A Learning Vacation

Left HNL today to spend a week outside Seattle on Bainbridge Island where I will be working with a great group of educators on preparing classes for this fall's launch of the Global Online Academy. 

We have the big challenge of working to design instruction that takes the best of what we do at our schools and translates that to an on-line environment.  I think that one of the greatest strengths of independent schools are the communities of learners that we cultivate, and the strong personal relationships that are forged which both encourage and facilitate enduring learning.  So how are we going to translate that into an on-line environment in which we may never meet our students face to face?  

Some of the answers to this major question will come from a commitment to engaging student voice and student creation in our courses.  There are many, many, excellent sources of information-- content delivery-- on the internet (Khan Academy, iTunes U, etc).  Where GOA has the potential to be unique, and truly innovative, is in fostering the relationships that allow for learning beyond the gates of our schools, in a truly global and on-line environment. 

I'm excited to see what the baby steps we will be taking tomorrow, as a group, to work on this project.  I know that we have just three (and a bit) days together, so we will have to go from baby steps to running pretty quickly.  I am going to spend the rest of my evening polishing the goals and outline of my course thanks to a great template provided by Ms. Darcy Iams. 

The Co-Creation of a Biology Class

We are in the middle of the "end of the semester rush" around here.  (We have final exams after the Winter Break.)  This final exam period for me has been challenging because I am closing up my Spanish classes and helping them prepare to put their best foot forward on the final or final project, but I also have one foot into the second semester as I am going to be teaching some biology classes starting next week.

Starting next week!?  I am no stranger to the first day of class jitters and new challenges are always a way to make going to work exciting, but this feels like a big challenge for me.  I majored in Biology and Spanish (it even says Biology first on my degree) and I even taught biology for a few years at my last job.  Here are some major differences between this and my previous biology teaching experience:

1. When I last taught Biology, I taught seniors, this time I will be teaching freshman. 
2. Now, I know more about teaching, pedagogy, learning. 
3. Before, I was the only teacher at the school teaching the course.  Here I will be part of a five person sub-department. 
4. The course I taught was one semester cell, molecular, genetics, on semester human anatomy and physiology.  This class is one semester cell, molecular, genetics and one semester ecology and evolution.  And I am teaching the ecology and evolution semester.

Of these four major differences, the first three are soothing.  I am trading two classes of Spanish 1 for two classes of Freshman Bio-- it is essentially the same population of students, I know them and what works for them as learners.  The colleagues that I will be working with are deeply impressive and inspiring; a diverse group of scientists and educators who are passionate about making this course a great experience for all of the freshman (and supporting me to that end). 

So really, the only element of this class that has me wondering how I will do is the issue of content.  I have "covered" these topics but am energized and scared to think of making these broad and essential themes of science into an inquiry based semester-long program that starts next week.  But then again, it really is putting me in a good position because I can meet the students where they are, learn about what information, biases, curiosities, interests and questions they bring to these themes, and then we can co-create the class together.  Fun!  Terrifying! Exciting!

Image from http://marcoivan.glogster.com/

Online Translator Discussion

The following are some of my reflections after a department meeting about this topic.

As a language teachers, we have always found some satisfaction in the fact that electronic translators are imperfect. Our thinking around these tools has always been that they make terrible mistakes and if students use them to translate their own work, we will know because the result is often mumbo jumbo.

We started the meeting by watching this short video on Google Translate:

 
We also brought up Jibbigo in our conversations. This is a tool that does voice to voice translation on iPhones and is pretty remarkable.

Basically, things are changing. As translators get more and more sophisticated, students are able to produce more accurate work with the aid of these tools. While teachers can still detect their use by knowing a student's level and writing style, there is less and less mumbo jumbo. Don't get me wrong, they are still not perfect-- as a colleague pointed out in our meeting, language is interesting because of the baggage that words have. She used the example of vacation in English and vacances in French. The words translate, but they mean such a different thing to the people who speak them.

So the conversation could go two ways:

1) How can we continue to communicate the ineffectiveness of these tools and work to "catch" our students using them inappropriately?

or

2) How can we use the increasing sophistication of these tools to closely examine what we believe is essential to the work we do?

They are connected questions, but the latter seems much more compelling. There were lots of interesting comments on the topic and the conversation was thought provoking. We talked about why kids turn to these tools: the structure of assignments, the different motivation levels in students, and the mounting pressure for perfection in all realms of their lives. One colleague spoke eloquently about literacy in general and how different levels of reading and writing ability in the first language impact work in the second language.

We also talked about how, perhaps, this discussion is analogous to the ones that happened in math departments at the dawn of hand held calculators calculators.  Perhaps not a perfect analogy, but it is interesting.

Our take away seemed to be that we would like to produce a document, a philosophy (including "rules"?) about these tools to facilitate our conversations with students. (In the early hours of the morning I imagined a short PSA video. . . we'll see if that comes to be.)

The central themes would be that our classes are about helping students fine tune their ability to communicate that which is meaningful to them in linguistically and culturally appropriate terms. There are many tools to support this learning, (textbooks, dictionaries, on-line translators, friends, etc. . .) but our main concern is not the content that resides in these tools, but, rather, the content that is honestly generated by the hearts and minds of our students.

Dear Students

Queridos,

I hope you will be and do your best, not just in my class, but in life. Your talents amaze and surprise me every day. Your generosity, energy and enthusiasm for the work that we do inspires me to try to challenge you. You inspire me to teach and learn from you with kindness and care. When you stumble, I hope to help you get back up and try again. When you succeed, it is my deepest joy to watch you soar. When things are hard, I hope you will tell me. When things are too easy, I hope you tell me that too.

I hope you speak Spanish sometime in your life (today, tomorrow, in ten years) and feel glad that you can communicate something that is meaningful to you in a way that can be shared. And if you don't remember any Spanish, that's okay, because an easy and kind heart will help you get by in any environment and culture. Be the good people that you are. You are meaningful to me.

Un abrazo,

Señora

Environment (Physical and Intellectual) Informing Culture

For our leadership class this week we read a selection from Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. The selection that we read had to do with circumstance and environment impacting behavior. Gladwell used the story of the renovation of the New York City Subway system as an example. Basically, when it is clean and free of graffiti, and people aren't skipping fairs, crime goes down. Gladwell points to research that suggests that despite our sense that personality, or even an individual's lived life experiences-- how they were raised-- is central in determining how people act, that environment and circumstance trumps all. He goes so far as to write:

"A child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood with a good family." p. 167-168

As a parent, this is both terrifying and a little heartening. It is a notion that I have heard before from proponents of boarding schools. Surround your kids with amazing people in a great environment, and the children will thrive. It makes sense that if important values are truly lived in the community, they will impact the behavior of people. This reminds me of seeing a headmaster stop and pick up gum wrappers walking across campus. What an important message that type of behavior sends to members of the community, particularly the students.

I am wondering how can this insight be applied to the intellectual environment in a school. We also read a selection from Shaping School Culture by Deal and Peterson. They offered an examination of the power of ritual, ceremony and symbolism in school culture. They explored the notion of "living logos"-- leaders who represent values or meaning by their actions in their work. "The symbolism of intellectual engagement" manifests itself as leaders who read and engage with the research in their field, philosophy, or education in general, and then share their thinking. Doesn't this serve a similar function to painting subway trains and picking up trash on campus? If school leaders foster an environment of continual learning by modeling that themselves, they create a what Gladwell might call a "circumstance" of intellectual engagement. It seems plausible that then this would have a positive impact on student learning.

(Photo Credit: Me! With my groovy new machine. Columbia Campus, a clean, nice place to learn.)

Accountability in a World of Difference

This weekend I was part of a three day, thirty-six hour, group relations conference called Leadership in a World of Difference, or something like that. The conference was based on the Tavistock model and was part of a Group Dynamics course that I am taking. In this event, essentially the people are brought together to create a temporary organization that allows members engage in a spirit of inquiry about how groups function. The group is split, convened, divided, poked and prodded into a variety of situations that serve as catalysts for engagement. The mantra of the experience is to examine the "here and now".

There is much fodder for a lengthy examination of the conference (I could just paste tweets and FB posts of some of my colleagues to give a sense of the variety of emotions that were experienced) but there was one moment at the end of the weekend that was really salient to me in terms of teaching and learning.

Some of the participants are Conference Management, including the director and a number of consultants. The role of the consultants was hotly explored over the course of the weekend, mostly in the informal settings (outside of the formal conference). In group settings, their role was mostly silent-- they sat and observed and sometimes offered some guiding questions, or

provocative thoughts, but they did not lead (in a traditional sense), or in most cases, evaluate the process.

It was amazing how uncomfortable this made the participant members. While the goal of the conference was stated (while it was by design not concrete, it was clear) there was a sense that consultants needed to take on a role of helping participant members understand what we were experiencing and what the endpoint should look like. The challenge of this, of course, is that they didn't know. Each individual experience informs the greater experience of the group which is a totally organic and unique organism. While there are some predictable patterns based on group theory, nothing is

set in stone and nothing is for sure. The experience that the consultants bring to the mix is a quiet and persistent patience to let the exploration occur.

This reminds me of really good teaching. One of my colleagues from back in Hawaii has a blog tag line: "I do my best teaching when my students don't notice I am there." I've always liked that and think that it is exactly what was going on this weekend. As participants in this conference we were immersed in a carefully planned and crafted environment. We were then let loose to see what we could get out of it, what we could learn. At the end of the weekend there was great frustration on the part of a number of members that they didn't get more support, that they needed more help.

Then, there were some energetic and impassioned voices that asked us to look carefully at the helplessness that our neediness for guidance

displayed. Why were some so unwilling to take accountability for their own experience and their own learning? Why the anger that the management didn't make the endpoint more clear and hold hands to help members get there?

As with good teaching, the management created an environment in which meaningful learning and inquiry would be fostered. The end point was not imagined, because that would be limiting. Similarly, if I assign a project to my students, might it better if I know less about what, exactly, the outcome will be? Is it good, and sufficient to create an environment to promote learning and let them loose? That is what constructivist teaching is all about. The ideal is students learning or creating something previously unimagined. When students have accountability for their experience, then they are truly learning and creating. After this weekend, I have a new hope for my students: that in their futures, they will encounter experiences like mine this weekend as rich and rewarding opportunities to create and explore meaning. And they will be well practiced in this at least in small part because of the time I spent with them.