Why Twitter is Only the Beginning

The speed of connection in social media can distract us from the possibilities for deeper engagement. Brian Costello urges us past the brief and immediate in this space and challenges us to dig deeper in our practices.

The Teacher's Journey

I personally found it weird when there was a month to celebrate Connected Educators and we celebrate it in a place that is exclusively for connected educators, Twitter.  Twitter is a great tool if you are using it correctly.  Engage, introduce surface ideas, build relationships, and share resources.  For these things, twitter is great, but if it is where your connected experience ends, you may not be getting everything out of it.

So many things that we talk about on twitter require a greater level of discussion.  They are complex, in-depth, educational topics that require more than 140 characters.  We only scratch the surface with twitter.

What twitter does, if we use it right, is open doors.  It opens doors to educators to connect in other ways to really have the conversations about topics they propose on twitter.  We still have to walk through.  Our job is not simply to…

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Collaborative Information Source Evaluation: Research/Inquiry Circles and the CRAAP Test

More fantastic insight into deepening the inquiry process with young researchers.

Something Deeper: On Teaching with Heart and the Poetry of Teaching

Something Deeper: On Teaching with Heart and the Poetry of Teaching.

On Children and Childhood

Paul Thomas examines the ways in which we power over children through erroneously assigning them minority status. Please consider this post today.

dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew

“[anyone lived in a pretty how town],”e.e. cummings

In one of those early years of becoming and being a teacher, when I was still teaching in the exact room where I had been a student (a school building that would eventually be almost entirely destroyed by a fire set by children), it was the first day of school, and I was calling that first roll—a sort of silly but important ritual of schooling for teachers and students.

Toward the back of the room and slightly to my left sat a big young man, a white male student typical of this rural upstate South Carolina high school in my home town; like me, he would accurately be considered in that context as a Redneck.

Just about everyone knows everyone in my hometown, and we are very…

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First School

I created it in the corner of the basement in our split-level suburban Chicago home. My parents must have recognized my love of all things school-related and they found two old hinge-top desks for me. They scrounged a chalkboard from somewhere and mounted it on the stubborn cement wall. My dad made ditto machine copies for me at his office from the workbooks I begged my mom to purchase at the strip mall teachers’ store.

I had this…

in case I had to take things on the road.

I begged my younger sister to play school with me and she’d frequently oblige. (I’m so sorry, Sharyn! It was so early in my career.) Occasionally our neighborhood friends would come down and I could convince them to put down the Barbies and Star Wars figures or quit roller skating around the support beam for long enough to cajole a worksheet out of them.

I loved that little space. I loved being the teacher.

My students often hated me.

I had internalized the system that I was attending, and I was cranking it back upon my sibling and friends, unaware that a space meant for play must release them from the shackles of their Monday through Friday, 9:00-3:3o lives.

But I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved my teachers, loved the smell of textbooks–even read them for fun, marvelling at why on Earth! couldn’t we ever finish them in a school year?

I loved the quiet dimness and echoes of the cinder block and tile hallways if I worked up enough courage to seek permission to go to the bathroom or get a drink during work time. I’d steal glances into the boiler room and the mysterious chugging machinery within.

I loved the library and the spots on the shelves I returned to time and again for my favorite books, piling them high on the checkout desk, always forgiven a book or two over the limit.

I loved the playground with it’s massive maples and places amongst their roots we called ‘secret’ for hiding special bits of stone and wood chips essential in scenes long forgotten.

In so many ways I was a fortunate child in an affluent school system that paved a foundation for my dedication to this field. But for all the warmth and goodness around me in those spaces, I knew early that others were not happy there.

In kindergarten, the beloved woman who smiled over her piano to keep us singing “O Beautiful” was also someone who tied a classmate to his chair with a jump rope. His needs were exceptional and special. I did not tell anyone who could help.

In second grade, a left-handed boy who looked out the window too long to those swaying maple towers was physically reprimanded to write neater, pay attention, and work harder at not smudging his papers. I remember the sound of his hand hitting the desk and seeing that she had made that happen, with her fierce grip on his wrist, tears and fear in his eyes. I bowed my head and colored my ditto copies for the pages of our bird books. Cardinal. Blue Jay. A robin like my name.

In third grade, the teachers shared a doorway between two classrooms. They were terse, diminutive women with high heels, cigarette-tuned voices, and a set of reprimands they spoke in common to us nine year olds:

“You’re a day late and a dollar short.”

“What? Do I look like your mother?”

“You’re going to need more than the right answer to get anywhere further than where you’re going.”

During presentation once where we had to report on the states, one boy had proudly traced the shape of Kansas and marked a star labeled “Kansas City” as its capital.

“Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?” the gray-haired one began. She went over to the doorway, opened it and called for back-up. The red-haired sidekick clicked over in her heels, and they put on a kind of back and forth act as my classmate stood in front of the room, slowly lowering his report. “This kid thinks the capital of Kansas is Kansas City. For the love of Pete, did you even do any research?”

Did they cough and spit upon the ground, too? In my memory, they’ve become the kind of people who would have done so.

Fourth grade was a reprieve. Our teacher was golden to everyone. She never changed the burlap background to her bulletin boards, raised chicks from eggs in the front of the room and once placed a lost duckling from the schoolyard into my hands so we could take it to our family’s farm. She was the kind of person with self-awareness to lower her voice when she felt it raising in frustration. She’d try again and again to explain difficult topics to learners who were stuck, and she included us all in celebrations. She was so kind.

Except for the time she was bowled over at the year-end picnic on the park hill by a gregarious classmate who was running one way, yelling and looking in the other direction. No one expected the full-contact hit and our teacher’s legs flying up from beneath her ever-present chambray skirt. She all but cursed the poor girl’s name.

In fifth grade, I missed out on being placed in the young and pretty new teacher’s class and was instead seated next to a child who never made contact with the seat of his desk chair, orbiting about that station in as many ways as he could. His lips were perpetually cracked and he’d gape them open at me as he glanced at my work, attempting to grasp something to put down during a pause in his movement. Our teacher wore various colored nylon stockings for belts, was considered “odd” and had a curious habit of playing Brahms and Beethoven unpredictably on the boxy class record player at various points during the day. I had just begun to learn to draw a bow across the strings of the viola so I found a place inside those swells of sound.

I remember drawing the Jamestown colony and trying to remind my busy neighbor to include a town square in his work. I think he finished just one goat. One day I returned from lunch to find him crouched under the coats along the wall, crying. I don’t think I had any idea how to help him. I think I must have just taken my seat.

I wrote that I wanted to be a “chimpanzee communicator” on the page about our future goals in our little fifth grade memory book, but somewhere in there I was already considering that I never wanted to leave the environment of school.

I had schoolosis and I was a watcher. I was transfixed by the actions of my teachers and my peers, and while I know that I must have spoken and interacted with my classmates, I remember them most with an almost-photographic quality or silent pans across the scenes in those rooms.

Junior high was taxing on my need for large swaths of time and space for my tendency to notice, mull and wonder.  The pace was so different. We had many more teachers for the first time, and hallways filled with students. I survived it. I remember having to play what was termed “The Ghetto Game” for points and a grade in a social studies room. I lost early by becoming a single mother without a GED. The teacher had a habit of rearing back on his chair and putting his boot-laced feet on the desk. He wore dark-tinged sunglasses and smelled of alcohol.

In high school, the mad dash to keep up was upon me. I found myself noticing things teachers were trying to do to engage us in critical thinking to stretch our habits. During the first back to school night as a freshman, the ambulance came roaring to the school’s great circle drive and they carried out the English teacher who had just introduced us to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I had finished it overnight beneath the glow of an overheated task lamp clipped to my bed. I was ready to hang on every word of his analysis over the coming weeks. He was gone.

The class treated the substitute horribly. I faced forward and raised my hand whenever her shaky questions hung in the air without any response. I could see her fight back tears most days. She nominated me for a position in the student writing center.

I found the elective for early childhood development and the chance to teach in the in-house preschool run by a fantastic home economics teacher and early childhood specialist. My advisor made certain to say that this was a course track most suitable for students who might not go to college and those who might find work in daycares. He repeated this two more different ways. I must have had a blank look on my face. A school within a school? Nothing was standing in my way.

One of my childhood friends questioned me relentlessly about my college choices. My peers were Top Ten-conference bound. I needed constant help with my AP Calculus work. She wondered if I was really going into education. “You’ll never make very much money. And no one respects teachers.” I started leaving out big sections of my thoughts and dreams in our conversations.

I was interviewed by a nun in an office with a view of Chicago for consideration of a scholarship at DePaul University to study education. She asked me why I wanted to become a teacher. I remember struggling to come up with words and landing on something like, “I can’t remember not loving school.” She was the first one to mention social justice to me, and that I would be expected to give back by teaching in an urban community one day. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t Catholic. Commitment to the mission of helping others through this social justice lens in the classroom was what they were looking for. Could I do that?

I signed various papers indicating that I could and the most transformative phase of my journey to become a teacher began. We read Freire and hooks and Giroux and stepped into classrooms that looked nothing like those I had come from. When asked to write a paper on our personal philosophy of education in a senior class on historical foundations in education, I procrastinated. Things weren’t feeling settled in my path to become a teacher. I was uncomfortable about attempting to understand and reconcile differences as the leader in a classroom. I panicked. I could not take on this responsibility.

Instead of writing an essay drawing upon the great philosophers of education, their contemporaries, and my dawning connection to them all, I wrote that I clearly had to quit this path because I was confused about my role in the classroom. Dr. Haymes scrawled the dreaded “See Me” across the top. I approached his desk after the last class and he said that I obviously hadn’t completed the assignment according to his guidelines but that he’d hoped I would reconsider my decision. That classrooms needed doubt, uncertainty, and the absolute commitment to ongoing questioning that I had communicated in my paper. There was a small “A” near the last line of my writing.

I took my first position in a creaky hulk of a three-story building on the the Northwest side of the city. At one time, there were over a dozen different languages and backgrounds represented in my classroom. I muddled through. A pair of Fiskars grazed my temple one day when I continued to force a point about missed math homework on a student who lived in a group home. I remember his shocked look at my fear. He bolted from the classroom. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to follow them if they ran. My principal said to let him go.

He came back at some point as the days went on. We settled on some sort of truce and I struggled behind it all to make sense of what I was doing to him and his classmates within these structures.

I discovered the idea of classroom libraries and the possibilities that a wired classroom might bring. My students, so many of them new to this country, smiled when they could at my mistakes. We laughed more.

When it was time to say goodbye to that beautiful old building with its views of the distant skyline through the big windows and WPA murals, I wept. Where would I ever learn as much as I had there? The undocumented parents of students had just started to answer my phone calls and come see me at conferences. Small treasures were pressed into my hands. I had learned to abandon what didn’t work and listen carefully to what wasn’t being said.

I considered taking a break from this work. We downsized. Sold our home at the height of the real estate bubble and moved to a farmstead in Iowa. A rare position opened in the small rural district near our family’s Wisconsin farm. A neighbor asked if I might be interested. In the interview I had to answer a round of unending questions about managing student behavior if all other resources were unavailable. At the time, I didn’t question the ridiculousness of the question. I started to sweat and babble, exasperated. I finally blurted out the scissor story. The interview committee dropped their jaws. I was hired.

And thus began my education as a rural educator.

Somehow I’m not quite ready to write about the decade I spent there. It’s coming, of course. My work and relationships there are unfinished. I hope to tell you more about how they were the best teachers.

And of my beautiful year in the School District of Holmen. About the freedom and respect I’ve found to create true learning labs for my students. And how I finally found my niche.

It’s funny how it looks a lot like my first school on George Street in a sleepy little suburb so many miles and years away.

Connected to Libraries

Here at the Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association’s Spring Conference. Blogging while my dear library media specialist (and their kin) slumber away.  Ready for them to give me all kinds of hassle about it in a few hours. 

So I should say some things about them. (Mostly so they’ll feel really bad about giving me a hard time.)

Getting together at conferences is really special for educators. It’s often questioned by folks from both outside and inside the field as frivolous wastes of time, where teachers go, come back with all kinds of fresh ideas and then burn themselves and their co-workers out talking about them and attempting to awkwardly implement them in an attempt to “stay relevant.”

I’ve been that gal.

She quickly left the building, thankfully early in my career.

My adventure into the world of library media science in shifted the tide.

Our former librarian Kris Kreuzer brought a UWSSLEC WISE Scholarship Program flyer to a lunch meeting, with someone else in mind for it. That person didn’t eat lunch that day. Kris mentioned that she might be retiring in a few years, so the district would need another LMS, and it might be interesting to see what it was all about. “Plus,” she added, “you get a free laptop.”

I had recently been in conversation with someone who was saying that I “better get my Master’s or you’ll never move on the pay schedule and your retirement is going to be way lower than it should be.” (I’ve always loved that reason folks often cite in our field for pursuing more education. Loans bother me. I prefer to go to school when I have questions and interests calling me into missing great swaths of time with loved ones.)

I was pulled in a little closer when I read on the flyer about developing rural educators in Wisconsin to be 21st century leaders in their schools and communities. 

I loved my little rural middle school. It was challenging interesting work on a daily basis with students and families who taught me so much about living and growing up in a country setting.

I was already and advocate for the transformative use of technology in learning. I was provided with some very important training when I working in the Chicago Public Schools with the amazing teacher-admin-professor, Heather Smith Yutzy, with whom I had studied middle school teaching methods at DePaul University. Heather had approached me and my colleague Michael to attend a series of sessions about using the Internet to impact instruction. I think it ended up being about building webquests. It was 1999.

I had been introduced to methods to use technology not as a replacement tool for learning, but as an invitation to learn more and interact differently with the world. I was hooked.

Heather and others who supported my decisions to integrate technology into my middle school classrooms helped pave the way for my decision to apply for the scholarship.

So back to this group of connected educators with whom I’m attending this week’s conference:

We were an awkward group four years ago, brought together by a team of professors of library media science who had studied the gaps and needs in our state and worked tirelessly to apply for grant funding to slow the loss of transformative library spaces in Wisconsin. Dr. Eileen Schroeder and Dr. Anne Zarinnia, together with their consortium colleague leaders, were welcoming us to the field in the basement lab classroom one sunny weekend on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

They were sharing a map of Wisconsin with marks for each UWSSLEC WISE scholar around the state. We had already done some awkward getting-to-know-you interview activities. They began handing out technology, including an iPad for each of us that they had purchased with extra grant money. “Use it. Bring it into your classrooms. See what you can do with it.” We were having our Oprah moment in that dingy little lab, pinching ourselves that we had really been chosen for this scholarship out of hundreds of applicants.

And then they introduced us to Buffy.

“She’s from Georgia, and she has these little dogs. What do you call them? Dahx-hundz?” Dr. Zarinnia explained, her Welsh accent wrapping itself around the memory. “Our Skype connection may be troubled by all that barking. Just so you are aware. And that accent…”

Before we knew it, we were in conversation with one of the leading minds in what would soon become our passion and true calling in education: finding the power to create an “unquiet” and user-focused library media space in our schools. Of embracing multiple literacies. Of bringing democracy into the library space and turning the tide against old, warn models of librarianship.

Ms. Hamilton was phenomenal at engaging us by painting a picture of her work in Georgia to develop the library as a place of dialog over what was meaningful and important to its users. I remember her showing us photos of kids gaming in the morning with Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards, podcasting about their favorite books, blogging and Tweeting. Her fierce love of traditional literacy and books was an important piece of the puzzle but, she cautioned us, just one piece of what we need to value in our library spaces.

I remember asking Ms. Hamilton if this kind of transformative, student-centered space could coexist within the growing confines of the standardization movement; if testing was keeping up with the transformative style of twenty-first century librarianship that she was developing. What restrictions would these tests impose on her kind of work? 

Because I should say at this point that I was hooked on this direction for my career in education. 

A lifelong lover of libraries, but the very opposite of quiet, I felt I was meant to help carve out a space for my students like the one at Creekview High School in Georgia. I could not wait to get started.

Buffy was considerate of the question as she is with just about any question hurled her way, and the woman is a force of nature at fielding questions from anyone on the planet about the things she cares about: literacies, voices, transformative directions in learning.

She said that it was a good one to consider given the high-stakes piece of the puzzle. She did say that testing was perhaps trying to go in a different direction, and that she had hopes that assessments one day would truly reflect what her learners knew and could do outside of content recall. 

I was convinced.

My new WISE buddies and I started packing up after our first day. Lots of sighs of hope and promise and many ‘thank you’s’ for the tech were exchanged with the professors. 

But we were beginning a journey together that holds fast to this day. 

Our teacher hearts were changing and have changed, but I come to a conference in the middle of our state to reconnect in person with the people I have been online with every single day since Buffy sparked our learning four years ago. These are some of the most fantastic library media-minded folks in our state. Look for their work. Visit their libraries. Find them on Twitter. Even those among the group (ahem!) who are not at the helm of transformative library media centers in Wisconsin are interested in this work and carrying the torch for the kinds of learning that Buffy shared with us.

Laura Effinger

Ellie Rumney

Polly LaMontagne

Susan Queiser

Tiffany Braunel

Mike Slowinski

Brandon Berrey

Julie Weideman

Jessica Schmitz

Lorisa Harvey

Leslie Hermann

Abbie Thill

Joe Diefenthaler

Laura Wipperman

Janet Sager

Lisa Sorlie

Arlette Leyva

Stephanie Kilger-Karker

Trisha Sabel

Introducing my PLN to the next gen

So this has been a good week.

We had a fully functioning kitchen lab working to produce a healthy version of the iconic Shamrock Shake.

We had a team of students designing a gaming arcade that will ultimately fundraise for an organization set up by Rob Johnson, the father of our student, Aaron Johnson, who lost a valiant battle with leukemia this winter.

The Sphero obstacle course plans continue to move forward, especially after a visit from our friend Nick Torgerson, who also helped lead lessons on precision and accuracy, and design thinking with Sphero. He also hosted an impromptu guidance session about college and savings, and the pride he has for MIT, and he shared just a bit about his robotics work on that amazing cheetah.

Parents and families had a chance to meet the Sphero interactive toy, and parent-teacher conferences were all the more interesting because of it!

In addition, I attended a fantastic SAMR/Google Apps training seminar led by the imcomparable Naomi Harm.

Throw in a professional development/Personal Learning Community conversation conducted entirely via text messages, lunch with two fantastic colleagues, and a chance to spend some social time with a fabulous bunch of educators, and things really rounded out nicely.

One of the coolest small-mighty moments of the week for a Twitter fanatic like myself was my conversation with our mathematics volunteer, Jacob Rice. As we worked with students on Friday, our conversation turned to the power of connected environments for learning as an educator. I explained that Twitter was fundamental to my practice.

Jacob gave me that skeptical smile that most people offer when I begin to Twitter evangelize. They usually follow up with, “I’m not really into that whole Twitter thing,” or something similar to this. And I can honestly say that I was not “into” the “whole social media thing” a few short years ago.

He went on to explain how it is used by his peers, and I acknowledged that it can be a space fraught with all kinds of awful extremes and examples of human behavior that we try to avoid in our real world environments.

But you know I didn’t leave it there. (WISE Scholar friends, I’m talking to you.)

I shared how my Twitter Personal Learning Network (PLN) has been a lifeline for me in this work. How it has rescued me from feeling that the fundamentals of my practice, conversation and connection–often with some of the most forward-thinking and wonderful minds in our world–can be lost in the day to day rhythms of schoolosis.

I told him to get into the conversation about mathematics education because he has a voice in it and there are so many great ones in the space there to engage with. Now.

Good things come in threes (or whatever) so I should also say that I shared the Twitter Sermon with Nick Torgerson and with a friend of Jacob’s, Charles Labuzzetta, to whom I was introduced to when I ran into his fantastic mother Carol at the bookstore Saturday evening. Carol was one of the first parents I met in my new district, and I have been so grateful for her welcome. Charles is working on something very interesting with DNA and computer programming at Iowa State University. We hope to connect him with my students to learn more.

All three young educators are now listening and conversing in the Twittersphere. My students will have the opportunity to learn even more from these leaders in from our community. I can’t wait to read their words.

You should definitely come join us there.

And, for the record, all three gentlemen are YOUNGER than I am. Yes. That’s right. I introduced a social media tool for education, learning, and exceptional conversation to members of the NEXT GENERATION. Feeling kind of good about that. But I promise that’s the last time I’ll mention it. 😉

Follow Nick @teknickMIT

Follow Jacob @Jacob_R_Rice

Follow Charles @clabuzze

Coming soon: A heart-swelling phone conversation with a college-bound former student who ventured with me six long years ago in our middle school classroom into Google Apps for Educators.

See you at #WEMTA14 and in the Twittersphere, friends. I’ll be back on the road to my learning labs bright and early Wednesday morning. And I’ll see parents at Evergreen on Thursday night. Better catch some sleep while I can.

Connections and Conversations Continue

Once you’re open to these fundamentals, they happen everywhere.

The rest of last week’s story is reflected upon here to share what can go on in the course of an educator’s week if those roots are tended. From a language arts group to a discussion about the need for change in mathematics education; from a lunch that boosted flagging spirits to a phone call from someone who went above and beyond to tell her students: “You matter,” these are small stories worth reading. (I’ll work on brevity as I go. Promise.)

Student Voices: Nurturing Independence; Finding Sparks

I arrived to my desk and some very strongly worded letters from students on my keyboard. Right where I would notice them. First thing.

They are precious to me in all their frustration, for they remind me that I ask for letters. My students know that they can and should file complaints. What they don’t always know is that a letter is a start of a conversation. If I receive one, we will be sitting down and talking about what prompted it and what needs to change. We’ll dig for the feelings behind the action and give them names.

Each of these letters are full page (front and back!) articulations of frustration over the direction our learning lab has taken. These carefully-crafted complaints had been ripped confidently from notebooks, their ragged urgent edges begging to be picked up and poured over.

The communication of frustration over directions becomes clear to me: it’s about what takes place in our learning lab on days when I’m at the other school. I should explain that I have a position that is split between two buildings on an every-other-day rotation. I’ve never taught in this way. I was always grounded in one classroom, so this orbit is new…and is it ever fraught with landmines! (I have a new appreciation for mobile teachers that I always admired but thought I could never be. I have so much to learn!)

The letters explained that on days I am not present no one seems to know what to do. They can’t get started. They end up bickering and getting shushed or corrected in the lab or library because they can’t agree on what to do. One person tries to lead and that doesn’t work. Another person branches off into his own thing, and that frustrates them, too. Tensions, confusions and chaos have reached a breaking point. The urgency of the increased size and slant of the script scrawling out on the pages tells me so.

At first the letters frustrated me right back.

I had no sooner set down my three heavy tote bags full of tech, files, shoes, a tangle of power cords, resources, and a thrown-together lunch, than I was being criticized for not teaching my students better when I’m not present.

Then I started to smile and laugh. These dear letters were a sign that my fourth graders were ready for a push. They needed me to teach them how to go forth independently as learners. To remind them that the best lesson or project plan is within each and every one of them, not me.

So I wiped down our conversation table with lemon-fresh clean, pulled the chairs around its steady circumference and awaited their arrival.

They trickled in, inspiration notebooks in hand. They glanced nervously at each other because I was at the table and seemed to be smiling.

“Thank you so much for your letters,” I said. They finally made eye contact. “Now lets figure out what needs fixing. Today is a conversation day, and you will leave with your own plan. But it starts with a spark. I can’t give you that spark, but I can help you find it.”

I pulled out a large piece of paper and our bucket o’ things to write and make with, and asked them to graffiti the differences between active and passive learners. (photo to come–I love their work!).

As we doodled and talked, grateful to have the creative element to take away some of the awkwardness of honestly sharing what bothered us, we faced our frustrations and replaced them with intention. I looked each child squarely in the eyes and asked them to tell me what they wanted to learn, discover, read, design, and do. Each one was able to find the spark and say it:

Two students are going to read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Another student is going to map out a design for his next game in Scratch.

Someone is going to research ant colonies and how they might inform robotics like the TERMES robots we’d been studying who were inspired by termites . (Who, by the way, can build unsupervised. Oh, how much like a robot-built structure or termite hill in Africa, the connections continue to mount!)

And then there’s the student who is going to brainstorm how she can help younger learners with a project that comes into play later in this post.

I ended the session with the charge to never wait for direction from me but find it in themselves.

Small thing. Mighty.

I can’t wait to see them after more independent learning days. Surely their work will be something I want to share with you.

More small things practiced through authentic assessment and an obstacle course

Sharky “walking” around our learning lab space. He’s created in an augmented reality app. The iPad is really “looking” at Sphero!

I also found some ‘small things connections’ later this week in a fantastic little scenario with one of my small groups of third graders. We’ve been really fortunate to have some great technology this year that has impacted our learning, thanks to a collaboration with our tech director, a little interactive toy orb called Sphero, and the room to create a dynamic classroom space provided by my principals. My students have been engaging with Sphero in amazing ways, from simply learning how to control him (hand-eye coordination makes a comeback!), to programming it to do specific things and playing interactive and collaborative games. An example of this is a work in progress with these third graders, as they are designing an obstacle course for Spheros so that every child in our school can play and experiment with Sphero. 

Seriously.

They want to share what brings them joy by coaching others to experience it in an interactive environment that they are building. It doesn’t get much better than that! I can’t wait to share more about that project, very much the antithesis of schoolosis.

Anyway, the small thing in this big project is that I challenged the team to interact as if our classroom was a workplace and they had some high stakes ahead. (Note: NEVER high stakes testing with me. More common: high stakes play. It’s much better for learning. Go watch children do it every day and join them.)

So we’re role-playing as engineers, writers, co-workers. And our principal?

She’s the CEO of this company, and they have to pitch their idea to her.

So they met in a little group on Wednesday to put the polishing touches on their presentation for Mrs. Stephens. They took turns at my desk workstation to type their letter outlining the proposal. The continued to sketch and dialog about their obstacle course. I joined in when they needed me and pulled away otherwise so they could do their serious work.

And then they started getting anxious.

“Wait. Is this like we’re going to get fired if she doesn’t like this? I’m nervous.”

“Did I sign my name correctly in cursive?”

I calmed them down by reminding them to believe in their project, share why they are so excited about it, and be sure ask for her ideas, too. I told them to keep playing. “Aren’t you having fun?”

The twinkle in their smiling eyes said it all.

I couldn’t have been more proud of this team of nine year olds. Mrs. Stephens was awesome in her new CEO role. She invited them to her circle table in her office and engaged them from the start, listening to their ideas, offering suggestions and asking great questions. (Mrs. Stephens knows how to play!)

“Does this mean we’re approved?” one asked, expectation in her voice.

“Yes. I can’t wait to see how this turns out,” Mrs. Stephens replied. “I know it will be something we all can be proud of.”

That little five-minute face to face interaction was such a highlight of this week.

The power of conversation and connection through play cannot be shared enough. The serious quality of the work was never developed externally by my direction. It happened through welcoming play in our learning space.

Talking Mathematics and Education with Diverse Perspectives

But wait. This week of conversations and connections continues. There’s the face to face planning that took place when a recent MIT graduate and graduate of the district in which I work came back to volunteer and help us enrich our understanding of the design process, biomimicry and engineering. Thank you, Nick. I can’t wait to watch the students listen as you explain the robot cheetah feet design and fabrication. It was neat to realize that in trying to help my students understand what’s going on in the world of engineering and design, Nick needed some time to “think backwards,” just as I do constantly in planning instructional design for my students. Engineers and educators…maybe not as different as we thought?

After Nick and I had a chance to brainstorm what we might do to engage the learners, we had the chance to have a deeper conversation about mathematics and education with our district math coordinator (and Nick’s former teacher!), and also a current high school senior who is one of the most impressive hopes for the future of education that I may have ever met. (Oh, and this same student donates his time and expertise regularly to work with my learners and me to deepen and stretch our learning in math, because “he wants to be there.” How lucky are we? Thank you, Jacob.)

This conversation did more to remind me that we are on the right path in deepening engagement in content vs. pushing through to “pass” kids through silos of content, all the while leaving them with foggy notions of how their learning will be integrated and connected in the future. But only after schooling them is finished. We can’t wait for this.

I look forward to the chance to continue this conversation with all three of them and perhaps share more of it here. The geography of our conversation in that short time touched on the pros and cons of the Common Core, the “Math Wars,” what Stanford and Google represent, how math is best understood through deeper questioning and conversations vs. sheets of problems, and how our young learners need folks like these two gentlemen to come back and share what they’re doing out there in the world.

But wait. There’s more to this wild week of connected conversations!

Wants versus Needs: A Breakthrough

So there are those moments of meta-reflection on our field, and then the conversation I had with another team of fourth graders who were arguing over the sovereignty of the Spheros and with whom I asked for an important conversation that led to insights from them like,

“I guess it’s about wants vs. needs, Ms. H.”

“If we spend all our time stacking up arguments over who should have which Sphero, then we don’t get to use them to learn. We waste time.”

And, “Well, I guess next time, I just want to let someone else have the one I want. It doesn’t really matter. We should get rolling instead. Did you like that joke?”

How could I not love this work?

Community in the Math Classroom: Is it okay to let someone stay confused?

Cut to fifth grade mathematics where we’re working to build a true mathematics community; where students have agreed that we haven’t really “finished” working on a problem until every single person in the room has a better understanding of it. So our important conversation was about how “staying confused” isn’t where we’re going to leave each other, and we can all give each other space to come to understandings at our own paces and with multiple forms of explanations. I love that these mathletes talked about needing quiet calculation time sometimes and room to think, but if they had that, they could then share. This group’s job is to have the same conversation from today with the students who were absent. I told them that I would observe it and see if they carried the spirit of our important talk forward. If our community will shift and grow. They finished the time by diving into ColorGrab together, inviting each other to play, smiling, looking at one another with true acceptance. I couldn’t make them leave for lunch.

Community. Conversations.

Power up lunch

And how better to end the week (or so I thought) than to be welcomed into a lunch group conversation with colleagues about life, work, our frustrations, and hopes. We all realized that we’d been “isolation” eating at our desks and that we need to get together to talk, boost, support and be what we need for each other. I am so proud to work with these wonderful people. They have made the challenge of joining a new workplace joy-filled and full of contagious laughter. I can’t wait for our next lunch.

Making Meaningful Matter

But then, just when I thought the connections couldn’t get any better, my dear friend Rhonda made the last call of my week that highlighted the sense of connection that bloomed over the last five days.

“I just came from our first-ever ‘girls’ night in’,” she nearly shouted, joy in her voice, our connection strained by the hills and vales. “It was about empowerment. About finding their voices. All eight of them and me, Robin. It was perfect.”

I could just hear how this event was recharging her. She planned and carried it out under the radar of course, like she always does. On a Friday evening after another long week. All with her own resources in our beloved little rural school. An educator making a difference. The very opposite of schoolosis.

My plea

Please look more closely at the work inside our schools. Not more critically. Take a moment away from that. You can always come back and be critical. But for now, please just look closely. There are small things going on in educators’ worlds that are the amongst the most important things human beings need. Connection. Small steps. Real topics. People sitting together and talking things over. Smiles of recognition, and the remembrance that we are not alone in all this.

The “Grit” Narrative, “Grit” Research, and Codes that Blind

Dr. Thomas posts are an important read every morning.

dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

The answer to Grant Lichtman’s Does “Grit” Need Deeper Discussion? appears to be an unequivocal yes—based on the exchange in the blog post comments, the Twitter conversations, and comments at my blogs on “grit.”

Those conversations have been illuminating for me; therefore, I want here to address several excellent ideas that have been generated.

First, I want to make a distinction that I think I have failed to make so far: We need to distinguish between the “grit” narrative and “grit” research. My concerns and most of my writing rejecting “grit” are addressing the “grit” narrative—one that is embedded in and co-opted by the larger “no excuses” ideology.

The “grit” narrative is central to work by Paul Tough as well as a wide range of media coverage of education, education reform, and specifically “no excuses” charter schools such as KIPP. In other words, the “grit” narrative is how we talk…

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This was one of those magical weeks…

where meaningful connections made all the difference.

A week in the life of this work begins and ends behind the wheel.

I’m spending enough hours on the road now to have true reflection time built into my day for the first time in fifteen years of this work. I like to think I’ve always been critically reflective about my teaching and learning, but I now have a commute to and from work that really demands it.

I’m fortunate enough to have a meditative drive, crawling out of our Driftless valley home every morning around dawn and following the contours of the Mississippi River north to meaningful and purposeful work in a district that has been welcoming and warm, albeit seventy minutes away. Evenings pull me back to this place, one of my favorite spots in all this grand universe: our family’s small farmstead. It’s the place I’ve known from my first weeks of life as home.

My current position wasn’t where I began my teaching career; actually, far from it. But it’s where I’ve landed most recently, and I’m so very, very happy to be here, despite missing the children, colleagues, families and work from my former positions nearly every single day.

I should say a bit about my start in teaching too now. That there were those very tentative first steps I took as an educator in a beautiful-old giant of a brick school on the northwest side of Chicago: a school and a city that continue to hold big pieces of my heart. Those first years of work as a teacher still call out to me regularly in remembered fragments on these drives. More now than ever, it has been to remember what it was to discover true love of this really, really difficult work. I miss those faces and voices. They informed me so much about education and the danger of schooling at the launch of my career, a fragile time for any educator.

I was almost one of the ones couldn’t stay in this field.

Fifteen years in, I’m so grateful for that strong launch. I hope to share about that part of my journey here and there.

But back to the present and the magic of connection.

I love my social media connections for they have sustained me and fueled my practice as an educator more than I can really explain (thank you, dear sweet Ellie and brother Eric for pushing me in all those moons ago!). However, this week gave me face to face conversations and three very important phone calls that fixed a bunch of things in my focus. Cemented them, really.

I’ll share them here at Diagnosis Schoolosis in a series of posts that may allow you to get to know the two fundamentals of my practice in education: connection and conversation. I’m firm in my stance on these fundamentals. I’ve determined that they are the most essential pieces to surviving and thriving in learning environments.

And I know that these two things are what every human being needs and deserves.

Connection and Conversation, Part 1

A friend called me on my way to work Monday morning. She and I have collaborated for the last decade on the work and questions of meeting social and emotional learning needs of young learners within the context of schools and classrooms. She’s one of the reasons I still work as an educator, and our regular commuter conversations are partially responsible for this blog.

It’s really all in the small.

Some Pig. A very small and fragile one. Tended by my father’s capable hands.

 

Jenny works with students who have developed extreme schoolosis. She is a kid whisperer human whisperer. Jenny’s keen observational sense and absolute ability to hold fast to calm compassion in the midst of human crisis, suffering, and the kind of learning that could never be assessed on a standardized test is something you should know about. I’ll tell more about her and hope she’ll come here to share sometimes as we go. She’s one of my most important teachers.

Jenny’s phone call Monday was grounding on a week that didn’t feel very promising. It was a day where temperatures leaned toward spring, but I knew they wouldn’t hold there, for deep cold and bad driving conditions were forecasted again. I was hard at work pushing away the unsettled feeling that comes with seasonal change as I loaded up for the long days and week ahead.  And it was a Monday that I wanted to avoid for various other niggling reasons. All resources were spent on moving mindfully through the discomfort and staying centered. (Hah. I never seem to quite pull that off!)

One connection with Jenny set it all in perspective.

She shared some smalltalk tidbits from her recent staff development training. From there, the day changed. We began to talk about how the biggest moments of learning are actually those that most folks will never see. She spoke about a tiny shift in the behavior of one of her students, one that came after months and months of relationship-building, modeling, scaffolding and practicing. How it led to a peace in the classroom where she caught the students problem-solving in a simple conversation rather than duking it out through one-upmanship and bickering.

“But no one saw it,” she said. “No one really could or would.”

And she’s right. The kind of teaching and assessment Jenny does on a minute-by-minute basis in her work with young humans is so nuanced that to an untrained eye, absolutely nothing takes place. Some even dare to imply to her face that nothing is taking place. I’ve been in those phone conversations with her too, where judgment without knowing the speciality of her art and practice pokes into her faith and belief in her work and threatens it.

Every time I hear her begin one of those conversations (and they usually begin with, “Robin, people just don’t get this work!”), I brace myself, for I know that something beautiful and precious will be shared, and I will need to reflect it back to her as powerfully as I might so she can remember that it was real. And I know that people truly rarely want to see what she so amazingly can see.

So Jenny shared a small growth in one of her schoolosis-sufferers, and I knew that I could soldier on through this uncomfortable Monday and make something good of it by looking for the small things, tending them, and remembering that they count more than numbers on a page and data sets, late reports, misplaced power cords.