Not So Distant Future

Our campus has a Vision committee which I’ve mentioned before, made up of parents, students, administrators and teachers.   Yesterday at our meeting, we were discussing the books Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner  and Horace’s Compromise by Theodore Sizer, and in discussing the two books together some interesting alchemy came up.

One of our parents delineated the five minds outlined by Gardner:  the Respectful Mind, Ethical Mind, Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, and Creative Mind.

As we started discussing the difficulty with synthesis and creativity if the curriculum is too “content” driven, one of the parents pointed out that how can we expect anyone (including both our teachers and our students) to be creative or synthesize or worry about a discipline when they don’t have the mental room to breathe in many of our rigorous-focused environments.    One of the teachers on our committee also talked about as a newer teacher, lack of that time to breathe meant she was more in survival mode her first few years of teaching than anything.

All of which brought up some thoughts for me–

1.  How are we supporting new teachers so that they have time to breathe?  We expect a lot of them–often new teachers come in with multiple assignments, as floaters from room to room, as part time coaches on the side, etc.   Even when providing mentoring, what else could we do to support them better?

2.  How are we supporting students so that they have time to breathe, and so they aren’t always rushing from thing to thing, from homework assignment to activity?  Could we have a homework/activity free week once in awhile?   Could we focus less on “content driven” curriculum where we try to “cover” things, and spend a little more time on one particular thing, delving more deeply into it?   As Theodore Sizer comments, ‘can we expect students to learn more while being taught less?’

3.  Are we passing our stress onto our students regarding testing?   Can we instead focus on passing them confidence, which helps create room for them to breathe?
4.  How do our school schedules reinforce this lack of “space” for thought?  And what can we do about that?
I wonder what we are saying to our students as future adults about how to live their lives when we foster environments that are driven by constant stress, overwork, overcommitment, and lack of creative time?

As one of the parents on our committee asked, “What do we value?  When you walk around our campus, what do we see?”

Look around your campus or classroom today.  What do you see?

I was fortunate to catch a glimpse via a live Ustream of librarian Jenny Luca’s presentation at a conference in Australia this past weekend, and I wanted to note it for two reasons–

1.  Though I couldn’t hear well, the presentation visuals were so engaging that I wanted to watch it.

2.  She introduced me to a new tool, Sliderocket.com, for making online presentations.

As I’ve recently written about, design of presentations can be an issue for students, who want to stuff every bit of info possible onto their slides-or who when presenting, simply read from the bullet points on the screen.

Jenny’s presentation, below, is both an excellent example of the power of Sliderocket as well as a great example of how messages can be conveyed in visuals and the speaker adds value with their discussion of them.  (Unfortunately the audio for her live presentation was troublesome, so we can’t hear the actual presentation).   But you can clearly see how she uses the presentation slides as the guide and the inspiration for her presentation.   (You can also see the extensive use of wikis at her campus Toorak College.)

Check it out!

As the culture outside our schools change, are our buildings changing to reflect the “outside” world?    

   Mitchell Joel’s interesting Six Pixels of Separation blog comments on a fascinating article in the Economist, “The New Oases,” about how people now are much more nomadic in their use of spaces.  (I found Joel’s blog via Garr Reynold’s excellent Presentation Zen blog).

Wi-fi, mobility,  and portability allow people to connect wherever they go, and so people gravitate to both indoor and outdoor spaces where they can conveniently “connect” or gather.

As the architect professor William Mitchell points out:

“The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is ‘a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces’ such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously ‘a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces’. . . . The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will ‘make spaces intentionally multifunctional.’

These seem very significant things to be thinking about as we continue to design new libraries and school buildings.   Are they flexible?  Are spaces multi-purpose?  Are there ad-hoc gathering areas?  Separate nooks for individual laptop work?   Wi-fi and open networks?   How are nearby outdoor spaces used? 

School libraries can function as these sort of information commons in schools–providing this sort of flexibility and multi-purposing.

But eventually this sort of design should filter throughout the school–with comfortable learning nooks for students to gather, as the article describes at the new Gehry designed student building at MIT whose “student street”

“ is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing.”

Sometimes it seems that school building designs are impervious to the changes in the culture outside the building.   But as Mitch Joel points out,

“We have all become Digital Nomads. Able to work wherever we’re feeling most inspired (as long as there is wi-fi). I wonder how the masses will deal with this?”

What I wonder is how schools will deal with this?

A group at our campus is starting a professional learning community.

I’m cross posting the post below from the blog we have started, which we aren’t quite ready to share “prime time” but are using for our organizing thoughts, because I thought it would have interest outside of our campus.

———— 

In our meeting this week, Jeff brought up the idea of curriculum AS relationship, and the importance of relationship as the foundation for reaching students.

In his book, The Passionate Learner, Robert L. Fried talks about the importance of that relationship and redefining curriculum.

He makes an interesting comment that he observed when struggling with the idea of “curriculum” and observing his students:

“The content of the lessons seems to pass through them, much of the time, like an indigestible substance.”

Throughout the chapter he talks about the collaboration that has to occur between teachers and students. 

“Curriculum for the passionate learner has everything to do with whether or not the relationships are right, whether teachers and learners feel that together they are shaping the learning that goes on.  This cooperation is necessary even when teachers feel pressure from external forces. . . .”

This is something we talked about in our meeting this week–how to make this happen even when feeling pressured by the demands of content driven testing systems and structures in our schools.  

Fried has an inspiring way of looking at it:

“When we view curriculum as a function of relationships, we bring it to our classrooms and lay it out, like a comfortable and useful garment.  We allow ourselves and our students to make it belong to us, to adjust it, to restyle it, to enliven it, to infuse it with meaning.  Such ownership increases the likelihood that young people will approach the knowledge and skills to be learned as active, critical, thoughtful investigators, rather than as passive recepters (or rejecters).”

He goes on to say,

“We are so accustomed to thinking of curriculum as “a body of knowledge” or a “grouping of concepts and theories” or as “the scope and sequence of instructional material,” that it is easy to forget that such definitions, absent an active partnership between teacher and students, are little more than words on a page.”

I like what he has to say because I think it goes even beyond just establishing a good relationship with students–but more something like collaborating with them on how the curriculum unfolds itself–something which makes them more involved and less of passive participants.  I’d be really interested in discussing what that would look like in practice.

This leads me to another question.   I was talking to one of my friends yesterday–a former teacher–and she asked if students were going to be part of our professional learning community itself.  It was a good question and something I hadn’t really considered.   Would that be a possibility?   Is there a way to invite some student participation in?  Would it be helpful to our group’s goals?

How can we enter into a different relationship with students regarding curriculum?  By the way, Fried’s chapter is well worth the read.

In his inimitable style, Doug Johnson posed a research question that I’m pondering this evening–

“Is requiring print resources a sacred cow that needs to be put out to pasture?”

My initial response(from his site) was that:

“I have very mixed feelings about this. It feels somewhat artificial sometimes to say “one print source” but on the other hand, I have seen students go from one print source to using ten, and being engrossed in their subject and it really enticing them in. And we also say “1 peer-reviewed journal” here, for example, or “1 periodical online or offline” so I’m not sure where we draw the line.

It’s not that I think everything on the internet is wrong, or that it’s not out there–but sometimes, I just wonder if the key is–how do we show students how to pick the right resource for the right job?

I think our guidelines have to be flexible. I think we have to consider topics like your son’s and what would work best for him.

Maybe to make this formula less simple, what we should ideally do is conference with every student about their paper(using a discussion board, chat, physical conferences) and suggest the very best resources for THEIR topic. Point their boat in the right direction and then let them steer but also have them self-evaluate their route and how successful it was for them?

I know sometimes we boil things down to formulas to make it simpler–”Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”, for example, or “Every essay has five paragraphs,” but then again I think these formulas ultimately hem in our students. . . .

I’m not going to defend books just because I’m a librarian–I’m going to just say that there is so much serendipity, comfort and wisdom in writing–no matter what the form it takes, that we should honor it in how we approach it with students.”

In considering this dilemma more, I really think it boils down to how we approach the research process in general. If any of us are doing “real” and deep research, of course we would consult all sorts of sources–we’d want to know who the experts are, whether we find them on the web, which leads us to their books, or vice versa?

Many many articles and blog posts relate ideas back to books, where an idea can be far more fully developed than in an article in a journal or on a website or blog. But are we asking students to use books because they “should?” or are we asking them to examine books because they would inform their research and expand their thinking about it? So many assignments we ask students to do in terms of research are more like reports than like research–in which case, any brief and concise and accurate source will do. But when we are asking more something more, something which engages them more deeply, then I warrant all sorts of sources are important and significant.

I also think that how we teach research has gotten pretty sloppy, to put it bluntly, in the internet age. I’m not one for notecards, or prescriptive methods, but we just sort of toss students out online too often with some sort of minimal scaffolding and minimal expectations of quality or evaluation on students’ part. (Of course sometimes quick research has its purposes, and I’m not talking about those sorts of straightforward fact gathering purposes).

In his post, Doug suggested that what is more key than the type of source is having student defend each of their sources in their bibliography, justifying the quality and purpose of it. This seems like such a pragmatic way to bring in that much needed element of evaluative thought into their research process, and models for them how we as adults examine and consider a source.

And when we ask students to construct meaning through the process of research, then it’s likely that books will very often be a significant part of the equation–not because we “made them” use them, but because the students found that they added meaning to what they were learning.

Isn’t that why we all read books? and websites? and articles?

So, Doug, I’m not sure I really answered your question, but perhaps reframed it–I just want students to be able to find the juicy wild daisies in that pasture

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joesflickr/666951546/

In a passionate post about school change, Chris Lehmann pondered a speech he gave in Oregon yesterday:

“I want to tell them that we have to question every single system we have in our schools. I want to tell them that everything should be on the table. All of it.”

A number of us watched his presentation via Ustream yesterday and in the chat room there was quite a bit of discussion about how to focus more on the process of learning and less on the bureacracy and status quo. We talked about how we teach the way we were taught, and wondered what it takes to “put everything on the table.”

I’ve been reading Innovation by Curtis Carlson and William Wilmot, which talks about some of the barriers teams face when trying to innovate. While I don’t believe all business-speak fits schools, some of the points the authors make about implementing change are important.

“When faced with significant change, many team members are gripped with FUD–fear, uncertainty, and doubt. . . .It means that people are frightened. They do not yet see their places in the innovative activity. They can’t visualize its success and they are unable to see how their contributions will be valued. People feel disconnected from their strengths and the new vision.”

In reading the book I’ve been pondering how we often don’t approach change in terms of “teams” in schools. Very often it’s top down, not grass-roots. What an incredible environment an administration has created when teachers feel empowered to bring in grass-roots change and propose ideas. But we often neglect to build supportive teams and communicate with those teams throughout the change process, and to be inclusive of all the stakeholders. Sounds simple, but of course in reality, in a large school, it’s highly difficult.

Carlson and Wilmot point out that for leaders, “It helps to view resistance, such as skepticism and FUD, as gifts. . . . Concerns usually have a kernel of truth that must be understood and addressed.”

The authors feel that champions(like Chris) have to listen carefully to the fears, and hear what is behind them in order to reframe the conversation.

Another significant area that Carlson and Wilmot discuss is not only the need to involve key players as I mentioned earlier, but to recognize that people want to achieve and contribute at what they do, and they want the freedom and empowerment to do it. So creating an atmosphere of good communication, respect for the talent in your building, and empowering individuals and teams to carry things forward is important.

As school leaders, librarians, technologists and administrators, how do we put our messages out there to the community in a positive, collaborative, invitational and empowering manner? SLA has provided an excellent model of how that sort of leadership not only helps one individual school and one individual body of students, but helps all of us “put everything on the table” and rethink what we do.

In his keynote “Reinventing School for the 21st Century“, podcast from Goodland Kansas in August (which I’m finally listening to this week during my morning commute), Wes Fryer asked the educators present,

“Why are you here? . . . If you’re here to positively transform the lives of children, if you’re here to make a difference every day, if you want when the children walk out of the room at the end of the day or the class period their brains to be different because of what they’ve done then stay. . . . You can change your mind today. You can choose to empower you and transform them to change the world. . . . You are tremendously powerful.”

We have to empower ourselves and others to “put everything on the table” because most of all–our children deserve the best we can do. Not what we used to do, or what we’re able to do, or what was done “to” us, but the very best we can do–the best we can create–the best we can envision.

So what next? Speak? Publish? Form teams on our campuses? Believe that we can create a grass-roots effort? Talk to our students? Form professional learning communities? Network? So many ways we are getting started!

Image credit–http://www.flickr.com/photos/22983550@N02/2349593475/

  Things of beauty attract our eye, refresh our spirits, calm a troubled moment, and bring joy and inspiration to our lives. 

I would even posit that good design can encourage us to “do better.”

Continuing my thoughts from previous posts about design, I’m contemplating points that Daniel Pink made in Whole New Mind regarding the significance of it.   He writes about a study at Pittsburg’s Montefiore Hospital that demonstrated that patients in well designed rooms have quicker recovery times, and a study at Georgetown University that enhancing a school’s appearance could even increase test scores.

Design really is about communicating something to the receiver–whether it’s the special lilt of a well-put written phrase, or the feeling of luxuriousness that a fine hotel imparts, or the comic turn of a slapstick movie, or the inspiration that society cares enough to make a beautiful learning space for students.  

On Beyond School, there’s been an ongoing discussion about written versus nonwritten communication.  But somehow I still think this all goes back to the idea of the audience and the issue of design.

Sentences and writing are things that are designed.  Presentations are something that are designed.  Videos are designed.   Maybe students don’t realize they are designing something–but there is an element of choice in every thing we create.   And we should scaffold students in understanding that.

For example, you can have written the most elegant of books, but if the publisher picks a poor cover design, chances are, the book will sit on the library shelves and be rarely read.   If you can write the most eloquent of essays but can’t stand before a class and present your ideas, then your communication with your audience is hampered.    If you memorize every joke in the book, but can’t deliver the joke with panache, then the joke falls flat and the message never is conveyed.

The point is, there is design behind everything we should be teaching students.   Yes, truly, they are sometimes struggling to master the basics, but almost all students can respond to the effective design of a story, of a YouTube video, of a superbowl commercial, of a poem, of a painting.   By illustrating the technique–by having conversations about how things are constructed, we really deepen their understanding of something–but we also are giving them important tools for communicating more effectively themselves.

Showing students two items they could purchase like these air cleaners (pictured below) and asking them which is more appealing to them helps them flesh out those ideas about what important intangibles design communicates. (I of course got this idea from Daniel Pink’s discussion of toilet brushes–but these two designs just were begging for me to compare them in the store).

Which one would you want in your bedroom or kitchen?

So, let students see one another’s projects in progress and see if that inspires them to better work themselves.    Share good presentations with them, good writing with them, good video work with them, good advertising with them–and see what it inspires.  

As one student on David Truss’s blog commented about a wiki project he did with students,

“I thought this was a great project because it was always fun, and when you needed inspiration, it was easy to just click on someone else’s page, and see all the neat stuff that they’ve done, and then it makes you want to make your page just as good (or, it did for me).”

Interesting and good design inspires students to reach farther, to stretch themselves.

Daniel Pink shares some excellent ideas in Whole New Mind for encouraging students to think about how things are designed –like keeping a design notebook, asking students to redesign a product they dislike, looking at magazine layouts, writing about an object they love because of its design, etc.

If writing or making a video or anything our students do is about conveying who they are, then what is really important?   The grammar details will come, the spelling can be fixed, the lingo can work, but if they know what they want to say, and how they want to convey it, their message will come through clearly and with impact.

Daniel Pink shared a quote which summarizes it well: 

“Aesthetics matter.  Attractive things work better.”  (Don Norman, author)

Shouldn’t this be a significant part of Language Arts and information literacy curricula?

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writing, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it.
- William Bernbach

A lengthy debate has been going on at Clay Burell’s blog regarding the weight and value of writing in Language Arts education, the effects of technology, and the importance of other aspects of communication like verbal or visual.

I’ve been thinking about this in reference to the new Pew Internet Poll regarding student writing and technology ‘diversions’ like texting, etc.

In the Pew study, teens reported that:

“They are motivated to write when they can select topics that are relevant to their lives and interests, and report greater enjoyment of school writing when they have the opportunity to write creatively. Having teachers or other adults who challenge them, present them with interesting curricula and give them detailed feedback also serves as a motivator for teens. Teens also report writing for an audience motivates them to write and write well.”

Those findings are what we might expect–that when they are challenged, passionate, and have an audience, they feel more motivated to write well.   But they seem to understand that the technology cannot “give” them the ideas they need to communicate:

“Many teens feel that while technology can help them compose, edit and present their ideas, it cannot improve the quality of the ideas themselves.”

And the survey shows that teens are doing all sorts of writing–from creating powerpoint presentations(73%) to writing journals(both personal or for school) (65%).

Also interestingly, some students find that computers help them write better(witness the discussions on Clay’s blog) and some think they help them write less well:

“In comparison, three in ten teens who write on a computer for non-school purposes at least occasionally feel that computers help them do better writing—and twice as many (63%) feel that computers make no difference in their writing quality. A small minority of teens feel thatwriting on a computer makes them write less than they would otherwise (12% feel this way) or that they write more poorly as a result (6%).”

After looking at this survey, and thinking about the discussion on Clay’s blog, it’s no wonder there is a difference of opinion.  The end users themselves have a difference of opinion!

Another interesting finding of the survey which is important for those of us having students write blogs:

“Teen bloggers in particular engage in a wide range of writing outside of school. Bloggers are significantly more likely than non-bloggers to do short writing, journal writing, creative writing, write music or lyrics and write letters or notes to their friends.”

Personally I wonder if blogging provides the sense to students of an audience who is interested in their writing, which motivates them to engage in more writing of more kinds.  And that the sense of writing for an audience actually serves to improve them as writers, because they are making that transformation to “communicators”?

Which brings me back to the quote at the beginning of this post–that a communicator is concerned with what the reader gets from the writer(or the visual or the oral presentation).  

Our students need to be skilled communicators, whether they are communicating visually, orally, or in writing–they need to have mastered the craft well enough that they can focus on the reader/audience.  They need to have enough encounters with communicating that they become much more aware of audience.   And they need to have these encounters in a variety of ways.

One of the Pew findings, which wasn’t that surprising, is that most in school writing is done primarily in English classes, and that the writing done in other classes mainly consists of short paragraphs.   If we want students to grasp the finer points of communicating–if we want them to have finesse as communicators, then whether they are writing, speaking, Skyping, or presenting a visual, they need to practice enough across the curriculum that they internalize the skills they need.

Do we need to emphasize one skill over another?  Or do we need to do a better job of reaching across the curriculum to help students become more able to reach their audiences, no matter the subject, no matter the topic, and no matter the means of presentation?

             And a complete sidenote, but important to librarians:   One thing the Pew study discovered is that many teens are connecting and writing via libraries–60% use it from the library and 76% from school;  also the usage in libraries varies by socio-economic group (making libraries a real democratizing force for these students).

I’m sure some teachers or others wonder why I blog or don’t really understand the point of sharing what’s going on in our school. And I’ve seen recent comments around online about the proliferation of blogs–wondering if we can get overwhelmed or there be too many, etc.

But this post at the Principal’s Page blog speaks to one of my primary reasons that I think blogging is important.

The principal writes plaintively about how we hear more negative stories about schools than positive ones, and asks:

“Why don’t we have someone who specializes in publicizing what we do well? Why are we not getting our positive messages across? . . . . Why aren’t we more proactive in sharing all of the good things that happen in education on a daily basis?”

I blog because it is one way of opening the walls of one school and one library, and sharing the ideas of educators to demonstrate all the complexity that goes on in our practices.    Perhaps it’s only one window, but I think as you add all of the windows of education bloggers around the globe, it provides those interested in schools–either policymakers, parents, students, or other educators–a glimpse in through that window.

It’s fascinating how schools work and how learning in a classroom works.   It’s fascinating to watch a child think through a problem with you in a library until you both find an answer or solution.    It’s rejuvenating collaborating with a teacher on something and bringing it to fruition.   It’s exciting when students reach out to you with ideas and share their thoughts.

I realize that blogs are only one means of opening that window, but it’s important that we think about sharing the positives that go on–and not just the teams winning, or the scores being good, but sharing the day-to-day struggles and learning and growing that happens.  If we don’t want the non-school world to have a one-dimensional picture of what we do, then it’s up to us to show and share what an exciting, engaged learning environment looks like.

I often think of the model set by former principal Tim Tyson at Mabry Middle School–the masthead of their website, as I’ve mentioned before, proclaims “Making Learning Irresistible for 25 Years.”    What a powerful way to begin telling that positive story, even in the design of the campus website.

Maybe this is a new tool we need to add to teacher training toolkits–how to share what exciting learning is going on in their classrooms?   And to principal toolkits as well?    We do have a responsibility to our own campus and classrooms and getting things done there, but I believe we also have a larger mission to serve education well.    And part of that must mean telling about the complex and amazing living organisms that are our schools.    We will help to inspire support, inspire one another, and help create a community that better understands what we do.

A video promo is a great way to publicize your library. A group of librarians in our district are meeting tomorrow to work on some video messages for our programs. But videos like these could be used on campus websites as well. Imagine energetic, amusing, enthusiastic video messages that convey what your campus is all about and create more of a dynamic sense of your campus on your website.

If we are excited about learning and about libraries, shouldn’t we show it? And shouldn’t we enlist our students to be a part of creating that message?

Here are a few idea starters, mostly from Gale’s Librareo contest submissions on YouTube. Quite a few of these use humor to make their message “sticky.”

This clever video is a way to demonstrate (humorously) the impact of a library:

Green Gables Elementary School Library–a former student sends a video love letter

Herrick Library–they don’t just tell about their services–they show them.

Library movie trailer–using humor to convey your message.

More humor from Irving Library

from Patrick Henry Library –students carry the message

This video below (my favorite) from Love Library in Jamestown, NY is brimming with energy:

And I had to include this classic –the Betty Glover Library Workout (this is strictly librarian humor )