Showing posts with label design thinking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design thinking. Show all posts

Monday, February 16, 2015

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.




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).



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).





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.

—

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.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Let's Design a School!

Crossposted at SlowchatED.

If you enjoy Twitter conversations on education and you're not yet familiar with #slowchatED, I highly recommend having a look. Rather than juggling questions and answers at the breakneck pace of many popular discussions, the #slowchatED model offers the opportunity for conversations that may benefit from a little more reflection. We push out one question per day over the course of a week, and throughout the week, participants are welcome to share their ideas as they are able and at their own pace.

Using the #slowchatED model, I'd like for us to design a school together, looking at individual aspects of school models over the course of the discussion. We've discussed similar questions in other Twitter groups, but I don't believe that we've given ourselves sufficient time to explore our own ideas in depth, nor have I see much discussion of what an actual schedule, org chart, etc. would look like, if we had a say in their creation. With this particular discussion, I'm hoping to see not just theoretical ideas but actual concrete and specific solutions to the problems we've all dealt with. It's one thing to give our opinions as critics, but it's another thing altogether to offer solutions to problems we regularly discuss from the point of view of designers—we need to start doing more of this kind of work. Though each question below is broad enough for a Twitter discussion of its own, we'll use them to work toward our own designs for successful school models in this way:
Q1 What does your ideal school calendar look like (i.e., daily schedule, teaching vs. service days, etc.)?
Q2 What does your ideal physical space look like (e.g., classrooms, offices, community space, etc.)?
Q3 Describe the ideal organizational structure of your school. Who makes decisions and how?
Q4 How do you hire, train, and retain quality teaching talent? Outline your ideal supporting PD program.
Q5 What else makes your ideal school unique or what wild idea would you love to try? What did we miss?
Q6 Write your school's mission statement.
I'm eager to hear a variety of thoughts on these questions, but I'm even more excited for the ancillary conversations that will be born from our discussion. In particular, I'm curious to know what I haven't yet thought of as being of central importance for school design. It will certainly be the case that the room will be smarter than any individual, and thanks to the variety of points of view and the general diversity of opinion on Twitter, I expect that these questions will be just starting points allowing us to explore school design more deeply. I hope that we push each other's ideas to give us the opportunity to dive deeply into what we think is fundamental for school design. There will be no wrong answers!

With these questions as our starting point, how might we design a school? This is your perfect world in which you get to build your perfect school. Assume that there are no restrictions or limits for our designs; but however imaginative and revolutionary they may be, let's also try to build a school that's feasible. At the end of the week, I'll invite everyone to reflect on our respective school designs and capture your model in a blog post of your own to share what you learned in the process. I can't wait to see what we each build over the course of the week of Feb. 9.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Friday, October 10, 2014

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.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

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.

—

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!
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Cultivating a Gratitude Practice

Latin IA Gratitude Notes
Following the CUE Manhattan Beach Rock Star camp, friend and colleague +Karl Lindgren-Streicher reflected on the incredible experience, sharing his gratitude with a number of influential people who have helped him along his journey. It's a great post, and now that I have spent the summer reflecting about many of the changes sweeping through our school and my role within them, I want to follow suit and start developing a regular gratitude practice of my own, beginning with how I ended up where I am today.

Though I always had an interest in technology and Google in particular, I never really pushed the envelope as far as I could in my current job and wasn't even aware of the possibilities that tech offered. Then, in the fall of 2012 our school went GAFE, and so I decided to attend a Google Summit in Boulder, CO in August to see what others have been doing with Google, working under the assumption that I was farther along than I really was.

It was the first educational conference I attended, and needless to say, I was stunned by the creativity that people were bringing to the table, and the things they were doing with their students opened my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking about teaching (especially as I look back on my notes from the summit). That's when I first met +Wendy Gorton, +Molly Schroeder, and +Mark Wagner. They introduced me to the professional world of educational technology and inspired me to get out of my comfort zone by trying new things. And Wendy in particular introduced me to the world of the Google Certified Teacher and the community that GCTs have created for themselves. I was hooked and wanted to be a part of it.

In looking back, though, I wasn't even on Twitter at the time of the Boulder summit! Thanks to what I learned there about the power of being connected, I soon got back on, after two previous failed attempts. It makes me smile to look back on my first Tweet:

It wasn't long before I stumbled onto #caedchat and started regularly participating in the weekly conversations, where I met countless other passionate educators who have since shaped my own thinking. That's where I first met Karl, and I also had the good fortune to start developing a relationship with the HBUSD crew, including +JR Ginex-Orinion, +Chris Long, +David Theriault, +Sean Ziebarth, among others like +Alice Keeler . These guys have helped me to see the value of sharing and leading by example through the interesting things they do seemingly every day.

With that momentum, I applied for the GTA in Mountain View in Dec. of 2012, though without luck. I applied again for Chicago in June of 2013, thanks to some inspiration offered by +Alice Chen, and this time luck was on my side. I had an amazing time in Chicago, thanks to the best community of educators I know and for whom I will always be grateful. They taught me the value of community and hammered home the power of the "Yes, and..." mindset. If I name one, I'd have to name them all.

It was in Chicago that I started to think about innovation and the role that design plays in education, and shortly thereafter, in the fall of 2013, I learned about design thinking and the #dtk12chat community devoted to its role in education. Through #dtk12chat, I met the Mount Vernon crew and a number of other regulars on Twitter who have had a major impact in how I now think about innovation and change. +Trey Boden, +Mary Cantwell, and +Dan Ryder, to only name a few, have made me realize that change first and foremost is about people, which has had a profound impact on how I now approach the teaching profession.

So many others have helped me along the way that it's impossible to thank them all. But these are some the folks who have been present a major turnposts in the evolution of my own thinking, and I'm grateful for the educational community that they have helped to create. Thanks go to Karl for inspiring me to write this post. I'll echo his call for others to consider who has helped them along their own paths and share it out.

—

A new school mission statement was just recently unveiled to our community, after a year of work building it. It goes well beyond traditional academic emphases, and I expect it to be a beacon for decades to come, and I'm quite proud to share it:
Harvard-Westlake strives to be
a diverse and inclusive community united by
the joyful pursuit of educational excellence,
living and learning with integrity,
and purpose beyond ourselves.
This year, I plan on cultivating a gratitude practice with my students. Once a week, we'll take about 10min to write down on a Post-It note something we're grateful for or share something good that happened in the week, and then we'll post it somewhere in the room for others to see (with or without names attached to the note). By doing this, I hope that we can create a more mindful classroom experience that underscores our new mission by actively engaging with gratitude and sharing it within our community. It should be a great year.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, July 5, 2014

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.

 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.


 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.


—

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.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, July 3, 2014

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!).


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.


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?

—

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.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, June 20, 2014

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?
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Sunday, March 2, 2014

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?
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

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.

--

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.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)