Can Schools Fix It In Post?

The real problem with not writing for a week is that my brain doesn’t ever acknowledge the vacation period. So instead of feeling relaxed, I build up a pile of half-posts and inspirations that molt into open loops, which in turn chew away at the edifice of DONE.

Living on the academic calendar does weird things to your mental model of time, leaving most of us more comfortable wishing people Happy New Year in September than in January. Every step I take outside of the classroom weirds me out even more, as the administrative calendar always runs three to six months ahead of teachers and students. So this week kids and teachers grapple with exams, and my head is swimming with new schedule plans and logistics for the coming year.

I’m enough of a colored-block nerd to like scheduling as a task. It’s a puzzle with intertwined and non-obvious restrictions, one that can reward either balanced or monopoly strategies, and it SEEMS ripe with novel victory conditions. Unlike any of the games linked above, there’s the potential to have a tangible, positive effect on everyone’s day to day school experience.

Larry Cuban posted a great exploration around why school reformers lean so hard on structural solutions like block schedules, enforced common preps, or linked courses, even though most research and observation shows that structural changes alone are rarely effective. I think the answer might be obvious, but it bears repeating — structural changes magnify the speed and power of administrative level decisions.

If a moderate-size school wants to move away from content-based lecture classes and a model founded on student inquiry, then each classroom and and teacher will need to drastically rework their classroom practice. To start this process successfully means building a consensus among the staff, extensive professional development and creating new support structures among the faculty, but at some point the structure of the school and school day will need to change as well.

When these structural changes are made without those other components, without clear vision, faculty preparation and extensive support, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the reforms are markedly less successful. But I can see how well-intentioned people can make psuedo-rational arguments for that sequence of choices.* Changing the structure first shows that the school is “serious” about the new direction, thereby limiting the need for real consensus among the faculty. Switching to 120 minute block periods, the thinking goes, will force teachers to change their approach and seek out new PD resources. Perhaps the schock of a new structure will convince an entrenched teacher to look for their next school, rather than adjust their practice. The negative effects of jumping into structural change are not mysterious or unexpected. Often they’re fully anticipated but recast as motivating challenges, and as such, lackluster preparation becomes an “authentic” sink or swim moment. It’s the EdReform version of “we’ll fix it in post.”

I’m personally guilty of this form of magical thinking, to the extent where even now there’s a part of me that wants to argue “you just have to jump SOMETIME!” It’s true! If the school experience you want to create won’t thrive in 45 minute blocks, then structural changes will need to happen. Opting for smaller piecemeal changes waters down the transformative potential, and perpetuates the message that we should tweak, rather than rethink, our teaching practice.

But using those “big changes” without, or possibly in lieu of, the necessary groundwork is the ultimate sacrifice of image for substance. Instead of embarking from a position of consensus and committed vision, the hardships of a sudden transition reframe the process as a series antagonistic moves on the part of the administration. Now instead of grappling with the “sink or swim” challenges, there’s a host of toxic and damaging behaviors developing. Teachers who feel slighted by the transition will avoid changing their practice out of principle, waiting for the administration to lose focus, change personell, or just concede and move on to the NEXT major reform. The entire experiment enters into the cultural memory of the school as yet another stupid reform plan that “won’t work here.”

Which makes winter a hard time of year. Instead of finessing the details of making that crazy awesome schedule work for fall, administrators need to push deeper into classrooms that are already overtaxed with exams. Playing the schedule puzzle can be fun, but without the cultural backing of classroom teachers willing to change their classroom practice, it’s probably better to stick with the games.

* The malicious interpretation is that reformers and administrators define success in terms of implementations they can list on their resume, rather than the longterm success or health of those schools. Choose your favorite quote from The Wire or The Simpsons to illustrate.

Obligatory Do What You Love Post #edcampisva

The first year I was “just” a math teacher I had a single desktop/CRT Dell tucked into the corner of my classroom. Between electronic gradebooks and parent emails, I spent most of my prep periods huddled over that keyboard. At some point in February, I realized that I had lost two prep periods trying to recreate a gravity-experiment in Squeak. At the time I had almost no programing experience, didn’t teach science or even know the science teachers at my school. I had just found a new toy, one captivating enough to drown out the stack of papers on my desk and make me forget the herd of 9th graders about to barge in.

That was the point where I realized that no matter what I was assigned to teach, I was still drawn to new tech and new (to me!) ideas. I realized that I needed to find a job where this hour, and all the others like it, were an essential part of work rather than an indulgence.

Today I’m at Fredericksburg Academy attending EdCamp IS-VA (#edcampisva), and I’m surrounded by people who must have had a similar moment. I keep moving between conversations that would, in isolation, be the hilight of a normal week. Everyone I’ve talked to is eager to share their plans, tools, experience and vision, all on a Saturday afternoon that’s otherwise ripe for napping.

The only other time I’ve driven this far south in VA was for a small Street Fighter tournament; an event which provides some surprising similarities to #edcampisva. Both provide a space and community for folk who constantly pokes at, play with and processes certain ideas. Here the conversations center around technology and reform, about institutional and academic structure, about encouraging authentic learning rather than option selects and character match-ups, but the communities are similar. Both groups full of manic, self-propelled learners, so passionate about their interests that they’ve learned to be cautious and circumspect in most other conversation spaces.

Almost a decade ago I had a choice to view my interests and passions as a distraction to be managed or as a pillar of my career and professional identity. After a few years feeling a bit isolated in Virginia, it’s nice to meet up with a community of other folk who made the same choice.

Tool Overload – Text Editors

I popped into the App Store this morning and was shocked to see that I had two OS X text editors that needed updating. That’s two out of the out of the 5 plain-text editors I use on a regular basis (ia Writer, Writeroom, MacVim, Text Wrangler, Notational Velocity, TextEdit). The iPad has even more, since the distinction between narrative writing and code writing extends to keyboard layout, and the basic OS tools (Notes) is so poor.

Why the hell am I so fascinated by text editors? Is this simply tool-obsessed procrastination, akin to the Blackwing nerds who “can’t write with anything else”? Or is there something substantive about choosing good tools?

I wrote all of my posts this month in ia Writer, both on the laptop and on the iPad. I love the look of it, love the sentance by sentance Focus Mode for editing, and the fullscreen mode is a decent substitute for Writeroom. Clearly the finger-to-key experience isn’t substantively different than most other editors, but I found some benefit in having a dedicated tool for just blog writing.

But it’s never enough. When I needed critiques and revision, I pasted the full text into stypi. I still needed to paste into the WordPress client to add links, media and then finally post.

In my head I’m still dreaming of a smooth solution for all of that. (Maybe a Markdown plugin for WordPress?) But I feel like I’m at a comfortable equilibrium with this set of tools. At least until another new text editor shows up on O’Reilly Radar.

Winning by Losing the Blog Lottery

All month I’ve felt like a non-participant in the November Blog-a-thingey, as I missed posting at least once within the first week. But after that first failure, I’ve felt moderately in control for the remainder of the month. My record doesn’t look anywhere as good as Melissa’s or Maryland Math Madness, but the important metric is that I wrote way more than I did in October.

There was a strong narrative in the early days of blogging that suggested that if you approached the Internet with clear prose and an honest heart that you’d be able to blog your way to a better life. You can see versions of this in the Dooce / Wil Wheaton / Chris Hardwick story, and it’s still vibrant within the EdBlog community. Just start writing, just start Tweeting, just form a PLN, and The New Wonderful will invade your teaching life. Put your practice online and you’ll be rewarded with a new community, new friends, a new school or new job.

This narrative is magical thinking to the core, and I should reject it outright. “Clearly,” says rational brain, “those stories say far more about the talent of those individuals, not some universal power of blogging. Suggesting otherwise is nothing but hucksterism and snake-oil.”

That’s when the black dog, carrying our self-doubt and insecurity, arrives. “It’s not like you’re talented. If you started writing, it’d just be a big signpost of how inadequate you are, strobing in neon every day that your life fails to change. What do you have that’s worth sharing? Who wants to read a math teacher’s writing?”

One of the reasons I hold onto that narrative of transformation, and even propagate it in my own small way, is that I know the destructive power of those internal voices. I know the isolation of a being the last car out of the faculty parking lot. I know the bleak view from age 25, imagining a 35 year career dancing through the same soul crushing machinery. If the blog-salvation narrative is a fantasy, it’s necessary one.

But even without the intervention of the EdBlog VALIS, even with page-views measured in single digits, writing changes people. It’s not guaranteed to change you into Dan Meyer, but it will change you into a different and better version of yourself; the version that writes and keeps writing. Every post is a stab at the black dog Every post transforms the stuff you think into what you say, and that’s immeasurably closer to being what you teach and live.

Did Dan Meyer win the blog lottery? Did Wheaton or Dooce? Maybe so, but as it turns out, the math on this lottery is encouraging. Instead of a regressive tax, it doles out small but steady payments to everyone who plays, including a clearer head and more cogent arguments. It does eat time, but it returns a trickle of new relationships centered around those ideas you cared about enough to blog about.

So hooray for November! See you all tomorrow.

Defining Failure: Cracking Open Success

Every time I see a headline that proclaims the immanent disruption and grand reshaping of the K12 classroom experience, I have a glimmer of hope in my heart. But as much as I share that belief, that we’re holding all the tools necessary to remake something personally meaningful and transformative out of the broad notion of school, I don’t find much to be excited about in most of the proposed solutions. Notably, I think that we’re stuck in a loop, designing systems that will increase some marker of success, without considering if that statistic is itself just a side-effect of another experience. I think we’re confused as to what success means for K12, and that both leads to a poor choice of goals and metrics, and a culture that makes os failure-adverse in all the wrong places.

Keeping up with my disclaimers, I’m going to try to pick this apart using an version of the high school I attended, rather than drawing any experience or anecdotes from schools I’ve taught in. I attended a moderately sized wealthy suburban high school that was largely class-stratified, using various combinations Gifted/Honors/AP tracking to build non-overlapping social strata. As it existed in 199X, it was, by most public measures, a successful school. For this discussion, I’m going to refine it further into something closer to the school I experienced. That imaginary school had a graduation and 4 year college attendance rate near 100%. Although the socio-economic signifiers for this population are completely screwed and non-representative, it’s a useful thought exercise to think about what school behaviors contributed to this success.

My only answer, the answer that has shaped my approach to teaching for the last decade, is that a majority adults in the community were open and welcoming to students. Every teacher would reach out to a student that they felt an affinity for, or one who they saw in need, or one to showed promise and interest in their discipline. While there’s no way that every teacher can form a meaningful positive connection with every one of their students, but the dream of this approach is that the combined outreach of all the adults can somehow reach every student.

The reality is that the boundaries of this imaginary school precisely map where that dream fails. “Successful” students had enough sustaining, positive relationships with school-adults to outweigh or outnumber the interest-sapping, humiliating, crushingly negative experiences of adolescence, negative experiences that came from inside and outside school. “Unsuccessful” students didn’t have enough, and got pulled under or pushed away by the negative forces.

The “successful” student population isn’t homogenous, all living lives of quiet privilege and moving towards graduation on autopilot. Many students needed those relationships, needed the support from a teacher or coach, from the communities formed in a photo labs and practice rooms, to bind the school experience to their developing “real” selves.

OK, that got a bit flowery. Let me bring it back to failure.

I really do believe that enduring communities and relationships between diverse groups of students and adults is the strongest argument for the continuation of school in any form my parents would recognize. I think even in our successful schools, these relationships are the primary driver of baseline success, poorly quantified in attendance, graduation, and college attendance rates. These relationships are also at the heart of most stories of personal or institutional excellence.

From this perspective, I see a truth that, strangely, encourages me about school reform. Most of what students and teachers are engaged in throughout the day does nothing to encourage these relationships, and is often actively detrimental to them. It’s a testament to teachers’ commitment to students that these relationships form in spite of the bureaucratic hamster wheel of the academic calendar. We can experiment with new structures that actively encourage these relationships, look for new ways to give students more time and more avenues to connect with a school community ready to support them.

This is where I’m looking for new ways to “fail cheaply.” Ways to put committed teachers into contact with students in new areas and build relationships that sustain kids for a lifetime.

I have Problems with Triplicate

Earlier today I was bemoaning my innability to write concisely. Just look at that sentence! Its skirting with a double negative just to complain that I’m longwinded! Instead of writing a direct one-idea blogpost, I find myself stuck with 4 paragraphs of preamble and quibble, a set of stacked ideas and still fighting to draw some sort of rallying conclusion out of the damn thing. Did the 5-paragraph essay touch me in a bad place when I was young?

A small Twitter exchange with @dontworryteach reminded me despite the frustration, there is a real benefit to this interminable process. It’s the process of working the idea into actual sentances that exposes all the hand-wavey gaps that I narrate over. Years of meetings that function on constant interruption, half-statement and “yadda yadda” sentence completion have turned me into a lazy speaker. Taking that mush and building something solid, one word at a time, is where my head fluff turns into something moderately cogent.

The next logical step is to plan ahead and leave time for actual revision.

Defining Failure

It’s been a taxing and flu-ridden Thanksgiving weekend here at Casa de Tieandjeans. In light of that, I’ve been trying to find a comfortable nice for short posts, suitable to days like this one where all I want is a darker room and a warm cup of tea. I don’t link much without significant commentary, in large part because Google Reader USED to handle everything I wanted out of fast link sharing. I don’t generate or deal in aphroisms, and sharing glimpses of my mind’s media landscape* probably won’t do much for my credibility.

I’m opting for the discussion post, which is a bit laughable for the developing blog. But, whatever. Operate as if you’re living the life you dream of. We are what we pretend to be.**

The Seth Godin / Web2.0 / Startup culture suggests that to disrupt an excisting system, the innvoater has to fail early and fail often. The connectivity and data sensitivity of the web should give us the ability to extract the maximum ammount of data from each failed product, and then pivot from the results and try again.

At the same time, districts and schools across the country are engaged in a furious battle through legislation and litigation, to avoid or remove a designation of “failing” from their institutions. It’s tempting to say that “failure” matters more to schools than it does to startups, but that does a huge disservice to the passion and desperation that entrepreneurs carry with them every day.

Maybe the more important distinction one of scale. What would it mean to fail cheaply in a K12 academic setting? What goals can we set for our students and our communities that are so clearly, overwhelmingly important that we’re willing to accept and learn from repeated, ongoing “cheap” fails?

*

**Well, looky here! I do come stocked with aphorisms!

Disclaimer Disclaimer

My push for a positive and encouraging social media policy, rather than one built out of fear and CYA language, continues to creep along. In every conversation someone mentions that any professional+personal writing from faculty or staff needs to be slathered in disclaimers, drawing a right, bold line between the writing of this individual who happens to work/teach at the school and the institution itself.

Obviously, right? That’s why I have a space on the school’s wiki where I make posts directed at kids and faculty. We all know the hassle that erupts when someone in the community takes any kind of comment from a particular teacher and generalizes it to the entire grade, division, school, district, ad nauseum. Any form of public speech brings those risks. Public, linkable writing is N-times more dangerous, and god-forbid something as impromptu as Twitter. All it takes is one teacher making an off-the-cuff reply to a snarky blog post and . . .wait, maybe we better rethink this positive social media policy again. Are we sure we want to do this?

While I recognize the need for disclaimer language, it stirs up a bunch of ornery in me. As halting and obscure as my writing may be, it’s my practice and I’m sticking by it. There are days when I’m actually proud of it. So while I recognize the systemic and legal necessity of providing the institution distance from each employee, I hate having to wave that flag myself. My writing doesn’t reflect the views of my employer, but more often than not it does reflect the views of this employee.

So, let’s disclaim. The words posted here come from an individual, not an organization. When I write about my hope for drastic changes to the K-12 classroom space, that does not reflect the current or immediate future policies of the school. When I discuss the central role of TMBG in the development of curious adolescents, I’m speaking from personal belief and not reflecting the curriculum maps of the school. The school does not operate a Writer’s Guild in WoW. The school does not have “productive farting around online” as an academic standard.

I started thinking about a positive frame for teachers and social media when I realized how skittish I was when positing about topics and ideas that are central to any meaningful discussion of K-12 ed. The direct consequence of a policy change should be that teachers weel empowered to write and imagine in public, even if those ideas move beyond the current operation of their current school. The secondary, and hopefully transformative, effect is that the school could see the huge reach and potential of their faculty, see the dreams that exist well outside 45-minute chunks of isolated content. Encouraging faculty to express their practice, pedagogy and experience means that those traits are now visible and available to the whole community!

I’ve seen the amazing outcomes from a small cadre of teachers blogging and thinking in concert. I’m twitterpated about the potential for a sizable community within a single school, providing meaningful channels of communication between distant grades and departments. If the benefit from that open engagement doesn’t grossly outweigh the downsides, then I think there’s a much deeper problem.

Instant Blended Classroom

Yesterday I wanted to talk about Stanford’s upcoming CS-101 online course. I sat down to write an intro paragraph, because I have some weird hangups about link posts, and then. . ..well, that happened. Yeah.

So, here’s the rest of the backwards story. This online course is built around materials from Nick Parlante‘s (yes, Coding Bat and Nifty Assignment Nick Parlante) semester long course. You can sign up now, and the class itself launches in February.

Last year when I taught a semester long CS elective, I found myself doing much the same thing. Trying to meet the needs of students with a huge range of experience and skill levels, I churned through hundreds of CS resources. Out of this hodgepodge stew, Coding Bat and the in-browser MediaComp exercises were clear standouts. Personally, I’m excited to revist those ideas in a cohesive curricular context.

But in our short Thanksgiving week, I had almost a dozen conversations with middle and highschool students asking about “how to learn code.” Normally I point them to the vast resources of the web and either CodingBat or Project Euler as a motiviating frame (or Python the Hard Way if they aren’t looking for motivation). This week I mentioned the cs-101 class, and then recieved a trickle of emails from students after they signed up.

So now, instead of jamming a full hour class (on the wrong campus!) into my schedule, and asking students to do the same, I find that I have a similar sized group looking to tackle similar material outside of the school day. They’re forming Wiggo and Google+ groups already, swapping resources and tips for getting started.

The combination of Stanford’s name and the promise of a fixed schedule has somehow created a new course, and a new type of classroom, for our school. I couldn’t be more excited.

Teach How We’re Taught, Learn How We’ve Learned

It’s a cliche to point out that new teachers teach in the way they were taught. There’s often a bit more to it, and every teacher I know has at least a handful of oppositional models (“I’ll NEVER do it the way it was done to me”) that propel their practice, though I’m unsure if that’s actually much better.*

Recently I’ve been wondering about how teachers learn and the effects of that unexamined practice. Teaching to our own personal learning style is one of the classic and cardinal teacher sins, and exposing that unspoken practice was one of the core goals of curriculum differentiation. How did that all work out where you are?

I wonder if it’s reasonable to expect teachers to approach their students, subjects and curriculum in a mode that’s completely distinct from their own learning experiences. Everyone seems to have a story about some infamous PD about differentiation or learning styles that’s presented as a time-crunched one-to-many lecture with xeroxed binders of support materials. Maybe the better PD option is to push teachers into new and unfamiliar learning experiences of their own, rather than try to describe the experience.

This thought haunts me when I watch teachers jump in to the “flipped classroom” process without any experience learning in a blended or distributed environment. I know that I’ve gained far more insight about the mechanics of teaching and learning in that new mode while following MIT’s Open Courseware Python material than I did from sampling Kahn Academy videos for familiar math skills. When I’m watching someone describe how to factor polynomials, I’m still living in my teacher brain, looking at the clarity or accuracy of particular statements, but I’m hardly invested in the process.. When I’m actually learning something new, an unclear phrase can destroy an evening! How can teachers judge the strength or effectiveness of their new practice without similar personal learning experiences on which to draw?

As a meta-teacher I’m looking for ways to make this process a tangible part of our school’s academic culture. As we move more and more of our learning resources into the public space, I want our faculty to enlist as active students in courses outside their departments and curricular comfort zones. Let’s make grappling with an alien set of ideas, with only a set of videos and Google Hangout as support, a part of every adult’s learning experience as well.

Maybe its just the bleak skies of November, or maybe it’s just a moment on the cyclical emotional calendar of the school year, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re coming closer and closer to a radical shift in how we practice and enact school. More learning, less schooliness.

* Then again, I distrust oppositional binaries.