FIVE School Designs for Now, not "The Future"

My conclusion:  The school of the NOW will trump the best school of the future.

...and in the future I hope to look back and see how my thinking has changed!

Look, the internet has taught me nothing.  There's a statement for you.  Except I would argue that it hasn't taught you anything either.  It's what people are willing to share on the internet that has made all the difference and it's that single fact that leads me to believe that the future of schools is less important than what we can do right now.

I've spent more than enough time thinking, and reading, and dreaming.  Haven't you?  Don't you find sometimes that what tires you out most at work is not the politics, but the fact that if you take that risk you've been thinking of you're going to fail in front of a number of stake-holders who have a pretty low tolerance for failure?  I want to take some risks!

I'm part of a hive-community of innovative and academic education researchers who all appear to agree (because I choose to follow people that think like I do) that education has a problem.  I haven't yet come across a succinct 140 character summary of what that problem is though.  What is it about the current education system that is broken?  What is it that is driving us to a major system overhaul over the next thirty years?

My thought: the fact that we think we might one day do better.  Only I got to thinking that doing better now is what the problem is, and the biggest single problem I face from day to day is that you can't really think about education from a scientific point of view when you're actively engaged in the process doing it professionally.  Moreover, the analysis can not be done instantaneously, but must be measured over a significant number of years.  So how are we ever supposed to know that what we are doing now is going to be better for the future?

Besides, who has that kind of time when students are competing for schools, and jobs, now!?

If I were to set up a brand new system tomorrow within the confines of a universal education system in the Alberta region this is what I would be thinking:

1.  The school of now is socio-collaborative.

No teacher can provide enough instant feedback to meet the needs of a diverse and growing student body in their classroom.  A social network can, and does.  If students are publishing and choosing those they trust to embed into their "circles" then they can and will get feedback that is important and more frequent then they currently do.

They will protect themselves against those they know will seek to harm, and will seek out those they know will be honest while maintaining a large community of those that will simply remind them how beautiful and awesome they are.  They will also find people who will push them forward and provide them with the missing details.

Look at your social community... the place where you publish what is important to you.  You've already created it for yourself.  And sorry... you created it yourself.

2.  The school of now is diverse.

First thing that you do when you adopt a new technology is personalize.  Not a single one of you reading this does not have access to a computer which you yourself have determined the layout, organization and work-flow for doing what you do best.  It has been influenced largely by what you've seen others do, but bares a mark of your unique and important learning style and value system and should not be tampered with.

So quit trying to market the "one product for all" attitude we've put in in computer rooms and libraries across our nations and by gum move away from creating PROFILES on public computers.

3.  The school of now is portfolio based.

Information is no longer the limiter in our system.  The time it took to go to the card catalogue, look up the two books on sharks that are not yet checked out, read them for a report and then regurgitate the information is now being used watching YouTube videos of cats -- being eaten by sharks.

Students are already becoming CURATORS of their own libraries.  They are creating YouTube channels in their names, they are flooding Instagr.am with THEIR visions, and frankly, I WANT IN ON IT.  As their teacher I want to know what it is they're thinking and seeing, and watching and learning and by publishing it publicly I'd argue that they WANT me to know too.

Why are they doing this?  Because we want people to recognize what it is we know, we don't want them to TEST us on it.  We want to say:  I'm ready for you to see this now that I've tuned it to what it is I want to say... that's why we look so good on our profile pictures!

And HOW was it we all learned how to do it?  Well, I did it by pushing buttons, and my Dad does it by scanning eHow's and my students do it with a YouTube video and frankly I don't really care how they do it because the final project reveals a great proficiency at getting it done and if the Facebook Timeline has shown me anything:  it can be measured as growing and changing at a rate that is significant and on par with my peers.

4.  The school of now is open-sourced

If I can't change it, adopt it, innovate or create... I don't want it.  And it had better be free.  No wonder we all freak out when an app costs more than 99 cents... forget that... when an app is not free.  We will give up our rights to our information so long as we have the right to design, create and improve the software/hardware we are purchasing.

There is a long history of the glorification of hacking and piracy.  Not only is it mainstream in our current schools, it's the norm.  Being from a highly affluent school population the first question I field from middle schoolers interested in the new technology I employ is not, "what does it do" but "did you jail break it?"

People want to be disruptive.  It's that fascination with celebrity.  It's why we personalize, and if it's not open-sourced then I can't experiment with it...

I am not one to promote copyright infringement, purposeful or unintentional.  Which is why I am so incredibly for sharing, flipping, public-archiving, the collective commons, and any software that allows teachers and students to say, "here is what I'm doing, reading, liking, loving.... and frankly you should see it too."

5.  The school of now is time independent.

I've said it already.  Even in the best situations, you put 25 middle schoolers in a room together with the most engaging lesson and you're going to lose valuable time to hearing about what they love the most in life right NOW.  Themselves, or celebrity.  So why force those minutes to be anything else?

Like us, students need their coffee breaks, their afternoon jogs, their naps, their snacks, and their mediation.  More-so if they're not working towards things that they themselves understand as moving them forward.

Our job is to guide them forward, not to judge whether the path they take will be lucrative, because -- seriously -- no teacher can possibly know the future and what's going to be lucrative.  We have one job:  Communicate the gov't mandated curriculum and create a space where the resources that allow students to show proficiency are readily available and accessible.

And in the school of now, that's already been done.




So, given you agree with these 5 postulates I ask only this:

A)  Admit you're not an expert and stop worrying if others will see you as such if you start sharing your work.  The reason people like the internet is because people put stuff on it, if they're going to love learning, stop being so selfish and start publishing!

B)  Find a way to open up the curriculum as a hand-book for your students.  They'll ask you for directions.  Since you've already been there, at least you'll know the way.

C)  Let them socialize.  It's the only way they'll develop trust and resiliency.  Which is far more important for their success than proficiency; that comes with time, trust may never.

D)  Trash the schedule (okay this isn't a small thing, but it's so necessary) -- when that structure is gone you'll be reminded just how much of a non-expert you are and how much your colleagues can gain from your expertise, and how much you can gain from theirs.

E)  Take a good improv class.  Seriously.  It's the best way to become aware of how great it is to FAIL.

So I come back to it.  We're already in the school of the future... only no one has bothered to bring it all together in one place...  They're trying... just look at Kahn Academy, Edmodo, Discovery Learning, et cetera, et cetera, et al, ad nauseum...

Imagine with me then what would happen if all that time on a social network was spent by people sharing, liking, publishing and creating ways of doing learning better.  A place where a student can say, "I need to learn about Dalton's Law and I need at least three different options for how to do it, and 9567 people have already viewed, vetted, and selected the top 5 choices for that lesson.

And all you had to do as a teacher was to encourage, assess, and respond...

Because that's the school of now, and it's way better than worrying about the future.

Open Space Modernation

Modernation = modern moderation; moving the moveable to make room for the masses to create space for the new generation's nation.

I've found that not having furniture in my new space has allowed for quick readjustments and strong collaborative work. The students pictured have made their own large group work circles and have not strayed from these areas for over forty minutes. Just an observation.

It's true at times the room echoes as I have "take the stage" as-it-were. At the same time the loud work of collaboration takes place.

It's not the rows that matter, but what you're doing with the students in them.

Authentic Yearning

Click Here to FF to the Media!

Every year our drama program struggles to create a space for students to use film media to convey their stories, and examine their processes.

Problem 1:  They don't want to film at school.  There's no where good.
Problem 2:  They don't want to story-board.  What's the point?  With digital technology we can just take one long shot and splice them together afterward
Problem 3:  They don't want to tell a story.  It's more fun for us to look at ourselves making silly faces on camera than stick to a script.

Been there?

With the advent of an iPad classroom, and the willingness to open up a project to something beyond getting a mark here is what has happened, and how:

The Story

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Problem 1:  Mandate a project with a note home from parents that no students are allowed to film at home.  That's work to be done in class.

Problem 2:  Create a project where you charge them for the film that they use.  For my students I charge them $0.80 per minute of digital film.  I don't really charge them, but I make them keep track of it in a budget.  At the end of the project their mark is scaled between a ratio of how well they were able to meet the bench-marks (good story telling, coherent story, likeability) and how much it cost.  They are to make 10 minute films.  They can be shorter, but must not be one second longer after editing.


Problem 3:  Examine the mystery genre.  Split them into groups of four or five and then lead them to these two sites:
a) The 5 Deadly Sins of Amateur Film Making
b) The film techniques of Alfred Hitchcock

Having approached each of the problems in this fashion start them off looking at Problem 3 with the understanding that this is a problem of the past that they are certainly more than talented enough to over come.  Give them time and the resources to investigate these sites in their groups and then create some time to share the more interesting details they discovered.

Then announce the project: "We're going to be hosting the School 10 Minute Film Festival, and your films will be featured just like at an industry Gala Event".  The look on their faces when they realized that this project was something that mimicked the film industry was one of excitement.  As soon as I stopped the pitch the creativity started.

The Yearning

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Quick note:  All media appearing below belongs to and was posted online (without encouragement) by my Grade 9 students.

 What happened in our class is that as soon as they understood there was a budget they started to come up with other things they should charge for.  For instance, several students are excellent editors, but other students have no idea where to begin with film editing.  So they wanted to charge for editing time from the experts in the Career Technology and Society class.  They knew of other actors they'd like to include in their project, but they needed to charge a rate to get them in their movie.

Mostly they wanted this project to mirror the things that actually happen for film-makers. Including and not limited to creating their own movie posters and the following "teaser-trailers". Stay tuned, we plan on streaming their videos!

I can't guarantee that this will happen every time this project is pitched, but for these guys it was working.

Finally, tell them that because this is a festival format they must meet certain deadlines and be able to speak to the work they are doing at the end of the project.

For the last two weeks they kicked me out of class so they could work toward their project goals.  They approached me only for permission to film in certain areas of our school (just like film-makers acquire licences they had to get licences).  And there are posters, trailers, and just a whole lot of excitement surrounding these films, because they want to do something valuable and authentic.

The Man in the Shadows (Teaser) from Grant on Vimeo.

I want you to participate in their film festival too, so I'm inviting you now to follow us on Twitter, keep up to date with this blog, and watch for a date (following Feb 7 when we will live-cast our event).

Peace.

If all else FAILS improvise.

Today was the culmination of a project that (though not ill conceived) was certainly bred from a trial and error hodgepodge of good intention and the type of foresight you might expect from a gnat.  Gnats have foresight, I'm sure of it, it's just not very much I presume.  I did not look this up on wikipedia so please don't quote me on that.

Anyway...  Our journey along the path of mystery-story-telling-for-grade-6-science-students came to an end today, and that WAS planned for, and deliberate and rather last minute as school ends for the season come Friday.

Last week we used technology to create, manage, and curate EVIDENCE that students would provide to those who did not participate in the project.  The non-participators (heretofore referred to as: investigators) would then take said-evidence and try and solve the mystery story that was created.

Things needed to succeed?

We successful stored date, properly catalogued it but due to (again) this boiling pot of good intention and gnat-sight we have not yet found an effective or efficient method for retrieving data from a class set of iPads.  We leave our data at the whim of the Apple Cart users.  (aside: we call it the "Apple Cart" because Apple makes iPads and we put them on one big rechargeable wagon.  Clever right?)  I digress.

Today we arrived raring to go, only to find that our data had been wiped for an unanticipated software upgrade.

Four weeks of work finally stored and it was all for naught... or was it?

What to do.  I have 20 sixth grade students ready to participate in a project they have been waiting patiently to close for four weeks, and another 20 sixth grade students who have lost their proverbial mittens and didn't know where to find them.

This is where good structure, and a bit of flexibility comes in.

Because the students spent four structured weeks building the stories they had timelines, story-boards, documents, and mind-maps of the work they had done.  They were intimately familiar with the work that went into building an evidence bank (that was sadly wiped) and they were able to tell a good story.

Digital Curation

With minimal preparation they were able to welcome in a flurry of eager investigators and lead them through a story our drama students had carefully crafted collectively and collaboratively.  In a style similar to 20 questions the investigators were allowed to ask about the evidence they would have seen and then report their assumptions and conclusions to an online Google Form that would help them document their thinking.

After one failed attempt (which we applauded due to the fact that it inevitably led to successful learning so we could just as easily have labeled it the more PC "practice attempt") the students were able to (within 30 minutes) visit two different groups, hear two different mystery stories, and document two different conclusions with absolutely no direct intervention from resident adult "expert".

Things that were lost: physical data
Things that were gained: an adequate end to a project, and a set of data illustrating student thinking, and students capable of being flexible in how and when they show their learning.  They did a great job cleaning up after the mess that had been created.

Cleaning Up

One important item that I have purposefully left until now to reference is that there was one group who did not use their data.  Rather than trust the school "blanket" of iPads they chose to use their own personal devices (privately because of course they wouldn't want to get caught having their own personal devices out on school time) and so when they arrived today they had their entire project organized, itemized, and digitized for dissemination.  Suffice it to say, our investigators were over-joyed to be allowed to interact with this group.

I have, myself, compiled my own digital portfolio of work on my own personal device.  As you may have already realized I am working at incorporating a strong and appropriate use of modern technology in the drama classroom, and documenting processes and strategies for making work -- well -- work.

What follows is a short list of links and apps that have helped make the process easier and more "expressive".

My digital booklet showing the students' good work:
http://ebooks.scribblepress.com/book.php?g=LXLMZ4ZN

The app used to create the book on the iPad:

The app used to create annotations in the pictures shown (and published):

The apps are both free - and I like them.

10 Step Graphology (or; what does my writing say about me?)

(disclaimer: this is my first attempt at blogging using the google app on the iPad2. Thinking about the content to follow; I really should be writing this by hand...)

Alright, today I witnessed thirty minutes of dedicated, controlled and productive group work for 20 Grade 6 students in WIDE open space followed by another thirty minutes with three teachers available to 50+ of the same.

If you're wondering how it came about, or where we're going then read-on, because that's the intent of this post.

Forensic Science is a small unit in Grade 6 for Alberta students. They are required to demonstrate that they can observe and make inferences regarding things like fingerprints, graphology, chromatography, foot-print-ology (that's the technical term, right?)

Drama is a course we invented for the students this year to prepare them to make a choice about what arts stream they would like to follow in Grade 7 throug 9. @bar_qu (the science teacher) and myself have worked the past couple of weeks to use our 90 minutes of drama time, and the science classes to allow the students the space to "create" their own mysteries.

My last cryptic post illustrated the details on how to roll out something like that. Today is to tell you about the opportunities that present themselves when the schedule of two partnered teachers happen to overlap.

With less than 20 minutes of planning we took one combine science class of about thirty students, with another twenty drama students, brought them to a wide open area and set the, to task decoding a mystery.

• First: Intro the idea (People don't write the same)
• Second: Indicate what some important observations of handwriting might be
• Third: Wake them up again.
• Fourth: Have the available teachers sign a giant mobile whiteboard away from the students, and then have each teacher write the same sentence.
• Fifth: Challenge the students (who wrote nothing down because this is all so easy) to match the signature to the sentence.
• Sixth: until they can explain the observations that led to their inference do not allow them to work on the premade practice sheets.
• Seventh: Do not reveal the correct answer, simply provide students with the handouts and explain they'll have one chance to get the answer after they work on the practice sheets.
• Eighth: Let the students work (wherever, and with whomever they wish)
• Ninth: Have students submit their final conclusions on the handwriting (ideally through a google form, or other online repository)
• Tenth: For the students who are writing the "Snow White" mystery, (see last post) allow them to tailor their work toward building their evidence package.

Drama students, like scientists must spend time observing, creating, and communicating ideas. They must work collaboratively but ultimately they have to stand on their own to demonstrate individual statements of knowledge and skill. Can we justify the time spent? I think so. Can the process be refined and improved? Absolutely. Are we proud of the results! Yes. Are the students engaged?

Well in answer to that question, I point out that in one wide open classroom with over fifty eleven year olds, only one sheet of a two-page handout each student received was left behind. That in-and-of-itself is representative of what I consider to be a near-ubiquitous buy-in by the students indicating that they've found the intrinsic value of a practice sheet... But that's just an inference.