Lead Mines, Canals and Crashes: Digging into Local History

Soho History (2)
I’ve written before about my co-teacher, and here is another example of how his ideas and my ideas play off each other so nicely. We’re reading Regarding the Fountain by Kate Klise with our co-taught class right now. The plot has to do with a fifth grade class doing research on the local history of their town, and uncovering a plot of fishy intrigue.

Bob, my co-teacher, thought we should do some research on our own town and then let the kids build a timeline of sorts of local historical episodes. Of course! So, I dug around the town’s website for some information, and Bob found a book that was published in the 1970’s by the town’s Historical Commission. We cobbled together a small packet of information, created a timeline that was missing either dates or information, and then had then work in teams to fill in the timeline. From there, they had to then create a placemat of the history of the town, organized in any way they wanted.
Soho History
Not only were the kids interested in the history of the community, they were fully engaged in all steps of the project, which took about thirty minutes. It was just one of the lessons that comes together collaboratively, and sparks something in the students that is just wonderful to watch. They were learning about history, using information reading for a realistic goal, creating timelines of information and collaborating together. That’s a nice bit of learning going on.  Not every lesson is like that, that’s for sure. But this one was.

Here are few things they didn’t know about their town but now do:

  • The town became a town because of a Lead Mine operation;
  • The New Haven-Northampton Canal ran right through the town, and when that shut down, the railroad followed. Now that is shut down, and the hope is for a bike trail (which is controversial in the town);
  • Sen. Ted Kennedy was once hurt in a plane crash (and the pilot died) in some fields not too far from the school;
  • The movie “Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (with Richard Burton) shot some scenes in a local restaurant in town;
  • An adjacent city tried to annex the town in the 1960s but failed when the town used its political might to fend off the plot (which led to cheers from the students when we talked about it).

Peace (in the discovery),
Kevin

Lend Me Your Ear(mark): NWP in Trouble Again

When I think of “earmarks,” I think of fluff — of bridges to nowhere and multimillion dollar research centers that have absurd missions, of things that don’t necessarily impact my life. When first started to hear about the push to end earmarks, I figured: I can live with that. It might mean one less terminal, or one less mile of bike trails, or one less repaved roadway, but I can live with it in this age of austerity.

I should know better, of course, being the old newspaper reporter and political junkie that I was. I’m a beneficiary of earmarks in a way that I never really thought about.

It turns out that my National Writing Project, as well as number of other important educational programs (RIFF, etc.) are also earmarks in the federal budget. Which means that the vote on Monday in the United States Senate on a proposal by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to completely eliminate earmarks for this current budget year, and the next few years, could completely financially dismantle the National Writing Project, which relies heavily on federal funding to provide crucial and important professional development for tens of thousands of teachers, and teacher-leaders, in the country across all grade levels.

So, I’ve been on the phone, calling my senators (Kerry and Brown) to urge them to reject the Coburn Amendment, and contacting fellow Western Massachusetts Writing Project folks, urging them to do the same. And you, too, please, if you are in the NWP network or have benefitted from NWP or if you care about education. Please pick up the phone and show your support.

Here is an open letter from NWP Exective Director Sharon Washington:
NWP Letter to Senators
Peace (in the push),
Kevin

More from National Writing Project

I tried to take some videos of the various elements of the General Assembly presentations at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting. The result: my hand would not always remain steady. So, these are a bit jumpy and the sound is just OK, not great. I am sure (hopeful?) that NWP will eventually have good videos of these available.

For now, though:

The incoming president of NCTE — Yvonne Siu-Runyan — gave a powerful welcome to the 1,000 plus NWP teachers in the room:

NWP Executive Director Sharon Washington gave insights into the busy days of a teacher:

And Donalyn Miller gave a passionate speech about being a writer:

Peace (in the jumpy sharing),
Kevin

Blogging for Real Education Reform: Empower Students

(see the overview of the National Day of Blogging — which is today! The overview: November 22, 2010 has been declared a Day of National Blogging for Real Education Reform, promoted by AASA andASCD. ASCD has gathered 10 articles, in advance of Monday’s Day of National Blogging, in The New Faces of Ed Reformthat discuss reforming education with teachers as leaders and partners in meaningful, lasting change.)

I’ll keep this short and simple: We need to let students become more of the leaders in our classroom when it comes to exploration of learning. I know this sounds counter to the push for accountability, and I don’t mean to suggest that we teachers stop teaching.

We teachers must still provide the framework of activities, the tools of assessment that help with reflective practice, the mini-lessons that guide students at a more individualized pace and the rationale for a project that has meaning, and then, we need to allow our students the space for creativity, collaboration and self-inspired learning. Our perception of the teacher in front of a room of rows of students, writing down notes of what we say, must begin to become transformed into us, the educators, listening more to our students. Let their voices ring out.

If we are all in agreement that we are preparing our students for the world, then we need more creativity in what we are doing and not less. But this also means that all of us teachers have to raise our game, too, and not let our standards of how we teach to fall. We need to get better at what we do. We need to do more integration of new ideas into our curriculum. We need to find more ways to engage our students in their learning. We need parent support, and we need administrative support, and we need society support.

Peace (in the ideas),
Kevin

NYTimes: Growing up Digital


In case you did not see the Sunday New York Times article, here is the link to Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction and here is video that looks at the attention of teenagers. It is a look at the “massive shift taking place at the intersection of education and technology,” according to writer Matt Ritchell, of NYT. Schools are looking to balance “the thrill of immediate gratification with the rigor and discipline of regular education …”

Ritchell looks at the topic from the science of the brain, and what being online and connected does to our thinking processes. I have to re-read the article again (and maybe again) but it is worth your time.

Peace (in the wired world),
Kevin

Reflections from National Writing Project, ancillary discussions

nwpam2010Sometimes at a conference, some of the most interesting conversations happen in the spaces in-between the official sessions. I made a few mental notes about some of the informal discussions that I was part of at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting last week — in hallways, near the snack area, after sessions, etc. — and thought I might share some of those topics out because I seem to think that they are bigger topics than I first imagined. That’s what happens when you get to talk with very smart people, as I was lucky enough to do last week.

Digital Identities: A few of us had a long conversation one night about the use of social media and tools and how we go about finding a “voice” on those platforms that is real. We find ourselves often caught between our official role as a “teacher” and 0ur role as a creator of content. There are legitimate fears from educators about how authentic one’s online voice should be, and yet, I would argue that we need to let some of that come through in our writing, our sharing, our collaborations. Hiding behind a veil of parsed language seems increasingly at odds with why one would create an online space in the first place, doesn’t it? And yet, I myself create a sort of wall for myself, too, ducking behind a nickname in some spaces. But I do try to write with an authentic voice as much as possible.

Future of Apps: There is no doubt that the biggest change from last year’s NWP meeting to this year is the explosion of Apps on handheld devices, and there was plenty of talk outside of sessions about what that means. Will the use of Apps mean a push towards allowing cell phones and other handheld devices into the classroom? That’s what we wonder, and then, we talked about what that would mean. Will the influx of new applications open up new spaces and new ways for composing and creating? In a session I did around stopmotion movies, one of the participants pulled out his iPhone and used a new app (imotion) for making stopmotion that used the camera in his phone. In minutes, he had created a movie and emailed a version of it to me from his cell phone. That’s pretty amazing.

First Steps: I had a lot of conversations with folks, wondering how they could take their first steps into the digital conversations. I mentioned places to enter with Twitter, and with social networks, and I pushed the use of RSS feeders to follow blogs. It seems to be me that this wave of conversation signals a concern that teachers are being left behind, and that they cannot ignore the technology any longer, if that was their tact. There’s more and more talk, and more and more evidence, that the media and tools that our students are using outside of the classroom are not filtering their way in, and the teachers I talked with are concerned about that trend. They want to feel relevant to the lives of their students.

The Standards: This topic came up in sessions as well as out of sessions. How do we balance the use of technology with the push and pressures of standardized curriculum and assessment? It’s a legitimate concern, and one that is local to the school and district where we teach. Some of us have greater freedom, as long as we are following curriculum frameworks, while others have more shackles, such as a cookie-cutter curriculum. It seems to me that we need to find ways to get more administrators involved in the kind of discovery that teachers are doing. If teachers have that support from the principal or superintendent, they are more likely to dip their toes into the water.

Plugged Out: At our conference, there was no Internet access. The cost was too much for NWP, I suspect. What that meant was that all sessions were off-line explorations, which works better for some ideas than others. But it was clear that many of us felt odd and strange, off the grid as we were. Many of us (not all) are used to taking notes online, sharing ideas from conferences “in the moment,” using backchannels for related discussions, creating multimedia interpretations of events, etc. It wasn’t until someone in a session pointed out that what we were feeling in this unwired space was probably exactly what our students feel like when we tell them to turn off and hide their cell phones when they walk in the schools. It feels disjointed when you have integrated something into your ways of communicating, and then find it suddenly revoked. We persevered, as most of our students do, but it never felt quite right.

Access: This is a constant from year to year — how to make sure our student have access to the technology and access beyond the firewalls so that the tools that we want to use for learning are not hurdles of frustration. I still hear about computer labs being used only for reading assessments, and of firewall filters being so strict as to be meaningless. Like many, I long for the day when this is NOT an issue facing schools.

Peace (in the discussions),
Kevin

Reflections from National Writing Project, day three

I spent almost all of my day with the NWP Makes! Session, in which NWP teamed up with MAKE Magazine to think about hands-on learning and the informational writing that can be partnered with artistic discovery. We spent much of the morning “doing” — working at tables on arts activities that included sock puppets, bottle cap jewerly, LED bracelets and more. I led the table on Stopmotion Animation, where we created a dance party video with characters created by the participants.

Then, each table had to design a “mock up” website of how they would teach someone else how to do their activity. This sparked a lot of interesting discussions, as you might imagine. We then toured the room, to see and make comments on what other groups were creating, and the informational text they were composing.
Here is what my group created:
NWP Makes 014

Here are the mock-up sites:

As we ended, we were asked to reflect on the experiences of the day as we sought to consider the possibilities of what we did for the classroom and for our Writing Project sites.  Here’s what I wrote:

What has me thinking, and what still resonates from last year’s Digital Is Conference, is how engaging these kinds of hands-on, collaborative projects can be for creators of any age. However, for the most part, we as a society have mostly driven arts and crafts – ie, Makes – from many of our schools due to the pressures of budgets, standardized curriculums and standardized testing. As a result, many of these kinds of creative endeavors fall to after-school programs (Girl and Boy Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, private companies, etc.) or electives, and are not necessarily integrated right in the classroom instruction as much as they used to be. Perhaps making the connection of “creating” with “composing” more visible is a way to start to change that tide.

On a side note, my state (Massachusetts) recently passed a law that mandates documentation of creativity in our schools. That sounds harsh, but it is designed by some state legislators to show that while mandated testing is not going away, schools should not be drill-and-killing the learning spirit out of every child. The development of a Creativity Index would not doubt open up the doors for activities and projects like this, in which the experts teach the non-experts, when then turn around to become experts themselves.

Peace (in the making),
Kevin

Reflections from National Writing Project, day two


Yesterday, at the National Writing Project General Assembly, more than 1,000 NWP teachers gathered together in one huge hall, and that in itself is a powerful experience to be part of. NWP Executive Director Sharon Washington and others urged us to remain positive in the face of increasing negative scrutiny from Washington and the national media, and to remember that it is our students — those young minds and hearts — that need our attention and nurturing.

The keynote speaker was Donalyn Miller (aka The Book Whisperer) who emotionally gave us a view of her history as a writer, and how difficult it is for her, and how her connection to the NWP helped find her a place to be and to thrive. She also brought us inside her classroom for a bit, too and all that added to a powerful keynote. (I am including a brief excerpt of her presentation here).

At the end of the assembly, Sharon Washington urged us to write (the silence of 1000 people writing together is an incredible moment) about the times when we emerged from our own difficult times in writing.

I wrote a poem about my first days at my own Summer Institute, and how the possibilities of writing opened up for me in new ways, and has never left.

I remember the room –
the nervous energy,
the possibilities

of writing

of wondering how it was
that so much of our days
would be carved out of words

I wondered
but did not question

I wrote:
streams of stories
poems
songs
histories.

I wrote what had been set aside
somewhere inside of me,
waiting for the space with which
to flourish.

I wrote as if the summer would never end
and I’ve never stopped writing
since.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Reporting from National Writing Project, Day One

nwpam2010During the first day’s events at the National Writing Project, I periodically called in a “podcast” as a way to reflect after the sessions. I’ll write about the sessions more later.

After: Digital Literacies Roundtable

After: Gaming in Education Lunch

After: Why Games Matter

After: Across Geographic Distance

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin