Mar 23

SLA Summer Teaching Institute

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On behalf of the SLA community, I am proud to share an email about the SLA Summer Teaching Institute we sent out this week:

We are excited to invite you to join us for SLA’s Summer Teaching Institute in partnership with Drexel University!

This professional development opportunity is designed for teachers from all disciplines and backgrounds. Participants will immerse themselves in SLA-style teaching and learning as we focus on inquiry-driven, project-based, technology-enriched learning. The week-long institute will be from July 15th-19th, 2013. Participants will receive three graduate credits from Drexel University.

For more information and to register, click here.

Sincerely,

Chris Lehmann (SLA Principal)
Joshua Block (SLA humanities teacher)
Tim Best (SLA science teacher)

Seven years ago, SLA opened with the idea that our school could be both a powerful learning institute for students and for educators in Philadelphia and beyond. With the success of EduCon, and the work many SLA teachers do both locally in Philadelphia and with schools all over the world, this represents an important next step for us as a learning institution. We are grateful to Drexel University for their partnership, and I know that the hard work Josh and Tim (and others) are doing will mean that this will be an incredible week of learning for all involved.

Join us.

 

Mar 23

Ask Better Questions

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This week, the Providence Student Union (http://www.providencestudentunion.org/about-psu/) published the results of an experiment they conducted. They gave fifty successful adults a math test that was based on the sample New England Common Assessment Program. Rhode Island uses the NECAP as a high-stakes test where students must achieve at least “Partially Proficient” to graduate high school.

Who can argue with making sure that students are at least “Partially Proficient” in math?

Except, apparently you don’t need to be considered partially proficient to be successful, as the results show:

The results were: Four of the 50 adults got a score that would have been “proficient with distinction,”  seven would have scored “proficient,” nine would have scored “partially proficient,” and 30 – or 60 percent – would have scored “substantially below proficient.” Students scoring in the last category are at risk of not graduating from high school. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/19/sixty-percent-of-adults-who-took-standardized-test-bombed/)

Now, some folks will say that the adults didn’t have the time to study for the test, but that isn’t the point. The point is that these successful adults were no longer proficient in the math skills on the test because they did not use them in their day-to-day lives. And yet, Rhode Island is going mandate “Partially Proficient” as a graduation requirement for students starting next year.

Why?

If we are to have mandatory graduation exams, let’s base them on the skills that adults need in their world. What would happen if we asked successful adults what the math they used day-to-day was? Do most people use the quadratic equation or do they need more math skills that allow them to create budgets for their business, calculate interest rates on their mortgages, understand polling data in the New York Times?

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach skills beyond what may show up on a graduation exam. What it means is that we have to start asking better questions about what skills are necessary for a high school diploma. And we need to start asking better questions to our students too.

Mar 19

SLA Students Make Anti-Violence PSA

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Since this blog is called “Practical Theory,” I think it is important sometimes to show the powerful, practical work that kids can do. This is a PSA made by SLA 11th graders for their English class. We need to always remember that kids care deeply about their world, and they are capable of sharing a vision of that world when we give them the tools and give them the chance.

What if high school wasn’t just preparation for real life? When we treat high school as real life, kids can do work like this:

Mar 14

Disrupt Disruption

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With the publication of Disrupting Class in 2008, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn introduced the idea of “disruption” to the education world, and the effects have been… well… disrupting.

The people driving school policy, from the Race to the Top architects at the US Department of Education to the Gates Foundation to the venture capitalists at GSV Advisors are now rushing to disrupt schools, pushing a faster rate of change and an increasingly corporatization of “the education sector.” And in states and districts all over America, the disruption has occurred as funding has dried up, leading to layoffs, school closures, and profound instability in what has been for nearly 100 years, one of the more stable institutions in American culture – the school.

But why were we – the tech-savvy educators – so quick to fall in love with the idea of disruption as Christensen presented it? Behind the idea that technology was going to change our schools – it can, it should, it is – was a market-driven vision of school that opened the door to “disruption” as a positive force in education.

When was the last time any teacher thought that “disruption” was a positive force in a child’s life?

The time has come for us to retake the language of school reform. Words like “Disruption” and “Revolution” create a mind-set among reformers that make it o.k. to cut budgets, lay-off teachers, close schools, and – at root – implement high-speed, high-stakes changes without fully examining the worst consequences of their own ideas. After all, there’s usually a body count in revolutions, and “disruption” always makes people uncomfortable for a little while. And we have to stop thinking that’s o.k.

Moreover, revolutionaries and disrupters have little use for history and context, after all, what they are creating will be totally new, right? Why would a disrupter have to immerse themselves in the history of education when what they are creating is so techno-saavy and new that will be unlike anything we’ve seen before?

The point is this: Those who think that they can come in from the outside of educational systems and “disrupt” schools are engaging in a profound act of hubris, only rarely are the reformers the ones who fall when the reforms prove less than successful.

The kids do. The reformers go back to the world of business or onto their next cause. And they get to throw up their hands and say, “If *we* couldn’t fix our broken schools, it’s not our fault. It just means no one can save them.” And that, of course, only serves to reinforce the notion that we should just blow the whole thing up and start over anyway.

We can aspire to more than that.

What we want in our schools is not disruption, but evolution. Our schools cannot stay static, on this we can agree, but disruption and revolution are the wrong models. We want our schools to evolve. We need to grow, we need to take the best of what we have been and marry those ideas to the new world in which we live. The patterns of the growth of our educational systems should make sense along a logical path with as few “disruptions” as we can manage.

We owe it to all of the people – students, teachers, parents – who bring the best of themselves to the flawed system of school every day to make our systems of school better tomorrow than they are today. But we also owe it to those people to make that evolution as painless as possible so that the upheaval and “disruption” does not mean the loss of dignity and learning and care for the people who inhabit our schools.

Mar 13

Don’t Get Ego-Invested

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This happened yesterday.

One of our teachers came into my office and said, “I’m concerned about one of my students.” When I asked why, he told me that the student had her head down in class and was really not engaging in the lesson. He went over to her and gave her some options — she could re-engage with the class if she was capable, she could go see her co-advisor, go see the counselor or even go to my office and just be, but she couldn’t stay in class unengaged. She left class but didn’t go any of those places, which he quickly realized. He used our SLATE system to send a message of concern to the student, her mom and me. The student has been having a rough go of it lately, and this was, therefore, not the first message that mom has received of late.

The young woman returned to class after being called by her mom and as the teacher checked in with her, she looked at him and said, “Why do all you teachers have to be so [you can imagine the word she used] helpful all the time? Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

Here’s the important part.

The teacher didn’t react in a “How dare you use that language with me?” manner. He didn’t send her to the office. And he definitely did not turn that into a power struggle in the classroom. Instead, he saw a student that he has known for three years as an advisee and a student who was not o.k. and he saw that, in that moment, he was not going to be the adult who was able to breakthrough her anger and get her through the moment. So he came to me.

Not to get her in trouble.

Not to “report” her.

To see if I could help.

That matters. A lot.

So I found her and asked her to come to my office. Needless to say, she thought she was in trouble. Students know they shouldn’t curse out their teachers.

Instead, I told her that her teacher was worried about her and was worried she wasn’t o.k. And I asked her what we could do to help.

And the wall came down. She was having a really lousy day. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing that wouldn’t get better but the kind of day that really makes it hard to be in a classroom because there’s no way you’re going to focus. And we talked about that for a while.

And then I was able to say, “You know, your teacher told me you weren’t o.k. He came to me, not to get you in trouble, but because he was worried about you. And you need to know… you cursed out your advisor and his first reaction was that he was worried you weren’t o.k. He could have gotten all teacher-angry on you, and he didn’t.”

And that was all she needed. She said, “Yeah, that wasn’t o.k., what I did. I need to go talk to him. I need to go apologize. I wasn’t mad at him. That wasn’t right to do that.”

That’s massive.

That’s the ball game. It is everything we want.

And it happened because a teacher cared more about his student than he did about his teacher-self.

It happened because a teacher knew that it really does take a village sometimes, and he knew that it was going to take more than one adult to help the student with where she was that day.

It happened because a student was very willing to move past her own defensiveness and see that she wasn’t “in trouble,” but that her behavior hurt someone who cared about her, and that wasn’t o.k. with her.

Mostly it happened because that teacher wasn’t ego-invested in his dominance in the classroom. He saw pain where others might have only seen defiance. He saw a kid he cared about and one he knew cared about him lashing out, and that worried him enough to ask for help.

We can get ego-invested in so many ways in our classrooms… we can fall in love with our own sense of authority. We can fall in love with our ability to be the one to “save” kids who don’t need saving, but just need care. We can fall in love with the bunker mentality — that we and only we can make a difference to the exclusion of the other adults in a child’s life.

He did none of those things, and so a young woman could trust him and could own her own mistake without feeling defensive. And yes, she doubled back to him and apologized completely. She owned that she was wrong, that she treated him poorly and that he didn’t deserve it. And she simply apologized, meant it and told him she would do better.

I am sure that she missed some good course content that day. But I trust that she can catch up. What she — and we — learned that day was every bit as important.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Mar 02

Why Are the Students In Your Class?

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With almost everything we teach, we are always toward two very different challenges. One, what are we doing to unlock the passion and skills of the 10% (or so) of the kids who either already are or could become so passionate about our subject that it becomes their course of study past their K-12 education, and two, what are we doing for the other 90% of the room? Why is it important that they are taking the class?

These goals often can feel at odds – both from a pedagogical and content perspective. But when we seek out goals that allow all students to engage in active creation of relevant, empowering meaning, we can honor the needs and interests of all of the students we teach.

When we look at the framework of backward mapped unit planning tools such as Understanding by Design, we can teach from the ideas of enduring understandings and big ideas. We get to ask ourselves – what will the students remember about this unit – about this class – twenty years from now? What are the concepts and ideas that are so important that everyone in the class has a reason to dive deep into these ideas?

When we take the idea of playing the whole game from David Perkins’ “Making Learning Whole,” we allow ourselves to stop seeing our subjects as atomized pieces of data to learn, but instead we see our students as junior varsity versions of the adult.

And yet, in most classrooms, the question, “Why do we have to learn this?” is seen as a challenge, not an opportunity. It is, after all, the first question a student should ask. It is a question that should be on the educational Bill of Rights. And the answers we give cannot just be “You’ll need this some day,” or “It is on the test.” We cannot continue – at best – to give facile answers and at worst – to tell lies – to our students. Our answers should, instead, give the students enough of an idea of the power and relevance and importance of the concepts of our classroom to set kids off on their own inquiry journey as they develop their skill and their ideas and then seek to, with us, create meaning in their own lives.

This is our challenge – to help every student we teach find the reason they are in our class. We must strive to ensure that the time we spend together will help every student become a better citizen and person, both today, and in the future. Our classrooms must then be lenses on the world, not just for the students who fall in love with the same content we love, but for every child.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Feb 28

We Don’t Know How To Teach Math

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And we barely know why we teach it, too.

We just don’t. Not to and for everyone.

If we didn’t, it wouldn’t be o.k. for so many people to say, “Oh, I hate math.” And yet, you can be in a room full of really smart, successful people, and you can guarantee that a not insignificant subsection of the people there will say that they hate math.

That means we are not doing a good job somewhere. Somehow in the “How,” “Why” and “What,” we are falling down on the job. And because we don’t do it well, math remains the third rail of progressive education. Seymour Papert (source – the Papert scholar, Gary Stager) said that math represents the failure of progressive education because the way we teach math always reintroduces coercion back into education.

And yes, there are those who fall in love with the pure beauty of higher level mathematics. For those of us who would have moments of epiphany when you could just “see” the math unfold in a way that seemed to explain the universe, math class could be amazing. But the fact that there are some of those folks seem to be justifying not changing the fundamental pedagogy and structure of math, thereby ignoring all the kids who never understood or cared about a sine wave.

Conrad Wolfram’s TED Talk about the need to understand the difference between computation and real mathematics is a good start to try to figure out how to do it better.

Some school – like the iSchool in NYC – just punt. They teach the stuff of math using computer software, and then try to use their project-based instructional time to have kids apply the math in their projects. Does it work? It probably beats sitting and listening to a math teacher write and explain the math on the board.

But it begs a fundamental question for me – why do we just teach math? Problem sets and the occasional poorly worded word problem seems just wrong to me when mathematical thinking is problem-finding and problem-solving of the highest order. Of all the subjects that seem to have been most damaged by siloing and a lack of true interdisciplinarity, math seems to suffer the most.

After all, math is the language of the physical world. There’s more real math in the arc of a frisbee in flight than in all the word problems in a textbook.

Math is the language of probability. Any poker player who has to consider the pot odds to know if they are making a good bet is doing applied mathematics.

Math is problem-finding and problem-solving as anyone who has ever tried to figure out why they have no money at the end of the month can tell you.

And let’s not forget that the same mathematical problem solving algorithms are involving in every computer programming challenge we could possibly undertake.

What if we completely rethought the way we taught math so that everything was structured around using math to seek out and solve problems? What mathematical concepts would become paramount? What pedagogies would come to the forefront? And how much could we finally get so many people to be willing to say that they simply “hate math?”

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Feb 25

Teach Kids Before Subjects

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Ask any teacher what they teach, and you’ll get the typical responses:

“I teach science.”

“I teach 3rd grade.”

“I teach English.”

Words matter. And when we give those answers, we miss a chance to humanize our classroom every time.

We should always remember that we teach kids. And that matters. Say the first set of answers out loud and then say the next set out loud.

“I teach kids science.”

“I teach 3rd graders.”

“I teach kids English.”

If we around going to create more student-centered schools, then we need to start by actually mentioning the students when we talk about our classes and our profession. Before we expect everyone to be able to do it, perhaps we should actually say it first.

And what is important about this is that it does not suggest that the things we teach the kids are unimportant. Science is important. English is important. 3rd grade is important. But they aren’t necessarily important in their abstraction. They have to be important to the kids we teach. It is in the intersection of the kids we teach and the subjects we teach that meaning and learning happen.

What could happen if teachers started using this language? Could it start us at doing a better job of seeing the kids in front of us as people, not just as students of a subject? Could it remind us that it isn’t enough to love our content, but that we have to love the kids we teach too? Could this be the first step we all agree to take in building human – more humane – schools?

In the end, our kids should never be the implied object of their own education, and we can start changing that with the very language we use to describe what we do.

Feb 20

Inquiring Minds Really Do Want to Know

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Turns out, the two-year olds have it right.

When they ask“Why?” it is a pretty important question. They are trying to make sense of their world, and while most parents can quickly tire of the question, those two-year olds are on the right path. We want our students, years later in school, to still want to figure out their worlds.

So what happens in the intervening years? How do we go from the natural curiosity of the two-year old to the practiced detachment of the stereotypical teenager? What is it about school that teaches kids to not care about their work — and by extension, their world?

The ultimate stereotype of the American classroom is still Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ben Stein is profoundly unlucky in getting any student in the classroom to care about the Smoot-Hawley tax. And maybe the Smoot-Hawley tax is irredeemable, we don’t know.  But those kids in that class will never know because the teacher was asking questions he knew the answer to, and the students had one job – to parrot back those answers.

That pedagogical approach is long since past its prime – if it ever had one in the first place.

An inquiry-driven pedagogy is – at heart – about asking questions we do not know the answer to. In Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes:

“A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.” (http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html)

And while the overwhelming majority of teachers are very good at the “facts” of their discipline, we have to get better at using those facts to help students build meaning by asking powerful questions that ask them to apply knowledge, attack problems of their own design, and come up with their own ‘small-a’ answers.

Inquiry really requires people — students and teachers — to live in the uncomfortable places, and that’s hard. Inquiry requires that we all develop a nimbleness of mind so that we do not give in to the orthodoxy of our own ideas. That’s important for students and teachers (and principals) so that we can start to really hone our skill of deep thinking.

And an inquiry-driven education does not preclude content – in fact, to the opposite, it makes content all the more important. For kids to tackle a problem they see in their community requires them to have a complex understanding of the problem before coming up with a worthwhile solution. For kids to engage in deep inquiry and make real decisions about what they think and understand about complex issues requires them to have synthesized a great deal of information.

It is the difference between simply having kids learn the facts and figures of the Smoot-Hawley tax – to return to Ferris – and having students question the relationship between commerce and government, study the historical evolution of that relationship and then decide for themselves what they believe the role of government in influencing the market.

And if we want our students to really be thoughtful scholars and citizens, don’t we owe it to them to teach them how to think for themselves?

Feb 19

School Must Be Real Life

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“You will need this some day. “

It is the thing that all of us as teachers have said to our kids at one time or another. As teacher-tropes go, it is one that makes some sense to use. Why would a fifteen year old care about when the Magna Carta was signed? Why does a third grader really care about the different kinds of rocks?

But fifteen year olds do care about power dynamics and fairness. And third graders are fascinated by their surroundings. And it turns out, understanding the world around you means understanding a great deal of the content that we teach. But it is up to the teachers to help the students to make the connections between the world of school and the rest of their lives.

At EduCon 2.5, Philadelphia superintendent Dr. William Hite told the attendees that teachers must be masters of both content and context, imploring the educators present to make school relevant to the lives their students lead.

I would go one step further. It is not enough that we help students understand how important school is, school must help our students understand how important they are to the lives we all lead. David Perkins, in his book, Making Learning Whole, writes about helping students to play the “junior varsity” game of the world they live in.

At SLA, our students have built sustaining bio-walls, they have planned a major education conference, they have created public service campaigns, they have made original films, and they have interned at over 100 sites all over Philadelphia. Whenever and wherever possible, we endeavor to help our students see their work as having real meaning now. Like the rest of our lives, not everything we do is the most meaningful thing ever done, but we strive to never teach in isolation, giving kids work that has no connection to the lives they lead.

This is at the heart of what we mean when we talk about inquiry-driven, project-based learning. And it is an important way we make sure that we work toward empowerment over simple engagement. Students will do the scut work necessary to make real connections and do meaningful work when students have ownership of the world and see how the work is important – both to their lives and to the lives of others.

And bizarrely, adults rarely are willing to spend the time learning things that are not of interest to them. All we have to do is walk into a school professional development session on the latest mandate from central office and see a group of teachers who look as disengaged as any stereotype of a teenager in a high school class could be. But walk into a school session where teachers are engaged in authentic action research or collaborating with peers on curriculum development, and you will see the learners we want to see in our own classrooms.

Why would we expect our students to be more willing to learn disconnected and inauthentic lessons than we are?

So it is incumbent upon us — in all classes — to find ways to make the work of the classroom have meaning. This means teaching mathematical problem solving so that students can apply a mathematical lens to the challenges around them. This means helping students to think like scientists and helping them do real scientific research and experimentation. This means teaching students that to think like social scientists and historians is to draw connections between the past and present, and that the space between the social scientist and the activist is slim indeed. And it means teaching students that the stories we read and the stories we tell have resonance in the way we learn, the way we live and the way we work.

It isn’t that we expect students to solve problems adults cannot. This isn’t about over-reaching about the ability of children. It is about understanding that there are plenty of challenges that are hyper-local or youth-oriented where they can make a difference either on their own or side-by-side with adults. And it is about understanding that we should not squander the energy and ideas of our young people by telling them that their ideas will matter beyond the classroom walls someday rather than daring them to share their ideas and make a difference today.

When we challenge students to make connections between the content of the classrooms and the context of their lives, school can be more than preparation for real life.

School can be real life.