old when the newest toys arrive, especially not as budgets make it less and less likely that schools will have the latest and greatest– or anything close to it. But we do want imaginative minds to mash up what works in our class scenarios, even in unlikely or incongruous combinations. Formulas and teacher manuals simply don’t work all the time. Who would have envisioned digital cameras, Matchbox® cars and an iPhone together? If they are in the same room, together they can be tools for learning. I don’t know how we “teach”  teachers what a three year old does naturally: to play with what is available and help students to do the same. Maybe we could try leaving some of the toys out and observing for a couple of weeks, then asking the students to explain it. Yes, I know this is idealistic, but a three year old made me think of it.

This summer, I have been following a BBC TV series, The Choir. Amid the cacophony of cable TV, this gem showed up during a search for buried On Demand treasure.  The reality series centers on Gareth Malone, a young choral director who wants to bring singing into the lives of schools and students as it was in his own life: a focal point of community and a transcendent experience in teamwork amid challenge. Having grown up in a school where music was such a central nervous system, I can understand Malone’s mission and passion. I had never stopped and thought much about the fact that music does not hold such a place in most schools nor in the out-of-school lives of most kids.

The series aired so far has shared two school immersions for Malone, one in a coed “comprehensive” (high school) and another in an all-boys’ sports-oriented secondary school roughly equivalent to U.S. combined middle and high school. Neither school is in an elite community or  culture where music is revered as part of  the “heritage.” A visit to King’s College, Cambridge to sing together with the fabled men and boys’ choir was the closest these school choirs came to the traditional world of Choral music with a capital C. More typically, the school settings show boys chasing each other on a playground, avoiding Malone, or sharing raps as they declare formal music  “gay.” One of my favorite scenes involved Malone trying to cajole the all male PhysEd staff into singing in a staff choir. Picture the chorus teacher in your school making such a foray into the world of smelly sweat socks!

As a teacher, I see so many messages in The Choir, but the loudest is one of raising student voices. Malone does it by popping his boy-face into places where no sane person would tread and finally winning over a group by recognizing reasonable goals for them and persistently exuding his own passion until the reticent are willing to take similar risks. But how often do we do either: publicly persist in our own passions despite ridicule or help students take risks with their own?

Too often,  curriculum is not centered on risks or passions. It is centered on sameness and uniformity of path. Malone is quick to point out the confidence that comes from finding an individual singing voice and sharing it. But he is not developing soloists. He is raising passionate voices together, voices that grow from within as they risk sucking in air and letting it out with gusto. The sameness of “chorus” is less about being alike and more about blending together. But it cannot work until each individual singer/student risks raising his own voice and hearing it among the others, eventually tuning in to how the sounds blend together. So should curriculum reach resonance. A teacher models the passion, even in a vacuum at times. The students find voice and hear themselves, and the choirmaster/teacher helps in seeing challenges that can work but will take work. The final performance is a recognizable accomplishment — for each raising his own voice.

Watch the choral boywonder-choirmaster on BBC America. As a teacher, you may find inspiration for a new voice of your own.