School Redesign Project

I spent a good chunk of the summer planning an introductory Humanities group project that students would be working on in both their English and history classes with my Humanities partner. It was a cool project - it required internet research, original research (interviews, surveys, class observations, etc), and a presentation. Plus, getting students to think about how to make an aspect of school better works on the ‘I’d like my classroom to be a little subversive’ meter.

Several cool things came out of the project. In no particular order…

Major growth in creating presentations. Did some kids still have whole sentences (and even paragraphs in some cases) on slides? Yes. Were there groups that presented only with images? Yup. That growth was cool to see.

Instead of saying school sucks, kids were starting to say that we start school too early (7:45am) and that the start time should be moved back because cognitive research shows that kids don’t learn well that early in the morning.

I saw students present about alternative assessments, the miracles of Finnish education, and a new way to do teacher evaluations to name just a few cool things that came up. Super cool!

There were more, I know. I am hopeful that this has started some real thinking about school and what it could be for my kids. As one said Friday as we wrapped up presentations in one class, “Was the point of this project for us to go out and like try to change school? And the world?” YES. #EduWin.

I want to leave with one last awesome piece of this project. Every year at Back To School Night the members of the smaller learning community I am a part of at Hillsdale gather before BTSN and have a potluck with the parents and students that we have that year. These are always fun, and the food is always spectacular. This year, we had two groups of students volunteer to present their projects to the 150 or so students and parents there.

These kids showed a ton of courage, both groups that presented really rocked it. Step back for a second. Think about those teachers that aren’t interested in using technology in their classrooms to push student learning. They have lots of reasons. One of them, though, is the what if it doesn’t work when I’m trying to use it reason. Well, when Charlotte and Eli were presenting, the internet was really slow. And when they tried to advance their Google presentation, it didn’t respond. So they hit the arrow a second time. And the preso skipped forward two slides. Then they hit back to get to the correct slide. Nothing happened. Back got hit again. And promptly, the preso hopped back two slides.

What’d they do? Made jokes. Acted like it was no big deal. Made the audience laugh. And continued on. Didn’t freak out. Didn’t act like anything abnormal was happening.

It was later in the evening that I got to talk to Charlotte and thank her for presenting. She mentioned how she was freaking out during the preso when the internet decided to hate her. And then it hit me: I had just had two of my kids present in front of parents, have tech difficulties, and handle it so calmly that it didn’t strike me until two hours later WHAT AN AWESOME JOB THEY DID handling those tech difficulties.

Those tech difficulties that would send some teachers running. Or cause them to not integrate tech at all. Yeah, my 10th graders crushed it.

Victoria, Daniel, and Claire presenting about tracking

Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

Publicizing student work!

So in an attempt to do several things, all very sneakily, I had my students create collaborative Google presentations that defined the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. Students then had to offer a couple solutions for places to retreat to before finally concluding with one ideal location to head to to survive said apocalypse. It was an attempt, through a high-engagement topic, to get them more comfortable with collaborative Google tools, introduce a watered-down version of citing sources, learn to get copyright-friendly images, and to start, very loosely, weighing arguments against opposing arguments.

It went well - students were certainly engaged. The feedback I got was good - more is still coming in, but see below. Also, as a bonus, I learned that Flickr, a great site to get copyright-friendly images from, was blocked at our school. After talking to our IT guy, I was able to get it and almost all other websites at our school unblocked. Not Facebook or YouTube (but I’ve got a YouTube workaround that works) yet, but progress.  

Check out the project description here and the final products here. Enjoy them!

Students Set the Classroom Expectations

I just finished my third day of school and tweaked my usual routine for establishing the expectations my students and I have for each other for our two years together – there are a couple cool tech tools integrated, and my kids responded to it well.

I don’t like rules – I like expectations. There is one rule in my classroom: we don’t make fun of people for the way they are born. Race and gender aren’t an issue, but now my kids know they can’t drop phrases like “That’s so gay” of “That’s retarded” in my classroom. Ever. So we come up with expectations for our time together. Well, they come up with expectations for our time together.

The expectation strand starts with a think-pair-share around two simple statements: In a classroom, a teacher’s job is to: and In a classroom, a student’s job is to:. Students individually completed these two statements with several bullet points. Next, they shared out their responses with their group members to create a ‘super-answer.’ Finally, students accessed a Google form with these two statements on them via a web browser on their phone or iPod touch, a QR code on the wall in several places, or on the shared classroom computer and uploaded their ‘super-answer’ to a spreadsheet.

The next day (today), I explained how Google forms worked and copied and pasted the entire ‘student job’ column and created a Wordle out of it. After explaining how Wordle generated its word clouds, students collaborated with their groups to create phrases that expressed their expectations for themselves and for me based on the largest words in the cloud. After getting an expectation from every group and recording them, we repeated the process with the ‘teacher job’ column. Finally, after collecting information from all of my classes today, I compared the lists and came up with a list of seven student-generated expectations for themselves and for me for our two years together. 

Tomorrow students will have the opportunity to approve or modify the list of expectations that they created. Once I receive final approval, the expectations will be put up on a poster in the room for the rest of our time together. So what is the list for tomorrow – what did my students come up with? The list of student expectations is to listen, ask questions, respect everyone, work until you understand, participate, be productive, and learn from everyone. I am expected to grade fairly, help students problem solve, be patient, make learning interesting and fun, help students understand material, listen, and learn from everyone. Needless to say, I’m psyched with how these lists turned out.

I like this activity for a couple reasons: we are talking about expectations, not rules. Students are generating everything – they set the expectations, not me. And finally, students get used to using technology in my classroom.  Thoughts? Tweaks? What do you do to establish expectations in your classroom?

Concerns About Groupwork in a Flipped-Mastery History Class

Chase Moore left an excellent question on a previous blog entry this morning. I answered his question cursorily and then went out for a run. Like most runners, I think when I run, often (most of the time?) about my classroom. I kept turning the last sentence of his question over in my mind. The entire question is below.

Chase's question

So how do you maximize collaboration in a flipped-mastery classroom? I can’t speak to this, for next year will be year one of running flipped-mastery classroom. I do know, from reading and talking to people at FlipCon12, that students seem to self-select into groups that move through a given unit at a similar pace. And that is all well and good – the people I talked to have run flipped-mastery classes and I trust them.

Still, Chase’s question stuck with me. I am coming from a groupwork-based history class. Students sat in groups every day, and interacted with their groups at minimum multiple times per class period. How can I ensure that I still have students collaborating to build knowledge together in a self-paced class?

1. My first unit is entirely skills-based and will not be self-paced (at least as I currently conceptualize it). It is based heavily around collaborative groupwork while learning how historians create history: how to read, write, and think like a historian. It is a four-ish week unit that also explicitly builds in the sentence starters as well as the body language and task division that are essential to group success. I am hopeful that this unit, combined by giving the students feedback daily on what their groupwork looks like by highlighting great things I saw or heard from groups, will lay the foundation for my students to continue to collaborate successfully after we move into the self-paced, mastery-based structure after the first unit.

2. I got several things reinforced at FlipCon12 around the idea of groupwork. One was the good old, “ask three then me.” Forcing students to talk with at least three other students before they come to me with a question will hopefully help. Theoretically they would be working in those groups that are moving at the same pace and would ask each other then head out to other groups to get their question answered. Presenters also suggested that once you answered a question from a student, that student becomes the expert in the class on that particular question. If another student has the same question, they go to the student who asked the initial question, not to you. Hopefully both of those tactics will help.

3. My room will be arranged in groups every day. Students will be able to work where they want to, but hopefully that initial reminder – look, we’re in groups – will help them to remember that my classroom is a collaborative environment.

There have got to be more ways of ensuring a collaborative environment than just those three. I’d love your ideas, either theoretical or this-is-what-I-do-in-my-flipped-mastery-class, to help me ensure that my students are working collaboratively in a self-paced classroom.