teach4aliving

I’m going through several transitions right now, one of which is this reflective space. 

-Writer to return 6/1/2012

I love writing. I didn’t know this about myself until I was 24 years-old. Someone I respected, a professor, said he enjoyed reading my writing. That planted something. That allowed me to take risks.

For a myriad of reasons, I haven’t been blogging lately, but I’ve been writing more than ever…

My teaching practice is taking me to interesting places. Right now, I’m designing 100 lessons for Advisory. At many (actually at every single one I’ve ever been to) student-directed project-based learning (PBL) high schools, Advisory is a gathering time at the beginning of the day. It usually last for 20-45 minutes, and is typically made up of multi-age, multi-ability groups. Advisory is a facilitation of the learning process rather than instruction of content. The students own their learning in a different manner than in a typically perceived instructional environment.

I’m writing now more than ever, because I’m synthesizing the last three years of research/experience/life into 100 lessons.  My process has been tweaked along the way. In Simon Sinek style, I began by outlining lessons in a why, how, what fashion. I felt good about the first few lessons, but here’s the thing about lessons designed to facilitate rather than instruct- they are uniquely dependent on the facilitator. When my lessons were handed off to other teachers, they didn’t make any sense because they were unique to my research/experience/life. After dialoging with my colleagues, I structured the lessons in a  manner that most teachers would recognize. The structure may resemble a lesson plan like any other, but the content, oh the content is a different story…

My process for gathering content is something I really really enjoy. Twitter. Since 2008ish learning has been delivered to me. Grinding through start-up over the last several months, I’ve been out of touch with my PLN (Personal Learning Network = people I actively follow and learn from on Twitter).  Having to design 100 lessons has had me reading truly great stuff.

Here’s a smattering of what struck me this week:
—->Sir Ken Robinson’s piece titled As Science Turns Its Attention To Feeling - a very solid piece validating what many adolescents will gladly tell you, “The way I’m feeling right now effects how I learn.” It’s hard to believe this article is ground breaking, but it really was a refreshing read, and I can’t wait until my students get ahold of it. The discussion ought to explode.
—->Mike Siligaze The Classroom Is Broken - articles like this are the basis of many conversations in teacher’s lounges across the country this time of year. I would love to see what the response would be if this was handed out to a whole school staff at ProfDev session and then the teachers broke up into small groups and redesigned their classrooms.  What about students starting at an innovative school/classroom? What if, on day one, a teacher handed this out rather than a syllabi?
—-> If you’re in the PBL setting, and you’re not aware of In-Sight, I do not need a thank you for this gift…from what I can tell through about 15 minutes of Googling, T-STEM is a charter school in Texas taking PBL very seriously. Here’s their piece on crafting a driving question, and boy is it beautiful! Trolling around their sight, I am grateful for their openness. Job well done to the learning designers of T-STEM. My students are going to benefit greatly from your work.
—-> David Wiley‘s Why Be Open – this presentation sat in un-viewed tab mode for far too long. Finally got around to hacking it this week, and it’s filled with valuable insight into making content open. Teaching Intellectual Property & Creative Commons is something I’m trying to simplify. Wiley does a great job. Einstein’s quote leads me to believe I need to keep diving into presentations like this, “If you cannot explain it simply, then you don’t understand it well enough.”
—-> This is why I really really really really love Twitter. The school I teach at has a large number of students studying all things water and doing water projects. Look what Dan Pink posted on his blog this week. You cannot make this stuff up. The learning is out there and comes right to you.
—-> LeadershipFreak is my treasure of the week. While Googling for content, I came across this wonderful blog and have subscribed. There have been three posts this week that students could dive into and grab knowledge. Dan Rockwell is doing an incredible job with this blog.
—->Badeges: A Solution To Our Teacher Evaluation Disaster by Valerie Strauss. Badges. I love them. Students do to.
—->On Business Madness by Alex Payne. This came from @rogre –very good piece on start-up.

Design time is critical. I will not grow as an educator without it. Innovation breathes. New ideas, new people, new structures, new methods.

This

Takes

Time.

This is learning.

Today is my first day back from winter break. I had 17 days off, and it was amazing. I had a few firsts. I took a 72 hour hiatus from email. Surprisingly, my account login still worked after a three day break. I say the time off was amazing because I was able to truly step back. I’ve had summer breaks before, but the first day of summer break is marked by coaching summer school and curriculum development. This winter marks the third anniversary of Kornerstone School. Even though the school has only been opened with students since this past August, the planning team began work in the winter of 2009. Since then, I never really unplugged. It was always one milestone to the next. The time off allowed me to look at the successes and failures of the past 3+ years. It also allowed me to do something I’ve been craving since school began- design time.

I intentionally stayed away from writing. I get consumed with writing; whereas, with design, it’s completely interruptable. I do much of my design out of journal or on various forms of Google Docs. Speaking of interruptable, my students just jumped off the bus (8:48am), and the excitement in school just crescendoed…will resume post at end of day.

End of 1st day back…

The student excitement today was incredible. Not quite like the first day of the school year, but I forget so quickly how much energy 13 – 16 year olds bring. We’re hitting the students with two days of orientation and community building before they dive back into project-based learning. I was excited as well.

Jumping back into the theme of this post. Time off allowed me to create several lessons I’m excited to facilitate. My portfolio is nearly ready to go live. I put about eight hours into the site and finally decided to purchase a subscription from Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes. After just 16 hours as a subscriber, I can tell you it’s flat out worth the $40 per year. The themes are incredible. I’m twerking the Chameleon theme. I envision each graduating student having their own website/portfolio. I think it’s worth the $8 per month to host. I’d gladly give up Netflix before giving up my hosting.

Something else happened. I started to dream again. Not while asleep, but while awake. The same what if’s that spawned Kornerstone School started seeping through my mentals. Much of this sparked was thrown down by my friend & colleague Tom Krause (@krauseunc). He’s proceeding with a program design in his district and he’s got a team of eager educators wanting to create, innovate, and implement. It was really good to talk with Tom extensively. Our children, both 2-years old, bowled. Later, we chatted up learning spaces, dynamic Rhizomatic redesign existing within a large high school. Tom’s doing great things.

The other area I put time into was the Wisconsin Digital Learning Day (#WIDigitalLearning). #DLDay is February 1 (Digital Learning Day). DPI’s Kurt Kieffer has been very proactive in organizing #WIDigitalLearning . With so many talented educators in the state collaborating, I was a bit hesitant to publish content without first involving my students. I’m sitting down with a planning team this week to discuss what February 1 will look like. I’d love to do a workshop model where we create content and publish it in the same day, but that would require taking an entire day away from the regularly scheduled program. Here’s the big thing about time off. It allowed me to go slow and methodical. Since I didn’t have three dozen menial tasks compiling, I was able to work for chunks of time and allow work to process, the work seemed to settle in more. I’ve written extensively about having priorities straight, and I believe the two week break naturally aligned my priorities. My family was in front of me each and every day, I had to go out of my way to pickup my laptop; it’s usually the inverse.

I am now the world’s biggest advocate for a, dare I say, year round schedule (European model). I will gladly start up August 1 and take off ten days in October, two weeks in December, and ten days in March. I am better teacher for it.

I coach. From mid-November to mid-July I am in the gym, at the track, and in the gym. I have often said, “I’m done coaching after this season.” Only to be drawn back in to the arena. I do love competition. I do love basketball, I fall asleep to the NBA nightly when the association is in session. I have grown to love track.But none of those things keep me coaching. Athletics is the purest form of personalized learning that exist today.

Personalized learning is difficult to pull off in the classroom, but expected in athletics. I coach a stud triple jumper. He’s a senior this year. He’s a three sport athlete, and very gifted. He’s hilarious. I got to thinking, what if this young man had to throw a shot put a minimum distance in order to triple jump, long jump, or high jump. The notion is ridiculous, but it’s basically what we do to our students in the classroom. So you want to take two art classes in a term? I’m sorry, you have to take English and Phy Ed every year. Your really exceptional at French? I’m sorry, you can’t get to French 4, until you’ve gone through the appropriate sequence. You can dunk at age 14 and shoot a twenty footer with ease? Please come and play against people four years older than you on varsity.

(after the game)
The above was written on the bus heading to the gym. Now I’m writing as we head home on the bus. My iPad bounces around, and I try to gather my thoughts. I’m angry. The refs were horrible. The players were not tough with the ball. As a coach, I feel like I didn’t prepare the guys. I have never had this feeling when reviewing state standardized test scores six months after the tests were completed. Athletics isn’t always fair. In fact, one thing I’ve been thinking about quite a bit is losing. In sports, losing happens often. Much has been written lately about framing failure in a different lens in education. But what if each student had a personalized learning plan documenting successes and failures. Imagine an annual plan where students communicate implementing designs successfully and chronicling a failed job shadow at a local law firm. Such a plan, easily allows personalized learning and assessment as a dialog to take place. I often ask athletes, “what do you want me to help you get better at?” I need to be more conscious with my students and elicit similar feedback. I think I am too quick with telling students what I think they need to get better at, rather than asking them what they want to be coached up on.

How do we build in supports to make teaching more like coaching? How do we push and find what areas individuals are extremely talented in? How do we provide countless educational opportunities at early ages and delay specialization? As with most of my posts, I don’t claim to have the answers. But I’d love to have a dialog and start building solutions with you.

How do we build capacity for our youth to serve in different roles? How do we make sure the same students are not always leading or sitting back and letting peers answer? This one I have been working out. I think we as teachers have to explicitly tell our best and brightest this: having the right answer is no longer enough. Student leaders need to include and build the voices of their peers. I as a teacher have a long way to go in terms of facilitating conversation rather than directing it; but I have seen tremendous growth in my students when I talked to them individually about supporting the learning of their peers.

Many thanks for reading through the typos…tablets, school buses, and county roads do not collaborate well.

I’ve been working with a few other educators lately. We’re undergoing training to receive our principal licensure in the State of Wisconsin. We’ve been throwing around radical ideas.

In a field where innovation is stressed; in fact, it is rewarded with half million dollar federal grants to start new schools- licensure remains stagnant. I’m in the early design stage, I’m toying with the idea of a new licensure for school teachers. The licensure is called Learning Designer. In small schools, and in big systems, innovative teachers have various titles: generalist, lead teacher, advisor, facilitator, tech implementor, learning coach, and on and on. These people provide services to students, often outside of the traditional realm. Google, “Innovation Synonym”. Words like deviation and permutation pop up. In my mind,  I connect innovation with a disruption to a larger system. My definition has been shaped by Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class. With the need for creatives to provide disruption, shouldn’t that innovation have a licensure?

Many of these ideas in this post are not my own. They come from my colleagues in my cohort at Silver Lake College. Ryan, Tom, Kim, Tim, and myself; we are doing project-based learning to gain our principal licensure. This is a radical shift from traditional adult ed. This is something I crave. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. During one of our first weekends together, Kim stated, “We should just create our own licensure.” The idea struck me.

I’m thinking about pursuing the concept of a new licensure a bit further. I’m hesitant to proceed for one reason though. It’s not the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. I think they need another licensure. With 200+ charter schools in the state, and thousands of teachers working in roles outside of their licensed area, the Learning Designer licensure makes sense and fills many needs. I’m hesitant because I don’t think colleges and universities would adapt to fulfill the license.

Initial concepts of Learning Designer licensure:

1. A Learning Designer is a facilitator of learning rather than an instructor of specific curriculum.
2. The license has milestones and is lifelong – initial teaching all the way through EdS. A person getting into the education field as a teacher could add additional competencies and qualifications (badges) as they make their way to administrative positions, possibly leading to a superintendency.
3.  Various specialties exist within and off of this licensure. Examples include, but are not limited to: Project-Based Learning, Montessori, Experiential, Brain-Based, problem based/Inquiry, Service-Learning, Environmental, Waldorf, Constructivist, Connectivist, Entrepreneurial, Multiple Intelligence, Innovation, etc. Education has so many various specialties and pedagogies doing incredible things for learners of all ages. Why not provide these people with a licensure to communicate their specialties and skill sets?

What are other states/nations doing for licensing innovative educators? What other ideas  do people have to professionalize the educators? How can this idea become a reality; finally, is this even a real need and a good idea? Would having an innovative license create greater learning opportunities for students or does this just add another layer to the bureaucracy? If you are interested in seeing this idea pursued further, please let me know. Comment, tweet, email, let’s get this thing going…here’s the link to a document started back in July. Please make it your own sandbox.

I’ve been out of commission blogging over the last month for a good reason. This November, I participated in National November Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo).  About a dozen of my students also went on the journey. It was strange to close out the tab of my nanowrimo dashboard and the tab of my google doc I used to create the novel on. I came to enjoy the daily update of word counts. I started doing something else as the month grew on, I started getting organized. Writing 1670 words per day forced me to set aside dedicated time. I would either write early in the morning or late at night. The more dedicated quiet time I could set aside, the more creative I became. Most impressive about this journey, was how my students took it over. I had a handful of dedicated students who became consumed with writing. One student organized a write-in at our school, in which a half dozen community members joined a half dozen students for a three hour chunk of writing. Today, I pulled all of the novelist in the room. I went over publishing options. To my surprise, and to something I haven’t quite figured out yet, only two of the students wanted to publish. I broke the scenario down in three different ways. I talked about publishing to have proof of work- no interest. I talked about publishing to sustain cool activities and make #NaNoWriMo a re-occurring thing at our school- no interest. I talked about publishing to share our stories with each other- still no interest. I was struck with this thought as I wrote this paragraph, I don’t want to publish either. Writing the novel became a personel quest, and a creative journey. But in that journey, I reveal areas of my life in that novel that I don’t feel comfortable sharing with the world. I also swore a half dozen times to give credence to the characters and dialog; using inappropriate language in my Intellectual Property is not something I feel comfortable sharing with my 12 -16 year old students.

[sidebar: over the past two weeks, while in Advisory, I've had my students share new ideas. Last week, we circled three full times on a moments notice. Over 40 new ideas were put forward. Incredible, amazing ideas. Widgets to document learning easier. Digital helplines for students, and so many other incredible thoughts. Today, I gave the students seven minutes to design their ideas further. No homework assignments were provided, no prompts to tell them to remember their ideas. Most of the students took off with their same ideas or put new ideas out there and had pretty solid designs. What happens in advisory stays in advisory, but I hadn't heard oohhing and aaahhhing like that in a while. It was one of the coolest things I've been a part of in a while. I'm thinking about setting aside solid design time regularly for students to push out new thoughts. It got me thinking, what if the most valuable commodity learners need is time. When given time, I could write 10,000 words in a single day. What can these young learners do with time? Especially if it's scaffolded. Right now, project-based learning is chunked in 75-90 minute sections, there's three in a day (the shortest is 60 minutes). What if students had one 4 - 5 hour chunk for projects? Would math and literacy still get accomplished even if all students weren't designated to do so? tangent concluded]

While noveling, I also participated in Movember. I stared a team for my school. I only had three team members and we raised 10% of what the team I was on last year raised. I’ve always told myself I was incapable of growing facial hair. I’ve always thought it was impossible for me to have any masculine hair growth. It was an odd feeling, shaving my moustache on December 1 at 12:01am. Many folks, including family, ridiculed me growing a moustache. I didn’t campaign hard this year, I was noveling, coaching basketball, failing miserably at fantasy football, teaching, and being a husband/dad. But I did do what was previously thought impossible in my own mind, I grew a moustache. I would not have had the follow through had it not been for the rules put forth by Movember. It was a blast, even better than last year. Next year, I hope to raise much more awareness and funds for prostate and testicular cancer.

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I had a very very specific reason for noveling and growing a moustache. I wanted to model for my students process. Writing a 50,000 word novel is only possible by writing most days, and on most of the most days, the writing is not always enjoyable. Growing a moustache on a face that’s not used to hair, can bring ridicule and embarrassment. Both of those things combined seem to summarize the learning experience to me. Learning is not always enjoyable, in fact, it can be monotonous. Learning, especially authentic learning can bring ridicule and judgement from people knowing nothing of the journey the learner is on. I teach in a school where we preach following passion and developing unique gifts. But even on that quest, following passions includes tasks needing to get done in order to continue on the journey.

My wife is an artist. She recently launched her own small business. She is the best example of monotony of the learning process. She loves painting in water colors and combining pastels with the dark ink of a sharpie. For her graphic design business, she uses Photoshop and Illustrator. She’s doing things that I cannot fathom. And she loves it. One errant brush stroke with water color and a piece she’s been working on for months fails. In Photoshop, she works with layer after layer after layer and goes through a proces to yield amazing results. Through her process, she’s engaged with a medium in a way that’s unique only to her. She can see the product, she knows the process, and that’s all that really matters. Over the past year, I’ve seen my wife make the transition from being a high school art teacher to a stay at home mother. She’s launched two businesses, and yet, she still finds time to engage in her artwork. She is also the best example of DIY (Do It Yourself) learning I have come across. She’s taught herself so many things over the past five years. Watching her learn Adobe’s Illustrator off of countless video tutorials has been energizing. She certainly knows how to take advantage of the public library system.

Seeing the example of my wife, I have been prompted to do a little DIY myself. Over the next six months, I’m implementing a few major pieces with my teaching practice. Students are developing portfolio’s representing their summative assessments, documentations of learning, and regular reflections. There’s a three part scaffolding process. First, students begin their portfolio’s on Blogger. Through blogger, they learn the basics of HTML & design. Second, students take their Blogger portfolio and transform it into a Google Site. This transition provides students with more options and greater flexibility for mapping learning experiences, but may limit dialog with audience. Third, and probably at least a year away even for the most advanced students, students create a professional portfolio. Here’s where the DIY comes in. I’m modeling the third part. I’m using WordPress.org to launch my portfolio. It’s so rugged I hesitate putting down the URL, but the learning is the important piece. My portfolio is http://www.michaelmccabe.org/ — it’s a vanilla install. I’m going slow, very slow. I want to document each step along the way. My plan for introducing WordPress to the students is to overhaul the current school website and replace it with a WordPress site. Through this process, students will learn code and advanced design concepts. I don’t expect every student to know how to code and how to put together their own site.  I do expect every student to know how to to document their learning, reflect on it, and have a passion to communicate what they’ve learned with the world. With those things accomplished, the portfolio will follow easily. I’m hoping the re-design of the school website can occur of the summer. This ought to launch students on to the same trajectory as me for developing portfolios that truly represent the value and uniqueness of the individual learner.

Another piece I’m working on for Kornerstone School  is the Community Mentorship Program. I’ve written extensively about the design of this program in the past. To summarize:
Year 1 – 3-5 job shadows in various professions
Year 2 – a professional from a job shadow the previous year co-manages a student project    (secondary advisor in Kornerstone dialect)
Year 3 – 20 week internship with that same professional

Questions regarding sustainability for this design have already arisen, and we’re just in the first year of implementation. Students are going on job shadows. They are much harder to arrange and require a ton of followup dialog. In order to pull of this program, it’s going to be a .50% FTE (Full Time Equivalency) job going forward next year. I’m not sure we’ll have that for our small school. I’m hoping this wasn’t a design flaw. The mission of Kornerstone School is to prepare students for their profession of choice and get have them make a positive impact on their community. The Community Mentorship Program, if fulfilled, provides tangible data allowing the program to live up to the mission. I’m going to put all of my energies that went into noveling into these two programs. The startup of the Community Mentorship Program may be monotonous, but the product could be a masterpiece.