Collaborative Structures and Inquiry in a 1:1 Class

I've been lucky to get to work with a really awesome teacher candidate (TC) this year: she has totally rolled with and been flexible in the weird (or more accurately the hot mess) that is my classroom. She asks good questions. She adds value to assignments and projects.

She has been working recently on a group task that she taught and is an assignment for one of her grad school classes. I went through the same grad program she did, and this was a class I remember pushing back a little bit against the class this assignment was for as well.

There are some structures to this group task that are imposed on TCs that they are required to use. As I reflected on her task with her, we got into a fascinating discussion about fostering collaboration versus assigning group work.

I then took this discussion to a few awesome members of my PLN. After bouncing ideas around with them, a few things became clear. One, the difference that I was trying to force between collaboration and groupwork was, as Kelly Kermode rightly pointed out, largely about labeling the negative aspects of poorly designed or thought out groupwork as groupwork and labeling the better parts of groupwork as collaboration.

So what were my issues? Hokey roles being assigned to kids. Too much structure in the resources - my class is 1:1 - for my liking. Not always having the necessary time crunch - in group tasks, kids can fall into what Jon Corippo calls The Suck: periods that lack productivity because of this lack of a time crunch. (Or sometimes because there isn't enough work for the kids to do, and people feel like they can slack off - someone else will do the work. But that's my addition to The Suck.)

So where is all this going? Yeah, that.

Well, all these ideas - yes, ideas fueled by an awesome PLN (#BetterTogether) - created a new iteration of historical inquiry for my kids. In groups of three or four, they had sixty minutes to figure out why people allowed the Holocaust to happen. I provided some initial resources and a description of the product. I intentionally created a task that was too big for kids to get done in sixty minutes. (Link to the description of the task is here.) They had to divide up the work and talk about what their research turned up and then create.

Collaborative Google docs were started immediately. Some groups made graphic organizers on the docs. Others cordoned off parts of the page to take notes on. And then they went at it.

I haven't had a chance to look over the products yet, but there was a lot I like about this task. It was too big for groups to handle without collaborating on it so The Suck didn't happen. Kids had to share - and listen - to their group members. And they had to come to some sort of a consensus about why people allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Was it perfect? No. Inquiry never will be. Was it a step in the right direction? I'm going with a hearty yes on that. The size do the task made collaboration necessary. Kids had a real reason to use devices: they needed to go out and locate more resources and test their hypothesis. The lesson was a step in the right direction towards what collaborative inquiry can be in a 1:1 classroom.

So what's next? A couple things. Look at the products my kids produced. Think more about the level of scaffolds that I provided for them: were more needed? Fewer? And finally - and most importantly - ask the kids how it went. What changes do they think need to be made?

I'm excited to keep pushing on this: good collaborative historical inquiry that leverages tech? That's moving towards exciting places in SAMR land.

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!

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

Inquiry-Based History Google Hangout

I got to do a Google hangout tonight with George Phillip, Kaelyn Bullock, and Michael Stafford tonight about inquiry based history classes. It was a thought-provoking conversation, and it was nice to 'meet' George and Michael. Enjoy the video below.