Practical Theory

New Year... New Challenges... New Goals... New Excitement

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-08-27T22:56:24Z

Things I'm really excited about as we move into the new year... in no real order:

Seeing who we are without the first class in the building. That's how you start to really see what you become... did the culture stick? Just listening to three juniors in my office today talk to some visitors... watching the upperclassmen teach the incoming 9th graders... I think we're in very, very good shape. I'm going to miss the graduates, and it has been a blast to see so many of them this week, but I am also excited to see how the Class of 2011 leaves their mark. A bunch of seniors confessed that they are staking out their claims to the various seats in my office.

We built a much larger committee structure at the end of last year, and we're already seeing dividends. We've got enough teachers that we don't need to be "all hands on deck" all the time. For our week of PD next week, I'm running next to nothing... and the people who are running all the sessions are doing it because it is in their established sphere of interest and influence. That feels awesome. The whole concept is to institutionalize the distributed leadership at SLA by letting people pick the pieces of the puzzle they want to work on. I think, given how many committees we created, that we will figure out which ones have use and legs and which ones were a better idea in theory than in practice, but overall, we are already seeing committee chairs take ownership and work with other teachers to get things done. So very good.

We get to really try to get good at everything this year. That's our focus. Document all the UbDs... publish more to the community... institutionalize things we've done by the seat of our pants. We've done everything at least once now, and while we'll do new things this year, the major pieces of the school are in place. Now we can cast a critical eye on all of them and work on doing them better. I'm excited to see how Roz and the Capstone committee revise our process. I am excited to see how Josh and Zac move us forward with our PLCs. And I'm excited to see us really work on our curriculum and on publishing it so that we can make our practice more and more transparent.

We want to establish an active and empowered alumni network. I read Radical Equations this summer and one of my take-aways was how the alumni of the Algebra Project formed the Young People's Project, and I would love to see something similar for SLA. I think our alumni are proud of their high school, so it is incumbent on us to find meaningful, powerful ways for the graduates to stay involved.

We want to find more ways to involve and engage parents. We have a wonderful Home and School board who are excited to build on the work of the founding parents, and I think we are going to do some great work this year. The board and I are doing a book study with "Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family/School Partnerships" (Anne T. Henderson, Vivian Johnson, Karen L. Mapp, Don Davies), and I am hoping that it gives us a powerful vision of new ways to strengthen the Home - School relationship.

We are rolling out a new web-site in the next week. I'd say more, but I'm sworn to secrecy. Suffice to say, it is going to be awesome.

What are you looking forward to this school year? What are your goals?

EduCon 2.3: Call For Conversations

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-08-18T21:24:56Z

The EduCon 2.3 Call for Conversations is open!

As many folks know, the students, faculty and parents of the Science Leadership Academy are hosting EduCon 2.3 on January 28th - 30th, 2011. EduCon has been successful in the past because of the incredible energy and spirit that everyone brings to the weekend. The conversation-style sessions are - and always have been - the heart of the conference. So please consider submitting a proposal to create and facilitate a session.

Session proposals are due October 20th. And we really hope for another year of incredible conversations!

SLA Named One of the Ten Most Amazing Schools in US (and other news!)

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-08-15T20:14:08Z

Some very cool notes for a warm August night!

The Science Leadership Academy was named one of the Ten Most Amazing Schools in the US by the Ladies Home Journal! We are honored and humbled to be listed alongside such incredibly innovative and interesting schools!
I was on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane last week. Dr. Anne Gardiner of Bodine HS and I were talking about small schools in Philadelphia. It was a really fun hour, and it is archived as a podcast if you want to listen in.
I have submitted a proposal for SXSW (South by Southwest) - one of the premier interactive / new media / social networking / new culture conferences in the world. Crowdsourcing makes up 30% of the approval process, so if you like the kind of ideas I write about here on the blog, please considering registering at SXSW and voting for my proposal - Building School 2.0 - Creating the Schools We Need. And while you're there, consider voting for the panel I'm on, too! Voting ends August 29th.

As always, thanks for reading!

The Big Lie (Thoughts on Why School Is Not Only About Workforce Development)

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-08-09T22:45:40Z

[This post is finally finding its voice after kicking around in my brain for most of the summer because of the amazing work of Umair Haque and his post A Deeper Kind of Joblessness.]

I knew a lot of very smart, very academically successful kids when I was growing up. I went to CTY which was a rather humbling experience, and then I went to pretty high-powered college. And I knew a lot of kids who worked hard, got good grades, and got to the job market and realized that no one really cared. In the workplace, they were just the next 22 year old, and there was intro-level work to be done, and little of it really required that BA in Eastern European literature. My generation came of age with Douglas Coupland's Generation X, and Coupland's refrain of "You Are Not Your Job" made a lot of sense to me then... and I find myself reflecting on it a great deal lately.

A frequent refrain of mine is that the purpose of public education is not the creation of the 21st Century workforce, but rather, the co-creation - in conjunction with our students - of 21st Century citizens. I really believe that "work" is a subset of "citizen," and that if we aim for citizenship, we'll get the workforce we need, but aiming for creating workers won't get our society the citizens it needs.

A public education that centers first around workforce development will put a high premium on following directions and doing what you're told. A public education that centers first around citizenship development will still teach rules, but it will teach students to question the underlying ideas behind the rules. Workforce development will reinforce the hierarchies that we see in most corporate culture, while a citizenship-focus will teach students that their voice matters, regardless of station.

It's not just about what society needs, it's also about what students need. We completely change the lens of "Why do we need to study this" when the answer deals with being an informed and active citizen as opposed to what we do with our work life, because let's be honest with ourselves, most people don't need calculus, the Periodic Table of Elements or the date of the signing of the Magna Carta to be a good worker. But you do need to understand statistical analysis to read fivethirtyeight.com and make sense of the political conversations there, you do need to understand basic chemistry to understand how the oil in the Gulf disaster affects the region, and understanding how England evolved from a pure aristocracy to a constitutional monarchy which did sow the seeds of the American democracy might help to make sense of our own country's history. The goal of a citizenship-driven education exposes students to ideas that will challenge them, push them, and help them to make sense of a confusing world.

And more to the point - we don't lie to kids when we say that's what high school is for.

Our society is changing, and there are some serious warning signs that our economy be fundamentally shifting in ways that will make it harder and harder for education to be "the great equalizer." Children across the socio-economic spectrum are realizing that the economic "sell" of public education isn't ringing true. As college costs creep over $200,000 for private colleges and over $100,000 for public colleges (Penn State's costs, with room and board, this year was $27,000 / yr in-state) and as more jobs move to labor markets that do not have the high wages of the United States (seriously, read Haque's post... it reminds me of a shorter, more digestible version of Joseph Stiglitz's work,) the idea that all kids who work hard in high school will have economic success in life is more and more of a lie.

I think - I fear - that the next twenty or thirty years of American life are going to be difficult. I think we're going to have some really challenging problems to solve, and I think that we're going to be faced with hard choices about our lives, and I want our schools to help students be ready to solve those problems, to weigh-in on those problems, to vote on those problems. It's why History and Science are so important. It's why kids have to learn how to create and present their ideas in powerful ways. It's why kids have to become critical consumers and producers of information. And hopefully, along the way, they find the careers that will help them build sustainable, enjoyable, productive lives.

I want to be honest about why we teach what we teach. I'm tired of schools and politicians implicitly promising that the result of successful schooling is high wages. And I'm tired of us forgetting everything else that goes into helping people realize their potential in the process.

Teaching kids that hard work in school will mean more money is a shortcut and an example of the shoddy logic that doesn't ring true to many kids. Teaching kids that hard work in school will help them develop skills that will help them be a more fully realized citizen and person is a harder argument to make, but it stands a much better chance of being true.

Leadership Day 2010: Be The Best Version of Yourself

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-31T21:30:13Z

Scott McLeod has, once again, called for a day of posts related to leadership - Leadership Day 2010. While Leadership Day was yesterday, I'm hoping I can extend it to "Leadership Weekend."

For me, leadership is intensely personal. The simple answer to finding your leadership style is this -- imagine the best version of yourself... the version of yourself that deepens your best traits and mitigates your worst ones... and then try every day to be that person. You'll fail a lot. Most days, you're not going to be that person, because that person doesn't exist. You're chasing a ghost that doesn't exist. But the effort to be that person will bring you closer to them. And in doing so, you'll realize that person is a moving target, because you're changing, and that best version of you will change. That's a good thing.

Here's another way to look at it... try every day to be the person the all the people in your charge need you to be. It is the essence of servant leadership. That's a tricky thing, though, because you will lead many people, and people's needs will be different. That's the difference between "all the people" and "each of the people." Worse, you're going to have to figure out what people need from you personally and professionally, and those two things are always in play, and they don't always work in concert. You have to be the person they need you to be professionally, and that means deeply taking into consideration their humanity (and yours), but it means that there are times when what they need from you on a personal level, and what you need to do on a professional level both for the person in front of you and for the organization as a whole are in conflict. Those are soul-searching moments, but the ability to be a good person who can care deeply about the person in front of you while still acting in the best interest of the whole organization is one of the great challenges of leadership.

Robert Pirsig once wrote, "Want to paint a perfect picture? Be perfect and paint what you know." The best advice about leadership I can imagine is "Be a truly good person and lead from there." You'll fall short of being that best version of yourself a lot, but for me, it's the only path to follow.

Technorati Tags: leadershipday10

New Work Flow with Tech

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-28T18:24:20Z

[This might be my first purely techie post in a long time, but hey...]

For the first time as a principal, I have a desktop computer on my desk.

I've always just carried my laptop to and from school every day, but with the launch of the iPad, I thought it might be time for a change. The laptop is good enough, but there were starting to be too many times when I wanted more screen real estate, and I found myself really envying my wife's big honking desktop, but the big issue was really that I didn't want files in two places. My laptop was organized to the point where it was pretty much hardwired to my brain. (My knapsack is like that too, but even it is wearing out... some might argue, so's my brain.) With the summer hitting, and with a realization that carrying my laptop and my iPad to and from school every day was really counter-productive, I made the leap.

How I made the changes:
1) DropBox - For $100 / year, I get 50 gigs of space. About 99% of the files I use are in two folders (with dozens of sub-folders. I'm a file organization nut.) What I love about DropBox is that the files really do live on the computers, and DropBox syncs the changes, as opposed to having to pull from the cloud every time. Also, DropBox has apps for the iPad and iPhone, so I can get to my files no matter if I'm on my home machine (now the laptop), school machine or iPad.

2) MobileMe - Syncs my calendar and contacts and mail accounts between all the machines for $100 / year. And I found that Back To My Mac has been useful for those times when I do need a file on the school machine that isn't in the DropBox folder. If iDisk was a bit more robust, I wouldn't need DropBox, but for now, DropBox blows iDisk away.

3) EverNote - I use this for my general note-taking on the iPad... it's quick, it syncs easily, and it is very easy to keep notes organized. It is also replacing "Stickies" for my quick "jot it down" notes on the computers -- which is a really, really good thing. If iOS4 for the iPad allows users to push documents to iDisk or DropBox, I could see this starting to lose luster, but for now, I love it.

4) GoogleApps - Perhaps this was just plain luck, but Chris Alfano, SLA's amazing web developer, convinced me to move SLA's mail to Google Mail as part of our strategy to use GoogleDocs and GoogleApps more. (As a hard-core DIY former-sys-admin, I was probably a harder sell than I should have been... what's that slide I have in my slide-deck, "What are you willing to unlearn?" I'm still evolving.) Using the SLA GoogleApps suite was awesome -- and that needs to be its own post -- and once I realized (again, thanks Chris A.) how I could set up my own GoogleApps suite for Practical Theory - including moving my Practical Theory email - another piece fell into place. GoDaddy had long only provided POP mail support, but now, with Google hosting my personal email, I had access to an IMAP account, which was a huge piece of the puzzle for streamlining the workflow between iPad, iPhone, laptop and school computer. So far, I am just using GoogleApps standard edition for my private GoogleApps account, but at $50 / year, if there's a reason to upgrade to Premium, I won't mind doing it.

(I've long used Spanning Sync as a way to sync up iCal and Google Calendar... I'm not 100% sure it's necessary anymore, as it seems just too easy to subscribe to GoogleCalendars on iCal on all platforms, but I like that it makes the calendars native to my Mac accounts, as opposed to subscriptions... and I bought a lifetime account, so for now, I'm still syncing that way. I don't think you have to, if you're looking at what I'm doing as a model.)

(I'm also thinking about moving my Flickr account to Picasa, but I don't think it has the social network that Flickr has yet. Yet.)

What all this has done has made every machine I work on, essentially, a thin client for my work, which is awesome. I love not taking the laptop to and from school every day, and I'm now thinking about replacing the old knapsack with something a little lighter for every day use.

Things I've noticed that I really like:
I love using the iPad as my primary mobile device. When it is paired with the bluetooth keyboard, it is a hugely productive tool. I think the keyboard is the thing that moves it from primarily a media consumption device to a productivity tool. I'm looking forward to doing observations on the iPad this year.

DropBox really is amazing. And I created aliases to put on my laptop and school computer so that the folders I most use are still only one click away, as opposed to two. (Yes, I'm that OCD sometimes.)

Using the iPad as a note-taking mobile-meeting device has had two unexpected ancillary benefits. First, because it doesn't multi-task, I don't multi-task as much. Even writing this blog entry, I stayed on it the whole time. I'm actually not as excited for iOS4 for the iPad because of that. (Who am I kidding... I'm just hoping I'm learning the lesson of self-discipline... who am I kidding again? Must check twitter...) Secondly, because it has a smaller footprint (I use the Apple case that tilts it diagonally up slightly on its horizontal axis,) I find that it allows me to be more present in meetings where I'm using it as a note-taking tool than my laptop did, because I'm not working over the top of a laptop screen.

After five years without a desktop screen, using the big honking iMac is lovely. Screen real-estate when analyzing spreadsheets and such is really nice to the point where I've thought about getting a personal desktop at home and really making the laptop a really secondary machine that would mostly be for long trips and such. I am even going to try to present from my iPad tomorrow, which would mean I wouldn't even need my laptop for conferences and such.

Things I'm hoping happen soon:
I'm hoping that MobileMe will soon allow me to store my iTunes library in the cloud as well. Rumor is that is soon to happen. Until then, I'm using my iPad as my office jukebox, which isn't the worst solution, really.
The iPad won't really be a full production device until you can push documents created or modified on the Pad to the cloud via DropBox or iDisk. Right now, if I work on an iWord (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) document on the iPad, I can only get it off of the Pad by syncing the device with a computer. It's why I use Evernote all the time instead. In the end, that is hamstringing me from time to time, as it creates the "multiple copies of the same document" problem that I absolutely want to avoid. My fear is that Apple only allows you to do it with iDisk. My hope is that DropBox can be push/pull too. (Hey Apple, if you are reading this... please make this happen!)
GoogleDocs functionality on the iPad - this could be better... and hopefully will be soon.

Thing I don't love:
This is a "cloud" problem that is exacerbated by using multiple devices. I don't love that my files are in DropBox, my GoogleDocs are in Google, my notes are in Evernote, and I need MobileMe for my AppleSync stuff. I worry about remembering what is in my GoogleDocs and what isn't, and as we use GoogleDocs more and more at SLA, I see this problem getting worse, not better.
I was a committed Things user as my to-do list, but it isn't a cloud solution, and now I'm syncing my phone and my pad and my laptop, so I think I need a cloud-based solution for that. I don't love the Google To-Do list. RememberTheMilk? Anyone have any other suggestions?

Apps I use all the time on my iPad:
Evernote
Mail / Calendar / Contacts...
iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers)
BlogPress (blog writer)
I'm going to buy FileMakerPro for the

Overall, I am thrilled with how my work flow has changed... and carrying a lighter knapsack has made my back much happier.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:New Work Process

EduCon 2.3 Registration is open!

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-26T09:14:05Z

Registration for EduCon 2.3 is now open! You can go to the conference site or straight to the Eventbrite registration page.

If you are unfamiliar with EduCon, it is the conference we host at SLA that looks to investigate the intersection of progressive pedagogy and 21st Century Tools. All sessions are dialogic / conversation based, as opposed to traditional lecture-based professional development.

From the EduCon 2.3 website:

What is Educon?

EduCon is both a conversation and a conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

Guiding Principles of EduCon

Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members

Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen

Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around

Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate

Learning can — and must — be networked

EduCon 2.3 is Jan 28-30, 2011. Registration is open. The conference costs $150 - $100 for School District of Philadelphia teachers.

We hope you can join us!

Least Restrictive Environment

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-18T13:49:48Z

(Playing with language a bit in this post... not sure this even qualified as a half-baked idea...)

I was thinking about the Special Education concept of Least Restrictive Environment and the idea that many of the concepts of special education, such as an Individualized Educational Plan, are concepts we should want for every student. And I was thinking about a conversation I was having with another principal a while back about the use of cell phones and iPods and such... the conversation went something like this:

Principal: I don't let students use iPods and cell phones in school.
Me: We do... I mean, I often work with music playing, so why not let kids choose to do so?
Principal: Well, it might be fine for some kids, but not for others. And I think it just serves as a distraction.

So... a month later, that conversation bubbled back into my brain, and I came up with the right response. Banning all these devices when there are many kids who can use them wisely and well is not putting kids into the least restrictive environment for their own learning.

Yes, there are some kids who struggle - despite many opportunities to figure how to manage it - to use technology in a classroom without it serving as a distraction. Let's admit that. At SLA, we have, at any given point in time, about 1% of our population on "Simple Finder" because the teachers or the parents have requested that the laptops have restrictions put on them for a while. And we do have some kids who get their cell phones taken from them in class because they don't respond to repeated redirects if they are misusing them in class. Those instances are absolutely the exception, not the rule. (In talking with colleagues, I'd say that cell phone misuse is much lower at SLA than it is at schools that theoretically ban their existence.)

But banning their use or locking up every laptop would hamstring so much of what we do, and it would not be, for the overwhelming majority of students, the least restrictive environment in which they could - and do - learn.

Let's take a tip from Special Education and in the coming school year, try to make sure our schools are the least restrictive environments for learning they can be.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Mobile Learning

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-16T12:43:02Z

So... I was at the Mobile Learning Institute at the Smithsonian Museum today. I was talking about the ways museums and schools can use digital media to share goals and collaborate and create really powerful learning experiences for kids. More importantly, I was listening to some really interesting people talk about what they were doing in education.

I met with David Gagnon and learned about what his group at U. of Wisconsin is doing with Aris Games, and my mind immediately began racing to all the ways SLA could harness this technology to do some amazing place-based storytelling.

But this was also a chance for me to talk to some museum people about some ideas I've been kicking around with folks at The Franklin Institute. Some folks in the poster sessions in ISTE were doing some really amazing things with QR codes, and at the time, I was thinking that we could collaborate with some student-led projects at TFI where we embedded QR codes around the museum to create an enhanced experience for museum visitors.

What if, for example, kids designed physics experiments around the exhibits of The Franklin Airshow and people could read a QR code that led to video explanations of the experiments and the math behind it? What if the QR codes led to a wiki with much more detailed information about what you were looking at than the museum write-ups are able to give? What if the QR codes led to a survey you could take or a way to take part in an on-going conversation about the exhibit? How could that enrich the experience for museum goers, and how could that create an incredible -- and on-going -- experience for the SLA student-designers? The tools to do more place-based learning with mobile devices (and with the laptops to create the experiences) are getting more and more robust. We just have to start to get creative about the way we harness them.

And as a final thought, it was experiences like today that speak to why we need to make an effort to get out of our comfort zones. This was not my usual group of folks today, and I am -- and hopefully SLA will be -- better for it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Constructing Modern Knowledge Reflections

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-15T22:24:01Z

I spent the last four days at Constructing Modern Knowledge run by Gary Stager in Manchester, NH. It was a truly unique and powerful learning environment. As the photo to the left shows, I got to meet one of my educational heroes, Deborah Meier. (And if you aren't yet reading Bridging Differences, the blog that is really more of an old-fashioned series of letters between Deborah and Diane Ravitch, then leave this blog right now and go read. Now.) If all CMK was was a chance to listen to, talk to, break bread with people like Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Marvin Minsky and James Loewen, then it would have been an amazing four days. But that really only scratches the surface of the conference.

The whole idea of the conference is that Gary and his team have created a truly luxurious learning environment. I don't mean that in the physical sense. We were in a hotel conference room for much of the time, but what it did have was time, resources and permission to play and learn. We were encouraged to talk to one another. We were encouraged to read. We were encouraged to listen. And we were encouraged to build. As Gary put it, we didn't have a schedule, we had appointments.

As the CMK Flickr group suggests, people created movies, they build robots that could draw, they made claymation videos, they learned Scratch. And often times, people set goals, reached them, reset them, and tried again. But people engaged in learning without worrying about what standards they were reaching. Can we do that all the time in our classrooms, probably not, but it felt good to remind ourselves what an unfettered learning environment felt like. To a person, I believe, we all wanted to ensure that our schools and our classrooms had that feeling.

For me, I think I had a number of takeaways. One early one was something that Deborah Meier said at lunch. (Yes, I got to have lunch with Deborah Meier.) We were talking about the goals of the conference, and I remarked that I thought it was funny that at a constructivist, progressive-ed conference, my favorite parts up until that point were the lectures. Deborah said, "Who said lectures can't be part of a progressive education? Some people are worth listening to. Reading is still good education, too. You are constructing knowledge there too." Now, I know that intellectually, but I felt like I had to apologize for enjoying listening more than doing. There are many ways to learn, and lecture can -- and probably should -- be a part of a good progressive teacher's toolkit. The trick is knowing when, what, how long and how you will help students to construct meaning from it.

Another take away was perhaps different than other people's. At SLA, I see teachers and students work together to create some of the most incredible projects I've ever seen. I see SLA students tackle problems that I think most adults would struggle with. But I worry sometimes that we (the adults) underestimate how complex the work we give can be. Complexity is different than - but can be related to - hard and time-consuming. Complexity can be the where kids fall into the "gumption trap" (Thank you, Robert Pirsig.) I experienced it this week. Our group's idea was to build a bi-pedal robot... and then we quickly evolved that to building a quadraped when we realized we probably weren't going to solve the balance problem in the time we had. We made early designs, and to be honest, we struggled. And I hit my frustrating point... I didn't know why I was doing this... I had other work I could be doing... why was I on the floor playing with Legos anyway... in short, I was being a lousy student. It wasn't because I didn't want to do the project, but rather because the problems in front of us seemed too frustratingly complex. Sure, it was fun to play around on the floor, but other groups were getting much further than we were, and what was the point, anyway....

Feeling that frustration was very good for me, because it served to remind me of one of the pitfalls of problem-based / project-based learning for kids. When there isn't a recipe / obvious sequence of events, the roadblocks can feel insurmountable. I worry sometimes that kids get stuck on projects, not because they don't want to do them, but because they reach stumbling blocks that they cannot solve. It is why teaching "gumption" (to again quote Pirsig,) and teaching process, and teaching problem solving is so important. It is also why, as teachers, patience and understanding and flexibility are necessary traits.

The next, perhaps related takeaway, is the utter need for us to honor / assess / grade process. Not every project gets to the finish line, and teachers (including me when I was in the classroom) can make the mistake of not giving a lot of credit for the unfinished work. My group was very close to not having a walking robot as presentation time crept near. If Brian hadn't made the last minute adjustments, we would have gone up there with much. Would that have discounted the incredible learning we had done on design, engineering, programming PicoCrickets, collaboration, experimentation, etc? Figuring out how we make sure that we honor the journey of learning in our assessments is essential, I think. And when we play on the 100 point scale that is really a 40 point scale where 59% is the same as a zero, we make it very difficult to do so.

In the end, we did get our robot walking... and we got it to stop and start by responding to noise. More importantly, we took a project through from "Hey, I wonder if we can..." to a neat little robot. We succeeded because we never were so wed to a design that we stopped looking for the best way to get it to work. We succeeded because we actually worked together and had a lot of fun. We succeeded because Brian was smart enough to go talk to other people making robots and learn how they were using gears much more effectively than we were. We succeeded because Jen refused to quit on Wednesday until she figured out why the program wasn't working. We might have even succeeded because I provided comic relief when necessary. But we also succeeded because we were in an environment where we were encouraged to spend the time to solve the problem. We had the permission, freedom, time and resources to create something.

This week, I was reminded of how powerful -- and how frustrating -- problem-solving and building can be. I also was reminded that we can work with our hands, we can listen and engage our minds in the world of ideas, and we can speak from our hearts. A great classroom should allow us to do all those things, with teachers who recognize the highs and lows that can come with all the different ways we learn.

Thanks, Gary, for a great week.

(And here's a quick video where you can see the of the evolution of the robot. Larger versions of the videos of the robot are on my flickr set of the conference.... including me singing "Sweet Georgia Brown.")

Community Organizing and the Algebra Project

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-05T20:28:26Z

I'm reading The Algebra Project: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project by Robert Moses and Charles Cobb. I'm only a little more than half-way through it, but it really has me thinking. Robert Moses was/is a Civil Rights activist, working to register voters in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s, and (I'm skipping quite a lot of time here) later in life, founded The Algebra Project - a project dedicated to helping black -- and other disempowered -- youth learn higher level math - specifically Algebra - in middle school. His theory is that math literacy is the key to both higher education and the ability to be a fully invested citizen in today's world.

Interestingly, he also believes that the key to doing this is through experiential learning and community organizing. The first third of the book is about the struggle for civil rights, primarily through the struggle of registering voters, in Mississippi in the early 1960s. It is a fascinating and compelling read about that differs from much of the traditional narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, in that this is not a "great person" narrative, but a "great people" narrative. (And he discusses the differing opinions between SCLC and SNCC around that very idea.) His is the story of Ella Baker and Amzie Moore and of hundreds of students and sharecroppers who came together to create change in the face of overwhelming opposition. He writes about how a good deal of the most daring work of the Civil Rights Movement was done by students who had the energy and unwillingness to compromise that older activists did not always possess.

This is important, both because the story of the Civil Rights movement should not be forgotten, but also because of the lessons he learned as a community organizer who was deeply invested - even as an initial "outsider" from the North - in the communities and people he encountered. He was changed by the experiences he had, not just because of the dangers he faced, but because he saw thousands of "ordinary" African-Americans in Mississippi find their voices and work to challenge and change the injustices they saw. He speaks to the need to listen as deeply as we talk, and he speaks to a humility that allows all voices to be valued.

That is important, because nearly twenty years later, that formed the core beliefs around math education. What is so powerful about the first 120 pages of the book -- and about the second part of the book -- the formation of the Algebra Project, is that it is not the telling of a proscribed curriculum, but rather presents the challenge of creating a project that can be scaled beyond its original walls while still being a project dedicated to listening. Moses and his organization empower students and parents and teachers to talk and listen to each other as they learn together. They listen to the needs of the communities they serve while also working to further the idea that math literacy is a language everyone can speak when the conceptual ideas - not just the rules of math - are communicated in a way that resonates with our day to day lives.

Beyond math, the other voice that is resonating with me in this text is how important it is to empower students and parents to have a say in their schools. I just had a meeting with a parent who wants to do more strategic planning about how to strengthen SLA within the larger community. How many parents have ideas about the school that remain untapped because they don't think they can call me to just schedule a time to talk? What are we losing because we haven't figured out how to get more and more parents to come into school to talk about their visions for the school community? And yes, I am proud of the level of parent involvement and parent input at SLA, but I want it to be greater. I want to figure out - as Bob Moses has - how to listen more deeply to the ideas of the parents. (As an aside, yes, I want to make sure we are listening to students deeply. I think, currently, we do that better than we do with parents.)

We are already planning a 9th grade tech workshop that will coincide with the handing out of the laptops. I think we need monthly - if not more often - meetings with me where parents can come to talk, not in a formal setting, but in the library.... and not to talk just to me, but to talk to each other. Much like the session at ISTE, where I was reminded of how much expertise is in our schools that remains untapped because schools don't always ask teachers what they dream for their schools, so should we remember to ask parents what their ideas are. We've been moving more and more in that direction at SLA, reading The Algebra Project is reminding me of how imperative that goal really is.

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Evolution or Revolution... or something else

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-04T19:39:24Z

I was reading the always thoughtful, always thought-provoking David Warlick today. His new post The Big Buzz at ISTE This Year - A Fourth "R" suggests this year we are moving toward a much needed revolution in education. And certainly, I am someone who believes that change (and innovation) is desperately needed in education, but I find myself very wary of the word "Revolution." Perhaps it is because that's the word being used by folks like Tom VanderArk as they call for a brand of education (and education management, really) that I cannot support, but no matter what I find myself less of a revolutionary these days.

I prefer to think that what we are doing is evolutionary.

So I threw that idea up on twitter, and it engendered some good conversation. Among the best is what Gerald Aungst (@geraldaungst) comments:

@chrislehmann But doesn't evolution also imply gradual change over a long time? Could some things need revolutionary change now?

To which I say yes... evolutionary change is harder and slower, and there's definitely many things about education that I would want changed tomorrow, but I worry that revolutions are often bloody. I worry that revolutionaries aren't always the most reflective or humble types. I worry that the fervor of revolution doesn't always lead to good things. And I worry that the rhetoric of revolution will lead us to ignore or devalue all the good work that has been -- and continues to be done -- in schools.

To use SLA as an example, I don't see SLA as a revolutionary school, I do see it as an evolutionary school. SLA works within the traditions of Dewey and Deb Meier and borrows from the free schools and from the open classrooms, and we then try to look at the best potential of what is in front of us and wed those ideas to those powerful ideas of our past. And I believe that willingness to recognize the debt we owe to those who have come before us has served us very well... both in our best moments and in our most challenging ones. It means that in our best moments, we always were reminded of our roots and of where our ideas came from, and in our most challenging moments, it reminds us that others have stood where we stand, and not to give in to frustration, because we weren't the first to struggle and we won't be the last.

But then Greg Thompson (@akamrt) wrote:

@chrislehmann I think we need a word between the two. Can we expect the current system to evolve w/o it carrying the bad DNA along w/ it?

And perhaps we don't have the word we need. Because even "evolution" suggests a natural progression, and that's not what I'm calling for either. I want to see us change, grow, evolve, so that all our kids can have the schools they need. But I also want the adults to be smart and wise and kind in their desire and quest for that change. I want them to be respectful and understanding of how difficult that change is. I want them to celebrate the incremental changes those around them make while never stopping to work for greater change. And I want the (r)evolution to be done in a way so that it doesn't require proverbial bloodshed, and I want it done in a way that does take the best of what we have been, the best of what we are... and marries to the the potential of what we can be.

I don't know that "revolution" gets us there. I see its appeal. But I think we we're trying to do might be harder than that. But I think if we strive for this kind of purposeful evolutionary change, we might get there in a way that is healthiest and sustaining for all involved.

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Batteries

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-03T20:52:15Z

My family is at the beach this week for our yearly vacation at the Jersey Shore. (No, Snookie isn't staying nearby.) Jakob is getting old enough that we need to bring every combination of soccer / baseball / basketball gear for beach play. Theo is old enough to love the sand and surf. He spent most of tonight talking about what a wonderful day he had. And I packed up a dozen books to clear off of the "must read" pile, and I am looking forward to getting through as many of them as I can carve the time for... in between game of miniature golf, bike rides and frequent naps.

Next week, I head off to Constructing Modern Knowledge with the amazing group of educators he has assembled, and I look forward to four days of just being a learner. It is rare these days when my own personal and professional learning gets to be my primary concern for several days.

Add to that a near zero professional email inbox and a goal of cleaning out my Practical Theory personal emails, and all of the sudden, there appears to be a realistic chance that I could put the previous twelve months away and start the coming school year (which for me means August 1st) rested, charged up, and in the proper mental space. Now that I've dared to put these words out there in the world, I fully expect something insane to happen to prevent it, but there it is.

My to-do list is as huge as ever, but most of what I have to do between now and August 1st is the kind of planning that never seems to be given enough time during the school year. We need to launch some new projects this September, and the time I am spending now on these things will reap huge benefits later. But it's also the time to examine what we have done and look for the spaces to innovate, to document, to reflect upon. And it is having the space and time to do that... and the mental distance and health to do that well, that is so important.

All of this is to say this... to all my friends and colleagues in education, I hope this summer allows you to find the time to recharge your batteries, to reflect deeply, wisely and well about the previous year, to learn about new ideas to bring back to the work we do, and find the time and space for restorative experiences this summer so that we can invest ourselves fully in the work we do for another year.

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Why School?

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-02T20:22:49Z

One of my frustrations right now is what I feel is a thin and destructive dialogue about public education in our country. Much of the dialogue is from a deficit model -- "How do we fix broken schools?" -- without ever recognizing the incredible work that happens in schools all over the country every day. Worse, the "fix" that is being advocated is often more reductive than what we currently offer - a focus on tested subjects, a focus on "work-ready" skills that ignores the civic needs of a nation. We look to the edu-capitalists to solve our problem at a time when, dare we suggest, the morality of the market should not be the model for school.

It is in that context that I read Why School by Mike Rose. There are moments in reading when I engage in what I call "Cheer Reading." Rose speaks the words of the rich power of schooling while recognizing how far we have to go to reach the potential of education in this country. More than that, he dares us to imagine a vision of school that enriches students and teachers alike... that sees the civic value of teaching all students... that sees the worth of all who inhabit our schools. He does it while urging us toward a better dialogue about school in this country... as he writes:

If we are a nation divided, we are also a nation yearning for new ways to frame old issues, for a robust language of schooling and civic life. Public education demands a capacious critique, one that encourages both dissent and invention, anger and hope. We need an expanded vocabulary, adequate to the daily joy and daily sorrow of our public schools. And we are in desperate need of rich, detailed imagines of possibility.

I could not agree more -- we need an open and honest discussion of what we dream of school... of where we succeed and where we fail. Rose's book - Why School - is a fantastic and necessary frame for the discussion.

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Beyond Tools: Thoughtful 21st Century School Reform

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — 2010-07-01T10:27:39Z

Beyond Tools - Thoughtful 21st C. School Reform

View more presentations from Chris Lehmann.

Yesterday was my ISTE session - Beyond Tools: Thoughtful 21st Century School Reform. It was at 8:30 am on the last day in one of the big 200 seat halls - a challenge of energy to say the least. I really wanted to make sure this was an interactive session, not a lecture. It might be because I've done a bunch of keynotes lately, but I really don't want to talk at people, I want to talk with them. And while, not surprising, much of what I was talking about in this session was, well, what I often talk about, my goals was to use the ideas I am most passionate about as a frame to get other people to talk about what they are most passionate about -- and how to start to think about creating schools that reflect those passions. (A perhaps unnecessary aside... the problem I have is that I really lay out what I believe about the big ideas of schooling when I do keynotes or workshops... and I hope I have had an evolution of those ideas, but it can be hard to radically change what I talk about.)

So the goal was to front load some of the ideas of reform as a framework for talking about school vision, and then to give the participants a chance to dream themselves. Once given a chance to dream, then the hard work starts -- what changes would schools have to make to achieve those dreams? How will you problematize those very good ideas? How will you build buy in for those ideas? And what happens if you actually achieve those goals? In all this, it is powerful for me (and I hope for the session participants) to be able to use the journey we have walked at SLA as a frame for those questions, but in the end, it matters more that participants frame those questions where they live and work and learn.

What struck me most about the session is what often strikes me in workshops I have done like this -- we have such incredible wisdom and expertise that often goes unrecognized and unhonored in our schools. People had powerful and meaningful ideas and they were able to see the changes necessary... and the pitfalls they face even if they were to "get their way." Teachers and administrators can, with a bit of a vision-push, see a clear and beautiful vision of the schools their communities need. And they can see the work necessary to get there. That's the most hopeful thing I can imagine.

So here's a question I have... and forgive me if it is presumptuous or in any way egoist. Something about today's session struck me as important... as real and powerful and resonant. (And yes, as I said, it's not wholly new. Somehow, the mashup of stuff I've done before felt really good.) And I really am somewhat consumed right now by the idea of 1,000 conversations all over the country where we dream big. Scaling EduCon is a powerful way to do that, but maybe there's an intermediary step.

If the work we have done at SLA, and some of the talks I have given about the ideas that unpin our school, is useful, perhaps the session I did today could be replicated. Is it possible that a school could bring together a group of teachers and students and parents and administrators and watch either the TEDxNYED or the #140 Conf talk and then tackle the questions from today's session (located in the slidedeck above) as the start of a larger dialogue about how to reimagine their school community? Because, in the end, a session at ISTE is great -- and I went to a bunch this year that inspired me -- but the work that needs to get done is on the ground where we live. More and more, I believe that grass roots reform, the hard work done by educators and students and parents, is our best bet to get the schools we need in this country. I want to know how to help... I am wondering if today, I stumbled into a way to be useful.

What do you think?