To tell the truth, I’m not in this to use the latest tools or make history as a cutting edge technology user.  I’m in it to remind people of the importance of their own voice.  I want students to know that, contrary to what the system has taught them thus far, they have within themselves  stories that need telling and creations that need sharing and knowledge that needs pooling so it can contribute to progress.  I see them every day pushing the boundaries of what we know about relationships and community on their phones.   I see them editing Wikipedia.  I see them making and sharing videos on YouTube.  People like Jim are trying to say: Hey, we could do this classroom thing so differently!  But I want to say “Who needs a classroom?”

Then I watched a video created in part by Pearson Education and heard internationally renowned educators saying the kinds of things I hoped to hear educators say: the old model doesn’t work in the new millenium. Take a look yourself, and see what you think.

Coming soon, I will be working with a group of professors to develop some new pre-orientation programs aimed at helping students with the intellectual transition from high school to college. As someone who teaches first year students, I am painfully aware that K-12 has not prepared them well for what I will be asking them to do: think independently, analyze, pursue an idea with passion, collaborate with others in their learning community, make mistakes and get messy! The plan of these “pre-o’s” is to give students a taste of what learning can be like once they are free of SOL’s and standardized testing. We’ll be using the materials from AAC&U’s LEAP project to do this, which ties success in the 21st century economy to the methods and golas of liberal arts education. It is a really exciting project. Stay tuned for results!

Students loved this job even though they found it challenging. It really forced them to grapple with ideas and synthesize them in new ways. I highly recommend this strategy. It can make even Marx a lot of fun : )

back to grading…

We can and must CREATE a climate for creativity and collaboration. Here are the major elements the enviroment must provide:

Challenge and Involvement: meaningfulness vs. disengagement (all members part of goal setting…getting a variety of thinking styles in the group, also get all stakeholders)
Freedom: Autonomy vs. Strict Guidelines
Idea Time: slack vs. tightness (great ideas and breakthroughs happen in the bath, on the bus and in bed…) (composting time)
Idea Support (resources vs. Automatic “No”)
Low Degree of Conflict: tension is bad; climate of acceptance is good
Lots of Discussion: Participative vs. Authoritarion (**relaxed readiness–not jockeying, listening for a break to make a point. GOOD Listening skills are KEY)
Humor and Play (spontaneity vs. gravity) be glad to do things differently, experiment, play; not eyes on the prize with judgement and trying only to be “perfect”

Try this activity: assumption reversal
-write down the assumptions of your organization (eg: students need guidance from teachers) and reverse them (teachers need guidance from students OR students WANT guidance from teachers OR students do not need guidance from teachers)

another activity to try:
generate a problem/opportunity statement
–be broad, brief, beneficial
consider the outcomes: say this: “wouldn’t it be nice if…” write those statements on cards and read them out loud to the group. Discuss and brainstorm, look for themes, etc.

A couple of important points:

Negative statments discourage people from thinking of new solutions (”we don’t have the money,” etc.) ROADBLOCK!
instead: spend time imagining, defining the problem in different ways, BEFORE you jump to solution
A healthy environment will encourage “Risk Taking” and tolerance for uncertainty.

if everyone is coming to work every day scared to make a mistake, fearful, nothing good or innovative happens.

Here is a book she mentioned that I think might be helpful to us:
“Ideas are Free”

Cool session. who knew??

That is a picture of the nest outside my window at home. I have become a bit obssessed with the bird family, watching the momma bird spread her wings to keep the rain off the eggs and snuggling down on them when it gets cold. But she abandons her job at the slightest movement, which is why I have such a good shot of those gorgeous blue eggs. Eggs don’t hatch without that warming, so I try not to disturb her too often.

I’m in Chicago right now at a conference for librarians. Olivia nd I are talking about a project we did with my students in which they had to use research blogs. (See our presentation wiki.) It seems to me that the old style “research logs” were somewhat helpful for students, but there wasn’t much opportunity for feedback. When they did get feedback, it was way past the time when the questions and doubts were happening. In a way, student researchers were on their own, incubating their thoughts on their own as best they could.

It seems so clear to me that blogs are the perfect solution. With Olivia and I monitoring their writing in their blogs, we got to jump in close to the time that students needed some advice or support. Sometimes it was enough just to tell them that what they thought was “failure” in their search was really just part of the messy process of research. Students also read each others’ blogs. We had this whole community of support! Those of us who blog know how great that kind of community can be. But I do think it is a little different from the blogging that I do; the students put their links out there along with their doubts, confusion and half formed thoughts. I used to do more “processing” like that in my blog (this the blog name) but I notice that I am not taking as many risks as I used to. Do we get self-conscious, wanting to write only well-formed ideas? The problem with that is that a great opportunity is lost: if I am not exposing my doubts and half formed ideas, I lose the chance to have others help, inspire, spark…

I dunno…just thinking out loud here…

So I am doing my part.

What am I passionate about teaching my students? Well, everything I know about learning I learned from my own children, so my picture for the quilt will let me tell a bit about that story:

My kids, like all kids, loved big, empty boxes. They would make me cut holes in them for doors and windows, and they insisted on painting them. They also loved costumes and pretending. It all came together one day with a large discarded window treatment and a case of the stomach flu. With both parents laid out on the couch, the boys were entertaining themselves (read:making a big mess) when they had an epiphany: Mom and Dad need us to make them feel better! They started to bring together the things they loved, making a kind of puppet theater in which they were both costumed actors and puppeteers. They told goofy, disjointed stories that had us holding our sore tummies and laughing. I could see on their faces how proud they were of themselves–they had created something effective and teh laughter they heard was all the “grade” they needed!

What I learned from that day has shaped the way I teach. I try to remind myself that the most amazing thing happens when I give people a reason to do something new, and then get out of the way. What I am passionate about teaching my students is that they have it in themselves to DO things, to LEARN things and to CREATE things. But what makes me a teacher is that I know that telling them this message is not the same thing as teaching them about this! Here is how it works out in my classroom: students read or write outside of classtime. Then, during class time, they work in small groups to come up with something new related to what they have read and written (a question, an answer, a picture, etc.). Then the small groups offer what they have come up with to the whole class. I try to facilitate a “learning community” because I think we learn best when we can work together to solve problems. It is important to me that they get back in touch with their “inner learner” who did this learning thing so naturally as a child, and connect the new stuff to themselves and to real life. I want them to know that they have the power to do this already–inside themselves.
And the interesting twist is that they seem to do this best when there is a real life product involved, when they feel that someone needs them and that what they create matters. I have written before about what I think of as my most successful class ever. I will never, never forget how I felt when I saw what had been a rag-tag bunch of flip-flop clad students with a “messy” project show up in suits and dresses to give the most amazing ,active presentation I have seen, demonstrating a deep understanding of the composition theory and pedagogy. Really–that presentation was better than most I have seen at professional conferences, and because they presented to real folks from Richmond and Henrico County, there are now middle and high school writing centers in operation in our area! Their work was real, it mattered, and I got out of the way and let them do the whole project themselves, with my only role being: designing the project, gathering an audience, and trying not to act too nervous while I paced around their group meetings like a sheep dog circling an unruly herd.

So now I will tag some educators who I would like to have add to the quilt.

Gardner
Tom
Steve
Reverend Jim
Jeff

* Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
* Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
* Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
* Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Let me put it another way: am I a paraprofessional or a professional? Do I support faculty, or am I leading change? In my early years, I worked as a paralegal, so perhaps that colors my view of this, but if I am support staff, is it really my job to lead change? Paralegals aren’t out there teaching lawyers new things about the law. But they are professionals in their own right, with their own duties and responsibilities toward the clients. They bill their hours just as lawyers do, just at a lower rate. In a typical teaching center (if there is such a thing) we are not teaching the classes ourselves, we are only supporting people who do teach the classes. I suppose this analogy places students in the role of “clients” which may or may not be accurate, but go with me here. In this scenario, why are we supporting faculty? Ultimately to inprove the educational experiences of the students at our institutions.
I think that any time we end up in the position of “instructing faculty” we end up in trouble. Yes, I know that they didn’t learn about education theory in grad school and that what we know can help them. Yes, I know that technology opens amazing new doors of opportunity for classes and students, and that we know about technology tools that most faculty haven’t heard of. But I am not sure conversations in which we develop a “holier than thou” attitude will help us in any way with the folks who have to go in the classroom on Monday and work with the people who get to say anything they want on student evaluations that are read by department chairs and deans and ultimately play a part in raises and tenure.

Am I saying “we” shouldn’t exist. Not at all. I think the answer lies in doing development in a different way. I think we can help faculty to know what we know and get them to be our change agent partners only by entering into community with them. I think we create opportunities for faculty to find supportive, stimulating community that they may not be able to find anywhere else. These communities that function as safe places to ask hard questions can change a whole campus culture. No matter how small the project, some of the same hard questions come up. For example, in a group of faculty members all using podcasting in their classes for the first time, the question will inevitable come up: how do you grade these things? It is not too productive for me to hand them a rubric at that point. What IS productive is to get the faculty talking about what grades mean, what their students expect, what the goals of the project are, etc. Anything they come up with will work better than some generic rubric, and the added magic of sharing ideas about teaching and learning has happened. I think that magic is the really important part. And so I think that, instead of a “paraprofessional,” I am a community building expert.

To read more about community, technology and risk taking, read on over to Jeff’s post.

And, just for fun, to see a really interesting way of viewing grading and the way community can build a shared grading system, read Barbara’s post.