Category Archives: personal

Week 2 Water Work

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The wondrous and wasteful world of water…

This week started with the official launch of our mini project on water quality. For a bunch of reasons both strategic and educational, Lyssa and I both wanted to do a quick dive into projects both to help us look at how our students work together, and to give them some ideas of the assessments, supports and structure we would use over the course of a longer project. We gave them the challenge of identifying a community in the United States that is struggling with a water quality issue, understanding the place and the people, investigating the water issue including possible solutions, and to present that information on Friday to a mock panel of experts that we deemed to be a “community board”. Over the course of the week they had an opportunity to explore with some new research tools like Wolfram Alpha, work on their library skills with a session in our library with our most excellent staff David Wee and Nicole Goff, work with their team taking on roles within the community, work with our media arts teacher Erin Carnes to design a graphic that would support a call to action and prepare and deliver presentation. yes – all in one week. Our panel consisted of Joshua Noga, the conservation program coordinator for the Sierra Club, two of our parents who are involved with community action and business development and our visual arts teacher. We were so appreciative of them taking the time to sit in and both listen to and ask hard questions of our student presenters over the course of two hours.

This gave Lyssa and I an opportunity to tightly script a project that was mapped out in a series of steps with deliverables, have us work with the students on formative and summative assessment practices, observe and jump into some of the groups to shape the way students work and learn in our class and to set the tone for the year. The pictures below gives some visual aspects of the story – I tried to caption them for their context in the above storyline. We took about 30 minutes to debrief the activity with the students, to talk about was what worked and what didn’t, and to give them a chance to reflect on their learning over the course of this experience. We certainly were energized by what we saw and heard over the last five days!

Next week, we start our investigation on chemistry and conflict – the ways that society, science and the physical world intersect and sometimes create tension and challenges in society.

Group presentation on water quality in front of our mock community board

Group presentation on water quality in front of our mock community board

Presenting on water quality issues in San Diego

Presenting on water quality issues in San Diego

Thursday – time to practice our presentations for ironing out problems and feedback

Thursday – time to practice our presentations for ironing out problems and feedback

Practicing presentations for Friday within our groups

Practicing presentations for Friday within our groups

Learning about valid sources – the quote of the day was the Internet gives you what it thinks you want not what you need!

Learning about valid sources – the quote of the day was the Internet gives you what it thinks you want not what you need!

Considering what kinds of sources we consider valid – time with our librarians

Considering what kinds of sources we consider valid – time with our librarians

Working on our call for action artwork using a variety of tools

Working on our call for action artwork using a variety of tools

Designing graphics for a call to action

Designing graphics for a call to action

This graphic turned out marvelous – a firefighter shooting water hose to fill water for houses – metaphor for delivery of water two houses by firemen and police in impoverished communities

This graphic turned out marvelous – a firefighter shooting water hose to fill water for houses – metaphor for delivery of water two houses by firemen and police in impoverished communities

Three Kinds of Math?

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Money, Philosophical and Artisanal Math

There was a wonderful piece on National Public Radio this week that told the story of Harvard researcher Houman Harouni (https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/houman-harouni), who had done historical research on why we learn mathematics the way we do.

(His full dissertation is here: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/16461047/HAROUNI-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1)

In the dissertation, he gives a very specific example of how this kind of approach to mathematics can be viewed through three different approaches.

Money Math
He makes the case that all of western mathematics has ended up looking like problems of this type:

Susan has 12 oranges. Her mother gives her 15 more. How many oranges
does she have now?

or: 12+15 = ?

This kind of mathematics came out of the economics of the time – money counters and accountants, business people needed to know this kind of math in order to balance the books. He makes the compelling case that the economies drove the need for this kind of math to be necessary, and it became the predominant way of thinking of mathematics since the Renaissance.

Philosophical Math
He offers two other types of mathematical approaches. What if the problem was worded this way:

27 = ?

This approach is a more philosophical approach about the nature of the number, and the ways that it might come to be and what it represents.what could go into the right side of that equation? 9×3? Three cubed? Log base three of 27? It invites a very different kind of mathematical thinking and exploration.

Artisanal Math
Another approach would embed the math in the professional work during apprenticeships with craftsmen. This was very reminiscent of the work of Jean Lave (http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/jeanlave) and her excellent work on situated learning. In studying the traditions of apprenticeship for Tailor’s in countries like Tunisia, it was clear that mathematical learning was built into the apprenticeship, but it is not anything like what we would call traditional teaching and learning of mathematics. Moreover, these tailors had a high functional ability to work with mathematics that were specific to their craft.

Tying it all together
Over the past six years in working in our MPX program I have been delighted and challenged to try and build all three kinds of mathematical approaches into the work we do with our projects. We have developed mathematical models in our scientific community to understand and categorize physical phenomena, we’ve looked at form and function in ways that they express themselves in artistic work in design and engineering, and we’ve practiced traditional math as a means to understand some of the ways that procedural knowledge in mathematics can help us unpack what we see behind certain expressions. I think the real challenge of the evolution of mathematics education needs to be in rethinking how do we approach these sometimes complementary but more often than not this connected or even underutilized approaches to building mathematical understanding in all of our students. In some ways, they fit the three legs of mathematical understanding that are part of common core: no (money math), do (artisan old math), understand (philosophical math).

Here is the NPR story that explains some of the research:

Laying the Foundation

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Well here we are already more than two weeks into the start of the new year. Something new for me this year – I am teaching two different classes: 10th grade STEM for our integrated Mid-Pacific eXploratory (MPX) and a new course that is just starting this year which is Innovative Design Technology – a one year course focusing on the design process and wrapping in rigorous science content. I am co-teaching this class with my friend and colleague Lori Nishiguchi – we each have one section of this course.

As a result, I’m going to blog in this space for both courses – sometimes separately, sometimes, like today, a general summary of what both classes have been up to. As I said before the intent of this blog is to both inform about what we are doing in class, but I also use it as a space for me to share the work we do, the decision-making and rationale behind the kinds of efforts we make, and broader questions about education and the future of learning. Hopefully if you read this, something here will resonate for you.

So here are a few highlights from the past couple of weeks.

In the design class,

the most engaging work we’ve done so far was running the Stanford d.school crash design course. Designed to take no more than an hour and a half, it is a quick iterative process that walks the participants through the design process beginning to end in the midst of trying to redesign a gift giving experience. Lori and I ran this on the second full day of class and it gave us both a chance to see how pacing, tempo and group dynamics were in our class, as well as a means to introduce the underlying foundation of good design principles that we plan to rely on for the next eight months. If you’re not familiar with their work, the homepage for their d.school is here. I’ve embedded the design course video below in case it would be interesting to look at. Below that are a few pictures from the activity in our class which I think does a nice job showing the engagement and effort in this very quick process. What was most interesting was the debrief with the students revealed both their interest in understanding the importance of getting to the empathy and the value of understanding the end-user experience, as well as the high pressure nature of quick prototyping and iterative design.

Students doing the design process - going for empathy

Students doing the design process – going for empathy

Students doing the design process - going for empathy

Students doing the design process – going for empathy

Students doing the design process - going for empathy

Students doing the design process – going for empathy

Students doing the design process - going for empathy

Students doing the design process – going for empathy

Students doing the design process - ideating

Students doing the design process – ideating

Students doing the design process - pro typing

Students doing the design process – pro typing

I’ve created a Flickr page that will host all of the pictures as we take some during the school year – that is located here.

We’ve now launched into our first full design project which is redesigning all or some feature of a standard school student chair. Students have already gone out and interviewed their “clients” and have come up with some issues that they are looking to try and address and are now asked to design some sketches of what might solve the problem for students. The full design brief is pasted below.

Chair design Challenge

In The MPX 10 STEM Class,

we have started with initial activities to lay the foundation for our year-long project in investigating urban transportation. The ultimate goal is really four steps: students being able to build and take apart bikes, students being able to design and build an electric bike from a standard bike frame, students designing a payload system for their electric bike to accomplish a course challenge, and the culminating set of activities around designing a more fully thought out urban system for transportation.
Although this set of challenges will be ongoing during the year, we will be doing breakaway work in a variety of other smaller projects and activities – both to create some other learning opportunities as well as to make sure our core content is covered in physics and algebra two. We spent the last week going back to some mathematics work around linear equations, and investigating constant motion which lends itself nicely to the beginning conversation around moving bikes as well as exploring linear functions and their modeling capabilities in the real world. A few pictures below show students white boarding, conducting experiments, and actually taking apart the battery-powered cars to investigate the way by which the batteries stored energy turns into motion.

Students Whiteboarding

Students Whiteboarding

Running a motion experiment

Running a motion experiment

analyzing data

analyzing data

Sketching out the inside of a battery powered car

Sketching out the inside of a battery powered car


Just like the design class, I’ll be keeping a Flickr account with a full set of photos here. The next blog posts will be more philosophical, but this was a good way to get started with year and what we’ve been working on. Last attachments for this post: the syllabi for the two courses which outline the main content areas, pedagogical practices, and assessment that we will be using in the courses.

MPX10 Stem 2014-15 Syllabus
Hines Design Technology Fall2014 Syllabus
E Kūlia Kākou
Let’s strive and aspire together

Words lead to culture which leads to learning

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A reflection on the book “Choice Words” by Peter Johnston and a commitment to move this work in my classroom forward this year.

Reflecting on the book “Choice Words”, there are powerful examples here about how to build a classroom culture that supports and nurtures learning, builds a culture of agency and makes a real community of learners happen.

One of my goals for this upcoming school year is to not just apply these ideas into my practice but to have my learners become fully aware of them as well – both to help me be more accountable in supporting and building a classroom of kindness, reflection and growth mindsets.

I am powerfully struck by the link between the goals of our program, the IB learner profile and the comprehensive tenants of the book.
One of ways that Johnston expresses this is by referring to the ideas in the book as an epistomology – Which I agree with. In a sense, how we interact and nurture conversation say a lot about our theory of knowing and learning.
As a science teacher, I think I do many of these things because of my philosophical (epistemological) underpinnings of being a constructivist. Questions liked “what would happen if?” And my favorite “why do you think/say that?” align well with my preferred ways to engage a class in discovery ad reflection.

What I feel I need to do more fully and work on are the aspects of building a community of respect and reflection in my learners. Let me give a few specific examples from the book. After some exploratory and explanatory chapters at the beginning, Johnston give specific types of situations in the language that can be engendered for deeper more reflective and powerful learning. These include chapter titles like “noticing and naming”, “identity”, “An Evolutionary Democratic Learning community”.

Most of the chapters start with an introduction to the idea, with some exploration of teacher exchanges, but then zero in on specific kinds of open-ended questions that engage students to think deeper about their learning.

So for example, in the chapter on evolutionary, democratic learning community, he includes examples like

“any complements?” – a means to create focus and listening strategies as well as building a culture of feedback

“are there any other ways to think about that? Any other opinions?” – He makes the point that research shows this is rarely done in classrooms, but the opportunity to create places where students see differing viewpoints is critical – Johnston mentions that research shows that disagreement in ideas is a more powerful and effective way to advance thinking that agreement.

In the chapter on identity, another beautiful quote is:

“what have you learned most recently as a reader?” – What a simple crafted idea that is wonderful because it honors students thinking, engages them to think about their own process in comprehension, and builds a sense that we are learning this together.

In the final chapter titled “who do you think you’re talking to?” He summarizes and dives into the application of these ideas and the outcomes from a culture of purposeful use of language. In doing that, he contrasts some case studies of teachers. He compares two – one whose name is Pam who was well-liked by her students, but does not engender this sense of agency with her students.

In one passage he states:
“It is fairly easy to hear the way Pam thinks of her students. They are people who cannot be trusted to read independently or make productive choices, children who are incapable of having a conversation.”

To move from a teacher-centric class to a community of learners, teachers need to change their beliefs on learners and learning. Johnston doesn’t come out and say or promise we can change this internal belief about learning by just changing our language. He does encourage the possibility that by starting to adopt the language we can start to evolve our beliefs about the transactional exchanges that happen and the value they can bring to improve classroom discourse.

In my role as an instructional coach I need to embrace and model this more fully. As a teacher/facilitator, I need to continually improve my craft and ask my learners and peers to help me be mindful of and shape my language.

The bottom line to me is the title of this post. If I want to get to better, deeper learning in my deeper learning class (MPX), I need to develop a culture that exemplifies the language of an effective community of practice. In order to get to that place I have to craft and shape all conversations and interactions in my room with a mindful approach towards the ideas of “Choice Words”.
My words WILL lead to development of a classroom culture that will ensure that everyone learns with respect and depth.

Addendum: After writing this blog post on the plane back to Honolulu from ISTE, I flipped through Johnson’s more recent follow up book “Opening Minds” and was struck by his close work with the research on mindsets by Carole Dweck amongst others. Not surprisingly, the work between language and student agency is powerful and very closely aligned. but that is another blog post for another day…