A Kindness Calendar

Tania Sheko shared a “Kindness Calendar” yesterday in the CLMOOC Facebook group, and she posed the question as to how CLMOOCers might hack the idea.

One idea that occurred to me: use this calendar as a guide or jumping-off point to making a commitment toward one act of kindness or praise to a different student, classmate, or colleague each day.

Those of us in classroom contexts might also ask our students to re-interpret the calendar for their own lives.

This calendar reminds me that I could improve some of my practices by systematizing and documenting them more effectively. That is to say, I make an effort every day to interact with students and provide positive feedback, but do I provide this feedback equally? Even if I do, I have no way of knowing because I do not always document these interactions.

This is not to say that acts of kindness should be audited, or that I should create some sort of arcane, complicated accounting system that will distract me from more important priorities (like interacting with students!). However, something simple, like a calendar, might be an excellent way of keeping track of kindness by reminding myself, at least once a day, that I need to interact equally with everyone. Revisiting such a calendar as part of my daily routine can keep my focus on equal interaction for the day; if the morning goes badly and I run out of time, checking in with the calendar later in the day can get me back on track.

The calendar idea could also help me to improve at creating positive interactions with my colleagues. I have close relationships with about a dozen or so colleagues, and I try to be pleasant to everyone – but I’m also sure that I can be more intentional about showing kindness to everyone. I can write thank-you notes more often, for example, or make an effort to praise or otherwise be kind to colleagues whom I typically have less interaction with.

What do other CLMOOC folk think about this calendar?

Author Michael S. WellerCategories CLMOOC, EducationPosted on January 2, 20176 Comments

“Share Something Small Every Day”

I’m reading Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, and one of the book’s many great ideas is “share something small everyday.”

I’d really like to do this, and I think Twitter would be an excellent place to start. Condensing my reflection on my work day into 140 characters (or, I suppose, 134 characters, since I’ll add the CLMOOC hashtag) would be an interesting, and I hope useful, experiment. Perhaps, if I can write a focused tweet every day for an extended period of time, I can expand on that as the semester goes on.

So, here’s my first daily share.

 

Research Brief: 2016-17

When I sat down to write my research plan for the upcoming school year, I began my re-reading my brief from last year. I realized that much of last year’s brief still applied; I also realized with some embarrassment that I had written some sections last year and then completely failed to follow through with them.

So, rather than write a new brief, I’ve updated last year’s brief:

The text in italics is new.

The text in blue indicates plans from last year’s brief that I failed to complete last year but want to pursue this year.

Dates are updated to reflect this year’s calendar.

Question

How can I involve students in setting their own learning outcomes and meaningfully pursuing these outcomes?

Subquestions

How do the power relationships at my school affect (or even constrain) efforts to create democratic spaces?

Can teaching practice that is non-coercive or non-deficit influence student motivation positively?

If students are involved in co-designing curriculum with teachers, will students have more meaningful learning experiences?

What is a meaningful learning experience?  How can teachers collaborate with students and families to determine what a meaningful learning experience is in their context?

What scaffolding or support is needed for students to design and pursue self-determined outcomes?

Purpose

I am hoping to discover and describe practical ways to empower students and create a learning space that is more democratic. I am also hoping to include families in an authentic (non-coercive, non-deficit) manner.

Literature Review 

As I conduct the inquiry, I will conduct a limited research review by blogging about relevant research.  (I did not do this last year. It would be fun to do a monthly “research corner” post.)

Method(s)

We will use James Beane’s Curriculum Integration model as a starting point for inquiry.  In particular, we will use the approach described in Chapter 4.  I will blog about this model at greater length in future posts.

I am going to modify this somewhat, in part due to this year’s special circumstances.

In the spring, our district and teachers’ union agreed to end the Fall 2016 semester at Christmas – an excellent idea, in my opinion, given that our previous model had two weeks of class plus finals after winter break before the change of semesters, which made January seem rushed and disconnected from what came before break. However, because an earlier start to the year was deemed too disruptive, we will have an 81-day fall semester with a 99-day spring semester. 

Another special circumstance is the presidential election, which has ramifications for all of my classes but especially, I think, for U.S. History.
As a result, I plan to use the following modifications this year:

•  In the fall, seniors (English) will work in groups complete a project that is smaller and less student-directed than I would ideally like. I will structure our workshop time more carefully and spend more time up front helping the students think about time management and outcomes
• In the spring, seniors will work more independently to pursue a project that is closer to the ideal described in Beane’s work.
• In the fall, juniors (U.S. History) will deepen their research skills by writing Letters to the Next President.
• In the spring, juniors will complete a Common Core Project, as described by Peter Paccone of San Marino High School. I will blog about this project later in the year.

We will create a Class Constitution and attempt to build a collaborative, non-coercive classroom culture that is based on honoring our agreements to each other.  We will also have brief but regular “check-ins” to discuss how well our Constitution is working for us. Check-ins will take place on Mondays/Tuesdays (i.e., the first meeting of the week in our block schedule).
I will use surveys, interviews, and perhaps sociograms to gather data from students on their perceptions in October, January & May.  I did surveys last year but not interviews or sociograms. 

Make An Inquiry: Curation Attempt #2

Mia Zamora & Risk-taking

In my last post, I discussed Julie Johnson’s contributions to the TTT conversation on July 8.  Another very significant contribution was Mia Zamora’s suggestion that spirituality plays a role in our efforts to teach as co-learners.  Though Mia published her piece “Taking A Leap of Faith” before CLMOOC started, it seems relevant to include in my curation.

Mia cites bell hooks’ idea of teaching as self-actualization, an idea that has resonated with me since I encountered it in MOOC MOOC Critical Pedagogy earlier this year.  Mia writes,

…it isn’t just that students should be empowered to show up as full selves, but that teachers must as well, in order to model, but also to show the kind of care for the work that only comes when we make ourselves at least somewhat vulnerable.

She also writes:

Institutional change that matters must generate first from the heart of the learning communities we design.

This is a helpful reminder that educators do have power to make change if we are willing to take risks.

I’m also reminded of two recent Google Hangouts, one where I was a participant and another that I watched, where participants made the case for taking a long view of our teaching.  In a TTT session about the Charleston Syllabus and BlackLivesMatter that I was lucky enough to be invited to, Alabama teacher Al Elliott made this point; specifically, he noted that our current system of entrenched institutional racism has been built over centuries, so we can’t reasonably expect to dismantle it in a few years.  In the Connected Learning hangout yesterday, Simon Ensor also noted that we need to take a long-term view if we are make meaningful change in learning spaces.

This is a very powerful idea, and paradoxically, it makes me feel a bit more motivated to make change in the short term.  That is to say, it becomes easier to take the kinds of risks that Mia argues for if we take the long view; if Room 248 is not a paragon of democratic discourse by Fall 2015, at least it will be a better place to be than it was in Spring 2015, because I will take some risks and invite my students to share more power with me.  And our room will be better in Spring 2016, and so on.  Somehow, not needing to be perfect in August makes me feel more emboldened to risk.

Kevin Hodgson & Colleagues

Kevin Hodgson has taken up the Make An Inquiry idea with enthusiasm, and for this I am grateful, as his efforts have helped me maintain my motivation.  Kevin and two colleagues, Jamilla Jones & Rick Taggerty, published a piece called “Nurturing A Culture of Teacher Inquiry” at Middleweb.  The article describes their efforts to promote teacher inquiry in a partnership between the Western Massachussetts Writing Project (WMWP) and the STEM Middle Academy in Springfield, MA.  The article describes some of the structure that the WMWP facilitators provided for the STEM Academy teachers, including drop-in coaching sessions and detailed checklist of steps.  I was especially intrigued by this excerpt:

A survey of STEM Academy teachers conducted in the days following our inquiry project sharing indicated that many of the teachers found the inquiry process valuable, but time-consuming. A few expressed that taking on practice-related research was too much to ask for from burdened classroom teachers.

The authors argue that inquiry is still worth doing, and of course I agree; but this points out to me that we need to be aware of possible resistance from our colleagues, and as a result we need to be very good salespeople for inquiry.  After all, if teachers received support in inquiry and still felt that it was too time-consuming, what will happen with teachers who aren’t receiving that kind of support?

Find (At Least) Five Friday, CLMOOC Make Cycle #3

I think I’m going to extend this week’s Make Cycle into next week, because I haven’t made as much progress on creating games as I would like.  My Find (At Least) Five Friday is going to be a document of the progress that I have made, as well as an acknowledgment of the people who have helped me along the way.

Kevin Hodgson and I have started on a game in Twine, and my face-to-face colleague Keith Bahrenburg has joined in as well by sharing some ideas he has for gami-fying his graphic arts classroom.  Nadine Aboulmagd and I have also started to collaborate on a game and are in the planning stages.  Nadine has also given me some valuable ideas in relation to my remediation make.

The Twitter chat on games yesterday was full of ideas.  As usual, Terry Elliot made me think about a variety of topics, including fence rows.  Chris Rogers got my hip-hop inspired pun on “system” and made it even better by mentioning Jamaican sound clashes, while our facilitators at Glass Lab Games did an excellent job of connecting the Make Cycle to the larger pedagogical and philosophical issues behind systems.  I think I would like to reflect further on how games and power might relate to each other.

The Teachers Teaching Teachers conversation I participated in on Wednesday deserves mention as well.  Kevin was there.  Karen Fasimpaur was also there, and she posted links for me in the chatroom and helped me get over my nervousness about participating in a chat with so many smart people.  Julie Johnson joined us on her phone from a hotel, which in and of itself was worthy of a shout-out; she also shared some intriguing ideas about inquiry and what she called “learning hubs” before her battery gave out.  She said that she’s still thinking through the logistics of what a learning hub would be, but the idea seems like it might be a workable framework for thinking about how to connect students with resources outside our classrooms.

When I was in elementary school, I was in a 3rd/4th combo and then a 5th/6th combo, and the kids who were a year ahead of us in that combo were our role models.  Charlie knew all about rap; Sharooz was the best at math; and Ryan was a kickball genius.  Mia Zamora and Anna Smith are kind of like those 4th graders for 3rd-grade me in the CLMOOC community.  They were in the TTT conversation, and they were able to articulate some of the ideas that I tend to express with metaphor or allusion.  For example, Mia mentioned that CLMOOC has the tendency to re-orient teachers as learners.  I tried to use an allusion to the Gospels – “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last” – to explain my idea that the most powerful teaching and learning happens when we de-center ourselves as authorities, and Mia summed up this idea with the term “co-learning.”  She also mentioned in the private Google Hangout chat that there is a spiritual element to Connected Learning and our struggle to democratize learning spaces; this also resonated with me.  Mia’s thought reminded me of the opening of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, in which she argues that schools should be spaces for teachers and students to achieve self-actualization.  (Full disclosure:  I’ve only read the opening of Teaching to Transgress, which was one of the readings in the Critical Pedagogy MOOC MOOC earlier this year.  I think I need to sit down with this book later this month and in August and read it before I go back to my classroom.)

Mia also wrote a blog post this week titled “A Leap of Faith” that deals with these topics; I read it quickly and plan to go back to it to read it more carefully a bit later.

I should also mention Paul Allison, without whom the TTT conversation would not have taken place, as he invited me, and asked me to propose a topic and invite people that I wanted to talk to.

Finally, Maha Bali’s ideas about power, democracy, and context have deeply influenced my own thinking about the ethical implications of my professional practice.  She couldn’t participate in TTT synchronously (6 pm in California is 3 am the following morning in Cairo, and even though she is often up at 3 am, she also has added commitments this month because of Ramadan), but she watched the Hangout later and added some helpful comments on Twitter.

In particular, Maha highlighted Mia’s comment about CLMOOC’s centering of teachers as learners, which – when I read it the following morning – helped me organize my thinking about the conversation.  I mention this because I’m intrigued by how the various media informed my participation.  That is to say, I was “there” in the TTT Hangout, and I was directly involved in the exchange in which Mia made her comments.  While her comments resonated with me during the Hangout and were on my mind, Maha’s asynchonrous comment on the conversation in another medium emphasized the importance of Mia’s comment for me.  I wonder what the implications of this are for learners in our classroom?  Can Twitter, for example, be a kind of backchannel (another idea, now that I think of it, that Mia brought up in the TTT Hangout!) to support student interaction?

I realize that this idea is probably very 2011, but I’m a slow learner!

Make Cycle 3: Games & Inquiry

This week’s Make Cycle is all about making games!

I played this a lot when I was a kid. Photo credit: “Atari-2600-Wood-4Sw-Set” by Evan-Amos – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atari-2600-Wood-4Sw-Set.jpg#/media/File:Atari-2600-Wood-4Sw-Set.jpg

My experience last week has led me to think that creating a game around my inquiry can be a useful way to deepen my understanding of my questions. I went into the summer thinking that I wanted to write a (more or less) formal research plan during the Make Cycles; now, however, I’m starting to think that I’d like to take on the various Make Cycle challenges as a kind of “pre-writing” for my research.

I’m interested in using Twine to create a text-based game that explores power relationships and learning outcomes. I’ve started creating a game that I’m calling “Inquiry.” If anyone would like to work with me on this game, please let me know!

Another resource that CLMOOC participants might look at is the “How I Got There” mission on Youth Voices that Karen Fasimpaur created. Karen described the mission:

A group of us on TTT [Teachers Teaching Teachers] last night started on a “How I got there” mission (activity) to encourage students to track their inquiry and research process. Afterwards, we started collaboratively writing this…Would love to have anyone help out with this.

If you’re interested in participating in the CLMOOC Make An Inquiry activities, please join us! A few resources are below.

• Visit the Make An Inquiry Google Doc or the Make An Inquiry Hackpad; feel free to add to these docs.
• If you’re blogging about inquiry, please consider adding a link to your post in the shared docs listed above.
• We’ve started to use the hashtag #makeaninquiry on Twitter in conjunction with the #clmooc tag. We are also using the hashtag #makeaninquiry in the CLMOOC Google Plus community.

Are you interested in inquiry, but not sure where to start? Or maybe you have an idea you’d like to share? Feel free to comment here as well!

To borrow an idea from Dave Cormier, we are attempting to create the Make An Inquiry strand while not exactly knowing where we are going, so your suggestions are really golden.

Remediating an Inquiry: CLMOOC Make Cycle 2

I developed much of the thinking in this post, and a good deal of its actual language, in blog and email conversations with Paul Allison, Nadinne Aboulmagd, and Maha Bali.

Remediating has been a challenge, in large part because I love to write, in the old-fashioned sense of the word:  using a pen to put text in a notebook or a computer to put text on a screen.  I’m not nearly as comfortable or experienced at composing in other media.  So when the challenge of remediating our texts appeared on Monday, I was initially resistant.  Even when Anna Smith suggested remediating our inquiry questions, I was skeptical:  wouldn’t this be a distraction or detour from the work I wanted to do this summer?

However, I’ve learned that good things usually happen when I push myself out of my comfort zone, so I resisted my urge to dismiss the idea of remediation in favor of doing my own thing.  The Make With Me, as I mentioned in my last post, helped me clarify what I might do:  use mapping to consider the power relationships at my school.

As the week went on, the thinking behind my make proved to me much more interesting – to me, at any rate – than the make itself.  Though I looked at a few different online mapping options, I decided in the end to make an old-fashioned pen-and-paper map.

This was my first attempt at mapping the power relationships at my school.

This was my second attempt.

The second attempt does a better job, I think, of showing my perception of power at the school, though I realized after completing the map that I switched from circles to rectangles without any particular reason.  Multiple rings in a circle shows more power.   The size of the circle or rectangle does not correlate to increased power, however.

I think I’m going to create a third map that uses hierarchical proportion to show who has more power.

I also should note that these maps only account for people who work at or attend the school as well as the families who send their children to our school.  It does not include other actors who exert power – e.g., district administrators, board members, outside consultants, the county office of education, lawmakers, vendors…

As I thought about the power relationships at my school, in addition to realizing that it’s extremely difficult to represent the complex manifestations of power, I realized that there are more questions that I might consider in my inquiry.

What would happen if I mapped my view of the power relationships at my school?  What would happen if I asked my students about their perceptions of these power relations?  Will these perceptions change if I give students more autonomy in my classroom?

What do we mean when we ask “who has power in our school?”  E.g., are we talking about power over resources?  Power over expected outcomes?  Power over evaluation and “gatekeeping”?  All of the above?  How might my inquiry change depending on which aspect of power I am considering?

To what degree do people cede power to others at our school?  If teachers/administrators/staff cede power to students and families, will this affect outcomes positively?

Can I use sociogramming techniques to learn about how my students perceive our school?  Can I use these methods to learn more about what students and their families want from school?  Would this lead to a greater democratization of expected outcomes?

I’ve also been thinking about Chapter 5 of Shagoury & Power’s The Art of Classroom Inquiry, which uses the term “distant teachers” (from Vera John-Steiner’s Notebooks of the Mind) to describe the texts we read to inform our research.  In addition to “distant teachers” in education, Shagoury & Power point out that we can learn from other fields as well.  I’ve been reading Margaret Collins Weitz’s Sisters in the Resistance, and this week I read the obituary of Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 children from the Nazis in Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939.

This has led me to ask some questions about how this reading can inform my inquiry.  For example, the incredible bravery and selflessness of Winton and résistantes such as Lucie Aubrac and Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux lead me to ask:

What are the possibilities of human achievement?  

How can I learn about my own potential as a human being from these stories?  

How can learning about people we admire inform and sustain our efforts to build communities that are humane and compassionate?

Make An Inquiry: June 23, morning

How much of the composition process is individual and how much is socially-mediated?

I’m asking that question right now because I’m visiting the LA Writing Project Summer Institute this week, and one of our norms is to open each day with 20 minutes of uninterrupted writing. I opened up Evernote and started to write a blog post about Make An Inquiry; this is pretty standard for me; when we do this free-writing I usually have a particular piece of writing in mind that I want to work on (last summer, for example, I did a lot of work on my essay on Gay’s Lion Farm).

However, CLMOOC was at the back of my mind – all the posts on Google Plus & Twitter that I saw yesterday but didn’t have time to respond to because I was at the LA County Museum of Art for the last performance of the late Chris Burden’s last work, Ode to Santos Dumont. (Okay, I was also streaming the US v. Colombia game on my phone, but I was still at the museum.) I also noticed that Kim Douillard had added to the Google Doc for Make An Inquiry that I started, but I didn’t have a chance to read it more than cursorily.

Out of curiosity, I decided not to look at all the communication that I needed to catch up on.

Of course, everyone’s writing is informed by their context; I’m not making any revelations with that statement. But I wonder how much my writing changed when I “disconnected” from the CLMOOC community for these 20 minutes? We give “on-demand” writing assignments “to see what students can do on their own” – but are we attempting to measure something that can’t possibly exist, if context is inseparable from composition?

I’m going to post this right now (9:30 am Pacific) in the spirit of Working Out Loud. I’ll come back to it later to edit and/or add links.

UPDATE: Links added along with minor edits (8:13 pm Pacific)

CLMOOC 2015: Make An Inquiry, Make Cycle 1

CLMOOC 2015’s first Make Cycle has begun!

We’ve changed the name of what was originally “the inquiry group” to Make An Inquiry.  (I worried that the term “group” would imply something that requires membership, application, approval from an authority, and so forth; we hoped that changing the name would lower barriers to entry.)

Another barrier to entry might be the word inquiry itself.  It seems to me that inquiry can have many meanings; it’s possible that the meaning of the word depends on the context and needs of an individual or a community.  I think that inquiry, like the term research, can be intimidating – but I don’t think it needs to be!  At its root, in my mind, inquiry is about asking questions and (to borrow a phrase from Michael Fullan¹) making these questions our friends by embracing them and then doing something about them.

Since the first Make Cycle encourages us to make and unmake introductions, I decided that I would introduce myself by sharing my questions.  I’m also going to share some “how to” ideas about inquiry – what Terry Elliot called “roadmaps.”

I also want to work on an annotated bibliography of resources – if I have time!  🙂

¹ Fullan, Michael. Change Forces: Probing the Depth of Educational Reform. London: Falmer Press, 1993.

Fullan writes (p. 39):  “In short, problems are our friends, but only if you do something about them.”

He elaborates (p. 37):

we cannot develop effective responses to complex situations unless we actively seek and confront the real problems which are in fact difficult to solve. Problems are our friends because it is only through immersing ourselves in problems that we can come up with creative solutions. Problems are the route to deeper change and deeper satisfaction. In this sense effective organizations ’embrace problems’ rather than avoid them.

Questions don’t have to be villains. (Public domain, accessed at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Batman_villains_The_Penguin_The_Riddler_The_Joker_1967.JPG)

 

Author Michael S. WellerCategories CLMOOC, Education, InquiryPosted on June 22, 2015June 22, 20152 Comments

#Rhizo15 Weeks 4 & 5, with a look ahead to Week 6, CLMOOC and my work in the LA Writing Project’s Summer Writing Camps

Week 4:  Teacher-less learning

I belong to a group of teachers at my school that works with the instructional coach to plan professional development.  We had a meeting earlier this month at which we discussed using lesson study as a framework next year for improving our collaboration and guiding our own professional growth.

We talked about identifying questions as a starting point, and I shared the question that’s been on my mind for awhile:  “How can I help students learn how to set objectives for their own learning? How can I involve students in making meaningful choices about their own learning? How can I help students to explore their own interests for meaningful learning?”

This led to a discussion about how Chris, our history chair, tried to implement Genius Hour unsuccessfully, just as I did earlier this year.  We came to the same conclusion: that students needed more support in independent learning.  Paradoxically, because our students have rarely been asked to take an active role in their learning, they often don’t know what to do when we give them options.

I’m excited about the possibilities of exploring this question next year. I’m looking forward to CLMOOC 2015 (you can sign up here) for this reason as well, as a space where I can (among other things!) begin to think about designing my professional learning for the upcoming school year.
The connection to Rhizo 15’s Week 4 prompt:  we won’t be depending on an administrator to be the “leader”; while we may ask for some administrative support, we will take charge of our own professional learning.
The question I identified – how to help students make meaningful choices regarding their own learning – also ties in with Week 1’s idea of learning subjectives.

Rhizo15 Week 4, I’d Like You to Meet the LA Writing Project

My full-time work is at a high school in El Monte, but I also wear the hat of co-director of the LA Writing Project (LAWP) Young Writers’ Camp (YWC).  This summer, we hope to focus not only the learning experiences of the students, but also on how the YWC teachers can benefit from the professional learning experiences the camp can provide.  I hope to be able to model some of these possibilities with my own work, starting with my blog.

My question about helping my students set objectives has become central, as three spaces of learning – Rhizo15, LAWP, and CLMOOC – converge.

Week 5:  Rhizomes As Invasive Species

The idea of rhizome as invasive species is intriguing.  I’d like to add this idea to my list of unwritten blog posts.

This list, waiting for June and more time to think and write, keeps getting bigger.  Kim Douillard‘s recent posts, such as this one, and a post on Friday by Deanna Mascle entitled Taking Time Out, have contributed to my nascent realization that I can’t continue to “wait till June” to write.   I have to restructure my practice so that I have time to write on a regular basis.

Maha wrote a post about the resistance of weeds that made me think of weeds as a metaphor for unintended learning outcomes (i.e., outcomes not intended by the teacher, pacing plan, policy-maker, standardized test).  This got me to think about Heather Flores’ argument in Food Not Lawns that we shouldn’t pull up any plant, “weed” or otherwise, unless we know exactly what the plant is and how it relates to other organisms in its ecosystem.

One person’s weed is another person’s nutrition, decoration, medicine…

I also started to think of the metaphor of monoculture vs. polyculture.  As I wrote on Maha’s blog, we are dominated in the United States by a kind of monocultural pedagogy:  we lack biodiversity because we are driven by policy-makers to create neat rows of a single crop.  For example, when we differentiate, we are not differentiating to respect or cultivate multiple outcomes; we are differentiating to provide access to the same, teacher-determined outcome.

Now, there are probably some outcomes that all students should get to.  I suspect that everyone needs to be able to write effectively for an audience, for example.  But there are so many possible ways to get there…

Week 6:  It’s Already Started, But It Never Really Ends

I have some ideas about how I want to write a “practical guide” to rhizomatic learning, but (see Week 5, above) I don’t have the time right now to put them down on paper, as it were.  However, I do want to point out this excellent work by Whitney Kilgore & Autumm Caines:  a Google Doc with step-by-step directions on how to teach and learn rhizomatically.  I’d like to build on their work by writing my own guide for the public high school context.