Stay Edgy, Stay Creative: Making is Key to Living

In thinking about how we might remain engaging and engaged as teachers with many years in the classroom, we have to find those things that not only move us but also move our students. The list I offered from one of my students in a previous post points in that direction. Students recognize and feel when there is a draw for the teacher, some curiosity or novelty that excites and energizes.

An example in my own career was the good fortune I had to be asked to create a middle school humanities class that focused on the connections between the static arts, the literary arts, and the performing arts . One of the highlights of every semester-long class was a trip to the Berman Museum of Art on the Ursinus College Campus in our district.

As exhibits changed with each semester, my class curriculum was largely based around the topics and genres of the artwork on exhibition. During one of our first trips back in 2005 or so, I taught myself to use iMovie and we created a video documenting the work students did during their trips to the museum.

Music: “Buried at Sea” by MC 900 Ft. Jesus from the album, One Step Ahead of the Spider 1994, and “Dream (All I Have to Do)” by R.E.M. from In the Attic – Alternative Recordings 1985 – 1989

These forays into different modes of expression utterly changed me as an English teacher. The focus on multimodal means of storytelling and expressions allowed us to find pathways between visual means of expression and the literary and bodily means of expression. These trips to the museum required constant preparation and learning and kept me fresh and curious as an aging teacher.

And while I now have NOVA Lab and the unique and original projects students develop therein to keep me active and curious, I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s line “always at my back I hear/ time’s wing’ed chariot drawing near”, and I feel like there’s something more I need to be doing. And perhaps this points to another way for us to stay engaged and engaging as we age: Starting new things.

In my career, I’ve started or helped start three different classes, a robotics team, and now an e-sports team. I’ve also initiated a school-wide poetry cafe, partnerships with businesses in the community, and I’ve had a hand in helping students start numerous clubs. I find that the new perspectives these projects bring with them is accompanied by an anticipation and rejuvenation that is uplifting.

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I imagine this must, in some sense, be the same energy accompanying the work done by teachers of the performing arts. Always searching for new compositions, working on producing a new play or musical in new ways. Or perhaps its the same drive associated with the work of the technology and engineering educator whose students are taking on different projects each year. Whatever it is…wherever it is, it is undeniable that new ideas embolden and enliven us.

So in this latest post I’m announcing something new. I’d originally thought these blog posts would end after I hosted the conversation on Staying Hungry, Stayin Foolish at Educon 2024. But what I discovered there, as well as in prepping for the conversation,is that so many teachers are searching for the same thing. In the face of accelerated change in both the profession and the human beings we work with, I’ve found that teachers want to discuss not only the future of their engagement with the profession, but they also seek a forum that might help them reconnect to the joy that brought the to and held them within the profession for so long.

Perhaps that’s what this space can offer, and so I’ll be exploring the ways I might build this out and offer insight and hope and fellowship to others. Below, once more, is a list of potential topics for blog posts (at least that’s the medium for the space right now) that speak to the topic of staying engaged and engaging as we age. If readers have more ideas or would like to offer guest posts on topics, I’d be more than willing to entertain such. Please just offer a comment and let me know.

Finally, here’s a link to the first post in the series, which ends with a table of contents.

Still Hungry, Still Foolish: On teaching at 30+ Years

Educon 2023: Where Conversations and Dialogue Are the Heart of Education

This year my students and I returned to Educon, the national education conference focused on progressive conversations about how we might improve education for all people. We had planned two conversations and both were geared to have high levels of student engagement.

Transparent and Dehydrated: Innovating with a Minimum Viable Curriculum

Our first sessions was geared towards opening the curriculum document for NOVA Lab and having members of the audience help us suck out some of the curricular water that had bloated the system. (I’ve written about that before and finally decided to take my own advice.). While the attendance was small, our troop of students had ample time to present their projects, both present and past, and create awareness for the good things they are doing. Our audience engaged us in frequent questions that helped us not only explain the methods and content of the class, but which also helped us understand the privilege it is to be able to have a class like this. Challenging the staid and standard curriculum is not something allowed, it seems, in most inner city districts. This opened an entirely new perspective about how systems suppress innovation in order to maintain dependencies and suppress upward mobility.

Gradelessness & Microdocumentation of Learning: Assessment through Learning Journeys

This session saw our largest audience ever at Educon, about 11 people. Ok, so that seems small, but with about 15 different conversations running during each session, it’s not easy to get a huge audience. Regardless, the attendees were engaged, asked hard questions, and received a huge amount of documentation via the sliidedeck we’d constructed. Students again had a huge role, culling data from “Big Paper” recordings of initial readings, creating a list of discussion topics, and also helping to describe the different ways we have attempted, in both my English and Innovation classes, to capture student Learning Journeys.

This session also allowed us to explore how we’ve been using Unrulr.com to capture learning journeys throughout the year so far. While my system for pulling in Unrulr is not where I want it to be, the success I’ve had with it has allowed me to showcase the beauty of cultures of commenting and communities of feedback like nothing else.

In the decade or so since I first started attending Educon, I have had the pleasure to meet with like minded educators who have helped shape my own learning journey. It is my hope that, by bringing students to Educon and allowing them to discuss their learning, the systems of both my own classes and the school in general, we are able to influence others and learn from others in ways that not only question why things are the way they are, but empower us all to make them better.

Evaluation and The Betrayal of Learning

A necessary precursor to this post is the beautiful, romantic, and wholly human post that Carol Black wrote several years ago on the Evaluative Gaze of schooling and the effect it has on the human spirit to spend 7.5 hours a day under such surveillance.   What is the effect of knowing that we exist in a system that is constantly measuring us and whether we meet the “standard student” profile?  Such an evaluative gaze reinforces the “school as hospital” metaphor:  Students are “sick”, they need to be treated in order to “meet the grade” or to get to proficient/average (see Todd Rose on this–though I’m pretty sure most of us have seen it.  (And if we have, I next wonder…why are so few of us doing anything about it?)).  

If You Never Try, You’ll Never Learn

Let me give you an anecdote.  I spent a week at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking in 2010,  in a cohort of college and HS teachers in a class called “Inquiry into the Essay.”  The first assignment we had was to read through 6 pages of definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary on the word “Essay.”  The impact of that exercise was lost on no one, because after reading them, we were asked to freewrite for 10 minutes on the patterns we noticed, on what surprised us.  Universally it was that only one of the definitions actually sounded anything remotely like what we have taught student an Essay is.  

I do this same exercise with my students before we engage in our first writing exercise.  I did it on Thursday with my students.  In my 10th period class when I asked students to share their observations, the first response was, “I feel betrayed.”  From there, the litany of complaints piled on.  And all of it. All of it! was tied to the fact that writing was always done for an evaluation.  Rarely was it done for any other purpose than “Writing to Demonstrate Learning.”  In my own classes, I tell students that we will strike an imbalance in our writing, as most of the writing we will do will be “writing to learn, to explore, to discover.” I will not “evaluate” anything. Their peers and I wiill, however, assess constantly.  Assessment–feedback, discussion, hashing-out–is the only end of our work.  And isn’t this what we want from an audience, from mentors, from teachers?  A chance to enter into the intellectual discourse and to see ourselves not as equals, but as explorers on the same journey to self-discovery, just with different levels of experience? A chance to feel part of a learning community with “better” as the only goal/standard?

My own path has been such in many parts of my identity.  I am not a designer, but I think in designerly ways.  I am not a scientist, but I can think in scientific ways.  I am not an entrepreneur, but I can adopt an entrepreneur’s mindset.  So it is for students in my class.  While not all of them may see themselves as writers, they can learn to think in writerly ways, to approach the world with the same sense of inquiry and wonder as writers and to attempt, through language, to figure out what they are thinking and what they might learn from those questions and wonderings that could be useful, insightful to others, even if it is just themselves.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

And what has it done to my classroom to remove the “evaluative gaze” Carol Black has so beautifully detailed here? (She used to write for the TV show, The Wonder Years.). First is a massive shift in the culture.  My students are no longer up till 12AM sweating out their final drafts (which for many was a 1 1/2 draft).  They are not getting their papers back, looking at a grade, and losing the paper amidst the physical din of a notebook or disorganized google drive.  They are engaging with each other in discussions of craft and inquiry and learning that are real and genuine and appreciative.  They come to see themselves as a community of readers, writers, speakers and listeners, engaged in a curious, wonderful, and often intriguing if not always engaging search for meaning.  

Is it always this way?  Not always. No classroom is a Utopia, and Carol Black, a staunch home/unschooler, would say that the very institution of school itself, even absent grades, has a gaze we cannot escape.  However, the culture of our classroom creates a community that is far removed from the classrooms I remember and hear about…classrooms where rote learning and predetermined lessons about what should be retained and what is most important create learning expectations for students that are alien to their own lives; classrooms that remove the joy and wonder of discovery from their lived experience so that an efficiency can be applied to learning that makes the task easier for the teacher, for the system.

This shift away from grades entails no loss of rigor, for those prescriptive traditionalists amongst you.  In fact, we still hold ourselves to standards, still understand the end of most writing is to communicate with clarity, beauty, and understanding.  We don’t need grades to enforce compliance, to measure the humans in our classroom like so many meat puppets.  

And this is all premised on the simple act of grading…a task for which most teachers never had a class, never studied in any depth, never, for most of us (myself included for 20 years) actually really questioned.  It’s just the way we’ve always done things.

(*For more on this topic, the recent Washington Post article on the work being done by Scott Looney and the Mastery Transcript Consortium is a clarion call. Also, check out the brilliant work being done at One Stone and how they shape the Learning Experience around their Growth Transcript and Disruption BLOB. Also, visit Teachers Going Gradeless. )

The Modern Learner: Dancing to Learn

I link below to the blog and youtube channel of a student who has taken a passion project/20Time project to levels far beyond my expectations.  If you’re an educator of any sort, you should take a look at her work.  While she is certainly an exceptional student,  she could easily be languishing in classrooms that sap her energy and deny her access to her curiosity.

Instead, Irina has created opportunities and taken hold of those presented to her to pursue her curiosity and interests.  This is the modern learner, the innovator, the self-determined learner.

This is the future of education, and it is now.

As educators, we know that we need to question ourselves constantly.  And while it may be exhausting, we need to find ways to be in a constant, iterative cycle.  Change is everywhere, and it is represented strongly in our students, especially those like Irina.   We can either lead with them or get out of their way.  But if we think conducting our classes the same way we always have will help students like Irina learn what they need in a world that has always outpaced our glacially paced system, we’re mistaken and worse, an anachronism.

Commotion — Blog

Youtube Channel

The Chaotic Arrow: Musing on the Importance of Perception in School Change.

Thursday’s blog post from George Couros got me thinking, as normal.    Take a look at it, especially at the line drawings for what constitutes “Success.”

 These doodles are true enough (you’ll also find the squiggle as the Design Squiggle ) to the pathways we perceive as leading to success and the meanderings that actually do.  In that, the straight arrow stands as a warning to the pretensions of linearity that typify most of our endeavors at schooling and its reform…STILL!  (I mean, come on.  We talked about this back in the 80s, 60s, 20s….)

Anyway, George has written another great post for teachers and teacher leaders.  If we are thinking of change, at whatever level, be it one teacher in the classroom, or one building, or a district as a whole, let’s admit to ourselves that our narrative will not trace the unwavering flight of an arrow.  That’s as illusory and destructive as the notion that time itself is an arrow.

Instead of an arrow, the change in which we engage will more resemble the narrative of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the great, muddy, messy river at the heart of the novel.  Change meanders,  ox-bows, turns back, crosses itself, confuses, drifts, gathers.  It is at once powerfully beautiful, and powerfully frightening.    And so the question for innovators in schools is really how do we make all of the learners (students, teachers, admin, support staff, etc.) floating down our own great river of change, education, understand and honor that the trip will rarely…should ever…be as straight and efficient as a line?

Answers to that question are complicated by the fact that any talk of change breeds fear, and that fear stems from the perception that something (comfort, safety, status) will be lost when we change.  This is especially true of districts like my own which label themselves with that perennial deflation, “We’re good enough.”    The real answer to how we get all learners on board the riverboat to effective change is that we need to help them shift their perspective.  If we can do that, then “fear” is replaced with “conviction,” “risk” with “opportunity,” and “failure” with “learning.”

But shifting perspectives is difficult.  It takes a willingness to see one’s self differently and an understanding that we are the only real engines of change.  It also takes a willingness to accept one’s power and its attendant responsibilities.

If we are to start shifting perspectives, we can hardly start in a better place than two simple questions.  “Why are things the way they are?”  and “How can we make them better.”  The first question opens us to an understanding that the built world is born of intention, that all the objects, experiences, apps, and systems we have made are responses to solving problems, and some of them do so better, with more focus on an understanding of the users than others.  The second question reminds us that we are the creators, the agents of change.  It empowers those who have forgotten their power and enlightens those who never realized they had it.