Beyond School

Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened. Read the rest of this entry »

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album [↩]
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.” [↩]
3. I actually use that phrase in class [↩]

An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged. [↩]

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?

I’ll have more to say soon about how I’ve been trying to teach the wisdom in this “napkin philosopher” piece in my classroom all year. It’s going to get center stage on my classroom door window first day back to school. Maybe even tattooed on students’ hands.

But right now, it’s off to the airport to send my in-laws back to Korea. (If you haven’t downloaded Seth Godin et. al.’s What Matters Now, follow that link. And see more about Dan Roam’s work here and here.)

Dan Roam, from "What Matters Now" (click image for larger file)

Watch the two videos below — I even took notes of highlights to prod the attention-deficient — and then show them to your students.¹

1. Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, on Collaboration and what I’ve been calling Social Intelligence in the Workplace. Key concepts:

1. Making co-workers look good, not bad;
2. “plussing” your partners;
3. wanting people not only with “depth” — résumé-based hires — but also a proven record (portfolios? blogs?) of innovation and
4. the ability to recover from failure instead of avoiding it;
5. on the desirability of “mastery of anything” (skateboarding, playing spoons) in a person’s past;
6. “the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a résumé” (and, I’d add, GPA);
7. on wanting people who are interested, not interesting (that is, your piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and daddy’s bank account are cheap ways to be interesting; much more interesting are people who are interested — hipsters take note);
8. communication skills based, again, on social intelligence vis-a-vis audience-awareness;
9. desirability of breadth (great, you’re a tech whiz; it would be nice if you knew, say, art history too);
10. on collaboration (“amplification” via “interested listening” and breadth and unique contributions to a project) versus cooperation (not getting in each others’ way).

Via Edutopia:

2. Seth Godin on Curiosity:

1. On the mental poverty of religious fundamentalists
2. On the mental richness of the curious
3. On how two generations lead sadly mediocre lives due to television, and how the lucky few have kicked that habit
4. On the curious and the fearful — “the masses in the middle [who have] brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing”
5. On the difficulty of becoming curious — due to decades of schooling punishing curiosity
6. Nice Mao reference for this Chinese history teacher!
7. Paradox: “The safest thing to do is be risky; the riskiest thing to do is be safe.”
8. How Godin beat the odds and remained curious.
9. How religious fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook that rejects curiosity.

Via Seth’s Blog:

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

1. Big hat-tip to Katie Day at The Librarian Edge, from whom both of these videos are nicked. Follow that link for an excellent post. [↩]

It’s in the air — and in this economy, it’s no surprise.

I felt it here, noticed Paul Krugman touching it here, and now Seth Godin here:

[W]hen we ask you to look people in the eye, be creative, brainstorm, be generous, find a way to satisfy an angry customer, work with a bully, learn a new skill or bring joy to work, suddenly the excuses pile up. Is this a different sort of work? Is raising your hand in class too much to ask of you?

The jobs most of us would like to have are jobs like this. And yet we put up a fight when given the chance to do them well. [whole post here]

I started to bold print certain phrases, but really the whole thing deserves emphasis.

The people who haven’t caught wind of it? In my experience this year in the classroom: students.

It needs a name — maybe even a whole class. How about “Recession Skills 101“?

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 [↩]

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. [↩]