Beyond School

In my second Open Thread a few days ago, “Your Dream Elective Class for a 1:1 Laptop High School?“, I invited any comers to propose a beyond-the-box fantasy for an elective “English Workshop” class I began this week.

Sean Law of the new Slam Teaching blog (again, a must-read blog for anybody more interested in pedagogy, English or otherwise, than mere tools) started things off by suggesting:

A course on writing that would be a sort of dream-come-true course for me would be a course wherein students explored their own authorities or authorships. A course where students were allowed to determine what it was they wanted from the course, and where a plethora of texts were available from which to draw (but where the primary texts for the course were the students’ works). Too often, writing courses aim to teach students proper form, thereby setting the “bar” at a certain height, *and setting a decidedly homogeneous standard. Writing, though, like teaching (thank you, Penelope) is a spontaneous, crazy, dangerous thing to do; and upon inspection, only the worst writing fits into a homogeneous standard. Why teach the worst writing? Teach to anticipate genius.

–got it. Love it. (Check.)

Several others weighed in, and their comments sunk into the mix. But then came the inimitable 14-year-old boy wonder, Arthus, who suggested:

Don’t teach writing; teach communication.

Note: Arthus was too high on some of Sean’s “genius juice” to notice that I’d already defined “English” for this class as “Communication” in the broadest multimedia sense. That juice really gave me a contact buzz in the rest of Arthus’ comment, to wit:

Basically, the idea being that during the class you teach students to be effective communicators in a digital era: combine marketing, video, audio and conversation with traditional writing.

Co-teach the class with a digital teacher. That is, have you upfront while they teach from the intertubes. Backchannel the class - instead of having students raise hands, put them in a Skype chat. The co-teacher could respond even as you continue the lesson. Bring up the most important thoughts from the backchannel. Watch as the discussion evolves and morphs - without students having to fear saying something “stupid” to the class at large.

Throughout the course, have students basically develop a voice through their works. Have them chose the mediums for that voice, and see who does it most effectively. Discuss and discuss and discuss.

No nit-picking assessment of every post. No fear of saying the wrong thing. Assess based upon the whole—the reputation the students have developed; the ideas they have presented; the effectiveness of their communication.

Pull in more eyes from your learning networks—point us to the best posts, allow students to see how their ideas are received. Teach them how to write in a two-way manner, to kindle conversation with their words.

Make comments anonymous (for the students), so they have no fear of telling a best friend he writes like a chinchilla.

Call me crazy.

If you call Arthus crazy, I’m guilty too. Got it, love it, and check #2.

Cut to today’s second meeting of that class. In the first class, we had gone through an exercise I participated in at the Asian Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok last month. It was designed to help people self-discover a passion-based project they wanted to do, and then to find like-minded peers in the group with whom to collaborate.

For the record, nine students broke into a 3-person script-writing and film-making group, a 3-person restaurant and bar design group, a 2-person NBA sports journalism group, and a non-conformist - love it - “one-person group” doing a project concerning racial stereotypes. They are all free to form lateral alliances and cross into and back out of the other groups on a free agent basis.

We also discussed grades and what “excellent” would look like. Regarding grades, each student will propose their grade each month, and support that proposed grade with evidence of effort via what they’ve done and what they’ve reflectively learned from their doings. Regarding excellent, success is not the important thing - impressive, creative, visionary ideas, products, and actions are. Big failures will be rewarded if impressive, and sucked to the marrow for their lessons learned. Back to the drawing board second attempts - dogged perseverance and sane attempts to get the same results by improved means - will be heavily weighted in the excellence scale. (More debt to the soon-to-be-podcasted conversation with Sean on “slam grading” for this twist.)

The funny thing is this: when I explained it to these students on the first day, they all got it very willingly.

Now we’re ready: Cut to today’s class. Here’s the short version: that “digital co-teacher….teaching from the intertubes” went from Open Thread fantasy to 1:1 School Reality. In the equivalent of one thousand words, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Arthus, invading Korea from the “intertubes”:

Using a model that organically developed as the Students 2.0 backchannels for editors, web developers, and other project management functions, Arthus set up separate Skype chats for members of all groups. Those Skype group chats will be saved as the repository for the cumulative project development for each group. Arthus likes to play and likes to teach, so he will join me in each Skype group with organic suggestions, synchronous or otherwise, for each group to develop a Personal Learning Network (or, as Chris Lott re-christens it, “Personal Living Networks” - h/t to Will Richardson).

I’ve got more to say about today - especially about Arthus’ follow-up coup with his Ustream TV live call-in coverage of the New Hampshire primaries, which I watched, chatted in, and called in to, but mostly just listened - because he didn’t need adults to provide the political analysis. His was better than CNN at its mediocre best.

But I’ve got to post this now - Will Richardson just tweeted a request “to tell a group of 4-9th graders here in CT what all of these connections might mean for them?“

–Is this telling enough, Will?

–

Slide from my Apple Distinguished Educator presentation, Bangkok, December 2007 . Photo by el clinto on Flickr

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