PD Conference Design

It's no secret that the majority of PD conferences for educators tend to follow a "one size fits all" model that tries to make everyone happy. While fun, these conferences aren't always the best use of educator time and money, and at least some of us think we can do better. With that in mind, last night on #CAedchat, +Karl Lindgren-Streicher, +john stevens, and I led a discussion on PD conferences, in which we tried to develop a better understanding of what educators want from their conference experiences (Qs here and Storify digest here). To help drive the conversation, we shared a survey with the #CAedchat community asking a number of questions about what conference participants want to see, including questions on presenting vs. attending, session length, keynotes, etc. By the close of the discussion, we collected 67 responses, which can be found in this Fusion Table.

ISTE 2014 in Atlanta

To generate better discussion through justification of responses, we intentionally kept the questions very simple, with only two responses each. For example, we asked respondents to choose whether they preferred "unconference" discussions or speaker-led sessions with no room for combination. In other words, we encouraged participants to stay off the fence. Moreover, we left responses vague to allow respondents to interpret the choices themselves. Long vs. short sessions, for example, could be interpreted in a number of ways, based on each respondent's own interpretation. This way, we can better target the subjective reaction and emotional response of each participant, since that's the ultimate goal of a study of sort.

In the end, we hoped that the #CAedchat discussion and deeper understanding of the data would allow us to work toward better conference experiences, and we encouraged everyone to write a blog post on their ideal conference, based on our conversations.

Designing a better conference experience based on the opinions of conference participants requires us to not simply give in to all the requests and preferences conference participants have. If so, the conference experience that caters to everyone would end up pleasing no one. Rather, design is about going deeper to uncover needs that the respondents themselves may not even be aware of, and that's exactly what we wanted to do with both the #CAedchat discussion and survey.

A few caveats: our survey was very cursory, with a relatively small sample size. And owing to the fact that we only used Twitter to circulate it, our respondents are self-selecting, in that they are likely to be regular conference participants. Ideally, we would have surveyed those who don't regularly participate in conferences, with the goal of creating the kinds of experiences that could encourage more participation. Nevertheless, our data was very interesting, and I think there's great value in using a survey to collect data, followed by deeper discussion of it.

Some of our highlights are given below:

• Of all the various educator roles represented at conferences, teachers seem to participate less often than others, and only administrators give presentations with less frequency (the unlabeled group below point to entrepreneurs). I think we need to find a way to encourage more teacher participation.

• Gender plays an interesting role: while women report going to more conferences than men, men tend to present more than women. When we filter the data below by school role, however, women in TOSA roles have given more presentations (6.8) than men (5.2) on average over the past 3 years. Again, I think these data indicate that not enough teachers without formal titles or tech roles are presenting at conferences.

• It seems to be the case that those who attend more conferences tend to prefer no keynotes or featured speakers and that those who present often tend to prefer longer sessions that are focused on pedagogy and follow the "unconference" model (i.e., more discussion than presentation).

We must be careful to overgeneralize from these data alone, and the commentary in the #CAedchat thankfully added some valuable depth to the study. In looking through last night's discussion, engagement and socializing with other people (unsurprisingly!) seemed to be apparent needs, regardless of conference type.

#caedchat A1 I go to conferences to mix it up with others. To learn others' perspectives, contrast with mine. To learn new stuff.
— urbie delgado (@urbie) February 16, 2015

A1: I go to conferences to learn and connect with colleagues from other places. I love to be the student sometimes. #caedchat
— Angelique Mullen (@Library_Ang) February 16, 2015

A1. While I love running into people I already know online, it's the conversations w/ strangers that feel like unexpected gifts #caedchat — Mr. Theriault (@davidtedu) February 16, 2015

A majority of us do PD to learn from others in social environments, where we have an opportunity to share our own thinking with other people. Hence, it may be logical to conclude that, the more we go to conferences, the more we want "unconference" sessions to allow us to converse with each other (in opposition to led sessions).

@mosspike Definitely #edcamp-style. When u have an “expert” in the front of the room, u r far less likely to share what you know. #caedchat
— Anne Jenks (@Ajay460) February 16, 2015

@mosspike For me, yes: prefer to present in #edcamp -style sessions, because I want those who can to contribute! #caedchat
— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) February 16, 2015

And we also tend to like shorter sessions, since they give us time to connect with other people and give us a chance to stay engaged with the topic of discussion (we also tend to dislike keynotes and demo slams, unless they engage us in similar ways).

A3: Short session = more breaks and more time to connect w others! #caedchat
— Danielle Lemke (@daniellemlemke) February 16, 2015

A3: I like having shorter sessions because I'm not good at sitting still for long time--longer sessions w lots of moving work too #caedchat
— Danielle Lemke (@daniellemlemke) February 16, 2015

@LS_Karl Short with time to collaborate after #caedchat
— Sara Boucher (@MsGeekyTeach) February 16, 2015

A3 Shorter sessions allow for more mobility in ideas. One quick topic, break apart, collab & connect, move on. #caedchat — Sean Farnum (@MagicPantsJones) February 16, 2015

I was a little surprised at the preference for shorter sessions, given my own way of thinking; but after learning from others why they prefer these types of sessions, it makes better sense to me, and if I had the opportunity to design a PD conference on my own, I would certainly have to keep this in mind. However, I wonder if the the desire to be social at conferences is strongly correlated with the self-selecting Twitter crowd, since not all conference participants (at least on the surface of things) are interested in meeting new people.

Knowing what I know now, I would design a conference that spanned 2 days, at minimum, and I would keep sessions relatively short, reserving one longer block a day for a deeper dives into various topics. I would create as many engaging social opportunities as possible by emphasizing the "water cooler" conversations that are had in hallways, giving participants a chance to share ideas out on butcher paper, Post-It notes, etc. One keynote could open the event, and we would provide closure through reflecting on our experience in small, thematic groups. At the end, it's no surprise that quality conference experiences are build by the people who attend them.

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In this brief study, we've identified some trends that aren't surprising at all and a few that are, I think. There's plenty of analysis left to be done, though, and anyone interested is welcome to use the Fusion Table and Storify digest to dig deeper. In the meantime, I would love to see some other people's blog posts describing their ideal conferences. And I'd also welcome more feedback on the questions we discussed last night. Feel free to reply here to keep the conversation going.

What if we ask more questions?: 2014 Reflections

Over the course of the last year, I've changed the approach with which I participate in conferences, thanks in part to a number of amazing conference experiences (e.g., FUSE14) and a formative conversation I had with +Karl Lindgren-Streicher and +Kristen Swanson at #cue14 last spring (Karl has also written on the conversation). In brief, we talked at length about how we want to make our conference experiences more conversational, given the amazing number of educational minds that they always collect, and wondered how we could create and/or participate in more discussion-based opportunities that give us the chance to think deeply about education.

There is power in "we"... what can we do to make things better? #WhatIfVegas the world needs more change agents pic.twitter.com/o3klqp4FnX
— Devin C. Hughes (@DevinCHughes) December 20, 2014

The What If...? conference model is one such opportunity, and so I was excited to learn a few months ago that one of these events, What If...? Las Vegas, would be coming to Las Vegas over the holiday break, when I would be home visiting my family. What If...? conferences work by inviting a number of "Questioneers" to give 8-minute presentations around a central question that's typically radical and challenging with the goal of inspiring change agents. After every 3 questions, conference participants break out in to small group sessions, where we discuss the questions in more detail and work on "action plan" steps based on them.

#sketchnotes for our action plan on using stories to build community. #WhatIfVegas #dtk12chat #empathy pic.twitter.com/3iEOmL3sba
— Moss Pike (@mosspike) December 19, 2014

With a welcome diversity of questions and participants, What If...? Las Vegas provided the perfect forum to think through some of the ideas I've been churning in my head this year. I'll outline just a few of the excellent questions below:

• For me, 2014 has been the year of innovation, in which I've been eager to put action behind the ideas I've been thinking on. Ebele Mogo asked the question "What if the only limits were the limits of our imagination?", focusing on disruptive criticism, which she argued we should be doing "by creation but first by confronting." I love the way she framed criticism not as something negative and to be avoided, but rather as a natural part of the innovation process that critically relies on the power of imagination and creation. By engaging with all prior creation in this way, we can all be artists, regardless of the particular subject that we study. This is the essential component of the "Yes, and..." culture that I'm so invested in creating within our community.

“Don’t be afraid to confront like an artist. Criticize by creating…but first by confronting.” @ebyral #WhatIfVegas #dtk12chat
— Moss Pike (@mosspike) December 19, 2014



• Over the summer, I read Steven Johnson's excellent Future Perfect on the rise of the distributed network, which has been one of the more transformative ideas I've learned in quite some time. Without going into too much detail here, I'm in agreement with Johnson, Aaron Dignan (cf. his fantastic 99u talk on thinking like a startup), and others that the "flat" org model that many startups are using belong in education. 

Melanie Sanchez wondered "What if the middle man should not be eliminated?", based on her experience translating between specialists and non-specialists. She provided a compelling argument for the need of facilitators or "middlemen", and so I'm still thinking about what role such facilitators can play within a distributed network. In this type of network, it seems to me that, unlike the centralized networks with facilitators only at network nodes, everyone in a distributed network should view themselves in this middleman role. And in education, I think this means that all teachers should see themselves as facilitators, bridging the gap between content and skills on the one hand and students on the other.

Without consent you can't have co-creativity. Maybe teachers should be facilitators, not the people in charge of the goals. #WhatIfVegas
— Ann Diab (@AnnDiab) December 19, 2014 



• In the last quarter of the year, I've found myself deeply interest in urban design and the "New Urbanism" movement, which argues for more pedestrian-friendly urban and social architecture and against the suburb or "exurb" model that grew after World War II in the United States (cf. Happy City and The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City for some excellent reading on the ideas). Like the distributed network, I think there are parallels to be found between New Urbanism and school design, but the idea is still just taking shape in my head.

Rachel Aliana Jaffe asked "What if we could design the future experience of the city using place-specific digital applications?" and explored what the future of the internet could look like as a tool for collaboration and socializing. As I continue to think about the ways that New Urbanist architecture applies to schools, I am reminded to consider the futurist perspectives that Rachel mentioned as a necessary part of this architecture, in that digital technologies should have a central role in adding a social purpose to what we do.

It's the mandated #whatifvegas selfie! @mosspike @rachelajaffe pic.twitter.com/fG5eUbZSsF
— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) December 20, 2014

• Overall, my biggest takeaway from the calendar year is the power of questions to spark storytelling. But there's often an awkward contradiction between using stories to define us and being able to change or let them go altogether so that we're not bound to them. This is exactly what mindfulness can bring to education, and it's something I've been thinking about for quite some time now.

There were a number of questions anchored on storytelling, and I found Mark Laisure's question "What if you could spend your days really truly being you?" to be especially provocative. He made me think carefully about what I tell myself about myself and what I really believe about myself, namely what it means to be authentically "me." This question is perhaps one of the more important questions worth reflecting on, as we continue to work on our professional growth, and I'm certain that I'll spend quite some time thinking through it.

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With its focus on people and their stories and its setting in a revitalized part of Downtown Las Vegas, the What If...? conference experience was a huge success (especially while spending time with +Sara Boucher and +Melissa Strong). I now see that we don't ask open-ended questions, either to ourselves or to our students, and it's more clear to me than ever that sustainable learning is about the questions we learn to ask, rather than the answers. Questions are precisely what allows us to be designers of our own experiences, and I am looking forward to thinking through the questions above in greater details with a designer's mindset. There will be at least three more What If...? conferences coming to California next year, with one coming to the San Diego, Los Angeles, and Bay Areas, respectively, and I can't wait to go through this process again. Thanks to +Matt Murrie and Felicia Mae Rateliff for organizing and running the conference, and thanks to all the wonderful and inspiring participants!

What are your top 3 takeaway questions that you've learned this year? I'm very eager to know what others have to share so we can start taking actions toward answering our questions the right way and make some waves together.

Actions are little ripples. Creating many ripples over time makes waves. #changemakers #tribeofdoers #WhatIfVegas #BAM @tamcdonald
— Felicia Mae Rateliff (@feliciamaybe) December 20, 2014

Grading Participation?

Today, I had an unexpected and quite interesting conversation about grades, including how we evaluate participation, and so I wanted to record some ideas here for further discussion. In the past, while teaching both as a TA and in my first few years at the secondary level, I've always built a participation component into my overall schema. But, after reflecting on what participation means over the past year, I no longer include it. It's a big shift from how I used to approach grading, but I think it's for the best.

The current conception of grading is severely flawed, as more and more educators are realizing; but I just want to focus here on participation, in that it may help us to see this bigger and fuzzier picture more clearly. I'm particularly interested in this question, since it has a lot to do with developing EQ and non-cognitive skills in students, which is one of my major projects this year. With that, grading participation, as I see it, is flawed for developing emotional and social intelligence for a number of reasons:

• Grades are founded on the "carrot and stick" model that Pink has criticized so well in his discussion on motivation (cf. Drive pp. 32-57). I've come to believe that we should never force kids to participate in class, but rather create the sorts of environments that encourage and welcome their participation in their own individual ways. It's thus our responsibility as educators to facilitate classroom participation, not our kids'. As such, they shouldn't be penalized for our own failures.
• Based on our different levels of "social comfort" within classrooms, participation cannot be evaluated evenly and fairly within a given group. How do we evaluate the more talkative students beside those who aren't as comfortable or confident voicing their opinions? How can we take into account different levels of brain development and self control? Too often, I fear, we attribute participation grades to personalities more than anything else.
• As far as I know, participation can't be easily defined and therefore measured. Is there such a thing as a "rubric" for participation, especially within "one size fits all" model? How do we give effective feedback for participation that accurately reflects an understanding of the brain?
• Most critically of all, perhaps, participation is often used as a tool to "fudge" grades, arbitrarily moving some kids up or down a grade level. Is it fair that one student with an 89.7% should get an "A-", while another a "B+" based solely on participation? Shouldn't an 89.7% that's fairly earned equal another 89.7% (whatever that even means!)? Opacity in grades just isn't fair.

Ultimately, this is a discussion about ego. It's not that egos are inherently bad, per se, but when we let them control us, as in this particular case, we build an expectation for participation, which we use grades to enforce. Within the traditional framework, then, assigning a grade to participation is more about us than about our students. But if we can let go of these expectations and let the kids be themselves, while we work to design engaging environments for them, we can develop EQ without the need for a carrot or a stick. In other words, it's about controlling our ego and expectation by building empathy, or an understanding of our classroom experience from our students' individual perspectives. It's not easy, but I think it's the right thing to do.

I'll admit that I'm heavily biased, so I welcome comments or other ideas below or on Twitter. What do you think about participation? Why or why not do you believe in using it to evaluate students? Can we make it work, or is it inherently flawed? What have I missed?

Building d.Teams with DEEPid

N.B.: This post can also be found on the #dtk12chat community page.

I've been talking with more people about design thinking (DT) lately, and the question about how to do DT within classes consistently resurfaces. It's a great question, and, to be honest, I myself have been thinking for quite some time now about how to incorporate DT into our Latin program. Below, I'm going to take a circuitous route outlining my ideas for an answer.

MVIFI's DEEPdt Model for Design Thinking

I'm sure most educators have some familiarity with the STEAM movement that now occupies the center stage at many schools. And I'm sure most are also familiar with a number of the attempts to twist the STEAM acronym to include other subject areas within an interdisciplinary framework (cf. the evolution of STEM to STEAM and another interesting idea that adds SEL elements in the equation). I deeply value cross-discipline thinking and the project-based approach; but while the inclusion of these other disciplines is often thoughtful, it's also forced and ultimately uninspiring, as I see it.

Since I've been paying attention to the development of STEAM, I've been keen to see when language study will finally find itself a part of the acronym; but to date, I've yet to see a single argument in favor of including our field. As a Latin teacher and an advocate of language study, I'm disappointed, if not not too surprised, by the relative neglect of language study beside more alluring subjects like math and science. The failure to include language study echoes our nationwide attitudes toward language learning.

As we've been rethinking our approach to pedagogy at our school and in our own World Languages department, we've had to work to justify why language study plays a valuable role within education. Fortunately, I think the justification is easy: language study is most valuable when it involves a high degree of cultural fluency in complement to linguistic fluency. That is, the best and most effective language programs focus on people, rather than the just language itself. That sounds a lot like DT to me, and I'm of the opinion that this is the direction that language study needs to take in order to stay relevant in the next generation.

To return to how we might use DT within our classrooms, I use DT in Latin to help me build discovery skills with my students. We focus on this one phase of the process and we learn to do it as best we can, now that I have come to understand how language study plays the role of discovery within the process of innovation. Language study teaches us how to communicate with people and, namely, how to value and learn from differences through divergent thinking, which is a critical component of problem solving. This is what discovery is all about, and since discovery is arguably the most important phase of DT, I think that language study is more relevant than ever.

So, I don't take students through the entire DT process in my Latin classes. Instead, we focus on the process of discovery by learning about the people who used Latin communicated. We work to build fluency of Roman culture, alongside the Latin language, through the documentation that they left behind, and by doing so we develop a number of critical non-cognitive skills like effective collaboration and listening to hear (rather than listening to reply), we test our creativity, and we build empathy for people who lived rather far away from us in both time and space.

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With this in mind, I want to rethink the STEAM as the sole solution to interdisciplinary work, in that it's too narrow in scope with respect to the kinds of collaboration and thinking that the world's problems need. In other words, STEAM and all the other acronyms offered for it too often seem to be attempts at pulling content together, rather than combining the skills necessary for creative and innovative problem solving.

DEEPid #sketchnotes

Instead, following on an idea proposed by +Mary Cantwell in her post on building d.Teams, I'm now more interested in considering an interdisciplinary study model through the DEEPdt framework, in which the skills that each subject area teach, not just their content, drive our collective interdisciplinary approach. These skills can then be woven together by members of a given d.Team to offer a more realistic vision for interdisciplinary work that can help us to attack real problems more successfully.

In these d.Teams, with a grounding in the DEEPdt model, our work begins with the skills that we use to learn from and about people. Since our language programs teach precisely these skills, problem discovery can begin in our language courses. Our work can be then passed along to those areas that move into the next phase of the DT process, hopefully encouraging the various subject areas to work together within it. I like this model because it favors skills over content, it brings people into the equation through the social impact that Mary stresses.

That said, I have more questions than answers for how DEEP interdisciplinary work could work in schools (I'll call it "DEEPid" for now). I've sketched out some tentative ideas for it, and I'm eager to think through them with everyone in our #dtk12chat community. We'll have a discussion on building d.Teams on Wed., 10/22 at 6pm PST, and in the meantime, I love to hear how others think that DT can be used to bridge our traditional subject divisions. What skills are most valuable in the traditional content areas? How can they fit into the DT framework? How might a DEEPid program get started? I'm looking forward to our discussion!

FUSE14 and Designing for Engagement

Sometime last fall I stumbled onto design thinking (DT) and was immediately drawn to its grounding in working with and for people. DT, to put it simply, is a process (or, if you prefer, the DT "mindset") that can be summed up as "people-centered problem solving with a bias toward action." Since learning about it, I've been working with it as often as I could, including participating in the #dtk12chat to meet others interested in DT in education. So when I learned about FUSE14, a two-day design thinking workshop hosted at the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation in Atlanta, I jumped on the opportunity, given that it was scheduled immediately before ISTE2014 this summer (on which cf. my reflections). At FUSE14, I was very eager to work on some problems we've been uncovering at our school with the hopes of designing prototype solutions for them.

At the event, +Melissa Strong, the chair of our MS World Languages Dept., and I represented our school in the 201 track, to which we brought our problem of "time" to put through the DT process. Using MVIFI's DEEPdt process (standing for Discover Empathize Experiment Produce; digital editions of the fantastic DEEPdt playbooks can be purchased here), we had hoped to gain a better understanding of how we manage time, with the goal of bringing back to suggestions to our community. And that's exactly what we accomplished, though not in the original way we had intended.

@mosspike and @DeLibrosCorazon doing some #empathy interviews at #fuse14 pic.twitter.com/toCYVNI4IM
— Amanda Kruysman (@coachhkay) June 25, 2014

Discover

Our Middle School campus has 9 periods each day, with 40min in each period. It's an exceptionally short amount of sit-time to have with students each day, and more faculty of late have begun to identify problems with our schedule and have suggested that we again explore block schedules, among other ideas, making it the perfect "wicked problem."

Before jumping into the deep end of the 201 track, we were asked to organize interviews with our "users" to be held during our first day. Time affects all users (e.g., students, faculty, staff, parents, etc.) in our community, but because we were biased toward our schedule, we decided to focus mainly on our students. After 75min of great Q&A with two students and two faculty members (thank you, Regan and Ian!), we realized that we needed to take a few steps back: our problem isn't as much about time as we initially thought.

Empathize

Our interviews exceeded all expectation and gave us some very useful data to work with. In particular, they bore out a few interesting observations:

• Kids are more engaged when introduced to new material, and they're more engaged when they're reviewing material in preparation for a test. They don't find the middle stages in a particular unit as engaging as the beginning or end.
• When asked to "think about something" at home, kids rarely do so. Unless there's some tangible activity to be done, kids don't do work outside of the classroom, and even then, they report less engagement than when doing work in class.
• When rushing through material, kids don't often feel that they should ask questions, and they sometimes feel that tangential questions, when not answered, must be irrelevant to the topic at hand.
• Double periods (only in English and science) are more engaging than single periods, on account of the types of activities done in class.
• 50min periods aren't necessarily more productive than our current 40min periods, since small talk often gets in the way.
• Regular breaks in the middle of the day are more welcome than random breaks throughout the day. 

Based on our subsequent empathy mapping of the interviews, we concluded that time and our current schedule aren't our primary problems. Rather, time was more of a symptom of other problems, namely the problem of overall engagement and "flow" (cf. Csikszentmihalyi's TED Talk). It's not that we don't have enough time, as much as it's about how we're using the time that we do have together. In other words, a different schedule, with longer class periods, wouldn't by itself fix any of the issues that our users identified. That's not to say that I wouldn't warmly welcome more time and longer class periods, but the interview results suggest that we need to work on engagement to give our community clear reasons for using time differently, before we can tackle more concrete schedule issues. With that, Melissa and I began to dig deeper into the assumptions and obstacles standing in the way of the kinds of engagement that we believe are possible.

Experiment and Produce

Now that our discovery work has uncovered engagement as the deeper issue, we, with the help of the outstanding FUSE14 coaching staff, next needed to uncover the long-held assumptions governing how we use our time (cf. Kahneman's idea of "theory-induced blindness"). We now believe that, by challenging these assumptions to produce "How might we?" (HMW) questions that have the potential to engage our community in productive discussions around these ideas without seeming confrontational, we can start working toward new kinds of environments for not only our students, but our faculty and staff too. Our users, then, have become faculty.

1. Assumption: Students learn best through regular content-based testing.
➔ HMW transform our feedback system to reward process over product?

We broadly use the word "feedback" to include not only rote testing but everything we do that informs students of their own progress through our courses. It's the way we answer (or don't answer) questions, it's the work we do with them in class, it's our body language, and more. With this in mind, we need to think through our feedback systems in much greater detail, starting with the fact that a test isn't the only form of feedback.

2. Assumption: Rigor usually excludes creativity.
➔ HMW: Use curiosity to drive our curricula and content?

That kids are most engaged when introduced to new material underscores the power of creativity and wonder in the learning process, I think. There seems to be a widespread assumption that rigor and creativity are mutually exclusive, but this isn't the case at all, as cognitive science is proving. We need to think hard about how we can continue to challenge our students, while also encouraging them to be creative, along with building on other non-cognitive skills. This goes for us too: if we're not feeling creative in teaching, I can't imagine that we're feeling truly fulfilled.

3. Assumption: Our purpose is driven by our obligations to the school.
➔ HMW: Separate true purpose from duty or obligation in what we do as educators?

Students and faculty have a frightening small amount of free time, thanks to the regular ancillary duties and obligations (i.e., external motivators) that are asked of us within our communities. Many seem to equate such obligations with purpose, thereby using such obligations to drive purpose; but Melissa and I would like to challenge this assumption and have larger conversations about purpose (i.e., intrinsic motivators), under the belief that our purpose as educators far exceeds these obligations.

4. Assumption: Kids need daily homework and class meetings to learn.
➔ HMW: Get rid of homework?

This assumption speaks for itself. A growing body of literature (e.g., a recent Stanford study), however, including our own school's Workload Study, makes a strong case for the relative lack of value that homework offers, especially within the traditional framework. That said, this HMW question may be the most controversial, with homework being so culturally ingrained in education.

In sum, if we can challenge these assumptions and work toward engaging both our faculty and our students in different ways than we currently do, we may be able to treat the symptom of time that we've been discussing in our community. No one would say that our classes lack engagement, but after talking with students and faculty and thinking through our wicked problem, we see the big picture differently and believe that there is still opportunity for improvement. A 40min class, while still short, can still be productive, if we have more of an active understanding of how engagement works. This is only the beginning of this process, and we're hopeful that we can unpack more assumptions in conversations with our community and conduct even more interviews, when we return in the fall.

#dtk12chat at MODA

FUSE14 included a trip to MODA, the Museum of Design Atlanta, where we had the opportunity to view the Design for Social Impact exhibition and watch a live broadcast of the #dtk12chat show, hosted by +Trey Boden and +Dan Ryder. The exhibition is amazing and included a number of remarkable works by designers driven by change.

In @modatl with a great group of educators. It's a great way to nourish our creativity and start our summer. #fuse14 pic.twitter.com/7VDgjMKXSn
— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) June 26, 2014

DT Resources

If new to DT and interested in learning more about it, I recommend any of the resources below. More than anything else, DT is inherently social, and so it's best to talk about it with others. Regardless of experience, I highly recommend stopping by #dtk12chat on Twitter on Wed. at 6pm PST.

• Creative Confidence (Tom and David Kelley)
• Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators
• Frog Collective Action Toolkit
• IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit
• Stanford d.school Crash Course in Design Thinking

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Throughout our workshop, our coaches were insistent that we do all the work, while they only gave us guidance and some of the tools to do it. For that reason, FUSE14 was one of the most intense and rewarding PD experiences I've ever had, and I can't recommend it enough to other educators seeking to rethink how we work with people. We came to Atlanta with a problem and left with a few questions that can offer opportunity for innovation within our department and at our school. Leaving Atlanta, I have more of a designer mindset than ever, and I'm eager to get to work. Thanks to everyone who made the experience so valuable for us, including +Bo Adams for his fantastic work as MC and host, Trey Boden for designing the experience, and the entire 201 team of coaches, led by +Greg Bamford and +Jennifer Chan.

My "Go Bag"

Following +Trey Boden's share of his "Go Bag," or what gear he carries around with him, I'll share my own gear that I have with me in my DT manpurse, with an eye on FUSE14 and ISTE2014. These are the things I find useful while traveling and/or conferencing:

My Go Bag

• Rickshaw Zero Messenger Bag (medium, custom) — Really love these bags. The medium size forces me to compromise on what I really need to have with me.
• Rickshaw Deluxe Drop Pocket — Pockets can be swapped out of all bags.
• Rickshaw Classic Folio — Great for carrying pens, cards, small notebooks, etc.
• 13in MacBook Pro
• MotoX
• Sennheiser CX215 earphones — Great sound for the price.
• Anker 5600mAh portable battery — Absolutely indispensable. Can get 3 charges from it.
• Extra large Moleskine soft cover journal (squared, gray) — For detailed sketchnotes.
• Pocket Moleskine hard cover notebook (squared, red) — My "commonplace book" for random notes and ideas.
• Field Notes notebook (dot-grid, pitch black) — For notes from FUSE and ISTE.
• Small Post-It notes
• Lexar 32gb flash drive
• Business cards and a Y&G business card holder
• uni-ball 0.7mm roller pens (assorted)
• MUJI 0.5mm gel ink pens (black) — Trying these out on a recommendation, but I'm more of a 0.7mm kind of guy.
• Sharpie retractable markers (assorted) — An addiction.
• USB dual-port adaptor and 6' micro USB cable
• HDMI and VGA dongles
• Microfiber cloth — Handy for cleaning screens, glasses, etc.
• Reading (Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and David Mitchell's Black Swan Green)

Add a pack of Starbucks Via, and I'm good to go. What's in your go bag?

Finding Purpose on #slowchatED

The Purpose Economy

N.B.: This post is duplicated in the #slowchatED blog.

I'm excited to host a #slowchatED discussion on finding purpose within education the week of June 9, since it's a topic I've become very invested over the course of this past year. Our school is on the verge of making some potentially big changes, based on a quite thorough "Workload Study" we recently completed with all of our students, and purpose has been one of the more salient talking points in the discussion. In thinking about how to design more engaging classroom experiences for my students and more engaging PD opportunities for faculty, as well as considering reworking our school mission, we've been doing a lot of thinking about purpose, focusing on the question of why do we do what we do.

Alongside autonomy and mastery, purpose is one of Dan Pink's three essential requirements for intrinsic motivation, which he outlines in his fantastic book Drive (cf. some of my thoughts on the book). Pink (2011:137) points out that we don't often enough ask "Why?" in the workplace, and I think the same is true within the classroom and at schools in general. Now that we're starting to understand the value of the so-called "non-cognitive" or "soft" skills like creativity and empathy that play a central role in engagement and happiness, it's the perfect time to call more attention to purpose and think hard about this question, as we're pushing change in our schools.

When I learned about Aaron Hurst's new book The Purpose Economy, I couldn't wait to read it and see what he had to say on this idea. It's an excellent book to add to the list of "books not about education that have everything to do about education," and if anyone is looking for something to inspire deep thinking about important ideas, I highly suggest picking it up (cf my notes on it). In the book, Hurst (2014:18) makes it clear that his idea of purpose goes beyond service, thinking of it within the following framework:

"When I say purpose, I mean more than serving others and the planet. Service is certainly at the core, but in speaking with hundreds of professionals and reading thousands of essays, I've discovered that there are two other key sources of purpose people seek: a sense of community and the opportunity for self-expression and personal growth. In other words, they pursue personal, social and societal purpose."

That said, the book (cf. also Hurst's blog) have served as the inspiration for me to have a wider discussion on the topic, with the hope that we can bring together a number of diverse ideas on purpose and start to answer the question "Why?" for both ourselves and our greater communities. "Much like technology a few decades ago, purpose has now become a business imperative," Hurst (2014:21) claims, and in my opinion, purpose should also be an educational imperative. If interested in discussing more on the book itself, by the way, share any thoughts or questions in our EduRead G+ community and/or use the hashtag #eduread14 on Twitter.

So to this end, we'll discuss the questions below next week using the hashtag #slowchatED on Twitter, beginning with Q1 on Monday, June 9, followed by a new question each subsequent day of the week. All are welcome to participate throughout the week, whether it's just for one question or for the duration of the discussion. As always, there are no wrong answers in a discussion like this, and I'm excited to see what ideas we can come up with together.

Suggested Reading

There's no need to read The Purpose Economy for our #slowchatED discussion (though you certainly should at some point!), but it may be helpful to read through a couple good blog posts on the idea:

• Do you want a meaningful life or a happy one?
• 3 Key Insights on the Path to Purpose 
• 6 Steps to Kickstart a Meaningful Life
• For Students, the Importance of Doing Work That Matters

Questions

Q1 Why is purpose important? What does it do for us as community members?
Q2a Define what purpose means to you as an educator, sharing examples. What is your own personal purpose?
Q2b Define what purpose means to you as colleague, sharing examples. What is your societal and social purpose?
Q3 What are some myths or misconceptions about purpose? Why isn't purpose often pursued?
Q4 How can we find, celebrate, and sustain our purpose as educators?
Q5 Why is finding purpose more important than ever for students? How do we help them find it?
Q6 Share a purpose project you intend to work on in the next academic year.

Summer Reading and Discussion

Cognitive Surpluss

Now that summer is fast approaching (and since I'm long overdue for a blog post), I've been thinking about what sorts of professional development I'l be doing over the next few months. Last summer, I spent a lot of time at conferences, and while it was a fantastically productive period of time, this summer I'm looking forward to doing more reading and reflection on the past year of experimentation.

Making Thinking Visible

In particular, I'm interested in exploring ideas on innovation and cognitive science, and to that end, I've compiled a list of books that have caught my attention in the past year (cf. some notes here on a few I've already read). I'm hoping that others in the PLN will be interested in reading and discussing some of these ideas. At the moment, I've got my eye on Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison's Making Thinking Visible, but I'm interested in all of them. If any of the books or ideas look interesting, upvote any of them in the comments section at the bottom of the book list document.

There are also a few books I've recently read that I'd love to discuss in some way, including Hurst's The Purpose Economy (cf. his blog) and Pentland's Social Physics (cf. his blog). I'm open to suggestions on others of value, and I welcome comments on them. And if anyone interested in book discussions will be at ISTE this summer, perhaps we can put together a time and place for conversation in person. Feel free to circulate the list among faculty, and cheers to a productive summer!

EduCon 2014 and Engagement

The Franklin Institute

The more conferences I go to, the less I find myself interested in discussions about specific tools. Instead, it's the new ideas that excite me, in that ideas have the power to outlast tools and make more of an impact on what we do in our classrooms. So, when I learned about EduCon in Philadelphia last December, a conference dedicated to innovation and building schools of the future around these ideas hosted by the rather impressive Science Leadership Academy, I immediately signed up.

EduCon is very similar to the EdCamp model, with "conversations" proposed by attendees, in place of invited speakers and vendor-driven content. I was pleasantly surprised at how little "tech talk" infiltrated the conversations. The sessions were all fantastic, as were the student hosts at SLA, who were impressive for their leadership and gratitude for being at the school. The Twitter buzz in advance of EduCon was as energized as I've ever seen, which was complemented by the conversations that were had while at the conference. All in all, I hope to make EduCon a regular part of my conference rotation, and I'd love to host a conversation of my own someday soon.

Love Park

In particular, I was drawn to a conversation on design thinking, run by +Trey Boden, James Campbell, TJ Edwards, and Jenny Novoselsky from the Mount Vernon Institute, one on mindfulness in education with Sarah Macdonald and Lydia Maier, and another on positive psychology, given by Alexa Dunn and her graduate students. Over the past year, I've found my own thinking to be heavily influenced by design thinking and mindfulness, and so I was eager to discuss these ideas with other educators in the open "unconference" forum at EduCon. They didn't disappoint (cf. my conference notes).

But there was so much more happening at the conference that I had the good fortune to participate in: David Jakes and Christian Long's inspiring session "Wonder, By Design" served as a call to action for the importance of wonder and creativity in schools, and Carey Pohanka introduced me to the concept of the "gemba" (cf. Deborah Adler's TED Talk) in her session "Going to the Gemba," which is the Japanese word meaning the "real place." Going to the gemba is basically making a direct observation of the process as it is happening, and fits in quite well with the empathy component of design thinking.

As I participated in what was one of the highest sustained levels of conference engagement I've seen (look back at the #educon Tweets and those that continue to come in), I started to think about what engagement really is. I've used the term quite often but never really though about what it is and how we measure it, until we had conversations about it at EduCon.

A few weeks ago, +Krista Moroder mentioned Philip Schlechty's book Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work in the ISTE Young Educator podcast #3, in which Schlechty defines engagement and argues convincingly that designing for engagement (rather than planning for outcomes) should be a top priority in schools. Without true engagement, in his hierarchy, students become compliant or worse (cf. the "Levels of Engagement"), and the ingredients necessary for intrinsic motivation to learn something that Daniel Pink discusses in Drive, namely autonomy, mastery, and purpose, won't be found.

With this in mind, the idea of engagement and the importance of designing learning environments to support it has become my new focus. Engagement encompasses the design thinking process, mindfulness, and everything else I've been working toward, I think, and it has direct application to both students and teachers. To my mind, it makes more sense to me than the often-used terms "student-centered" and "21st century," and it doesn't need to involve anything special (i.e., no tech guarantees engagement, nor does IdeaPaint, etc.). I intend on spending the spring and summer thinking about designing more engaging environments that encourage creativity and innovation for both faculty and students, and I'm very eager to hear what others think about engagement and how it's approached at your schools. #HMW design for more engagement?

Top #EdBlogs2013 Posts

2013 was a productive year that saw quite a bit of professional development and new thinking, highlighted by traveling, where I made new colleagues, and attending the Google Teacher Academy in Chicago. In reflecting on this year, +Eric Saibel has inspired colleagues who blog to share their most influential posts of 2013 for the #EdBlogs2013 series he's collecting, and I'm honored to participate (read his own post here). Taking a page from +David Theriault, who reworked the organization of the #EdBlog2013 idea (cf. his fantastic #EdBlogs2013 post), I'll reflect on 2013 thematically, organizing my post around some of the ideas that I've been interested in this year. And I'll keep the summaries of each post, so be sure to give them the love they deserve.

Innovation and Mindfulness

I've been very interested in creativity and innovation, along with the part that mindfulness plays, thanks to my PLN. I now believe that creativity is one of the most important skills that we should be teaching (alongside collaboration and empathy), and the following posts are just of the few of a growing body of literature that has helped me to think this way.

• Daniel Goleman, whose book Focus I enjoyed, has a couple of posts shared in LinkedIn on mindfulness and creativity that I enjoyed reading: Three Must-Haves for Team Creativity and Mindfulness: When Focus Means Single-Tasking.

New Pioneers blog

• Collisions of Creativity from the magazine Mindful is a good piece on the relationship between mindfulness and creativity.

• Lee-Anne Gray (@DrLeeAnneG) wrote a great post on the need for mindfulness in education as a source of innovation titled Why Mindfulness is Needed For Education Innovation.

• I love the idea of starting a "life hacker" club build around the modern world, as outlined in Start a Life Hacker Club at Your School by Adam Renfro in the +Getting Smart blog.

• Stephanie Harrison's (@cultivace) This will make you happier at work is a great post on bringing mindfulness into the workplace, offering several suggestions for doing so. Creating a mindful culture within the workplace is one of my long-term goals, assuming that, if teachers are generally more mindful and happy, we can also help students to be more mindful and happy.

• Finally, this academic year I began to realize the importance of the relationship between pedagogy and physical space and never fully appreciated it, until +Alice Keeler led a revelatory session at #edcampSFBay last August on the topic. The conversation was inspiring, and +Kevin Ashworth followed it up with his own room redesign in a 2-part blog post on his work (Part 1 | Part 2). We're undertaking our own room redesigns of History, Visual Arts, and World Languages classrooms, and Kevin's work will serve as a source of inspiration for us to craft true collaborative space for our students in a mindful manner.

Design Thinking

Mindfulness and design thinking are very similar in a number of ways; to my mind, mindfulness is an internal application of the external principles of design thinking, and they're both critically dependent on problem definition and system awareness. In designing new forms of pedagogy, especially around technology, I've tried to keep a number of basic principles in mind, and the following posts.

• Last winter/spring's #etmooc was the first digital experience that opened me up to the value of taking risks and the importance of building a PLN. In particular, +Christina Hendricks wrote a post Etmooc: Rhizomatic Learning In Philosophy Courses on the concept of "rhizomatic learning." which was one of the first blog posts I read that challenged the way I thought about learning and pedagogy.

Creative Confidence

• Eric Saibel wrote a great piece The Art of Coaching: Or, Disrupting the Echo Chamber that has helped to give me a framework to apply design thinking at our school, particularly the concept of the disruption and the "echo chamber," or the repetitiveness of thinking that we can find ourselves stuck in as a group that too often prevents us from identifying the core of a problem.

• Grant Wiggins, in his post Beyond teacher egocentrism: design thinking, has some great thoughts on what design thinking means in education, and he share some of the same ideas I have about the ways that the ego gets in the way of creating this type of environment.

• In an important discussion about transparency in education, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@Braddo) asks the question Can a radical transparency replace grading?. It's short but asks a great question that opens up discussion of standards-based grading and general openness, of which we still have far too little.

• Though not published in 2013, Cathy Davidson's (@CathyNDavidson) idea of crowdsourced grading in How to Crowdsource Grading grabbed my attention. I haven't yet put this idea to use in this form, but I love the approach to empowering students in this way.

Gamification

2013 was the year of gamification for me. I got to know the concept in the spring, though through some ideas of the summer, and now I'm working toward creating a gamified Latin IA course around our new 1:1 BYOL program. Fortunately, a number of excellent blog posts have helped me with the work.

• Tanya Sasser's (@TanyaSasser) post 3 Things I Wish Everyone Knew about Gamification corrects some common misconceptions about the role of game-based learning and gamification in education.

playwaresrudios.com

• +Rory Newcomb has a fantastic blog series on gamification, starting with Gamification 101: Why Gamify? Part I. It's a minefield of great ideas for anyone interested in game-based learning.

• +Jennifer Roberts has some helpful words of advice on the importance of good game design  in her post Broken Games.

• And last but certainly not least, IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley have a great post on the real-world value that games have for learning with How Daydreams and Videogames Can Make Us Confident In Real Life (Yes).

Quisquiliae

I'll close with some random yet influential posts on professional development, the MOOC, language study and the humanities in general.

• +David Theriault's The Magnificent 60: Introducing Your #gtachi Participants is brilliant for so many reasons, mostly because it paints such a colorful picture of all the amazing people who participated in the #gtachi last July.

• At the beginning of last summer, +Jennifer Peyrot shared her Summer Learning Fun on her blog, which helped me to rethink how I approach the summer. In particular, it's a good idea to plan out some activities to ensure a fairly high level of productivity, lest it go by too quickly.

• In August, I had the opportunity to help +Nancy Minicozzi organize and run the PlaydateLA conference. Her reflections in Playdate L.A. capture the excitement I also felt for providing PD to over 100 people, rather than receiving it at an event. It was such a positive experience that the PlaydateLA team is already looking forward to doing it again next August.

• If you're not yet a regular reader of the digital journal Hybrid Pedagogy, run in part by +Jesse Stommel, I highly recommend having a look. His post The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses, along with the #moocmooc event last summer, helped me to see the larger possibilities of connectivism and constructivism that the MOOC can bring to education.

• Language teachers are always concerned with promoting language programs, especially as STEM disciplines grow in popularity. +Dana Ariss wrote a great post Learning Languages: Who Says You Can't? that underscores the value that language study has for resilience and taking control of learning. I'm now interested in promoting an "Hour of Language" in a way similar to December's Hour of Code event.

• Along with the diminishing interest in language study, the Humanities have also been suffering (cf. what's happening at the university level). Ben Stern understands Why Humanities Still Matter In 2013, however, and argues a strong case for the importance of the Humanities in understanding the world we interact with.

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That wraps up my 2013, more or less. In addition to blogs, I've also been reading a fair number of books that have all shaped my thinking to a large degree, and I've share some thoughts here on a few of them. But as we begin 2014 (and now that my coding streak has finished!), I plan on carving time to read more blogs, and I'll be looking forward to the ideas that develop from them in this year.