Category Archives: habits of lifelong learners

The Revolution Continues: Edcamphome 2.0

Posted on by under 21st century learning, edcamp, Edtech, habits of lifelong learners, inspiration, resources for teachers

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Last July I attended the first Edcamphome , and today those same amazing organizers brought us back together along with some new folks for the second edcamphome. Armed with experience, Kelly, Shawn, David and Karl created an even richer experience for the participants who gathered to talk about everything from GAFE in the classroom to the Concept and Practice of Rebellion. The sessions were all published on youtube, and you should definitely check them out if you have the time (session 1 and session 2).

I’ve written before on the unconference format of edcamps and its virtues. Online edcamps like edcamphome or edcamp online take edcamp to a whole other level. Although there are obvious technical challenges to hosting synchronous google hangouts (challenges dealt with brilliantly  by our organizers), the ability to connect with teachers from across the nation and even the globe about shared concerns, challenges, and sources of inspiration is mindblowingly awesome. This edcamp experience was by far the most valuable one I have had to date mainly because I connected with teachers and began really vital conversations about questions that have long been on my mind. 

The session I was most excited to attend was one suggested by Peter Gow who posed a question that has been on my mind for as long as I’ve been an educator: What do independent and traditional public schools have to say to one another?”  Although the conversation only included independent school educators, we had a rich conversation about some of the challenges we face as connected independent school educators in terms of creating deeper connections both amongst ourselves and with our public school peers. Discussing the seeming dearth of independent school educators connected on twitter or attending events like Edcamp home with  Chris Thinnes, Chuck Maddox and Vicky Sedgwick was fantastic, and we began a conversation that I hope will continue via a new, yet to be determined hashtag and twitterchat.  We all left the session excited to meet up again and perhaps begin to bridge the divide both between independent school educators and public school educators, and address the gap that exists between connected independent school educators and those who aren’t yet. Talking with such passionate, experienced, indy school educators certainly made my day, and inspired me to get back to the work of this blog which I have been long absent from, and for which I am exceedingly grateful. 

The second session I attended was on the subject of rebellion, and although I did not have the chance to participate for the full session, I again left feeling inspired and energized by the fantastic educators who shared their time to talk about the role of rebellion in education. The greatest conclusion we came to when addressing the question, how do teachers become accepting of rebellion in the class was to pose rebellion as really just critical thinking in action. We want our classes to be places where students question and examine all sources, ideas, and assignments with a critical eye. Believing that education is the basis of informed citizenship, I left the chat thinking that actually what we meant by rebellion was really active participation. We want our students to actively participate in every aspect of our classes even if that means questioning our assignments or our ideas, and if we build a community that allows for this type of questioning then we have done a good part of our jobs. 

So again edcamphome was revolutionary. It was definitely a great way to wind up winter break.  I look forward to future edcamphome experiences and to maybe even using the experience as a platform to bring more independent school teachers into the fold. So again, we all want to change the world and edcamphome  has allowed us to find comrades with whom to take a few small steps in our own edurevolutions.  We are, afterall, always #bettertogether. 

For Further Reading: 

Peter Gow’s post on Edcamphome and the dialog we need

Markette Pierce on “Chillin’ with my edcamp Homies”

 

 

Podcasted: Podcasts for Professional Development and in the classroom

Posted on by under 21st century learning, amstuds, Edtech, habits of lifelong learners, podcasts, resources for teachers, social studies, web2.0, youtube

As a teacher and lifelong learner, I absolutely love podcasts. You can find limitless inspiration and terrific resources via the talks, videos, and conversations broadcast with teachers in mind. Rita Pierson’s Talk is one of my favorites and something I believe every teacher should watch. I subscribe to a bunch of really good ones including the ones at Teacher Cast and NPR Education and Ted Talks Education.

We also use podcasts in our American Studies Class as well for example: Studio 360’s American Icons episode on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and The History Guys episode on the War of 1812. Most of our students love the podcasts although some of them have stated that they would prefer a reading as they have a hard time concentrating for long stretches of time and are afraid they are missing key points. I am  a huge fan of audio books as with 4 children it is often the only way to satisfy my appetite for books and keep up with our crazy, busy life, so I don’t necessarily understand how hard listening or viewing at home  is for some of our kids.

I think one of the problems is that they are often listening on their phones while simultaneously being bombarded by texts,notifications, phone calls and who knows what else.  We try to circumvent distraction by giving our students listening guides  and viewing guides so they have a purpose. Learning to watch and listen with a purpose is a vital academic and life skill, and one sometimes I fear we are losing as we become more and more screen driven.  This year we  will be using VideoNot.es when our kids are assigned videos to watch like episodes of Eyes on the Prize during our Civil Rights Unit. VideoNot.es is an incredible tool that allows you to take real time notes on videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Udacity, and Khan Academy that are automatically synchronized with the video and saved directly into your google drive.  Here is a terrific tutorial on how to use Videonot.es

Again as with everything on the web the resources and available material is overwhelming. In addition to the links above here are a few other great indexes and resources if you are looking for great podcasts:

For great resources from the New York Times including podcasts visit the education blog.

Edudemic’s 10 Best Podcasts for Teachers

TeachThought’s 51 Education Podcasts for the 21st Century Teacher

Please be a teacher: A Response to Warnings and Resignation Letters

Posted on by under habits of lifelong learners, inspiration, teaching, teaching literature

The last couple of weeks have been rough in terms of the media coverage of the teaching profession. First there was Jerry Conti’s Resignation Letter and then Randy Turner’s A Warning to Young People: Don’t Become a Teacher. 

Each article paints a bleak picture of the teaching profession today and an even bleaker picture of the role of the humanities teacher in today’s education system. As Conti writes:

I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

First a disclaimer: I teach at an Independent School where we do not face near the number nor depth of challenges facing by my public school teaching peers.  All students of any tax bracket face struggles and ours are no different. But they come to school every day well-fed, confident of a safe home, and with the resources, technological and otherwise, to be able to focus on their studies. Furthermore, Independent School teachers have an immense amount of control over their curriculum including what content we teach and what kind of assessments we give. Standardized tests do not drive our curriculum although the SAT and AP tests are extremely important to our college admissions minded population. Certainly, we have been under a tremendous amount of pressure to adopt “21st Century” practices, but how we adopt them is not mandated by the state.

I know, mainly from my friends who do teach in public schools, my PLN on twitter, and the media that the past 10-15 years have posed tremendous challenges and that recent reform impulses  have frustrated and disheartened too many teachers. I cannot speak for their experience or to their frustration, and frankly it would be incredibly unjust and arrogant for me to even begin to try to address these concerns in this post. Instead, I am just going to outline the reasons why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, talented  young people interested in social justice should still go into teaching and why it is the most fulfilling, life affirming job anyone could choose.

I fell into teaching somewhat accidentally. Just having finished my masters in American Studies at UVA and considering law school, I was lucky to get a part time job teaching Upper School English in 2002. I was looking for a job, but what I found was my calling. And that is what teaching is, not a job or a profession, but a calling. I was lucky to find mine at an early age, and it has been, aside from my children and family, the true blessing of my life.

The sacred relationship between student and teacher based on the shared experience of learning is the main reason why despite all the negative press teaching is still one of the best and most rewarding jobs in the world. Where else could I get to spend all day talking about books, words, and ideas with students whose eyes are just opening to the possibility and importance of all of the above? What other job offers the opportunity to start over every year and a new chance to get “it” right? Where else does one spend all day being asked questions about everything from the mundane i.e. what is the assignment to the transcendent i.e. what makes a meaningful life? Every day is new and every year is new, a new chance to learn and to teach, a new opportunity to grow and develop strong, caring, intelligent, well-educated future citizens.

No one goes into teaching for the money or the accolades.  We teach to help young people realize that learning matters, that knowing your world is as important as impacting it, and that empathy is the most important of all human virtues. We teach to change the future and the present. Furthermore, we teach in America because we are patriots and as Thomas Jefferson famously stated “an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

“Democracy” as FDR argued,  “simply cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” This has not changed and nothing, not the Common Core, not the well intentioned if sometimes misinformed reform movement, or the emphasis on standardized testing in public schools will or can ever change the primacy of the role education in our country.

So to those who think that teaching is just too hard or that the system is just too irrevocably broken, I say this: The “profession” as Conti suggests may not be what we want it to be right now, but the calling-that’s timeless and no disfunction in the educational system will ever destroy it.   So please future teachers everywhere, for the sake of our country, our children, and our world, become teachers. Certainly, go in with your eyes wide open. Know that you’re facing huge challenges and that one of the biggest will be societies lack of respect for the excellent work you will do. But also know this, there is no more meaningful, albeit frustrating and challenging job you could have. You may never be able to change the world of education as much as you might want. You may find yourself hopelessly frustrated with the system, but I guarantee you will change lives for the better including your own.

Pass it on: On The Importance of Owning Knowledge in the Digital Age

Posted on by under 21st century learning, amstuds, habits of lifelong learners, humanities, inspiration, reading, teaching, teaching literature

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Let me start by saying, I am a fan of Tony Wagner. I follow him on twitter, and I read and enjoyed his The Global Achievement Gap. He is a wise man who makes many good observations about education, but continually I have balked at his theory that owning knowledge is increasingly less important in the digital age. Recently, in a op-ed for the New York Times. Thomas Friedman quoted him as saying:

“Because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know.

This sentiment is echoed throughout the modern dialog about education and exemplified in the new common core standards currently driving public school reform.  Consider this quote from The Innovation Unit:

Now that many mobile phones can access more information than is held in any library, the idea of school as the place you go to acquire knowledge is an anachronism.

Perhaps it is because I am at heart an English teacher or maybe it is just my own education, but to me the idea that we no longer need to own knowledge because we can always google the answer to any question  is depriving education and, for that matter educators and students, of soul. Of course developing 21st century skills is a vital and central part of education today, but the seeming acceptance that schools are not a place where students acquire knowledge both for its own sake and for their own edification as human beings is detrimental to the entire educational process and to our students.
Luckily, although my school is determined to educate students for the 21st century and impart 21st century skills, we have not moved away from the belief that the students do actually need to own knowledge. We are not forced simply to show children how to use the mountains of information at their finger tips. I am allowed and encouraged  to turn kids on to books, words, and histories that will inform their being and to hold them accountable for the knowledge we impart in our courses. While analysis is key and central, students are expected to leave our class knowing basic civics including the bill of rights, the separation of powers,  a few poems by heart, and the basic trajectory of all of American History. We hope they leave with more, but our goal  is to make them active, curious and engaged citizens.  To become engaged citizens, they must possess more than a device to access knowledge. They must own knowledge itself.

As Hector, the incredibly flawed yet idealistic old school teacher  from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys who believes in knowledge for its own sake, articulates:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

You can’t google that experience, and you can’t duplicate it by looking it up. You have to experience it, and you have to have teachers who help you acquire to knowledge to access that skill, that level of empathy. How can one truly know and love a poem if he/she can’t recall from memory two or three lines? How can you understand history if you don’t know some major dates and ideas without turning to wikipedia?

Another great moment in the play comes when one of the students expresses his hatred for poetry. Hector explains that what he is teaching these boys isn’t for any test. He tells them “to learn it now, know it now and you’ll understand it whenever” they need it. They are, according to Hector, “making their deathbeds.” It is because education is about so much more than test preparation and 21st century skills. It is about preparing for a life of meaning, and I do not think any student now matter how good their 21st century skills are can find that on a search engine.

So on this point, I have to respectfully disagree with Tony Wagner and his echoes. Students do need more than just schools that teach 21st century skills. They need schools to be places where they acquire knowledge. They need help “making their deathbeds” and preparing for a life of meaning.

Marking Up Texts: Our Methodology

Posted on by under amstuds, habits of lifelong learners, studentwriting, teaching

In our class, we regularly check our books and count book check grades when calculating our participation. We use the following 10 point scale:

  • 9-10  Significant Passages of the text are highlighted/underlined with key words circled and marginal notations are meaningful and consistent throughout the assignment.
  • 7-8 Significant passages are highlighted/underlined and some marginal notations are evident.
  • 6  Some underlining/highlighting is evident although it is inconsistent and there are few, if any, marginal notations.
  • 4-5  Student brought their book, but did not highlight or underline.
  • 0-3  Student did not bring a book.

We let students develop their own methods and are quite open to a variety of different styles. Some use highlighters, others different colored pens. Some keep notes in the front pages of their books, and some rely solely on the margins. Our guidelines are much less exacting than the method of my 11th Grade American Literature teacher and personal teaching hero Marie Stone, who would merely have us turn to a page and grade us simply on whether we had the correct passage marked, had written character names and key themes at the top, and taken notes in margins that met her criterion of what was important.

Yet like Stone, we require our students to consistently mark up their texts. We do this for a variety of reasons, and, in fact, using it as a way to hold our students accountable for the reading is perhaps the least important. We insist our students master this skill during their junior year  because it is the best mechanism we have for making them engaged and active readers.

Throughout my 10 years of teaching, I have found that there is a direct correlation between my best students and those who demonstrate active reading by annotating their texts. In fact, it is nearly always the case that our students overall grades almost exactly mimic their performance on book checks. Of course those students who consistently score well on book checks are the most diligent, but more importantly, they are the most engaged and have the best command of the material. It isn’t so much that they have an easier time recalling the text or finding salient passages to augment their points in our discussions or when writing papers, they do, but more importantly they demonstrate the critical thinking skills necessary to dig deeply beyond the surface of the text and make the broader connections necessary for success in our course and beyond. Through developing a method of annotating texts that works for them, they gain possession of the active reading skills that will serve them well as they continue the lifelong process of learning.

IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD: MARKING UP TEXTS

Posted on by under amstuds, habits of lifelong learners, humanities, teaching

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As a humanities teacher who regularly checks and grades my students’ texts based on how well they have marked them up, I was recently dismayed to read an article by Anna Murphy which appeared in Time Magazine seeming to denigrate the whole process of marking up a text.

 Ms. Murphy cited a comprehensive report released by the Association for Psychological Science, the authors, led by Kent State University professor John Dunlosky which argued that:

Highlighting and underlining led the authors’ list of ineffective learning strategies. Although they are common practices, studies show they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text….Nearly as bad is the practice of rereading, a common exercise that is much less effective than some of the better techniques you can use. …Highlighting, underlining, rereading and summarizing were all rated by the authors as being of “low utility.”

I am not sure how they were testing the “utility” of this skill, but it seems to me that they missed the proverbial boat. This article suggests that the study merely examined the relationship of certain reading skills including highlighting to test performance, and I would concur that as a study aid on its own highlighting/marking a text doesn’t fully prepare students for tests absent other study skills.

But marking up a text is far more than a mere study skill; it is an integral habit of lifelong learners. It is a way to engage with a text and learn to think critically. Furthermore, it is a means by which each student can keep track of his/her own thoughts and educational development. These markings provide a snapshot of what a student thought was important at a specific moment.

I think perhaps that what the study examined were students who merely highlighted and weren’t in fact engaging actively with the text. These students seem to have been using their highlighting merely to “draw attention to individual facts,” instead of using the margins to make connections both among different ideas and different texts. In short, it seems that perhaps the study examined students who really didn’t know how to mark up a text, but instead of critiquing the methodology they condemned the method itself.

Further Reading:

All Books are Coloring Books

How to Mark a Book