Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Action Research Project

For my masters thesis, I have chosen to do an action research project involving my classroom practice, using my own students as participants in the study. I have only begun to formulate the theoretical framework for the project at this point, but I will begin the field research and data collection in the Fall of this year. As an introduction to my research proposal, here is an excerpt from my work so far:

As identity and self-perception are key elements in the development of high school students, one subject often plays a large role in students' understanding of themselves: race. At High Tech High, a school with an increasingly more diverse student body, educators need to understand how this complex issue affects the students' understandings of not only themselves but of their peers and the school community around them. As a teacher of tenth grade humanities, the topics of race and ethnicity arise frequently in the work I do: in our studies of modern world history, my students and I often address issues such as genocide and ethnic cleansing, slavery, socioeconomic trends and their correlation to race, and other sensitive issues. Similarly, in our studies of English language arts, my students and I address issues of identity and self-perception through creative writing and Socratic seminars. Not only do these issues play an important role in my work in the classroom, they also affect the school as a whole by their influence on the development of students' sense of safety and community. Because issues of race and ethnicity are so crucial to my work as an educator in a diverse learning community, I will research the question, “How do students talk about race and ethnicity?” I chose to emphasize talk because it is more easily identifiable than how students think or feel, yet it gives insight into both. In addition, it also addresses a component of the work I do as a humanities teacher: verbal expression. The answer to this question will help me understand how to support the development of students' identities, and also how to create a more inclusive, safe space for discussion of this often touchy topic.

To read up on the rest of this project, as well as related artifacts from my work as a teacher and a learner, visit my digital portfolio: http://www.spencerpforsich.com

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Paulo Friere's "Cultural Action For Freedom"

In Paulo Friere's "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom" (1970) he suggests the idea that illiteracy is a form of cultural oppression (a rather risky assertion in 1970's Brazil). To me, this makes perfect sense, since adult literacy rates (and all forms of education, for that matter) almost always follow class lines. It's interesting, too, to read his examples taken from the state-sanctioned reading programs of Third World countries, which sound like not-so-subtle indoctrination more than anything else: "Peter is smiling. He is a happy man. He already has a good job. Everyone ought to follow his example." Some of it sounded frighteningly similar to Orwellian "double-speak."

I also found it interesting how very Marxist his perspective is. To think of educating the workers of the world as akin to empowering them is pretty much directly from the Communist Manifesto. The quotes from the workers about how they feel like they have something to say now that they can read and write were pretty telling; it’s no wonder Friere’s programs were not popular with the “powers that be” in Latin America. As soon as the weapon (a.k.a. the language) that is used against the poor is taken up by them in defense, the oppressors lose much of their power over the oppressed.

I had a serious “a-ha” moment when I got his notion that “marginalization” is not the right metaphor for the disempowered members of a society, since they are necessarily within that society in order to be oppressed by it. Therefore, empowerment is not about bringing them back from the margins, but rather about teaching them the mechanisms that hold them down (or the rules of the “culture of power,” as Delpit puts it).

I had never thought about literacy as a weapon of power before, but it makes a lot of sense to me now. Even in the First World, most of these issues ring alarmingly true.

References:
Friere, P. (1998). The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 480-498.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

What is differentiation?

After attending a class on "differentiation and inclusive classrooms" this past Wednesday, I was left still struggling with a question that one might think would have been answered by the class itself: What really is differentiation? That question is really a big way of asking a lot of other, more specific questions that I have swimming in my head: what does differentiation look like, how can I do more of it, am I already doing it in ways I'm not conscious of, is differentiation about the teacher or the learner (or both!), what factors inhibit effective differentiation, and so on and so on.

One thing that I took away from the class was the idea that behavior is a factor in differentiation. I think I understand that to mean that, for example, student-teacher interactions should be unique to each student - which, of course, they are inherently - and that our cognizance of how those interactions affect students (academically, socially, psychologically) is crucial to making the most of our relationships with them. This means knowing students well is part of differentiating our own behavior towards them and helping them direct their own behavior in productive, successful ways.

Does this seem accurate? I know I can point to examples in my own class of ways that I have used to motivate certain students that didn't work to motivate others, so is this differentiation? And I can recall the point when I started putting more pictures on my handouts because one of my failing students told me he remembers images better than words (he can still remember the names of painters and paintings we discussed two months ago, but he can never recall what year World War II ended). Is this differentiation, even though it's now a strategy I use with all students and not just him?

I'm really eager to get the answers to these questions. I don't know how to point to my own practice and say, "Yes, that is differentiation," or "This project/lesson/assignment needs to be better differentiated," so it's difficult to replicate what works well and/or revise what needs help.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

The "Six A's" Strike Again

Recently, my partner Anne and I have been working on a project called (Art)ifacts - a study of modern art, through which students design and execute their own original paintings using painting materials that they produce with their knowledge of chemistry. I mentioned it earlier in my blog when discussing the planning stages and my consideration of the "Six A's" in that process (see The "Six A's" of Project-Based Learning). One thing I discussed in that post was that we were considering having students interview professionals in the field about the world of contemporary art-making. Well, we did it, and it was a big success.

We've had students interview professionals in the past, but under much more restrictive circumstances - video taping, making sure entire groups of students could be present, etc. - and so the authenticity of the experience was compromised to an extent by the conditions of the assignment. This time, the assignment was much less structured: to interview someone who makes a living doing something art-related (e.g. professional artists, museum curators, gallery owners, etc.), and then write a 1-2 page reflection about the experience. Students were not required to record the interview in anyway, and the range of possible interviewees was left as open as possible. The resulting reflections were striking:

  • "The whole experience was really eye-opening..."
  • "This was a very valuable experience; I never thought I would learn so much about art."
  • "Talking to someone who actually does art as a living really teaches you more about art than just learning about it in school and taking tons of notes."
  • "She went through my sketch book with me, giving me insight on a professional artist's view...It was very interesting to hear her ideas of my work."
  • "This has been one of the best experiences that I have had."
  • "I think getting out into the real world and familiarizing ourselves with adults and the bigger picture is kind of what our school is about. I'm glad I got to be a part of this, especially because it was so fun."
  • "This whole thing was a really positive experience for me. I'd do it again in a second."
  • "The most important thing that I realized during this interview is that you have to love what you do."
  • "It really taught me a lot about the art world versus just learning about it through a lecture...But then again, that's what High Tech High is all about, taking a more hands-on approach."
It was great to read these comments, because it fortified my sense that what I'm doing with the kids is working. The funny thing is that this assignment was almost an afterthought - it got tacked onto the project after almost the whole planning process had been completed. As it turns out, it seems to have been one of the most significant experiences we've been able to provide our students this semester. It just goes to show that sometimes the most meaningful lessons are also the simplest.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Blogging as a Teaching Tool (Revisited)

In my last post about blogs in the classroom (January 27, 2008), I mentioned that one obstacle I've encountered in using blogs in the classroom is how to get our blogs to be something more than just a homework assignment. Writing in a way that is inviting to a broader audience (people outside of our class/school, non-students, etc.) has proven to be difficult to overcome, but I've slowly made headway toward getting students to do this more effectively.

First, I showed examples of posts from last year's students. Then I gave examples of "professional" bloggers' work. Then I showed my OWN blog. While each of these got us a little bit closer, I still had a number of students whose writing sounded a lot like "Today in Spencer's class I worked on my project." I didn't seem to be getting through to them that, if I didn't know them personally or know about their school work, I would have no idea who this Spencer guy is or what the heck their project is about. This kind of writing automatically precludes a readership outside that immediate context.

What finally worked best was just to let them start writing (seems obvious, but I didn't get it at first). After about a week of posts, I was able to pinpoint who understood our new objectives and who still struggled. Sharing the work of those who "got it" with the rest of the class was really exciting because I finally saw some light bulbs turning on in their heads. These trailblazing posts were the model around which the rest of us could shape our work.

Here are some examples of the students' blogs:

Monday, February 18, 2008

White Privilege

This week I re-read Peggy McIntosh’s article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” I had read it a few times before, and the point that always stands out to me is the line that reads, “Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal….” I occasionally realize that I have this exact attitude when I recognize that “white” is not really a part of how I identify myself. There is nothing inherently valuable (I seem to have learned) in my race, so I don’t tend to count it among the things that make me proud of who I am. And yet, this is so because I inadvertently see myself as the default, the norm, the “average” as McIntosh says. This was put into stark contrast by my experience in grad school class last week when a colleague – the only person of color in the room – was the only one to include race in her answer to a warm-up icebreaker that asked, “Who are you?”

I say that I see myself as the default. In fact, McIntosh suggests that the reason I can see myself that way is because my position of power in society allows me to have that perception. If I wanted, I could enumerate the ways in which my profile represents not the default, but rather the top of the power totem pole. My racial identity would be at the top of that list, and here's a partial list of others:

  1. I’ve never thought I was disadvantaged or missing out on anything because of my gender.
  2. Financially, I’ve never wanted for anything substantial (even now as an adult).
  3. It is legal for me to marry the person I love in any state. (See article on "Straight Privilege" for similar points along these lines.)
  4. I can travel almost anywhere in the world and be fairly confident that I can find people who speak English – my first (and only) language.
  5. I am not the first in my family to go to college.
  6. I am not the first in my family born in the U.S.
  7. My doctor says I’m physically and mentally fit. I have health insurance that pays for her telling me that.
  8. I can walk into most affluent neighborhoods and not feel out of place. (This one is the product of many of the above points combined.)
  9. I get most of my religious holidays off without having to request them.

I want to stop here to note that I originally intended this to be a list of the ways in which my profile does, in fact, represent the type which is perceived as normative and average in the us/them dynamic of which McIntosh speaks. It wasn’t until I had written about half of the list that I realized I was actually making a list of the social advantages of my power position. (I added the second sentence in the paragraph above once I had made that realization.)

At the CES Small Schools conference (see my post about the 2008 Winter Meeting) last month, I listened to Camilla Greene talk about the stages that many white, privileged educators must go through in order to become effective advocates for change in school systems. The first step, obviously, is awareness. One of the next steps, though, is often guilt and shame. I admit that I'm still (in many ways) working through this stage, but I can see the progress I've made and the ways in which I am starting to envision my position of privilege as a powerful tool for enacting the change I hope to see. As Dr. Anthony Clark (Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, Innovation and Social Justice for the San Francisco Unified School District; also an affluent, white male) said, he encounters colleagues of color who often tell him that they've been saying for ten years the same things that he says, but when he says them, people listen.

References:
McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Wellesley: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Access and Engagement

In her book Access and Engagement (2000), Aida Walqui describes the myriad factors that contribute to the success (or lack thereof) of immigrant students in schools. When reading her work, I found myself feeling pretty helpless as she described the various factors that impede their success – family support, immigration status, previous academic achievement. These enormous factors are more or less entirely out of the hands of teachers, so it leaves me feeling like we are attempting a hopeless task in some ways.

On the other hand, she does mention a few things that contribute to student success on the part of the school and the teacher, such as support in second language acquisition, social challenges, and in some ways educational continuity. She mentions programs such as Project New Beginnings (a "newcomer program for newly-arrived adolescents"), which seems to use many strategies that can be successful, but in some ways these programs may also stigmatize the immigrant students within the greater social context. It’s this stigmatization that we should avoid as much as possible to help what she calls the “enduring” and “situated” selves coexist in a healthy way.

One thing that stood out to me in her book was the idea of “noninterventionist” parental support (passive means of supporting academic success, such as providing a home environment conducive to learning, as opposed to active support in the form of phone calls to teachers and visits to the school). I don’t think I had ever considered this kind of support as a contributor to student success, because I just assumed that students who do well without the apparent involvement of the parents were able to do so because of inherent motivation or greater understanding of school expectations. However, I do appreciate the implication of this idea, as my home growing up was certainly a place conducive to being academic and productive, whereas certain friends’ homes lacked that atmosphere and were consequently poor places to study.

This ties back to Kozol (see my post about his book Savage Inequalities) in that, just as homes can have that atmosphere, certain schools can be more conducive to being academic than others. The “75% equal” schools he describes (pp. 175-180), with differences in teacher pay, books, facilities, and resources, are less likely to be able to achieve the desired atmosphere than other schools and are, therefore, less likely to allow students to be successful.

Kozol leads me to wonder about how High Tech High plays a role in this system. So far we have been able to keep our schools small enough to provide mostly individualized attention to students who need additional support, and we certainly foster an atmosphere of studiousness and professionalism that will help channel our students toward being “governors” rather than “governed.” However, as a school of choice I wonder how many students who have not yet been taught how to gain access to power will be likely to apply in the first place. If none of those disempowered students are being served by our schools, then we are only sifting out the ones who have learned how to “play the game” and separating them from their peers who haven’t (instead of using the former to uplift the latter, as I think we hope to do).

I hear this criticism from friends of mine who work in other schools in San Diego - that the existence of our schools makes the job they do harder. The only vaguely satisfying response I’ve gotten to the accusation that HTH schools only “skim off the top” and lower the mean for neighborhood schools is that it’s more a question of long-term vision than immediate results. If what we do works, eventually school districts and legislators and communities will see that it works and understand how to implement some of what we do to make the whole system a little bit better. In the meantime, though, it will likely get worse.

An obstacle getting in the way of that process of uplifting all schools, though, is that, because we are successful, we attract students and families that already have access to power and influence and successful schools. It’s the same concern as the KIPP schools mentioned in Tough’s article (see my post on the "Culture of Power") – if students who don’t need us are attracted to come here, it leaves less room for the ones who really do (and who are likely to be the first ones muscled out by power and influence).

Now I feel like I’ve talked myself in a circle and I’m again feeling a bit hopeless. I really believe that what we do works, but at times I wonder who it really works for. And as our student population continues to diversify, it seems like we’re losing our sense of how to keep doing what we do (as evidenced by growing numbers of students in summer school – the bulk of whom are minorities – as well as the growing number of students being held back, being put on academic contracts, etc.). The fact that the ethnic composition of students on IEP’s seems to reflect the power dynamic only reinforces some of my skepticism.

References:
Walqui, A. (2000). Access and Engagement, (4-22). McHenry: Delta Publishing Company.
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown Publishers.

Savage Inequalities

While it's on my mind, I wanted to share a bit from a book sitting on my shelf right now. In Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities (1991), he aimed to expose the very separate and very unequal state of schools in America that, with the support of the courts' gradual degredation of Brown v. Board, perseveres still today. The following passage stood out to me:

“The parents or the kids in Rye or Riverdale [two notably affluent communities in New York]…may well tell themselves that Mississippi is a distant place and that they have work enough to do to face inequities in New York City. But, in reality, the plight of children in the South Bronx of New York is almost as far from them as that of children in the farthest reaches of the South.

All of these children say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Whether in the New York suburbs, Mississippi, or the South Bronx, they salute the same flag. They place their hands across their hearts and join their voices in a tribute to ‘one nation indivisible’ which promises liberty and justice to all people. What is the danger that the people in a town like Rye would face if they resolved to make this statement true? How much would it really harm their children to compete in a fair race?”

A colleague of mine recently pointed out his frustration with the fact that Kozol has been writing books like this for years without ever attempting to offer solutions to any of the problems he exposes. But maybe some of us need only to be reporters - to shine the klieg light on the truth - so the dissemination of the knowledge we report can inspire others to action. (Which reminds me, thanks to my good friend Ephraim for lending me this book.)

References:
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown Publishers.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Culture of Power

I recently read an excerpt from Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children (1995) in which she talks about what she calls the "Culture of Power." This is, essentially, the culturally inherited values/norms/expectations that allow children of the dominant culture to be more successful in school than children of marginalized cultures. She says that the former receive constant implicit reinforcement that allows them such a greater level of success, whereas the latter need to be explicitly taught the "rules" of power in order to be allowed access to them.

Reading her work led me to think a lot about how this is at play in my practice at High Tech High. One way in which the culture of power is apparent in the classrooms of HTH is through the difference in the performance of “village” students (students from within the High Tech schools prior to high school) versus students who came recently from other schools. The class of students I currently have includes a number of students who were in the inaugural 6th grade class at High Tech Middle five years ago, and the degree of socialization into the “High Tech High Way” that they exhibit is pretty extreme. To observe the difference between those students and the students who were new to the village last year is pretty substantial. As some of my colleagues put it, the former have “drunk the Kool-Aid” – they understand projects better, they work more cooperatively in groups, they are able to budget their time more effectively, they verbally assert their ideas and opinions with greater ease, and they demonstrate other similar academic skills that make them more successful than the students who don’t yet have those skills.

These are all skills and strategies that we explicitly teach to students, particularly in 6th and 9th grade classes, through benchmarks and scaffolding. We model how to communicate and cooperate in groups; we set intermediate deadlines to help students understand the pacing of a long-term project; and we practice discussion skills through Socratic seminars, mock trials and debates. This kind of explicit instruction in behaviors that support academic success is similar to the kind of “rules” which Delpit enumerates and which schools such as KIPP provide to their students (see Paul Tough's "What It Takes to Make a Student," for a further discussion of the KIPP schools). As an aside, KIPP's "SLANT" approach feels so incredibly prescriptive that I can’t imagine being that kind of teacher, but I understand why some students might really benefit from it.

In spite of our complex socialization process, somewhere along the line some HTH students do not develop these skills to the same degree as others. As I think of the students in my own experience who are less successful at applying these skills, the faces that come to mind belong mostly to working class students and students with IEP’s. The latter may stem from the additional challenges that some students with learning disabilities face when it comes to organization, focus, and articulation of ideas. One thing I know I often struggle with is how to support those students so that they may be better able to enact the same strategies as their more successful peers.

The question of why working class students struggle with these skills perhaps comes from a difference in communication strategies employed by students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. As I perceive it (from my limited experience), more affluent students are often taught from a young age that speaking up, disagreeing with adults, and having opinions are behaviors that are rewarded – all of which are skills I know I personally value in my students. Meanwhile, many students of working class backgrounds are taught that respect for one’s elders and waiting one’s turn to speak are very important values. Those students – at least from what I see in my own classes – will usually answer when asked a question, but won’t tend to volunteer information or advocate for themselves when they are confused or need help.

In Tough’s article he references statistics to back up these observations, although I suspect that this is the kind of subject where I could easily find data that tells me the exact opposite is true. But regardless of the numbers, I still have a lot of learning to do in order to better support all my students in their acquisition of the kinds of skills and "rules" that will make them more successful later in life.

References:
Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children, (pp. 21-26). New York: The New Press.
Tough, P. (2006, November 26). What It Takes to Make a Student. New York Times Magazine.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Intersession 2008 (part 2)

As mentioned in my earlier post (Intersession 2008), I recently taught a two-week intensive course called The Art of Social Protest. In it, students chose from a variety of media and created socially conscious work about a variety of topics of relevance to them. Because students received a pass/fail designation for course, there were several issues paramount to its success. One was student choice: because the grade was not an issue, it was clear from the beginning that students' most significant motivating factor would be their intrinsic investment in the work they were doing.

As a result, the issues and media students chose for their work vary greatly: a surrealist film suggesting the social pressures felt by girls to look a certain way; a surfboard mural depicting extinct species of frog; a dystopic short story about censorship; political comics on global climate change; punk songs about racism and the government; and a collage protesting the depiction of women in shojo cartoons - just to name a few. By and large, the pieces students produced were successful in their aims. I've posted a few examples below.

Lora, "Shojo Collage"


Beth, "Bob Dylan"


Lisa, "Scared of Growing Up"


Beth & Mari, "Somewhat Surreal"


For more student work or information about Intersession, visit my Digital Portfolio (http://teachers.oregon.k12.wi.us/pforsich).

Student Voice

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I want to work harder at including students' voices into the process of designing and implementing projects in my class. One way I have tried doing this recently is through comments.

At HTH, semester grade reports are accompanied by teachers' narrative comments about each student - usually consisting of a brief summary of the work our team did that semester, a few comments about the students' strengths and areas for improvement, and then a goal or two that the student should consider for the future. For many teachers, this process feels a bit like writing notes next to the letter grade on the last page of an essay: the student is going to look for the letter grade, knowing that he doesn't have the opportunity to revise his work, and he will possibly never read the comments. The comments, then, feel pretty meaningless.

The way my partner and I make comments feel more meaningful for us and for the students is to have "student-led comments," in which the students write some notes about their progress and performance over the course of the semester and then we augment them with our own observations. Having the students take this opportunity to reflect on the work they've done is useful not only to us as teachers but also to their parents, who (in some cases) rarely get to hear their children talk about school in quite this way.

The process of including student voice in our comments doesn't end there. Today, as a warm-up activity at the beginning of the period, I gave everyone back their comments and our responses so they could read them before their parents get them in the mail. Then I asked them to write their responses to our responses to their comments. Some students took the opportunity to challenge the constructive critiques we had offered; some asked questions of us; and some thanked us for the complimentary things we had written. One student said, "I appreciate the opportunity to hear your perspective on my work ethic, because in general I'm a pretty self-conscious person." Another said, "I disagree that I've become more mature since last year; I know I need to keep working on my school attitude." A third student said, "You wrote...the best things I've ever read about myself. I stand complimented."

The exciting glimpses that comments have allowed us to see of our students on a truly personalized scale have helped us to know their aspirations, their motivations, and the way they really see themselves.

Other ways I've been working to incorporate student voice in my practice include student-generated rubrics (which my partner Anne and I have done this week with great success), one-on-one conferences to set project expectations/goals, and discussions with my classes about issues concerning the school outside my classroom. Usually, it is during these activities that I feel the most connected to the students and the most effective in teaching them the skills/information that will be useful to them beyond high school.

Friday, February 1, 2008

CES Small Schools Network - 2008 Winter Meeting

This reflection taken from my notes at the Coalition of Essential Schools' San Francisco conference on equity in the classroom:

"Sitting in a conference about equity in schools, hearing Camilla [Greene] remind us to 'call a sham a sham,' I am literally holding back tears as I think about how much harder I need to work to address these issues, how much more of myself I need to give before I can really make the difference I want to make. I feel ashamed that the only students in my class who are failing or close to failing are students of color. What am I perpetuating by allowing this disparity to exist in my classroom?"

Thursday, January 31, 2008

The State Standards...

In our class last night (HTH 216 - Advanced Project Based Learning), someone made an off-handed comment about the state standards and how they play in to project planning. The two Explorer Elementary teachers shared a look of confusion as the rest of us sort of brushed it off (see Carlisa Endoso's comments on my post "Talking with a colleague about PBL" - I started to respond to Carlisa by adding another comment to that post, but it seemed like a conversation worthy of more than a footnote.)

Carlisa mentions that at Explorer Elementary, she feels incredibly supported in her efforts to be creative and have curricular freedom, but that ultimately it's the state standards that drive the teachers' thinking about project ideas. The ideological perspective that supports teacher autonomy, freedom and creativity is definitely something Explorer shares with the other schools in the High Tech family; however, it seems like the starting points are different.

I think the reason why the High Tech teachers glazed over the discussion of standards in our class last night is because standards almost never come up in conversation in the HT schools. We are encouraged to worry more about doing exciting, rigorous curriculum that we think is meaningful and worth doing - and to worry less about coverage of standards. Most of us find that, when we do this, we hit a good number of the standards anyway. (In language arts, for example, a great number of the standards refer to skills, not information, so our humanities teachers' typically skill-oriented approach jives pretty well with that.) The reason why they still come up in articles and other materials that are distributed outside the HT community, as Carlisa noted, is that we understand standards to be a reality all teachers have to accept; if what we do is going to be of value to teachers who feel pressured by standards coverage, they need to know that our methods can be applicable to their situation.

That being said, it seems to me that most teachers who are told to teach "to" the standards find this task stifling and overwhelming, which puts them in a frame of mind totally contrary to being creative with their practice. Rather than a system of accountability, then, it creates a climate of mediocrity. I'm excited to hear that Explorer has found a way to use the standards as a jumping off point for truly engaging teaching practice, and I'd love to hear more about how they manage to do that.

My favorite HTH example of "coverage" of the standards was when Jeff Robin did an art project with his class that covered all the standards for visual art in only one week. His conclusion: "If you make anything it is still better than studying standards."

To visit Explorer Elementary's website: http://www.explorerelementary.org
To visit Jeff's Digital Portfolio: http://jeffrobin.hightechhigh.org

Monday, January 28, 2008

Talking with a colleague about PBL

Today I spoke with fellow HTH teacher Tricia Ornelas about her experience with project-based learning. Although I've worked at HTH for two years in a room practically nextdoor to hers, I have never really taken the opportunity to ask her about her teaching practice.

Tricia teaches English/Creative Writing to seniors. During her six years at HTH, she has team-taught, she has worked in a partnership, and she has worked alone; she has taught juniors and she has taught seniors. Throughout those varying situations, she has had to adopt a range of approaches to our project-based environment - some of which, she acknowledges, work better for her than others.

One thing that struck me about her perspective on PBL is that she (unlike most of our coworkers) is quite critical of its effectiveness as an approach to teaching and learning. She employs projects in what she does, but considers it to be just one strategy amongst a range that work for her. Although probably many of us at HTH do this as well, she is more explicit than most that doing projects has its drawbacks. She prefers to structure her curriculum in terms of skills/knowledge she'd like them to acquire, as opposed to deliverables she'd like them to produce.

I think a lot of what she told me resonates with what I do already, but perhaps it's a matter of semantics. She says the project is just one strategy amongst a range of strategies she employs; I say that the project steers the curriculum toward relevant content knowledge and skills. Probably we're doing the same thing and just articulating it differently.

An example: after about 45 minutes of discussion around her critique of PBL, I mentioned that Anne and I had been struggling with how to make our art project "authentic" (see the six A's from last week's post). She made an offhanded suggestion to me that we find a gallery to show our students' paintings for the next project. She said it would help give the project "teeth" and, therefore, raise the stakes for the kids. Although it felt like an afterthought to her, this small moment indicated that, in fact, Tricia's approach to teaching demonstrates the same principles that are the very foundation of PBL (in this example: connecting learning to the adult world, widening the audience beyond the classroom, etc.). She just seems to focus less attention on the big, exciting end product and more on the process of learning that goes into creating it. I think that's a pretty sound approach.

To view Tricia's Digital Portfolio, visit http://staff.hightechhigh.org/~tornelas

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Blogging to Learn

[Note: This article was published in the first issue of the HTH Graduate School of Education Journal, Fall 2008.]

In spring 2007, when I first used blogs with my students, it felt practically like an accident. Before that semester, a blog in my mind was either a venue for self-absorbed cyber addicts needing to vent or a highly elite emerging news media form best suited for cultural editorializing. It had never occurred to me that it could be used as a tool for reflecting on academic research or a medium for peer critique.

As I said, I first implemented the use of blogs in spring 2007, as a way for students to document their progress through a highly student-directed project called "The Plague of Circumstance" - an investigation of how some countries and cultures are more susceptible to disease exposure than others as a result of historical, political or economic factors. Because this project was so individualized in its execution, my previous partner Janel Holcomb and I decided that the blogs would be a good way for us to accomplish two things: first, to allow students to become assets for each other's research by requiring them to list and annotate all their sources; and second, to allow us as teachers to observe the direction and progress of each student's studies. One student put it this way in her post "The Truths That All Teachers Know" (http://diseaseproject.blogspot.com/):
"So, this blog idea is both ingenious and evil. As I understand it, the idea is to make sure that students are actually, you know, doing their research. Generally the idea is that the teacher pretends that the students are taking the entire time given to complete the assignment, even though everyone knows that the assignment will get started maybe around 10:00 the night before it's due.

Of course, I myself am not guilty of this...In fact, I am so responsible, that I'm posting on the weekend after the blog was assigned (This is only because I saw that other 'responsible' students like Joe and Gabby had posted on their blogs and I wanted to seem as awesome as them).

So Truth #1 is that students procrastinate. Truth #2 is that most students use Wikipedia, despite it's bad rep for unreliable information. So I've decided that in the spirit of honesty I will first post the information that is found on Wikipedia. Now, have no fear teachers, I will not rely on this information. I will merely use it as a starting point..."
After reading this and other similar sentiments expressed on students' blogs, Janel and I knew that we had hit on something. Not only was their writing pleasantly candid, it was hinting at the potential for a sort of online community to form amongst our students. As this student mentions, she had already read others' blogs and been motivated by their work. And while the explicit audience was still only the two of us teachers, there was a greater audience being implied under the surface. We picked up on these elements and were quick to tap into them with our students later on.

Another element we observed is the increased confidence in the work produced by our shy students. In our rapidly evolving integration of technology into practically every aspect of our lives, it's clear that there are some students who are quite a bit more comfortable interacting with one another online than they are doing so in person - an observation that is both useful and terrifying (the implications for the future of society are staggering, but far beyond the scope of this post). For those students, a blog is liberating for its publicity yet privacy, extroversion yet anonymity. They can have the confidence they are afraid to exhibit in person, and they can say what they think with the safety of knowing that if it comes out wrong there's always an "undo." In other words, the affective filter is very low in a blog.

Because the blogs were essentially an experiment for me, the students and I had begun posting blindly, with only the idea that research sources should be cited and annotated, as one might do while amassing a traditional bibliography. There had been no formal rubric and very few explicit guidelines. At first, of course, that meant that the students' posts were hit-or-miss. One way that I further developed the effectiveness of the blogs was to pick out exemplary posts to share with the class. We would read the posts together and tease out what elements made them successful, keeping a list as we went of all the things they could replicate later. A really exciting part of this process was that we were able to look at the work of students who typically might have struggled in more traditional research and writing tasks, because the unfamiliarity of the territory gave them an equal footing and an equal opportunity for success. Using their work as a model for their peers helped them to feel valued in our community.

Since that project, I have continued to use blogs in a variety of ways - as project logs, as reflective journals, and as news reporting, to name a few. However, the greatest benefit of blogs has so far eluded my students and me: their ability to attract a potentially unlimited, global audience. The kinds of tasks for which my students have used them are not of the type that would interest someone outside of the context of our class, so in order to unlock their wider appeal I will need to revise my thinking about the kind of writing students might include.

One way I've already begun thinking about doing this is to use examples of professional blogs with large readerships - of the kind that, these days, has the power to make or break box office sales, celebrity charity causes, or even political campaigns. For students to see that a blog can be more than a journal or more than a homework assignment will help them to find value in the effort required to do it well.

Another, more humble way in which I'm trying to revise my thinking about blogs is to use my own blogging as a model for my students. Up until now, I have had a blog that I used purely for posting homework assignments or writing guidelines (see http://spencerpforsich.blogspot.com), but this one is a new endeavor with new objectives. It would be useful for my students to see that I am also using this medium for honest, reflective thinking. In my case, that thinking is about the issues that relate to my work as a teacher, which is a good corollary to the thinking students document in their blogs about the issues that relate to their work. Maybe if they see that even professionals struggle and stumble through ideas in writing then their own struggles and stumbles will feel more justified. Or at the very least, less artificial.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Intersession 2008

For the past few years, High Tech High has done something called Intersession -- a two-week session between semesters in which students choose an elective course of interest. Students take only that course all day (8:40-3:40) for two weeks, at the end of which they receive a pass/fail designation on their transcripts. The course I taught for intersession last year was called "(ism)x(ism)," and was a painting class focused on how social issues (human-isms) intersect with art movements (art-isms) throughout history. This year I've taken a similar idea and expanded it out to include more than just painting. The course is called the Art of Social Protest, and its course description is as follows:

"Throughout history, the arts have been a place for expressing social discontent, protest and revolt. In this course we will work in various media (writing, painting, graphic design and music) to create our own expressions of social protest. We will also investigate other examples of protest art and report on their contributions to the course of history. Our studio and academic pursuits will be augmented by a museum visit and possible excursions into public art making."

The class started just yesterday (1/22) and will go until next Friday (2/1). So far, there are a few things of interest which have carried over in my mind since last year's intersession. They are:

Motivation & student choice: One of the components of High Tech High's design that I struggle with is the lack of student choice in the course schedule. Each course in the students' four years at HTH is already mapped out for them, making the term "electives" a bit of a misnomer for our non-core classes. Intersession is the only time in students' time at HTH that they really get to choose a course solely based on interest. As a result, we get students who really want to be in class - making it easier to convince them that hard work and rigorous academic inquiry are worth doing. And if kids realize in the first couple days that a class is not what they expected, it's easy for us to find a new one for them.

Time frame: Doing anything for seven hours a day is exhausting. Having the same class, with the same teacher, in the same room all day for two weeks is enough to drive teachers AND students crazy. However, it also gives teachers the potential to think very differently about what's possible with kids. For me to teach a painting class in 50 minutes a day would be frustrating, because if I subtracted time for set up and clean up, students would get maybe 25-30 minutes a day of painting. But if a student has a block of 3 1/2 hours to paint, then the set up and clean up time is negligable compared to the vast expanse of time available to really get into a piece. Another example would be a critical film study course, which of course works best if one has time to watch a film in one sitting and talk about it immediately after. Or a course that relies mostly on field work, such as community service that involves travel to and from a site plus several hours of work on-location. These differences in the way I perceive my day during intersession are really refreshing, and they help me break out of the box in terms of how to envision the possibilities for the rest of the year.

"Rigor" & creativity: Possibly the most exciting aspect of intersession for me is the sense of freedom I get from designing and executing a course entirely from scratch that may or may not be in my certified subject area. The kinds of courses that teachers choose to do during intersession are often surprisingly different from their "day job" subject areas: a math/chemistry teacher conducting a course on modern folk lore; an engineering teacher doing community service; a multimedia teacher doing a health and fitness class; a humanities teacher conducting a course on fishing. Yet all of these classes are rich with real learning and a kind of "rigor" that the traditional curriculum doesn't leave room for. For myself, the opportunity to teach art for two weeks is a great way to recharge my enthusiasm about the possibilities for exploring serious academic content through creative media, and a lot of the energy I'm feeling in intersession is going to spill right over into our second semester.
Once intersession has passed, I'll come back to this topic and post about the results of the course, as well as some student work samples. In the meantime, this is my syllabus for the course: Download the Word document

Sunday, January 20, 2008

The "Six A's" of Project-Based Learning

In the book Real Learning, Real Work, Adria Steinberg establishes a list she called the "six A's" of designing projects. These are:

  • Authenticity
  • Academic rigor
  • Applied learning
  • Active exploration
  • Adult relationships
  • Assessment practices
Steinberg's intent in creating this list is to provide a "self-assessment tool for teachers" (Steinberg 1998) with each "A" including several sub-questions teachers might ask themselves when designing projects.

When I look at the project work I've been planning for the coming semester, I see a lot of things I've incorporated into them that her Six A's suggest doing. For example, the art project we're about to begin asks students to explore the process of making paint from scratch in order to use it in creating their paintings - which is a skill that many professional artists value in their work ("Authenticity"). Also, I'm planning to incorporate some element of inquiry into the world of gallery and museum curation by having students interview curators about what is valued in the world of contemporary art, with the goal of developing that contact into something that will provide them feedback as they produce their own work ("Adult relationships").

There are some things that I haven't yet incorporated but I would like to. For example, she suggests that students should be a part of setting project criteria, rubrics, etc. ("Assessment practices"). This is something that I think about but often neglect to incorporate into my planning. Typically, we'll put a rubric together and impose it on the students without asking for their feedback; however, getting their input would certainly help them understand the expectations better and feel more invested in meeting them. I want to make sure this happens in the future, starting with our next project.

She says, "It is probably unrealistic to expect to be able to answer 'yes' to all of the questions posed." But it doesn't hurt to try!

References:
Steinberg, A. (1998). Real Learning, Real Work: School-to-Work As High School Reform. New York: Routledge.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Sex, Drugs & Rock N Roll

Most everything I do in my classroom is coordinated with my teaching partner, Anne, who teaches geometry and chemistry in the room next to mine. When I refer here to things "we" are doing, that's who I mean.

Recently, we wrapped up a project called "Sex, Drugs & Rock N Roll" - a project in which, using the myriad tragic examples set by the rock music culture of the past, students studied the perils of drug use and created radio-style public service announcements about resources available for drug treatment and prevention. In conjunction with this, they learned about the history of Rock N Roll, investigated the chemistry of elicit drugs, and participated in a sexual health education class.

Since this project required the use of specific equipment that students only had access to at school (microphones and software for recording and mixing sound), and since we have 20 computers for 51 students, Anne and I devised a schedule where our students would be broken into three sections (17 students) instead of the usual two (26): one group would be with me for humanities class; the second would be with her for math/chem; and the third would have "tech time," with enough for one computer per student. It was a challenge to coordinate the details of this strange rotation, but it seemed we had sorted out our technological limitations.

One positive biproduct of our new arrangement was that students who were used to being in class together were shuffled around, which allowed us to investigate different dynamics in their influence on their peers. Students who influenced eachother negatively were separated, while students who supported their peers' academic performance were kept together - a sort of harmless social engineering experiment. For the most part, the results were positive and led us to think about making a few permanent changes for next semester. Of course, the decreased class size (17 instead of 26) helped improve dynamics as well.

One negative result of this arrangement was that students in the "tech" period were left without much direct supervision. From a behavior management perspective, it wasn't a problem; however, because Anne and I were engaged in teaching the other 2/3 of the team, students' "tech time" was entirely self-directed. If students had problems they couldn't solve, we weren't available to steer them in the right direction. Also, our engagement with the other students left us without much time to check in with them about their progress on the project. In some cases, it wasn't until time was running out that potential crises came to our attention. The average quality of the end products reflects this lack of direction, and I felt like I was missing the one-on-one personal contact that I usually love so much about projects.

Overall, I'd love to do this project again next year, but with some careful revisions. Anne and I have already begun talking about how to refine the project in order to avoid these pitfalls, and I think we can get much stronger results the next time around. When we return to class next semester, I plan to spend some time debriefing with the students about how the experience was for them and how we could have supported them better.

Student work samples from the project can be viewed on my Digital Portfolio.

Cracking my knuckles and settling in...

Journaling has always been a struggle for me. For that matter, doing anything habitually is a struggle for me. Sometimes I forget to feed my cat...

In the spirit of reincarnating the Journal as something I might be able to maintain, this blog will serve as a new space for laying down my thoughts. In it, I will reflect on my teaching practice, my experiences as a graduate student, and my thinking about anything related to schools and schooling. Perhaps pretending there's an audience out there to read and respond might make journaling feel more like a conversation, which is the missing element of a traditional paper-and-pen journal that always turned me off.

Much as a Captain's Log is written to keep a record of the semi-private experiences of a sailor traveling vast oceans, with the knowledge that the only way it will ever be read is if he makes it home safely, a web-log can be an intriguing forum - both private and public; possibly never read and possibly read only by a very selective audience; and charged with the potential for an occasional fantastic discovery afloat in a mundane, featureless seascape.

Then again, it's probably not as romantic as all that.

But the dramatic flare that leads me to such grandiose comparisons is not wholly inappropriate for discussing schools in America. Anyone who works with kids knows the comedy, drama and heroism that pass daily through their lives. And anyone who works in schools knows the intense tragedy that engulfs our current system.

I know I've been incredibly fortunate so far in my career as an educator, and much of what I will have to say here will reflect the exciting and inspiring energy I draw from my work. Some, too, will be the discouraging moments; and some will be the plodding day-to-day. All of it, though, will be in the spirit of deconstructing and interpreting the goings-on of my classroom practice and my work with peers in the profession, in order to get closer to the core of my personal philosophies about schooling. I'm looking forward to the journey ahead--I hope to discover sunken treasures, and I hope, too, for smooth sailing.