Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

The Case for Crafts

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Can I start by saying that it’s 6:00 PM and it’s dark outside? We felt sorry for the commuters in the highway cameras they show on the news as they will be driving home in the dark for the next few months.  Winter seems to come with the time change. More time for indoor sports, including something I love to do: needlecrafts ranging from crocheting to knitting to sewing with the focus mostly on crocheting.

I have been a crafter all my life. My grandmother taught me to crochet. She also sewed. My dolls had unique, homemade clothes. If she were still with us, my grandmother would be a hit on Etsy.

I love making things. I find crocheting to be both challenging and relaxing at the same time. It involves math and patterns. I also make pop up cards where I learn a little bit about physics, I think.

So, I was happy to see that Craft is included at Make, the website devoted to DIY and how to projects. The focus tends to be on digital and electronic gadgets. But there, in the midst of Arduino boards and 3D printers, are crocheted crew members from the Enterprise and a quilted Kindle cover. These may not be the typical Martha Stewart kind of crafts but they show the fun of creating stuff.

The maker movement reminds us of the pleasure of creating by hand. There is a sense of being connected to a long tradition of folk artists and basement inventors. And, in my case, to my grandmother, who was never very far from a crochet hook or knitting needles.

Friday Find: Why Empathy is Important

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This blog post showed up in Zite this morning: Glimmers of Hope in the Education Debate. The writer makes the case that the two sides are not as far apart as it might seem.  He shows several places where the seemingly rigid accountability movement is opening to the possibility of non-cognitive skills:

Friedman gives a nod to the Common Core Standards, adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia — and long anathema to many in the progressive educator circles — which establish clear learning goals and competencies in math and literacy for students across multiple grade levels. Quoting Duncan, he cheerfully writes, “For the first time in our history, a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi will be measured by the same yardstick.”

Even there, however, the battle lines are no longer quite as rigid as we tend to think. Earlier this year,Expeditionary Learning — known for an educational model built on Outward Bound, with an explicit focus on empathy, collaboration, and self-discovery — was hired to develop the curriculum and professional development training for grades 3-5 of the Common Core for the state of New York.

It’s a big deal, because for the first time, it means we don’t have to choose: we don’t have to choose between academic learning and non-cognitive development; we don’t have to choose between overly burdensome (and by many accounts, meaningless) standards and nothing at all; we don’t have to choose between the interests of teachers and the interests of those who control them.

It’s worth a read: the cynical side of me couldn’t help but think that Flowers was being a Pollyana, something she says of herself. The people she reads might be interested in redefining “highly skilled worker” but I haven’t heard a whole lot of discussion of empathy in the mainstream discussion.  Maybe Paul Tough‘s book will help form a foundation for discussion. And, maybe I’m just in a negative mood since my current read is Jonathan Kozol.

The blog post is part of a larger website focused on empathy, which is sponsored by Ashoka, an organization that strives to develop the citizen sector of society. They believe that empathy is an important 21st century skill:

We know that a child who masters empathy at the age of six is less likely to bully ten years later, and that, for students, having one supportive relationship with an adult outside the family can be the difference between success and failure as an adult. And we know that far from being a “nice-to-have,” empathy – and the various skills it entails – is increasingly critical to our success at home, in the workplace, and in the world.

I was also intrigued by the writer’s comment that he had a Google alert related to empathy.  That was not the kind of search time that occurred to me so I signed up. The first email included a wide range of articles from a report about research that shows empathy can override analysis in the brain, a description of a new app designed to make commuting on the London Tube less stressful, and an interview from The Salt Lake Tribune where a CEO discusses the characteristics of great leaders, one of which is empathy.

I was a bit surprised by the depth and breadth of articles and am looking forward to future alerts. There are articles, well written blog entries and lots of videos. One series tells the story of a Tokyo teacher and his students who write notebook letters to each other:

Friday Favorites

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One of my online students wondered what a NETS school would look like.  I immediately thought of two of my favorite case studies from Edutopia.

The first profiles Newsome Park Elementary School, a science magnet school in Newport News, Virginia.

The second describes Eva LaMar’s 3rd graders who are engaging with local history in powerful ways.

Both these videos are old and so you’ll see bulky digital cameras and Alphasmart keyboards. But, it isn’t the technology that makes the difference here. It’s what the students and teachers are doing with that technology to support their learning. The pedagogical ideas are important.

The Present of Work

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Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff points to an article in Forbes about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg.  The company has employees all over the world who work from home. They do have a big travel budget and are able to meet with their team at spots all over the world. And their work lives along with that of the lives of workers like me suggest that this is rapidly becoming the present nature of work so it becomes all the more pressing to help our students figure out where they fit in this world.

Tim asks the question I asked several years ago when I was describing my own “work” life: what skills and mindsets do we need in order to work in this kind of world?  In 2008, I focused on the need to find a balance between work and play when what passed for work often seemed like play.  For me, that continues to be the biggest issue: when you don’t have a particular start and end time to your day and you really love what you do, there is the potential to simply work all the time.  Additionally, since you don’t have the promise of a regular paycheck, you are always hesitant to turn down offers so you end up working on multiple projects at a time, which requires the ability to juggle activities even as it can create a varied and interesting to do list.

In 2008, my attempt at an answer to Tim’s question got at that second issue: the ability to plan and implement projects. I felt then and still do that we need to give kids more opportunity to not just work independently but to take charge of that work.  I have taught with colleagues who, when assigning individual projects, provided a packet with very prescriptive steps for how to accomplish the work. I know why they did it: they had long experience of students waiting until the last minute (the night before) to tackle what was meant to take a month of ongoing work.  My simple suggestion would be that rather than the teacher developing the schedule, make developing the schedule and interim due dates part of the project. So, learning how to work becomes part of the work itself. That’s how it goes in the real world: a client provides an overview and a due date and then it is left up to the worker to determine how and when the work gets done with check ins along the way to confer and collaborate with the client.

As for finding the balance, I think that’s a tougher problem and one I am wrestling with right now. I have a copy of this article by Tony Schwartz–The Magic of Doing One Thing At a Time–in Evernote, and I find myself reviewing it at odd moments. When I first read it, I bristled a bit, particularly over the third behavior of disconnecting completely.  In that 2008 blog post, I talked about how I almost never disconnect even when I’m on vacation and I had some perfect rationalizations for it.  But is it healthy to always be connected.  The article would suggest that it is not and I find myself annoyed to be answering work-related emails on Saturday or Sunday and then realize it is my fault for checking my email in the first place.

The lessons in the article might be good ones to introduce in some way to students.  We’ve always done it, even in the pre-digital era when we told students to turn off the TV when they did their homework. And we can integrate the three behaviors in our own lives and our classrooms in appropriate ways as well.

This blog post represents my attempt to work on the second behavior: Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. I am hoping to work writing into my daily practice so rather than immediately opening email today, I perused some of my favorite bloggers to find a topic for my own thinking.  (Thanks, Tim, for being the spark.)

 

 

Relaxing with a Game

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I have been traveling and training for the past two months and finally just needed a Friday afternoon mostly off to relax a bit before the last push next week. So, I opened up my current game: Roads of Rome 2. It is a time management game, my favorite kind, and I was looking forward to a bit of time creating settlements, negotiating with pirates, building roads and picking up crystals and other artifacts. But as I played I was thinking about gaming…something I’ve been doing a lot of this summer with the book group and the discussions I’ve been having with teachers and tech coaches. Two quick observations:

1. There are parts of this game that I still don’t completely understand. They have added a few extra types of buildings that help in some way that, at least to me, is not completely transparent. In some cases, I haven’t built them at all and it doesn’t seem to make a difference to the outcome of the level. It’s odd that I’m able to play a game fairly successfully without being an “expert.”

2. I also haven’t always had to upgrade the buildings in order to get the expert score. In fact, I suspect I got the high score because I DID NOT upgrade the buildings. It seems that one of the lessons of this game is learning how to prioritize your use of manpower and resources. When do you hire new people and when can three people do the work? Which buildings must be upgraded in order to succeed? Sometimes I get it right on the first try but often I replay the level, putting my knowledge from the previous tries to work. Which resources were in short supply? Did I get a lot of warnings about needing more workers? With time ticking away, there really can’t be any down time as you wait for more gold or for a worker to scurry home.

Can these lessons be applied to life? In the James Gee video from Edutopia that I shared with some teachers yesterday, Gee talks about how World of Warcraft teaches collaboration by forcing you to work with others who have different skill sets and expertise, certainly a very important real world lesson. The lessons above should also be part of a real life toolkit: being able to live with a little ambiguity and knowing how to use resources and people wisely are mentioned by many leadership experts as characteristics of successful leaders.

Am I rationalizing playing a game on Friday afternoon by trying to write something thoughtful? Sort of….but my audience yesterday was not made up of gamers and I could tell they were surprised by learning about some of the features of games and what kids (and grown ups) might be learning as they are playing or how games like Chore Wars could make houseclearning fun!

iPad Lesson: Creating a Food Web

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I’ve been doing some training for teachers who will be using iPads in their classrooms this coming year.  I wanted to show them the power of mobile technologies so designed a lesson plan that I thought others might find interesting, particularly if you doing your own training.

Pretty simple idea: the content I used was the food web since it seems to be a ubiquitous standard in the biological sciences.  The teachers started with their own school campuses to locate and photograph the various parts of the food web that they could find.  If they couldn’t find certain ones, they were allowed to supplement with photos from the web.  They opened the photos in Skitch to do some annotations and then used an interactive whiteboard app to create a presentation.  The preferred app was educreations as it allowed the user to have multiple screens.  Considering the limited amount of time we were able to devote to the activity (just about an hour), the resulting products were pretty good.

This past week, I also had math teachers so I gave them the option of creating one related to triangles and other geometric shapes.  They were able to easily find photos in the school and combine them into great presentations.

I would love to hear about other ways you’ve incorporated hands on learning in your professional development…I’m convinced that if teachers can experience engagement with the devices, they will be more likely to use them in more powerful ways.

Learning As You Go

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I am in the midst of playing several time management games and one thing they have in common is that they don’t come with any help files.  Unlike the board games I played as a kid, there are no directions printed on the lid. In her book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal points out that this is the big difference between digital and predigital games:

Many, if not most, computer and video games today are structured this way. Players begin each game by tackling the obstacle of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to play. This kind of ambiguous play is markedly different from historical, predigital games. Traditionally, we have needed instructions in order to play a game. But now we’re often invited to learn as we go. We explore the game space, and the computer code effectively constrains and guides us. We learn how to play by carefully observing what the game allows us to do and how it responds to our input. As a result, most gamers never read game manuals. In fact, it’s a truism in the game industry that a well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.

This observation resonated with me and reminded me of an experience I had with a group of non-gamers in graduate school.  I was charged with showing a group of educators a simulation, and I chose Food Force, a game developed by the World Food Programme.  I gave them the overview of the game, showed them how the various virtual aid workers would guide them and then let them go.

The biggest complaint at the end was that I did not give them enough information and background in order to play the game.  Essentially, they wanted me to take them through each section of the game and show them how to be successful before they ever started.  Learning as they went meant that they often “failed” and this was not something that doctoral students liked doing.  The mind set was that you either did it right the first time or you were a failure and I couldn’t help wondering how that translated into the way they worked with their students in their classrooms.

Learning as you go and learning as you fail are part of the lessons of digital games and I wonder how those lessons play out in the game of life?  Are gamers more observant in the real world?  Are they better able to navigate an unfamiliar landscape?

Teach Balance Rather Than Zero Tolerance

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I ran across a new movement, advertised via social media, advocating “unplugging” during certain times of the day. Evidently, more and more people are choosing to disconnect for specified periods of time to see what it’s like to go without and then musing about it on the web, once they’ve reestablished connection. Most, amazingly enough, found productive things to do and were able to resist the urge to tell everyone else via the network.

I was reminded of two things: the “turn off the tv week” that I used to sponsor in the late great days before the Internet and the actions many schools are starting to take towards social media. These disconnect movements–whether done in the name of personal challenge, family togetherness or student safety–all seem to suggest that there is something suspect about our relationship to social media just as, in earlier generations, we worried about our television viewing. So I find it particularly ironic that the Good 30-Day Challenge folks who are unplugging at 8 PM do allow you to use your computer as a television.

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Well, duh

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I will admit to envy….I would like an iPad. But since I still need a regular laptop, it seems hard to justify. I am saving up for a new Air and the iPad gets me almost half way there.

But I also find myself using my phone to complete a lot of work and being frustrated by the too small screen and keyboard. Then I had a flash. I had tablet: my Nook. But my narrow vision made me think of it only as an ereader.

It does just what I want. Easy emaii and web
access aand a few games. I am typing on it right now. Cool.

I remember using the same tunnel vision with my iPod touch, thinking of it only as a music and book player.

I am a happy tablet owner now! Time for a game of Angry Birds.

Naming Things

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I couldn’t find my phone this morning. Not plugged in. Not by my chair. So, I dialed the number and discovered it propped up against the kitchen window. I had used it yesterday for access to a recipe for Thanksgiving. There it was, spitting out the blues riffs that I had chosen for my home number, reminding me of the difficulty of names in this crossover, hybrid, multi-tasking age in which we live.

Earlier yesterday, that 3 X 4 inch piece of technology had been a camera, which I used to record the passing of the seasons as I walked the dog along the road to the winery.

This morning, I was looking for it because I needed it as a book to look up a quote to share with a friend.

Later, I will play sudoku and surf the web and listen to music.

Yet, we reduce it to one name: cell phone. And, we ban it, despite its potential to provide access to all the tools of education from textbooks to videos to pens. Because we can’t control it and schools have a responsibility to keep kids safe and we’ve seen plenty of examples where they’ve gotten in real trouble having unfettered access to the world. But there are also plenty of examples where grown ups haven’t done such a good job either. It’s THE media literacy issue that we need to discuss: consumer/producer/prosumer and the implications.

But even as I write the above, I wonder if we will miss this opportunity as well…the chance to make learning, working, and living all more humane enterprises. Anyone who knows even a little of the history of school reform understands that technology almost never drives real change. Instead, it gets incorporated into the existing structures of the system, maybe making small changes, but ultimately being changed itself.

But, at the risk of flying in the face of history, there seem to be larger forces at work here that are challenging our names for lots of things. Work: Changes in the way people access their jobs may lead them to question a school schedule that no longer matches their own. School: Easy access to educational resources makes it easier to imagine teaching your own children.

Even the word “teacher”…last Saturday I was part of a conference with pre-service teachers and I made an off hand comment about not being a real teacher. One of the 20-somethings looked at me and asked what I meant by that. I explained that while I was a teacher in many ways, since I didn’t teach the grueling schedule of a K-12 classroom teacher, I didn’t really consider myself a “real” teacher. I had it easy with my online courses, afternoon workshops and evening webinars. But, he insisted, I was a real teacher because I was doing the work of teaching. Just because I wasn’t adhering to a particular schedule or killing myself to try and meet impossible demands didn’t make a difference to him.

And, there it is: what will make the real difference in the future. Young people who are questioning everything about the world we have created and the way we have defined words like “work” and “school” and “fun.” His generation is the real force that, when joined with mobile multimedia technologies and other cultural shifts, will change definitions in ways we can’t even imagine.