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.

EdCampSFBay

I just participated in my first EdCamp at #edcampsfbay this past Saturday, and I'm still feeling the adrenaline from it. The "unconference" was one of the single best experiences I've experienced of sitting in a room and having a conversation with other people who share interests and passions of mine. I left Hillsdale High School on Saturday afternoon believing that I could do anything and that there is an army of people who also believe this and are available to help.

The session discussions were amazing (cf. below), but the best part of events like this is the face-to-face interaction: I finally had the opportunity to meet in person some of the brilliant educators with whom I've been having great conversations on Twitter. Steven Johnson is certainly correct in believing that "the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop" (Good Ideas 61).

If unfamiliar with EdCamp's "unconference" model, it's very simple: show up at the appointed time and talk with people, while ideas for sessions are posted on the board. The ideas can be on anything, and one need not be an expert on a given idea in order to propose a session. Then, once the sessions are set, you can go to any of them you choose, including leaving a session for another, should it not be what you anticipated. Within the sessions, formal presentations (e.g. slides or handouts) are strictly forbidden. Finally, a demo slam at the end of the day gives everyone a chance to share something they've learned.

In the morning, +Alice Keeler set the tone for the day by exclaiming that EdCamps are not "tech" conferences, which is absolutely true. Aside from taking notes in each session (found here), we spent the entire session in conversation that was always open and helpful.

20% Time Projects

The first session I attended was on 20% Time or "Genius Hour" (cf. an introduction to the idea), which I'm considering offering to my 9th-grade Latin III course next year, focusing on Classical reception. We spent some time discussing how "creativity loves constraint" and that it's critical to help students develop specific questions to explore, when working on #20time projects. Moreover, it's important to work with students throughout the process of the project, rather than simply assessing the final product.

One participant shared the positive effect that mentors can have in doing #20time work with students, and I'm going to suggest to colleagues that they consider working with our alumni office to find volunteers who could help them with #20time projects. We have a rather large alumni base that would be more than happy to work with students to do creative work, I'm sure, and I imagine that our students would love to work with them too. I'm not sure that our community includes many Classicists, but we have plenty of other fields to work with.

It was also suggested that #20time projects be connected to field trips, in that students could explore a
physical space and develop the kinds of specific questions that are perfect for #20time work. For instance, one class explored a historic site of importance for California history, and her class then developed #20time projects around the questions they wanted to investigate in relation to the site.

#20time projects are then shared with each other through blogs, TED Talks, or other interactive methods that promote students learning from each other and generate excitement that rewards the hard work put in by the students.

Gamification

The final board 

I've become deeply interested in gamification, and so I was happy to see a session devoted to it. Despite thinking about gamification for the better part of the summer, this session added a new dimension to my ideas. In particular, I'm considering using badges within Latin IA game modules to a greater extent than I thought I would by connecting them more closely to our class standards, e.g. offering levels 1-5 (or perhaps even "Servus", "Libertus", "Civis", "Senator" levels, etc.) for verb master and adding even more levels as we meet subsequent tenses. Doing something like this could, in principle, allow for more differentiated learning by letting students move at their own pace.

I'd also like to offer students the possibility to earn their own unique badges, and I think that #20time projects could be a great way to accomplish this. In other words, if a student wanted to learn more about Roman culinary practices, the "Roman Foodie" badge could be the reward. Likewise, the "Consul" badge could be awarded to students who investigate Roman politics. I don't know of any good way to create and store badges for students yet, and so I enthusiastically welcome any input or advice.

Even though I find gamification very exciting, I'm very concerned about connecting badges to grades on account of the potential backlash.  I'll have to think on this and test out some ideas this fall.

Reorganizing Physical Space

In many ways, +Alice Keeler's proposed session on "Rethinking the Classroom" was the most interesting of all. Though I'd been thinking about ways to transform pedagogy for quite some time, I haven't yet put much thought into reorganizing my classrooms' physical spaces. The point that " physical environment can affect relationship between teachers and students" was made repeatedly, and now is the time to change (or at least shift ) school culture toward an improved awareness of classroom organization, considering what we want our learning to actually look like.

It's true that we have too many traditional desks at our school that reinforce the lecture model of learning. Several, if not the majority, of our classroom spaces could be significantly improved by the addition of more tables, couches, and even movable beanbags, in place of the desks. And after seeing entire walls at Google Chicago covered with IdeaPaint, I have it in mind to remove the whiteboards from classrooms and cover walls with it. Imagine classroom space with no clear front or back, where students and teachers mingle freely and put work right on the walls as needed. Going even further, imagine a similar space for teachers and administrators to work together. I believe more than ever now that rigid physical space imposes rigid intellectual thought.

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I left #edcampsfbay with all sorts of ideas to work on for the coming year, in addition to those outlined here. Thanks to the experience, I'm even more excited for PlaydateLA this coming Saturday, 8/17, which will be more of a hands-on technology conference, and I'm already looking forward to #edcampps on Saturday, 9/14 in Palm Springs.

#latinlangchat Twitter Chat

I've had a great time participating in Twitter chats like "CAedchat", with hashtag #caedchat, which happens Sunday evenings at 8pm PST and provides a forum for CA teachers to discuss current topics in education and pedagogy.  As far as I know, there exists no current live chat devoted to Latin and the ancient world, and so capitalizing on the popularity of Twitter chats like this one (cf. this list for more), I'd like to start one.  It seems to me that we Latin teachers don't talk shop with enough frequency, and this could be a great way for us to build community (even Pompeii had social networks, after all!).

Latin graffiti from Pompeii

Given that the hashtag #latinlangchat is already in use by some Latin teachers, it makes sense to continue using it for this purpose.  I've created the #latinlangchat calendar that I'll use to plan our discussions, and I welcome help in any capacity, including co-moderators.  Though we're tagging our discussion with #latinlangchat, it is open to those who teach Greek, ancient history, and any other related fields.  Everyone should feel free to participate as much or as little as desired.

Let's have our first hour-long chat on Tuesday, 4/9 at 6pm PST and talk about the promotion of Latin programs.  How do we convince students to take Latin and maintain our program strength?  Is retention an problem, and if so, why?  Depending on how it goes, we can reconvene every other week at 6pm.

We'll follow the usual chat format and introduce ourselves, before jumping into questions labeled "Q1", "Q2", etc.  For convenience, answers should begin "A1", "A2", etc.  For chats of this sort on Twitter, it is usually suggested that tweetchat.com (vel sim.), which has worked very well for me, be used to monitor the discussion.  Chat digests will be kept using Storify.

Disclaimer:  I am in my fifth year teaching Latin at a middle school in Los Angeles and will be implementing a 1:1 laptop program for our 7th graders next fall.  I'm consequently very interested in discussing the incorporation of technology into our program.  I will again teach our 9th-grade Latin I course, designed for students new to the school or students taking a second language.  Traditionally, we have used the Oxford Latin Course for both the Latin IA-IB-II progression and this accelerated course, but I don't like its pacing for Latin I and will try Wheelock instead next year.  Finally, I teach Latin III to advanced 9th graders, using a reading-based approach that departs from the Oxford texts.  We begin with Balme and Morewood's Cupid and Psyche text, before moving on to one of the Focus Aeneid commentaries, in addition to other supplementary readings.  I am thus interested in discussing textbook choices and other resources for intermediate Latin students.  Based on my own experiences, I'll offer some of tentative ideas for discussion here, but I'd love to know what concerns others have:

• Building a Latin program
• JCL club culture 
• Latin and technology
• Textbooks and digital resources
• The AP Latin curriculum
• Latin-specific professional development opportunities

I can be found at @mosspike on Twitter, and our JCL club lives on at @hwjcl.  I'm looking forward to our first #latinlangchat next week!

What's the Value of Foreign Language?

Bolchazy-Carducci is one of the more prolific publishers of Classical texts, and they've done a lot of great work for Greek and Latin teachers that has helped to make our jobs easier.  In their February eLitterae newsletter, Sherwin Little's Little's Bits column "A Latin teacher wears many hats..." addresses the complexities of a Latin teacher's job, which often requires us to serve in part as a "public relations specialist" to help keep our numbers strong.  Now that it's time for students to start signing up for next year's classes, the question of why one should choose to study Latin is again placed under the microscope, and the recent news that the Pope's resignation was delivered in Latin has been in wide circulation as more proof of its importance (no fewer than 5 colleagues have independently emailed me news about this in the past week!).  I certainly do believe that PR is a big part of game in this field, as anyone who does JCL club work knows all too well.

At any rate, Little's column today reminds me of an article a few colleagues and I read last summer, Bryan Caplan's "The Numbers Speak:  Foreign Language Requirements are a Waste of Time and Money".  In short, Caplan argues that learning a foreign language is irrelevant and unnecessary in this day and age.  He backs off somewhat at the end of the article, confessing that he actually "got a lot of value" through his German studies, but he thinks that the majority of Americans don't have the same experience (if interested, I suggest reading through the comments to the article for a myriad of varying opinions).  It's a preposterous argument, but it also raises some very interesting questions about the state of affairs in foreign language vis-à-vis the growing importance technology in education, and it's clear that it's not just Latin that's under fire.

What's interesting here, to my mind, is the perceived value of foreign language in our culture.  Foreign language teachers can easily, even if not effectively, dismiss a poor argument like Caplan's from our point of view as language teachers, but it also underscores the challenges that we face in creating a valuable classroom experience for our students.  I read Caplan's article as a call for foreign language teachers to defend why we believe that what we do is important.  If we accept the challenge, it's a great exercise for us to do some self-reflection and actually articulate these reasons, rather than simply dismiss Caplan's claims, without further thought.  Cf. a similar challenge issued by Andrew Hacker in his article "Is Algebra Necessary?" in the NYT last July that math teachers have taken up.

In the comments, several people have asked if Caplan's argument applies to all academic subjects in our schools, like algebra and science, given that most Americans don't use them on a daily basis.  I don't think so, though.  Math and science are privileged right now (and being a former engineer I'll never say that they shouldn't be), and as such they receive quite a deal of publicity, especially at our school, which held a very public STEM day last year, complete with all kinds of interactive events and activities.  Even the arts have frequent public showcases and special assemblies here, but foreign language (and indeed the humanities in general!) has no such days for public celebration, where kids get to share their work pridefully with the community.  And though kids do enjoy their foreign language classes, in general, this very culture that promotes science has also taught our students to undervalue language study, in comparison to the more "popular" subjects.  I suffered from this myself in in high school, when I loaded up on math and science, while loathing my Spanish classes, since I saw relatively little value in it.  Thanks to the growing popularity of STEM work and now President Obama's endorsement of STEM education, administrations aren't going to automatically put foreign language departments on equal footing with the math and science anytime soon.  The burden, then, is on us to make language study more worthwhile.  We have to do a better job of earning attention and making students want to take more languages classes for reasons other than financial gain or status.  Even the Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's NYT article on "Why Bilinguals are Smarter", though insightful, is pragmatic and so doesn't do much to bolster the intrinsic appeal that language study can offer.

Ultimately, though, pitting physics against Spanish and chemistry against Latin is a loosing battle, not because the languages can't win, but because education shouldn't be about competition. Where Caplan's argument fails most — and even where much of the argumentation for taking Latin errs, I think — is in the compartmentalization of academia, in treating foreign language in isolation from other subjects.  Language study will not evolve, unless we change our approach for teaching and learning them.

Caplan's compartmentalization doesn't facilitate community, which languages necessarily depend on.  The trouble that language programs have found themselves in, whether now or in past generations (e.g. Latin in the 1960s), seem to be a direct result of the lack of a strong communal focus that leaves students feeling unengaged and unfulfilled.  Today, there are a number of great tools that can help us to strengthen them within the classroom, e.g. PLNs, blogs, digital storytelling, and I'm sure there exist other ideas to explore that I'm not even aware of.  I see no reason my foreign language courses can't work beside English, history, art, and even math and science courses to do more connected work through the use of these tools.  Despite the fact that we don't teach Latin as a living language (though there are arguments about oral Latin), we derive the strength of our program from the strong community of students and teachers here.  I don't expect many of our students to pursue advanced degrees in Classics or linguistics, but I'm confident that the majority of them won't believe in 20 years that what they're doing right now is is pointless.  In fact, a significant fraction of our Latin students begin study of a third language in 9th grade solely because they've enjoyed learning how language works.

Several colleagues at our school have questioned the technological directions that we're taking, but for me, that's really what all this "technofuss" is about:  community and interconnectedness.  Or as Little put it, creating a "buzz" in our classes.  Having to have relied on the strength of our community for the sake of numbers in the past, I'm a big believer in its importance for engagement.  With all the new tools at our disposal now, we can build the kinds of communities that we never imagined in the past.  We've necessarily had to adopt various strategies for creating a strong Latin culture within our program without technology, and now that we have new tools, we can do an ever better job on an even larger scale.  I'm excited to put on yet one more hat, and I hope that others do the same.

Over the next few months, I plan on detailing some of the new directions with technology that our department would like to take, as we plan for our 1:1 program in the fall.  But for now I welcome others to share their own ideas for developing stronger communities and promoting more engagement between students and even classes.

Content vs. Creation in the Classroom

Socrates

I remember an undergraduate survey, when I was a TA in grad school, asking them what they thought made a TA great, in their opinion.  To my surprise, it wasn't how much their TA loved what they taught or how dynamic their classrooms were that mattered most, but rather how well they knew their subject matter.  In other words, undergraduates wanted masters of content, which has become a hotly debated word in education.  There are several ways to explain the survey results away, including the fact that the students simply cared about getting the highest grades possible.  But it's an important statement that deserves more thought in light of the growing criticisms of classrooms that excessively focus on content.

Mitchel Resnick's "All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten" (found in the course syllabus) is first reading in the MIT media lab MOOC I'm taking.  It's a great read on the need for more "creative-thinking skills" in modern education, and I'm certainly in agreement that we need to move our classrooms toward this goal, with the help of various digital technologies.  But I already know how this argument will be perceived, at least at a school like ours, where academic content is privileged above everything else.

Our Foreign Language Department is in the middle of an internal review, for which each language invited a visitor to observe and evaluate our program.  Latin invited Prof. Robert Cape, the chief reader for the AP Latin program, and after extensively talking with him, I, who have been as critical of the AP system as anyone and hopes that what Dartmouth is doing only spreads, came away with new-found respect for the exam.  Rather than representing the ultimate goal that students should aim to achieve, Cape, a trained Classicist, adamantly argued that he sees the AP exam as representing a baseline of skills that should then enable Latin students to do more advanced work after the exam, or what most educators would now call inquiry-based learning.  I was very happy to hear him say this, since, without a set of content-based skills, students are unable to do the kinds of analytical work that the field of Classics is built upon.  Having gone through a PhD program myself, I also firmly believe in the importance of content mastery and skill-based inquiry.  This view of the AP exam as merely a doorway to future study isn't prevalent everywhere, however, especially among the crowd that places content-driven AP exams as the goal of study rather than a means to further study, and this is a problem.

With that in mind, colleagues have and will continue argue that "kindergarten approach" to learning cannot help students to learn the required AP content and skills and will thus quickly dismiss Resnick's argument.  Both our faculty and students are so under the gun to perform on AP exams that there's no time for creation and playing with technology, they maintain.  Moreover, the body of literature advocating creation over content is growing, and nearly every argument I've seen recently in favor of pushing for more creativity criticizes the "failures" of the current system, including Resnick himself, who argues that "today's schools are out-of-step with today's needs".  The majority of this literature, however, is unable to offer very specific and concrete examples of using creative methods in content-driven curricula, which only strengthens the "content" argument.

So, that's where I am right now.  I fully believe in Resnick's plea for the need for creativity in the classroom and I am a firm believer in the power of technology, but I also appreciate the fact that skills and content needs to maintained, in order to teach the next generation of inquiry-based leaders.  And I don't think that the current system, however traditional, is necessarily broken.  There are certainly some deeply-rooted problems in education today. but we're also doing some good things that should be more often identified.  In my own field, at the very least, Classical scholarship cannot continue without mastery the rigorous skills needed to understand and really engage with the material that we study.  But we also need creative thinkers who can look at ancient texts and think about them in new and exciting ways, hopefully asking new questions seeing things in them that no one has hitherto noticed.  The question at hand, now, is how to preserve content, while also embracing creativity and technology not in random games and projects, but as a pervasive feature of the curriculum.  I don't think anyone has seriously addressed how to do this, and that's a big reason why not everyone has warmly embraced the kinds of creativity that using technology can offer.  Blamed for current methods and already skeptical of new ones, they're left to come up with ideas on their own.

Content is important.  Creativity is important too.  I think that there's should be some ideal mix of the two that will look different in different classrooms.  I also think that educational literature that is quick to dismiss tradition and content-based learning, however broken, is ultimately unhelpful and only serves to widen the gap between sides.  Likewise myopic is the claim that using technology to create more opportunities to play can only be accomplished at the expense of content.  Ultimately, it's not the content or the creative technology that matters.  The single most important factor in quality education is the teacher, and I fear that too much of the pedagogical literature being shared right now fails to focus on this fact (cf. ASCD "21st Century Skills" for a good assessment of this).

In addition to MIT's LCL MOOC, I'm also participating in #ETMOOC, which has been fantastic.  Though I started the course almost two weeks late, I've already learned a lot about digital storytelling and have been thinking through some ways to use it to enhance the content that I'm teaching in my Latin courses, perhaps embracing some of the principles of "rhizomatic learning" (which I don't fully understand yet).  And as our school embarks on a 1:1 program next fall, that's what I want to get out of my participation in the two MOOCs, namely, find my own balance of content and creative learning:  not tools that will make be better at technology or smarter in content, but a balance that will help me to become a better teacher.