Beyond School

I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place.

Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in this case, Photoshop technique — while at the same time adding a creative element that makes the content-master stand out from the equally masterful but unimaginative competition. Point blank: in the hands of this guy, something as dull as “how to use layers” becomes a vehicle that screams, “Hire me to write for ‘30 Rock‘!” He proves he can turn lead into gold, which is a real-world skill not many people have. Alchemists like that deserve the chance to display their creative magic in school.

The Mental Work is Hard….

“You Suck at Photoshop” displays that creative magic in the form of fiction (see the Wikipedia entry on the series for  more). The host of the tutorials is a persona named “Donnie,” a loser stuck in a lousy life with a lousy wife. We learn about Donnie’s life through a series of such sometimes-subtle details as his choice of photos for the tutorial — “Say you want to use a photo of the Vanagon your wife meets her high school boyfriend in on Friday nights….wait, I’ve got one right here” (scroll past other photos of — gulp — handguns, and one of the high school boyfriend labeled — gulp — “douche-b.png”) — and such sometimes-over-the-top details as the wife barging in to kvetch at him in the middle of his tutorial, or his loser friend Skyping in with a loser-emergency while Donnie is making his screencast.

The creator of this project not only demonstrates his literary creativity by creating the fictional “Donnie” persona and populating his Photoshop folders with props like the pictures mentioned above; he takes it further with his dramatic creativity as he acts out the role of that persona with his voice-over. The vocal acting covers a broad emotional terrain, from dude in his basement chillaxing with his laptop to powder-keg psychopath struggling to keep the flame from his fuse. The acting is just awesome.

….The Tech is Dead Easy

The beauty of the project technology-wise is that it requires nothing more than a screencasting program like the free Jing or Screencast-o-matic, plus a webcam and microphone — your standard kit in most computers today. So the technical hurdles for students to do such a project are basically nil.

That leaves the whole of their energies to devote to the other two aspects of the project: mastery and critical understanding of the content, and creative concept development to deliver that understanding.

Too Beautiful for School?

So I’m wrestling, as usual, with the ways this wonderfully simple approach to creative learning will be complicated by the forces of schooliness:

• Do I have to make a rubric for it, and if so, does that kill the creativity with its prescriptive check-box drudgery, or limit the infinite creative possibilities by dictating “it must be this and not that, and that and not this”?
• Is it sustainable in terms of watching and grading and giving feedback to 100 students doing such an assignment?
• How do I define satisfactory content mastery and creativity for this assignment?
• How do I encourage experimentation and the healthy embrace of possible failure when I have to slap a low grade on it if it does indeed “fail”?
• Should I make it optional, in following with my increasingly elitist impulse to definitely not “push” the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student population who might blossom in the attempt?

I don’t know.

Nor do I know how to adapt this for a history classroom. Can “You Suck at Photoshop” become “You Suck at History”? How? How can this be used for Europe from the French Revolution to the present, or the complete history of China?

My recent brainstorm on giving a conceptual purpose to learning Chinese history by “interpreting it for historically-ignorant Westerners” seems to have some openings. God knows, there are ample websites of Chinese and Western art, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and more that students could tab through on their screencasts as they provide their commentary like “Donnie” does to his open Photoshop on his desktop. But the maker of “Donnie” has the luxury of revealing that persona through the image “props” in his folders, while history students wouldn’t have as easy a task of  revealing persona if they were forced instead to work with history websites in their screencasts.

One solution I’m considering is making it a summative, end-of-semester project, in which students have most of the semester to let their creative juices stew and come up with their own ideas over the first few months. Then give a couple of weeks of class time to a workshop in which they design and execute those ideas.

Otherwise, I’m mostly adrift. Maybe you can help.

But if you watch the three-minute first episode below, you should see why I’m bewitched by the idea:

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole playlist. Then help me figure out how I can make this work?

Were, in a fire of becoming,
Laboring to be burned away,
Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,
Would be as serious as play.
–John Hollander, “Adam’s Task”

Still tunneling out of the avalanche of semester exams (have I mentioned I love my ninth graders in Western Civ? Exam essay quote: “Without the Reformation, Obama would be planning his Pakistan policy with the Pope.”), but I can’t let Paul Krugman — you know, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and NYTimes columnist — get away without tying his recent observation about the limitations of “mere” academic excellence to what I yammered about in the last post.

Krugman marks the passing of economic theorist Paul Samuelson. After summarizing eight — count ‘em, eight — of Samuelson’s seminal contributions to economic thought, and noting that any one of them would be enough to win him a seat in intellectual history, Krugman asks:

So how did he do it? By being smarter than anyone else, of course. But there were also, I’d suggest, two aspects of Samuelson’s intellectual makeup that empowered his intellectual quest.

The first was his playfulness. Read Samuelson’s work, and what you get is the sense of a man who, rather than sitting down to write Very Serious Papers, was having fun with ideas. Sometimes the playfulness boiled over into inspired silliness. Look at footnote #9 in his overlapping-generations paper, where he writes: “Surely, no sentence beginning with the word ‘surely’ can validly contain a question mark at its end? However, one paradox is enough for one article …” It seems clear to me that Samuelson’s playfulness liberated his imagination, and fueled his creativity. [emphasis added]

That Nobel Guy Sure is Smart

And to tie that in with my last post, real simply: some readers who didn’t read me closely enough (or closely at all, since I said it clearly) claimed I was saying “academic excellence” doesn’t matter, when what I said was that it doesn’t separate one 4.0 egg-head¹  from his or her numerically identical twins,  while social intelligence does. In a room full of 4.0’s, we’re going to want to work with the ones we’d give a 4.0 to for attitude and personality — professional attitude and personality, which I argue doesn’t mean “stiff” and “buttoned-up” (what I call “constipated” in my buttoned-down moments), but rather smart people who are also  engaged, engaging, and passionate about the work at hand. And I argue that takes social intelligence, because I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s all-too-familiar with “passionate professionals” who, owing to social ineptness, only alienate and anger their colleagues. It’s much nicer and more pleasant when they’re smart enough to be, well — nicer and more pleasant. Which takes smarts.

What I love about Krugman’s excerpt above is his identification of another intelligence — creativity, which he nicely links to “playfulness” and “fun” — that, Krugman believes, enabled Samuelson’s superior academic performance and insight.  Creative types aren’t doing it (only) for the grade (or _your extrinsic carrot here_), and it’s tempting to argue the converse: their academic creativity results in the grade (or other carrot). They invite complex subjects over for a private mental  cocktail party, entertain and have a good time with them, and share the proceedings with us in their texts and talks. And that’s why we like them more than the extrinsically-motivated grade-grubbers doing it perfectly, but without heart or spirit. (Those types risk becoming what Alexander Pope, in his “Essay on Criticism,” called “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read/ With loads of learned lumber in his head.”)

TED Talks is really all about this sort of buttoned-down, socially intelligent, and creative intellectualism.

Code: Lesson 2

It takes social intelligence to know how to button-down in spirit, and not just in form. Losing the tie is not the same thing as losing the constipation, as anyone literate in body and facial language knows. How we move, sit, stand, arrange our faces, choose what to say and how to say it, are all forms of writing by which others read us; we’re walking texts, in this sense. And our whiz-kids need to be taught this, since so many of them clearly need it.

I could go on forever about this, and probably need to, because I can hear the rumblings before the comments are even formed (so let me say, again, that I’m not saying academics don’t matter, but that so much else matters as well — especially in a landscape of diminishing opportunities). I’ll just close this sermon by saying that what I’m saying is nothing new to adults, but it is to kids. We’ve conditioned them to think that all work, no play, and 4.0 gpa makes Johnny a success, when they really, as the old saw goes, make him a “very dull boy.”

Now back — half-measuring, half-humming — to the grading.

1. and this is no slur on egg-heads, since I count myself among their numbers [↩]

I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), and moreover, who throw “modesty” out the window in favor of the desire to acknowledge the extraordinary  and to unabashedly try to illuminate it. And all of this connected, in this teacher’s head, to an experience I had last week in my classroom.

So let me steal a couple more minutes from my gradebook deadline and share it. It’s this:

Single semester courses at my new school give Academic Excellence awards at semester’s end. One award is given per 50 students or so, and I have only 36 combined in my two Chinese history classes — a semester course.

So: given that a good six or seven students from those two classes all qualified as “academically excellent,” how choose one over the other?

Highest grade point average wasn’t the magic bullet, since the few tenths of a decimal point separating several of the students were surely as attributable to the performance of the grader — me — as to the performance of the students (that will be a revelation or a scandalous idea only to those who have never taught, read the research on, or thought for five unbroken minutes about the imprecision of grades as a measurement of student quality).

Long story short, I looked at the little canned script the school gave us teachers to read (optionally, bless their hearts) when presenting the award. It had a blank list of “five accomplishments” we were encouraged to fill out. I played along: 1) likes history; 2) good thinker; 3) good writer; 4) good speaker; 5) reliable and accountable, yadda yadda. Again, that still described at least five or six students.

Then it hit me.

Our Past is not Your Future — And Why That’s Bad News

What separated one from all the others was this: social intelligence. Call it “energy” or “life force,” if you will. It’s what the vast majority of “academically excellent” students are lacking. As  I tried to explain it  to the class when presenting the award:

The Dow topping the 10,000 mark aside, many economists are arguing that the U.S. economy may take years to recover to pre-crash levels in terms of something more important to most people than stocks — I mean jobs. Employment and production continue to decline, and many say those jobs may never come back.

High school students are so stuck in the myth that grades will lead to jobs — and so stuck in the textbooks about yesteryear — that they’re oblivious to this. The evidence for it pervades the classroom daily in the “I’ve done my work and I’ve got a high GPA, and that’s enough” attitude. I can slouch in my chair during class, use my mouth during discussions only as an oxygen-intake port, foul the collective sound- and vision-scape with complaints and sighs and sour looks, promote complacency by refusing to put any imagination or energy into improving the group experience, on and on. Again, my GPA is enough. It will get me into college, and college will get me into a job, because I have no inkling how much more difficult my future may be due to the several gathering clouds on the horizon — have no inkling, for example, that for every single vacancy in the professional job-rolls today, there are between five and six very qualified people seeking and needing that job.

The Only Thing Worse than a Suck-Up….

So in deciding how to give that award, I gave it to the person I wouldn’t only hire for being academically capable, but would promote for qualities of character: a person whose body language said “I’m awake and alert,”  whose facial language said “I’m not sour,” whose actions said “Let me help improve the class” instead of shirking that option — who was, in short, “energetic,” positive, constructive –  neither a “suck-up,” as I put it in class, nor, as importantly, a “suck-down.”

In a sense, by giving that student the award, I did “promote” her. That honor might, after all, be the tipping point in a favorable college application decision down the road.

I don’t know where I read it — and now that I think about it, I believe I saw it on a TV interview — but somewhere I saw a headhunter or executive type respond to a question about how the new economic landscape was affecting his hiring decisions, and his response should be posted above the gates of all schools for the privileged (such as mine): He didn’t care, he said, about an applicant’s academic pedigree, regardless of how ivy-covered it was; in fact, he went on, such a pedigree can even be a red flag and a demerit. Because the last thing he was looking for, he said, was people whose backgrounds led them to believe they were entitled to the best things in life. He wanted people who see  privilege as a thing to be earned.

This is something American students, especially, may need to hear, since they’re less able to compare themselves to their English-speaking peers from India and Asia — perhaps India especially, since it has two advantages over both East Asia and America: the presence of native English literacy skills equal or superior to those of American students, and the absence of the Confucian submissiveness and rote learning habits of many East Asian countries.

(The short version: watch out for India. It’s confident, it’s capable, it’s talkative; it’s hungry, it’s not spoiled, and it’s socially intelligent. This is made abundantly clear in my international school classroom every day.)

Psst…Your Code is Showing

In any case, in this age of the interwebs, this teacher once again shares with the rest of the world what he shares in his classroom, hoping it’s of value to students anywhere, whether they’re in his gradebook or not. What I hope you’ll take away:

First, your grades might get you in the door, but they won’t get you up the ladder. (And in this Age of Defining-Down “Success,” even getting in the door shouldn’t be taken for granted. Having a job at all, in other words, may be the “new” success. Just ask the 1-in-5 Americans currently unemployed or under-employed.)

And second, we don’t see you as a GPA, because we see the rest of you daily. How you walk and who you walk with, how you sit and how you compose your face, where your eyes go and don’t go, what comes (and doesn’t come) out of your mouth — all of things things are very obvious codes that we decode daily. And when you leave us, others with the power to pull you up or keep you down will take our place, and they’ll read those same codes.

I know this sounds crazy authoritarian, and that maybe one or two of you might be possessed of the type of genius that can beat the odds and conquer the world without an ounce of social intelligence or maturity of character. But — to share a dirty secret — I, like most teachers, really do want you to succeed. And I write this because I think it may help some of you.

Now here’s that TED Talk:

The comment thread on Gary Stager’s HuffPo article on the Duncan appointment wouldn’t allow this long response, so I’m posting it here.

Gary,

I’m still informing myself (and as others have noted, your links are now more of my homework), so I’m going to withhold judgment somewhat.

I will say that all the reading I’ve done so far – and I’ve been reading a lot – confirms that Duncan’s record in Chicago is far from miraculous.

But I’ve read some ‘benefit of the doubt’ types who note that Duncan’s hands may have been tied by the Daley machine. Since Duncan’s appointment is now a fait accompli, we can only hope he’ll surprise us under Obama.

I’ll also note that, a propos the tempest around gay-basher Rick Warren’s selection for the inauguration, Duncan gave strong support to a “gay-friendly” school in Chicago. (Yes, I’m aware such an idea smacks of “separate but equal,” but wrote here about why I still think it’s a good idea.) While not an educational feather, it’s still a refreshing one to see in a cabinet member’s cap.

We may as well add that Duncan is on record as condemning the lack of funding for NCLB, its stick-instead-of-carrot posture (which could be changed), and its low-cognition assessments. If he “reforms” NCLB along these lines – and yes, many more – I can think of worse outcomes.

In the end, the decisions on education under the Obama administration are Obama’s responsibility; what he said regarding HRC at State pertains to education as well: “I’ll make the decisions.”  And while I’m as nervous as the next guy over so many of his moves lately, I guess I’m holding out hope that all the recent theater is outside-the-box tactics in a longer-term strategy that will make progressives proud. His campaign – a masterpiece of proving the nay-sayers wrong – makes me think more than twice that I can unriddle his long-term plan. So maybe he is selling out or simply making stupid choices; but maybe he’s not. He’s so damn poker-faced and close to the chest, it’s beyond me to know at this point.

I also take heart in the fact that he tapped Darling-Hammond to lead his transition team, and by choosing Duncan instead of a Rhee or Klein, arguably signaled his opposition to those more extreme edubiz proponents. I also take heart in the possibility that BO is so enamored of the “cabinet of rivals” idea in the Lincoln book he’s been touting lately that his appointment of Duncan might not equal an endorsement of Duncan’s record. Again: fait accompli – I’ll cling to any shred of hope until actions in office shred it beyond clinging.

This is all a long-winded way of saying you may be right, but until we see more, you’re not yet. Let’s hope you never are

Parting shot: To me, the money quote of your article was this:  “Perhaps we need federal legislation requiring a fully qualified superintendent in every school district!”

I’ve been thinking the same thing since I began watching the Texas Board of Edu-Creationism try to jimmy Genesis into science classes and, worse yet, textbooks nationwide (Texas standards wag the national textbook industry dog: if Texas votes to deny Darwin, all the science textbooks will aim to please. I still pray somebody stateside takes on the Smart Mobs idea to protest this putsch).

So I’d revise your money quote to add Board of Education members to the list of politicians requiring expertise in education. Failing that, we’re prey to anti-primate jackasses evermore.

Who is Arne Duncan and how will his choice as Secretary of Education affect education in the US (and, for better or worse in this hegemonic age, much of the rest of the world)? I’ve spent so many hours since the announcement reading reactions online that both my eyes and my brain cells are fried. (Enjoy the Diigo bookmarks if you’re masochistic.) All that reading will have to steep for a while before I can serve it as tea.

Until that happens, I’m going to focus on one controversy surrounding Duncan, and toss out some thoughts on it. That controversy is performance pay for teachers.

Bill Ferriter’s excellent recent post on this issue at the Tempered Radical got me thinking. I replied there,

Thinking about it a little more, this is what I can come up with so far:

We’d have to define “merit” to include the higher-order thinking skills – analysis, synthesis, evalutation/critical thinking, creativity – that the best learning projects require. This is not the opposite of the “fact-based, right/wrong, multiple choice” testing that NCLB and the College Board/AP/SAT pushes, but what you might call the upward extension of it. Mastery of facts is the beginning, not the end, of the assessment for meritorious teaching and learning.

If we start there, that means teacher merit is measured by the types of projects that are assigned in the classroom – not by the standardized testing industry – and by the performance of students who complete these projects. This further means that said teacher measurement is performed not centrally, but locally – or perhaps by boards consisting of local and central judges. (I know that “central” is vague.)

My thinking is that if teachers were rewarded for designing learning activities that measured positively against a checklist of such higher-order thinking traits – and crucially, that the measurement was based not on a single unit, but on a portfolio of all units assigned throughout the semester or year (this eliminates the dog-and-pony show liability of single principal evaluations) – then the best teachers would be rewarded with higher pay, while the worst ones would have an incentive to change their practice for the better. Teaching to the test wouldn’t be the goal any more; teaching to higher instructional standards would be.

As for what those higher instructional standards would look like, we need look no further than Linda Darling-Hammond for answers. Her presentation linked in an earlier post lays the groundwork for such guidelines.

As I commented on Will’s post about the Duncan pick,

Since Darling-Hammond led BO’s ed transition team, she may have had his ear long enough to fill it with good sense on how to reform NCLB’s assessments for the better – so that they align with better teaching-and-learning.

And I just discovered Bill Ferriter posted a follow-up to my comment, so off I go to fry a few more cells. Bill’s worth it.

Announcing…

ΨΨ The Winner
of the McCain Stump Speech Wordle
“Write Your Own Caption”
Competition © ΨΨ

I am pleased to announce the winner is the very talented Vincent Robletto, whose Kerblotto blog screams “Subscribe” for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Vincent’s submission rose above thousands hundreds tens ones of rivals.¹ So, without further ado [drumroll], first the unveiling, followed by Vince’s acceptance speech:

Robleto Acceptance Speech:

[Vince takes microphone. Voice trembling, blinking back tears, beaming:]

I landed a job as an advertising copywriter and won the McCain wordle today. It’s really been a stellar day.²

~  ~  ~

Okay, enough silliness. I do think it’s wonderful, though, how little whims like the lead-balloon Wordle contest ³ can still lead to new connections in this new world. I went to Vincent’s site and discovered some original Photoshop remix goodness he’d created, and got his permission to share. Two of my topical favorites:

A couple last examples of why I suffer from Photoshop Envy on a massive scale, from different posts on Vincent’s blog:

and finally, for something completely different:

"Mmm...Ham face." Vincent Robleto.

And if you just want to laugh, find more than one, guaranteed, at Vincent’s selection of “A Few Bad Logo Choices.” (And congrats on the writing job, Vincent!)

Obligatory “Educational Relevance” Ending: On Photoshop Free Open Source Gimp as a Literacy Skill

Seriously: Have you, or has anyone you know, ever told students that original Photoshop (or, as Vincent corrected me, and used to make these images, the free open source software The Gimp) illustrations are encouraged – not instead of writing, but supplementing it – for essay assignments? I think it’s clear they should be. It’s a skill that sets a person apart. This whole post is all about that, in a way.

1. And Diane Cordell was close on his heels. [↩]
2. This from an actual email. [↩]
3. It happens to all of us, Terry! [↩]

"Old dogs" my mange-ridden tail. (I'm the guy with the receding hairline, inset lower left.)

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy.

Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, got the nod in mid-November. (Some of my fellow tweets know this.)¹

And while it’s obvious that I enjoyed the advantage of being a foreigner when it came to breaking into radio at my age, I want to add that it didn’t hurt to have a background teaching reading, writing, and speaking skills for eight years. The old joke I loved as a new Humanities graduate – “I have a Liberal Arts degree: Will that be for here or to go?” – seems less funny now, because less true.  The basic skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening, which really just mean communicating, in the end – have more value to them than we often credit.

That teaching unit I mentioned? I think about it most days as I drive home from work. In a nutshell, it’s this: invite your students to turn your content, whatever your subject matter, into five-minute “top of the hour” newscasts, applying the craft of writing for radio (great resource here), and then speaking for radio. Then have them follow up, at certain points, with “talk radio” in which they discuss and debate their “content news.” In addition to that work-flow’s simple progression from fact-mastery (identify the main ideas of each section of a chapter and distill them into a short, well-crafted précis) to higher-order thinking (analyze, synthesize, evaluate those main ideas in a natural discussion), there are two more bonuses: first, the technology slice is so simple it’s invisible (in live studio news broadcasts, you only get one chance to announce the news, so for students that means hit record, read for five minutes, then wrap by hitting “stop” and call it a day), and technology should ideally be as invisible as pen and paper; and second, the activity develops all the real-world skills that come with real journalism and broadcasting (or, as Wes Fryer puts it in regards to podcasting, “narrowcasting”).

Glancing back at my last post about Linda Darling-Hammond on performance-based assessment, this type of learning-while-doing workshop measures performance across a wide range of literacy skills: reading for main ideas, writing them with economy and accuracy (and no passive voice, mostly action verbs, citation of sources, distinctions between “alleging” and “charging,” and more), and best of all, speaking with proper pace, volume, inflection, emphasis, pitch variety, and all the other qualities radio announcers have to master to avoid losing their listeners to the next station on the dial.

It’s “real-world project-based learning” that uses the same skills as outlining, note-taking, and giving those schooly little front-of-the-classroom speeches.

The only glitch I can see is this: if you have 20 students that you put into pairs, they can’t all record at the same time in class, so they’ll have to do the actual recording outside of class. They can still have the class period as the workshop to read and write their news scripts, and practice announcing them to each other. They can also discuss and outline the questions and topics for the higher-order “talk show” piece.

Here’s the process we follow at my station. I really think it could be duplicated in an 80-minute block. At work, I do it as part of a team of two. Here it is:

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.: Read newswires (in class, this could be, say, a chapter from a history textbook), select ten articles (sections from the textbook) for the 5-minute 9:00 hourly, divide the labor, then condense those news articles – which read aloud would take two or three minutes each – into crisp little 20-to-30 second summaries of main ideas.

That means cutting about 90% of the length, without cutting the important ideas. (In other words, that means: critical reading for main ideas.)

8:30 to 8:50 a.m.: Practice reading the scripts, making last-minute adjustments where necessary. Focus on the oral skills here: breath control, pace and pause, acceleration and deceleration, words and phrases to emphasize (just consciously watch or listen to any TV or radio newscaster, and notice how different their speaking is from normal off-air speech).

8:50 to 9:00: Go upstairs to the studio, make sure your pages are in order.

9 to 9:05: Announce the news. No second chances.

Again, the reading, writing, and practicing take 80 minutes – a standard block period. The actual recording would have to be done outside of class (Skype, anyone?).

Now for the testimonial: When training for this gig, my first few attempts at speaking were disasters. Adrenaline would make me read too fast. I couldn’t control my breath, so you’d hear huge whooshing sounds as I came up for air after long sentences. My voice and hands shook. I couldn’t meet the 5-minute final out deadline. I couldn’t turn pages skillfully – you’d hear rattling paper or, worse, page one seque to page three because I’d lifted two pages instead of one, resulting in an economy article ending with a surreal sports score followed by a brain-frozen omigod pause. My vocal style would start strong, but during the underwater feeling of the third and fourth minute, I’d drop into a monotone without realizing it. And more.

But my partner’s constructive feedback and encouragement, and self-critique by listening to the performance, and imitation of newscasters online and on air, soon – within a week – led to massive improvement in both writing and speaking, by all accounts. I still have the job, so that must be the general consensus. My point here is that, done regularly, giving students time to stumble and fail, then try again until they succeed and become finally comfortable with all this literacy, will, I’m convinced, make them much stronger readers, writers, and speakers than ye olde schooly lecture-outline-take notes-summarize-give a speech drill.

It was the same with the reading and writing. My partner and I took forever, the first few days, to be able to hone in on the main ideas in all the articles we re-wrote, leading to no practice-time before going live and worse. But now, our speed has at least doubled. We’ve developed the skills, in other words, of skimming, evaluating, separating central from supporting information, and re-writing those quickly and clearly.

So, when I re-enter the classroom next year (yes, you heard that right), this performance-based workflow will be one I introduce early in the year, and sustain throughout it.

I know it’s not original, by the way, and I’m sure many teachers are doing this type of thing. I’m just struck by it because I’ve experienced it from the other (and real-world) end, as a learner.

1. The station is the first all-English radio station in Korean history, and launched December 1. La-de-da. [↩]

Doug Noon at Borderlands wrote a post, “Assessments for Learning,” that I want to stop time to respond to, but until that’s possible, this quickie:

Doug Linked to a presentation at the Forum for Education and Democracy that featured short-listed Secretary of Education Linda Darling-Hammond and others discussing performance-based assessment: “assessing students based on demonstrations of what they know, understand, and can do.”

You can view the full event here, or watch each speaker’s segment in video here. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, at least watch Darling-Hammond’s presentation. Here’s the blurb:

“What we have thought of as fairly rare in this country [i.e., the USA] is quite common in most of the high-achieving countries internationally,” Linda Darling-Hammond began. (See her presentation here.) Beginning with a list of 21^st century skills, Darling-Hammond contrasted US tests – which require recall of a simple fact or ask students for a one-sentence explanation – with exams abroad that include designing science experiments, refining computer programs and explaining the reasoning behind solutions for complex problems. “[In many nations,] there’s a teaching and learning system, that operates to provide rich curriculum and strong outcomes,” Darling-Hammond said. “They are what assure that the higher-order skills are actually taught and practiced.” [emphasis added]

Darling-Hammond gives overviews of state and local assessment design and purpose from such high-performing countries as Finland, Hong Kong, and Australia, and includes the International Baccalaureate (IB) program as well. I challenge anyone to watch it and still argue that the rote bubble-filling of US assessment is the best way to go.

Also worth a watch are the presentations by Ann Cook of the NY Performance Standards Consortium, and by filmmaker and Consortium school graduate Kiri Davis. Again, see the site for more – and notice, at the bottom of the page, you can download

a report by Conveners Linda Darling-Hammond and George Wood, “Assessment for the 21st Century: Using Performance Assessments to Measure Student Learning More Effectively.”

Finally, if the Obama team is serious about listening to us at Change.gov’s education page, then it can’t hurt to throw a comment there supporting Darling-Hammond as Sec. of Ed. She’s got the vision and values to help kids instead of corporations, and teach the whole child instead of the state test.

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think.

I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list my favorite ways of using blogs for both Learning to Write and - a very different thing – Writing to Learn.

Here goes:

Jan’s Opening Question and Comment:

My First Reply:

Re: factual accuracy: maybe a sidebar disclaimer saying “I’m young and possibly wrong sometime.” (If only FOX would do that. Or me.)

Or maybe just trust to the two-way nature of this medium to allow people to push back/correct errors  in comments.

The whole accuracy thing can be skirted by doing more creative stuff – personal narrative and so on, too.

And maybe a wiki instead of a blog so students can correct their stuff.

Re: conventions and mechanics: I’m a six traits guy myself, and am more concerned with the first five – ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency – than I am with grammar/spelling/punctuation. So I grade far more heavily for notable attention to those first 5 traits.

I want students to write freely and ideally discover they enjoy it. Perfectionism and fear of errors won’t create the conditions for that to happen. We’ll talk about errors after I’ve read enough volume from you to do an error analysis of your most frequent _serious_ grammar/spelling problems, which I’ll prioritize and teach to you one on one down the road.

Then you can select your five or ten favorite posts – which maybe I’ll score as a single test grade – and _correct those errors on only those posts_ to apply what you’ve learned/I’ve taught you to look for and correct.

I know this is sloppy, but it’s 1.40 a.m. and I’m replying to your contact communication.

Afterthought: I think students should have the option of not publishing if their work is too sub-par.

But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they?

–

(To Add More:)

Since you told me in a private email that you were looking at the French Revolution Ant Farm Diary (right?), I’ve got more to say:

That was a formative project using “Writing to Learn” pedagogy. The point of the writing, above all, was for students to learn the material in this active way, rather than listening to lectures, reading the textbook, or other passive ways of learning. So the writing in this approach is secondary to the learning.

The summative assessment was an essay that did hold accuracy and writing at a premium.

And every time I use WTL, I’m amazed at how much deeper and broader the retention, comprehension, and insight are, compared to when I lecture, they discuss, or just read or watch stuff.

Have you ever used WTL? I’d be interested to hear your (and everyone’s) experiences with it.

Second Exchange:

Jan replied:

Clay,
Your approach is terrific and I am not questioning intent.

I teach high school & college English, media literacy, speech & debate, and have taught in all grade levels. I have used 6 traits and don’t think of myself as a grammar nazi.

Lately, I have been concerned with the declining (even by current standards) level of writing and content information that seems to be fostered by the web. Blogging, IMing and texting encourage stream of consciousness-type of writing; with no regard for logic, facts or conventions. I think this is fine for drafts and, well, this conversation.

I often tell my students, “Remember, you are writing for a college graduate, NOT your girlfriend,” in an attempt to make them slow their thoughts and process their communication. Still, I get final drafts that need additional editing, presentations with missing capital letters and assorted other errors that, when I point them out, they say, “Yeah, well, you know what I mean…”

I find this attitude in college writing, too. I have students of 20-30 even 40 years old who write without thinking of editing, who think that whatever they write should be accepted as their ‘best’ and who have little sense of thinking about WHO will read their work.

For me, it’s even become about respect. If I respect you, I will do all I can to make sure that my communication is clear and accurate. but if I don’t care who reads this, I can spel anway i want sdo touy will no whut i mean…

Don’t misunderstand that I am critiquing your projects, nor the work of your students. It’s that your projects got me thinking about this issue, and I used it as an example.

When we publish something, especially to the web, as a teacher, do we have the obligation of editing, or do we just post ‘as is’? Your comment (But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they? ) begs the question of who is the audience?

My reply:

I sympathize with your concerns, Jan, and hope I didn’t sound defensive when I, oops, defended Writing to Learn.

I’ve seen the chatroom-ese on student work on blogs, forums, and wikis when I introduced them, but didn’t have much problem rooting them out with discussions of the respect you mention (and self-respect, since using “cuz”, e.g., in a public writing is like going to a job interview in dirty clothes). Most students got it and met the standard after that, and those that didn’t woke up after a few shocking bad grades.

But that could be specific to my private school students, whose moms rip them new orifices at the first A-, much less C-.

Online writing is definitely no silver bullet for writing, as I’ve argued a million times. Over time, though, and – crucially – in conjunction with 6-traits rubrics that set the standards for their writing from the quality of Ideas on down the line to Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions and Mechanics, AND Presentation, I really have seen marked improvement in quality in all those traits, overall, AND in engagement. Wake-up grades, again, given early, were also key.

But we’re talking students here, so I’m not claiming miracles (and not suggesting you’re implying I am).

It’s the “over time” thing that’s key, to me.

I do think students who write because they’re forced, and probably see no lasting value in most cases to what is still, in the end, mere homework to most of them, will have a different attitude about what they publish compared to people who, like us, write voluntarily about things we care about.

And since it’s 9.24 a.m. this brisk Saturday morning, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee as I start the day thinking with you (which I enjoy too), I’m going to ramble a bit more.

There are so many different approaches to assignments, we both know, to inculcate whatever habits of mind or skills we’re working on in a given week. So I just want to toss off a few that come to mind:

1. The “comment on the teacher’s post” assignment:

Rather than students writing on their own blog, they do a specific task in the comment thread to the teacher’s. That way they see their work standing alongside that of their peers, and may be more motivated to look better and work harder, in order to avoid looking weak. I’ve done that with:

a. Syntactical variation exercises (sentence openings, e.g.): “Take this sentence and re-write it, using only the words in the sentence, in as many ways as you can.” If you moderate comments, they don’t see other students’ work until all have done the assignment. Then they can see and learn from other students’ responses. That’s a wickedly powerful affordance of online writing that is hard to duplicate offline. I posted about it here.

b. Introductory paragraphs (hooks): Copy and paste your “hook” from your first draft, and the revised version from your latest draft, into the comment thread, and briefly explain your writer’s decision that guided your revision. (There’s an entire class discussion of authentic writing right there, which my students enjoyed, because they were seeing what others had tried. The few successes were great cases of student modeling, and the weaker ones were great cases of cliche or otherwise dead introductions.) (You can see my Seoul and a flat world teacher’s Hawaii students doing this here.)

c. Titles. (Titles are a pet peeve of mine. “My Essay” from high schoolers makes my blood boil.)

2. Critical Thinking:

My latest Diigo Daily Reads auto-posts feature highlights (basically copy-pastes, though Diigo does that work for me by publishing only what I highlight from a web page) that I then respond to with sticky notes that do NOT summarize the reading, but instead either “challenge, extend, or qualify” the point. That’s an “ideas” sort of assignment that simply forces students to THINK about what they passively read. (See this post for a screencast on this approach.

3. Trait-based assessment of x number of student blog posts per unit for a test grade:

The biggest bear, for me, about student blogging and wiki work is the sheer volume. When I assign regular posts, I normally can’t assess them all with any depth. But I still want regular writing in the same way a PE teacher wants regular running to keep his/her students fit. So to allow students to self-select 3, say, while you randomly select 2 (whatever you work out, obviously), to grade by the rubric – either for all traits, or just one or two un-disclosed ones (since they won’t know, they’ll ideally give more care to all the traits), is the best solution I’ve come up with for this dilemma. The “teacher choices” keep them from shamming on the posts they won’t self-select.

Closer, for now: I haven’t taught long enough to be able to compare this generation of student writers from previous ones, so I don’t know whether their skills are any better or worse than in the past.

I do know that the elitist side of me wants to use student blogs in a highly selective writing elective class – see For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging for more – to simply rid myself of the headaches of dealing with the bums, so I’ve got my Delta Force of real writers who want to train.

I guess that’s my way of saying, “I hear you.”

I share this simply because I think Jan asks good questions, and I’m sure others have valuable input to add. Here’s hoping they do.

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog); the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interracted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries; King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.

The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss in the webinar my thoughts on the relative merits of both approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)

Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and introduce them all in one fell swoop.

If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives.

Here’s the event (it should start when I do, at almost 26:50, and finish a half hour later. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners. The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):