Just do it!

from Getty Images


As we approach the end of another school year, teachers look forward to a few precious weeks of summer to reflect, recuperate, and prepare for the upcoming fall. This period is an excellent time to consider how our students learn and, even more importantly, how our teachers grow in their practice. For those of us who advocate for deeper learning, it’s clear that there are structural issues with how teachers develop professionally and how adolescents are taught in schools.

The problem partly stems from a long history of schools being designed around a “Tell, Show, Do” approach. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this method, it often creates a gap between telling, showing, and doing. As a former Boy Scout assistant scoutmaster, I’ve seen firsthand how skills like using a knife, administering first aid, or leading a group are taught using this approach. However, the challenge lies in the delay between the different stages of learning.

Consider learning to ride a bicycle. We wouldn’t spend years teaching about all the parts, testing for understanding, and separating components like wheels and pedals from balance. We certainly wouldn’t wait long between showing and letting the learner practice. Yet, in both teaching and student learning, we often focus extensively on individual parts without letting them play the whole game. The line “when do we use this information?” has been part of the student voice for a long time. Historically, learning happened through mentorship and apprenticeship, where learners worked alongside experts, observed, listened, and practiced actual skills incrementally.

In his book “Learning to Leave,” Elliott Washor argues that effective learning involves dovetailing, doing, showing, and telling in incremental steps without delaying practice. This concept is crucial as we help teachers integrate deeper learning into their work. Providing opportunities for them to practice is essential.

In an article about microcosms of practice, Jal Mehta advocates for teachers starting with a unit (a microcosm) to experiment with pedagogical and assessment practices in deeper learning, whether it’s project-based learning, inquiry, place-based learning, design thinking, or other student-centered approaches.

This leads to the central idea of this article: if we truly learn best by doing, how do we ensure that this happens in our professional learning? One approach is providing teachers with opportunities to practice their new skills in the classroom. This summer, we will work with a group of teachers from Nānāikapono Elementary, introducing them to deeper learning design concepts and then observing, sharing, and building on what works during their four-week summer program. This summer lab approach offers a rich opportunity to just do it, with support and opportunities to learn from and refine practices that enhance engagement, evidence collection, and learning in their classrooms. As Dewey said “we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.”

Research shows that experience increases teachers’ effectiveness and efficacy. One of our biggest challenges is giving teachers the chance to not just be told or shown new teaching methods but to put them into practice. It’s time to just do it!

AI generated – “PBL educator saying Just do it”

AI in Education: Navigating the Waters of Deeper Learning – Truly Living in Permanent White Water

“A female Polynesian teacher swept up in white water using her desk to navigate through looking confident” prompt, Mid-Journey, Discord Server 13 Aug. 2023,

“A female Polynesian teacher swept up in white water using her desk to navigate through looking confident” prompt, Mid-Journey, Discord Server 13 Aug. 2023,

The term “Permanent White Water” comes from Peter Vail’s “Learning as a Way of Being (1996) and has always been a powerful metaphor for ongoing change, and never more true than at this moment.

Navigating The White Water with Deeper Learning

Much like the waters of the Hawaiian Islands, deeper learning comprises moments of turbulence, tidal pulls, following seas, and sweet rides on waves – if you can catch them! It’s about reading the water, grappling with real-world challenges, and emerging with an enduring understanding. In our journey at Kupu Hou Academy, we’ve always emphasized the importance of being present, of truly immersing oneself in the learning experience, whether it’s understanding the complex interdependence of our local water systems or the intricacies of a mathematical concept. At its core, deeper learning, as described by Mehta and Fine in the book “In Search of Deeper Learning” revolves around the pillars of “Identity, Mastery, and Creativity.” It’s not just about acquiring knowledge; it’s about forging a strong sense of self, mastering complex skills, and channeling that mastery into creative endeavors. It is this kind of learning that makes knowledge powerful, transferable and engaging.

AI: The New Current

Enter AI. This technological marvel promises to revolutionize education and be disruptive to entrenched systems and past methodologies and beliefs about teaching and learning. As champions of student-centered learning, how does it fit into our deeper learning framework? Can it enhance the richness of our learning experiences, or will it merely streamline them, potentially robbing us of the ‘grappling’ essential to true understanding?

Imagine a classroom where AI-driven platforms adapt to each student’s learning style, providing real-time feedback and challenges tailored to their current understanding. It’s not about making the journey smooth; it’s about ensuring it is meaningful and aligned with the learner’s “just right” feedback and support.

The Confluence of Culture and Technology

Drawing from our experiences, like the insights gained from indigenous perspectives managing and appreciating water, it’s essential to approach AI with a balanced view. Technology, when integrated with cultural and local contexts, can provide a richer, more holistic learning experience. The stories, the narratives, the connections – they all matter. And AI when used as an adaptive tool can help weave these threads together, creating a tapestry of learning that’s both deep and wide.

Charting the Course Ahead

As we navigate these turbulent waters, it’s crucial to have a clear sense of where we are going. Much like the attached picture (that’s Mark steering a crew off Manana Island near Sandy Beach on Oahu) we need to read the waters we are in AND have a commitment to the ultimate destination we are heading to. Just as we have supported hundred of teachers over the past years in developing meaningful projects and inquiries for their learners, integrating AI into education requires clear goals (Got a good Essential Question?), purposeful learning, assessment criteria, and continuous feedback. We need to ensure that our students not only reach their destination but also cherish the journey.

The fusion of AI with deeper learning presents both challenges and opportunities. As educators, it’s our responsibility to ensure that we harness the potential of AI while staying true to the principles of deeper learning. The journey promises to be exciting, and I invite all educators, students, and tech enthusiasts to join us as we chart this new course.

**This draft was supported by conversations with ChatGPT on August 13, 2023

Reference:
Vaill, Peter B. Learning as a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Mehta, Jal, and Sarah Fine. In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

It’s about the journey, not just the destination!

Active Learning = Real Learning

It’s been too long since my last post. TOO LONG. Not for lack of thinking or amazing things that have been percolating in my brain. Just TOO LONG. Intimidated by the process of writing cogent prose? Probably. Lazy? Maybe. Here goes….

One of the joys of being part of a learning community – a REAL PLC is the ability for all to step up and step back. We share, we trust, we empathize, we care. And we read and reflect with religious fervor. (shout out to Phil, Deanna, Sophie, Melissa, Susannah, Josh and Leigh). This post is from one of those things we passed around and shared.

In Peter Nilsson’s “Educators Notebook” from the week of September 15 there was a published article from the National Academy of Sciences titled “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom”. Two major ideas:
Students involved with active learning learn and remember more than their peers who were learning in more traditional passive (teacher centric) classrooms. OK. For those of us Deeper Learning evangelists not a big surprise.
Students who learned in teacher centric (lecture) classrooms felt they had learned more than students who were in active learning classrooms. Even though they had not!
At some level this should not have surprised me as much as it did. After a decade of Deeper Learning work in my MPX classroom, it was not uncommon to have some students feel they weren’t learning as much as their peers who were in more traditional classrooms.

Why? The authors of the research put it well:

Having observed this negative correlation between students’ FOL and their actual learning, we sought to understand the causal factors behind this observation. A survey of the existing literature suggests 2 likely factors: 1) the cognitive fluency of lectures can mislead students into thinking that they are learning more than they actually are (30, 31) and 2) novices in a subject have poor metacognition and thus are ill-equipped to judge how much they have learned (27–29). We also propose a third factor: 3) students who are unfamiliar with intense active learning in the college classroom may not appreciate that the increased cognitive struggle accompanying active learning is actually a sign that the learning is effective. We describe below some evidence suggesting that all 3 factors are involved and propose some specific strategies to improve students’ engagement with active learning.

The money line in that paragraph is “students who are not familiar with intense active learning…may not appreciate increased cognitive struggle”. Yes. Knowledge construction is a process that only the learner can do by “grappling” (a word that Ron Berger uses a lot) with new ideas, concepts and skills.

It reminds me of a great graphic that epic teacher Marco Torres shared at one of the early Schools of the Future Conferences:

His point: If you are travelling, which journey will provide the most rich opportunities for learning? In our rush to get to CONTENT, we have lost the value of challenge and grappling that is fundamental for powerful learning. We have paved too much of the roadway, forgetting the journey has value, not just the destination.

In the Article from NAS, the authors make the case that by going Meta with learners – explaining WHY active learning feels harder, WHY it might feel like you are learning less, WHY grappling is good you can improve learner’s perceptions of whether they feel they are learning. Indeed. The journey, not just the destination, matters!

Reflections on Water and Wailele

(This post a reflection from a class visit from our Kumu (Teacher) Makana Kane Kuahiwinui, who spoke to us about the Hawaiian cultural perspective on water, in general and specifically in our Manoa Valley.)

The work we have been doing and thinking about water consumption at times seem disconnected from a real problem, situation and solution. Kumu’s sharing today broadened my thinking because I usually see most things through a western science perspective. Is it dirty? How do we know? How can we clean it? I deepened that meaning by really backing up and considering what the water all around, the rain (Tuahine) we see every day, the running water on campus, Wailele and how it sits with Kahala O Puna in the middle of campus. I need to recommit myself to not just going for learning information but learning to be present in this moment and know why and how it matters.
The connection to this place in Manoa is something that we can do something about if that speaks to us. The importance of how water is around us and why and what we could do with it is a lesson and a challenge. And an opportunity.

I also think that the idea of ‘amakua and the importance of Pueo is interesting. The fact that Hawaiian culture speaks of the importance of a generational tie to what might be our guardian’s ties to families and their histories binds us together to this land.

Lastly I am struck by the importance of story. The value of connecting events, places, people through a compelling narrative is a uniquely human characteristic. I can do better job of using stories as a means to conveying ideas, values, concepts, etc. I should find more storytellers to help engage and tie together our work… Who might this be?
What was my wish for Wailele? That I don’t go by without checking in on her and asking how we are doing with her. We, our students, can visit and ask “how are you doing, how are WE doing?”

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do

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

Class Norms

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

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

Assessment Criteria

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

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

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

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

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

Gentlemen, Start your Engines!

Well here we are at the end of our first week of school. Our most excellent MPX 9 team (John, Bob, Chris and myself) had decided back in July to start the year with a small scale project that would have the students look at societal conflict through a role playing simulation. It would give them a chance to experience a mini form of a project, lets us scaffold some of the baseline agreements we need (group norms, reflective blogging, storytelling, etc) and have a product in time for Back to school night on August 24 for our parents.

MPX 9 Teaching Team ready to go on Day1!

After some opening activities with students getting to know each other and us, we jumped into a group problem solving activity to have them work together and start thinking of what effective groups have in common. The students set up their blogs and other tools like Showbie to allow us to have a class workflow.

Students working on the collaborative puzzle activity

Students working on the collaborative puzzle activity

Students working on the collaborative puzzle activity

By the second day of class they were into the societal conflict simulation and were also developing norms for group work and reflective blogs. Chris Falk and I ran class together and it was a lot of fun having all 42 students in class together!

Students co-constructing group norms

Students co-constructing group norms

42 students together for conflict simulation – mayhem!

Students portray a tableau from their conflict

Students portray a tableau from their conflict

Since we wanted students to work with video for the project, we had them do a STEM challenge of building a bridge with popsicle sticks so they could capture video and images to create a short movie.

Students build and record popsicle stick bridges

Students build and record popsicle stick bridges

Lance Iwamoto shares how to create strong video stories

They made a quick video trailer

to practice creating video. Our excellent video storytelling teacher, Lance Iwamoto dropped in to give the kids some of the secrets of create quality video stories. He included showing some of his students’ award winning Hiki No videos like this

109 Shawn Kalei Kahookele from GWN Storytelling on Vimeo.

The Students finished the week planning a bit for their videos they will be making next week and reflecting on their learning from the week.

We are off to the races! We are excited about the great work the students will do this year.

Energy is the thing!

Our MPX 10 students were blessed to have a visit from a Mid-Pacific alumni: Yoh Kawanami c/o ‘97. He is currently the Director of Demand Response Programs at Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO). Koh reached out to the school through his work with HECO and in particular with his interest in sustainability, resource management, and global interdependence, especially Japan and Asia. He agreed to come and meet the students, and gave us a presentation on energy sustainability with an emphasis on the challenges facing HECO with their work to move towards better resource management and the eventual goal of energy interdependence by 2045. Over the course of his talk with the students he shared his pathway after leaving Mid-Pacific, going to the University of Washington, and then to Duke before relocating to the islands to do work in Department of Defense and engineering resource management. The students were very appreciative of him sharing his knowledge and passion around this topic and our hope is to continue to connect to the work he is doing in the community.

Although our curriculum changed this year so that we were not doing as much with energy sustainability, Yoh’s visit reminds me how important it is to get back to the question about sustainability and the role Hawaii can play in helping the world see resource management: energy, water, agriculture, waste to name a few as problems that we can tackle with the right amount of energy and commitment. My hope is that we will continue to work closely with him and expand our relationships we have established with organizations like Hawaiian Electric, Blue Planet Foundation, Energy Accelerator, Kapiolani Community College, Mari’s Gardens and others. The task of doing real work with our students in the community is an ongoing process…

Yoh explaining the energy consumption profiles of different countries. Yes – the US is the Red bar on the right side!

Now We’re Cooking – Really!

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

yes, we ARE having fun!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cooking the soup

Tasting our final product: Tuscan Bean Soup

We received training on prep use of knives as well!

Prepping the vegetables at KCC

Cooking away in our classroom

Working in Our classroom lab with cooking meat and vegetables

Ka Wai Ola – Water for Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scope and Sequence and …

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

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

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

scope-1

scope-2

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

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

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

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