The circuit breaker has been challenging for us all. We have had to be resilient beyond what we thought possible.
I’m reminded of our school motto by Kurt Hahn- Plus Est En Vous- there is more in you than you think.
We have done a remarkable job as a community building systems that have kept us learning, connected and engaged. We have all been working hard for six weeks, and for all we know, we have six more to go. There is a time and place to hunker down and get things done, and I have no doubt you will step up to the challenge when asked. While there are benefits to establishing routines, sometimes these new habits create a blanket of malaise that drapes over us, making it challenging to stay motivated.
During times like these, we need a spark. Inspiration. We need Pink Mohawks (Or metaphorical equivalents. Please DO NOT try this at home) !
And to do my part, I have kept my promise to Grade Six and enacted operation Pink Mohawk. I hope you have already seen the video at the end of this week’s announcements, but I wanted to write a few words to add context and explain its meaning
This hair-do is meant to remind us all that schools are places to challenge and excite us, regardless of whether we are on campus or not. Operation Pink Mohawk is a reminder that adults come in a range of shapes and sizes. The way we look, the way we dress, the hair on our heads can all be indications of who we are or what we believe, and I believe in the levity that comes from not taking myself too seriously. I respect the power of silly authenticity and vulnerability. Adulthood doesn’t have to be a mono-chromatic path to oblivion. We are not all mind-numb zombies, always stressed and chasing bills. We are filled with creativity and passion too. There is not only one way a teacher should look or act; our diversity is what makes us great role models.
Every school needs a Pink Mohawk to remind it not to take itself too seriously. To remind it that life is fun, exciting and maybe a little wild, and that it’s not too scary to stand up and take a risk.
What are a few things we will remember from this time?
Who are the people that brought us joy?
How will you lift our community?
Sometimes middle school teachers are jealous of high school teachers. There I said it.
Interacting with 11th and 12th graders after a day of engaging with 8th graders can be jarring. High school kids make eye contact. They seem genuinely excited to be talking to you. They are articulate and exude an air of reliability.
We MS teachers talk to our upper school counterparts in awe as they tell us about the efficiency with which HS Global Concern groups get things done. We marvel at the sophistication and depth with which the older students unpack a text or express themselves through art.
We ask ourselves- what must it be like to teach kids who don’t harbor so much disdain? What must it be like to work with kids who have made it to the other side of teenage cynicism? Don’t get me wrong. I know our kids are not all sloth-like-monsters. I am also not naive enough to believe that HS kids are angels.
All I am saying is that being a MS teacher in April of G8 can feel like a thankless job. Are these kids learning anything? Do they respect us? Are the hours we spend with them having any effect at all?
The answer is yes.
I was reminded yesterday that while middle school teachers might not always see the results of our work, we must remember that we are part, some would say the most important part, of the journey a child makes from K-12. The payoff might sometimes be delayed. For years!
Yesterday, a former student that I taught in grade 8 came to my classroom during class to give me a card and a small gift. I remembered her in MS, the same way I see many of our kids: Serious. Stoic. Unexpressive. When I joked. She usually didn’t laugh. She worked hard and was a natural writer, but it was hard to know what impact I was having on her at the time.
While MS teachers wish we could see the fruits of labor while we are teaching, while we wish that we could receive gratitude from the kids that we currently teach, while we wish we could have tangible evidence of the impact we have on the kids in front of us- sometimes we have to wait four years before the students feel the need to share their gratitude.
But let me tell you this, it is worth it.
Having said that, it does feel nice not to have to wait four years. Can I ask that you speak to your child in the coming weeks to see which of their teachers has had a significant impact on them in MS? Or do some reflection yourself, who have you seen really inspire and motivate your child? It would be great to let them know.
A small note. A short email form you or your child will go a long way. MS teachers appreciate the notes from students they taught years ago, but the notes from the students they teach now are priceless.
If I were to write this post how I feel it needs to be written– long, comprehensive, timely and engaging, then it would never be written. So instead I am going to try a quicker, choppier, more get it down approach. Going to try some Guerrilla Blogging . (I might have just made that term up, because when I looked it up there were little to no references.) But what’s up with this lengthy, rambling, irrelevant intro. This is not Guerrilla Blogging! Get to it.
What You Need To Know:
I haven’t blogged professionally since September when I Backed Away From The Edge, and consequently upset a few people in the process. But I am back now. I am revamped, energized and seeing things with a fresh outlook.
I’ve just returned from Japan, where I facilitated a two day EARCOS workshop with Rebekah Madrid called Beyond Blogging. We were primarily looking at why shared online school spaces like class blogs and portfolios seem to fall flat. We decided that we knew, or at least thought we knew, what these spaces could do or have done for adult learners, but we were flummoxed, like many of you, as to why K-12 spaces looked more like glorified teacher created worksheets, than dynamic authentic student created spaces designed for identity exploration, content creation and community building.
Big questions I know.
Everyone I spoke to before I left said, “Looking forward to seeing what you find!” And upon my return? “So what did you find out?”
Here goes:
I started by talking with some students who I knew were active online. Two successful Youtubers from our school. I chatted with them for two forty-five minute sessions and this is what they said.
I was struck particularly by the key words which I highlighted in the video.
These words seem pretty straightforward. I think most teachers would like to think that they attempt to incorporate at least a few of these ideas into their daily teaching. But listening to the girls, it is pretty clear that they do not see the work they are doing in school at all similar to the work they do on their own.
This discrepancy, to me, seemed like the crux of our issue. The dichotomy between school generated curriculum and what kids w0uld choose to do if given a chance appears to be wider than many of us think.
You can take a look at the agenda from the workshop and explore some of the work the participants did here, but I wanted to take some time in this post to try and consolidate some of my own thinking. I thought about the Do’s and Don’ts we generated, and wondered what next. Here are some raw thoughts fresh from the weekend:
1. Choice matters– No one likes to be told what to do, and we like it less when we are told when or how to do it. Kids are no different. True, we are all working with a written curriculum which needs to be taught– a set of skills, concepts and understandings that we have pre-determined are vital for learning, but kids will always see this as “work.” It will be rare to find kids enthusiastically reflecting or sharing this type of teacher assigned work. When kids create or share online on their own accord, they seem to share ideas, skills and understandings which they choose an care about. No amount of forced reflection will make the work we assign authentic. Blogs will not magically make students care about what you want them to care about.
2. An Audience Matters– Kids are not worried about being exposed to the world, but they are aware of who might be watching, and they want feedback from this audience. Perhaps, the idea that every kids has the same method of sharing (a blog or portfolio) with one massive audience (The world their school or class) is false. It is important that students create their own spaces and connect to smaller interactive audiences that give them feedback, instead of sharing everything with everyone and never connecting in a meaningful way with anyone. The tools learners use to create these spaces and communities must be chosen by the user.
3. Diversity of Tools- Kids need to create their own unique audiences and choose the methods and tools with which they connect to this community. Perhaps the readers in your class connect to other readers using Goodreads, but the actors choose Youtube as a place to connect with other actors, and the writers use a blog designed for Harry Potter fans. We cannot expect every member of our school community to use one platform to share their learning.
4. Being Open Requires Trust– Students have to know that their teachers are not looking for reasons to doubt or question student choices. They have to feel free to be themselves even if their identities do not always illustrate the perfect student. Life online requires risk taking, exploration, and the awareness that sometimes we all make mistakes. If we want students to be authentic we must allow them the time and space to find out for themselves what that means–without our own systemic institutional expectations.
5. Time– True student interests often exists beyond the curriculum. Kids need time to explore questions and solve problems of their own choosing. We need to make time for students to think, play and learn beyond our curricula. Things like the MYP Personal Project or Google 20% time could be key areas to allow for real blogging and online sharing. Allow students the time to learn, create and share the things that are important to them. Beyond assessment, school and work might be where students can share their learning. Take a look at this great pitch by Madeline Cox:
The problem, as I see it, with student blogging is not technological but curricular and institutional. We are expecting students to be excited about content they never chose to be excited about, and then we are disappointed when they are not super keen to write about it or share it with people who are not really their friends and who also lack interest in said content.
Share everything with everyone will never work. The better model is share what you love with those who care and can help you.
What does this type of sharing and learning look like in our schools? Most teachers do not work in student-centered, problem-based, inquiry model, project based institutions. No matter what we tell ourselves most of us are responsible to a curriculum and all the restriction it includes: explicit instruction, assessment, and reporting.
I think we need to think about what the learning looks like beyond our curriculum, so that it makes room for looser, freer, student choice. I have been hard on curricula in this post. I do not mean to say that students do not need the skills, concepts and understanding we teach them, but perhaps they do not see the value in sharing their school work in the place that we tell them to.
In a perfect world, we would see evidence of the curriculum in these more independent projects, and like Sidney said, the teacher can build the learning around what has already been done by the student. I am not sure what this model looks like in different schools or different subjects, so I can only share examples of what we are doing in our MS English department at UWCSEA East.
We are using the Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Workshop. Coupled with our benchmarks, we have a pretty solid set of skills we are responsible to teach. I think these skills are important and I think teaching them explicitly is valuable. I also feel that assessing these skills, offering feedback and reporting on student progress is crucial for their growth as readers and writers. But I do not expect them to share their reflections of their learning on a blog. Who would want to read that?
I do see the value, however, of offering them choice in content. The beauty of the workshop model is that it offers absolute choice of what they write about and what they read. The units do focus on certain text types and this can prove problematic for everything I have mentioned in this post, so what we have done is intersperse independent writing units in between the more prescribed units of study.
For our last unit, students were given the choice to write about any topic or issue in any style or text type they found relevant. They wrote a range of pieces from cookbooks, to Rubic’s Cube tutorials, poems, songs and short stories. The next step is to coach these kids how to create communities around the content they create. Instead of publishing their assigned article on a blog, they need to learn how they might create a space to share their independent work, in hopes of finding other chefs or musicians.
As adults, we build communities around the content we create to express our passions and foster our learning. Why then do we not allow students the time and space to do the same? It’s not that blogging is dead or that we need to find out what lays beyond. Schools as we know them are dying and we need to look beyond them.
This what I am thinking so far. What do you think? Share some thoughts and let’s see if we can’t figure this out together.
Been a while huh? You still there? How did you end up here after so long? Is RSS still a thing? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t read a blog post in almost six months. Have you? Did you follow the Twitter trail here? Are other people still blogging? Are you? Did I miss anything?
I am not even sure who you are, and to be honest, these days I am having a hard time knowing who I am, and what I am doing here. Blogging. Writing. Sharing. It has been so long since I did any of those things that I feel I have lost what it was I wanted to say when I started. Have I turned my back on whatever audience or community I spent so much time and energy cultivating? Do you care? Does it matter?
Yeah, I am and have been having a bit of an existential crisis since the end of the school year last year.
What have I been doing you might ask? I have been spending my time reading every Young Adult book I can get my hands on. I’ve been falling in love with #TCRWP (Reading and Writing Workshop), to the point that I even have grade eight kids writing in notebooks. Pen and paper old school. Pages and pages of it. And it feels great. I am hand writing charts on flip chart paper for goodness sake. And to be honest, I feel I am doing some of my best teaching in years.
What else? I spend some of my energy on the plants in my classroom. I’ve also been playing open mics in the hope that I will be able to sing a full set of songs without tabs and lyrics by Christmas.
Not sure how or why I fell into this new territory. There was no conscious choice to turn my back on ……What do I even call it? What exactly have I turned my back on? Is there anything at all to be named? My PLN? Blogging, Ed Tech? These labels seem so simplistic. Have I turned my back at all?
My thoughts have drifted I suppose and my priorities have shifted, but what really happened is that I have grown bored of my own shtick. Digital stories, sharing, sharing, sharing and networks– round and round left me dizzy, till I just had to get off the ride. I have forced myself to name what I value and why? In short, I know that I still value open networks and community learning. I still value expression and stories and the magic of the web. But what that looks like in my classrooms these days? Your guess is as good as mine.
Things have been feeling stale for me for a while. After a decade of being on the cutting edge, I need a break. Maybe, for the time being I need other people to be the innovators. I need some time to reassess what I value. What felt new and transformative when I started, feels stale and unimaginative.
This re-evaluation reminds me of the value of having people on campus who sustain the momentum when some of us lose it. Every school needs people on the edge, so that when the rest of us need to move back from it, they can push us back where we need to be. I’m talking to you Digital Literacy Coaches and Tech Facilitators. Thank you for the work you do, to keep the rest of us on our toes. So that when we hit a rut, like the one I have described, you can rejuvenate us and remind us of what we value that we may have forgotten.
Which brings me to Learning 2.014. Feels like I have gone full circle in the last decade. I feel like the doe-eyed n00b again this year. I am very much looking forward to seeing what everyone is excited about this year. I have no role to play at this conference other than open-minded learner. I am looking forward to having energizing conversations. I am hoping to creep back to the cutting edge, or maybe share the view from the way back.
Today, as my grade 7 students were working in small groups, I heard someone say,”Stop being such a homo. That is so lame and gay.”
I walked over very calmly, sat down and said:
Can we have a very quick but serious conversation? I heard you just say, “Stopping being such a homo. That is so lame and gay.” I just wanted you to know that I would prefer that we didn’t use that kind of language in our classroom. I don’t think it is very kind to use words like Homo or Gay or even Retard in a derogatory way, do you know what derogatory means? It means to use it in a negative way. To use those words in a way to be put someone down. I don’t think it is okay to use words like Homo or Gay or Retard to put people down. There are most likely people in our class who might be homosexual or know people who are homosexual and if we use it as a put down, then they feel badly about themselves and that doesn’t seem fair. I know from experience because many of my friends who are homosexual have told me that language is powerful and the words we choose affect people in ways we cannot always see. Does that make sense? So please do not use the word Homo or Gay or Retard as a put down in our class again. OK? Thanks.
