Using archetypes to match learning spaces with physical and digital spaces.

(NOTE: The following is an article that was written for a teaching journal, after a bit of an anxious wait it was rejected – didn’t quite fit in with the focus of the edition. It’s somewhat dated now, but thought some of you might find good in it. Some of it is from older blog posts, sorry for those who’ve been reading my drivel for a while now.)

We all know that education is changing rapidly. We’ve all been to conferences where the keynote speaker shows slides depicting how vastly different the world is now to 25 years ago and how vastly different it will be in another 25 years. We know that the internet has lots of information and that the educator’s job is to support students as they wade through the mire that is the world-wide-web. So just how is this changing the physical education landscape? For many, it’s not. The traditional classroom stands tall, defying the agitating of edupunks around the world.

The traditional classroom originated in the throbbing heart of the Industrial Revolution – that was over 200 years ago. As pointed out by Nair and Fielding the ‘early 20th century school design standard (was) modelled after Henry Ford’s factory production methods’ (http://www.designshare.com/index.php/design-patterns/traditional-classroom) . [BH1] Model T anyone? I doubt any parent would like to think that in 2011 their child was being viewed exactly the same as the child beside her/him. So why set up an environment (a visible embodiment of a teacher’s education philosophy) that fails to differentiate between human beings?

Over the last twelve months the way I view my (physical) classroom has changed significantly. These days I encourage my students to align their physical learning space with their mental learning space. I’ve been interested in the role that physical spaces play in learning since the introduction of DER and the immediate discovery that a 1-1 classroom will not function effectively with students sitting in rows facing the front of the room. However a chance encounter with the article ‘Classroom for the 21st Century’ (‘Australian Teacher Magazine’ – the ‘ICT in Education Guide 2010′)[BH2]  by Steve Collis, Director of Innovation at SCIL, gave me the impetus to think more seriously about the interplay between spaces and learning. Collis’ discussion of the ‘mythic notions of the campfire … the watering hole … and the cave’ (Collis, 2010, p.10) really grabbed my attention. I blame this on the fact that I’m an English teacher and salivate upon seeing metaphors. Inspired by what I had read, I was keen to see how I could (re)organise my classroom space to better match my students’ learning.

Collis’ ‘mythic notions’ of learning spaces were discussed back in the ’90s in an article by Prof. David D Thornburg titled ‘Campfires in Cyberspace: primordial Metaphors for Learning in the 21st Century’. In his article Thornburg identifies four ‘archetypal learning spaces’:

1.    Campfire: A place ‘where the storyteller … shared wisdom with students who, in their turn, become storytellers to the next generation.’

2.    Watering hole: A place ‘where we learn from our peers … each participant at the watering hole is both learner and teacher at the same time.’

3.    Cave: A place where learners ‘isolate themselves from others in order to gain special insights.‘

4.    Life: ‘The application of knowledge … is an essential component of the learning process (because) when we learn something in anticipation of its immediate use, we not only reinforce our understanding, we increase the likelihood that what we have learning will not be readily forgotten.’

These have been adapted by architects responsible for designing new educational spaces, and images of these designs can be seen on the DesignShare website: http://www.designshare.com/

I have had great success introducing my students to these archetypal learning spaces and helping them to learn how to match their learning space with the physical space. Like I mentioned earlier, I am a public school teacher with very limited resources, so I have to be creative and really embrace the ‘failure is the road to success’ mantra. Ultimately my students have learnt that their physical learning environment is flexible as they rearrange furniture each lesson (and often during the lesson) to ensure it meets their specific learning needs.

There has been a lot of talk in the media and in the academic world about ‘learning spaces’ in the 21^st century. Often the term ‘21^st century learning space’ is accompanied by images of students lounging in brightly coloured beanbags looking into the screen of a Macbook or iPad or working in groups at jellybean shaped tables. The rooms are large, flexible spaces that allow for many more than 30 students and one teacher. But the reality is that for many of us teachers – especially those of us working in a public school – these types of spaces won’t be available to us for a long time. Furthermore both teachers and students must undergo a process of un-learning and learning if they are to effectively utilise this more flexible spaces being made available. The aforementioned archetypal learning spaces metaphor can support the successful transition from traditional to 21^st century learning spaces. I am a public school teacher and I have managed to transform a very traditional learning space (4 walls, a door, two windows, a whiteboard, 30 plastic chairs and 30 small desks) into a flexible 21st century learning space.

The reshaping of my room has pushed me into reshaping my pedagogy – a most desirable outcome. I am more conscious of the types of learning that are implicit in the activities I create and the outcomes I expect students to meet. Essentially I have created a space where the class can come together and discuss, present and listen (our campfire) as well as spaces for group work (watering hole) and individual work (caves).

It’s true, my students did think it was a bit odd when I started saying, ‘OK, everyone into their cave for some quiet reading!’ but after a while they just ‘got it’ and they now happily move their chairs into the campfire position for ‘story-time’, into bunches for ‘watering hole’ chats or find their own personal ‘cave’ for reflection and internalisation of knowledge. When students need to move into the ‘cave’ I allow them to listen to quiet music on their iPods, sit on the floor, sit outside in the hallway or move their tables and chairs somewhere solitary in the room.

Here’s how it’s working for my classes right now:

Year 9: We sat in the ‘campfire’ circle to chat about their test results and the features of ‘persuasive texts’ that they were struggling with. Then they moved to the desks (watering hole) to work on their projects … some more successful at this than others.

Year 10: We sat in the ‘campfire’ circle to read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and discuss what the novel is teaching us about ‘resilience’.

Year 11: We sat in the ‘campfire’ circle to read ‘A Property of the Clan’ and discussed the focus question ‘Should Art Imitate Life?’. Students then moved to the desks (watering hole) to work on a mini-group task based on one of the Five Elements of Writing – these were then shared in our cyber-space campfire – edmodo.

Year 12: We sat in the ‘campfire’ circle to read ‘Notes on Nationalism’ by George Orwell and discussed the similarities between Orwell’s world and our own. Our discussion led us to the killing of Osama bin Laden and how the celebrations of the Americans reflected their nationalism.

When thinking about how you could transform your own space, it is important to acknowledge two things:

1. Many teachers do not have their own ‘home room’ as they spent much of the day ‘travelling’ around the school from room to room. This makes it very difficult to have a permanent furniture arrangement. I think that this restriction should be viewed as a challenge rather than a barrier. Sacrificing time during the lesson to arranging and rearranging the furniture to suit the learning occurring is really worth it.

2. It is important that you do not try to create a space that is inflexible – try not to allocate a specific area for ‘caves’, ‘campfire’ etc. What a classroom needs is flexibility of space and furniture this allows for an ever-changing, dynamic learning environment. This approach to classroom layout can be quite intimidating for teacher and students initially as it is unfamiliar. It takes time to create a thinking culture and requires a much more relaxed attitude towards classroom furniture being moved – in fact, I’ve changed entirely as I now actively encourage my students (nay, require) them to move the furniture to suit the learning experience they will be involved in during our lesson.

What is important to acknowledge is that my classroom is different not simply because I am flexible with its daily design. My classroom is different because I use metaphor as a means to help my students develop metacognition. Using the metaphor of ‘archetypal learning spaces’ my students are actively engaging with their own learning. They must consider what type of learning will occur in each lesson and how the design of the physical space needs to alter to meet the learning taking place. I do feel that my students are developing learning autonomy.

My room is a little different to most I see daily because I have considered the impact that physical space has upon intellectual and emotional space. This is not to say I (and others) haven’t ever (re)designed a classroom to maximise learning – I have been known to do this frequently and have been an advocate for groups/bunches that allow students to work together, especially with the introduction of the Digital Education Revolution’s 1-1 laptop program in NSW. The introduction of mobile digital technologies into the classroom necessitates a transformation of the learning environment. A failure to consider the impact of the relationship between these technologies and the physical learning environment can seriously undermine the value of these technologies in a 21^st century classroom.

For me the current design is different because it drew on the mythical archetypes of the campfire, watering hole and cave. This philosophical underpinning gave me a metalanguage with which to speak to my students about ‘why’ the room is configured in this new way. This ‘language of myth’ actually works as a cue for my students. Yes, they think that it’s pretty uncool to start with – but once you get them thinking about WHY these three types of learning are relevant to their world, they just get it. Plus, kids like it when you show enthusiasm for their learning – they love it when teachers throw caution (or is that fear?) to the wind and take a very visible risk. I can now be heard saying to my students, ‘Alright – lets have a chat around the campfire and then you’ll spend some time in your caves.’

Visual cues really help orient students with the lesson’s expectations and prepare them for the transitions between cave/camp-fire/watering hole. A chronological list of the lesson ‘goals’ matched to the appropriate learning and physical spaces can be written on the whiteboard or projected onto an interactive white board. This visual cue gives students the opportunity to self-direct their learning. The metalanguage of the archetypal learning spaces similarly engages students in metacognition as it forces them to think about the types of learning behaviours associated with each learning space. Ultimately students, familiarised with the notion of ‘mythic spaces’ to enhance learning outcomes, will self-select the appropriate ‘space’ to meet a task. It is this which is my ultimate goal – to encourage self-direction and an appreciation of the influence that physical space can have on intellectual/emotional space. Speaking of visual cues, the pre-service teacher I have been supervising this year, Lauren Forner, even created beautiful posters as visual reminders to my students of the expected behaviours within each ‘space’.

Of course there are risks to be taken in this approach to classroom design. There can be a great deal of noise as the students move furniture (where necessary) and as they move themselves into the appropriate ‘space’. But the fear of noise in a classroom is simply a veiled fear of that which is natural and normal.

David Thornburg was interested in how these mythic notions of learning can be replicated in ‘cyberspace’. Since the theorising of Thornburg, a plethora of digital tools have become available to teachers who wish to replicate the physical archetypal learning spaces in cyberspace. From my experience it is possible to use just one flexible online tool to facilitate this shifting from physical to online space (such as the social networking for education site edmodo) or multiple online tools. For example, my Year 10 English class have successfully used edmodo for their cyberspace campfires, watering holes and caves.

My students often use the small-group function on edmodo as their virtual ‘watering hole’ – a place where they discuss and collaborate on projects. Posting to the class group facilitates whole group discussion for an even larger ‘watering hole’. Students wishing to work independently in the ‘cave’ can read and view posts made to the edmodo group or write and create posts of their own that can be shared privately with their teacher, with a small group or with the larger class group. Edmodo is also a wonderful presentation tool for those ‘campfire’ sessions where the teacher or student adopts the role of ‘storyteller’ or ‘expert’. Files, videos and other learning objects are easily accessed and larger group discussions can occur in ‘real time’ by students interacting with polls or responding to group posts.

Here are just a few examples of other digital tools that facilitate online archetypal learning spaces:

• Campfire – videos (youtube, teachertube), virtual worlds, video-conferencing, Skype, transmedia texts (including interactive narratives like Inanimate Alice)

• Watering hole – social networking (twitter, facebook, google +), wikis, google docs for collaboration, multi-player games, virtual worlds

• Cave – blogs for reflection, interactive learning aids, single-player games, the web itself for independent research.

• Life – the web itself is pure Life space. The most important digital tools that allow students the opportunity to apply their learning in the Life space are social media, blogging and youtube. These tools provide a powerful, immediate and global audience for student projects, discoveries, ideas and experiences.

Given that most teachers will (at some point) incorporate the first three spaces – campfire, watering hole, cave – into their lessons, it is pertinent to note that the final space – Life – is ironically missing from most classroom ‘learning’. Student-centred pedagogies – like Project Based Learning – force students to grapple with real-world problems and share their products and presentations with an authentic audience. These pedagogies provide students with the opportunity to apply the knowledge, skills and habits of mind developed in the campfire, watering hole and cave learning spaces to the final and most important space – Life. It is because of these reasons that Thornburg states ‘The pedagogical model most closely aligned with the learning space of Life is inquiry-driven project-based learning.’

I’m really happy with my new approach to learning spaces. Through my continued experimentation with learning spaces, it has become evident that a 21^st century classroom is not, nor has it ever been, about the screens, gadgets or funky furniture. Rather it is about developing a heightened awareness of how the digital and physical learning environment being created helps to construct each learning experience. I firmly believe that the true 21^st century teacher embraces a changing learning landscape and is as much at ease facilitating a group discussion on Macbeth outside under a tree as she is moderating a Skype call between students and a published author.  I do hope that in the future more schools will be approaching learning spaces in a far more flexible and student-centred/learning-focused way. So whilst it might initially feel a little contrived, I encourage you to use the metaphor of the archetypal learning spaces to help your students develop an appreciation for the need to alter their physical and digital spaces to match their learning space.

Reference:

Collis, S. (2010). ‘Classroom for the 21^st Century’ in Australian Teacher Magazine: ICT in Education Guide 2010. Retrieved September 12, 2010 from http://www.tempomedia.com.au/html/index.php?option=com_flippingbook&view=book&id=38&Itemid=160

DesignShare. (n.d.). DesignShare Traditional Classroom. Retrieved January 11, 2011 from <http://www.designshare.com/index.php/design-patterns/traditional-classroom>.

Nair, Prakash, Randall Fielding, and Jeffery A. Lackney. (2009) The language of school design: design patterns for 21st century schools. Rev. ed. Minneapolis, Minn.: DesignShare, 2009. Print.

Thornburg, D. (2007). “Campfires in Cyberspace: Primordial Metaphors for Learning in the 21st Century.” Thornburg Centre. Retrieved October 22, 2007 from <www.tcpd.org/thornburg/handouts/campfires.pdf>.

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School Has No Point: That’s No Joke

I was watching ABC3 with my  boys yesterday (as you do when you have a bunch of uni work to get through) and one of our favourite shows came on – You’re Skitting Me. It’s a very funny Australian skit show with teenager comedians … the boys and I love it because it is silly and often irreverent. Yesterday’s episode had a typically satirical and biting skit that made me rush to iView to capture it for you. Why? Because it supports the observation we’ve all been saying for ages: school has no point.

(*sorry if the vid is a little a dodgy, you can watch the full episode here – it’s about half-way through.)

Love that this is teenagers making the point – supposedly we teachers are smarter than them, yet we continue to support a system we all know is flawed. I’ll be showing this skit to my colleagues at the beginning of my workshop on project based learning on staff development day. I think it’ll get people thinking about the need to make the schooling experience more real-world, meaningful and relevant for our young people. I mean, let’s face it – this isn’t just about high school, it’s about all education: uni is the same, just without the bells.

Watch the You’re Skitting Me series one here on iView or check it out on ABC3 at 5.05pm weeknights, it’s worth it!

Surprise PBL driving questions for SDD

Next Monday I have to run a workshop with 47 teachers at my school on … PBL! Woot! First time I have presented on it to my colleagues so a little bit nervous about it.

I have decided to run this workshop just like a ran my last few PBL workshops, as a project! I only have an hour and fifteen minutes so it’s going to be pretty tight. What I realised with my last workshops was that designing the DQ proved super time-consuming (understandably cos it is one of the most important things – in fact, the most important as it determines the validity and success of your project). Because of time restrictions, I’ve decided to supply my colleagues with a driving question – they’ll get it as a ‘surprise’ in an envelope.

This morning I had to come up with nine driving questions … no easy feat UNLESS you have a super comprehensive epic website on driving questions that you can access. And ‘ta da’ I have one! This site is AMAZING and really detailed … I’ve read it through once (I think) and now I just jump to the tables and the bottom screen cos there are cool sample questions. I’ve taken 6 questions from there and also written some of my own … see if you can notice the sneaky one that I wrote in order to get some change happening to a part of my school.

SAMPLE DRIVING QUESTIONS:

How do we use our sense to discover the world?

How does climate affect the way we live?

How do drugs affect our health?

What makes a school safe?

How does our school impact the environment?

How do wars start?

What makes a good person?

How can we redesign our school library to meet the needs of 21st century learners?

What are the ingredients for a successful school?

I can’t wait to see what projects my colleagues craft around these driving questions … fun!

Project Based Learning: share your story …

I have been overwhelmed by the response to my last blog post, Trend Alert – Project Based Learning! Who knew? Not everyone posted a comment with their experiences: I received emails, tweets and direct messages full of excited words by eager and adventurous teachers.

The response has blown my mind!

In the middle of last year I made the decision to embark on a Master of Education (Research) at Sydney University so I could research into PBL and the impact it has on assessment, multiliteracies and the use of technology in Australian classrooms. You can read my rather ambitious research proposal here. I wanted to do that research because I felt so passionately that PBL could make a difference to the way young people learn in Australian. Heck, it can change how old people learn in Australia! And it can change a lot more beyond ‘school’ too. I thought if I had some hard data people would listen and start changing how they teach, even if it was just once a year or just incorporating some aspects of PBL like scaffolding, inquiry questions, formative assessment or team-work. But it wasn’t until this weekend that I’ve realised that I don’t need that data. I need stories!

I need you and your story!

Please, if you have used PBL in your classroom ever (you may have been doing it for ages as a TAS teacher or a cutting edge constructivist guru who’s been teaching since the 70s, you might have only tried one project and failed, you might only use some bits of PBL, you might have transformed your whole approach to teaching because of PBL, you might be crafting your very first project now, you might be a preservice teacher planning on using PBL in your class when you finally get one!) I wanna hear your story.

Here’s some thinking questions to warm you up … tell as little or as much as you want:

How have you used PBL?

Why do you use PBL?

What works? What doesn’t?

What are your strengths as a PBLer? Your weaknesses?

How have your students responded to PBL?

Do you wanna try PBL? Why?

Have you done cross-curricula or single-subject PBL?

Is there are team in your school dedicated to PBL?

Is your whole school a PBL school full of massive cross-curricula projects all year long?

Please be bold, and add a comment below. You’re a risk-taker – I know you are because you’re reading an edu blog post and you’ve thought about using (or already have used) a project-learning approach. So take a bigger risk and tell us your story.

We need to hear it.

Why?

Because narratives are more powerful than numbers.

Sorry Maths teacher friends. I don’t want numerical data anymore. I want emotion and heart and experience. Tell a story and you can change a person’s way of thinking.

Stories inspire.

Will you share your PBL adventure with us?

PS: Use a pseudonym if you wanna be a secret agent educator, lol.

Trend alert: Project-Based Learning! Who knew?

It wasn’t until Tuesday this week that I realised how trendy PBL is. Someone I follow retweeted a tweet that went something like this ‘when are people going to realise flipping and PBL are not going to revolutionise education’. The tweet freaked me out. I was like, ‘What? The flipped classroom is soo trendy and totes hype, but PBL too? How can this be?’ My surprise stems from my own experience as a classroom teacher in a public school. I hear talk of PBL in my staffroom because almost two years ago Dean Groom came and presented PBL to our faculty. I picked it up straight away and started playing, dipping my toes in, trying my hand at it and all that. Late last year my HT decided he wanted to give it a go too and this year a couple of other teachers are experimenting with PBL as well. But we are not a representative sample. No, not at all. Yes, people have tweeted occasionally about trying PBL and I know that Parramatta Marist has been doing some form of PBL for quite a few years now. But it’s still one tiny, tiny handful of Australian teachers giving it a go.

Or so I thought.

It seems that there has been a tidal wave of PBL enthusiasm (aka ‘hype’) that I have failed to see as a unified ‘movement’. When I was researching for my draft research proposal into PBL and the English classroom last year, I found there weren’t really that many published studies into Project-Based Learning. It seemed like a young field of inquiry. I know PBL is big in some parts of the US and a form of PBL (more problem-based than project-based) is very successful in Singapore. I also know PBL isn’t anything fancy or particularly new. What I didn’t notice was the sharp increase in interest in this approach to education … I certainly wouldn’t have equated it with the ‘flipped classroom’ in terms of its centrality in the eyes of edugeeks.

This afternoon I read a post by Dean Groom about the difficulty of ‘making a PBL teacher‘. It’s a great post, worthy of a read. But you need to know the context of Dean’s post, lest you get put off from trying PBL as a solo teacher. I am a solo PBL teacher with no whole-school support for this style of teaching. That’s not to say they don’t support me, I just mean to say that I’m not teaching at a ‘PBL School’. It is entirely possible to reshape your pedagogy as an individual and be very successful; I feel that I am. What does become problematic is that PBL inspires you to see education in an entirely new light. Once you go PBL, you never go back. You can’t. That can be scary because you start looking at your school and your colleagues in a new way. Not in a judging way, but in a ‘look at all this untapped potential’ kinda way. PBL can make you a frustrated teacher because you begin to see the possibility of what education could look like if all young people were engaged in authentic, meaningful, challenging, inquiry-based, passion-driven learning. The truth is, the world would be a better place. Young people would be much happier.

As part of the twitter conversation about Dean’s post, I realised how many people have been following my PBL journey/adventure/experiments. (Pssst – thanks!) And even more surprising was the number of teachers who had decided to give PBL a go. And a silly tweet about the difficulty of PBL for the solo-teacher (by me) may have set off a change of thoughts, concerns, anxieties, apprehensions in these teachers who trust me. If you trust me, trust me now when I say this: Project-Based Learning is trending because it is powerful and it is important.

Here’s a few examples of this trendy powerful pedagogy making waves on the web:

#PBLchat is a weekly twitter chat started by the New Tech Network

New Tech Network is a collection of public high schools that use PBL and technology to make learning great. One day I’m going to start a public high school like the New Tech High schools. Just saying.

Buck Institute for Education (BIE) – an oldie, but a goodie. The original PBL gurus – still celebrating authentic, project learning.

This year BIE are holding their first ever PBL conference called PBL World. I hope to attend one or two of the days in Napa, CA in July. The interest in this conference has been huge.

BIE also has a PBL edmodo community that has over 3000 members – does that indicate a ‘trend’? I think so.

Edutopia – another oldie but still so amazingly new. Loving the blog posts of Suzie Boss on PBL. Really excited to see the addition of Andrew Miller to the team, his blog posts are inspiring.

So it looks like PBL probably is starting to ‘trend’ a bit more than usual. How cool is that? I guess there are some things teachers keen to give PBL a go do need to keep in mind:

– your first project will be so painful to plan that you may want to ditch it before even beginning

– writing a Driving Question is like pulling teeth

– your students will think you have gone made and the ‘bright’ kids will resent it

– you will need to maintain a pretty strict routine of goal-setting and learning reflections for your students

– you will need to smile and laugh and help and shrug your shoulders and ask questions and not give answers

– your second project will be a little bit better

– creating product/presentation rubrics is worse than writing a driving question but equally as important

– don’t give grades; better to give ‘points’ and ‘badges’ or ‘level-ups’ for mastery of content, skills and habits of mind

– your third project will see you giving your students a choice of products, audience and teams

If you wanna see how some Aussie punks are doing PBL, you might wanna sign-up to the PBL course being run by me and mad-man Dean Groom towards the end of April. Add a comment below to register your interest. No time wasters, just people keen to ‘do’ and mess with education as you know it.

trendy, trendy, trendy

I’ve never been trendy: think I’m gonna have to get me a bowl-cut, some horn-rimmed glasses and a Fleet Foxes album. Woot.

English Essay Writing: YouTube Series

I have been out of the classroom 3/5 days this term and I will continue to be out of the classroom 3/5 days next term. It’s been an interesting experience so far. My classes have happily continued with their projects (OK, except for Year 8 who just wanna have me there to clown around with them) and are communicating with me via edmodo frequently. One of the things I have found difficult is not being their for my ‘I am the expert’ lessons – you know, where I spend part of a lesson being a ‘teacher’ at the front of the room and doing some whole class interactive instruction. This stuff is important when you set extended writing tasks, like writing an English essay.

It’s taken me a few weeks but I’ve finally managed to get the time to create some videos to help my students to write English essays. This is my mini-take on the ‘flipped classroom’ method. Here was the process I used to create the videos:

1. I brainstormed what I wanted my students to know and created a super rough outline of the structure and content of each video. I decided that five shorter videos was heaps better than a 20 minute video. I divided them up loosley on the main components of an essay, that way students can pick a video for their weakness.

2. I used the screen-casting tool Jing Pro to record my computer screen as I typed on Bubbl.us (the online mind-mapping tool) and on MS Word docs. I heard via twitter that Jing Pro is dead and gone, but I paid for Pro a year ago and it still seems to work on my Mac just fine – I chose pro because it automatically converts the videos to mP4 – a much more user-friendly format. At this stage I didn’t record any audio – I needed to plan that a bit more.

3. I imported the Jing videos into iMovie and added audio. I thought that I would have to run through these a couple of times to get it right but in the end I just did them off the cuff and I was happy with the final product. There are a couple of silly things I say or awkward pauses but I think that’s fine. Gives the kids something to laugh at. Adding audio to a video is really easy in iMovie.

4. I exported the videos to my desktop and then uploaded them to my school’s YouTube channel (DavoHSEnglish Channel). I made sure that in the description of each video I told the students what was featured in each clip to help them make the best selection. I also added extra information about each element where necessary.

And here is the finished product:

Habits of Mind and PBL

Last week the focus of #ozengchat was ‘critical thinking’. I couldn’t participate in all of the chat (I was out walking my dogs in the dark, and yes – that did end up with poop on my shoes) but I did tweet out a few strategies/tools that I use in my PBL classroom to facilitate critical thinking. I suppose I could have been a brat and just said ‘PBL = critical thinking’ and left it at that. But that’d be a bit mean, huh? So the three things that I did contribute were this:

1. The KWL table. Every teacher has heard of this. Maybe you haven’t used one in a class, but you know what one is. My students use a KWL table at least once a week. Our projects are structured around them. What do I mean? Well the very first thing my students to when they are introduced to a new project is to determine ‘What I Know’ (this is testing for prior-knowledge to ensure we don’t repeat stuff unnecessarily), then after reading the project outline they ask ‘What do I Want to Know’. We usually play a fun game called ‘Speed KWLing’ that I made up. (I explain it at point 3 in this post here). At the end of the project students reflect on ‘What I Learned’ during the project. Of course, I often use this structure for each stage of a project too – that means students complete a minimum of THREE KWL tables for each project – one for the investigation, one for the product and one for the presentation.

2. Geoff Petty’s goals/medals/missions checklist. This is an idea that I discovered whilst researching for my Draft Research Proposal. I read Geoff Petty’s famous book Evidence Based Teaching and was really keen on this idea of structuring learning experiences using the Goals/Medals/Mission system. You can read about it here. I have my students set their learning goals at the beginning of each lesson and then they reflect on their learning at the end by giving themselves ‘medals’ and ‘missions’. I have embedded this structure into assessment handouts as well because I think it’s super important to give students a checklist of what is expected of them for each product. You can see some of the checklists I’ve created here and Petty has sample feedback proformas on his site here. Of course, we need to keep in mind that flexibility for creative interpretation of a task is needed.

3. Habits of Mind(HOM). When I was at ISTE last year one of the keynote speakers was Stephen Covey. If you don’t know who he is, you probably have heard of his book ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ – I hear it was a big seller in the 1990s, lolz. Well you may not know, but he recently wrote a book about education The Leader in Me—How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. This was the focus of his keynote and it really was inspiring. It made me think about how I use Art Costa’s 16 Habits of Mind for the same purpose – to get students to think about their thinking! Having a good understanding of how you can control your own habits of mind is super important for students as they participate in project-learning experiences. For success in PBL students need to be fully conscious of their learning behaviours and how their habits of mind can hinder or help them succeed in the project. In my school my HT has chosen four of Costa’s 16 HOM to have our students focus on this term. I refer to these each lesson and students are starting to understand how something like ‘Listening with Empathy’ is important to master if you are going to be a great audience member, peer-assessor or speaker.

Cory MacDonald (@MrCoryMac) is a teacher from Newcastle who popped up on my twitter radar a few months back. He’s a man of mystery because he doesn’t tweet much and isn’t bothered about following too many people – he wants twitter to be useful and manageable and totally respect that. Cory came to my attention when he tweeted me his blog post about learning spaces – he had adapted some of the ideas I had posted here to make them work for him and his students. I must confess I am super envious of his space, it is just epic. So it’s not just the learning spaces that he has put to work, Cory has also adapted my use of edmodo, classDojo and Habits of Mind. To be honest, Cory has taken my ‘meh’ ideas and transformed them into complete, workable and beautiful ideas. His blog is like a secret treasure trove of AWESUM and I recommend you all read the posts he has written this year here.

The things I got the most excited about was Cory’s most recent post about learning management (I hate the expression ‘classroom management’ – for me ‘management’ is all about managing the projects well and using strong structures to enhance the potential for students’ success). You can read his post here.  My favourite quote is ‘Structure is about consistency not uniformity‘. This is very true! What I also love is how his focus is on personalising reward-systems to motivate students to develop better Habits of Mind. Just like me, he has selected a small number of Habits of Mind that his students will ‘master’ in Term 1. Like me he decided to use ClassDojo to award student points for demonstrating these positive Habits of Mind. Like me, he has linked the Dojo points to ‘awards’ that students can attain. Unlike me, he has personalised the award system to make them appealing, fun and relevant for his students. Unlike me, he has created beautiful posters that not only give visual cues for each Habit of Mind but he has also added a series of tools that students can use to ensure success at mastering this Habit of Mind. The man is a genius! I love that he has negotiated with his students the types of rewards they would like to work towards – Zombie Escape looks amazing! This is Student Voice at its best! I’m really looking forward to discussing with my students their chosen rewards – it could get crazy! I wish I could make pretty posters, I can’t. But I can set the task for my students to do it for me! Here are the first three of Cory’s Habits of Mind posters:

Please note that these posters belong entirely to him and it is super cool of him to share them with us. Please, feel free to use them in your classroom and in your school, but attribute him as the creator – attribution goes a long way in 2012!

That’s all from me – hope some of these strategies might come in handy at some point for you, even if you’re not doing PBL!

My first teachmeet #TMWR2012

Last Friday night I did something very different. I attended a TeachMeet. If you don’t know what one is, I recommend you watch this video. TeachMeets have been happening for a while now, but it’s really only be in the last twelve months that I’ve seen them happening consistently as part of my own PLN. But up until now I haven’t been motivated to attend one, which is kinda odd I guess since I spend so much time on twitter talking with my PLN about education. I guess I haven’t attended because I haven’t felt the need to go – the ideas I would share in a 7 or 2 minute presentation have been shared via this blog and via my tweets. To repeat those to the same audience strikes me as being redundant. And yes, attending would not be all about me and what I could do, but I also feel that if you attend a teachmeet, you should present at one – even if it’s for 2 minutes.

I attended Friday’s TeachMeet for two reasons: 1. I was asked by one of the organisers (Matt Esterman) to present on PBL. 2. The organisers are genuine, committed, hard-working people who were attempting to break a world record and I wanted to help them out. I could lie and say that I was motivated by the names of people presenting or by the excitement of being part of an event that big. But then I would be telling a lie and that’s not cool at all.

I had offered to present a 7 minute pechkucha on Project Based Learning and a 2 minute micro-presentation on Learning Spaces. At 12 noon on Friday I was emailed by Matt Esterman asking me if I minded presenting for 2 minutes as part of the opening ‘hello everyone’ session. I was shit scared at the prospect, but I also knew that if Matt was asking 5 hours before the event he was probably pretty desperate for someone to fill a gap. So I said yes. What did he want me to present on? Anything at all. Right. Let’s just say the following five hours were full of anxiety and doubt. I had to talk about ‘anything’ for 2 minutes in front of up to 300 people on a rainy and cold Friday night. Hmmmm.

After getting lost on our way and then frantic dialing Matt, we finally found our way to building 4 at Australia Technology Park. I must say walking through those doors and seeing Mitch Squires, Pip Cleaves, Megan Townes and Malyn Mawby was pretty neat. I didn’t stop bumping into my twitter PLN – in the flesh (no, not naked, although that would have been hilarious) for the rest of the evening. I must take this sentence to apologise for my blank stares at times, it really is hard to match faces with avatars and twitter usernames, I feel like I was rude to a number of people and seriously didn’t intend to be – the night was nothing short of overwhelming. When I finally found Matt and Simon Crook (another of the key organisers of that massive event) I was surprised to learn that my 2 minute Learning Spaces presentation had been bumped from the program – I was meant to present on Learning Spaces in front of 300 people? That wasn’t going to happen.

A glass of wine and a series of reassuring words from my English-teacher pal Mark O’Sullivan at the front of the ‘Theatre’ and I was feeling a little, tiny bit less stressed. As Ewan McIntosh spoke to us all about the origins of TeachMeet (which was actually really cool and I hope to revive pubmeets very soon), I hastily typed up an outline for my 2 minute talk and asked the guys near me to read through it and check it’d be OK. I even started smiling at someone sitting beside me whose face I recognised, only much, much later to realise it was Chris Betcher – no wonder he looked surprised and a little put off by me, lol. Anyway, here’s my notes:

 

Wow – three paragraphs into this post and it’s all about me, me, me. Oh, wait – that’s the point, right? This is my reflection. I walked up on stage and grabbed mic from Ewan (when he had finished speaking, of course). I hate microphones. I think I told everyone that. They are awful things. Despite my nerves and my insanely shaking hand, I managed to speak for 2 minutes. If you wanna see it, you’ll have to click on the link below and watch the Ustream that was recorded. I went 20 seconds over my allocated time – oops!

I just want to say that this really was a spontaneous talk (despite my one minute planning) and I hope I didn’t sound like too much of a git. The lovely lady who got up and presented on Google Docs after me was really amazing and she had put so much effort into preparing. The purpose of my talk was to just say, hey we should all be thinking resourcefully, embrace a ‘do it yourself’ attitude and make sure we keep our learners at the heart of everything we do. Yup, don’t stop thinking about the kids. I just wonder what the evening would have been like if we had some younger thinkers there – from the ages of 5 and up. Yeah, a logistical nightmare, but I still think it would be super cool.

My next presentation was also in the Theatre – it really is such a large space, designed for a much grander and more formal presentation than the one I was giving. Actually, filling that space was a tough gig – not filling it with people (I think there would have been 50 or so people in the audience and many, many empty seats) but filling it with your presence, your ideas, your passion, your voice. That was tough! As always I had left my preparing to the very last minute and was still tweaking my slides at 2pm that afternoon. I was happy with the images I had chosen, but really had to make up what I was saying on the spot. I wish I could find a video of what I said, I might learn something from the impromptu me – really, it feels like another person takes over your body and just blabs when you only have 20 seconds per slide to talk. Since I don’t have the video, I’ll just have to post my slides for you. Hope they make sense!

I will also share with you the slides for my Learning Spaces presentation that never was. I guess I’ll have to put my hand up for another TeachMeet so my presentation gets an audience. Lee said this one was better than my PBL one. Glad he told me that after I finished my PBL pecha kucha, lolz. Here are the slides:

 I was really stoked by the support of my PLN during my talk. It sure is an amazing feeling to sit down after a presentation and look at your twitter account to see a whole load of tweets mentioning your name and saying really nice stuff. I kept some of those tweets and I’m going to post them below. How about following the people who tweeted? I can attest that they are awesome – and not just cos they told me I was awesome, lolz.

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Oh, and this post is all about me – I know that – and I’m sorry. The next post about teachmeet will definitely be about the presentations that I saw. The people who were responsible for planning, organising and running the WORL RECORD BREAKING TeachMeet are well spoken for in this moving blog post by Simon Crook.

Lesson planning: project-based style

I think I can remember what classes I have tomorrow … oh dear, lol.

About an hour ago I tweeted about my need to stop blogging and to start writing lesson plans for my replacement teacher. This sparked a mini-conversation between me and @sthcrft

And you know what, it is worth a try … but to be honest I ended up writing my plans up in an email and not as a blog post. What I have decided to do is copy & paste them into a blog post because I think they give insight into how project-learning works in my classroom. Poor Kate my replacement teacher! (To help you understand what I’ve written, I’ve put in brackets notes for Kate – these don’t go on the whiteboard for students. I’ve put them in italics too!)

PD 1: Year 8
They have a quiz on MR RAP ASS O that I am just making now and will send it through soon! (ASIDE: I haven’t finished this yet, it will be done before the class starts at 8.30am, lolz)
Write this on the board:
TODAY’S LEARNING
– MR RAP ASS O quiz
– marking quiz
– class discussion about point-of-view [and link to The Highwayman: whose point of view is this narrative poem told from? (it is third-person, an omniscient narrator) Why is the poem called The Highwayman and not Bess or The Highwayman and Bess?]
– complete ‘L’ column for ‘investigation’ KWL [might need to have them reread their ‘investigation’ task on project outline, basically as a class or in a team have them identify what they learned during that task]
PD 6: Year 8
ON BOARD:
– poetry project product #1 discussion [read through Product #1 on the project outline – this is glued in their book]
– team completion of KWL chart for product #1 [each team tries to write at least 5 things they ‘know’ and 5 things they ‘want’ to know about the product and give them all a point for this – team with the most things added to chart gets 2 bonus dojo points – they read out their ‘knows’ and ‘wants’ and other teams tick them off or add them to their lists]
– (if time remaining) brainstorm ‘monologue’ [and copy a definition of ‘monologue’ off the board ‘Monologue: A speech or composition presenting the words or thoughts of a single character.’]
HW: decide which point of view their monologue will be written from – Bess or The Highwayman.

YEAR 9: Not sure what period you have these guys. Last lesson they read out their protest poems. They are also up to the second phase of their poetry project so just run through the same activity that Year 8 did – complete the ‘L’ for the first task and then complete a new KWL for the next product. If time left over give them the poetic devices quiz attached.
ON BOARD:
– complete ‘L’ column for ‘investigation’ KWL [might need to have them reread their ‘investigation’ task on project outline, basically as a class or in a team have them identify what they learned during that task]
– poetry project product #1 discussion [read through Product #2 on the project outline – this is glued in their book]
– team completion of KWL chart for product #1[same task Year 8 did]

YEAR 10: These guys are also on to the next part of the project.
ON BOARD:
– complete ‘L’ column for ‘individual task’ KWL
–  poetry project GROUP TASK discussion
– team completion of KWL chart for product #1 [same activity as Year 8 & 9]
– (if time) begin work on turning their cyborg poem into a digital visual poem (like the one by a student last year that they watched in class)

So that is all a bit mental – huh? I wonder if you can see how these lessons fit into the design of PBL. Basically the KWL charts are super important components of project-learning as they encourage students to ask questions and focus their inquiry so as to complete the project. KWL charts also teach planning and reflection skills – see that each class is required to reflect on the learning gained during the first part of the project? Because my classes have already completed the preliminary investigation and products for their poetry projects they are quite adept at this learning metalanguage. I think they’ll be fine without me. Can you also see where my learning spaces stuff fits in? Maybe not – basically when Kate writes ‘today’s learning’ on the board, she has the students identify the space/frame of mind required for each activity – cave, campfire, waterhole.

Anyway, it’s storming here and I better get off my laptop. Night!

Creative writing for Extension English: Collaborative Novella

I have the pleasure of teaching the HSC English Extension class this year. It is so much fun teaching this class because I get to work with six wonderful young people who are always eager to discuss literature. That might night sound like you’re idea of fun, but it gets me thinking hard and giggling every Tuesday morning. I always look forward to the class even though I’m usually a bit tired from having stayed up late preparing for our discussions!

Another cool thing about Extension English is that it is a split divide with critical and creative. Students in this course are assessed 50% critical thinking about the literature & ways of thinking set for study and then 50% creative writing using the conventions of the literature and reflecting the ways of thinking set for study. I love that divide.

Right now my students are working towards developing their creative writing skills so as that they can reflect the Romantic style and ways of thinking through narrative form and language. For their next assessment they will be assessed on these skills. The blank page is a cruel, cruel thing for most young writers and I know that this is the case for my current students. They love to write once they get going, but starting really is ‘like a bout of some painful illness’. As a sort of poulitce to their pain I have designed an assessment task that means the writing will be collaborative – if we write together we can share the burden! The task is to write a collaborative novella – each student is responsible for up to 2000 words in the form of two ‘chapters’. I will be one of the writers on the project – and this means I can support them in the planning stage as well as modelling best practice when it comes to drafting, editing and rewriting. I’m so excited that I get to write. Oh, and the best part is that we will be entering the novella into a competition using a pseudonym. They are SO excited about that.

Here is the assessment outline given to the students. It essentially functions as a project (PBL) with a driving question, investigation, product and presentation. If you look closely you will see that I have incorporated formative and summative assessment – as well as speaking elements so students must present/defend their work.

Yesterday we spent the double period in our ‘waterhole’ learning space. We had the tables arranged in a ‘boardroom meeting’ configuration and we spent two hours planning characters, plot, setting and considering what paradigms would be evidenced/explored in each scene. It was delightful to see their ideas come whooshing forth – young people are so wonderfully, crazily creative when given the confidence to take risks and share.

I have been cast as The Philosopher – a madman and a drunkard who talks to a horse named Doyle. I have one week to write the first draft of my two chapters. Excited!!