Author Archives: witchyrichy

Commitment On My Own Terms

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I made the decision today to commit to participating in the thoughtvectors course that just started at VCU. But, I’m doing it on my own terms. As an open participant, it was liberating to be able to skip all the grading stuff and think about what I am hoping to get out of the course for my own learning. It was this paragraph in the syllabus that convinced me:

In addition to the specific assignments above or others required by your instructor, which will include many rough drafts of, and reflections on, your budding inquiry projects, you will also need to write write write. And create create create. And explore explore explore.  In other words, you should participate robustly in free-range learning and sharing. What you do should be relevant to the course, of course, but please think of “relevant” as potentially a very large set of things. A large part of this course depends on consistent, robust, and relevant participation. Without it, the course is just a bunch of assignments. Good assignments, mind you, but not an adventure or a journey. What you will make, and the total of what we make together, will be visible to the world and might even inspire others. Actually, if prior experience is any guide, it will inspire others. And we could all use some inspiration.

I have a statement somewhat similar to this in my own courses because I think this element of learning has been left behind in typical grade-centric courses. The best learning comes when you commit your whole self to the experience and worry less about the grade and more about what you are both giving and receiving as part of a community of learners. By not having to worry about the grade at all (aah…the power of a terminal degree), I can just focus on that second part.

I am very much in need of a learning community right now, one where I am a participant rather than an instructor or facilitator. I want to have an excuse to close the email tabs for a bit, tuck the to do list in the drawer (yes, I am still using a paper/pencil to do list) and write, create and explore. I particularly want an excuse to write. I tinker with blogging, run through ideas for posts, and then get distracted by everything else. Creativity in any form takes discipline and I’m hoping that is part of what I get from this experience. I’m taking a course and even though I am doing it on my own terms, it requires commitment.

I’m getting ready to post my “nugget” about Vannevar Bush’s article As We May Think and I know I’m not planning to follow the assignment but that’s part of doing this on my own terms as well.

Lessons in Leadership

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My leadership mentor is Warren Bennis. One of my most highlighted and tagged books is On Becoming a Leader. I was excited to read his memoir, Still Surprised: A Memoir of Life and Leadership. He tells his story honestly, including both his triumphs and his mistakes, both personal and professional. As with any memoir, there seems to be a lot of name dropping but this is a man who was a pivotal figure in many important movements in the mid-20th century so it was interesting to see who he knew.

Bennis encourages leaders to cultivate emotional wisdom that includes empathy, respect and insight in dealing with others. Listening is an important practice.

I feel that I am less a creative thinker than a creative listener. Listening is an art, a demanding one that requires you to damp down your own ego and make yourself fully available to someone else. As listener, you must stop performing and only attend and process. If you listen closely enough, you can hear what the speaker really means, whatever the words. And paying undivided, respectful attention inevitably makes you more empathic, one of the most important and most undervalued leadership skills.

The story that resonated with me, however, was of moving to SUNY-Buffalo as provost. He had been brought in to change the university. However, like many change agents, he failed to get to know the culture and community that he had been asked to change. His work there was essentially a failure. At one point, he describes driving with his colleagues in an expensive sports car, realizing only in hindsight: “The three of us might just as well have carried signs that read CLUELESS, ELITIST OUT-OF-TOWNER.” He goes on to provide the lesson he learned: “Every leader, to be effective, must simultaneously adhere to the symbols of change and revision and the symbols of tradition and stability.”

I have somehow gotten embroiled in a local battle where my outsider status is something of a hindrance. The community has some real divisions and without realizing what I was doing, I got involved with the wrong side. They are good people who have done good work but, it seems, they have done so without involving the surrounding the community so they are often viewed with suspicion by others and accused of only working with a select few. But they showed up with kids at the farm and I saw a way to work with young people again so I dove in.

The questions I ponder now are about the next steps. I have reached out to the other side but been mostly rebuffed. Have I lost the opportunity to be either a peacemaker or a change agent? How can I respect the traditions while also pushing to bring unity to this divided community? For now, I am pondering before acting any further. What would Warren do?

Is It So Hard to Believe?

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There are many times when I wish that I was still in the classroom. It seems like there are so many great opportunities to engage students in new ways of thinking and learning. I imagine an exciting classroom space where kids could write and create and collaborate, where my Nancy Atwell style reading and writing workshops could move beyond the walls of the classroom, encouraging students to pursue and share their ideas and passions with the world.

OK, take a deep breath…I was just beginning to get a good rant going about this post from Richard Byrne about the new Student AR app for Google Glass. I went back to click on the press release and discovered that the whole post was an April Fool’s Day joke. Phew!

So, now what am I going to write about? How about the fact that I believed it in the first place? Throw in names like Bill Gates and Salmon Khan and is it so hard to believe that they are busy creating an app that takes the teacher out of the game of assessment? It isn’t so far fetched. The Hewlett Foundation sponsored the Automated Student Assessment Prize, designed to encourage development in the area of automated assessment, and EdX has created discern, automated scoring software. At least one researcher is busy showing that the computer can grade as well as a person and much more quickly.

The article from University of Akron about the work of Dr. Mark Shermis is interesting and a little ironic. Perhaps the writers should have used the software to avoid the grammatical error in this paragraph:

The study grows from a contest call the Automated Student Assessment Prize, or ASAP, which the Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring to evaluate the current state of automated testing and to encourage further developments in the field.

Did you find the mistake? “Call” should be “called.” I would also suggest that the communications and marketing department should refrain from calling their website the “news” room since this is obviously a press release. It makes passing reference to critics of the research study but doesn’t dig too deeply into the controversial nature of automated scoring. Lucky for us, The New York Times takes news a bit more seriously and describes the real criticism of the grading software: it can be fooled. Les Perelman, the retired professor from MIT who launched a petition against adopting such software, takes great pleasure in both critiquing the research AND gaming the system.

Those who criticize Perelman point out that the purpose of the software is to provide instant feedback to students so they can learn to be better writers. The final product will be read by a real person. So, what of that instant feedback? Karin Klein’s daughter found that the software was more confusing than helpful. And, Barbara Chow, from the Hewlett Foundation and quoted by the University of Akron, seems to undermine that very argument. Automated scoring will mean more writing on tests and less human grading:

“Better tests support better learning,” says Barbara Chow, education program director at the Hewlett Foundation. “This demonstration of rapid and accurate automated essay scoring will encourage states to include more writing in their state assessments. And, the more we can use essays to assess what students have learned, the greater the likelihood they’ll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication.”

It turns out that fact checking is exactly what the software doesn’t do well. It is checking for basic structure and grammar rather than knowledge or critical thinking. As an adjunct for several universities, I laughed out loud at Perelman’s argument for why higher education is so expensive:

“The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents,” he wrote. “In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.”

Dr. Perelman received a top score for this well designed argument. Oh, if the computer scoring software could only make it so.

I hope you have a great April Fool’s Day…try not to be taken in as I was by jokes that border on truth.

Doing Good

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Tim Stahmer’s post about Apple choosing to do good over making profits reminded me of my recent reading of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. I loved the book for lots of reasons and have been stumbling over real world connections right and left since I finished it. Tim’s post makes one of those connections.

Pink discusses the seemingly anti-capitalistic idea that businesses can make money AND do good at the same time. He highlights Tom’s Shoes whose business model includes donating a pair of shoes for every pair they sell.

Another connection related to Pink’s description of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow was one of my favorite reads in graduate school. Turns out it is one of Pink’s favorite books about work:

Flow is the mental state when the challenge before us is so exquisitely matched to our abilities that we lose our sense of time and forget ourselves in a function. Csikszentmihalyi’s contemporary classic reveals that we’re more likely to find flow at work than in leisure.

As part of his work, Csikszenmihalyi (Chicksa-ma-hi).researched happiness using a somewhat unique method that took advantage of the technology at the time. According to Pink:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did more than discover the concept of “flow.” He also introduced an ingenious new technique to measure it. Csikszentmihalyi and his University of Chicago team equipped participants in their research studies with electronic pagers. Then they paged people at random intervals (approximately eight times a day) for a week, asking them to describe their mental state at that moment. Compared with previous methods, these real-time reports proved far more honest and revealing.

I think Flow is a relatively well-known concept so I was a little surprised when a recent report on National Public Radio described “new” ways to research happiness using an app that pings you several times a day and asks you to complete a survey failed to mention the connection with this earlier work. The researcher’s findings are similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s:

KILLINGSWORTH: So when I look across all the different activities that people engage in, they are universally happier when they’re fully engaged in that activity and not mind wandering, no matter what they’re doing.

The last, and perhaps most interesting, connection I made with Pink related to a comment he makes about contemporary businesses. They are, according to Pink, living in the past, and not even the recent past:

Big Idea: Management is an outdated technology. Hamel likens management to the internal combustion engine—a technology that has largely stopped evolving. Put a 1960s-era CEO in a time machine and transport him to 2010, Hamel says, and that CEO “would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago.” Small wonder, Hamel explains. “Most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War.” The solution? A radical overhaul of this aging technology.

This accusation is usually flung at schools: they would be familiar to people from earlier generations. And, ironically, that accusation often comes from businesses who are, according to Pink, themselves outdated and who are not always successful at adopting new technologies. Pink describes the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) adopted by companies including Best Buy. The focus is on the work rather than the seat time (hmm….again sounds familiar). But, as Best Buy began to struggle, the new CEO disbanded the practice, returning to a more standard top down management, 40 hour work week model. This, along with Yahoo’s decision to end telecommuting, is seen as a step back for flexible work arrangements despite evidence that it can boost worker satisfaction and productivity.

 

It’s Not About Unions Either

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I caught the tail end of this CBS News report this morning. It’s the typical kind of media coverage of teacher unions that gives one hugely horrible example of how tenure protected someone who shouldn’t have been in the classroom in the first place and then suggests we need to get rid of unions completely. If the laws are making it difficult to get an abuser out of the classroom then those laws need to be modified. But doing away with teacher unions, which is the real purpose of the multi-billionaires who are funding this lawsuit, is not the answer if the question is how do we make teachers more effective and students more successful?

How great it would be if the billionaires put their money into the classroom to provide coaching and support for teachers to help them become more effective. Think of how far all that money that is currently going to lawyers on both sides would go if the two groups worked together to identify the most challenging environments where teachers, students and their families need substantial social, emotional and economic support to succeed. Let’s move beyond union busting to have the harder conversations about equity and opportunity in this country. Maybe like they are doing in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

At the end of the piece, the commentators all agreed that providing the best education for these kids is the answer to everything so even though they sympathized with the teacher, we just have to guarantee that a good teacher is in every classroom, and they seemed to support this lawsuit. Certainly having effective teachers is essential, but I’m not sure this lawsuit would really make that happen. And, honestly, the better answer to everything would be to figure out how to lift every kid out of poverty.

Gamifying My Reading Practice

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Even though I love playing league of legends and getting a lot of lol wins, I consider myself more a collector and avid reader instead of a gamer. I ran a reading workshop for many years in my middle school classroom to both introduce my students to reading and to work my reading time into my day. Since 2005, I have tracked my reading at LibraryThing. I generally don’t have a reading plan past the next one or two books and these are often the ones on the newest pile or that I can get immediately on my ereader. But my shelves are filled with lots of unread books that I’ve collected over the years and one of my goals this year is to read some of them rather than continuing to buy new ones whether analog or digital.

Couple that with a desire to get more involved with online community, and I’ve begun to gamify my reading practice.

I did this by joining the 75 Books a Year Challenge Group. One of the perks is that it includes suggested challenges that help direct you to specific books using a wide range of criteria from book covers to characters to topics. Last month, I read one challenge book. The Red Tent was a book I shared with the LibraryThing user with whom I share the most books. I’ve had Anita Diamant’s retelling of the Old Testament story of Jacob and his family on the shelf for a long time. I’ve always meant to read it but somehow it never called to me. The challenge encouraged me in a way that nothing else has.  I finished on the last day of the month, determined to meet the goal and add “completed” to the challenge page.

This month, I signed up for four challenges and am meeting all of them by reading books that I already own. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin is going to be the biggest challenge as it is a long book: the challenge was to read a chunkster. LibraryThing provides stats about your reading including average pages. The challenge requires that you choose a book that is higher than your average by at least 50 points. At close to 751 pages of text (you can’t count the appendices and bibliography which, in Team of Rivals, get you to almost 1,000 pages!), this book is far above my average of about 300 pages. I’ve already started, and it is wonderfully readable as it describes Lincoln and four of his main rivals who also came to work with him. My plan is a chapter a day, which leaves a few days at the end of the month in case I fall behind the pace.

I’m wondering how I would translate this to the classroom reading workshop. We did a little of it by having them read books with Accelerated Reader…sometimes I’d ask them to read a book at the high end of their score. And some of the students found it fun to take a quiz and earn points but others struggled just to find a book. Giving them some kind of guidelines, even if it that the title has to be red (I’m reading All the King’s Men to meet that challenge this month), can help get them to pull a book off the shelf that they would normally skip. Then, and this is the most essential point, they need time to read and it can’t just be on their own time. If we value it, we need to make time for it. 

 

Consumed (weekly): ROWE Resources

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I’ve been reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. I’ll post more about the book but here are a few links about the Results Only Work Environment that Pink discusses as the future of work. Not everyone loves it…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

More On Moby Dick

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Joyce Valenza posted a link to Jen Hunter’s insightful review of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the English Classroom. Hunter is a student in Joyce’s social media course at Rutgers and the review is part of a larger website related to the reading of the book. Go read it now and be prepared to buy the book when you’re done. I did.

I am looking forward to reading the book even though I can’t imagine reading Moby Dick with any students, much less the challenging population described in the book. It almost makes me want to head back to the high school classroom, a place I haven’t been since the beginning of my career in the ice age before digital media:

Edited by new media literacy scholar, Henry Jenkins, and Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, the book describes how the two came to collaborate with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, who had been teaching young men in a juvenile detention center not only to read Moby-Dick, but also to care about it and make sense of it in the context of their own lives through a stage production called Moby-Dick: Then and Now. This collaboration sparked a study in which NML strategies were applied in English classrooms to teach Moby-Dick, and more importantly, to empower students to claim ownership of their authority and participate in the wider conversations happening around them.

The section of the review that struck me was the notion that incorporating popular culture to help students grapple with traditional literature is somehow a lowering of expectations for those students:

Without ever saying it explicitly, the text seems to imply that while students can learn to read, find relevancy in, and enjoy Moby-Dick, educators need to reframe their expectations of their students, which might be interpreted as lower expectations as opposed to simply different expectations.

Hunter goes on to discuss how Jenkins’ addresses this concern:

Jenkins defends the use of popular culture in the classroom when he says, “It should not be seen as a means of entertaining students or holding their attention, but rather as a means of respecting their existing expertise and helping them to acquire core skills they will need to meaningfully participate in this new and emerging media landscape” (location 1071). While all of the authors advocate for the development of the kinds of skills that educators may associate with traditional literacy and scholarly inquiry, they suggest that there needs to be a gradual building to that level, particularly for at-risk youth.

Respect for our students’ experiences when they are different from our own is a powerful concept. I am, in no way, lowering expectations for contemporary students when I suggest that not every child needs to grapple with Shakespeare in the original. Or, as Jenkins and his colleagues demonstrate, plunge into Moby Dick without some kind of preparation. I may question if getting through Melville is a good use of time but if it really does provide the students with a confidence and sense of authority, then the time will be well spent.

The book is one my Kindle and may rise to the top of the TBR list. I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

 

Changing the Way I Work

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Thanks to Curt Rees for pointing me to this article by Matt Boyd about avoiding burnout. The 11 suggestions range from working weird hours to changing scenery to writing it out and I found that there are a couple I’ve started implementing in this new year.

In particular, I’ve been focusing on doing micro-work (without knowing that’s what it was called) at weird hours. Maybe not as weird as the writer seems to suggest but weird as in late Friday night before heading to bed or early Sunday morning while I’m watching the news shows.

Boyd defines micro-work as follows:

Micro-work is the idea of an always on mindset where you do bits and pieces of work throughout your natural 16 hour awake cycle. This way, you can mix in a healthy dose of daily activities while still accomplishing a whole lot.

I have daily morning routines that include checking email and touching base with my online students. I’m also a fan of Brian Tracy’s “live frog” theory of getting things done so I usually have at least one or two items on the to do list that need to be done before the lunchtime dog walk. (In looking up the reference I discovered there is now a live frog app.)

Once I get past those routines and frogs, the day opens to possibilities beyond work. But then, about 9 PM, I find myself back in my chair, laptop in hand, considering the to do list. That’s when I like to at least get started on the next morning’s live frog. It’s taken me a long time to realize that working independently from home means that I don’t have to follow the classic work schedule. Just because other people are battling the morning commute so they can be behind their desks by 8 AM doesn’t mean I have to. After all, my commute, including the stop at the coffee shop, is about two minutes. 

Rees pointed to the “strategic procrastination” tip: I don’t really think about my work flow as procrastination but simply knowing when I need to start working on a long term project. For instance, I’m doing a workshop for school administrators in early March. I’ve already created the folder and copied potential resources into it but I’m just not ready to start the final presentation. It will take about two days of work and I have plenty of time. For now, I’m letting it percolate: do I want to play a game? use a special group project? organize the day around a theme? These are questions I can be contemplating even when I’m not working specifically on the project. So, it may look like I’m procrastinating but it is very much strategic.

I tweeted the article with the question about how this could apply in what Boyd calls the “classic 9 to 5 grind.” And I continue to wonder how we prepare our students to live in a non-classic environment?

 

 

More On Making Learning Relevant

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Sometime after I posted the last entry on the relevance of Algebra, I was paging through a book catalog and it seemed like each page had at least one book that focused on how and why literature mattered. Here are just a few of the titles:

I haven’t ordered any of them. I’ve already read Moby Dick and W.H. Auden and spent a lot of time teaching children Shakespeare. At some point I realized I was trying to turn them into English majors, when what I really wanted to do was help them learn to love reading the way I did. If, eventually, they found Melville and Auden and the Bard, so much the better. But to force it upon them meant it only led to the inevitable question of why they needed to read it in the first place.

It is an interesting side note that the authors of these books are writers who were probably English majors at some point in their lives so perhaps the lesson here is that, if you plan to become a writer, then reading literature is part of the career path.

And then there’s this blog entry from Edutopia just published today: Why Do We Need To Learn This? Allen Mendler offers strategies for answering the question that might diffuse the immediate situation but never gets to the heart of the answer which is that someone, somewhere decided that “this” was important for everyone to know and, as Mendler does point out, it is going to be on a high-stakes test:

Upon hearing the “When will I ever use this?” refrain, a high school teacher I work with tells her students, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what you want to be in your life. But if you give me a list of everything you plan to do and accomplish, I’ll do my best to let you know when we cover something that I think you might use.” When kids say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” her response is, “Exactly. You might need it next week, next year or never. But it is going to be on Friday’s test, not because I want to make you miserable, but because at the end of the year, it is going to be on the state test, and if you want to pass, you need to know it.”

So, you have to know it because I’m going to test it and later someone else is going to test it? I think this is probably the worst answer to the question but the most relevant in our high-stakes world and that just makes me sad.