Evaluating World View
The second semester brought me to the first day of a new course, as in, brand new senior level elective. I've thought about this course a ton, planned some and am hoping it goes off well. The first activity I put in front of the students was an adaptation of World of 100. An activity that asks students to conjure global statistics as they exist in the student's mind. Essentially, they guess a series of demographic categories and then compare with the correct answers.The link above details the steps I undertook in the activity. But, I want to use the space here to reflect a little on why I do activities like this, a pre-test, if you will. (In American History I start with the US Citizenship test)The reason I *torture* the students with this type of activity isn't so much to bring to light their lack of knowledge, but rather to get them to evaluate how they perceive the world they inhabit. These activities do humble the kids (a bit), but also serve as a motivation for them to assess their own view of the world and figure out why it is their version of the world does not jive with reality. One of my favorite classroom moments, was when they immediately wanted to know where the numbers came from, sources, links, etc. They wanted to verify and validate. (yay, them!)Some reactions from the students were:
Filling out the sheet was strange because it forced me to think outside of my environment and what I deem normal.
I, all of a sudden, felt like I knew very little about the world. I thought that I would have been able to do ok with this since I have gotten to travel quite a bit around the country and out. Obviously though I still know very little about the world.
When I was filling it out I kept wanting to fill it out for just America and I had to keep reminding myself that it was supposed to fill it out for the whole world.
I felt confused. I never thought about the world in numbers like that before. It's hard for me to look at the world at such a large point of view.
Filling out the world of 100 worksheet gave me a different perspective on a lot of things. I couldn't remember a time when I had ever thought about the world in that way.
At the end of last semester's class, the goal was for the students to know the function and interplay of the major governmental branches (at all levels) and to understand how those branches and functions and interplay, impact them personally. For the Globalization course, the goal is to have students evaluate world issues from a perspective outside their own, be able to converse about the similarities and differences that exist in different regions of the world and ultimately engage in a more holistic, global conversation about the pressing issues of the day.At least that is the goal, we are off to a good start.
Post EduCon 2.2
First of all, thank you to all the session leaders who led some amazing conversations, thanks to the workforce of SLA students, staff and parents, thanks to the attendees that were willing to brave the brisk, snowy Philadelphia weather to join us for the event.Organizing this event is an undertaking. It literally takes the entire SLA community to step up. I value community in a really specific, necessary way. Working in a place that rallies, pulls together, works hard, and laughs along the way, is necessary (for me) in my workplace. So YAY!The reason I find EduCon personally compelling, is that if I am going to foster and sustain my PLN, I need to see them, in person, face to face... reality. I can limp along throughout the year, trading tweets and IMs and blogs and comments, but I really don't think I would keep up with the whole endeavor if there was not a time to process, converse, share in real time and space. Asynchronous can only get me so far.Today I am tired, as Lehmann would say, "bone weary". There is no good way to recover but with copious amounts of sleep, couch time and fresh air. The effort is so worth it, the benefits/impacts have a long tail for all people involved. It is incredibly fulfilling and humbling to play a role in all this. Thanks for taking part. So good.
Phlagstaff 2010
From May 2nd-May 9th, 2010, ten students and two staff from SLA will venture to the southwest once again for adventure and learning. The inaugural 2009 trip was a smashing success and we are looking forward to new experiences on a new river this trip.We will be visiting:Red Rocks of SedonaCinder Cones of Flagstaffthe "Lava Tubes"Grand Canyon - South RimCoconino High SchoolGrand Canyon - Diamond DownThe students in Philadelphia are partnered with 10 Flagstaff students who attend Coconino High School. This partnership allows for not only for the adventure of the trip, but of a real connection to the people, not just the place.This tradition of exploring far flung places in nature all started with my 7th grade Science teacher and I've never been the same since. I've been trying to pay that kindness forward for the past 15 years as I have taken kids all over Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Southeast Utah, and AZ/Grand Canyon (from Glen Canyon to Diamond Creek). None of this would ever have been possible without the serious support of my family and a robust community committed to providing these special experiences for students.If you would like to support our trip, consider donating to our fundraising efforts!
Serendipity
Last year during the 2008 election cycle I explored a plethora of websites with my students, at times the amount of tabs I had open scared the students (it was amusing). One of the links that we investigated was WhyTuesday? In the heat of the most exciting election of my lifetime, the students were incredibly engaged and interested in all things election. They were curious about the idea of change and how it was manifesting itself on the WhyTuesday? site. It was all about citizen action and moving the people toward more political participation. Good stuff.Fast forward one year to the 2009 election cycle. Night. Day. The students were once again in my class talking about the election, but whatever electricity had existed last year had long faded and we witnessed a lackluster election cycle in Philly. One thing had not changed, though, I still introduced my students to WhyTuesday? and talked about the work that was occurring. They were once again intrigued. This year, however, I shot out a message on twitter that I used the website with students.Enter twitter searching.Jacob Soboroff, contributor at WhyTuesday? reads tweet about use in my classroom, retweets and this is how the story goes...We trade emails, then phone numbers to organize a time when I can get both of my classes in the same room at the same time and when he is awake (we are EST, he is PST). It is a little surreal to have the person iChatting into History class also be interviewing Clint Eastwood in the same 12 hour span of time.While Jacob and I are arranging for times and such, the students are working on a mini-project which asked them to propose a reform to the US voting procedures. They were specifically challenged to look into what change would bring about the largest increase in voter participation in the US. To prepare for this we looked at voter turnout history in the US, investigated other democracies in the world and evaluated current US voting procedures. After all the investigation was complete, the groups came to consensus about a reform they were going to propose and chose a slogan. Then in each group: one person wrote a position paper, one wrote a rebuttal, one recorded a radio ad and one produced a print ad. The goal was to have a consistent theme/slogan and be presented as a package reform proposal. The project portion was essentially completed in two classes, the research spanned about four classes. Some sample final projects can be found on my wiki.Last Tuesday (how fitting), Jacob iChatted in at the end of the school day to 60 juniors all jammed into my classroom. They spent the next 45 minutes trading ideas and questions about voting, civic motivations and US history. It was spectacular. When we debriefed on Thursday, many of the kids felt like this was a wonderful way to 'have class'. A majority of hands went up when I asked if they would like me to try and arrange for other experts to iChat in. When I asked them what they liked about the iChat, they were most impressed that during their conversation with Jacob, he didn't just talk *at* them. They genuinely felt like he was interested in their ideas and the process of sharing thoughts, rather than just hearing himself talk. (so good)From my perspective everything mentioned above was wonderful but, having a real person that uses their life to try and improve civic engagement in the US, iChat into my class to speak with students is superb. The fact that it all went down because of 140 characters on twitter is, well, perfect.
SLA goes to AZ/UT
Backchanneling the (not) State of the Union
Goal:Student engagement with and reflection on the (not) State of the UnionMeans:Moodle Chatroom backchannel for the live broadcast of the addressANDPersonal response to the ideas/issues presented using GCast channel and cellphones*Results:20 students participated in the live backchannel**AND1-2 minute student reflections recorded on GCast*For directions on how to set up a gcast channel to use with multiple users**Kyle Stevens and I are toying around with having a TX/PA joint chatroom next year between his students and my students
Feels like Home.
At some point in the last seven days I finally synthesized my decision making process for picking up from a place I adored to join in the fun at SLA. The days leading up to the EduCon kick off were nothing more than a blur of constant activity and thought focused on organization, doing, cleaning, constructing, moving and every other action verb you can imagine. It was delightful.However, when education professionals started pouring into the school on Friday morning one question kept popping up. It came in different forms and slight variations on a theme, but really people wanted to why SLA works, why I would move across country to join in. When I left Flagstaff last spring, I wrote:
The visit to EduCon2.0 and SLA solidified within me a certainty that I think I had been coming to for quite some time. I needed to work in a place with people that ‘get’ it with regard to students and learning. Although many of my revelations and connections were at tech conferences and online, at the end of the day I need to be in a real space with educators that approach education with a similar philosophy and curricular approach. By walking through the door of the Science Leadership Academy I literally opened a new door on my career path.
All of that is still true, however I realized a more subtle and significant connection in this whole choice to be here and it connects to another theme I find myself returning to time and again. I grew up in the smallest of farming communities in western Wisconsin, in the 80s. Glamorous it was not; hard work, struggle and perseverance were at the top of the list for descriptors. I would not change a bit of it. Nothing. Not one moment.The school I attended was not progressive, traditional in all those really traditional ways. Lincoln High School was phenomenally important to a bunch of farm kids in the Midwest. Our teachers pushed us to be prepared to get out and do more with our lives. The people in the community pushed for it, the students reached for it and the result was a singular effort striving for opportunity that only college offered at that time. The high school held 160 students 9-12, but has cranked out a Ph.D. from Berkeley that works for the National Institutes of Health, a member of the CIA, a top account in a major firm, a vice president of Ericsson and who knows what else. Small farm towns do not tend to have this kind of success rate for their students. What my hometown did was unify behind the success of its young people in the most consistent manner. Communal, unyielding support and expectations for success walked with us everyday.Since I left the cozy security of rural America 16 years ago, I have tried to create that feeling of community I left in the rolling hills of Wisconsin. And on Friday when I was being asked over and over again, why does SLA work, why did you choose this. The answer was the same for both questions: SLA epitomizes all of the good pieces of a community of care I was carefully raised in as a child and after all these years teaching all over the US, I am home again.
Grading Education
During our decadent snow day today, I began reading Richard Rothstein's Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right . If anyone else has read or is reading this particular piece of writing, please let me know as I would like to process some of this as I go. The Economic Policy Institute has the introduction posted.Some introductory ideas/assertions from Rothstein that caught my attention:--In education, “accountability,” as described here, requires schools and other public institutions that prepare our youth to pursue the goals established by the people and their representatives through democratic processes, and to achieve these goals to the extent possible by using the most effective strategies available.--Yet none of these proposals commanded sufficient support because none addressed NCLB’s most fundamental problem – although tests, properly interpreted, can contribute some important information about school quality, testing alone is a poor way to measure whether schools, or their students, perform adequately.--State accountability systems should ensure that schools and supporting institutions promote all these traits in a balanced fashion, because accountability for only some outcomes will create incentives to ignore others.--One reason, perhaps the most important, why No Child Left Behind and similar testing systems in the states got accountability so wrong is that we’ve wanted to do accountability on the cheap.--The chapter describes how an accountability system organized around achieving a fixed proficiency point leads to excessive concentration on students whose performance is slightly below that point and ignores students who are either above or far below it.These are just a few of the quotes from the introduction. I am perpetually intrigued by the idea that standardized testing, as it is currently employed through NCLB, is a false path for a successful educational model. In the attempt to wrap my brain around relevant research, I picked up a few books over the last month to dig into. This is the first one into which I am digging.The last few sentences of the introduction really hit home after this past weekend's conversations.
But first things first. Before detailing this accountability program, we have to ask, “accountable for what?” What are the goals of American public education? Certainly, good test scores are part of the answer, but should schools be accountable for more – say, good citizenship, or good judgment? If so, is it possible to measure these broader school outcomes to know whether educators are performing satisfactorily? It is to these questions that we now turn.
Now onto page 13.
Rebranding History
Rebranding HistoryWoke up this morning and heard 'crackdown' again...this time on NPR.While having a conversation last night during the Olympics Opening Ceremony, a friend expressed disappointment with NBC for the treatment of Tiananmen Square in the historical overview of China. The word NBC employed to describe Tiananmen was: crackdown. Webster's definition of crackdown: as to take positive regulatory or disciplinary action. If that is the correct definition of Tiananmen, I must have watched different video footage when I was 15 years old. If you want a refresher...there are endless videos and readings online. But make no mistake, there is nothing positive about what you will see. Tiananmen was a time when 'democracy was sweeping the globe', the Wall was crumbling, perestroika was working and the people of China were ready to have a voice. As the days clicked by in 1989 and the people began to crowd into Tiananmen Square, I remember thinking that this could be their moment. But all of that came to a halt on June 4th when the tanks rolled down the street.Fast forward fourteen years when I had the extreme privilege of visiting China during the summer of 2003. We traveled to many places in China but I knew that when I got to Beijing, I wanted to see one thing for myself. The city was quiet that morning and I wanted to get there without the crowd I was traveling with, to have a moment before the hawkers and tourists and lines rolled in. I needed to be there, I needed to stand there. At one point I turned around and looked back towards Mao's tomb and my mind flashed to the scene of the military coming down the street. It was unchanged, I could see the tanks in my mind, and I was frozen. This was a place where a generation of people tried to fight against oppression of action and thought, and lost. This was the scene of a massacre, not a crackdown.Possibly most upsetting about the media's word choice in using crackdown is that it adopts the Chinese government perspective of Tiananmen, rather than the perspective from the rest of the world as we watched. When the media starts to adopt the language of the Communist government to describe a catastrophic violent action against free speech and action, we should all take notice and question the re-branding of a staggering human rights nightmare.Words can be incredibly insidious in changing the memory of an event. The use of the word crackdown is one of those moments and, although I wholeheartedly want the Olympics to give the Chinese people their voice, I think much would be lost if the global collective culture began to actually think of Tiananmen as nothing more than a government action to bring order, rather than the massacre that it was. Could be an interesting moment to parse out in the classroom with students about the 'smoothing' of history over time by using vocabulary differently... this unfortunately is not the only example.
Grand Canyon Youth and the San Juan River
20 Eighth Graders + 2 Teachers + 5 River Guides + 4 days + 1 River = PRICELESS
Will be back from the trip on Tuesday... we are all in need of serious 'hydro' therapy!
(Brought to us by the most wonderful non profit in Flagstaff... Grand Canyon Youth!)
Makes me laugh...
So, I send emails everyday through our webmail service at school... which is basically an online version of Outlook. I have the preferences set to spell check each email before it is sent. The amusing part is that the list of words that are 'spelled' wrong are those that just are not recognized by the dictionary. Words that are either spelled wrong or unknown: blog, wiki, RSS, mashup, Google, etc. The list goes on. Each and everyday I misspell words that I want to catch, but I also see these words and more sorted out as 'unknown' by the ONLINE EMAIL dictionary. Does anyone else find that absolutely bizarre? In a place where we need to start recognizing the potential of Web 2.0 tools, it is quite a contradiction to see that the easily updated online dictionary can't seem to recognize those tools.