Habits of Mind

As I continue to work my way through Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas, I'm particularly struck by one of the key organizing structures around which the intellectual work done at CPESS revolves: their "Habits of Mind."

From my work at High Tech High, I was already familiar with such ideas, but they were sort of an endangered species in the years when I worked there. Now that I'm seeing them described in Meier's book, I'm reminded how much they resonate with my own values about what defines work worth doing. The six habits that they emphasized at CPESS were:

Evidence: "How do we know what we know?"
Viewpoint: "Who's speaking?"
Connections: "What causes what?"
Supposition: "How might things have been different?"
Relevance: "Who cares?" "So what?"

Once upon a time, HTH had adopted this same set of habits (although they preferred the term "perspective" over "viewpoint"). I think they should bring them back.

I realize now, as I don't think I have done before, that I imply a lot of these habits in the work I do with my students, particularly the first three, although I rarely make explicit the manner in which these habits can be learned and cultivated. The fourth - supposition - is the one I practice least in my own life, and so is not surprisingly the one I promote least in my own classroom.

The fifth - relevance - is the one I think we as teachers do the worst job of addressing with our students. What I mean is that we too rarely have a good answer to the questions, "Why are we learning this?" or "When am I ever going to use this in my life?" Although the relevance of our curricular content is usually (hopefully) clear to us, it's not made clear to students. It's not surprising, then, when students have a hard time applying it to their own work.

References:
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas, (50). Boston: Beacon Press.

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.

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:

• "The truth is rarely pure and never simple"
• "Philip Guston: An Abstract Expressionist"
• "Did you know that pigments are toxic?"
• "Art - Industrial Revolution"
• "Let's Talk About Impressionism! Yay!"
• "Quizas??"
  

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.