#ShareTheMess: The October/November Swoon

"nosedive" by Elijah Nouvelage from flickr

Late October and early November was a bad time for me. Yeah, it's the time of year that we all hit a dip in our collective energy level - there isn't a long weekend to be found in October, the new year smell of the school year has worn off, it starts to get dark earlier and earlier - but I made some mistakes in October and November. They dogged me for about a month. Don't do what I did. In no particular order:

Don't focus only on the students you're struggling with. There will be students that you have growing pains with. That you butt heads with. There will be classes that are a struggle. But fixating on those students you're struggling to get on the same page as, focusing on the things you're not able to do in the class you're struggling with: do those things for long enough and they get toxic. You stop seeing the great thinking some of your students are doing. You become blind to the growth that groups of your kids are making. And your failures build up inside you as you continue to fixate on the areas you're not making progress in and ignore the successes present around you.

Don't compare your old students to your new students. Yeah, we do it. Yeah, it's inevitable. But those comparisons can eat you up. I loop with my students: I get my ninth graders for a two year world history loop. So when I said goodbye to my tenth graders last May, I knew what was coming. I have looped back down before: this year was the fourth time I've done it. However, the contrast this year really hit me. In too many instances I only saw what my students couldn't do. In other times it was comparing second semester tenth graders to first semester ninth graders.

Combine these two things for a solid month? Come the middle of November I was a mess. I felt like a phony: here I was, advocating trying new things in the classroom and celebrating what your students can do when you get out of their way and I couldn't get out of my own way.

Finally, Victoria asked me about all the things my students could do. Asked about what was going right. And finally, slowly, I started to focus on the great thinking my students were doing. I started to be kinder to myself, to see my students for who they were: freshmen who I had another one and a half years with. Talented kids who were making strides at critical thinking and owning their learning.

And that focus made all the difference. I started seeing the amazing projects they were working on. The student who taught me a ton about the transgender movement. The kids who shared a ton of information about a fascinating slave revolt in Rome that I had never heard of.

And here we are, in December. First semester is (shockingly) almost done, and things are looking up. All it took was someone asking me the right question.

My Imperfect Classroom

It seems like since becoming involved in social media, lots of doors have been opened. I see into spectacular teachers' classrooms on a regular basis. I beg, borrow, and steal (with attribution) from awesome people all over the place. I talk about the good things that happen in my classroom. I talk about the bad things that happen on my classroom.

And, given all the awesome I get to see from other connected educators, I'm more vexed than ever that I have students that are disengaged. I'm bothered that I can't create the climate of excellence in my classroom that lets me move away from grades. A climate that gets students to do their best always. That gets rid if the 'how many points is this worth' mentality. That attempts to reach this point have both been unsuccessful and made my assessment this year kind of a hot mess.

I can't explain why I couldn't reach two students who chose not to do one of the most spectacular projects that we do. A project that everyone does. And everyone talks about for the rest of their high school career and beyond.

I can't logic out why kids are still sometimes creating things that are less then their best. Why when given choice around subject matter and the way they demonstrate their knowledge, products are still being created that demonstrate less thought and use of classtime than are appropriate.

I'm stuck in a rut with a few kids: I can't get their focus for my class period. They are highly capable students. They are successful and thoughtful in other classes. But I don't have the answers - or choices - that they need to be successful right now.

In this age of the global teacher this is hard to stomach. I see so many people doing so many great things with their students and I wonder why that isn't happening in my room.

It isn't teacher jealousy: jealousy implies a desire for someone to do less well or be less good at something. I want the ninjas in my PLN to keep inspiring me with the great things they are doing in their classroom.

It's a feeling of not-good-enough. A feeling of frustration. And it's kind of a dangerous game.

Before I was a connected educator, I was looking into classrooms on my campus. Now the pool is so much bigger. I get to look into a LOT of classrooms and hear about what is going on in them. And that opens my eyes to what I COULD be doing. And I know I'm not the only connected educator that feels that way.

Being connected makes the bar that much higher. Being connected therefore makes the shortcomings in my classroom that much more visible to me.

So what's the answer? I wish I had one. Keep sharing. Keep listening. Keep taking to people. Keep asking yourself how that awesome thing that that teacher does in AP Chemistry - keep asking how and what does that look like in my world history class.

Keep asking how. Keep asking why. Keep asking 'what if.'

Keep listening to our students.

Get better. Iterate. Try things. Listen to people way smarter than me - and yes, this definitely includes my students.

Steal more ideas. Try and fail more. And keep listening. That's the only way forward.

#FailForward: Learning From The Russian Revolution Unit

I’ve already written about the unit structure for my Russian Revolution unit. It was my next step towards trying to create the most student-centered history classroom that I can. The unit happened. And it’s done. What were the takeaways? Two big ones, in no particular order…

While the crowd-sourcing activity was cool - and a neat way for students to build schema about a unit - it wasn’t enough schema. My students didn’t have enough knowledge of the Russian Revolution unit when they went out and chose their inquiry topics for the unit. Some ended up choosing questions they were really interested in. Other students ended up with questions they weren’t really interested in and floundered as they went further into their research. This was my fault - live and learn. For the World War II unit, my students will have more schema before they go out and do their own inquiry.

Secondly, and students pointed this out as the unit wound down, some felt like the need for an inquiry question took away from their ability to go out and get a broad view of the unit. They felt like they didn’t really understand the broader progression of the Russian Revolution unit until they got to watch their fellow students present on their aspect of the Russian Revolution.

Again, my bad. It is rewarding, though, to get to own these mistakes with my students publicly in class after the unit ended. I think that as you try new things in the classroom, it is so important to model your learning from these experiences with your students. It was gratifying to get to name those mistakes and explain how the next unit would be different.  #FailForward, right?

North Bay CUE Conference Thoughts

I was lucky enough to get to attend the North Bay CUE’s annual event today. It was a good time! Like most conferences these days, it was awesome to get to catch up with Twitter friends in real life. People are the highlight. Does this mean that conferences aren’t worth it? Absolutely not. I take ideas back to my classroom that will make me a better teacher. But man, it’s cool to get to hang out with folks who are passionate about making education better!

I got to check out Amy Fadeji’s #twitterrocks in the first session of the day. Amy swore this was her first presentation on Twitter, but her session layout was excellent. I especially liked her use of a TodaysMeet backchannel as a non-Twitter way people could share concerns and questions they had. It was inspiring to be in a room learning about Twitter with multiple administrators and superintendents. Connected administrators - what a powerful thing!

I got to co-present with with Sarah Press about the Innovation Day we had at our school last spring. We spent a lot of time thinking about the structure of this presentation - neither of us wanted to stand up in front of people and talk AT them for 90 minutes. We settled on a nice structure that allowed us to share what Innovation Day was and have participants brainstorm issues they would have on their campus running Innovation Day as well as try to find solutions for these issues. The presentation is embedded below. All of our resources that we used to prep for Innovation Day are there - please steal away!

Catlin Tucker’s keynote was excellent. What really struck me was Catlin’s emphasis on failure in the classroom. It’s one thing for me to talk about failing forward with my students. It’s entirely another thing to have an author and keynote speaker tell a large group of teachers that is their job to go out and fail and then reflect and get better. What an awesome charge to go and do!

Catlin’s push to get teachers to blog was one I hadn’t thought about but is so totally on the money. By blogging, teachers are doing two really important things that often get skipped over for a lack of time: they are reflecting and sharing. What a great rationale for blogging!

I got to lead a session in the afternoon on better feedback with Google tools. First live demo presentation ever! And by the end of the session, everyone had created a Google form, gotten responses on it, and run Doctopus and Goobric on the results of their Google spreadsheet. Check out the step by step directions I created here. I ran out of time to have everyone walk through Kaizena, but I’m hopeful that my fast run through and the step by step notes (available here) that I made will have people feel comfortable using this powerful feedback tool.

Thanks to the NBCUE team for throwing an awesome event - great wifi, nice facility, good food. As always, hanging out with passionate educators is awesome!

Thursday’s #EduWin

Tomorrow marks the end of week seven of the school year. Which means six week grades were due Tuesday night. Which means I can see my advisees’ six week grades today. But first let’s back up.

A little context: my advisory was the chronically underachieving group in my smaller learning community last year. No one did horribly, but my advisory was the ‘paper in a little late’ or ‘not passing the benchmark’ or ‘talks too much and doesn’t focus’ group.

And while we can all agree that grades are dumb, my advisees six week grades blew me away. Half my advisory has a 3.5 or above, 80% have a 3.0 or higher and no one has anything below a 2.5.

That’s my #EduWin for today.

Unit Structure: What Will This Year Look Like

Or what one unit this year will look like...

I’ve written previously about my struggles with last year’s new structures in my class. In short, my class was too prescriptive and a bit of the richness of wrestling with primary source documents together was lost when some of that wrestling was done asynchronously.

There were some good things, though, that came out of last year’s experiments. Things that I’m keeping for this year. I’m still done with homework. No more. Done. Period. No homework is staying. I also had elements of my class running synchronously last year. In these ‘the whole class together’ times, we worked together on bigger historical thinking activities: we did Socratic Seminars, inquiries, and structured academic controversies. The richness of doing these activities synchronously isn’t something I want to lose. And I won’t.

What’s new this year? 1:1 Chromebooks. A student teacher. No tests. More student-centered. This is my put up or shut up year. What do I believe education should be about? Well, why doesn’t my class reflect that? This is that year that my class jumps way closer to my beliefs about what education could - and should - be about.

Students working UNDER desks. Because, well, why not?

So, now that I’ve just about finished up my first content unit of the year, what did the content part of class look like? (The content part of class as opposed to the historical thinking part or the writing part.) We started the Russian Revolution unit crowd-sourcing knowledge about big areas of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s rise to and use of power. I’ve blogged about this here. After crowd-sourcing this information, students went back over the documents their classmates created and came up with their own inquiry questions to research that were based within the Russian Revolution. Check out the directions my students went through to do this here.

Students had a couple weeks to go out and do research. Presentations started today for them. They had to present their learning in 3-4 minutes then answer questions from their classmates. I’m fascinated to see how things unfold.

Really though I’m excited to hear from my students about their experience in this unit. Generally history classes are about a mile wide and inch deep - people focus on breadth of content coverage. Not this unit. This unit asks my kids to be an inch wide and some level of deep - maybe not a mile, but for some students close to that. I’m curious to see how this (somewhat militant) push towards student-centeredness sits with my kids. I’m excited to hear their feedback. I’m excited to recount my failures with them and explain how I’m going to learn from these failures and make the next unit better.

I’m excited to #FailForward!

#20Time, Day 1: Bad Idea Factory

I tried a version of Google’s 20% time last year. It didn’t go well for a lot of reasons. I was mixing 20% time (it was slated to be about 12% time, but the idea was there) with a self-paced class. Dead space that I built in between curricular units was supposed to be used for 20% time. Work from the units expanded and students didn’t have the time to work on their projects. And those projects - I didn’t do a great job of scaffolding them. There weren’t check-ins throughout the semester to talk about progress. There wasn’t a lot of choice in the product as the projects were research-based. I also graded the final products. So there you have it - I made pretty much all of the mistakes possible.

I spent a chunk of my summer researching 20% time. I did Google hangouts with a bunch of folks in my PLN to figure out a way to get the tension between self-paced work and 20% time to even out. When I went to the Google Apps for Education Summit this summer in the Bay Area, I intentionally checked out a couple workshops - by Kevin Brookhouser and Kate Petty - about 20% time.

I owned those failures to my students on the first day of school (I loop with my students, so the 9th graders I had last year are the same kids I have this year) and explained that we were getting rid of that project from last year. They were glad to hear it.

Today was the fruition of that promise: Day 1 of 20% time for the 2013-2014 year. I was a bit apprehensive about today - my students’ distaste for my failed 20% time last year worried me. However, my kids left class today jacked for the project. How did the day go down? By combining resources I ‘borrowed’ from Kate and Kevin.

I started class using the ninja Google script Doctopus on my kids to push out their individual brainstorming document to them. This doc was modified off of something I found on Kate’s great 20% time in education website. After about 15 minutes of brainstorming, I gave a brief description of the project. Like super brief: we’ll spend every Friday working on this, it will be based on your interests (and not history-related topics), and the final product wouldn’t be graded but there would be some small steps along the way that would be: a project proposal, a check-in speech at the semester break, and a final reflective TED-style talk about how you used your year of 20% time. Then, it was on to the Bad Idea Factory.

The Bad Idea Factory idea was also ‘borrowed,’ this time from Kevin. Students worked in groups to come up with ideas - some good, some bad, some really bad (phrasing stolen directly from Kevin’s excellent blog post about the Bad Idea Factory) - and recorded all ideas on binder paper. Yes, even the really bad ones. I passed out dry erase markers to kids and had them record ideas on the board. Varying levels of chaos ensued - you can see the results of the brainstorming of three of my four classes below. (Didn’t realize I should take a panoramic photo of the board until second period...)

But man, that energy though. In three of the four classes, it was just contagious. The volume went up, kids were hopping back and forth between their seats and the board. This feeling was especially present during my second period class - the 25 minutes we spent doing the Bad Idea Factory were 25 of the most fun minutes I’ve had in the classroom.

Next Friday I’m going to lay out the structure that my students 20% projects will exist in and they will do some more focused brainstorming. Perhaps some will even get to their project proposals. More next Friday on what day two of 20% time looked like!

Bad Idea Factory, period 2

Bad Idea Factory, period 3

Bad Idea Factory, period 5

Unit Structure: Reflection on Last Year’s Shortcomings

Which were numerous. And led to this year’s changes - more on that later. The best part of those failures? I loop with my students - the ninth graders I had last year are the same kids I have this year as tenth graders. On day one of this year, I got to own those failures and explain how I was going to fail forward and make this year better; I got to explain my plan for fixing last year’s mistakes but not to worry - that new mistakes would be made this year.

So what didn’t I like about last year? Thanks for asking. Running a self-paced, mastery-based world history class was a blast - I got to walk around and talk to students all period. But. But. There were things that needed changing. My class was too prescriptive. Do this, then this, then this (here’s a unit plan to check out). This is your test - short answer questions, same for everyone. Revealed at the beginning of the unit. Completed when the unit work was finished. Transparent? Yes. Self-paced? Yes. Waaaaaay too prescriptive? Yes. Too much ‘everyone does the same thing’? Yes. Absolutely yes. There was nowhere near enough room for student choice within the structure of my class last year.

And what about when students work at their own pace? It was freeing for them. But when students are wrestling with primary source documents, there is some power in the shared experience of that discovery together. I still kept a couple weeks at the end of each unit for synchronous, whole class historical thinking activities like structured academic controversies and Socratic seminars. However, that aspect of richness that was present in those synchronous historical thinking activities was lost in the self-paced sections of my class because everyone wasn’t always wrestling with the same documents.

Were there more failures last year? Most certainly. But these were the two biggest ones that needed fixing over the summer. My solutions will be up here soon.