Just a quick note that I have a column in the current issue of English Journal. It’s titled “‘Like Reading’ and Literacy Challenges in a Digital Age.”
The article describes how my ninth graders challenged my understanding of literacies today, the pedagogy of reading audiobooks, and how a 90 year old poem is changing today.
If you’re a subscriber, you can read it here.
Several months ago I asked readers from Figment to help me develop the syllabus for the Adolescent Literature college course I will be teaching in the fall. I wanted to share the finalized book list with everyone. While not all of the books on this came from Figment, the help I got from YA fans was invaluable. Thank you. I will be posting the reading schedule online soon as well. Our class discussions will take place online and I encourage anyone interested to join in.
Here’s the list along with the ringing endorsements of many Figment readers.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World. The book pleasantly showed up in my mailbox over the weekend. It’s author, Suzie Boss, is a prolific blogger and journalist around issues of education and has, on a couple of occasions, asked me to share projects like the Black Cloud. As a result (and full disclosure here), I make a couple of brief cameos in Bringing Innovation to School.
Her book and my work with CDAGS has me thinking about the challenges of sustaining teacher innovation in today’s era of standardization. Suzie agreed to answer a handful of questions about her book and ways to support innovation via email. And, since I’m sure you have much more insightful questions than I do, I encourage you to tweet questions and reactions to the book to @suzieboss.
I want to thank Suzie for her time going over these questions with me. And, as you read over this, I would challenge educators to think about: how would you share the ways you innovate? What challenges do you face and how are you innovating around them?
Why did you want to write Bringing Innovation to School? Where did the impetus come from?
This book grew out of writing and consulting I’ve been doing for the last several years. I spend a lot of time talking with and writing about innovative teachers, the ones who design learning experiences that open up the world for their students. (Your Black Cloud project is a good example, Antero.) For audiences outside the K-12 field, I often write about global innovators who are tackling some of the world’s toughest problems—clean drinking water, illiteracy, climate change, poverty. So what do K-12 education and social change have in common? More than you might guess. When I talk with social entrepreneurs, I hear them describe the same problem-solving strategies that work well in project-based learning. This book is an attempt to bring these two “worlds” together and offer some fresh ideas about how we can prepare today’s students to become tomorrow’s creative problem solvers.
I’ve been seeing the idea of innovation in schools being defined primarily by folks outside of schools – the i3 grants, for instance. I’m wondering if you can help break down what you mean by “innovation” and what it means specifically for teachers?
Innovation is often easiest to spot after it happens. It might be the breakthrough product or new idea that we didn’t know we were waiting for. Once it comes along, we don’t want to go back. (Would you replace your laptop with a manual typewriter?) But innovation involves more than consumer products. It’s an approach to problem-solving that can be applied to any sector to create a “new normal.” For teachers, it’s worth knowing that innovation is not only powerful but also teachable. We may think that breakthrough ideas come about through some kind of alchemy. That’s seldom the case. When you look at the back story of an innovative idea, you tend to find a familiar process at work. It’s a process that students can learn and then apply to tackling any kind of problem. For teachers, it’s worth remembering that innovation involves both thinking and doing. Give students opportunities to generate solutions and then put their ideas to work in practical ways.
The conversations I have with teachers in Los Angeles are often rooted in feelings of frustration. Particularly at Manual Arts, teachers felt like they were being blocked from being able to innovate or create exciting experiences for their students. What are the barriers schools are facing? What kinds of advice do you offer?
I hear you. Plenty of teachers are rightly frustrated by obstacles that get in the way of innovation. They might face an expectation to stick to scripted instruction or lack access to the technology tools that students need to connect and create. In the book, I challenge school leaders to think about how they foster or hinder innovation. One of the action steps I suggest is finding allies who share the goal of developing a new generation of innovators. It’s also important to showcase success when it happens. Let others see what your students are capable to doing and creating when given the opportunity. We can also do much more to encourage a “fail safe” learning environment. Innovators don’t fear failure. They learn from it.
Without giving away all of your book’s findings, can you share a couple of ways educators are sparking in-school innovation? Also, some of your earlier work focuses on project based learning. I’m wondering if you can talk briefly about the connection – is PBL innovative?
Project-based learning doesn’t guarantee that students will be innovators, but good projects can set the stage for innovation to happen. For example, the book takes a close look at one project in which students designed an inexpensive water purification system for villagers in Haiti. It has all the elements of high-quality PBL, including core academic content, teamwork, research, problem solving, and public presentations of learning. But it goes beyond what we see in typical projects. These students were determined to “go big.” Leveraging their communication skills, they raised funds to travel to Haiti, install the devices, and teach villagers how to maintain them so they will have a sustainable source of clean drinking water. The project expanded from one science class to engage the entire district, plus many community members. Part of innovative thinking is knowing how to engage others in your good ideas. These students figured that out—and they’ll never forget what they accomplished. Throughout the book, there are many more examples of projects that start with a strong PBL foundation and build in opportunities for students to take risks, learn from mistakes, and put good ideas into action.
Finally, I’ve been thinking lately around the challenges of teacher training and professional development. Is innovation something you think can be taught to teachers? How can principals and administrators support teacher innovation?
Early in the book, I encourage teachers and school leaders to think about their own innovation profile. Are they action oriented? Do they know how to network? Can they look ahead to imagine the benefits of new ideas? School leaders need to encourage these traits, in themselves as well as in their staff, if they’re serious about developing a new generation of innovators. We can also offer teachers professional development experiences that let them learn and practice the process of innovation. I did a lot of field work for this book. One of my most enjoyable experiences was taking part in an innovation workshop for teachers at the Henry Ford Learning Institute in Detroit. It was immersive, energizing, instructive, challenging—and fun. How often does professional development feel like that?
While in Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time sitting in traffic. Directly related to this, I spent a lot of time sitting in traffic listening to audiobooks. At one point, I got frustrated with the insanely slooooow pace at which most book are narrated that I started listening to audiobooks at double speed. The shift is disorienting at first, listening to a reader spin manically into hyper-speed. The thing is, I can only (easily) do that with books I download from Audible. CDs checked out from the library and MP3s I download have to go through a lengthy process to be considered “books” by my iPhone and are treated like music files, which is where things get interesting …
See, for a long time I resisted the shift from listening to an album to listening to individual tracks. But somewhere in the early 2000s I caved and my iPod is now filled with a rotating repertoire of evolving playlists created for specific times, moods, and places:
The success of these playlists is contingent on the iPod’s shuffle function:
Each playlist preserves a feeling, but never the exact same experience.
The thing is, if I switched from listening to a playlist to an audiobook, I would often forget to turn off the shuffle button. For books that are downloaded in Audiobook, again this can’t happen and even if it did it wouldn’t matter as much. Take for example a couple of YA books I purchased on Audible:
Each of these is a relatively short book and is downloaded (and consumed) as a single file. Rats Saw God is a solid uninterrupted 6 hour and 24 minute listen (or, if you’re like me, a 3 hour and 12 minute listen).
Even if you wanted to shuffle these books, you couldn’t. They are single files. It would be like creating a playlist with one song and hitting shuffle:
A Feast for Crows, a much longer book (topping out just under 38/19 hours of listening time) is downloaded as four separate files. You could shuffle these 8 hour tracks, but the narrative will have progressed so far ahead that it will become immediately obvious when the four chunks are not played in the correct order.
However, let’s take a CD or MP3 example. I bought a (DRM-free!) copy of Doctorow’s For The Win sometime last year. It is downloaded as a series of MP3s that can be easily burned to 13 discs. That’s a lot of MP3s:
If I don’t import these into a playlist in the correct order the 3 or 5 minute files will play in a haphazard fashion, creating a new narrative line not intended by the author.
And this is what I’ve been thinking about: the shift in narrative as a result of audio shuffle. Though time is cyclical for me (It’s morning then night and I eat breakfast and then lunch and then dinner and go to sleep), the ways I perceive and work throughout the day are anything but (I open Word to start writing and then get a cup of coffee and check my phone and write a paragraph and read a chapter of a book and then delete that paragraph and write a title for the Word document and yell at the dog for barking and then add a new sentence and then put on some music which reminds me to see if Martha Wainwright has a new album anytime soon-she does not-and then I start chatting with a friend online … and eventually write something of substance in the Word file).
Some novels incorporate the chance-element of shuffle into their structure. But they’re usually experimental and unfulfilling as traditional narratives. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates gets close. It’s a series of pamphlets that are shuffled together to create a new novel for each reading:
Cortazar’s Hopscotch supposedly works in random-ish order.
I think a more controlled chaos could also work. I think of the three parts of Skippy Dies and, considering Paul Murray tells you exactly what happens by the end of the book in the title, wonder how my experience would be altered if I shuffled the three parts of the books. Ditto the five parts (and three bound volumes) of Bolano’s 2666.
I think of Deleuze and Guittari’s notion of the rhizome. A model for looking at research and culture, the notion of the rhizome differs significantly from traditional tree-like hierarchies. Seeing multiple points of entry and exploration, they write that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” The world is shuffled. We curate rhizomatic experience everytime we create a playlist – a digital piñata of randomly falling sonic riches.
What would happen if I were able to curate my reading library and create a playlist?
“Today I feel like reading a Murakami playlist-not an anthology-but a new Murakami narrative shuffled only for me” or “I’m going to cozy up with a read-list of contemporary Russian authors in translation.” Or “You know, I feel like a discordant mix of John Ashberry and Shel Silverstein.”
Music products are being produced in this way now:
The latest release from Nicholas Jaar (on the right) is a cube of music with two headphone inputs. Listeners are subjected randomly to the tracks stored in the device’s memory. Pragmatically, I won’t know which song is up next or even what it may be called.
A rhizomatic listening experience is one that can be parsed every which way. Purists (myself included) would argue that this is a bastardization of the art form. “Hendrix wanted you to listen all the way through, man.” And they/we’re right. But it seems like print culture can by shuffled in ways to create new narratives budding from the old.
I’m reading this.
Maybe it is just a dwindling attention span, but I like playing with my food. I don’t mean that if you take me to a fancy restaurant I turn into an orangutan and throw things in the air or peel bananas with my feet.* But things like Rosca de reyes make eating a playful experience.
At a local sushi restaurant, Ally and I ordered what they called the Roulette Roll. Served in a circle, one of the eight pieces of sushi was filled with chili seasoning. Each bite of the roll became a risky dare.
So when we bought these Skittles yesterday, I was pretty excited. It’s pretty awesome to be able to buy food that deceives you.
And then Ally pointed out that pretty much every pack of Skittles I eat functions this way. Being colorblind pretty much ensures that I never know exactly what colored candy I’m eating. Jelly Beans, in particular, are a dangerous proposition…
There has to be something rewarding in encouraging kids to hack their food, right? Turn your licorice into a straw, pretend a gummy bear is a festering boil on your face, make those bread rolls do the Charlie Chaplin dance… aside from embarrassing parents, that’s surely fostering valuable out-of-the-box thinking.
* Though to be fair, if I was actually capable of peeling bananas with my feet, I would probably do so all the time and in as public of places as possible.
Seriously. Unpacking I realized these were books from class sets I forgot to donate before leaving.
I think I only have four copies, but a few more may show up. These are the no-frills Dover editions. If you have never read this book, you should … and I’ll send you a copy for free! Send me an email with your address and it’ll get in the mail sooner or later.
Note: I would lean toward expecting this “later” in “sooner or later,” so if you need the book for a class you are taking, I wouldn’t count on this… I’m still working on unpacking office supplies like envelopes and trying to properly navigate myself to the nearest post office.
It’s been just over a month since I stopped working at Manual Arts, the high school where I spent the past eight years trying to cut my teeth as a teacher; the place where I probably learned more every day than I was privileged to teach. And while I’ve been spending my time since packing–and later unpacking–boxes, standing in line at a new (though just as slow) DMV, and figuring out how to at least somewhat safely operate a circular saw, this primarily offline time has afforded me the opportunity to reflect on this final year at Manual Arts and what that school space has meant to me.
In many ways, leaving this school–particularly in light of this last year–has been filled with sadness-tinged relief. It makes me uncomfortable to say that, so let me explain where this feeling is coming from.
I should make it clear, though, that despite any of the challenges I’ve faced or dealt with at Manual Arts, I feel extremely, extremely privileged to have been able to be a teacher there. The students that I’ve worked with have pushed me in ways that this rant will not encompass. In a moment, I plan to share the more troubling challenges at Manual Arts but want to make sure that my gratitude to the abundant experiences of joy and enlightenment I’ve had from my students and colleagues is noted.
I’ve made it no secret that Manual Arts has had its fair share of challenges over the years. From truancy policies that essentially criminalize students to the fact that my eight years at this school has included eight different principals, Manual Arts, structurally is a persistent mess.
Last August, I met my eighth principal for the school. Robert Whitman was assuming his first head principalship at Manual having been an assistant principal at several other local urban schools prior. I want to stop here for a moment and note that this is par for the course of urban school leadership in Los Angeles: the schools most in need of strong leadership according to district metrics like standardized test scores, teacher turnover rates, and dropout levels act as training grounds for principals. The majority of the principals that have left Manual Arts while I was there spent little more than a year (sometimes less) letting the school coast while adding their new leadership position to their resumes and quickly taking a job at a less demanding school.
The new principal’s challenges were compounded by the fact that the school moved from a three track year-round schedule to a traditional calendar. While the three track system meant longer school days and is generally inequitable for all of the students involved, it was at least a routine students and teachers had learned to cope with for the decade plus that Manual Arts was a year round school. And while time was stabilized as a result of the move to a traditional calendar, all else was disregarded: class sizes shot up well beyond what teachers or classrooms were equipped to deal with. Across the board, students were packed 36-40+ students deep in core instructional classes. Strangely, our security and deans at the school were gutted. Here’s an equation for disaster at even the best of schools: too many kids with too little supervision equals dismal instruction.
Of course, the instability of varied leadership and strategies takes its toll on the students and teachers of Manual Arts. The Freshman Preparatory Academy–the school’s effort two principals before Whitman–was an effective effort in sustaining student interest during the year our students are most at risk of dropping out. With a new regime of administrators and a general lack of institutional memory to drive the decisions of the school this year, the majority of the practices that supported ninth grade teachers were decimated. The halls of FPA, where I spent most of my time helping teachers with technology challenges at the school became chaos. Even the most collaborative teachers I was privileged to work with went into all-out-survival mode, trying to get through the overcrowded classes one day at a time.
The administration, like LAUSD’s superintendent’s phrase, shifted to a “laser-like focus” on skills and test preparation. The execution of this focus, however, was generally incompetent. My former guiding teacher and one of the most innovative educators I’ve been privileged to work with was subject to no less than a year-long procession of passive-aggressive administrators observing and encouraging him to volunteer to pilot the Scholastic Read 180 program in his classroom. The experience sapped him of the enthusiastic energy I typically got to see in him and seemed like a contract-protected form of administrative bullying. (I assure you I have no problem with being observed–under the best of administrators my practice has significantly grown from administrative observation. What this teacher underwent felt possibly retaliatory for the way he has been outspoken on the school’s campus.)
As a quick aside: as I type this, my former advisor forwarded me her emailed “word of the day” and it is fitting to today’s discussion.
Quantophrenia: “Undue reliance on or use of facts that can be quantified or analyzed using mathematical or statistical methods; inappropriate application of such methods, es. In the fields of sociology and anthropology.”
Nearly all of the teachers I’ve come to work with closely and that I’ve learned from are voluntarily leaving Manual next year. Most of them have helped co-design the Schools for Community Action and are trying to make these new schools (just down the street from Manual Arts) a more humane alternative to the bureaucracy that has plagued Manual Arts this past year and long, long before.
I say “voluntarily” in the previous paragraph somewhat uncomfortably. None of these teachers want to leave the students at the school. As is the case in school after school, Manual’s problems are adult-driven.
Perhaps what’s driven me to this reflection more than anything else is an announcement that was made during my last week at Manual Arts: the school has been awarded a School Improvement Grant for next year as a “turnaround model.” What this means is that the school is being reconstituted. “Reconstitution” is fancy ed-speak that essentially means that everyone at the school is being fired and needs to reapply for their jobs. Everyone, that is, except that in this single instance the principal will be keeping his job without reapplying. Wait, what? Yeah, that happened. Oh yeah, one other thing: in this particular concoction of reconstitution, the school will only hire back 50% of the teachers that choose to reapply at Manual Arts. This is clearly an opportunity to clean house and ensure that the bad apples in the eye of the nascent principal and less-than-effective management company, LA’s Promise don’t come back.
Here’s the fancy color-printed handout that teachers received notifying them of the reconstitution. Sure looks expensive to have printed out the school’s logo in color: a sound decision, I’m sure.
I should make it clear that money is great: the million plus dollars that the School Improvement Grant can bring to the school can make a real difference in the outcomes of the students at Manual Arts. But you know what else can make a difference? Positively driven, motivated teachers that know and have been involved in a school community. I should note, too, that even when working on school wide reforms in the past and reconstitution was invoked, I could not find significant research that it leads to positive academic outcomes.
So: sadness and relief. The work conditions at Manual have become untenable in a way that has made such an archaic word to me feel positively spritely. I’m genuinely saddened that the school I’ve invested so much time and energy in and that has rewarded me again and again with happiness and the best of my teaching experiences has been denigrated by inconstancy and poor management. I’m saddened that I left the school under these conditions. And, as awful as it may be for the students there, I am relieved not to be there next year. Even if they would have hired me back.
Why, hello there. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
A few things have waylaid my updating of the ol’ Crawl. In particular:
Okay, so recognizing all of these things pretty much took place concurrently, any kind of free time for blogging or–as some of you know–socializing, texting, replying to emails, being a generally personable person to be around-was thrown out the window. Though I’ve been somewhat competent at juggling several things at once, the past two months have been pretty insane.
All that being said, I want to say, “I’m back” and offer a few extra notes about the above.
On dissertating:
So the only extra thing I’ll add is that UCLA’s dissertation filing system is completely digital. This means that the rather classic committee approval page is no longer physically signed by dissertation committee members (they get to leisurely click a couple of buttons online). While this makes the whole process easier, it also felt lacking of the the tangibility of being done. So I made my own unofficial signature page.
On CDAGS:
CDAGS is going to be incredible. It will continue to be a part of my research and I am truly excited about the ways this school offers meaningful and equitable learning opportunities to the students of South Central. One interesting thing about the CDAGS: it is going to be on a brand new campus (sharing the space with two sister schools that, together, are called the Schools for Community Action). Aside from an interim principal and a minimal staff, the only people that have ever used this new campus are the several dozen displaced teachers from Miramonte Elementary School. (For the non-LA based readers, Miramonte faced several severe allegations of abuse at the school earlier this year; Superintendent Deasy, in response to parent concerns, removed all of the Miramonte teachers and had them housed at the new campus for the remainder of the year while a new stuff was temporarily in place as the abuse investigation proceeded.) It’s been interesting visiting the home of CDAGS. It looks like the teachers currently getting compensated to sit here and not teach are really good at working on puzzles much of the day.
On moving:
I cannot begin to recount how stressful, frustrating, and overwhelming the moving process has been. This warrants a longer post. I will say that the day of moving involved ransoms, shouting, and fires (literally). And while I am certainly going to miss L.A., I must say that our new Colorado friends and colleagues have made life in the quieter city quite easy to adjust to.
On Olive:
Olive was rescued by Ally and I because… well… just look at this thing and tell me you wouldn’t do the same:
We adopted Olive under the assumption that she was a beagle. She’s not. She’s part beagle, part Jack Russel terrier, and part Linda Blair in the Exorcist. I’m not saying Olive is the spawn of Satan. But I’m also not saying she might not be a not-too-distant relative. To be fair, Olive is a pretty awesome puppy (she’s 6ish months old). The only problem is that her happiness is inversely related to my own writing and packing productivity, making the above list of things I needed to accomplish in the past few months a bit more trying. Olive loves a few things about her new home in Colorado: more space, the dog park nearby, and the assortment of rabbits, mice, and birds that she can chase.
Phew! It’s been a busy few months and I apologize for this blog being out of commission. I’m excited to return here and wipe off the cobwebs at the American Crawl.