Category Archives: education

Discussing Teacher Driven Innovation with Suzie Boss

Leave a reply

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?

Play with Your Food

Leave a reply

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.

I Will Mail You Souls of Black Folk

3 Replies

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.

 

Sadness-Tinged Relief: Uncomfortable Reflections on Leaving Manual Arts

4 Replies

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.

“Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself…”

3 Replies

Why, hello there. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

A few things have waylaid my updating of the ol’ Crawl. In particular:

  1. I revised and defended my dissertation.
  2. Did you skim #1? I finished dissertating!
  3. I helped organize the opening of a new public high school, Critical Design and Gaming School (CDAGS) in South Central.
  4. I dealt with the most stressful moving challenge ever and have relocated from Los Angeles to Fort Collins, CO.
  5. Ally and I adopted a fiendish canine.

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.

More Than Show and Tell: Redefining Participation at DML

1 Reply

The Following is Cross-Posted at the 21st Century Scholar blog: 

A month to reflect on the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Conference, and my mind is still buzzing with the ideas and innovative shifts in educational learning I was able to engage with during the three-day conference. As with the two prior conferences, I left the conference with a strong sense of optimism for the possibilities of schools and teachers and learning as a result of the presentations, conversations, and debates I participated in during DML 2012.

And while the ideas and individuals I encounter are so inspiring, I left with a looming and frustrating sentiment: we can do more. While I typically blog at DMLcentral about the ways that the Digital Media and Learning field can continually improve, I want to stress that I am talking here about the conference space. At the DML conference, we can–and need–to do more. The format of conferences is an ego-boosting and elitist one: typically, presenters stand in front of a crowd share their work for 15–20 minutes and take questions from the crowd. Keynote speakers get longer and panels basically allow audiences to witness a conversation amongst three or four experts on a given topic. The problem is, when it comes to digital media and when it comes to learning, we are all experts to a certain extent.

As a conference that brings the latest innovation from a nascent field, the DML space needs to become more egalitarian. What is the net impact of this conference convening? If we are bringing together hundreds of the most motivated and knowledgeable people interested in DML, we should be doing more than listening to a select few in a glorified show-and-tell.

As one of the conference committee members for the 2012 conference, I saw first-hand how competitive and selective the programming process was. A small percentage of the proposals submitted could be selected and I regularly heard from frustrated applicants that were eager to share their valuable work. What if we moved beyond a traditional conference format to a space that encouraged bazaar-like trading of ideas and it was facilitated to have purposeful outcomes by the end?

I want to note how powerful the DML backchannel is: the screens displaying recent conference-related tweets and the participation by a majority of conference attendees in the backchannel made it a robust and valuable resource. And isn’t it, thus, strange that a conference that can so ably illustrate the power of newly emerging backchannel tools cannot redefine the traditional components of a conference?

Ultimately, if the DML enthusiasts (myself included) are critically and enthusiastically pushing against worn and hackneyed learning formats, isn’t it time we also begin pushing against the traditional conference and presentation format as well?

Lunchtime Intellectuals and Backseat Driving in Education

1 Reply

Yesterday, I learned about the intersection of race, class, and (in)justice in the American legal system.

The content was engaging and I felt, afterwards, ready to share my ideas and concerns with others. I felt like I was learning.

All of this happened during lunch. While watching a single twenty-three minute TED talk.

And in general, that’s great. Right?

Sure it is.

Only … the thing is… I already studied this topic as a graduate student. It was a two-quarter long course and at the end I’d read stacks and stack of books and written what felt like reams of paper on the nuances of the topic and after those 20 intense weeks of studying… I felt like I hadn’t even scratched the surface.

 

As the popularity of TED talks continues to grow, I sometimes feel like we are missing something in the truncated hyper-entertaining style. I don’t mean that I expect everyone to jump into full-on academic geekdom around a topic instead of watching a TED talk. However, I do wonder what is lost in the snappy medium.

In the Critical Media Literacy course I am currently co-teaching, we showed Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk at the beginning of the quarter. It seems like her concerns of a “single story” have probably been invoked by my students on a weekly basis. But her concerns are invoked in passing; my students have not tussled with seeking additional knowledge about Adichie, her writing, or the political circumstances she discusses. Similarly, I’ve had numerous conversations with people about “the problem with schools” based solely on Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk. While I find this talk, too, tremendously worthwhile, I tend to feel like we are locked out of creativity and personal opinion when most of our talking points are pinned to 15-20 minute talks.

 

I’ve had these sneaking suspicions about TED for a while, but I do want to make it clear that I appreciate much of the content and the vision of what TED represents. It’s not TED’s fault that it’s so popular. It’s more a problem that it’s so much easier to embed or like or share or forward a 15-20 minute talk (or 30 minute propaganda video) than look into the larger concerns.* Slacktivism (as recently mentioned in a post related to #kony2012).

I bring up this navel-gazing whining about TED and “Lunchtime Intellectuals” (did I just invent that? I hope so) because it is now directly impacting the teaching profession. Earlier this week TED announced TED-Ed:

An invitation to teachers across the world to help us dial up the effectiveness of video lessons. As an initial offering, we have posted a dozen lessons that we think show promise. And now we’re ready to assist teachers in creating hundreds more.

I guess that’s good, right?

And I really like John and Hank Green’s Crash Course videos that teach history and science via YouTube videos.

And I guess someone likes this Khan Academy thing.

All of these might be doing something somewhere. But I do know that, in the same week that more than 11,000 LAUSD teachers receive notices that they will be laid off at the end of this year, it feels uncomfortable to have organizations helping in ways that basically suggest ‘let’s throw a bunch of snappy videos your way… figure out the rest.’**

All too often, we tend to try to simplify the really (really) complex challenges that teachers are in. At the DML conference last week, I took issue with John Seely Brown’s keynote talk that tended to idealize the Montessori school system. Meryl Alper helps complicate this as well as point to an early-education blind spot in the DML community. This stuff is much more complicated than can be covered in an 18 minute ohhs-and-ahhs-filled video. This stuff is about our future and it’s about the youth in our schools and it–thus–deserves for us to try untangling it as a complicated mess.

It’s not that TED-Ed is a bad idea. I’m more concerned with the continued trend of non-educators being able to get high profile coverage for creating faux quick-fix solutions (or worse: another community to work on solutions) for deep-rooted inequity that’s been decades in the works.

 

*Like, for example, who funds Invisible Children’s work… but that’s a digression beyond the purview of this post.

** By the way, Peter tweeted reading and reacting to his annual RIF notice:

“Be the Pink Panther & your loves will be like the wasp & the orchid, the cat & the baboon.”

Leave a reply

 

Later this week (Thursday to be exact), the third annual Digital Media and Learning conference will take place in San Francisco.

As one of this year’s conference committee members, I am excited about the ways that this conference has come together and the excellent community of participants, panelists, attendees and speakers that will convene. It’s been a busy lead up to this week and I am extremely proud of the work the various DML participants have contributed in preparation.

Typically, when it’s close to conference time, I list the various topics and times of presentations where I can be found. And while there are a few sessions I’m participating in, I want to urge conference attendees to get lost in the DML space. Wander into a session and allow yourself to be surprised. Be active in the conference back channel. Go to the who-knows-what-will-happen ignite talks. Send me a tweet and say hello.

See you there!

 

 

Adolescent Literature and Asking The Experts for Recommendations

1 Reply

Do you know about Figment? It’s a reading and writing community for primarily young adults. And it’s awesome.

In any case, one of the first courses I’ll be teaching at Colorado State next year is focused on adolescent literature. Asking an avid YA-reading community like Figment to help develop the reading list for the course seemed like a no-brainer. So far, I’ve been thrilled with the suggestions and feedback that the Figment community has provided. I’ll be finalizing the reading list at the beginning of next month, so feel free to add your suggestions if you have not already.

Also, as I mention in the thread, I am anticipating having the CSU students interact with the Figment community through the site’s “groups” feature. I will be posting information about ways to participate in the class once it begins in the fall.