Generation YES Blog

It’s been two weeks since the Constructing Modern Knowledge 2008 summer institute in Manchester, NH, and I’m still processing it. CMK08 was an exhilarating learning experience, both as a participant, an observer, and as part of the team making it happen. You don’t often get to have all those experiences at once!

Preparation
The goal of the conference was to offer a way for educators to spend time being a learner and using technology in deep, rich, constructive ways. A way to “walk the talk” of taking off the teacher hat and exploring what makes learning with technology different. There was no way this could be another session-session-session conference, or even a typical “hands-on” workshop.

So participating in the planning of the event was an eye-opener. How do you create a climate where people feel supported, but will still take risks? What “stuff” do you need? How to structure a day with enough time for working on projects, learning new things, collegial interaction, and sleep. The man in charge, Gary Stager, has had plenty of experience planning these events, but I’ve had almost none. So listening to him talk about how this could work, drawing on 25 years of experience was informative. I learned a lot before the event even started. In the end, each day consisted of a short opening framework from Gary, one guest speaker, and the rest of the time spent working on individual and group projects. Plus evening social events!

The stuff
OK, we brought a lot of stuff. About 100 books that ranged from academic classics to books that are great for classrooms and students. Here’s the list. Lots of books about the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education - they are all beautiful, with amazing care taken to represent children’s work and discuss it thoughtfully. Two large suitcases of Lego and robotics materials. Lots of articles and how to guides. And then when we got to Manchester, we went to WalMart and Staples for more. We bought bubbles, marshmallows, bubble gum, a whiffle ball and bat, a printer, color pencils, crayons, art supplies, an a bunch of other stuff. What’s it all for? Read on…

More stuff
Once we got to the hotel to set up, we found 10 more boxes. Several companies had donated constructive, creative software and materials for our participants. Tech4Learning sent full suites of their creativity tools, including a whole Claymation Kit. LCSI sent MicroWorlds EX Robotics and Inspiration sent InspireData. Make magazine sent a case of Make and Craft magazines. Sibelius/M-Audio sent 3 keyboards and music composition software for us to use. By late Sunday night we had everything ready.

Sunday excursion
In the midst of all this, Gary took several early arrivals on a tour of Boston, his college home town (Berklee School of Music). They went to the MIT Museum and did a guided walking tour of the Freedom Trail. Once back from that, Gary had to rush back to WalMart to buy rice for some mysterious reason - more about that later.

Getting started
Monday morning started the institute. Everyone started to arrive and settle down, install new software and meeting and greeting. The introductions were amazing. People had come from all over the country, and two from Israel and Khartoum. We had kindergarten to high school teachers, math, science, art, administrators, public and private schools, tech coordinators, district — just about every combination of educators you could imagine. After some opening words, we brainstormed some ideas for projects - dancing clowns, musical sculptures, a video or simulation about the immigrant experience, a boat, a kaleidoscope and more. Then people grouped themselves on a project. My job was to float around and facilitate, connect people with resources, open boxes of stuff, find clay or eyeballs or pipe cleaners or debug programs or whatever.

Some groups took off right away. I spent a lot of time with a group doing a video using the Claymation kit and the Frames animation software. We set up the green screen and brainstormed ideas. Some of the ideas worked, some didn’t, and when we did a test with the software, we had our first AHA moment. Working with our test pictures and the software lead to another, wholly unexpected discovery and that lead to an even better idea. Our story took on a new and different shape before our eyes because we allowed it to and we had time. If we had rigidly stuck to the original plan and schedule, it wouldn’t have happened.

Someone started making turtles out of the clay. Why turtles? Not really sure how that happened. But suddenly they were the stars of the movie. Somebody said, “it’s hard to line the turtles up to the previous frame” and someone pointed to the onion-skinning button, and that knowledge was passed quickly around the table. Then someone else sat down with one of the keyboards and composed a song to go along with the movie. We didn’t have to sit through workshops on music software, frame animation techniques, or turtle carving. The idea of “collaboration through the air” that Gary had talked about that morning had just happened.

But I wasn’t supposed to just help one group! So I walked around and asked people what they were working on. Two or three groups were going strong. But I found some people just “playing” with software. Hmm…. that wasn’t supposed to happen, where were their groups? One of the groups had disbanded, some were sitting at the same table, but not working on the same thing. So, I asked our fearless leader, Gary, what to do - should I try to get people working in groups? No, he says, let people approach things in their own way. Offer them help but let them decide to participate. So although this is against my A-type to-do list mentality, I have to trust him.

A couple of people off in the corner are clearly not working on a project. I ask them what they are doing and they say they are doing lesson plans for fall. I encourage them to join a project and learn about some of these tools, to have the experience of learning. No, they say, this is a good time away from the office for them to work on these plans, but they promise they’ll start working on something later in the afternoon. They look at me and smile, clearly hoping I’ll go away and leave them alone. I do.

Some people are just doing amazing stuff right out of the box. What is the difference?

Sarah Sutter from Maine put it like this, “I figured someone would lead us through some exercises, show us some plans, maybe discuss how best to implement these new (to me) tools in the classroom, and I’d receive enough information to work with it later. Nope. Gary told us to take off our teacher hats, and he meant it. From what I observed, the quicker one transitioned from teacher to learner, the better things went.”

The Rice Sculpture and the Texas Boys
On Sunday, the two “boys” from Texas went on the tour of the MIT museum where they saw an exhibit of kinetic sculptures. They came back with an idea to recreate the moving rice sculpture in Lego, and even improve it by replacing the hand crank with motors. This was the cause of the late-night WalMart rice run. Be sure to read Paul Wood’s and Scott Floyd’s blog reflections with pictures and videos about their re-creation of this sculpture.

Scott Floyd - Drowning in rice and other deep subjects
Paul Wood - Constructing modern knowledge

By Monday afternoon, the first version was done - and it was fascinating. It had an organic movement to it that was both creepy and compelling to watch. This was more than a nice piece of engineering, it was beautiful. That was the first piece for me in what turned out to be my big takeaway from the week - the part that esthetics plays in construction of knowledge.

Closure
Each day ended with a circle where everyone could wrap up their impressions of the day. Typically I’m leery of anything that smacks of touchy-feely kumbayah theatrics. But it was important to bring the meta-analysis back to the day. People had allowed themselves to take their “teacher hats” off for a time, now it was time to step back and think about the meaning behind what was happening to them as learners and what it meant for how they might change their own management of student learning environments. More than a few people expressed how uncomfortable it felt to be “thrown off the deep end” and told to JUST DO something. But then almost all said that the feeling of moving past that discomfort and frustration was meaningful and necessary. Gary had mentioned watching for this “mouth-up frustration” as a good sign. But what’s the right balance of frustration and hand-holding? Obviously, in this group, there were as many answers as there were personalities. What does this imply for students?

What I learned
I know I’ll have more to say about this, but to wrap up this reflection, here’s some of what I learned from Constructing Modern Knowledge.

• A workshop plan needs a lot of space for people to adjust it to their own needs. Gary expressed this by not having a set agenda, but “appointments” - lunch was noonish, the speakers started only after they visited with the participants and saw the projects that were underway. The work was first priority, not the schedule.
• Some people walk in the door ready to hand their hearts and minds over to you, some have agendas you will never understand.
• Uncertainty and frustration signals growth and learning about to happen. On the teacher side, it’s tempting to step in right at that moment to “fix it” — which is exactly the wrong thing to do (assist, answer questions, yes… do it for them, no)
• Having more than enough “stuff” let people focus on what they wanted to do, not just what they could do. It became inspiration, not a recipe.
• You have to have enough time to let the process work. People are different, but I believe this unconventional experience worked for the vast majority of participants. It also signals the kinds of learning environments that work for kids.

There was so much more to talk about — the guest speakers, so many other very cool projects, the role of esthetics in learning, but this is enough for today!

To close, please enjoy a video by Michael Steinberg, shot, edited and presented at CMK08!

Sylvia

In my recent post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, I grouped PD: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research. One of the reasons I grouped the 6 types in this particular way is that it situates the professional development.

To me, one of the most powerful ideas in learning is the theory of situated learning. This term was first used by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. I first read this book in grad school, and it has colored everything I’ve learned since. Situated learning happens in Communities of Practice, defined by Wenger on his site as, “… groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Community of practice is a term often used when we talk about teacher professional development. But in fact, I think often it is confused with community of interest. Community of practice is where you DO something. Community of interest doesn’t have to be. When we chat with friends and Twitter buddies about teaching and how to do it better, or what tools to use, that’s a community of interest, not a community of practice.

The primary community of practice for most teachers is within the confines of their own classroom. The participants are the teacher and students. Sometimes other people visit, but these visits are few and short. While teachers may participate in other communities in a professional capacity, for most, the classroom is the only setting for their professional practice.

Traditional forms of professional development remove the teacher from their classroom and attempt to create a community of practice made up of teachers and technology experts. This community exists only for the purpose of imparting information from the experts to the teachers. While there is certainly a place for collegial discussion and access to professional improvement, it is not unreasonable that teachers often reject transparent efforts to force them into participation.

Wenger, in discussing designs for learning inside communities of practice, makes the point that they, “…cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and nonlearners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute.”

Common recommendations for technology professional development include that teachers be given more time for independent practice without fear of embarrassment, to watch expert practitioners, go to conferences and workshops, or participate in online learning communities.

The problem is, these attempts to fix technology professional development only serve to reinforce the separation between the teacher learning new skills and real change in classroom practice. In a book chapter called Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse? Mark Schlager and Judith Fusco look at the use of Tappped-In, an online teacher community, for professional development. They say it “… tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice.” Mark Schlager is director of Tapped In, so this is not just someone who doesn’t like newfangled online PD.

In short, mere discussion about practice does not create a community of practice.

Even if a great workshop excite teachers about new possibilities and tools, the teachers are removed from the successful context and sent back to the classroom to fend for themselves. They are expected to use their new skills without colleagues or experts present. One-on-one coaching that provides in-class mentors is expensive and rarely available. The technology specialist is not always there, and the “teacher-down-the-hall” that many schools depend on for technology help has their own class to teach. Online teacher communities can only take place outside of classroom time, too late for any intervention or advice to be useful. Maybe you can Twitter out a call for help, but that’s too unreliable to count on in crunch time.

So as teachers struggle alone in their classroom with questions, issues, and problems, valuable teachable moments are missed.

In an interview discussing what changes need to take place in classrooms to allow project-based learning, Seymour Papert says, “What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the kids and with the kids. Unless you do that, you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.” (Interview on Edutopia site - Seymour Papert: Project-based learning)

So you know where I’m going with this. You have to look at the whole classroom and maximize the chance that teachers will learn alongside students. It has to be the norm, not the exception. By looking to students as co-learners in the effort to use technology, teachers end up learning more themselves. It takes a willingness to take risks in front of students and to model an attitude of openness to new ideas. I think seeing learning with technology happen through the eyes, hands, and screen of their students is the only way teachers will really understand the potential.

Situating professional development in the classroom is, I believe, the only way that technology will really be integrated into every classroom.

Sylvia

As some smart person once said, you have to count what matters to make what matters count.

Professional development plans often have “measurable outcomes”, accountability, and other such means to prove that professional development is successful. But very often, the evidence of success is simply “showing up”. You go to a workshop or conference, you get credit. It doesn’t matter if the workshop was boring or if you knit a sweater instead of participating. The measure of success unfortunately has little to do with the intended outcome.

As Mike Maloy pointed out in the comments on my recent post, What is Professional Development?, some of this is a matter of finding better ways to document what’s happening. What is the evidence that any professional development works. In the big picture, you hope that professional development makes a teacher better, and a better teacher will produce better results in the classroom. How do you measure better results in the classroom? Saying there is a certain amount of disagreement here may be the understatement of the century.

What Matters is Your Vision
When we work with schools as part of a grant, there is often an evaluation design that seeks to measure the effectiveness of the grant. When we sit down to talk about what to evaluate, we always advocate that the evaluation actually measures all the outcomes you would like to see. Not just the usual suspects that are easy to measure, like test scores.

What’s your biggest dream? What would like to shout to the clouds when you are finished?

Isn’t the real vision that you hope to see kids more engaged, teachers who feel that they are doing a better job, parents who see that their kids education is more relevant? So why not ask those questions. There’s nothing wrong with combining test scores with a survey that asks questions that go to the heart of the matter. If you don’t ask what you really want to know, the opportunity is lost forever.

It’s often dismissed as “touchy-feely” to include subjective questions and measures, and yet, this is often exactly what we hope happens when we implement a new project. Somehow, affective and subjective have become a dirty words.

Blending PD Models to Produce Measurable Results
In my recent post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, I grouped PD into these types: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research. The reason I these particular groups is that 1) they situate the PD and 2) illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of each model at creating evidence of success.

Some of the more informal PD types are notoriously bad at creating measurable results, because documenting them undermines the reason they are interesting and easy. Imagine documenting your Twitter interactions, as an extreme example, or counting your Diigo friends and getting a “score” based on friends and how many bookmarks you post. That’s a sure fire way to stop participation!

But sometimes it really makes sense. Blogging, for example, is something that creates “evidence”. As I outlined in the post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, combining the informal practice of blogging with the discipline of action research can give you the best of both.

Say for example that someone blogged every day and gave a “score” for how they felt the day went. For example, a teacher could rate their own feeling of satisfaction that the lesson went well, or how well behaved the class was, or any other item that might be important. A simple scoring system from 1-5 would end up giving you data. After a time, you could extract data from the blog. Maybe you’ll find that scores are always better on Fridays, or worse after a 3 day weekend. To delve deeper, you could try to connect events actually recorded in the blog with the scores. You may notice that every day you go to Starbucks, it’s a better day. You might keep track of greeting the class in a certain way, or using an active whiteboard, or turning up the air conditioning. Just because the criteria is subjective doesn’t mean it can’t be measured.

What matters is counting what YOU think will make a difference, and proving it by measuring what YOU think counts.

Next: Why situating PD is critical

Sylvia

Just announced, a fantastic adventure in computers and learning for educators this summer - the Constructing Modern Knowledge Institute. I’m excited to be participating in this event.

Constructing Modern Knowledge will be a minds-on summer institute for educators July 28-31, 2008 at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, NH. In addition to four days full of computer-rich learning adventures for creative educators, Constructing Modern Knowledge features amazing guest speakers, a BBQ at a minor league baseball game and a night on the town in nearby Boston.

Since knowledge is a consequence of experience, Constructing Modern Knowledge, is designed to create a context for remarkable learning experiences. Instead of spending a conference listening to an endless series of speakers, Constructing Modern Knowledge, enables participants to spend time working on hands-on projects, learning how to create minds-on classrooms, and interacting with educational pioneers and colleagues from around the world.

• Alfie Kohn - one of education’s most provocative speakers and bestselling authors
• Bob Tinker - director of the Concord Consortium, inventor of science probes for learning, and a foremost authority on technology for math and science education
• Cynthia Solomon - co-developed the Logo programming language with Seymour Papert
• Peter Reynolds - beloved artist, software designer and children’s book author

The rest of our team has expertise in creativity, multimedia authoring, student empowerment, programming, robotics and a whole lot more. I’m honored to be part of this team - this is so in the GenYES spirit and I hope to see some GenYES teachers there!

Hotel accommodation is affordable and Manchester, NH has one of the most convenient and affordable airports in the United States. Constructing Modern Knowledge is also within a reasonable drive of most cities in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states.

I can’t wait to spend four days working on creative projects with like-minded educators.

Space is limited, so register today!

Sylvia

“The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.” - Seymour Papert

The second annual Constructivist Celebration @ NECC 2008 in San Antonio is sold out!

I didn’t even get a chance to post it here. That’s why I’m almost afraid to write this - don’t hate me! We sent an announcement email to the list of people who had signed up on the Constructivist Consortium website, and emails to the customers of the six member companies. It got out on Twitter, too, and the event instantly filled up. Seriously, that fast.

The good news is that it’s going to be a great event celebrating creative, constructive software use by educators from around the world.

Sylvia

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a podcast about technology professional development. The interviewer was Matt Vilano, editor at THE Journal. Matt said afterwards that it went so well that it might become an article, and sure enough, it has!

Five on Five: A Dialogue on Profession Development

A quintet of educators gathers to sound off on what works and what doesn’t in the ongoing mission to train teachers to use technology in classroom instruction.

Thanks Matt for turning an audio interview with 5 people on the phone into a great article! Plus, they did caricatures of us — kinda cool.

If you are an auditory learner try this:

Five on Five: Professional Development Podcast

Thanks also to the other podsters - Kristin Hokanson, Jim Gates, Bob Keegan and Cathy Groller. It was so much fun we kept talking after the time was up!

Sylvia

There is a vast difference between being creative and creating something.

• You can write a creative report about bridge building, or design a bridge that holds weight.
• You can make a creative video about careers in programming, or write a computer program.
• You can build a creative website with links to sites about solar heating, or construct a working model of a solar panel.
• You can blog creatively about saving the environment, or you can start a movement to do it.

Building a real bridge or writing a computer program or constructing a solar panel or committing time to a cause is constructing something real. It is a different educational experience than reporting about something. Both are valuable learning experiences. Both should be present in a well-rounded education.

However, when we talk about Web 2.0, the focus is often on information gathering, sharing and presenting. This short-sighted focus on information and reporting misses the most crucial part of learning — constructing. It is an incomplete picture of what we want students to learn and be able to do.

Life is not a report.

Sylvia

The other day I blogged about “Gizmo High” - a teacher’s opinion piece of how technology was forced on his school to the detriment of learning. As I read some of the reaction to the story and to my blog, I realized that I wasn’t clear about what the point of my post was. I “buried the lead” as they warn beginning journalists not to do. In fact, I buried it so deep it was completely missing.

So here’s my point. Forcing technology on a school won’t work and will likely result in resistance and resentment. To match that mistake, teachers, the community, and even students can resist change simply because it’s different. There are so many ways for technology integration to go wrong, and this story simply illustrated one of them.

So where’s the magic balance? What’s the secret of success? I thought a lot about it and have a theory to throw out here in the form of a chart.

• The horizontal axis represents collaboration and goes from the most authoritarian system (one person or group has complete say in what happens) to maximum consensus.
• The vertical axis represents control - by which I mean steering towards a vision, sort of like having a rudder. It goes from the bottom, where there is absolutely no vision about what to do to the top where someone (or a group) has a perfectly formed vision of the future.

I’ve labeled the quadrants with what I think happens with these combinations.

1. Resistance, resentment (top left) - this is where Gizmo High falls. Somebody with an extreme vision forced it on everyone else. That vision was something like “the one with the most goodies wins.”
2. Successful change (top right) - where everyone would like to be. The perfect storm of a shared, guiding vision and just enough process and consensus building to get everyone on board as it happens.
3. Paralysis (bottom right) - When there is so much consensus building going on that nothing of significance ever happens, it means that the vision is missing. The engine is running but there’s no one at the rudder.
4. Status quo (bottom left) - There’s not even a vision of change and there are plenty of people who feel passionate about keeping things just as they are.

Successful change is more than just gaining consensus from the participants about “what they want” without first establishing a vision of change. People can’t choose a future they’ve never seen before. Many times I think technology integration is considered successful if the teachers “feel comfortable” with the technology. Often this means that they are using technology to do the same old things with new gizmos.

So where does the vision look like? I can’t tell you — that’s exactly the point. My solution wouldn’t work for you, because that’s just a recipe for a “Quadrant 1″ style Gizmo High disaster. No one can come in and tell you what your vision of the future should be; you can’t follow someone else’s dream.

But you can stand on the shoulders of giants. One place I find my inspiration is by reading great thinkers about education like Dr. Seymour Papert. He painted a picture in the very early days of computers of how students could program computers, instead of computers programming children. He worked to create a programming language for children that would directly connect to math in a natural way. This language is still in use in schools around the world today and is the backbone of new ones like MicroWorlds and Scratch. His constructivist theories of how students learn are the basis of the One Laptop Per Child Initiative.

But don’t take my word for it. Read him, read others, and find your own.

Sylvia

At TCEA 2008, Tim Wilson of the Apple Distinguished Educators interviewed me about the Generation YES approach to professional development. The 14 minute podcast is on the Apple Learning Interchange site.

We discussed how to help teachers quickly move to student-centered uses of technology. Many professional development sessions focus on teaching tool features, yet this method can sometimes result in less teacher confidence as they become overwhelmed. By teaching students, or teaching students and teachers together, teachers can see how quickly students learn technology and that their fearlessness overcomes many obstacles. Teacher fears need not translate to student fears, but it’s hard for teachers to believe that until they see it with their own eyes.

Sylvia