Although this post is coming a little late, this is a reflection about our work in our MPX program for the second week of the school year. Not surprising, most teachers spend some of the initial time with their students setting the context for what they are doing. We take time to establish our norms, have students understand our routines and rhythms of the class so that we make it possible for them to work efficiently and to stay on task when they are with us. In our work with MPX, we did a few things that set the context for our work. It struck me that the quote that the title is based on (which is from Lewis Carroll) kept coming up as we were working with our students in these first few weeks on our mini project on conflict resolution in society. Let me give three examples of how this played out in our work this week.

Class Norms

We took time in our class to have the students consider what are the kinds of behaviors, attitudes and beliefs we bring in when we work as a class. We did a co-construction activity where the students offered ideas, and then we distilled those over 100 thoughts down to 19 key statements that they made about what it means to learn in our class. The key thing was to make sure the words were theirs, since our goal is to give them feedback and hold them to these agreed-upon expectations.

One of the beautiful things about having these posted clearly in the room is that we can proactively challenge and point out to the students that these are the things that powerful learners do. It acts as our roadmap to a class culture that will move us forward productively.

Assessment Criteria

When we ask students to produce quality work there are really a few ways for us to get there:
– looking at models that we admire and can use to help us set the language for what excellence looks like
– a process for feedback that allows learners to look at their current states and to know where they need to move next
– and lastly clear criteria that we have agreed on about what the end should look like.

One of our artifacts from the society conflict activity was a two minute video that the students made in news story format that would tell a story of conflict and resolution in society. In order to help the students get there, we needed to know the language of good storytelling, and then we needed a tool to help us operationalize our ways to look at our work and to judge whether it was of high enough quality. The rubric we used for this project is here:

The language from this came from our own research, from looking at quality examples, and by using expertise to help us make decisions about what goes into good storytelling. The students used this rubric to give each other feedback multiple times, and it was used in the final assessment as well.

Project Sheets and Descriptions
At the start of any project, we give the students a map out of what that project will unfold like with clearly defined goals, an essential question, an outcome that is important and challenging and the steps that are required to get there laid out with enough detail that they know what needs to happen to get from the start to the finish. When we do our professional work with teachers around the state, this is the key thing that we tried to instill in those teachers – that without a roadmap and clarity around the means by which students will have time to understand, give feedback and reflect on their learning, the likelihood of getting to the end is drastically less. We have seen many teachers talk about how they have implemented projects, and only a few or some of the students “got it” and produce a product that they had hoped for. More often than not, it is not a fault of the students, but lack of clarity of the roadmap on how to help them get there.

As we continue to move on into the school year we hope to continue to provide clear guidance for our students so that they do the traveling, but they have the support they need to end up in the right destination. It’s

“At its most basic, cooking is the transfer of energy from a heat source to your food.” from the wonderful resource Serious Eats

yes, we ARE having fun!

My friends and my family know that I spend way too much of my expendable income on dining experiences – not casual affairs, but going to interesting places and trying out new chefs in town when I can afford them. I also love cooking and my own kitchen, constantly playing with new recipes or adapting old ones.
**By the way – if you haven’t been to Scratch in downtown Honolulu, put it on your must do list.**

It’s no big surprise then, that I’ve always had it in my mind to figure out how to bring cooking into my students’ experiences. At so many levels this is such a important experience – research shows that families that cook and eat together have deeper relationships, healthier diets and also save money at the same time. Were living in a society in which “prepackaged” and “to go” are the main means that many of our students understand eating, and yet for most of society’s history food and cooking has been at the center of culture, interaction, and identity.

Moreover, the science of cooking is deep and powerful and cuts across many disciplines – physics, biology, health and nutrition, chemistry, sustainable science, environmental impact… the list goes on. So how do we make this happen in our classrooms? How far can we go with this to both engage our students and still have a safe learning environment?

We have been blessed over the last four years to work with a wonderful community partner: the Culinary Arts program at Kapiolani Community College (KCC). We have coordinated projects with them dealing with sustainable agriculture, food to table and cooking classes – but in the past these were focused on life sciences as our primary core standards. Our wonderful friend and colleague Daniel Leung from KCC helped us to design a project this semester that centers on cooking and thermodynamics. The underlying science of this includes heat and temperature, radiation, convection and conduction, and the first and second law of thermodynamics. Additionally, there is a wealth of information about the chemical phenomenon that happens around the process of cooking food including the way that plant and animal cells behave differently, how proteins work at different temperatures, and even the important Maillard reaction.

We mapped out a set of experiments and activities, readings and hands-on work that would allow our students to investigate this deeply and tied to our energy standards in our physical science curriculum. Over the four weeks of this project, our students will visit the KCC kitchen classroom/lab to prepare both Tuscan bean soup and a dish to be still decided – but something that involves braising and the three different types of heat transfer. In class we are doing things as simple as looking at the effect of different metals in the way they transfer heat, to the way that cooling happens, through looking at the heat capacity of different materials including food. In the end, two of the outcomes will be our students cooking a meal for their family and explaining the science behind it and the creation of a five-minute video in which they explain the science behind a particular cooking technique – modeled after the widely known show “Good Eats” with Alton Brown.

As usual, I’ve been posting pictures of our work on our Flickr site here

This first four-week unit we designed is the starting point for us expanding on this idea next year to create a deeper look at food, science and culture. We are excited to see where this will take us but we know it’ll be fun and powerful!

Here’s to good food, good science, and powerful learning! Cheers!

cooking the soup

Tasting our final product: Tuscan Bean Soup

We received training on prep use of knives as well!

Prepping the vegetables at KCC

Cooking away in our classroom

Working in Our classroom lab with cooking meat and vegetables

One of the great pleasures and challenges of doing real deeper learning work is finding real challenges in our community and community partners that can help us become part of the work in working towards a healthier, safer community. Some of our classwork this year centered on science standards in chemistry, which lend itself to looking at the water issues in our community. The island of Oahu is really a perfect water catchment system, and in particular almost all of that water resides under the island in aquifers that hold freshwater that filters down from the 1.8 billion gallons of rainfall that occur on the island every day. Many of us that live here sometimes take this water for granted, but if we go just a little deeper into this resource, we see that there are important challenges that are facing the island, and a real need for stewardship of these critical resources for us to enjoy the quality of freshwater that we have become accustomed to.

On December 2 our class of 10th grade MPXers visited the Board of Water Supply (BWS) to learn more about when, how and what gets tested to ensure the safety of our water.

**A quick note about the difference between field trips and community partners. Our Deeper Learning Hawaii Network group ran some community partner workshops a year ago and we developed the language of distinguishing one time visits (just to get some information) and an extended interaction with community experts in which students become part of a process in supporting the work of an organization or helping design solutions for that organization. There is a much more detailed version of that here: http://deeperlearninghawaii.weebly.com/community-partnerships.html. In this case, we are looking at a much deeper relationship and an extended investigation about water quality here on the island of Oahu**

Before we visited the site, we spent time reading through the resources about what the board of water supply does, and in particular some of the challenges that they face. I shared slides from a community meeting in October that detailed one of the most pressing issues in Honolulu, In particular, there is a situation with the water that comes out of the Halawa shaft (http://www.boardofwatersupply.com/community/tours-education/halawa-shaft-underground-pumping-station) which feeds water to one quarter of the island’s population. There are large jet fuel storage tanks that hold upwards of hundred 87 million gallons of jet fuel just 100 feet above the aquifer. There is already evidence that these tanks have leaked, and there is continuing tension between those who feel the tanks need stay where they are because of security concerns, and the community that feels that it endangers its water supply.

Our visit to the BWS allowed us to observe, deepen our understanding and ask questions about this key issue. The folks at the BWS were gracious in opening up their labs and sharing the process they use to test and ensure water quality for Oahu.

What role can we play? The Honolulu City Council has met with us and asked us to help them better understand the ins and outs of this issue. They worry that they don’t have a good enough understanding of the science of the water and what and how it might be tested and treated. Our class will be diving in to understand this problem and helping the city council to better see the issues and what they can do. The goal is to present our findings to the council in April and share our learnings and recommendations. It should be an exciting exploration in an important actionable issue in our community!

Here in my 35th year of teaching, I think about some of my early experiences in my role as a teacher there was a lot of emphasis on What (scope) I taught and how it fit into the learning path of students (sequence). Most curriculum documents and textbooks are structured to map out the scope and sequence of a course of study. What often is left as an afterthought, or at least as a secondary action is How (pedagogy) that Scope and Sequence is delivered and by what means we assess success.

In 2012 I gave an Ignite Talk that was titled “Mobile Technologies & Personalized Learning: A quest to make thinking visible and technology invisible” (Slide Deck here). As a part of that talk, I emphasized that technology and pedagogy play an important role to move learners to a more personalized, powerful and lasting learning experience. The overlapping of Content, Technologies (tools), and Pedagogy is the place where where learning can be shaped.

In our work in the Mid-Pacific eXploratory (MPX) program we spend as much time planning for how students encounter their learning as we spend looking at what they will be learning. For example, in our recent work, we have our students designing and building trebuchets for a project we call “Santa’s Little Helper”. Although the underlying content is from the Integrated Science 1 in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), our goal has been to create the conditions under which the students have an opportunity to create, make decisions, iterate, explain their work through real world activities and build in design and engineering as a part of the process.

This gives us a chance to create a classroom environment that has a strong culture of learning. In his recent wonderful book, Cultures of Thinking, Ron Richart lays out 8 Forces that must be part of learning to really transform classroom practice:

time, opportunities, routines, language, modeling, interaction, physical environment and expectations (more information here).

Note – none of these forces are the scope and sequence. However, they are just as important a component in the instructional design process for learning. In an earlier blog post, I discussed the “Pebble in the Pond” which is an instructional methodology that looks at whole problem learning. There are other frameworks that are structured like this – whether it is Wiggins and McTigue’s Backwards Design in UBD, the Buck Institute’s Gold Standard for PBL, or the TPACK framework for 21st-century learning.

Back in the 1990s when I was working with the ASU modeling instruction program for science education, it was impressed upon us that we were not learning a curriculum, we were learning a pedagogy of scientific inquiry. In much the same way, the work that we continue to do in our MPX program reflects that idea – that it isn’t just about what we learn (scope and sequence), but it is also important to consider how we learn.