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.

Go Out and See Them!

We spend so much time in school telling kids what to do and when to do it. The classes students spend time in each day allow for varying degrees of choice: some classes are very structured with very little student voice or choice. Others have more.

Regardless, we DO a lot of things to our students at school. Kids are at school in many cases because they have to be. Some are passionate about school or a subject area, but some kids are just there. They are told to do things that in many cases just don’t resonate with who they are or what they are interested in.

But getting to see kids to things that THEY choose to do? That THEY are passionate about? Oh man. So magical. And that’s why I go to so much stuff (for lack of a better word) that my kids do. I got to go check out about a dozen of my tenth graders in our fall play In The Heights this past Thursday. And got to see kids do awesome, creative, talented things that THEY chose to do. And it was so much fun.

I spent the afternoon today with my work wife at one of my advisee’s choir concerts. And it was a blast. So much talent!

The jazz band - our jazz band is really good and I’m their groupie that wanders down zero period to listen to them - has a concert on Thursday. Can’t wait to go to that either.

Getting to watch kids do things that they are passionate about is just too much fun not to do. Take the time. Go to the play. Stop by the soccer game. Make time to go to the concert. It means so much to them.

Added bonus: this then makes your job easier in the classroom.

Florence 10th graders from In The Heights

Sarah (my work wife), Livvy, and I after a spectacular choir concert

Thankful

We don't take the time often enough to tell kids - or entire classes, or their parents - of the great things that they are doing. Or maybe I shouldn't say we - I don't do this enough. Whenever I do, it is absolutely one of the highlights of my day: whether it is feedback to kids or parents, positive news is ALWAYS fun to deliver.

Fast forward to Monday night. Having cleared the enormous hurdle of writing - giving feedback on writing is time consuming! - that got dropped into November, I finally had some time to do some more serious reflecting.

Teachers are neurotic for a lot of reasons. We always see the one kid off task, not the rest of the class that is engages. That one kid - or small group of kids - eats at us. Teach four awesome periods, but that last period of the day bombs? That's the one that sticks with you all night. I go home tired and frustrated and forget the other four great periods. That last period sticks out like a sore thumb.

Well, this year I've been really blessed with a spectacular last class of the day. (Well, my last class of the day.) My fifth period just gets it. They're on point. They help each other. On Fridays - our 20time day - they're an absolute dream: focused, on task, and excited about their projects. But most importantly for me, in this first year of being 1:1, they give me thoughtful, not whiny, actionable feedback about what they want to change about my class.

And today I got to tell them that. All of it. Especially the part about how they let me end my day on a good note. And it felt SO NICE to get to express genuine gratitude to these kids about being, well, awesome. They gave themselves an impromptu round of applause. It was a really nice way to head off into Thanksgiving break: feeling really thankful and blessed to get to end my day with such an incredible group of kids.

A Day of #20time

I've been meaning to write more about how 20% time has unfolded over the last month or so in my room, but have gotten crazy busy. Whoops...

After losing some momentum because of missed work days - my fault for not budgeting time well - we are back on a #20time roll. My fifth period class today was a joy. Projects are approved and kids are rolling. I wandered around and took pictures - they are below.

So much fun to watch kids go out and just do. Create. Help others.

A couple groups are going to be using on-campus facilities for their projects and had to submit facilities use forms to get the space they needed. These requests got turned down, so a couple groups spent time today with one of our principals talking about their projects and facilities needs. Both are moving forward with the blessing of the principal. She bumped into me today and mentioned how cool it was that the projects were happening, but also how neat it was that kids were being forced to deal with the red tape of securing facilities use as sophomores. Clearly, I agree!

Matt, Tara, and Karen editing one of their how-to videos

Natalie working on her gluten-free cooking website

Ana, Mari, and Lauren making blankets for needy families

Jacob and Sophia making fliers for their coat drive

Aidan and Andrew working on their Minecraft how-to video series

Zach creating a video game and William learning about special effects in zombie movies

Sanchit building his website for his computer company

World War II Project Thoughts

I’m still waaay in the developmental phases of what my 1:1 class looks like. As of now, it consists of some whole class work - big historical thinking projects: socratic seminars, structured academic controversies (basically inquiry-based history) as well as Humanities focused items that connect my class to English content. This time is coupled with time for a ‘your choice’ section of the unit where students have the freedom to go learn about some aspect of a given unit that interests them.

So based on some feedback from my students after the Rise of Totalitarian Dictators unit, changes were made to the ‘your choice’ section of my World War II unit. (WWII unit project description here.) Students were given the choice to pursue a smaller area of focus for this section of the WWII unit - female spies, for example - or something larger that would allow them to see the whole scope of WWII.

Great. Awesome. Let’s do this.

Oh wait. Then I took away the ability to show what you learned with a Google presentation. My kids had done too many of them. Let’s move on to something new.

So what happened? Kids who are REALLY excited about Thinglink. Kids who taught themselves Prezi. Groups are collaborating using mural.ly. And guess what? This doesn’t happen WITHOUT taking away Google presentations.

Scale models are happening. Minecraft is happening. SO COOL.

Okay, I get it. I shouldn’t get excited about students being engaged by a new tech tool. But still. If they are excited to use the tool to show what they know, and are more engaged in the content creation, that’s a definite win.

Andrew and Aidan on a GHO w/ Diane Main talking about their Minecraft project

#brewcue: How (and Why) to Make It Happen

Before we get into the how to make a brewcue happen, let’s talk about the why. Why should you bother to organize a brewcue? Thanks for asking.

Photo courtesy of @pronovost

Do you like hanging out with dedicated educators who want to make school better? Brewcue will help with that.

Do you like informal conversations about education? PD that you choose, at your own pace? Brewcue is for you.

Do you like connecting pictures on Twitter handles with actual faces? Brewcue is the place to do that.

Do you relish extended conversation, not 140-character-at-a-time conversations? Or conversations that can flow, but face to face - not in a Google hangout? Yes. Brewcue for that too.

Do you like an excuse to hang out with friends, but call it professionally developing? Yup. Brewcue. Make it happen. Now.

Now, the harder part: the how to make a brewcue happen. Okay. It’s not really that hard - it’s actually pretty easy. Another reason to organize one! Okay, on to it.

1. Find a cohost for brewcue. This person will help you publicize the event, and if no one else comes to the brewcue, you’ll get to hang out with your cohost for an hour and talk about education and whatever else comes up. Robert Pronovost is that guy for me.
2. Choose a date. Set a time that both you and your cohost can make - remember, if no one else shows you need someone else there to talk to! But don’t worry - other people always show. Also, Robert and I always try to leave about a week of time to publicize the brewcue. The more time you have to tweet out the location, the more folks will see that it is happening!
3. Choose a location. For Robert and I, as Bay Area residents, we shoot for somewhere about halfway between San Jose and San Francisco: we want as many people as possible to make it to the brewcue.
4. Publicity, publicity, publicity! Tweet out your brewcue. Use your state and/or district hashtag. My favorite? Tweeting the brewcue date and location five minutes before California edchat (#caedchat, the best state edchat) begins: at this point there are a lot of people looking at the hashtag, but there aren’t a ton of tweets going to the hashtag yet. Tweet out reminders as the day of brewcue approaches - you never know who hasn’t seen the tweets publicizing the event yet!
5. On the day of the brewcue, have a way to let the attendees know where you are at at your chosen venue. Robert has created a brewcue sign on his iPad that lets people know which table we are at. In the early days, though, we just wrote “brewcue” on a napkin and hung it on a menu. This totally worked fine.
6. Buy the first pitcher. Then, sit back and enjoy the conversation.

Not into the brew aspect? Or want to do your brewcue in the morning, when a brew is less appropriate? Throw the more staid version of brewcue: have a coffeecue at a local coffee house.

Finally, though, really why do this? Education is all about relationships. Brewcue builds relationships. And hey, usually a whole gang of #eduawesome folks show up!

Over 20 educators deep! Photo courtesy of @pronovost

Today’s #eduwin

I written before about the School Redesign Project that my students did - it was a cool project that created some neat - and also subversive - thinking. Here was one of the presentations:

On slide 7, this group - who is discussing a redesign of the school schedule - suggested, among other things, class yoga breaks on days with longer class periods. During the question and answer session of this group’s presentation, someone asked which change would be the easiest to enact. The answer the group gave was yoga breaks on block days. The immediate follow-up question won’t be a surprise: “Are you going to lead yoga breaks?” Unfortunately, no one in the group knew how to do yoga.

Fast forward two weeks. One of the group members asked if I would be okay if they led a yoga break on our once a week 88 minute block period.

“I thought you didn’t know how to do yoga. Or teach people how to do yoga.”

“Well, I watched some YouTube videos last night. I think I want to try.”

Umm, YES!

After a little negotiation on the location of the yoga break, it was on. Today, 45 minutes into class, 2/3 of my third period world history class headed outside and did yoga for 10 minutes. And it was kinda awesome!

Sorry for the high contrast in the picture - I was pulling the ‘make sure you can see your students outside while you are near your classroom and can check on the kids in there’ trick. And yes, that larger individual in the right foreground is my students’ math teacher, who had a prep third period and went out and joined the kids.

That, friends, is my Wednesday #eduwin.

Crowd-Sourced Information in Class

So thanks to a blog post by Catlin Tucker, a brilliant NorCal English teacher (if you’re not following her on Twitter, do it now), I figured out how to start my world history units this year: crowd-sourcing schema from a unit! Why? Well, before my kids can dive into their chosen inquiry question within a world history unit, they need some schema for that unit. But the question is, how do you get that schema?

Obviously there are a ton of ways to do this, but Catlin’s crowd-sourcing idea was attractive to me for a couple reasons. First, I was able to provide my students with some structure to direct their research. For the Russian Revolution, I asked my students to look at the following six areas:

1. What were the conditions in Russia in the early 1900s that led to people revolting in 1917?
2. What did Lenin and the Bolsheviks offer the Russian people? Why was this offer appealing? Hint: think about the context of the Russian Revolution (see question one).
3. What was the Five Year Plan? What impact did the Five Year Plan have on Russia?
4. What was collectivization? What impact did collectivization have on Russia?
5. What tactics did Lenin use to keep power? Describe the tactics in some detail.
6. What tactics did Stalin use to keep power? Describe the tactics in some detail.

Second, my students had some schema about this era: they had started to read Animal Farm in English and knew some information about the Russian Revolution. By running a modified KWL to start this activity, my students were able to both activate and build their schema and start to figure out what further questions they had about the Russian Revolution. Here’s the perfect time to start crowd-sourcing information! Third, my students got to practice their research skills, but this knowledge came from them. No screencast. No lecture. Their research. Their ideas.

And like anything else I’ve done that’s new, I learned some things. One thing in particular. The maximum number of users you can have on a Google doc is 50 - after that people don’t have editing privileges on the document. No good for a crowd-sourced research section. My classes max out at 28, so I wasn’t worried about this. I didn’t have students log into their Google accounts first period - 27 kids? Why bother? Well, with that many anonymous users on the document, Google Drive freaked out a little bit. Some students started to get an error message - too many editors on document. Which didn’t make sense - there were way less than 50 kids in the class. Next period, my class - 24 kids - logged into Google Drive, then accessed the document they were recording their research on. No problems. No problems the following period either. Weird. Live and learn though - have students log into their Google Drive account before crowd-sourcing information with your students.

It was a great kick-off for the unit. In the coming days, students are going to go back and check out the documents from the other classes and start to find areas that they are interested in spending a couple weeks researching intensely. Even today, as kids were doing the basic schema-building research, they were starting to generate questions that they wanted to answer. Excellent!

It was definitely the right start to the unit - thank Catlin!

Reflections on Year 4: Successes

I am incredibly lucky – I work at a school I love with an incredibly passionate and dedicated group of teachers who routinely go above and beyond in supporting their students. Additionally, I believe that the smaller learning community (SLC) structure that my school uses creates opportunities for more students to succeed than in a normal comprehensive high school. I am blessed with a supportive administrator who believes in me and supports my teaching. I was lucky enough to get hired four years ago onto the same SLC team as two good friends from my graduate school class. But. You knew that was coming. But…

I just completed my second two-year loop with students – my sophomores are moving on and I get a new group of freshmen in the fall. And, despite the efforts of myself and my team, things did not go well. Did things go horribly with no success? Absolutely not. Some things worked well.

The Humanities projects my students do – I teach in close collaboration with the English teacher who shares students with me – continued to challenge all students. Since the grading of these projects is split between my English colleague and I, the time that we can spend tailoring our feedback and challenging all students regardless of the place they are at worked well.

I also spent this past year at Foothill College participating in the Making Education Relevant and Interactive through Technology (MERIT) program, which pushed my thinking and teaching in several positive ways. First, more projects that I assigned had a technology component embedded in them. Students enjoyed experimenting with the various technology tools and many used them in projects later in the year. Though I only have anecdotal proof, the number of students submitting projects with a technology component increased a bit over other, more straightforward writing assignments.

A second positive that came out of the MERIT program was student choice in the product they created in various projects. Instead of providing guidelines for the product of a given project, I provided students with a rubric and told them to show me they learned or knew something in any format they desired so long as the rubric criteria were fulfilled. And while some wrote letters or created Google presentations, others created beautiful art pieces or three-dimensional models. This creativity was highlighted by a project on our Israel/Palestine unit where a student created a paper version of a Facebook page with “Like my status (LMS) for a truth is” page: she was able to creatively express deep knowledge of Ariel Sharon, the Second Intifada, and Palestinian hunger strikers (among other things) and do it in a way that I couldn’t have even begun to imagine. Differentiating around product was very successful, with students showing creativity and intelligences that they don’t (unfortunately) usually get to show in a typical classroom.  Additionally, this was more successful than explicitly integrating a technology component into a project in terms of submission of completed projects. Unfortunately, again I have only anecdotal evidence of this, not hard numbers.

The final positive came out of exit interviews with my students and dealt with literacy. Two summers ago I was able to participate in a professional development series put on by WestEd around Reading Apprenticeship. This PD emphasized talking to the text and making the processes that advanced readers use to deconstruct and create meaning from text explicit. Students had good things to say about how their textual literacy skills improved and how they felt more capable and confident attacking text.

My struggles? They’re coming up next…