Leaders of Learning: stupendous HarvardX MOOC

My brain hurts in one of those, good-brain-hurt ways. With very little time to spare I completed the most challenging MOOC I have taken yet, Leaders of Learning with Dr. Elmore from Harvard University. I initially decided to take the class because this year I will work with mathematics teachers in the classroom as well as all Upper School teachers on integrating technology into their curriculum.

I thought I was going to get a formula to help me navigate. Instead, I learned I don't need a formula. I became a detective, an observer, a forensic expert examining evidence. And not just of myself but of my students, peers, parent body, administrators and the School (a being all of its own, both physically and culturally). I learned to listen to group dynamics, human interaction and personal psychology. I learned that learning, teaching, organization and space must be aligned with philosophy to work together.

Here are the four Modes of Learning:

After much thought (and confirmed by the MOLA results) I have realized that I am mostly Distributed Individual and Hierarchical Collective. I have been having a hard time reconciling this and will continue to think on it throughout the school year.

People learn best when they can pursue a body of knowledge at their own pace with guidance from a community. I would present an essential question to the class. Together they would brainstorm what they need to learn. They would divide and conquer so as to pick their preference for deeper understanding while then being able to learn from their peers. Teachers take on the role of resource specialist being sure to provide digital and physical resources as well as space and time to discover. There is an extended learning platform (forum, website, google docs) available to help organize the community learning. Teachers do provide structure with rubrics, have time and space available for formative assessment on an individual basis (both digital and physical) and are allowed time to reflect and plan with fellow teachers.

Here is my overall philosophy though I need to take time to live this, ingest it and fully understand how the theory applies to this school year.

• physical & digital space for collaborative study
• physical & digital space for individual collaboration with teachers or peer evaluator
• physical & digital space for research
• physical & digital space for teacher collaboration

We were asked to imagine an ideal space but I decided to use my thinking time to try and apply these ideas to my limited resources as my classroom stands at this exact moment in time.  I have two bookshelves, a few small desks and 4 large desks, laboratory stools, a rug, an interactive white board that I must be next to in order to use and one long white board. You will see two configurations below. One for larger group work and the other for smaller group work. I have tried to leave space along the white board wall so students can feel free to use it to collaborate standing up.

So as I synthesize this incredible knowledge and realize how fortunate I am to have had the opportunity to study in a MOOC (a quadrant I am quite comfortable in) with witty, thought provoking, creative pioneers in learning, I hope to continue the momentum through this school year.

The Lemon in the Bottle

While I am extremely grateful for the fact I have access to clean drinking water whenever I want and don't need to buy it in plastic bottles, I don't really like plain water, it is after all, plain. So I got a brilliant idea to put slices of lemon or lime into the bottle to flavor the tap water. Two days passed and I thought it was time to replenish the citrus.

What was I thinking?

How was I going to get it out? 

I shook. 

I stuck a chopstick in to try and coax it out. 

I used a butter knife when I realized the chopstick was too round. 

I used a steak knife when I realized the butter knife was too round. 

I hacked it into smaller pieces and eventually the bottles were lemon free.

As school starts in 1 week time, everything I read, hear, see or do becomes fodder for a lesson plan. 

You see, I have been teaching digital art, movie making, programming and robotics along side math and started to realize that the creativity that leads to breakthroughs in thinking in those subjects was not cultivated at all by me in math classes.

So last year I started encouraging creative math thinking. I'd throw out open ended problems such as 

'compute the result 3,456' and challenge the class to come up with the most creative answer.

Students worked individually then shared in small groups who picked a few examples to show to the entire class. We voted on the most creative answer. Note, I did not say the right answer. This encouraged students to take risks and try new things because improving the process was the goal, not the final answer.

My students reported at the end of the year that creative thinking helped them problem solve because they started to think of different ways to do things. Even more exciting, they learned how to be more creative from watching their peers' solutions.

This year I will continue these exercises but I will also give them other types of problems to solve to explicitly teach the power of creative thinking (like how to get a piece of lemon out of a bottle).

Back to the lemon in the bottle. I brainstormed a few other possibilities: letting the fruit dry out or trying to dissolve it.  Any other ideas?

The Little Engine that Could...maybe not the best lesson

So last summer I skimmed it. This school year I reskimmed it when developing strategies for teaching students of all levels of English as one of the standards I was studying towards the ECIS International Teacher Certificate. I just finished reading it for the second time in 2 months.

If you have not read it, stop, drop and pick up a copy of Carol Dweck's Mindset.  I was introduced to the book by Jo Boaler in the online course I took with her last summer.  I wanted to find a new way to approach mathematics teaching and it worked. This was the most successful school year I have had yet with math students. Not because of test scores, not because of less challenges or fewer ups and downs. Because at the end of it all, they wanted to learn math, bumps, bruises and all.

Remember The Little Engine that Could? It taught us that if you were not endowed with the qualities that a big engine had, you had to work hard to get to the top of the hill and that it was possible. It was an either ~or. Either you are endowed or you work hard. Not according to Dweck and her theory on growth mindset.

At the start of the school year I asked all my 9th graders if they thought their 'mathematical intelligence' could be improved. 92% of my accelerated level math students said yes while only 12% of my regular level math students said yes. Amazing.

I took action.  Three new classroom practices that I think helped contribute to our positive learning environment:
1. The only sign up in my classroom: F.A.I.L. is a First Attempt In Learning
2. I tried (though habits are hard to break) to always use the phrase, "help us make sense of that" rather than, "no, it is wrong or yes, it is right."  That way the focus was on THINKING, the PROCESS, the CREATIVITY and not just the final answer.
3. I helped students understand how they THINK in mathematics and then through collaboration, they could find like thinkers and learn from unlike thinkers. Isn't that what we want? Students who are stuck on a problem to open up a tool chest and pull out a new way of thinking!

This year I will add more hints from the book and even start applying the growth mindset to personal, not just professional development.

If you want to skip the book, here is a video by the amazing Carol Dweck though there are so many more, you might get lost for awhile and trust me, it will be worth every minute.

Can Art Change the World?

Well, it certainly has changed mine. I have just completed my 3rd standard towards the ECIS International Teacher Certificate. I am one month late but elated none the less.  What my students taught me for the last few months about passion, compassion, discovery and responsibility as global citizens far exceeded my expectations of this unit.  I hope to take this energy into planning for next year and make all my classes focus on essential questions. They are powerful and worth the extra re-planning.

They began studying the Olympics and making art based on the concept of a worldwide truce. Note: none of them had used Photoshop before.

Then they studied the history of selfies (aka self-portraits) and Andy Warhol to better understand themselves, their motivations and emotions.

They next studied tolerance and stereotyping creating animations on Photoshop.

As a quick celebration of #HappyDay they created words out of their own bodies symbolizing peace, nonviolence and happiness.

They researched peace activists and celebrated them using silhouette and text art.

And now they are busy planning Peace One Day September 2014.  We were honored to have had the opportunity to Skype-meet Jeremy Gilley, author of Peace One Day and founder of the organization. He blew us away with his commitment, perseverance and advice on how we too can change the world.  My students have written incredible blog posts on this once in a lifetime experience. We can't wait to share our enthusiasm with the whole ASM community in the fall.

Stay tuned for an update on our Global Art project. Here's a preview to some of the work:

Changing perspectives

Today I had the luxury of roaming around Milan for an hour and while to most that surely seems romantic and/or lucky, for me it was a bit boring.  You see, it is the same area I have walked around many Sunday mornings while waiting for my son.  Only today was full of sunshine which we haven't seen here for months and so off I went.  At the first corner I came to, I looked up.  Not sure why, but I  noticed a spire in the distance.  I carry my camera with me most days so I got closer and took a photo.  For the next 30 minutes I walked around looking up.  It was a whole new experience, both enjoyable and educational.

So what does that have to do with my educational journey blog?

I've been trying to put into words how my current studying towards the ECIS International Teaching Certificate is going.  I am doing the practical work with my middle school digital art students.  In this standard, teaching competencies for the international teacher, we are supposed to "explore ways of taking learning beyond the classroom to develop global perspectives."  For me, digital art has always been about an internal journey.  It seemed like a great idea to go global instead and the work has been rewarding but I have had to change my perspective and "look up" to feel comfortable.

So how is it going?  The students are learning, having fun, collaborating and creating. From this point of view, all is good.  I, however, have not gotten to know the students as well as I usually do by now (this is a 1/2 year course) and I'm finding that their work is not as diverse as usual.  I'm looking forward to combining our global piece, "Can art change the world?" with their passion piece and hoping I get comfortable with this new perspective.

A voice for the non-talkers

As part of standard 4, language and learning for ECIS ITC, I have been brainstorming ways to give my students choice in how they are formatively assessed.  Today we introduced our 6th graders to Voki.  They wrote diamante poems about their holidays (great exercise in its own right for language learners) and then typed them into Voki.

One comment from a weak English speakers, "did you hear that? I speaked without speak."

Another student, a native English speaker, asked me to email her teachers so they know about Voki and let them choose it as a way of doing assignments.

Here is my Voki based on the lesson plan I adapted from the Voki Classroom site.

   
What other ways could Voki be used to empower students of all different learning levels?