What happens in Las Vegas comes back to school!

Next week five of my Lower School Colleagues will travel to Las Vegas for the National Conference on Singapore Math Strategies. In responding to advice on how to track spending and budget for meals, I jokingly ended my email with a directive to ignore the Las Vegas advertising campaign that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. After all, I want this investment in our teachers to come back to serve our students.

Faculty at Westtown School benefit from several different programs to promote summer professional growth. We are sending three teachers to Ghana to work with and learn from the teachers at our sister school at Heritage Academy. One teacher has a grant to visit Alaska and develop a new relationship with a school there. Another teacher will spend a month in Italy deepening her understanding of the Renaissance. While she is there she will be corresponding with her students from last year, all of whom did reports related to the Italian Renaissance. For these students, their teacher will be bringing their interest in a topic to life in a a personal way. We have sent our Diversity Director and 11th grade English teacher to Eastern Europe to better understand the Cold War and how its vestiges continue to impact this region. Her students this upcoming year will directly benefit when they read How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed and other stories and poems from Eastern Europe.

Along with school funded travel many faculty are attending conferences. Along with the trip to Las Vegas teachers as Westtown will attend the Exeter Math Conference, ISTE, conferences on counseling, Admissions Boot Camps, and others. More targeted than travel, these conferences, scheduled as they are in the summer, allow teachers time to prepare for the experience, focus more completely on the conference while there and most importantly, provide time after the conference for teachers to digest and integrate what they have learned into their own practice. While conferences during the school year are excellent, upon return the immediate demands of our students often prevent time for the reflection necessary to truly draw on the new learning to inform our teaching.

We also provide curriculum development grants. These funds support the creation of new courses or significant redesign of current courses or units within courses. These grants are targeted towards supporting strategic initiatives. Priority is given to grants which are collaborative in nature. Often in writing the reports about their work, teachers reflect on the professional learning they experience as they take the time to think deeply about the work they have undertaken.

In all half of our faculty will be involved in the programs described above. And what of the other half? What is the expectation for teachers in the summer months? Many of them will spend significant time on their own reading, revamping, and planning for their classes next year. But for a few reading for pleasure will be the focus. Can a teacher in this century take the summer off? Disconnect for two entire months? The folks I work with most closely on professional development are discussing what we as professionals should be doing in our two months of time away from our students. What is expected of us as professionals and what is beyond the expectation and deserving of compensation or other recognition. (Certainly, I am a big believer in disconnecting. I try and spend at least two weeks each summer someplace where wifi and my cell phone are at best unreliable). Turning our minds to things other than curriculum, grades, or students, can be incredibly generative and beneficial to us in our professional lives. And yet, we want our students to read over the summer, to do some math to keep their abilities sharp, speak their second or third language to maintain their fluency. What do we need to do to sustain our growth through the summer months?

I occasionally write for Powerful Learning Experience. Please read my latest blog post there.

Student Creativity: the Importance of License and Limits

The Risk of Creation

I love vacations, for time apart--what Henri Nouwen might call renewal in solitude. I have read new books by favorite authors Louise Erdich and Barbara Kingsolver and discovered a writer I will read more of, Nicola Griffith. This is also a time for cleaning house - reclaiming my space-- and visiting with friends. Throughout this time two questions have been percolating in the back of my brain --What is excellent teaching (and can you measure it) and how do we foster creativity in our students? I will let the teacher question season some more before I pursue it here. However, the second question has taken an unexpected turn today. This morning I read a short piece by Janet Scott in Daily Reading from Quaker Writings Ancient and Modern. She writes that "As we act in obedience to the Light Within, we may become mediators through whom God's love is known. . . it means that we join ourselves to the risk of creation, to the authentic human being."

This phrase "risk of creation" has stuck with me all day, as I watched the snow (on March 25th!),  graded late work, folded laundry, read Griffith's Slow River and cooked for my family. What is so risky about creation? Is creation the same as creativity? As I visited with my daughter, home from her music rehearsal,  I found myself thinking about an interview I recalled in which Ravi Shankar, the late sitarist, talked about his long years of learning to master the traditional sitar technique and traditional sitar music before he ever attempted to create something new. His years of practice, memorization, study, and imitation had been necessary first. I recall a similar story about Izak Perlman traveling in China and listening to a young student play with great technical accuracy a challenging violin piece then Perlman played the same piece and the two were as different as night and day as he bought a life time of experience to creating something new from the score-- the difference between being accurate and authentic. How much mastery of craft (obedience) is necessary for creativity?

By this time in the year, I am actively encouraging my students to push through the boundaries of what they think I want them to know, to pursuing what they want to learn. But how do they share the new meaning and understanding they are gaining for themselves if they are still learning how to replicate and manipulate the forms and medium we use for communication -- essays, class discussions, on-line forum, blogs, debates, movies. Shouldn't it be enough for tenth graders to master skills and forms (and learn some history) and build a foundation for creation when they are older? I have respected colleagues who believe that high school must remain the place for skill and content mastery while college is the place for experimentation and individualized pursuits. I suspect Shankar's teacher would agree.

Teenagers are risk takers, its inherent in their unformed brains, so why not have them take risks within their learning? Why not encourage them to makes leaps from knowing one thing to conjecturing about another. Why not reward risk in the name of creativity. I have always looked at history as a means of teaching a set of skills. Why not create something new within the limits of the forms needing mastery? In recent years, I have come to look on history as a means of moving students from knowing to doing. I don't have an answer for the question I posed myself above except that I keep asking my students to think new and original thoughts and to adhere to the limits of the formal essay or the public blog or the round table discussion.  And sometimes out of this complexity they do venture something new and exciting. Perhaps obedience is about practice and over time practiced creativity leads to a courageous willingness to risk creation.

Focused Skiing

I have just returned from a wonderfully exhausting and renewing three days of skiing with my family.  For me, the beauty of down hill skiing is that it requires a high degree of focus. To not focus is to risk getting hurt. The past few days, every time my mind has wandered to something at work, I have found it very easy to push that thought aside and refocus on my body hurtling down the mountain on two skis. I am only an average intermediate skier with a healthy interest in NOT falling.

While sipping hot chocolate slope side I was reminded of Thomas Kelly's call for leading an integrated internal life as the best means for simplifying our lives.  Somehow or another skiing feels for me a bit of a metaphor for this. Skiing is a dynamic activity that demands coordinating a whole host of activities beginning with deciding what to wear and then over the course of the day constantly checking equipment. There is a constant feed back loop from my feet to my legs and torso to my brain.  Are my hips and shoulders pointing down the mountain. Is my right foot cramping (and why never the left foot?)? How are the Charley horses in my thighs? In the physical world there are the slope conditions. Is there ice on the trail ahead,  moguls (I hate moguls), sharp turns, or precipices to avoid (cliffs make me queasy)? On top of this there are the other people on the mountain. Where is my family? Who is moving around me? Is it a child? A teenage boy or other young male who may or may not have had a second beer on the chair lift? How is the visibility--there are few things as blinding when your are heading down a slope as skiing through a line of blasting snow making machines! Are my toes cold? I find I go from comfortable to cold in a heartbeat and once my toes hurt, my skiing becomes less effective --hot chocolate is always the solution so where is the nearest lodge?

Meanwhile, another part of my brain is reveling in the pleasure of being outdoors, enjoying the quiet and the natural world. The mid-westerner in me delights in the cold, the frosty trees, and icy creeks as I go whooshing past.  My spirit is focused and finds it natural to rest in gratitude in the present with my Creator. Though I have described all of these as separate and distinct thoughts, in truth, on the slopes this is all one singular state of being as integrated and natural as breathing. Now as I reflect on my skiing and because I am an educator, I am left considering how to lead my students to this place of simplifying their complex, dynamic external lives through focusing and integrating their internal life?

The Children Are Watching

This morning I woke to snow and fog. By lunch time, the snow was largely gone and the temperature had risen into the high 40s! All of a sudden every bicycler in the tri-state area was cruising down the road below my house. My teenage daughter said it made her wish for spring! She went for a four mile hike with a friend and two Bernese Mountain Dogs at Ridley Creek State Park. I went for a more sedate walk in the neighborhood. While I was out I noticed a little boy, probably three or four years old, pushing his bubble mower around the yard. He was happily mowing the bit of snow that remained on the north side of his home. He reminded me of my own son, now 23, who loved his bubble mower. He thought nothing of working over an acre of our yard as he helped his father "cut" the lawn. The boy I watched today wasn't making bubbles but he was fascinated by the way he created patterns in the wet grass. As I watched he stopped mowing and started to head in, then he stopped, came back for his mower and put it into the garage, next to his parent's lawn mower ! I would like to think he has watched his parents cut the lawn and then put their machine away. He might have left his own toy outside, but he knew that wasn't the way to finish the job.

How often we forget that our children, our students are watching. At our house, we have a rule that cell phones are not allowed at the table for any meal or in the living room when we are visiting, relaxing or playing games. We don't even answer the house phone when it rings (this drives some of our extended family batty!) At Westtown School, our dining room is a place where mobile devices are not permitted. Instead, this is a space where the people present are the focus. Were the adults in the community to ignore this rule, pull out their phones to check appointments, texts, or emails our dining room would quickly become a place where nurturing relationships would be replaced by what Sherry Turkle calls seeking validation. We model for our students, electronic disconnection in favor of personal connection. Meals are about more than consuming calories!

In our classes our students are watching too. Are we comfortable with all of the technological changes constantly coming our way? More importantly, are we able to navigate these changes? In my most recent project, my students created films on the amendments to the US Constitution. Because we operate as a BYOD school, my students were using at least three different video editing programs. I only know the most basic features of the technical aspects of creating films. And yet just as I can help my daughter with Calculus -- a subject I have never taken. I always begin by asking her what she knows. She talks me through the problem and often arrives at a solution or a resource to help her find the solution--I am still able to help my students produce better films. For instance, one group showed me their film in draft form. I found it hard to hear two of their narrators over background music. I asked them to show me their editing program and then I asked them how to adjust sound levels. By walking me through what they knew, they were able to extrapolate to what they needed to do to create a more understandable film. I also consciously and publicly go out of my way to ask for help from colleagues in this and all of my students' projects. I want my students to see me asking for help, stepping out of the "expert" role into to "learner" role.

Unleashing Talent

I have always considered my Lower School Colleagues to be creative and intelligent educators. In a recent Lower School faculty meeting many teachers shared new and exciting examples of successful integration of technology into existing curricula. Successful because each example demonstrated enhanced learning by their students; integrated because each example showed technology supporting the learning rather than being a flashy add-on. Two years ago, this same faculty held technology at an arm’s length. Computers had been removed from primary rooms, Smartboards were nuisances taking up valuable white board space, and concerns for on-line safety trumped interests in the possibilities for connecting students to people and information beyond our school walls. So what changed?

During our summer vacation in 2011, our third grade teachers received professional development funds to attend the annual ISTE conference. Along with lots of wonderful and overwhelming information, they came back with one concrete idea for a shift in a current project. They decided to replace their students’ usual African Animal Project Posters with Glogster. As a part of the third grade’s term long exploration of African Culture, Geography, Fauna and Flora, each student researches an animal. Previously each student created a poster about their animal; in 2011-12 each student created a glog! (The added bonuses were greater longevity in projects' life span and trees saved!!)  That same year, the second grade teachers experimented with creating class blogs and asked to have the computers returned! Two other teachers provided leadership for using an on-line discussion tool to help collect information for writing student comments. From these first adopters the rest of the faculty was interested but not ready to make a huge leap in their own technology experiments.

Over the past summer, the Lower School gained a new principal committed to technology innovation, and a new librarian with a job description shaped to combine media literacy and technology skills. We also hired a three division, dedicated technology integrationist. The librarian and tech integrationist have created a wonderful tag team meeting with each Lower School teacher to explore current curricula and look for opportunities to create shifts. While the first adopters were able to make the leap from an ISTE presentation to implementations, others needed help to find the right place to use a new tool, explore a different information gathering means, extend learning using an ISTE Net, or adding a new creative dimension. This is the gentle lifting our new teachers provided. Having been supported and successful with a first adaptation, faculty find themselves looking for other intelligent places to shift learning.

Some of these shifts were on display in the aforementioned faculty meeting. Besides the third grade glogs, our fifth grade teachers have modified the final product of their Peacemaker Biography project from research papers to individual web pages using Weebly. Everyone involved from students, to teachers, to parents loved this new media for communicating learning. Research and writing still mattered but now the audience for student work was much broader than the single teacher reading the paper--classmates, parents and others were able to read and react with student work! Next year the plan is to teach students enough html to do their own website programming! Our science teacher showed us the Lego Robot students were learning to program. Finally, one of our art teachers showed us student created stop animation films using iPads and the clay figures each student created for their films. We ran out of faculty meeting before we had run out of examples of experiments and successes folks had brought to share.

Reflections on this online learning experiment

First, would I teach US History in this online format again??  YES
Second, did this consume too much of the time I would have otherwise spent reading for pleasure or sitting on my mother's dock starring off at the lake?? YES
So why, given how much I value summer for the time to read would I do this again?

The paradox in the above statement is emblematic of so much of teaching 10 students US History in an online course. There are real trade offs that have to be made.

Face to face versus virtual: I believe absolutely in the teacher student relationship that happens within a bricks and mortar classroom and the peer relationships that develop around those tables. The online experiences is different. You have to work with great intentionality to make it personal, to make it human. It helped that we began with two days in a real classroom. Assignments were created in such a way as to "force" conversations between peers in the discussion forum and the class wiki. And early projects were designed to be collaborations. Regular SKYPE check ins between myself and the students, even for just a five minute discussion of an assignment idea were a necessity. But the upside of this individualized approach to building class cohesion and student support is that the learning is individualized. Rather than spending time preparing for four classes a week, I prepared for one class and focused on individual student thinking and learning the rest of the time.

Time is an all too precious commodity in a 6.5 week summer school course: Over the course of 9 months, teachers feel pressed to cover all the content. 6.5 weeks raises that pressure at least five fold. I had to stay focused on the themes I wanted my students to have ingrained in their brains: the evolution of the meaning of freedom (and who it includes) over three hundred years, the development of a market economy, the rise of American imperialism/exceptionalism,  the Constitution as a living document with meaning for their lives, and the agency of ordinary citizens for creating change in their communities and nations. Over these themes, stood my own working assumption about history--that history is created by the actions of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary people). Within these themes, I had to let go of insisting every student learn every detail of the battles of the War of 1812 or the Civil War, the many treaties signed by the US over the course of the 19th century, or even all the places the CIA fomented rebellion during the Cold War. Did I make the right choices for my students? Should we have spent more time on Reconstruction or the Taft Presidency and how it compares to Roosevelt's or Wilson's (something I do when I teach US History over the course of the school year)? I have colleagues who believe this is the only chance many of our students will ever have to learn the details of our history. In 6.5 weeks, either the details come fast and furious -- in a blur-- or the focus is on the big picture with details helping to ground those themes in time and place.

Students still need to communicate: Thursday evening class was a rich experience (even when the technology wasn't perfect). The short class time worked because students had already been "talking" in the forum. The discussion forum worked because the students came to trust each other to read carefully and respond honestly-even when they didn't agree.

There is a place for this sort of learning within the continuum of bricks and mortar to large scale MOOCs. Done well, student's learn content and skills--skills they will encounter in their life. This sort of learning helps to break down that artificial wall between what you learn at school and the rest of your life. The students learned at a time they were ready and in a manner that served their very different learning needs.