This is why my school approaches the whole child, stressing social connections for students with neurological differences as well as academics. You can’t have one without the other as an adult. Having approached my students like this for three years, I know this: I won’t teach any other way anymore.
A study published this week in the Journal of Happiness Studies shows how children and adolescents get this well-being as adults.
In short, social connectedness massively overwhelms academic achievement.
The study mined 32 years of data from the New Zealand Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which followed about 1,000 people from birth to adulthood. About every three years, the study measured nearly every psychosocial goodie you can imagine, including measures of attachment to parents and peers, self-perceived strengths, socioeconomics, club and group participation, language development and academic achievement (among many others). At age 32, the study measured well-being.
Surprisingly, though psychologists have spent careers asking what in childhood leads to bad stuff like psychopathologies, nobody had asked what in childhood leads to good stuff like well-being. Authors Ollson, Nada-Raja, Williams and McGee changed that. (Note: the fourth author’s first name is Rob – apparently feeling good is not, in fact, good enough for Bobby McGee.)
The factor that most pointed toward adult well-being was social connectedness as an adolescent (0.62 correlation, if you’re into that sort of thing). Academic achievement was a much weaker predictor of adult well-being, at 0.12.
I’m a builder of things. As a child, I built models and dioramas and train sets and miniatures. In college I built poetry and plays, papers and rhymes. I built a piss-poor set of ethics also, but that’s a different post. Now, I build furniture at home and students in my classroom.
I don’t do any of these things because they are good monetary investments. I can make more money as an engineer than a teacher, I can buy better furniture than what I can make (though the difference grows smaller every day). Shakespeare’s a better writer than I’ll ever be. I’m no Mitch Albom and I won’t sell schlock. I can even buy those minis painted. The ROI (return on investment) of my time in teaching, in creation, in living, seems to so little.
Back to the classroom. Project-based learning doesn’t always translate into standardized, multiple choice test answers, the currency of our American educational system. There’s no box which represents critical thinking skills, no box for the slow sweet confidence which comes with being able to use tools well, no box to check for smiling, no box to check if a student becomes a more competent, ethical, compassionate human being. At times, project-based learning looks like it provides a lower ROI in a multiple-choice test. Why even attempt it? Just drill-and-kill. It’ll get you there cheaper.
Which is probably another, different blog and/or post. I’m a lucky teacher. I can preach and practice, practice and preach what I love: project-based learning makes a difference in student’s lives, not only because it is an effective teaching practice, but because it provides something more than a simple ROI. Project-based curriculum creates learners, not widgets. Project-based learning gives high ROA.
ROA: Return on Adventure.
Make it safe & keep the rubberside down this weekend.
Interesting review in the New York Times today on parenting. Take a look…
After all, as Levine notes, the inconvenient truth remains that not every child can be shaped and accelerated into Harvard material. But all kids can have their spirits broken, depression induced and anxiety stoked by too much stress, too little downtime and too much attention given to external factors that make them look good to an audience of appraising eyes but leave them feeling rotten inside.
Let’s consider the things that TED Ed asks the learner to do: watch a video, take a multiple-choice quiz, write brief constructed responses, and read through a bibliography. If I took the name TED out of this scenario, I would suggest that many educators would say that this format is exactly the type of traditional assessment that project-based, inquiry-driven, personalized learning is at odds with.
It is perfectly fine to watch a video. It is perfectly fine to view a lecture. It is perfectly fine to quiz yourself on what you remember from the video or the lecture. It is perfectly fine to write a brief response about a big question. But let’s not call that a lesson. That’s just a starting point.
My summer homework this year contains a unit involving Kahn Academy. I’ve listened to the critiques of both my colleagues and Dan Meyer on internet tools and I think the answer is pretty simple.
As a teacher I collect as many tools as I can to put in my toolbox. Some tools are used 80% of the time. Some tools are used 20% of the time.
But the most important tool is the tool I need right now. In this instance, it’s a old-school-pedagogy with a Web 2.0 twist. I don’t think all of my children will succeed or use it to its highest potential. Its just a great way of encouraging my kids to explore math in a “non-traditional” way. Even though it’s traditional.
Computers don’t actually make a Maker classroom, computer access does. In the past to years, I’ve developed an instinct, capability and ability to integrate the technology into our science and math-based classroom activities. Not every project needs computer (for example, the spirograph build) but many projects can be enhanced with its use. My students use a computer almost everyday; researching the day’s project, finding working examples and interactive demonstrations online or better yet, actively engaging with their small corner of the online world. A Maker’s classroom without computers can still work, but becomes harder to facilitate.
9. Alice Programming Environment
Currently in beta, developed in part by Randy Pausch and sponsered by Electronic Arts, the Alice Programming Environment provides a free, useful sandbox for students to learn the basics of computer programming. No, its not a powerful, high-level language like Python, nor does it have many applications outside of a the program itself (like say, Arduino’s sketchpad) but students learn logical thinking, loops, conditional structures and the like. This high-level of abstract thinking immediately transfers to other areas of life. My students often have to use conditional structures when planning a get-together (if I invite John and he doesn’t like Stacy then I can invite one OR the other) or completing multi-step, sequential projects (finish step 1, move on to step 2, check during step 3, go back to step 1). This type of abstract thinking comes naturally with age and cognitive development. When you teach a population challenged by exectutive functions like I do, any tool which allows students to practice these skills in an explicit way gets on my personal top ten.
8. Google Sketch Up
If you are looking for the most bang for your buck, find a way to incorporate Google Sketch Up in your room. I use GSU8 as a baithook, as a reward for strong academic performance, as a product creator, a academic break activity, as a curriculum enhancer, as the “cool” homework, as “can you believe this, parent? Look how competent your child is!”-bragging rights maker. I bait the kid with computer time and hook’m into learning geometry concepts, I reward twenty mulitplication problems with five minutes of worktime. My students create castles and learn spatial skills placing firing arcs from the catapults. My students create designs for headphone holders and houses and Borgian libraries. My students thrown tantrums and ten minutes designing furniture calms them down. My students turn in homework when I say the fateful words, “build it on Sketch Up”. My parents shake their heads in disbelief and new wonder. Familiarity with a program like GSU translates to coursework in college, into certificates in industry, into a career.
Perimeter/Area/Polygon Exercise in Google Sketch Up
Bang for your buck.
7. The support of community experts
Despite what my students may think about me, I don’t know everything. But I know a lot of people who do, and if I don’t, I know people who know a guy. Community experts mean I can do more with less and I can do more than I know how to do. I just have to ask and listen. I just become a facilitator, rather than a traditional teacher, for my own kiddos. I get the opportunity to occupy a different, more equitable and just as powerful space. My classroom thrives.
For those in Houston, look out for my Community Watch tag. I try to give credit when credit is due.
6. The woodworking tool box
Last summer, I started working on this toolbox. It holds various hammers, chisels, squares, sliding bevels, saws, tools and supplies for four to six students to build nearly anything with wood. This box contains magic. Absolute magic. If I can’t make it with the contents of this box…
…then it is beyond the scope my middle school curriculum.
5. A blog
Once a student is done listening to a lecture, performing an experiment, finding a solution and wrestling with a problem the student must process their new-found knowledge. Communication – whether short answer on a test, long essay on a bulletin board or oral presentation – provides the best opportunity for a teacher to evaluate their student’s learning progress. Student-centered blogs provide a quicker turnaround, leverage a student’s love of technology, allow practice zones for literacy skills, support multimedia integration and boost parental engagement all at the same time. The Math/Sci program produced roughly 80 posts this year. Some 2000 page views. We had twenty students contribute to these articles. That’s four essays on math/science learning per child. I teach science…but my kids can write. That’s a whole lotta communication.
4. A team of expert, engaged, bad-mamma-jamma professional educators
In the words of Arlo Guthrie – “One man singing a bar of Alice’s Resturant, then that man’s crazy. Three men singing it…that’s a movement”. Teaching is an art, a craft and a sweet science. Artist need muses, craftsmen need tools, sweat and wood. And boxers need to be knocked around a little to “season them”. If you do this alone, you burn out. You do this with a crew of people you can rely on, you change the world.
And I’ve gotta helluva movement marching with me.
3. Eyes and Ears
I carry a camera with me at all times. The camera records my students’ smile, my students’ learning, my students’ simple moments of success. If I don’t record it, I don’t share it, I don’t put it in my students hands and say “Remember this. This is important,” then it didn’t happen. The camera preserves my students’ success.
My colleagues use the discontinued Flip cameras to record video. We edit the video in MovieMaker and move it over to a YouTube channel. Other teachers can see our work, parents can look over our shoulder, the boss-upstairs can say “this is what our teachers do.” My eyes and ears give context and visual ooomph to any project I can develop.
2. WD-40, Hot Glue, Vice Grips & Duct Tape
Use them in this order. Always works.
1. A school which provides the space, curriculum and materials for exploration
My plea for you – especially if you are not already engaged in education – is to find a school which promotes Maker values and Maker projects and support those programs the best you can. Lend your expertise, donate used tools, put your dollars and voice behind hands-on education. Individual teachers, like myself, can only do so much inside a classroom. We need support on the streets, on our speed-dial and in the hearts of our parents. Hands-on, project-based, maker-centric education works and we need your help to get it to the next level. Keep talking, making and setting things on fire until our principals, superintendents and school boards sit up and take notice.
Make it safe & keep the rubber side down this weekend.
Perplexity is the goal of engagement. We can go ten rounds debating eggs, broccoli, or candy bars. What matters most is the question, “Is the student perplexed?” Our goal is to induce in the student a perplexed, curious state, a question in her head that math can help answer.
For me, that question is simply: “How does this work?”
But I have to figure out a couple of better ones. Right now, I’m building wind chimes, building rooms in Google Sketch Up, constructing an Art Car and maybe assembling a few tables. I know, deep in my soul, the hands engage the mind which engage the heart – but how do I make students perplexed?
The textbook is now digital but students still encounter it as they always have: wisdom to be received, perhaps highlighted, annotated, and memorized, but not created, constructed, or made sense of. Teachers still interact with students as they always have. The platform doesn’t offer them any new insights into the ways their students think about mathematics. As far as I can tell, the iBook doesn’t establish any new link between the student and teacher, or strengthen any old ones.
In my classroom, I have very few textbooks. They have their place in other classrooms but my students – students who have spent countless hours, literally years, of their life avoiding the very act of comprehensive reading – have no use for textbooks. Textbooks create visceral disgust within them. Everything which is unfair and wrong with the world, with them, with me, with this exact moment spills out like ill-placed illustrations, small text and incomprehensible, without-contextable, testable, contemptible chunks. You bring a textbook to class, expect ramifications. You may not have any students in your room.
Books. My students don’t want no books. They want experiments, conversations, ah-ha moments and excitement. Which is funny, because our school’s Lit Department has dropped some serious cash on Kindles, iPads and time developing Promethean Board projects. From the scuttlebutt – and number of Kindles which pop up like spring flowers in my classroom – the new flashiness gets eyeballs on words. My students are reading. My students are writing. My students talk more – to each other and me. I know this because unlike last year, I get two or three sentence answers to science questions. I ask for a blog post reflection on their work and the work is turned in complete. I assign project books as research materials and the students mark six projects in the book instead of two.
But if that’s the only trick – buy a flashy toy – then the 1:1 Laptops programs, Smartboards and iPads should’ve solved the “education” problem. Whatever that education problem may be. Word processors should have made every kid a writer in the 90′s.
So why doesn’t technology-alone engage students in academics? Christopher Danielson puts his own spin on what tends to happens to teachers when technology enters the classroom -
We tend to adopt the tool uncritically and use it without a tremendous amount of creativity. We extend current practices rather than use tools to change our practices. And frankly? I’d be a lot happier seeing more meaningful use of poster paper in more math classrooms. Let’s save the spending on Smart Boards until we’ve got that nailed down, shall we?
He’s specifically talking about the difficulties with Smart Boards (I use a Promethean). And as a relatively tech-savvy dude….he’s right. I don’t use the Promethean near as as effectively as I should. Have my student’s suffered? Probably not. The Promethean is a fine broadcasting tool. It’s a bit like an iPad textbook, or a fancy flashcard or TV – it broadcasts a small amount of information to a large group. Or just a textbook. Just a bit more interactive.
So what does work?
Economically disadvantaged students, who often use the computer for remediation and basic skills, learn to do what the computer tells them, while more affluent students, who use it to learn programming and tool applications, learn to tell the computer what to do.
Those who cannot claim computers as their own tool for exploring the world never grasp the power of technology… They are controlled by technology as adults – just as drill-and-practice routines controlled them as students.
Pillar, C. (1992). Separate realities: The creation of the technological underclass in America’s public schools. MacWorld, 9(9), 218-230.
While the poor/affluent part of this quote can wait for a different post, the striking contrast between rote and constructive learning held true 20 years ago, and for the most part, holds true today. One classroom described in the Neuman quote sounds intriguing, the other doesn’t. My classroom involves computer programming through Alice, computer-aided design through Google Sketch-Up, mathematical modeling in Excel & Geogebra, airfoil designs in FoilSimIII and others. I can’t say anything I do is innovative, but I do do technology better’n most. I’m not particularly interested in whether or not my students can use a computer. I want to teach them how to use a computers.
Which brings me back to my first example. Didn’t I start this post with kids getting Kindles and suddenly becoming readers?
Well, that’s not completely true. The innovation in that classroom isn’t a two-hundred dollar device. A teacher stands at the center of the new vortex, asking students to build, create, research and learn in ways they have never done before and with questions they have never asked. You want to use the blowtorch in shop class, kid? Lemme download the safety manual for you. Here’s thirty questions on its use. Call me when you need help, a reader or you’ve got your answers. Finished the test? Make a video on its use. Blog about it. Teach a peer how to use one safely.
A friend of mine has a word for this learning environment: student ownership. That’s what I’m looking for, that’s the trick to teaching (and teaching technical literacy on the iPad).
Indeed “play” and “hard work” are not opposites: in fact, they can be seen as synonyms. Anyone who has ever played hard also knows how to work hard. There may be aspects of our play that we dislike, that are not “fun,” but we do them because they are steps in the process we are teaching ourselves, the challenge we are undertaking. And young children tend to play hard, throwing themselves wholly into it, immersing themselves into it as they see fit, to the degree they feel comfortable, up to the point of their interest, until their driving questions are answered.
And this is where [others] tend to interject: Ah, but what about the hard work of doing things they don’t want to do? How do you teach them that through play?
The short answer is: you don’t.
I have tried for weeks to say this better than Teacher Tom. I haven’t succeeded yet. Check his blog out. If I had the chance to move to Seattle and send my kid to him, I would in a heartbeat.
How do you transform factory era school systems so that they better serve the needs of an information age society? You don’t do it by being timid.
Unlike most school reformers floating ‘tweak-the-status-quo’ proposals these days (let’s test kids more! let’s get rid of a few teachers! let’s make school longer! let’s lecture better!), the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents (CAPSS) decided to swing for the fences:
You’ve been to a science fair, right? Tri-fold boards, volcanoes and blue ribbons. This month, my colleagues and I shepherded the “STEM Fair” into existence. The STEM Fair is a showcase for any Science, Technology, Engineering or Math project our students produced over the course of a month. My school produced forty to fifty blog posts, hundreds of digital pictures, a dozen two minute videos, thirty presentations and about ten individual physical showcases. I have a room filled with Japanese art-chemistry, rocket cars, rockets of various propulsion methods, a small robot, a Lego-Branded robot, paper gliders, a seesaw and more. How can a teacher show off his students work to parents, grandparents, etc who may not be able to attend the event physically?
The Digital STEM Fair.
I have I ever told you this is my other…other….other blog? I have a handle at Lumberjocks, I blog here and I blog at school. Well, my students blog. I facilitate the school’s Website Committee. Last year, I revamped the committee’s operation – launching a WordPress-powered blog. This year, I opened the site to the various other parts of school – student newspaper, various academic classes and clubs. This week, I will use this student-centered, student-owned tool to create a digital gateway into the Math/Sci department at my school.
The Plan:
A splash page which directs parents to the different classes. The classes will link to STEM Project Proposals, Updates & Final Posts. All of this can be sorted by a strong tagging system. WordPress also makes certain posts “sticky” – meaning they always lead the blog’s front page. I’d like to “farm” this work out to my students, but most likely I’ll need to do this, as I have administrator access.
Next, I’ll have the students upload their videos to a web-hosting service and embed those videos into the posts itself. I use Youtube as a video host, so I need to turn of the “suggested video” option. If a “suggested video” happens to be controversial, we don’t want people thinking it’s the school’s issue.
Lastly, my students will create a inclusive slideshow of the work they did, embedding this into the splash page.
Our school does have some rules which I should be aware of -
1. Each kid’s parents/guardian signs a media release.
2. Only use first names.
3. Any video is unsearchable & password protected. WordPress can password protect individual posts and many sites like Youtube have an unlisted option.
4. Don’t put anything up which shows the school in a bad light…
5. Last but not least, turn comments off.
I like these rules – if you blog about children, take them into account. Teacher Tom only posts pictures of kids hands and keeps the screen squiggly. Other bloggers do the same. I tend to only take shots of the finished products. Unlike my examples, the student blog has a kid-driven focus – its intent is to show our students and their competence. I try to keep that in mind as I put student work “out there”.
