Beyond School

More from the previous posts. I’m having a lot of fun creating that staff development wiki. The “Digital Arts for Multiple Intelligences” pages are coming along nicely, but unevenly, so your input would be great (thanks, Patrick and Diane!).

I’ve also got a page called “Links to Real World Examples of 21st Century Educators.” I’ve added links myself, but…

…as my high-speed middle school colleague Anthony Armstrong suggests in his recent post, the best way to compile examples of 21st c. classrooms and educators is to invite you all to collaborate and share.

I updated the wiki to include the password (“welcome,” w/o quotation marks), so come on over and add your own classes (or favorite examples from others), and your favorite digital tools for the various multiple intelligences. (And while you’re there, why not take the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire and learn your alleged strengths? 40 quick questions and a cool little graphic is yours. I’d love to hear your profiles in comments

It’s good for all – drives traffic and readership to the classrooms that want them, and gives us all food for thought on how we might approach The Next Thing.

And while you’re at it: there are so many great staff development wikis already out there. Feel free to start a page and add your own, and/or others, for a master list. Why not?

Photo credit: Flickr Tag Network by toby maloy

We expect my presentation to start around 7.30 p.m. That would make it:

• Thursday 11 a.m. in London
• Thursday 12.30 a.m. (ouch) in Hawaii (sorry, Chris! I owe you! Or you can send me a YackPack voice message?)
• Thursday 4.30 a.m. (carrumba) in Denver (Karl, how about a YackPack message?)
• Thursday 5.30 p.m. in Bangkok
• Thursday 8.30 p.m. in NSW, Australia
• Thursday 6.30 a.m. in New Jersey
• Hey Vivek in India – you game?

The actual Skype talk itself would probably come about 15 minutes later, but I’ll give you a heads-up call at the times above. Please confirm I got your times right?

Following up on that last post questioning whether it’s time for the very idea (and institution) of “school” to die, a thought experiment:

Create a real-world project with all the right ingredients:

• relevance: it’s not a school exercise that ends up just another class project on the web, primarily designed to make students learn content they’ll forget within ten years (to be generous), and to give teachers something to grade

• citizenship: it’s about “enlightened community self-interest,” saving our own skins from the guaranteed miseries that will define the 21st century by helping effect some prudent changes now, while (maybe) there’s still time

• fun: it invites youths to organize a youth version of the worldwide Live Earth concerts (high school, college, and other local musicians at festivals on Earth Day ‘08 – plenty of time ’til April), and to create a website to stream those concerts, create meaningful digital content, and contribute to their communities through engaged citizenship (really, look at the Live Earth website and tell me why our students can’t create the same thing for the monthly global price of maybe 20 bucks – a dollar per country, say – and you know, really, it’s on me. I’ll spring for it.)

• empowerment: it pushes students beyond their schools, instead of sequestering them inside them, to experience the challenges of persuading their community to make practical changes, which is a pretty good definition of real “empowerment.” It liberates them from infantile school-based “projects” like “cafeteria reform,” “prom committee,” debating “school uniforms,” and writing for their “school newspaper” to broaden their sense of belonging to the world, not the school.

• learning: from the persuasive speaking skills to the scientific research skills to the managerial, organizational, and digital production skills, a campaign like this offers learning only limited by poor imaginations

You get the idea – especially if you’ve been reading this blog since mid-June (the “world citizenship” tag includes all those posts).

Now here’s the experiment:

Send invitations to participate to the three social groups most in touch with youth in industrialized nations:

1. Educators affiliated with schools
2. Youth leaders in churches
3. Parents affiliated with home-schooling / deschooling communities

In your own thought experiment, tell us what you think would be the answer to the questions in the following polls. (I’m aware that polls are unscientific and that school, church, and home-schoolers communities are diverse, so go with your gut, if you can. And add an “other” if I you think I left a potentially valuable youth group out.):

Me? I think the home-schooled / deschooled youths are better situated to contribute to this project than the other two. So I’m going to post this on a few of their websites.

Again, the poll is not the thing. It’s the question about which institutions create the most relevant and socially responsible youths that interests me here.

Thanks for playing. Comments would be interesting too

Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and others are discussing how to include student voices at NECC. While I admire Karl immensely, I find the scope of the idea inadequately ambitious. NECC means less (next to nothing, I would guess) to students compared to their daily school experience, and their participation in the larger world generally. They should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners.

But they’re not. I raised the issue months ago and added some student bloggers (and an “Individual Student Bloggers” category) to the Support Classroom Blogging wiki, but nobody has followed suit. Why? Fear of parents? Concern for job security? Valid enough. But this article from Psychology Today about psychologist Robert Epstein’s thesis, in his book The Case Against Adolescence, points to more: We don’t challenge arbitrary laws that define our youth in counter-productive ways. We confuse man-made (and depressingly American, in this case) laws as “natural truths.” The “truth” in question? That teens – high schoolers, particularly – are “not adults.” And the consequent “infantilization” we inflict upon them as educators and parents.

From the article:

We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other “children.” In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong.

The edublogosphere is as guilty of this as the rest of the education world, generally. “Elevate student bloggers by giving them equal footing in the adult echo-chamber? It’s illegal. Privacy issues. Case closed.”

I don’t think so. Something as simple as a parent permission letter/waiver, maybe coupled with teacher moderation of student posts (if we must retain control and continue the infantilization of our teens), could do the trick. Forward-thinking parents would buy in, I suspect.

Giving them a “voice” at NECC is a token gesture, at best, when the real issue is that we’ve rolled over in the face of laws that silence those voices as valid participants in authentic discourse.

Radical? Yes. But so was every commonplace “truth” we hold now – human flight, moon landings, public education, womens’ suffrage – when it was a new idea.

We need to broaden this discussion about teen voices. Again, traditional “school-y” solutions like a simple parent waiver consenting to student blogging among the adult world might make this “radically sane” idea easy enough to take hold.

Otherwise, we’re stuck reading each other and muffling our young. That’s not my idea of ideal educational practice.

In a conversation on Scott Schwister’s blog, Higher Edison, I ask why it is that churches and church youth group leaders have the right (and take full advantage of it) to lead youth groups with so much more freedom, authenticity, relevance, and effectiveness, than schools and teachers. Why are educators so afraid to be true community leaders beyond the schoolhouse and classroom? It shouldn’t be that way.

I’d love to hear some of your ideas on this. How can we make the edublogosphere itself – not merely NECC – more student-centered? What am I missing?

[This is Part 5 in a series. Click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, here for Part 3, and here for Part 4. Sometimes pushing a snowball starts an avalanche, and we need all the cool snow we can get for this. So please take a moment, and just push this snowball of a post to a few go-getting teens you know, and you'll have done your part. And thanks in advance.]

“Well begun is half done,” said some Greek or other.

So in that spirit of beginning well, I’m posting the Flixn video below for you to simply send to high school students in your area. It’s five minutes long, and gives the plan for the next year, culminating with teen rock concerts around the world that will be filmed and embedded on the project website.

All the nuts and bolts of the idea are there, in five or six simple steps.

I’ve never used Flixn before, but I think there’s a way you can embed this on other websites. Please feel free. Help something happen that will teach our teens that they have more power than schools generally let them realize. Here it is:

[This is Part 4 in a series. Click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, and here for Part 3. Part 5 is a 5-minute video invitation to global teens that lays out the simple steps to making this happen by Earth Day 2008. Please simply forward this to high school students in your area. It doesn't require teachers or classrooms (though part 4 argues it could be a powerful Understanding by Design thematic year in all classroom disciplines).]

Dana Huff at huffenglish motivated me to dust off my unread copy of Grant Wiggins’ and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design (UbD) (and here). I’ve read the intro and first two chapters, and Dana’s reflections on them on her blog (she’s also set up a wiki for anybody to join her–I’ll be there eventually), and the ideas in it are playing in the background of my thoughts as I do other things.

The essential concept of UbD is understanding. The authors illustrate how students can “learn” math without “understanding” it through the example of a math question which asked, “How many buses does the army need to transport 1,128 soldiers if each bus holds 36 soldiers?” One third of students tested answered, “31 remainder 12″ (Schoenfeld, cited in Wiggins and McTighe, UbD, first ed., p. 2). Those students had “learned” division without understanding it. Because the right answer is 32, in the real world — unless you want the “remainder 12″ (who seem to be anything but real soldiers to these students) to walk.

UbD then goes on to outline a cross-curricular unit based on the theme of “apples” which is a hilarious example of what they later term “hands-on, minds-off” project-based learning. In their English lesson, the students read Johnny Appleseed, and write and illustrate a story about apples; in their art lesson, they make a hallway collage of leaves they collected from apple trees; they sing songs about apples in music; they classify apples in science; they do math to convert an applesauce recipe that feeds two so that it will feed fifty (pp. 1-2).

Wiggins and McTighe rightly credit the teachers of this apple unit for trying to make interdisciplinary connections, but go on to point out that, unfortunately, there’s not much worth understanding here (my bluntness, not theirs). If I were Bart Simpson in that classroom, I’d ask Ms. Crabapple, “Who gives a damn about Johnny Appleseed, man?”

I look forward to more time with UbD in the coming weeks. But I’m reading it with an eye toward a blind spot in their book (so far, anyway — and maybe the 2d edition remedies this) that only edtech geeks would notice: there’s no attention paid to how digital literacies can promote the types of understanding and unit design they so brilliantly advocate.

Later, I read Patrick Higgins’ latest post on Chalkdust (Patrick’s one of my favorite bloggers, if you couldn’t tell). It discusses his campaign to get classroom teachers on board for the 1:1 laptop move his school is making (I hope I’m getting this right) next year. Since I’m tech coordinator/part-time AP Lit teacher for my high school next year, as it rolls out its own 1:1 program, I’m reading Patrick closely these days.

I left a comment on Patrick’s post that, I later realized, was shot through with the ideas of UbD. I’m sharing parts of that comment here, because it adds curricular, instructional, digital literacies, UbD elements to the “Community Service 2.o: global teen concerts against global warming” project I’m so actively hawking on this blog lately. (I’ve got to come up with a name for that. Any suggestions?)

Here’s the comment:

I’m pushing my admin to buy into a school wide HS theme to start the year: “The Year of Global Warming.”

I’ve already asked math, statistics, economics, and English teachers to mull the idea, over the summer, of devoting a 2.0 activity or project related to the theme from their different disciplines (clearly Global Warming is a magnet for science, health, math, economics, history, multimedia, and persuasive writing applications–even foreign languages could jump in with PSA’s in their FL).

Every teacher said they would.

We’ll post the digital products on a Global Warming consciousness-raising AND concert-promoting website for a community service 2.0 music festival project for next May [update: I'm thinking Earth Day is the obvious date--April 19 is the Saturday of Earth Day week next year].

I’m excited.

I am excited. Think about it: Global warming is relevant to our students; they want to do something about it. It’s relevant to us, our children, and grandchildren too. It’s relevant to animals, orphans, widows, the poor, the environment, and every other cause you can think of.

And it is a “magnet” for project-based learning across the curriculum that, because it is relevant to students, will be “minds-on” activity promoting “understanding.” Examples:

• Our AP Statistics teacher told me he could see a million applications for his class. He was concerned about a digital project eating into his “coverage time” before the AP exam–evidence that half the battle for tech coordinators is battling the misconception that a digital project has to be huge, when it obviously could be as small as a podcasted Skype interview with a professor or other expert about whatever topic is being studied. But then he saw a possibility: our AP exams are over about three weeks before school is, leaving AP teachers at odds for something to do with that time. He was open to the idea of students making multimedia charts and graphics of statistical analyses of various energy-reducing approaches to reducing carbon emissions at home, school, and the workplace, which would be real products embedded on the “Rock for Global Cooling” website’s “Things You Should Know” or “Steps You Can Take” page. (Patrick’s site turned me on to a cool little graphics 2.0 site called Swivel that I’m embedding here as an example. Very cool for it’s interactive charts and graphs:

–picture that in an AP Statistics student’s hands, applied to global warming, and published on a real-world project website.

• Our AP Economics teacher is a very socially conscious young man who was very interested in this “more than Johnny Appleseed” unit idea. Podcast interviews with “green economists”? He wasn’t worried about coverage. He’s in.
• Our American Literature teacher, a technophobe willing to change, said yes. “It might be something we can apply our Native American literature unit to,” she said. And she found out this year, when she assigned a free-choice presentation project to her students, that she didn’t need to teach digital storytelling to her students. Many of them just did it without asking. So she’s in.
• Another math teacher I asked — also the student council advisor, who in that capacity too I invited to contribute to the “Year of Global Warming” project (“Year of Global Cooling”?) — said she was game.
  
• I’ll find a way, I hope, to get my AP Literature students on board.
• I haven’t asked the science, music, art, PE, and drama teachers yet. I had all these conversations on the last day of school, as teachers were packing up their classrooms for the summer, and I couldn’t get to everybody.
  

Here’s the thing: Our school is aware that our rollout of the 1:1 program in the high school in August will be under the microscope. Parents will not be happy if their kids are just using them as word processors and Google machines — and they shouldn’t be. Teachers are nervous because they’re not trained to teach this way, are not edublogging edtech geeks like some of us, but — want ideas so they don’t get flack from parents.

Added bonus: they — as I hope is true for you, dear reader, as well –are authentically concerned about this issue, and do guiltily wish they could take action on it. So this “Year of Global Cooling” (I’m starting to like that title) theme is an umbrella under which authentic 2.0 projects can be carried out, the school can more successfully launch its 1:1 program, and the teachers can feel good about making a difference in the classroom.

All that’s lacking — except, so far, from Kevin in Massachusetts (Kevin, who the heck are you, anyway? We should talk on Skype and get to know each other a bit) — are the thousand other points of light to join in this project.

If this were a flat classroom — flat schools — project, the classroom 2.0 naysayers would soon enough have some evidence to chew on to the contrary. But that means we need you.

(Or maybe the students will do it without the adults, I keep reminding myself, in the worst case scenario. Another disturbing reason for the silence in response to this idea is that I changed my RSS feed settings to feedburner, and I’m wondering if my posts are even going out to my old subscribers. Could somebody out there let me know?)

The last piece needed for this project to take off also worries me: administrative support. It’s funny how people in my own school get a faraway look in their eyes when I try to share this vision, say the easy supportive comment, but don’t take the crucial step of asking, “How can I support this?”

Clearly, no “Year of Global Cooling,” no grand inter-disciplinary authentic project 2.0, no successful 1:1 launch as I’m suggesting here, is going to happen if my school’s owner, director, and principal don’t back it.

Since I only had the idea two days before school let out, the timing was horrible for pitching the idea to them. So there’s still hope there. I guess I’ll find out in August, before school starts. I’d like them to say yes to a school assembly on the first day that announces this year-long theme with all the fanfare it so direly deserves.

And . . . I’ll close with these just-in pieces of evidence: in reply to my invitation to students to take the lead on this. Patrick N., age 15, wrote, in its entirety, this email:

I’m in. This is truly the most amazing project I have heard of in years. And I mean that.

Just being asked to be a part of this project is an honour and privilege.

Patrick N.

And Kyongmin, same age, wrote this:

mr. burell i really want to help out on this concert
but i am not sure how to start this…
do u want me to just spread the word and the idea to my friends
in other countries or actually get band in Seattle (where i’m going) and
make a concert…
i’m not really clear on this idea…
can you explain a bit more?
thank you~

I’ve invited Kyongmin to ask for clarification in a Skype conversation, so we can podcast the discussion for other students with questions about all this.

Patrick just came to Korea from New Zealand, so I’m sure he can spread the hope in that direction, and get students on board there. (And check out Patrick’s Yahoo Project digital story here. It’s quite beautiful — and created by him and his girlfriend, I think.)

They want to help. They want to learn. They need collaborators from your area. So I want you to help.

Please?

[Update 16 June 07: This is Part 2 of a series. See Part 1 here; see Part 3 for an invitation to students who can take the lead in your area; and see Part 4 for how this could be integrated into Understanding by Design - based "classroom 2.0" digital, flat classroom projects. Part 5 is a 5-minute video invitation to global teens that lays out the simple steps to making this happen by Earth Day 2008. Become a point of light--by giving your students the chance to become one.]

This one’s amazing. I just browsed my Bloglines, saw a new post about an Odyssey class filmmaking project by Connecticut HS English teacher Jeff Wasserman at “When the Hurly-Burly’s Done,” clicked on the link to go to his blog and leave a commiserative and congratulatory comment, clicked “leave comment,” and when the page refreshed, Lo!–I saw my own lines about global warming, K-12 education’s need to awaken to its urgency, and the “melting sky” sentence from my last post staring back at me as a quote from a fresh-off-the-keyboard newer post from Jeff’s blog.

How’s that for synchronicity 2.0? We both must have clicked about each other within 15 seconds on opposite sides of the world.

And I read commented on Jeff’s new post, which comment I paste below because sometimes you just do some good thinking when writing on other’s blogs, and want to have a copy for yourself on your own blog. So here’s my comment. I hope you see, after reading it, why I’m so excited. The idea is only a day old, so there’s much fleshing out to do, but I think it’s The Best Idea I’ve Ever Had. If I die after launching this, I’ll consider my life not useless. Here’s the comment. Read beyond the lines:

….I pitched–okay, preached–my world high school rock concert idea to fight global warming to my ninth graders today as something to chew on over the summer, and a good number stayed after each class to volunteer. So we’re off and running on this project already. (One student has connections with Samsung and LG, so those doors are open for corporate sponshorship, student-enlisted, in Korea.)But “Think globally, act locally” is so 1.0. Come on, Jeff, be the first to get another school on board. Let’s get a community service 2.0 project going where students organize, promote, concsciousness-raise about their own complicity (and their schools’) with global warming and take action by having city-wide rock concert fund-raisers in as many locales around the world as we can muster.

Myspace and YouTube will be our free advertisement. Wikis and blogs will be our headquarters. And students will get corporate sponsorship, raise hell about their HVAC classrooms and Poland Spring bottled water degeneracy, and proclaim their hip status by walking or biking to school.

We can make doing this all without a paper footprint a badge of honor and principled point of pride along the way.

And your filmmakers (and my digital storytellers) can put their fledgling editing skills to work by making commercial spots (to embed on their Myspaces) illuminating their peers about the problem, selling wisdom instead of consumption with their films, and spreading the concert idea to their real-world peer audience in the dreaded, non-schooly Facebook Xanga Myspace universe they live in.

What shall we call it: Something about “cool,” “cooling,” and music. I want a Greek theme, since Gaia was “the earth who feeds us all” to the Greeks, who didn’t look forward to her death at the end of the world. Nature was all to them, and the Muses sang their hymns in her praise.

How many concerts at how many “points of light” around the globe can happen for this cause on the same sunny springtime Saturday afternoon next May–and be filmed and embedded as streaming video music performances from around the globe on a project website? And how many more such concerts can happen the year after that? And what shall we do with the money? Buy some Amazon acreage to save it from Burger King?

My final pitch: I’m resolved that the students, not me, will exhaust themselves over this next year. I don’t know about you, but one of my needs pedagogically is to make 2.0 projects ones in which I don’t (as I did this year) work harder than all my students combined, but instead empower them to. They’ll coordinate and manage this campaign. We’ll just hook them up and provide advice. They’re natives. They’ll probably blow us away with the buzz they can create, given the freedom, on their social networking sites.

I can already hear “Mercy, Mercy Me” playing around the world as this thing spreads. (And remember, I’m an international school teacher, and we swarm the globe with former co-workers everywhere, so I really do mean “around the world.” We really can make a network like this, and so can our students. And we can assign commercials and multimedia projects as English projects to align instruction with the real world, and get beyond school in our classrooms that way.)

Come on, now. Say yes.

I repeat that proposal to the rest of you reading this: “Come on now. Say yes.”

(And James, Barbara, Chris, you all seem positioned to help this happen. And Jeff Utecht, my teacher band played in Shanghai’s student band “Rock for Charity” last year. Can you hook me up with anybody involved in that in Shanghai? And is that shaven-headed middle-school teacher-rocker, Dale E., still there? He’d probably make it happen. Patrick, you want to pull Boston in? Scott, how about Minnesota? Kim, Bangkok? Julie, Qatar? Darren, Clarence , Jeff Whipple, you want to bring Canada on board? Patrick, New York? Doug, England? Karl, Denver? Bing, New England?

The beauty here is, we don’t have to teach this in our classrooms. We just have to hook students up –musician and promoter types, recyclers, anybody else with a skill and/or passion to contribute — and let them show us what they can do. We can always refine the following year. It’s education that matters–because the earth is sort of important. And so far, we’re educating our kids to keep screwing it up as badly as we in the developed world already have, but to make really good grades and get into really good colleges while doing so. So let’s face the music–and the science, and the future–and do something to make a difference.)

Photo on Flickr by snowriderguy

From the LA Times:

The presidents and chancellors of 284 colleges and universities nationwide have signed a pact to combat global warming by making their campuses “carbon neutral” as soon as possible, leaders of the initiative announced Tuesday.

The institutions pledged to carry out short-term strategies to conserve energy and reduce emissions while they develop long-term plans to convert their facilities so that they would no longer produce greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.

Advocates said the colleges and universities were the first sector of society to make such a vow. Signatories included community colleges and Ivy League universities; the largest institution on the list is the University of California, with its 10 campuses.

“Global warming is a defining challenge of our time,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow, a leader of the climate campaign. “Colleges and universities must lead the effort to reverse global warming for the health and well-being of current and future generations,” Crow said.

The institutions that signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment agreed that they would within two years devise an action plan and a target date for making their campuses “climate neutral.” . . . .

Organizers said they hoped to enlist 1,000 institutions by 2009.

The presidents and chancellors wrote in the pledge that they were “deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming” and that they accepted the scientific consensus that the change in climate was being caused largely by humans.

“We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by midcentury at the latest,” the signatories said, “in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.”

Henny Penny was wrong: The sky is not falling; like the Wicked Witch of the West, it’s melting. And only the scientifically illiterate deny that we’re causing this problem, and exacerbating it with simple waste.

So are K-12 schools in any country leading by example the way the above universities are? (Harvard, to its shame, didn’t sign.) Does anybody have input into how to make administrators buy in?

Because education for our kids is a minor issue compared to this.

(My principal was cool today. He asked me if I was proud of him for emailing e-copies of grade verification sheets to all the teachers, rather than mindlessly printing them out and stuffing them in our boxes. That shows something in itself. Now if we can just institutionalize that attitude.)