DT in the Latin Classroom

Now that I've working more with design thinking and have learned how powerful of a mindset it can be for creativity and innovation, I've been trying to infuse it into my Latin classrooms. It's not always easy to move through the entire design thinking process in a Latin course, but I believe it can be done—and done well—in at least a few ways. In particular, since language programs are the perfect content areas for "discovery", I'm using a design thinking approach to do this kind of work with my students (on which I've written in more detail here) by building empathy for a society of people who lived in a very different world than ours.

I've been exploring using a "gamified" structure in my 7th-grade Latin IA course in the past two years, in which we have a number of thematic "modules" containing both grammatical and cultural content. In each module, we cover the grammar and vocabulary necessary for the course, then do a project around the cultural theme. Our first module focused on ancient geography to give our students a context for their study of the language, and students were asked to build interactive maps to help build an understanding of how geography affected how people lived within the Roman world.

First, we did some research about cities and travel in the ancient world, relying heavily on Stanford's excellent ORBIS tool (Google Maps for the ancient world). Students worked in pairs to select a city, discover some historical significance about it, learn how far it was from Rome in days, distance, and cost, and figure out how one would have traveled from Rome to that city.

After each group submitted their research into a Google Form, we used it to build one collaborative map for the class in Google's My Maps (formerly Maps Engine) containing all their data. Because Google can't locate every ancient city, students had to note the modern country in which the ancient city can be found, before adjusting their location pin. Students then used ORBIS to draw the travel route between Rome and their chosen city. Our Period 9 map looks like:

In complement to our design mindset, we're in the process of building a "Yes, and..." culture in our classroom that governs how we interact with each other. That's to say, whenever we're sharing ideas, we're very careful to "Yes, and..." each of our classmates' thoughts, rather than being the "Yeah, but..." type (thanks to +Eric Saibel  for directing me to Dave Morris' brilliant "The Way of Improvisation" TED Talk that shows how valuable saying "yes" can be!).

With that in mind, I then asked our students a few questions through Canvas (our LMS) about travel in the ancient world, using our "Discovery" goals as the driver for the questions. In other words, I encouraged them to consider how travel affected people first and foremost by imagining that they were the ones taking these trips.

• How do you think travel affected communication in the ancient world? What was it like to travel?
• How different is our world today, thanks to the speed with which we can communicate?
• In general, what are the benefits of travel? Does it shape our thinking about people and ideas, and if so, how?

Students used what they learned through making their maps not only to post a response but also to respond to their classmates' ideas with our "Yes, and..." approach. I was amazed at the quality of the posts that they shared, and I was quite surprised that 37 students generated over 100 total posts in a single day. Just a few of the responses to their peers' posts:

• "I agree with this a lot, I like the way you mentioned how business can expand!"
• "I fully agree, the communication has improved a lot and long distance communications aren't very difficult. In the ancient world, communicating would take a lot of effort, money, and time."
• "I think you make very good points in why traveling was a necessity in ancient times and the benefits to travel."
• "I totally agree with how you mentioned that you can know about world events almost instantly, while hundreds of years ago, you wouldn't know for months, or maybe more than a year."

To close the project, we followed up the online discussion with an in-class activity comparing ancient to modern travel. I divided the class into an "Ancient" group and a "Modern" group, and students then had to think about positive and negative things about travel according to their assigned perspective, based on some of the ideas they saw in the Canvas discussion. They wrote ideas on Post-It notes, with one idea per note, and then stick them onto a white board that was organized in "+" and "-" squares for each idea (cf. the picture below). Finally, students had a chance to examine each other's ideas (as well as previous classes' ideas when possible), before crafting an argument explaining the positives and negatives for each group, again focusing on how geography affected people living in the ancient world.

Thoughts on Travel in the Ancient and Modern Worlds

Frankly, I expected most, if not all, of the discussion to favor modern travel for convenience and speed; but I was surprised when a number of students said that ancient travel would have been more fun and exciting, since we would have had the opportunity to explore more different types of geography and people. It would have taken at least 5 years for an average person to save enough money to travel from Rome to Londinium (ancient London) over the course of a month (at best!), to be sure; but imagine what we could have seen on the trip! Without any prompting on my part, some were saying that we should focus on the journey rather than the destination whenever possible, which helped us to discuss why travel is so valuable in the first place.

So, we didn't prototype anything, but I still think we found a successful way to bring some design thinking into the study of a dead language by discovering how geography determined to a large extent how people interacted with each other. The approach isn't perfect, and it still needs some tweaking and tuning, but I'm happy with the direction. In subsequent projects, I'll continue to explore how we can continue to build a designer's mindset through studying Latin.

ISTE2014 and Collaboration

After a week in Atlanta for FUSE14 (cf. my reflections) and ISTE2014, my head is spinning. It was an extraordinary experience, and I learned so much that it's going to take months to sort it all out. Most of all, it was a invigorating and inspiring to spend quality time in person with so many amazing people (thanks +Dominique Dynes for the picture below!).

Having fun at #iste2014 with friends! @DeLibrosCorazon @mosspike @Ms_Cerda @coachk #brewcue pic.twitter.com/3ra21bCTMG

— Dominique Dynes (@DominiqueDynes) June 27, 2014

Last year in San Antonio, I spent a fair amount of time reading the ISTE Tweet stream, which helped me to learn what others were doing at the conference. This year, however, I spent the majority of my time presenting and talking with people in person, including meeting a number of Twitter friends for the first time. While I regret not being able to follow ISTE on Twitter as closely as I'd have liked, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations I had, since this is what ISTE is all about.

Come learn about Google Maps at #googleedu booth! #iste2014 #googlect @mosspike pic.twitter.com/I3jqNTsywq

— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) July 1, 2014

So much happened in Atlanta, but I'll share some brief highlights:

• Our #brewcue was very successful, and the Google events were awesome, where we were able to reunite some of our GTACHI colleagues. It's amazing to see what we've all been doing in the past year, and I'm beyond honored to be part of such an illustrious group. The Instructure party was also quite heavily attended, and I enjoyed meeting other independent school folks at our #isteisen dinner, where I got to catch up with an old friend and colleague +Jennifer Carey. The #isteball baseball game was a lot of fun, too. All in all, there was plenty of great socializing in Atlanta.
• HackEd was again fantastic. I had the opportunity to lead a session on design thinking, following up on FUSE, and we had some good conversation about bringing DT into the classroom.
• At the GlobalEd Day "min-conference," +Melissa Strong and I led a discussion on world language study and globalization. We learned what others are doing at their schools to make their language programs more global, which gave us some ideas of our own to try out.
• I've been experimenting with gamification in our Latin program, and so I was geeked to chat with +Michael Matera about some of my ideas. He gave me some extremely helpful feedback that I'm very excited to test next fall, and I look forward to continued collaboration with him.
• +Zee Poerio invited me to join her poster session on using technology in Latin classrooms, focusing on the project-based learning approaches we've been taking. We had fun sharing some of the projects we've been working on with our students and hopefully offered an attractive plug for the study of Latin.
• +Isis Stephanie Cerda and I gave a session on using Google's Fusion Tables in the design thinking process at the Google Playground. This session was particularly interesting, in that it generated a number of questions about how we collaborate that I think are worth exploring in more detail.

The State of Collaboration

Given that ISTE is all about bringing people together, Stephanie and I decided to send out a brief survey on collaboration to collect data that we'd use in our Fusion Tables session. In particular, we collected standard demographics like gender, role, experience, etc., followed by research questions on collaboration. Using a 4-point scale to prevent selection of an unhelpful "no opinion" middle response, we asked respondents to rate their agreement with the following statements, with 1 representing "strongly disagree" up to 4 "strongly agree":

• I collaborate with others in my organization.
• I collaborate with others outside of my organization.
• I participate in regular PD activities.
• I organize regular PD activities.

With the collected data, we demonstrated how Fusion Tables can be used for quick analyses in our session (cf. the overall Collaboration by Experience results below). All told, 90 people submitted a survey (we thank them all!), and the data are summarized in this Fusion Table (feel free to copy).

A few caveats: We pushed out the survey on Twitter at a ISTE and must acknowledge that the sample size is both small and certainly skewed toward the more collaboration-friendly; but our numbers are nonetheless interesting. And we must remember that correlation does not imply causation, so any apparent relationships in the data will need to be investigated further, before conclusions can be drawn. With that in mind, here's a summary of our findings:

• It is certainly significant that 60 of the 90 respondents were female. Any comparisons between males and females must thus be taken with caution.
• Not one male response had more that 20 years of experience in the current role!
• Participation in PD is relatively stable across experience levels (i.e., no one experience group participates with greater frequency).
• Overall, there seems to be an apparent correlation with experience and organizing PD: the more experience one has, the less PD she organizes. Those with 0-5 years of experience report an average response of 3.77, while 21+ stands at 2.67. That's a huge drop.
• Female administrators (3.92) and tech specialists (3.78) organize significantly more PD than respective male counterparts (3.4 and 3.5, respectively), but male teachers (3.15) organize more PD than female teachers (2.71). Female teachers with 21+ years of experience only report a 2 for organizing PD.
• The less and most experienced administrators and tech specialists organize PD more often than those in the 6-10 year range.
• Less experienced educators collaborate more inside of their organization, and more experienced educators collaborate more outside. This phenomenon is more pronounced with males (a statistical by-product?). 

Even in an informal survey of this sort, we can ask some potentially powerful questions about the data we collected and dig deeper into problems that we may not have known existed. Among a number of interesting questions, we can ask why the more experienced teachers are not leading as many PD opportunities as others. I've witnessed veteran teachers who believe they have less "value" than their younger colleagues who are more tech savvy, but this simply isn't true. Now knowing this, how might we encourage educators with more experience to share their experience inside and outside their communities? How might we learn to better appreciate the diverse value that everyone brings into our communities? To gain a better understanding of the problem and begin to work toward solutions, we should next talk with more experienced teachers about their thoughts on PD.

It could be quite interesting to repeat this process in a Twitter chat sometime. If we pushed out a survey, ideally asking students questions, and gave our communities a week to respond, we could spend the discussion time analyzing the results and generating more questions for investigation. Any takers?

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So much for ISTE2014. Atlanta was a fabulous host, full of friendly people and great food. I enjoyed talking with you all, and I can't wait to do it again. And in the meantime, I'll be looking forward to kicking around these ideas.