A week of construction and reflection

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Mark Hines

Well, here we are eight weeks into the semester. What are we up to these days? And for that matter, what’s on my mind about our work?

Let’s start with interacting with text for meaning. We often in education asked students to read text to acquire new terms and concepts, to expose students to different opinions and to consider different perspectives and approaches. This week in the design class the students were reading some different articles on the importance of ergonomics as they go through the process of designing, prototyping and testing their chair designs.
As I was looking through their notes, there was a wide gap between some students and others. As I was thinking about the role that these notes played, I realized I was having the students take the notes to deepen their understanding of the field, but I wasn’t really having them interact with their own thinking enough. Below are a couple of pictures of work I considered exemplary because they show students not just taking down ideas, but organizing, reflecting and sketching to try and deepen their meaning.

Matt’s Sketches on good ergonomics

notice Samantha’s interaction with her own text

some of samantha’s notes

notice how matt organizes through color and offsetting text

There are certainly many ways to go from this initial data mining activity to more meaning. I realized I wasn’t doing enough to have them consider their own work, so I asked them to go back through their notes and highlight three important concepts and two areas where they felt that they didn’t really understand the ideas fully and annotate those in a way so that we could talk about what they learned and what they still have questions about. I also debated whether having them do a think pair share activity would be helpful so they could talk about that – I plan to have them do that when they come back together with me next class period. All of this is tied to working towards creating a more reflective process in their learning. Their blogs are another element in doing this.

As a part of the design class we have been working on re-designing the student chair experience. They have created designs in sketch up make:

They have been working on printing these in our 3-D printers, which added another layer of technology to this project. The last step is to create a full scale prototype out of cardboard. I realize that most of them have not made a full model out of cardboard before so to get them warmed up, we had them research ways to work with cardboard and then pick a small-scale project to build from the following website: http://www.ikatbag.com/2011/03/how-to-work-with-cardboard.html

Today they showcased their constructions which took about an hour and a half of class time:

mini top hat

hinged gift box

sabers and swords

top hat design – love the aesthetics

mini top hat

dragon boat

alien space ship (the inside was detailed as well)

top hat with examples of ways to adhere edges

so for them, the next step now is to build the chair out of cardboard – more to come on that activity…

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The 10th grade MPX students have still been exploring issues around transportation, but we’ve also been trying to understanding the kinematic equations of motion which are part of our physics content as well as a deeper conversation about motion in transportation. One of these sidebar projects I’ve had them working on is building a catapult by first converting the design into orthographic representations, building a one quarter scale model out of chopsticks with the ultimate goal of building the catapults, which we will start tomorrow. There’s many layers to this particular activity – working with the mathematics of scaling, attention to detail around design and construction, understanding how we move from concept to design to construction and central to the core content, the physics of projectiles… The pictures below show the scale models that the students completed which took a couple of hours of class time between creating the schematics which I showed in my last blog, and the final products you see below:

careful measurements

finishing touches

attention to detail

competed 1/4 catapult scale models

construction of scale models

Hopefully by the next time I create a blog post, we’ll see examples of their final product work. Tomorrow we pull out the power tools and let them have at the full construction! Speaking of which, our ninth graders just started working on their first construction which is building tables that they will be using to do their full scale aquaponics constructions on during the course of the year:

engineering: from design to construction

mpx 9 construction team

working in our make-shift lanai shop

When we say we believe in constructivism, we really get our hands dirty!

Knowledge, Understanding and Application

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Mark Hines

The work over the last two weeks in our exploratory class has been really focused on three pieces that I am working to weave together for our students. In the common core standards for mathematics there is an emphasis on three domains of learning: procedural knowledge (I will refer to as knowing) application and understanding. In a sense, the work that we are trying to do in both mathematics and science is to build not just the knowledge of things like definitions or how to solve problems, but putting them into real-world context so that we can use this knowledge to solve problems, and to apply that information to novel situations.

So how does this play out over the last two weeks? In our mathematics work, we have been looking at solving algebraic expressions which is a foundational skill that will allow the mathematical models that we are developing on our science side to be more fully understood and accessible so we can solve for a wide range of problems. As a school, we are working with Dr. Milfreid Olson from the University of Hawaii Curriculum research development group (CRDG) to help us reflect, strengthen and deepen our approaches in mathematical work throughout campus.
In our class, that has meant doing some traditional math practice work with the equations and eventually inequalities as well as moving on to more complex functions like quadratic equations which will help us better express and understand motion that is both linear and constant as well as changing and accelerated.

As an example, we just did a investigation on Wednesday that had students rolling a golf ball down an inclined plane to try and better understand its motion through the mathematical model generated by looking at its position as a function of time. I’ve included an example of graphs and mathematical models that the students generated as a part of that study below.

investigating motion of golf ball

golf ball rolling in action

analyzing video capture of motion

Cami explains the math model in numeric, graphical and motion map forms

What is notable here to me is in order to get to the kind of representation you see, it requires students to do all three phases: knowledge, application and understanding. We can deepen this more in the post investigation that will occur on Friday as we look at different inclines, try to use these models as predictive representations of the real world and try to come to a more complete understanding of what the unit analysis and the mathematical function tell us about the motion.

The ultimate goal is to make this real world applicable and we are in the midst of learning about the mechanics of bicycles as a part of our year-long investigation in transportation. This week we spent our double block on Tuesday taking apart cleaning up and reassembling the different bearing systems that allow a bicycle to translate force into motion by reducing friction.

using torque to take apart the crank shaft

using torque to take apart the crack shaft

taking apart the bottom bracket to expose the bearings

galen explains the roll of bearings

All of these activities lend themselves to rich meaningful conversations around terms like friction, torque, force, procession, rotational mechanics, mechanical advantage, simple machines and much more. We will be using part of our time on Friday to unpack some of the terminology and physical understanding that was easily evidenced by their work on the bicycles.

There isn’t always a perfect fit between the work we are doing with our math, science and technology (STEM) but as much as we can, we are trying to draw meaning between these investigations so that we are weaving together these strands into a more tightly integrated and understood unit about our investigations of the physical world.

On the design process, iteration and feedback

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Mark Hines

Over the past 2 weeks, we have been working on a design challenge on improving student chairs (brief posted last blog).

Learners have looked into empathy by interviewing and observing MPI students in chairs across campus.

From that they have defined the problem more clearly. They have identified a set of design problems to address: hardness of seats, movable writing surface, greater mobility, flexible back rests…just a small sampling…

This past week was spent on the ideation phase – coming up with ideas on the design. The learners first started sketching ideas in their book, then took those ideas and scaled them up for a feedback loop with other members of the class – you can see pictures of this below. This kind of activity really serves two critical functions. First, it provides an opportunity for learners to assess their own thinking about what a quality drawing should have, and what strengths and improvements they can recommend to someone else. It also gives the receiver of this information opportunity to embrace feedback that is both supportive and helpful so that they can improve their own work. This kind of structured class activity builds agency in learners as they learn to see each other as a means to improve their work, and therefore increases the importance of conversation and critical thinking in our class. The next step will involve them editing these drawings to include the feedback and to reflect on the importance of this kind of formative strengthening of their work.

Some of Kris’s ideas on share design in his sketchbook

Some of Samantha’s quick sketches of chair ideas

Feedback loop in progress

Students getting feedback

The learners also researched the field of ergonomics. instead of giving them an assigned reading, they created a database of articles, websites, information briefs all of the topic of ergonomics. we did a thinking routine protocol that asked the learners to share their information and come up with 12 deep questions about their reading – we will follow up on Tuesday with time to pick out the most important questions we need to understand as a part of our study.

A few of the websites students found and described regarding ergonomics

The other activity we did was to start building the skills around using Sketchup Make. Learners completed a series of tutorials that allowed them to understand the basic ways to use the toolbar in the program, and understand how to build and subtract material and a virtual space. they will actually have a design quiz next week where they need to model a specific object. Last year the group needed to design a coffee cup. This year’s challenge is a surprise!

Designing with sketchup

Working with sketchup make

So, next week we move on to the phase of prototyping after we create a virtual version of their design using Sketchup Make. Once they have a design completed, they will print it in our 3-D printers. Once this completed that, they will build a full-scale model using cardboard. once that’s completed, a judging panel will test their designs and give one more round of feedback.

Laying the Foundation

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Mark Hines

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 – ideating

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.

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

Running a motion experiment

analyzing data

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

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Mark Hines

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…

Connect Learning, Connected World – ISTE 2014

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Mark Hines

Currently in Atlanta Georgia to participate in ISTE2014. As a part of that, I am presenting a two-hour poster session on mobile applications in a project-based learning classroom. I was particularly interested in sharing applications that were open-ended, constructive and creative. I grouped my applications into four main categories:
– data analysis and simulation
– web, blog and writing
– graphics and infographics
– media

To do the poster session, I created four panels to go on the board – I’ve attached these below as images,

and then I put together a slideshow presentation that showed some of the same examples and I have included the embedded YouTube video below.

The pdf version is here – the links should work for that:

Mobile Apps and PBL

It was a lot of fun putting it together, as it gave me chance to look through student work over the last two years and find interesting ways in which we have used iPad applications to support the kind of student driven project-based work that we are committed to in our MPX program.

Looking back at 5 years of School of the Future

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Mark Hines

Last week Monday April 28 was our last Community of Learners Meeting for our schools involved with the “Schools of the Future” grant initiative. Although our work continues as individual schools, we will need to develop new ways to connect and converse on our work. As a part of the last get together I put together a slide presentation reflecting on the journey and what it meant to be involved. My slide deck is included both as a pdf and slideshare show.

Schools of the Future: year 5 reflection from mhines

PDF version linked below:
sotf final prez dole cannery

My Deeper Reflection about Deeper Learning 2014

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Mark Hines

Deeper Learning 2014 Reflection

I suppose I should start my reflection by reminding myself what the purpose of the conference was based on their own language:

Connect – I have made several new connections and have deepened my relationship with several old connections.
Innovate – I have new ideas for how to better support deeper learning in my organization, school, or classroom.
Experience – I will experience deeper learning for myself, which will help me to apply deeper learning principles to my own work.

so measured against their own questions, here is some of my thoughts

***It is worth pointing out that ALL the conference materials for the sessions are free and available at : https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/ **********

Wednesday: Deep Dive: Teaching Science with Robots with Dr Karl Wendt

After walking us through a series of robots that he had built – from underwater robots to programmable motorized robots – Karl introduced us to the project of the day – building, and testing a small entry-level robot that cost less than $10 to build called spout.

resources for all of his work are located here:
https://sites.google.com/site/discovercreateadvance/home

One of the strengths of what he’s doing, is he made a series of short instructional videos that show how to build the robot. My partner was Ben Daley, and we agreed that by doing it as a series of self directed videos, there was a sense of pacing and authenticity in constructing that would’ve been very different if it’d been synchronously teacher led. We found his work on these videos to be excellent, and felt that we could initiate this project right away.

My Take Aways: The thing that struck me about this project/deep dive was that there was a good principle at play here: the fun part begins with the students building the robot. The hook is that in order for the students to solve the challenges, there needs to be enough core content knowledge (electricity, torque, light, friction, switches, etc.). Depending upon the way the activities of the challenges are set up, it’s entirely possible to cover different branches of physics and physical science. That to me was the strength of this activity – in the kind of work that we do with STEM education, the way to get kids engaged in by bringing some authentic design challenge or construction. Careful selection conversation and building an adequate resource library to support learning will help shape the learning that needs to be part of the academic rigor. Karl’s webpage for his resources is located here:
https://sites.google.com/site/discovercreateadvance/projects-1
Nice. Design.

After dinner, there was movie night and a panel discussion. The teaching channel has built a resource area that includes 50 videos that are meant to be short explorations of specific practices of schools in the network (looking at student work, advisories, comity partners, etc). this is a great source that I plan to use extensively in my work both on campus and outside of campus. the video series is located here:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/deeper-learning-video-series

Thursday:
Keynote with Ron Berger.
At some point, they will put the video of this keynote online. My guess it will be linked somewhere from the main page here: http://deeper-learning.org/dl2014/
Ron talked a bit about beautiful work, but the highlight of his presentation was four 8th grade students from Polaris Charter Academy in inner city Chicago. Their presentation was engaging, compelling, executed flawlessly, and a powerful story. Their work started with the investigation of the preamble of the Constitution but evolved into a study of gun violence in their neighborhood and what that told them about their freedoms and liberties and protection for the common good.  If this video does get put online, I highly recommend you watch it!

Looking at student work
attendees were put into groups of about 10 and given a piece student work. Facilitation of the session was led by a high-tech high student – our young lady was Killian and she did an excellent job leading and guiding our conversation. We looked at a compiled magazine that was created by sixth grade students to answer their big question of inquiry about different cultural and scientific theories about the end of the world. Our group had an excellent conversation about the things we saw that indicated deeper learning was evident, and places where we think the work could have been made stronger.
My take away from this one was a recognition that we need to more regularly look at our own student work as a team to help us decide how we are doing in looking at the rigor of our work, as well as how well it meets the other deeper learning characteristics like collaboration, developing academic mindsets, and problem solving.
Hour. Well. Spent.

Session 1: From Scratch with Scratch with Don Mackay
In this session, we were led through a series of design, Inquiry, and challenges about our understandings of electricity and magnetism. The documents for the workshop were here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-1

After investigating , we were challenged with building a spinning motor from the equipment that he gave us. One of the things that made this interesting was the play between designing and exploring what we understood about electromagnetism. You can see that in the document linked above.
What were my big takeaways? I really feel that the pedagogical approach Don took was excellent – in our modeling terms from ASU, he began his studies with a discrepant event which challenged our notion of what we understood about the phenomena that underlie a particular field of study – in this case of electromagnetism. I like the bite-size nature of what he designed to explore this naïve understanding that we might have. I think this would suit well as ways to build knowledge in projects we do that a more extensive so that we’re creating place for rigorous conversation about what we understand. I’m going to try that with our light project will be doing in May.

Session 2: From Maker Space to Maker Campus with David Stephen
Wow. I had never met David until this day, but he was a teacher and the architectural designer of the interior spaces for the high-tech high buildings. Wow. He led an excellent, progressive session about the work that he does, and how he sees the importance of space as one of the ways to create and support student agency and 21st century teaching. Instead of summarizing what he did, here are my tweets I sent out for his session (there are in reverse order last to first):
 #deeperlearning Session with David Stephen http://www.newvistadesign.net Provocative, Progressive, Powerful ideas on Agency by Design 
#deeperlearning ideas for transforming spaces on the cheap: Make Space http://dschool.stanford.edu/makespace/ Great book. Easy to read. Low hanging fruit. 
another great site on maker ideas – The Fab Lab http://fab.cba.mit.edu #deeperlearning 
#deeperlearning the resource at @AgencybyDesign is tied to the Making Thinking Visible team as well. too cool! 
Two useful resources on design: http://www.archachieve.net and http://www.designshare.com Great ideas abound! #deeperlearning 
#deeperlearning SO much of our conversation on Agency by Design is reminding me of the work by Pine and Gilmore on the “Experience Economy” 

#deeperlearning Agency By Design is a project out of Harvard Project Zero http://www.pz.gse.harvard.edu/agency_by_design.php … 
#deeperlearning great turn of phrase from Davis Stephen: “airport grade” soft furniture. Love it! I’ve seen blown apart bean bag chairs! 
#deeperlearning how to create inviting educational spaces – David Stephen uses the term ‘artifactorium’ to define exhibit space feel of HTH 
#deeperlearning with David Stephen of New Vista Design talking about creating Student Agency By Design “From Maker Space to Maker Campus” 

His three shared documents are on the materials page under session 2 :
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-2

 My Take Aways: This session rekindled in the and interest and passion around the importance of facility design editing needs to both support and lead teachers needs and behaviors into the place they need to be and to not reinforce things that are keeping them from advancing their professional practice. This topic has been of high interest to me since we started designing the Weinberg technology Plaza on our campus back in 1998. I definitely want to spend more time going through his resources and the agency by design website mentioned above.

Friday:
Session 3: Beautiful, Beautiful Math with Marcia Dejesus-Rueff

We had about 16 people in this session and we looked at ways to bring Art (poetry, dance, musics) into the mathematics that we do. I really liked the fact that her compelling case was mathematics is a search for patterns. These patterns can be found in poetry, dance, music, just about any art form we looked at a Dylan Thomas poem, and a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window as ways to create a linking between art and mathematics. Her documents can be found on the session 3 resources page here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-3

my takeaways: I am still professionally challenged by looking for rigorously appropriate and engaging art that can lead to deep understanding of algebra to mathematical principles. the session provided me with opportunities to look at some other examples of how that looks.

Unconference Sessions:
Polls were taken on Thursday to determine the topics that would be offered on Friday. They were a variety of sessions offered that looked at everything from how to start your own deeper learning school, to what assessment looks like, to professional development strategies for teachers.
I attended:
The Leader’s Guide to Deeper Learning with Ken Kay and James Gibson
Ken is now at EdLeader21, and the session focused on walking us through the deliberate planning process and leading a school through transformation to deeper learning. At our tables, we modeled the process of developing core competencies, identifying new student skills necessary, and finished by proposing strategies to move towards these goals. The pictures of the chart paper are located here:
https://flic.kr/ps/2Rxk1U

the resources that they shared in the workshop are located in session 3 folder here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-3

Other Thoughts:
Larry Rosenstock mentioned in his address the importance of recess for our group as a means to connect with familiar and new colleagues. I can’t agree more with that impact – whether it was lunch time, or just corridor conversations, or the after hour social events, the group used the time outside of the sessions at least as powerfully if not more so as a means to explore, connect, challenge and extend their thinking about their work. Looking towards our conference in November (http://sotfconf.org) there was a lot we could take away from what work here at deeper learning 2014.

Student work is everywhere in High Tech High. Every time I come I take pictures to add to my collection – but this time with different intent for me. Since our students are going to work on building projects for the rest of the year, I wanted to capture some examples of already displayed student work to challenge my students to think of how they could make something as good as or better than what they see in the images. I have included a few examples below.

Last Word
One of the last things we were asked to do was fill out a post card with at least one idea we would implement. I wrote three:
for my MPX program, bring more student work protocols into our meetings
for our work with Kupu Hou, find ways to sustain a community of learner model that will more directly influence the attendees to stay connected over a longer period of time
for work with the Hawaii education leadership Summit, rethink what the topic might be by spending more time asking our intended audience what would suit their needs past so that we can align our work with their needs

MPX STEM Week of March 10 update

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Mark Hines

The past couple of weeks in our class have been focused on a few ongoing projects:

Energy Project:
Over the course of the past semester students learned the ins and outs of energy audits – not just the science of electricity but a more broad view of alternative options and conservation approaches. Trips to places like Hawaiian Electric and Kahuku WInd Farms were brought in to have them consider the ways we are trying to address energy needs of the island. For their culminating activity, the students have come up with a project that would change someone’s behavior around energy use. Student ideas cover a wide range ideas. One group is creating ad designing eye catching stickers to go near places like light switches, where a change in behavior will save energy and educate.

Another group is developing an infographic on alternative wind energy to help people understand why these are such an important past of our mix of options. A few groups are making videos that help people everything from ghost/phantom loads to a kitchen survey to better understand how to save.

One group is developing a system to save on wasted food and energy in refrigerators.

These projects wil be featured in the next OwlLine and are slated to be finished the first week back from spring break.

Continued Math Work
Although we try and integrate our math as frequently as possible, we also do stand alone investigations of mathematics to practice and apply core ideas in algebra 2. Three examples from the past 3 weeks:
– we studied rational expressions, did some practice problems, then tried to apply it to solve the classic “When will we reach the middle of the journey” challenge that airlines typically give passengers on long flights. Students were given real head wind and distance measures and tried to determine the total travel time for a jet doing a round trip LAX to HNL.
– we determined the cost of running a water cooler on campus based on current electrical load and pricing from Hawaiian Electric. This required them looking at ratios and dimensional analysis to solve.
– We did practice problems this week to better understand radical expressions, but will use it to design a tank and pool system next week to apply the ideas to a real world problem

Personal Project Time
We restarted the personal project time in both Humanities and STEM class to give the students a class period a week to design and implement a project of their passion and choosing. The information for the project is given below. Students have already submitted proposals and we are seeing much clearer and achievable project ideas than last semester.

MPX 10: PIP/ PEP

You get one period each week in Hines and Davis to work on a project of your choice. The constraints are that a) your project must help someone b) you must include all four disciplines in some way in your project: English, US History, Physics, and Algebra II.

Your project must be an ORIGINAL IDEA.

You may work with up to one other person on this project provided that are with you in either Hines’ class or Ms. Davis’ class together.

*

In-class time for project will be graded on a 3 point scale, judging on your focus, engagement, and productivity during this time.

March 11th: Draft of Proposal Due.

March 13th: Final Proposal Due

April 15th: Model or prototype is due.

April 30th: Second, improved model or prototype is due.

May 7th: Feedback session with community members who specialize in your area.

May 22nd: Final presentation off campus to parents and community members, all possible funders of your product or service.

Where to next?

For the STEM side, once we come back from break we have two more projects to undertake:

April: The Water Park Ride. We will be designing and building a portable, exciting, safe backyard water slide (we had wanted to try and do this in time for Ho’olaulea, but we needed to push this into April.

May: Waves, Light and Sound Exhibit. We will build exhibit boxes that highlight certain features or the wave and particle nature of light and examine wave phenomena in general.
The goal is for these to be displayed in the Watase Courtyard.

Building Knowledge and Assessing Learning

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Mark Hines

It strikes me that three things converged on the same professional question over that past month or so.

School:
In a previous blog post, I mentioned how we at MPI are engaged in the act of developing more purposefully conversations with students about the criteria used for assessing learning. We call this “co-constructing criteria”. Since I’ve talked about this before, I don’t want to go into detail, but I do want to point out that it implies there is a big difference between assessment and evaluation – assessment in the service of learning is a conversation with a student about learning targets, level of completion, and mapping out a pathway to get there. It draws the student and the teacher onto the same side of the table to ask the question “How will WE know when you have reached a sufficient level of proficiency or reason mastery?”

University:
Over the past two months I’ve been taking my data from online conversations, coding them and now I am making meaning of the data in order to finish my dissertation about knowledge building in online communities. One of the key aspects of my research is trying to more closely look at knowledge building principles as a means to evaluate the value of an online community of practice (CoP). (Etienne Wenger defines a CoP as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”).

In “A Brief History of Knowledge Building” by Scardamalia and Bereiter, they state:

“Knowledge building has several characteristics not shared by constructivist learning in general, although common to organizational knowledge building. Two of these are:

Intentionality. Most of learning is unconscious, and a constructivist view of learning does not alter this fact. However, people engaged in knowledge building know they are doing it and advances are purposeful.

Community Knowledge. Learning is a personal matter, but knowledge building is done for the benefit of the community.”

Scardamalia, M. and C. Bereiter (2010). “A brief history of knowledge building.” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 36(1).

I believe one of the tangible benefits of good project-based learning is a sense of both purposeful knowledge building in our community, and intentionality in how we address looking at our work as a part of our community to strengthen our own personal learning.

Deeper Learning Network:
In the #dlmooc Deeper Learning MOOC last week, the topic was on assessment. Much of the conversation focused on assessment in the service of learning – that is, assessment that happens during the learning as a means to give students feedback, direction, additional strategies to support their building of knowledge – which is happening in conjunction with their peers in their teacher as a conversation. This to me has much of the same hallmarks as knowledge building mentioned above. In the end, there can be different assessments at the end to evaluate learning, but the act of formative assessment is an application of knowledge building principles and it’s exciting to see how it is the most significant step in the learning process.

“How do you know that?” In my training back in the 1990s on the Modeling approach to learning science (http://modeling.asu.edu), that question of how do you know something became a critical one for us to unpack students’ thinking. To me, it ties together these ideas of knowledge building, and assessment in the service of learning that seem to have converged in the last couple of weeks.

Dr. Mark Hines Blogorama

Exploring issues in 21st Century Learning, Transforming Education, EdTech, and my PostDoc Work at University of Hawaii