Archive | April, 2009

Scott Carpenter and the Future of Education

Posted on April 27, 2009 by in Leadership

Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter speaks to students and community members in the Centennial School District's Special Experience Room.

Mer­cury Astro­naut Scott Car­pen­ter speaks to stu­dents and com­mu­nity mem­bers in the Cen­ten­nial School District’s Spe­cial Expe­ri­ence Room.

I had the amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity to hear Mer­cury Astro­naut Scott Car­pen­ter speak, albeit briefly, at my school on Sat­ur­day. He was attend­ing the 40th Anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion of the Spe­cial Expe­ri­ence Room, a plan­e­tar­ium and mul­ti­me­dia space in the McDon­ald Ele­men­tary School in Warmin­ster, PA.

Fifty years ago this month, Car­pen­ter and six other men were selected to become the first Amer­i­cans in space as part of the Mer­cury pro­gram. Part of Carpenter’s mes­sage to the gath­ered group was to encour­age stu­dents to stay in school, and that through hard work and deter­mi­na­tion they could accom­plish great things. Some might con­sider the mes­sage to be cliche and no longer rel­e­vant to today’s world. But I think it’s impor­tant to remem­ber the value and neces­sity of dili­gence and effort.

Car­pen­ter com­mented about how we have accom­plished so much that was unimag­in­able fifty years ago, and he expressed hope for a bright future, con­fi­dent that we will be able to do things in 2059 that we can’t begin to con­ceive today.

The for­mer astro­naut, who insisted that he was today just “Scott” and that the title of Com­man­der Car­pen­ter had long since been left behind, pointed out that the eight-​​year-​​olds sit­ting in the audience—of which my youngest son was one—were exactly the right age to become the first per­son to stand on Mars.

Edu­ca­tors must more than occa­sion­ally remind them­selves that the stu­dents sit­ting in front of them today really are the lead­ers, inven­tors, cre­ators, explor­ers, design­ers, teach­ers, builders, and dis­cov­er­ers of a world that doesn’t even exist yet, except in the imag­i­na­tions of those same chil­dren. The only way those imag­in­ings can pos­si­bly become real­ity is if we nur­ture them. Edu­ca­tion isn’t about knowl­edge any more. In fact, it isn’t even about giv­ing stu­dents tools and the skills to use them, because we don’t have the tools they will need to cre­ate that future. We must teach them how to lead, invent, cre­ate, explore, design, teach, build, and dis­cover for themselves.

What an awe­some and ter­ri­fy­ing respon­si­bil­ity we’ve been given. Just as the Mer­cury astro­nauts launched Amer­ica and the world into space and opened new fron­tiers, new dis­cov­er­ies, and new ways of liv­ing, so we have the power to launch our chil­dren into their future. I pray we do so thoughtfully.

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How Many Reps?

Posted on April 16, 2009 by in Differentiation

The weight stack from a Cable machine.
Image via Wikipedia

In strength train­ing, so the com­mon wis­dom goes, if you want to tone the mus­cles you have, use mod­er­ate weight and many rep­e­ti­tions of the same exer­cise. If, on the other hand, you want to bulk up and build more mus­cle, higher weight and few reps will do the trick. I’m no exer­cise phys­i­ol­o­gist, so I can’t tell you whether this is actu­ally true, but I’ve been think­ing lately about how the prin­ci­ple should be applied to learn­ing new skills in school.

Think about the typ­i­cal class­room math les­son: intro­duce a skill, model it, walk the class through an exam­ple or two, then a set of eight or ten prob­lems to prac­tice the skill. This is not arbi­trary or sim­ply tra­di­tional. For the aver­age stu­dent, it takes at least five to seven cor­rect rep­e­ti­tions of a new skill before it begins to become auto­matic. Most stu­dents in your class­room, then, need to be guided through this process each time a skill is taught. And we need to use the same process each time a new vari­a­tion in the skill is added. (Think sub­tract­ing with­out regroup­ing, then with regroup­ing, then regroup­ing across zeroes, for example.)

There are stu­dents in your class for whom this approach is inad­e­quate, how­ever. Some will need more prac­tice before they begin to mas­ter the skill—these are the ones who you pull aside for extra help from time to time. We often for­get, though, that there are stu­dents in the class who not only got it the first time they tried it, they are already extrap­o­lat­ing the vari­a­tions you’re going to teach for the next three days.

So what hap­pens to these kids in a typ­i­cal les­son? They start the class­work before they’re instructed, they fin­ish their home­work before it’s assigned, and they start to day­dream because they’ve already fin­ished the thought that you haven’t fin­ished explain­ing yet. And typ­i­cally we treat this as mis­be­hav­ior: stu­dents who aren’t on task, aren’t fol­low­ing direc­tions, and are dis­rupt­ing the flow of the les­son and the learn­ing of the stu­dents around them.

The real­ity, though, is that these kids are ready to move on and do some­thing new, and being asked to con­tin­u­ally repeat over and over what they already under­stand is actu­ally dis­re­spect­ful. Here are two strate­gies that can help you address these kids’ needs with­out undue stress and extra work on your part:

Stay With Me or Go Free

A col­league of mine recently explained this strat­egy she uses with her class. After intro­duc­ing a skill to the class, she will pause before start­ing the prac­tice ses­sion and tell the kids, “You can stay with me, or go free.” Stu­dents who feel con­fi­dent with the con­cept may choose to use the time for other work. Of course, she has already estab­lished rou­tines in the class­room which are con­ducive to this, such as wait-​​time fold­ers and exten­sion menus with chal­leng­ing activ­i­ties for the stu­dents who can han­dle them.

Most Difficult First

This strat­egy, described by Susan Wine­bren­ner in her book, Teach­ing Gifted Kids in the Reg­u­lar Class­room, is appro­pri­ate for sit­u­a­tions where you need more account­abil­ity for the stu­dents. When plan­ning an assign­ment, iden­tify the four or five most dif­fi­cult prob­lems in the set. When it is time for inde­pen­dent prac­tice, any stu­dents who feel ready may opt to do the most dif­fi­cult ones first. If they are all cor­rect, the stu­dents are excused from the rest of that assign­ment and also are given a reduced home­work set.

When you see stu­dents who are off task, work­ing ahead, or seem to be day­dream­ing, con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that they may already get what you’re work­ing on. What are some other things you do for stu­dents who are able to fin­ish quickly and move ahead? Share your ideas in the comments.

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Hallways: The Original PLN

Posted on April 15, 2009 by in Networking

The Tall Tale Parade Passes By
Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr

Social net­work­ing, if you believe half of what you read, is a 21st-​​century, Web 2.0 phe­nom­e­non that has exploded onto our cul­ture through our youth.

Any­one that was around before the Web was even a 1.0 knows this is hog­wash. Social net­work­ing has been around as long as there have been humans. The older I get, the more I under­stand that every­thing comes down to rela­tion­ships. My suc­cess as a teacher, in par­tic­u­lar, depends far more on the rela­tion­ships I develop than it does on what I know or my ped­a­gog­i­cal skills. There are many tech­nol­ogy tools that I’m learn­ing to use to strengthen and grow those relationships.

But the more I think about social net­work­ing, the more I real­ize that we’ve had them in our schools for­ever. They’re called hall­ways. Class­rooms may be where instruc­tion takes place, but they are essen­tially pri­vate islands, iso­lated from the school com­mu­nity. The hall­ways are the pub­lic face of the school, and they are where the con­nec­tions hap­pen. I’ve observed a few things tak­ing place in hall­ways over the last few weeks that I’m con­vinced make schools oper­ate well and make the learn­ing that takes place in the class­rooms more effective.

Class­room “Home Page”

As I walk through a school, I can some­times get a glimpse of what is going on inside a class­room through the door. More often, though, I only know about the class through their pub­lic face: the hall­way space just out­side. Some teach­ers use this inter­nal build­ing “home page” to the fullest, giv­ing us ongo­ing, devel­op­ing pic­tures of what the stu­dents are learn­ing and their growth over the year. In my expe­ri­ence, these class­rooms and these teach­ers are the ones gen­er­at­ing the most learning.

Cour­tesy and Respect

Within a class­room, the stu­dents and teacher nego­ti­ate over the course of time an under­stand­ing of how things will work. Often, the rules–stated and unstated–can vary widely from one room to another. I visit four­teen dif­fer­ent class­rooms besides my own every week, and I see so many dif­fer­ent sets of pro­ce­dures and expec­ta­tions for behav­ior it is some­times dif­fi­cult to keep track of what is appro­pri­ate in each.

But the hall­way is a dif­fer­ent world. Out there, every­one in the build­ing, as well as the larger com­mu­nity, have to func­tion with more broadly accepted rules of cour­tesy and respect. It is in the hall­ways of a school that many young chil­dren first learn the con­cepts of pass­ing on the right and stop­ping at inter­sec­tions. They need to learn how to travel as a group, and when to allow oth­ers to have the right of way; how to be aware of oth­ers’ per­sonal space and respect­ing the learn­ing going on in rooms as you pass; wait­ing your turn, nav­i­gat­ing new spaces, and han­dling respon­si­bil­ity. (Do you remem­ber the excite­ment and anx­i­ety you felt the first time you were cho­sen to be the messenger?)

Col­lab­o­ra­tion and Planning

We teach in an inclu­sive envi­ron­ment today which requires more than pos­si­bly ever before that teach­ers work together and share respon­si­bil­i­ties within class­rooms. The real­ity of school sched­ules means that a sig­nif­i­cant amount of that plan­ning hap­pens on the fly. It is com­mon for me to run into a col­league as I pass by in the hall and we will stop to have an impromptu meet­ing to dis­cuss a stu­dent or plan an upcom­ing les­son together. The hall­way is some­times the only oppor­tu­nity I get dur­ing a day to see and inter­act with my fel­low teachers.

Com­mu­nity Infrastructure

Within a school com­prised of indi­vid­ual class­rooms and grade lev­els, the hall­ways pro­vide a means to develop a larger, build­ing com­mu­nity. Office bul­letin boards, par­ent spaces, the school store, the main lobby, and hall­ways out­side com­mon areas like the gym, cafe­te­ria, and audi­to­rium, are all oppor­tu­ni­ties for devel­op­ing the unique cli­mate and char­ac­ter that defines a school. The hall­ways in a school set the tone, and can tell you a great deal about how tightly con­nected the net­work there is. I can often sense within a few min­utes of walk­ing into a school what the cli­mate is like and how peo­ple will inter­act there.

Some of the best schools turn hall­ways into addi­tional learn­ing spaces, too, by set­ting up areas for stu­dents to work and putting up activ­i­ties and infor­ma­tion. One school I visit, for exam­ple, has a “Word of the Week” posted out­side the library. Stu­dents and vis­i­tors walk­ing by can’t help but see the dis­play and think about the intrigu­ing vocab­u­lary word as they walk by every day.

(As an aside, I was struck as I was search­ing for a pho­to­graph to accom­pany this post that pic­ture after pic­ture showed vacant, ster­ile hall­ways with lit­tle or no dec­o­ra­tion, and in most cases lit­tle or no color at all. It makes me won­der if the instruc­tion going on in those build­ings is sim­i­larly vacant and sterile.)

Hall­ways are what con­nect the dis­parate pieces of a school into a com­mu­nity. Hall­ways are one of the ways that real rela­tion­ships can occur in a school, and the mem­bers of the com­mu­nity need to rec­og­nize their func­tions and importance–as well as their limitations–in order to make the most of them. We can think of hall­ways as sim­ply a way to get to the rest room or the office. Or they can become a place where we join together with our col­leagues to build a net­work that can deal with the chal­lenges con­fronting us in our efforts to make learn­ing happen.

Hm. Sounds just like the “new” 21st-​​century, Web 2.0 social networks.

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