Mark Hines EdTech Blog

Another Brick in the Wall

This week’s readings and class time focused on two main ideas: how the instructional design process should be considered within the context of informal learning environments, and consideration of learning theory in looking at exhibit design.

The readings are here:

Braverman, B. E. (1988). Toward an Instructional Design for Art Exhibitions. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 22(3), 85-96.

Schlenk, G. W., & Shrock, S. A. (1991). The Use of Instructional Development Procedures To Create Exhibits: A Survey of Major American Museums.

The very general synopsis of the Schlenck article is a research question on what kind of instructional design approaches are used by museums in preparing exhibits. Although that isn’t really the thrust of my discussion on this blog post, it should be mentioned that although this research was from almost 20 years ago, it makes the case that most museums make a perfunctory effort to consider instructional design practices and exhibit creation, but it is neither prevalent in or thorough in most cases. Perhaps, it is best to say a lot of it is done like action research — that is “if it feels good it is good”.

As always, I am not just interested in the formal context of the focus of informal learning environments by itself. I’m still driven to explore where the overlap between informal learning environments, and the more formal learning environments which have been most of my professional career. With that in mind, and our conversation around both instructional design theory and upcoming visits to Bishop Museum and the Waikiki Aquarium, have me thinking about the impact of field trips as means of merging the informal environments into our formal schooling.

Probably most powerful in my mind, was when I was teaching astronomy back in the 1990s, I took students on a three day trip to the big Island of Hawaii to visit the active volcano, snorkeling in a Marine sanctuary, and visits to the summit Mauna Kea, which was ostensibly what drove the trip, as I was interested in exposing my students to the greatest astronomical Observatory which was a short flight away. Invariably, at the end of the trip, when I asked the students to summarize what they have learned, many commented on it being the most exciting and motivating experience in their educational career. This always surprised me, as although I knew that the trip had wonderful visceral experiences built into it (swimming in a coral reef, exploring lava tubes, seeing 200 inch telescope’s up close) I hadn’t expected it to be that powerful an experience. It always was in the back of my mind that it was a telling commentary about the stark barren experience that most traditional education exposes inquisitive minds to.
But here is the real problem — whenever a teacher wants to take students out of the traditional school day for experiences that we would deem “authentic” it involves a myriad of paperwork and coordination and apologizing to your professional peers for taking their students away from their seat time in their classes. As a result, over the years, although I have encouraged fellow teachers to explore the opportunities offered by taking students into authentic, informal environments, many do not choose to for the reasons stated above. Easier to conform then to challenge the status quo.

In a recent conversation with an administrator, the question came up about the value of a trip during the school day with the question being “can’t the students to do this on their own after school?”. Although I understood the rationale for the question, I felt the need to explain why experiences in the field a few times a semester can have powerful affective influences on students, and increase their motivation, behavior, and willingness to follow through the more traditional school day.

This came to my mind, because in talking about writing good learning objectives, our class this past week struggled with how to construct good learning objectives in the affective domain. When I took students to the Bishop Museum planetarium, I knew instinctively that the opportunity to see the way the stars look at the planetarium, to get out of their normal routine and interact in a different way, and to approach the subject matter from a different perspective well outweighed the inconvenience of taking them away for three or four hours from their normal routine (my opinion). Of course, by that point in my professional career, I had a adopted the mantra that the job of a good instructor is to be an arsonist lighting fires, not a fireman putting them out.

Which brings up another story from this week. I was at the hospital for a routine procedure, and the laboratory technician that was setting up some tests told me that when he was in ninth grade he was removed from his normal classroom, which he was doing academically fine, because he couldn’t help laughing in class because the word “dingy” had come up as vocablary. His family for years had called him “dingy” because he was the smallest of the family. His language arts teacher asked for him to be removed and put into the lower-level class, because he couldn’t help giggling during class time. As a result, he was put into a class with other failing students, where he said they read third-grade level books like “go dog go”. That singular event determined the rest of this person’s life, as he never had another chance to recover and join the academically challenged students at his school. As we talked during the day, he expressed his love of history, art, and literature. He was well read, historically motivated, and a wonderful interpersonal communicator. Yet, he readily offered that he was not smart, based on his experiences that have led from this demotion when he was 14 years old. Why talk about this? He talked at length about his love of Civil War history in particular, in his fulfilling of a lifetime dream to visit Gettysburg this past summer. His vivid recalling of walking the grounds, thinking of the battles on the hills that he knew so well, and Lincoln’s later visit showed an incredible intellect and passion about understanding the historical and social context of this important event. Yet, when I mentioned to him that I thought he would make a marvelous teacher, he insisted he would never be smart enough to do so, because he had never learned to write, since he was put in a lower-level class. I could imagine for Joshua a different outcome in his life, had he been in a school where visiting real sites that engaged and expanded his learning beyond the classroom walls might have led him down a different path.

After talking to Joshua, I couldn’t help but think of Pink Floyd’s great album “The Wall” which includes the lyrics:

We don’t need no education

We don’t need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

In the article by Braverman, he asks the question “…why are learning theories not readily adopted by museum professionals when designing exhibits devoted to art?” (p 86). Braverman also makes the case that there is little research about how art museums and their desire to showcase aesthetic have any ability to evaluate the impact of their exhibits on visitors. In much the same way, traditional classrooms suffer from that same problem of not thinking of the whole child, and how experiences that reach to the aesthetic can engage and transform a learner.
Braverman talks about how the unique experience of the art museum requires this special consideration towards the aesthetic, but taken for a broader perspective, the need to think about affective responses and motivations within all learning is a consideration that all formal and informal learning needs to address better.
Braverman also gives a definition of appreciation (from Kjell S. Johannessen,) “… a skill that is central to the dynamic interaction, or praxis, between art museums in their public.” (Page 88). It reminds me of an old Sidney Harris cartoon. I’ve always found his commentaries on society, science, and their mismatch particularly funny and have shared many with my classes over the years. This graphic says it all to me:

So, as we continue to explore informal environments, I hope to keep thinking about where the interplay between informal and formal can continue.
To that end, this week our high school principal, who used to teach in the Museum school at New York City (mentioned in my previous blog post) will be talking to the class this week a bit about the use of informal learning spaces in formal education. Stay tuned…
Here’s a question to end our visit for today — if students were not required to come to our schools by law, would they? I don’t mean to confuse this with wondering if students are interested in learning, or whether valuable things are happening within the confines of the bricks and mortar of our traditional schools, but would they choose to come to this environment if they could? Museums and other informal environments every day ask themselves that question, because no one comes to them unwillingly. Perhaps it’s because in an informal learning environment, you’re not treated as another brick in the wall.

NECC Summary

This document is the summary report for this year’s conference. Thinking about what’s most readable, I decided to do a little differently. I’ll summarize all five days in a paragraph or two here, and then if you wish you can look for the detailed notes, which are more “bullet style” but have specific tools and links as well as as many comments as I could cram in while I was typing with my laptop and tweeting. Caveat emptor!
After note — for the sake of readability, I broken down each post by day — that way the documents won’t be too far apart from the information that refers to them.

Tuesday June 30
(detailed notes with more info and links at end – this is just a summary)

The first event of the day was a pro and con discussion/debate on the topic of bricks and mortar. This was hosted by NPR’s Robert Siegel and was provocative although at times didn’t really address reality in my mind. not surprising to me, Cheryl Lemke had the best statements to make, reasoned, research-based, realistic. Her session later that day, of course was just as excellent. By contrast, Scott McLeod’s presentation the day before on disruptive technologies did much better job of portraying (what I believe is) the looming crisis in education due to technologies disruptive influence. The video of the session can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/13Bvc2

The first session I attended was Kathy Schrock’s “winning strategies for handling information overload” – Does this woman sleep?
As always, she was well prepared and had a lot of great advice. (I am trying to get the slides from the presentation so to make sure I didn’t miss anything, it was a pretty whirlwind presentation, she covered a lot of ground in one hour)
she was first going over strategies for managing e-mail overload, key advice — switch from pop to IMAP
she talked to the bit about networks — in particular she had reviewed a bunch of different models at some specific recommendations — these went to buy for me to transfer here hopefully I will believe this if I can get the slides from a presentation.

She then went on to talk about smart phones and waxed eloquent on the iPhone — as an owner of every version of this phone since it was released, I couldn’t agree more. A fabulous piece of technology, well-designed, state-of-the-art, visionary. we take it for granted now just two years after it was released and expected every new phone to do what this can do. Need I say more?Her YouTube video in tribute of the iPhone is in her notes

to manage just email she mentioned the email peek- cute device

she also mentioned a device called Chumby -
this is a great little device that keeps all of your social network in gadget/widget stuff off your computer. Touchscreen, 3 inches one button — on/off – simple fun and useful. Retails for under $180 — I gotta get me one of these!

she then went on to talk about a bunch of web 20 tools for things like social networking, blogging, etc. edmodo, diigo, Google docs, ether pad, etc.
here is a provocative one — Foxmarks- for Firefox, maintain bookmarks on one computer, and it shares with all the others that are subscribed to it. This would seem a wonderful strategy for computer lab, so that a librarian/resource person could maintain a set of bookmarks on their computer, and have all of the lab computers subscribe to their foxmarks. to take a closer look at this one…
she posted a website that has links for all of the tools she talked about, as well as a pdf of her presentation here:
http://kathyschrock.net/score/

Gail Lovely’s session
top ten sites for early learners
I believe Gail Lovely is a fantastic resource for elementary education. In this session she spent about three minutes each on 10 tools that you are powerful examples of technology in elementary education. her website does a fantastic job explaining this so I’ll just put the link here: http://glovely09.wetpaint.com/page/TopTen+for+Young+Learners
her general websites are:
http://www.gaillovely.com/
http://glovely.wetpaint.com/

tools mentioned: vocaroo, simplybox, kerploff, yakpak, gloggster, animoto, skype, voicethread, blogs, wikis

Cheryl Lemke, The Metiri Group
The Ripple EffectYes
once again, Cheryl showed why she is unique (well her and Ed Coughlin) in not just talking about technology education, but using research as the focus for both understanding and having a conversation about appropriate uses of technology. Certainly others rely on the research and some folks like Chris Dede are doing the research, but the combination of work her group does in her abilities to ariculate it is always refreshing.
she started her talk by using the research from the November 2008 research white paper by Mazuko Ito et al funded by the MacArthur foundation titled “living and learning the media”. This paper alone was worth attending the session for, as her group made available on their website for download and it is a phenomenal read!
In her presentation, Cheryl points out that teens use the social side of the web for two overlapping but distinct phenomena — the friendship side of the web that they don’t want adults part of, and the learning side of the web which adults can be part of But not necessarily.
She also talked a bit about truth and fiction on multitasking, talk about lesson design using Web 20 tools and what it means to engage deep learning.
She talked about the importance of trends in collaboration and about powerful ways to make online collaborative learning more effective (one example: recent national study shows that in a one-hour class period, only 1.7 minutes are for sustained, engaged conversation with adolescents)
she finished by talking about specific tools and activities that she thinks support the research on learning and are effective.
Her presentation notes are located here:
http://www.metiri.com/presentations/NECC09-Lemke.html
phenomenal!

Monday June 29

{{did not attend morning sessions, as I volunteered from 9-noon}}

I attended A session on Second Life in Education.
Since I arrived about halfway through the presentation they were already into the part where they were talking about sites and visiting them. A few of the sites they visited: the Alamo, which had been set up for last year’s conference in San Antonio. They went to a marvelous site for the war victims from Middle East were each soldier has a plaque or information about them. They visited genome island where you can do things like fly inside the cell and click on the parts to learn more about how they work. At that point the question came up on accuracy and it was agreed that teachers should help the students plan for the appropriate use of these sites by checking them in advance. I had a conversation later in the conference with Westley Field who is working with Linden labs to develop a more controlled easily accessible environment so that some of these issues won’t be as difficult.

I attended a session titled
“teachers learning in networked communities” this was a pilot program with a bunch of schools (U Washington, U Memphis, U Colorado Denver) to build an online community for supporting pre-service and student teaching. They chose the platform Tapped In which they recognized although it is still very old-school in its approach and its compliance with Web 20 protocols, still serve the basic need for them and building a community, having public and private areas, having file repositories, supporting synchronous and asynchronous conversation,etc. the program was very successful for them, however, once the need for the students to be part of the community ended, few stayed on. One of their goals had been to expand the site from her just true service teachers, but they still need to do more to understand and use professional who are not required to come to space. Of course, if we look at the research from Ito that was mentioned in Lemke’s presentation this year, the closer these tools aligned to the more personal networks to students use — things like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the more likely we are to make the spaces inviting enough two continue to sustain conversation professionally. someone else from the University of Washington mentioned that they are looking at using elluminate as a tool to connect students together. (Mark’s personal feeling is that although this is a useful tool to support an online community, you can only be one piece as its synchronous nature doesn’t allow for the full opportunity of knowledge building that happens in asynchronous environments.)

The next session was with Scott McLeod

who maintains a website:
dangerously irrelevant
his goal for this topic was disruptive technologies — based on Christensen’s books and writings. This was a great presentation which was highly attended much to my surprise. Apparently even the most traditional of the public schools are beginning to understand that they need to look at new models of change. He first covered the ground that Christiansen had in his latest book and then talked about things schools need to do in order to survive. One of his points at the heart was the research and viewpoint that if schools don’t make dramatic change happen, they will struggle to change their organization. One model that he discussed was creating a new organization rather than trying to change the one that you currently have. This is much in line with our (MPI) initiative in the high school, where instead of trying to change all the school at once, we decided to try and innovate a school within a school with the hope that we would learn from that school what works and what doesn’t and make further determinations if we want to expand the size and reach. He finished with some insights, what schools should do, more detailed notes are located on the in the documents section listed below

my document repository (notes, slides, etc) here:

The Morning Session was with Knowledge Works foundation who shared their future of education roadmap to the year 2020. This is definitely worth the time to visit and very provocative stuff. Essentially, we explored each of their six forces that they see pushing education in either a positive or negative direction. For each one of these, we had a chance to stop and reflect about the implications as well as examples of these. You can look at my notes or go to their website to get more detail, but the six forces are altered bodies, amplified organizations, platform for resilience, new civil discourse, maker economy, pattern recognition

they have lots of resources on their website that links to examples of this
http://www.futureofed.org/

the afternoon session was a meeting of the special interest groups on technology coordinators sponsored by ISTE. the session was led by Max Frazier who started by talking about the role of the technology coordinator and the challenges it presents.

His slides are posted in my repository as well as my notes. A couple of key things that came out of the session, there is a desire for the group to continue this conversation beyond this meeting today, there’s a recognition that the current economy will cause all of us to rethink some of our core assumptions about providing technology service and campus, and there was a sense of lack of control over budget and policy Center off dictated by other areas of campus — school boards, principals, public initiatives.

my document repository here

Reflection on Malcolm Gladwell keynote at NECC 2009

one of the key ideas that Gladwell explored in his keynote was the significant evidence that both supports the idea of perseverance over talent and its implications for education. There is a very nice summary of his keynote here:
http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/28/face-to-face-with-malcolm-gladwell-at-necc-2009/

at one point, he talks about the success of KIPP schools (http://kipp.org) and their formula for success being more contact time, therefore more “time in the trenches”. If you look at the MET school, their idea of rigour comes not from curriculum that is hammered into kids, but from rich authentic projects that develop rigour.

In particular, Dennis Littky quotes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi … rigour is “the opportunity for young people to experience intense concentration in any activity that requires skill and discipline, regardless of content”

the key idea here, is that two very different schools accomplish the same goal by lengthy hands-on hard cognitive work on the part of learners. In one school that is driven by the teachers, and the other is driven by the direction of a student who is passionate about a topic they have chosen. For our HAIS/HCF schools of the future initiative, we have left the approach that each school takes to themselves. Transformation for each institution will be different, and the good news is that Gladwell’s tenet would seem to imply (and I agree) that the paths that each school takes can be different as long as rigour is a significant part of student work on a day-to-day basis.
He said himself during his keynote that it is probably not so much what schools do as it is how they do it.

interesting stuff…

These are my notes form the sessions I attended today:

Charting a Course For the future of education

Sunday Morning 830 am – 1130 am

Doug Levin – national boards of (NASB) and Dave Moore from knowledgeworks and the foundation

came from cable in the classroom – planning for strategy for futures of ed

created a roadmap – 2020 map for future of education

website: http://www.futureofed.org/
This is a really deep website has lots of resources that support their future trends and give him some votes of data and examples as well as interesting scenarios and pieces to reflect on

we started with a question to group – what will school be like in 2020?
we talked about a range of issues/thoughts

what will drive change?

they have developed six forces that they have identified as shapers of the future of education.
In order: altered bodies,, platforms for resilience, a new civil discourse, the maker economy, pattern recognition

the bottom line is that each of these developments will affect in some way how schools can or must change.

marks thoughts – which of will succeed in leading our schools to change in ways that will help children into their future?

gotta think about clay’s book about disruptive innovation – how will this affect school’s development? All of these forces have disruptive majors in them — some positive, some negative

#1 altered bodies

thought of the day – if you could take a drug that would improve your intellectual performance without side effect would you?

this brings up an issue I think about – dichotomy – there will be 2 societies – those that have gets…will some technologies level the playing field or increase the divide? clearly given our past history, many of the technologies and forces we are talking about will act as dividers, not unifier’s. This is a shame, but reality.

do we teach kids ways of focusing – things like mediattion/focus strategies?
We know there is lots of research (stress/cortisol levels for instance) and yet we do very little in a formal way to help students understand how to create the best conditions psychologically and physically for learning — this is a shame.

interesting observation (me) – he mentioned harvard study about coping mechanism – mark’s thought – prayer is one example of this – the power of church may be drawing on this …
community of schools (think MET) – if stronger connections, better dealing with stress
As we move from elementary to middle to high school, we typically move further and further away from community, and this seems a shame as that sense of community that supports the stress on them During the day students deal with.

#2 amplified orgs
clay shirky – ted lecture – groabnies example
he used a TED video about Josh Grobin and how a community formed both around supporting his career, and a nonprofit to raise money for needy causes. Technology was an enabler that allowed these groups to form.

in our sotf – how to take our amplified organization and make it do more…
is rapid beta testing in ed going to be possible

one of the big ideas – if we can change the isolation of teaching through these amplified networks – then education might be transformed – internet access is pretty ubiquitous, so the ability for teachers to connect pretty much anywhere has become a nonissue

we really need to redefine rigor – need to memorize littky’s definition of this…all of us need to take on the domains we can change and take ownership of them…

littky – “ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – rigour is “the opportunity for young people to experience intense concentration in any activity that requires skill and discipline, regardless of content

#3 platforms for resilience
showed a video of Jamais Cascio talking about autoimmune responses in education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIBMaoiboZ4&feature=player_embedded

we had a bit of a discussion here about schools reaction to banning devices to limit what students can do. The subject came up about the analogy of schools being devoid of tools that students feel comfortable with and therefore becoming less relevant.
discussion around internet access and the reaction little relevance to a world where kids will have their own always on access in the next few years

need to blog on: if most students soon will have data access through their own devices and schools can’t filter, how will schools react
research – grunwald and associates – gap between admin and student perception of tech use and appropriate use. Whereas administrators look at worst-case scenario, the self reporting by teenagers indicated much lower levels of inappropriate technology use than adults assume.

#4 new civil discourse
example of melboune wiki – the city of Melbourne has created a wiki for city planning that allows all members of its community, even from outside their community, to help in urban planning.
and curriwiki – what happens when a community can build knowledge
involvement of parents in school another example — we have a true opportunity here to use technology to create transparency that hasn’t existed in schools before.

#5 Maker economy
see notes – instructables, etc
He gave examples here — plenty on their website — of services and trends that indicate moving away from mass merchandising, and tailoring to individual design, localize products, and green technologies

#6 pattern recognition
how to sift, filter
this is reminiscent of shirky’s filter failure comment on web20 conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI

how to make meaning of data
is web 3.0 going to help? mark’s a comment here — the promise and potential of Web 3.0 (symantic) is one of the future trends of the think is a powerfully understood well enough yet. As meta-data and personal information merge in the cloud, the common experience of the web will be a personalized pattern experience that will take into account our preferences, tendencies, and needs. This won’t address all the problems with making meaning, but it should help.

the future is
local
digital
personalized
stressed
vibrant
collaborative

Arthur Levin oped in edweek feb 20 2009 – the change of schools and learning… Although Arthur has been a fairly conservative voice in education, Dave’s point was that this piece even from a conservative voice indicated both the recognition and need for schools to do more than they are old mission of preparing standardized assembly line workers.

SIGTC – The 21St Tech Leader

Sunday afternoon 1-4pm
(mark left at 3 pm)
background context – ms tech person, moved to writing book for tc fr dissertation

goal – past work
goal – he is an incrementalist

video of doug skinner – day in the life of a tech coordinator (for google teacher academy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5x_GylPdIU

21st tech coordinator – leader in the middle

refers to David Morusund – his 87 book on tech go To coord is the first

dm: need for long term commitment… tough to look at volatile tech
pd
budget
curriculum analysis
transitional period – think long haul (reminiscent of Jukes Digital Diet)

research – even though we look typically at yr1&2 , the substantive work happens into yr 3&4 and beyond…
interesting point here — one of the things in our schools of the future grant was a recognition that the transformation process for schools is a multiyear effort to need support from more than just the first year or two and he agrees with this.

things mark needs to work into his sphere of influence: phones, data, security..others?

slide of Edward De Bono – hats worn by execs

frazier – same idea 0- hats worn by tech coord

teaching & learning
desktop support
administrative computing
network issues
budgeting and planning

new themes for 21st century tech leaders
digital citizenship
convergence
connectivity
data

the data crunch is a reality – how do you manage the amount we deal with

his question – either you need to be a transformational leader (take the early adopters and move on) or a progress leader – incremental change…

here’s a big question (my dissertation)_ what style of leadership will schools use and what success?
give the early adopters resources and go, or support incremental change as an institution… I believe most of us support both of these groups — I suspect how we decide where we put our energies is our higher yield activity. Here’s the big question — if we use the Moretti rule we know that 20% of our effort would give us 80% of our yield – which group is our high-heeled group?

two questions
what is the most pressing issue for us?

what advice to a friend about to become a tech coord?

topics that came up – cell phones, funding and control, data management (forced externally) – getting things to talk to each other (ex email – the way people share information)
amplifying of issues over the internet (cyber bullying, posting inappropriate)
not always control over own money, access to real time data that teacher can use,
gap between admin lack of tech use and need for better understanding, filtering issues…infrastructure and budget during crunch times

digital media – old school texts trying to bring new media

organizational structure and impact on edtech and security concerns (filter, etc)

what does success really mean? target/scapegoat of decisions.

interesting issue

worked on this for the robert craven session I attended this am

here is an embedded voicethread form the workshop:

So today, after getting situated in the hotel it was about 2:30 PM and I decided to take a walk through the city post to get situated, find the convention center, get lunch and see a few sites. Inspired by the splendid table on NPR, I looked up Jane and Michael Stern’s food finds and chose Ben’s chili bowl which is about half a mile from Howard University. From there I walked through sites like the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Smithsonian air and space Museum, the Capitol building and then walked back. I knew it’d been a long hike, and Google mapped it. To my surprise the distance with even greater than expected — 8.7 miles:

View Larger Map

this is the second part of my visit to the Metropolitan school in Providence Rhode Island.
The earlier notes are published in the blog under part one…

lunch with some of the teachers
a tour by Alicia
some sitdown time with some of the students
in participation in a student exhibition as part of their judging panel
– I’ll try to get this post tomorrow

Nancy brought me to one of the building lunchroom’s — I should explain that there are four main buildings on campus and Senate each of the four corners of the property beaches labeled liberty, justice, unity when I can’t remember the fourth of a speech building holds something on the order of eight advisories — two for each grade level.
So I have lunch in one of these buildings with some teachers. we talked about the challenge of the environment — some of the teachers were advisers, a few were LTIs which I think students with learning something integrators — in a sense they’re specialists that help shepherd the process and actress resources for students and advisers. one of the teachers I spoke to, Dennis, was very willing to share the challenge is that his experience has — he had been a traditional teacher in Florida — green biology was his degree work, and he had been teaching Marine science, biology, and environmental science in Florida.
He came up to Rhode Island he was looking for a new environment to teach — and so had to transition to this new paradigm. We talked a bit about the challenge and he was very positive about the adjustment and in going from teaching a single subject, to being a generalist in his advisory role. (This was his second year at the school). The agreed with many of the things that Nancy had told me about the need for organization, the chaos of day-to-day learning (it’s messy), and the truly wonderful pleasure of seeing every student in your advisory being engaged in real work.
If I remember more, I’ll add here about my lunch conversations… I didn’t take notes here because I was eating and talking at the same time
after lunch, I joined the tour with a group of about 15 students from Keene State College in New Hampshire — liberal arts majors they look so young, they look like the students!
The tour was led by a senior — Alicia and we looked at the different buildings and campus including the media Center and the wellness Center. she was another example of a great, highly engaged students. Her brother goes to a more traditional school and I asked her about how that difference plays out and she admitted theft there are days of very different.
One of the interesting parts of the tour, was the media Center which is pretty much managed by a single individual — Brian Mills — he is a daunting task of managing performance space, and their media Center which includes a studio, editing equipment, audio equipment, etc. He clearly has a lot of work — even though he doesn’t have an advisory he works long days and nights to maintain all the resources needed (will see an example of that at the two o’clock exhibition that we attended)

after the tour we were able to sit down with two students — hope and allysa so that we could ask them about their experiences at school. Hope was a senior who had spent the last three years at the New England aquarium working as a exhibit guide, a behind the scenes exhibit curator, and in the medical area working with animals. Her goal was veterinary science. I think she also may have been interested in marine biology as a secondary topic.
Alyssa was new to the school (three months) — she had spent the last couple of years volunteering at a therapeutic writing center — this was before she came to the school. The reason her parents applied her, was the opportunity for her to more fully be involved in the writing Center is a part of her curriculum — and it was clear she was highly motivated by her commitment and her love of working at the center. She admitted that they had become so dependent on her during her internship at if she wanted to switch to a different internship he would probably affect their program adversely. If one of the questions we asked him the students was anything that they would like to see that the program doesn’t have, and a couple of students venture that they’d like a little more rigor in their mathematics and science. I remember in talking to Dennis about Clay Christensen and it struck me that the possibility of using well-designed online learning modules might well fill in some of this gap that falls outside of their internship and advisory experiences in school
what was striking about all the students that we spoke to was their sense of commitment, ownership,

I next attended an exhibition of work from an 11th grade student (Angie). there were about 20 people in the room that she presented her work to and she had about 1 1/2 hours to do this. The group included students, other teachers, her parents, and some members from the community including her mentor. Essentially, at the end of each stage of learning, the students present an exhibition — this was her third quarter exhibition of learning. And this was the highlight of her work
so the highlights of exhibitions — how did the student meet the goals in their learning plan?
How could a student go deeper?
We were give in a form to comment on the quality of the presentation on evidence of learning
there were five A’s that we were asked to comment on:
authenticity
active learning
academic rigor
adult relationships
assessment

for her learning plan, she started by talking about her 75 page autobiography that is due for all students when they graduate. At this point, she has 30 pages completed to date (keep in mind this is due for her in a year and a half.)
She she did a facing history Project and she talked about how she had worked at speaking at a conference regional CES (? This is what my notes say the conference was called) with her mentor, who is a college professor.
In working with her mentor, she worked with teacher development programs, and looked at how she created a product for looking at under served children in the community
for quantitative reasoning she did comparisons of To student teacher is then look numerically at why one was a better candidate than another
for reading she gave examples of some of the books she had read the power of ideas, one person at a time learning goals,

There was a lot of conversation about how they prepare students for college. In particular, they made a point of talking about how they worked on creating a great profile that was more in lines that colleges want to see. Essentially they wanted to get this right.

Back to Angie -in her mentorship she worked with the principal read the evaluations, talk to students, use the observation tools for teacher professional growth. She looked at their reflections, their notes, is very powerful — she was able to see how people write in improving what they do.
Her goal is to do more administrative professional development for teachers after college.
Then, she showed us her project-the video archive of exhibition work from the MET
the purpose was to help newer teachers see what a good quality project looks like. Also, it’s possible to use in class with incoming students and with professional development to help both students and teachers develop a more refined sense of what an exhibition should look like. (Mark’s note to himself — got to read Alfie Cohen’s work on homework)
for her video project need to see the artifacts in the documents to understand what’s happening.
to accomplish this project, she taught herself Final Cut Pro in the use of all the equipment (cameras, microphones, audio interface, etc.) — impressive! She also had to spend many hours entity, as she did to camera shots to show both with the student is doing and a larger view of how the audience plays a role in the exhibition.
All in all a wonderful example of powerful and directed exhibition of quality work that wrapped around self designed and implemented projects that are real and effective.

I have also posted some pdf of school documents here:

 

Summary of my visit to the MET school in Providence Rhode Island
April 6, 2009

http://www.themetschool.org/

I started my day meeting with Dennis Littky. You can find lots of good information about him here: http://www.bigpicture.org/dennis/

For professional development, they do a variety of activities. They have an April conference which lasts three days and has educators from around the United States. They are willing to send people to us to share their knowledge – and Dennis requires that students travel as well, as they have important information that must be art of the sharing
They will also set up special experiences on site: for example they have special program they have set up for Dutch principals — they send 50 for a week to try and implement new changes their country
he also has a whole new plan with his “big picture company” too not just deploy out their expertise to K-12 schools across the country, but he believes he needs to also change colleges and therefore it is planning on opening a new college based on this model called Outward Bound.
He made a point of saying that although high Tech high does wonderful things, their audience is very different. He is proud that 70% of his population are free school lunch, normally 88% of the students drop out in traditional schools, but he has almost 100% graduation rate as well is than 86% college graduation rate. By contrast, he explained that at Rhode Island College (RIC), only 8% of African-American students that enter as freshmen graduate — and this is the students they selected! Another example: only 9% of all community college students in Rhode Island graduate.
He was curious about my area of interest with educational technology and we talked a bit about the role of using technology including things like social tools to support learning. He commented that one of his goals is to hire a person, perhaps out of MIT, who would help teachers and students look at technology as emergent tools.

He also talked a bit about conversations with clay Christensen, in particular his disagreement with him about “disrupting class”. Dennis does not believe that online learning will be as disruptive force in education as clay does.

one of the people I need to get in touch with his Jill Olson — both Dennis and Nancy mentioned her as a point of contact for their big picture schools Project.

So what is the model that Dennis has implemented here at the MET?
Essentially, students spend two days a week in the community working with a mentor doing real work that they have chosen. The school has hundreds of mentor programs that students can choose from, so whether they’re interested in education, law, engineering, science, whatever they can find a project to work within.
(of course, it’s interesting that this comes up in time for me when I’m very interested in apprenticeship learning as a powerful vehicle — for both students and teachers. The notion that Dennis has that we first started with students interest get them working and excited about something that may choose — ownership! — then when they are working with a their advisors, they are much more open and motivated to succeed)
the other three days, they spend on campus in groups of 15 called advisories. One adult advisor starts with the students at ninth-grade meets with them over the course of their four years at the school. The adviser with the support of other specials and volunteers helps develop and shape the learning experience for students so that they work on the five core learning objectives and are part of the math student experience:
– empirical reasoning ( thinking like a scientist)
– analytical reasoning (thinking like a mathematician)
— oral communication (effective writing and oral communication)
–social reasoning? (Thinking like a historian/anthropologist/sociologist)
– personal qualities (habits of mind and personal character)
Dennis was frank, funny, quick minded, confident and most importantly dead on about both the problems in education and his approach to redesigning schools.

After leaving, I met with Nancy his co-director of the school and we spoke for an hour about my questions.
she explained that new teachers and new students have a two-week summer orientation schedule when they go over from the ground up for philosophy and structure of an education at the school. I was very interested in how they do professional development and she explains that there are variety of meetings that happen weekly and monthly for the different parts of the school — advisers, specials, support staff, etc. Advisers meet weekly to go over best practice they also have weekly staff meetings to business of the school. They have regular grade level meetings monthly. They also have monthly staff development where they look at the schools learning plan and continue to work with it. They also have a topic of professional interest — for instance this month was intervention — and meets on this topic as well. For instance they would look at student data and look through different lenses and it to see how to improve their understanding of what students are producing and how best to judge it.

Two weeks before school starts all staff meet for professional development to reconnect, and get ready for the new school year.
The importance of mentoring new advisors is critical. that trend of advisers go out with anonymous advisors to look at depth how they work with mentors in the community
Nancy also talked about how they support veteran teachers and they work on a variety of models for this including shadowing other veterans, visiting other schools, and going up to businesses to reinvigorate their thinking about how mentors work in the community. Nancy mentioned that she will be going to the match school in Boston to look at how they do math tutoring which they find to be an innovative program. So all of their staff consider (sharpening the song) a critical part of their job.
Example, she has four rookies this year at ninth-grade — so they receive specialized training in the summer to help them get ready. Even for the veteran and advisers that are going back to ninth-grade, they take time to reflect on what works and what needs to improve etc.
For Nancy I talked about bringing new teachers on board the question came up about where their experience for teachers in traditional schools was a strength or hindrance and she did mention that they look for the ability for individuals to unlearn what they know so that they can succeed at the school. She did mention that some of their best people have come from nontraditional jobs, but because of the state requirement for certification for teachers, more and more of their hiring teachers and less likely to hire professionals from other fields because of the certification problem. One thing she did mention, was they look for generalists — she mentioned that elementary teachers are generalists by nature and therefore already understand this. They do consider putting different content matter experts in buildings for example, math, science and language arts and his cohort advisors.
I asked about retention of teachers — she said that that has not been a problem, as much as the percolation up of advisers into more administrative roles. For instance there are 12 12th grade advisers in this year, next year two are going into new roles at the school and two were going outside of the school to other jobs (some in the partner schools).
She also talked about how after one or two cycles of advising, some advisers begin to experiment with different models within their organization — a specific example was a teacher who is interested in combining ninth and 11th grade students together (something like 7/9 graders and 8/11 graders) to see how the multiage nature of this would drive student work.
I asked a question about evaluating advisor performance, and she mentioned criteria like maintaining relationships with mentors in their organizations, observation of the way they work their advisories, the important skill of organization and coach-ability. She spent some time talking about how important both organization and multitasking is for advisers. She also talked about the importance of helping people understand the importance of organizations, their commitment to this program, and how to make sure they feel attended to through this process.
Dennis and Nancy are moving forward with expanding this model, both throughout the state of Rhode Island, and nationwide. They formed a group called “the big picture schools” — right now 65 schools are involved. She mentioned Jill Olson is someone who could get names of other contacts within the schools, as they try and refer request for visits to these outside schools that may be closer to the original request these.
Although not all the schools adopt all of the practice of the original MET school, the basic criteria are there — still out two days a week to work in the community, still believing that you plan learning “one student at a time”
advisers are expected to go out at least once a month to make sure that the student work at a mentor site is progressing well.
They have a position — internship coordinator — who mentors the internship, planned celebrations, sends cards, gift certificates
there is also a partnership person who reaches out to organizations to develop mentors — there is also a database person that tracks mentors and make sure that they stay in the flow
mentors find the experience powerful for their organizations, and the vast majority come back for more students after one set of graduate

that’s all for this post — it’s still more to come:
lunch with some of the teachers
a tour by Alicia
some sitdown time with some of the students
in participation in a student exhibition as part of their judging panel
– I’ll try to get this post tomorrow