connectED

I had an opportunity to participate in a panel discussion about the impact of social media in education this morning on the campus of the University of Michigan at Flint. Students in their graduate program for Educational Leadership met this morning to discuss how social media has changed professional development for educators.  And, Saturday mornings are the perfect morning to discuss this!  I got to mention how awesome #satchat has been for growing my PLN and exposing me to new and innovative ideas in education.

I also was excited to share how I use social media to amplify my students' voices and connect them to other thinkers around the world. Our world has been flattened by technology.

But this is old news.

Instead, I was surprised to hear about the level of push-back that these future administrators faced. Many of the educators in the room spoke about their districts having strict policies against connecting with parents online.  Connecting with students online was out of the question, as the districts they currently worked in had clear board policies against using social media in the classroom even at the secondary level.

Perhaps it is because I have immersed myself in technology and love sharing how social media has connected my learners with authors, experts, real readers, and classrooms around the globe that I forget that there still exists fear about how young people are using connective technologies.  I am not naive. I know that students need to be taught digital responsibility and that irresponsible behavior online can have dire real-life consequences, but locking the box on social media is not doing anyone any good.  How can we teach digital responsibility if we do not allow our educators and students to access it?

I hope that I was able to share today ways in which social media has helped make the walls of our classroom more transparent. I loved sharing some of what I have learned from Joe Sanfelippo (he's actually in town on Monday for MACUL's Mindshare!) and Tony Sinanis's work: "As lead learners, administrators, and educators, it is our responsibility to transform the thick brick barriers surrounding our school buildings into clear, transparent walls of glass." Social media helps teachers and administrators connect with our most important stakeholders.  It also helps us clearly articulate our story. The story of our schools.

Mentoring Failure

I love these conference connections!

I am presenting at the Michigan Google Summit today at Lake Fenton High School on both teaching with TED-Ed and a session on mentoring passion.  I love the conversations that stem from my presentation on the work Christy Brennan and I did on our mentoring passion project, bringing together students of differing grade levels to share their inquiry experiences with one another.  In fact, I was hoping to scale this into a much larger project by putting together an online space to connect various teachers, students, and experts engaging in similar passion-driven inquiry projects across the country.  It was to be my TED-Ed Innovative Project.

But I failed.

Sharing my Mentoring Passion project with TED-Ed Innovative educators in June

I love this presentation, but so much of it is still in process.  It is not a finished project.  I am still reflecting on the role student ownership plays in the inquiry process. As I was presenting today, I revealed some of my pitfalls with my passion-driven inquiry projects and where I was still struggling. I need more time to reflect on where I am stepping into the student inquiry process.  I still spend too much time hunting down expert connections for my students, instead of facilitating opportunities to define and find those experts themselves. And as I shared, a conversation emerged that has me thinking more deeply about changes I want to make in the coming months to our inquiry projects.

Here is what I have learned: I need to open up more space in my classroom for students to talk about their failures. So much time is spent honoring the successes, the students who have done everything we have asked and have come to the conclusions that we expected them to have.  But what are they really learning?  Instead, I need to open up time and space for my students to share their struggles, like I did today, because the conversations that emerged from my admission of failure has moved me forward in my planning and thinking in important ways.  Imagine the power of those types of moments in our classroom.  Instead of teaching students to jump through hoops, we should be mentoring students on how to recover from initial failure.  This is a critical step in innovation. If we want to grow innovation in our classroom, we must open up spaces for failure.

Writing My Keynote

No, I haven't been asked to keynote a conference. However, after attending Todd Bloch and Heather Gauck's session titled "Finding Educator Voice" at the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference yesterday, I had a bit of an ah-ha moment. I need to write my keynote.

I go to a lot of conferences and professional development workshops.  I'm a bit of a self-confessed PD junkie. An Edcamp in 60 miles and I am there! The conference sessions that I am drawn to are both interactive and story-driven, much like a good keynote address. They draw you in with the speaker's personal experience but leave you with a "now what," as in, "Now what are you going to do about this?" Good presentations are those that hone in on a theme and drive thinking forward by coming back to a motif that reminds the audience of that central theme. Jennie Magiera does just this when she speaks. Her keynote at the Chicago ETTSummit in 2014 connected a large group of educators both by having us interact with one another and by reminding us how we connect global for a singular purpose - empower learners.

Now I have done a lot of presentations and workshops in the last two years, over twenty presentations focused mainly on the getting students to write and create for authentic audiences.  A recurring theme in many of my presentations has been the idea of moving from engaging students to empowering learners. But many of these presentations have been how-to workshops, or at their worst they have been how-did, meaning here's how I did this. I hope that some of these presentations have been helpful for those educators in attendance, but my guess is that they may not have been very inspiring.

I need to stop thinking of my audience as teachers and begin addressing them as learners. That's what we are.  All of us who are PD junkies are just that because we love learning.  So for my next presentation, I need to reflect on how to empower and inspire the educators in the room to move to that now-what moment.  I need to present my keynote and not simply a how-to manual.

And I have an idea for my theme, something about getting out of your seat and onto your feet.  So just in case you are in need of a keynote presenter, I'll be ready.

Flickr CC image by Thomas Hawk

Simply Incredible Week

It is Thursday, and the week isn't even over, but I'm confident in saying that this may just be one of my best weeks ever!

Please forgive this not-so-humble-but-totally-excited brag:

Sunday afternoon I received an email invitation from Fox News to attend and ask a question at the Democratic Town Hall hosted in Detroit. So on Monday afternoon, my husband and I hopped on the road to Detroit.

As we were driving, I learned that my classroom was one of the selected recipients of a 1:1 grant by the EdTechTeam. We have 36 Chromebooks on their way! I couldn't resist. I immediately texted my students when I found out.  When I returned to the classroom on Tuesday morning, the excitement was palatable.

Yesterday, a reporter from the Ionia Sentinel-Standard visited my class to do a story on how my students started an anti-bullying group at our school. I could not be prouder of the students who have spearheaded this initiative. Their worked stemmed from a project-based learning activity connected with our reading of The Crucible last semester. And although the project has long since been completed, the students are still working hard to address issues of bullying and promote kindness in our community. 

Today I am presenting with four of my students at the ‪#‎MACUL16‬ conference in Grand Rapids.  Together with Brad Wilson of WriteAbout.com, we are sharing how writing for authentic purposes and audiences changes how emerging writers engage with the process of writing. And of course, I needed to take my student presenters out for Philly cheese steaks as a way to say thanks!

Not sure what I did to deserve so many blessings, but I am certainly grateful!

Taking the Stage

I'm nervous.

I've spent the day making sure that everything is in order for our visit from the One Book, One Philadelphia author Christina Baker Kline, author of the fantastic historical fiction novel Orphan Train. Emailing maintenance to make sure we have a registration table and microphones, asking students to come up with questions they want to ask of the author, and running around the building snapping pictures of teachers and students reading Orphan Train. I had quite a bit of fun with that last task. As teachers, students, and community members file into our auditorium tomorrow, I have a slideshow prepared of our community members reading Orphan Train, and snapping pictures throughout the day has also meant that I have had the opportunity to talk with so many different people about this story. There has been one common thread - we love this book!

A guidance counselor shared with me the story of discussing this book with her 90 year old mother, connecting over the history behind Vivian's tale. A tenth grader shared how she loved the parallel between Molly's story and Vivian's. A gym teacher nearly cried as she shared how this story helped her connect with an important young person in her life who shared a similar journey to that of Molly. Young and old, men and women, students and teachers from all walks of life connect to this story. There is something so moving about Vivian's journey, her struggles and decisions, her heart break and connections and the way in which young Molly is able to reach out and connect with her experiences across generations that touches all sorts of readers.

But, I am nervous.

I have the job of being moderator for tomorrow's program with Christine Baker Kline. It's not that this is my first time moderating an author presentation, but that doesn't seem to quell my nerves.  I have had the pleasure of moderating presentations authors Edwidge Danticat and Julie Otsuka made when they visited our campus in the past, but there is something about being so near the writers whose work I've admired, while also standing on stage in front of hundreds of people under a spot light. I mentioned this nervousness to a non-teacher not all that long ago who gave me a quizzical look. "Aren't you 'on stage' in front of people every day? Isn't teaching the same thing?"

My classroom is not a stage, and I don't put on a performance each day. Although I work with about 75 - 85 young people each day, it's not quite the same experience. As years pass, I find that I spend less and less of my time in front of the class. My nervousness about tomorrow alludes to my position in the classroom. I am not confident speaking in public. It is not something that comes naturally to me. I much prefer to be in the classroom working with people. So to prepare for tomorrow, I had my students help me brainstorm questions to ask of the author. And, not surprisingly, they came up with great questions about Ms. Baker Kline's writing inspiration and her process.

So I'm starting to feel a bit more prepared for tomorrow because when I go up on that stage, I'll take with me the stories shared with me by our community of readers about their connections to Orphan Train as well as the questions that my students generated. We've prepared for this together.

Okay, I'm more prepare but still nervous.

Proud Fangirl

It arrived today. I went down to check my school mailbox during my lunch period, and there it was. A big white envelop addressed to me...from Patty McCormick. Yup, Patty. So when I came back into the teacher's workroom with my white envelop, holding a signed copy of Sold which author Patricia McCormick donated for our March Madness Book Battle, I'm pretty sure I was floating. Earlier last week, as students and staff were suggesting titles for our March Madness Book Battle, I reached out to some of the authors whose books were nominated a number of times by our community. Ms. McCormick's novels Sold and Never Fall Down were recommended multiple times. I sent an email to her assistant and publisher. Within 24 hours, Ms. McCormick emailed me directly offering to send signed copies of both of her books. She signed the email "Patty."

When the email hit my inbox, I'm not going to lie, I may have spent the next 30 minutes telling every student and staff member in earshot that I had just received an email from Patty.

You can only imagine what happened when the signed book arrived today.

Sitting at the lunchroom table, a fellow English teacher commented, "I love that authors are celebrities for you. You are such an English teacher!" It's true. I've met a few celebrities. While on the set of Wonder Boys, I was able take a photo with and get an autograph from Michael Douglas. Wanda Sykes shops at my grocery store. But the nervous jitters and joy I feel when connecting with an author is unparalleled. There is something about first connecting with a text, with a well-developed character and a captivating story, and then meeting the writer. I can rattle off a list of writers that I have had the opportunity to meet in person: Georgia Head, Ishmeal Beah, Edwidge Danticat, Julie Otsuka...okay, I'll stop name-dropping. All to say, I am a fangirl. Squeal out loud and fluttering hands fangirl. I am a literature fangirl.

And proud of it!

Opening the Door to Strangers

I love bringing authors and guest speakers into my classroom. It's selfish really, but I love learning from experts and writers. I am passionate about opening up opportunities for my high school readers and writers to ask questions of experts they might not have access to in their daily lives. Okay, I like to be able to ask questions of experts I might not ordinarily have access to outside the classroom. Today was no exception.

This morning Donna Nordmark Aviles came to speak with my tenth grade students about this history of the orphan train movement in the United States. In preparation for our visit from author Christina Baker Kline who is coming to speak about her book Orphan Train next week, Ms. Aviles shared the story of her grandfather, sent to ride the orphan train to Kansas in 1919 along with his brother.  Inspired by her grandfather's story, Ms. Aviles spent a number of years researching the history of the orphan train movement, one of the first social welfare programs introduced in the United States. Orphans from the large east coast cities, like New York City and Philadelphia where immigration populations exploded, were taken from orphanages and placed onto trains headed west where Midwestern families would either adopt the children or use them as extra labor on farms.

The opportunity to hear the real story behind the historical fiction story of Orphan Train was fascinating. Bringing in outside voices helps to build a greater sense of empathy, a greater sense of responsibility to bear witness to the lives and to injustice when and where they see it. As a teacher, I have the opportunity and responsibility to facilitate those sorts of introductions. I hold open the doors of opportunity, facilitate learning, and introduce students to possibility. I open my classroom doors to strangers in the hopes that all us become more acquainted with the voices in our community.

Motivating Readers

What a fantastic morning! I got up early to share my Saturday morning with teachers, librarians, reading specialists, and educators from around the Delaware Valley for the Delaware Valley Reading Association's conference on Motivating Readers In and Out of the Classroom. I was invited to share how I connect my student readers using 2.0 technologies. And although we didn't plan it, the other presenters, Lauren Strohecker, BJ Neary, and Janine Sacks, and I all ended up reinforcing the same thing - students need to be heard! We need to give space in our classrooms for student voice and choice.

In preparation for my presentation this morning, I asked my high school readers what got them into reading, what motivated them to read, their responses came faltering at first. But when I asked them what didn’t work to motivate their reading, their responses came faster than I could record. Repeatedly students mentioned not having a say in what they read, how they read, or how their knowledge was assessed. Students mentioned being assigned books, assigned chapters to read in those books, and then being assigned how many comments they needed make during a class discussion of the book. Students wanted to read, but many said that reading in school killed reading. “Having to make six comments during a class discussion put the focus on the grading and not on the book,” Steph offered. Her comment opened up a conversation about how reading is assessed. “Why do teachers give quizzes to check if we’ve read? Does it really matter if we remember that the protagonist was wearing a blue shirt on Tuesday? I’d rather talk about the book,” stated Vivi. “A teacher told me that I shouldn’t read ahead, but I really liked the book,” another offered. "So what does work?" I asked. “I love when teachers give us a chance to talk about the books, and not just answer questions that the teacher came up with,” Nina suggested. “Yea, I learn so much more by listening to how others interpreted particular scenes,” Kelly added. “I don’t learn a whole lot from worksheets, but they sure seem to count for all of my reading grades,” Anthony shared.

As writer and teacher Peter Elbow points out, “...when students struggle for excellence only for the sake of a grade, what we see is not motivation but the atrophy of motivation: the gradual decline of the ability to work or think or wonder under one’s own steam” (“Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer” 129).

And this was echoed by my students when I asked them about their experiences reading in the classroom. So what can we do to encourage voice and choice in the reading classroom? Give students opportunities to have their voices and choices validated!

You can follow along with our online conversations from this morning by clicking through our Twitter conversation below.

Reflections on ETTSummit and Empowering Writers

I can't thank Chris Loeffler enough. I borrowed a lesson that he originally shared at Edcamp Delaware a few months back. In order to inspire his elementary students to reflect on how they learn, he asks them to fold an origami crane in silence, without the help of a YouTube tutorial or the ability to talk with friends, in a set amount of time. And this was how I started my presentation this morning at Chicago's EdTech Teacher Summit. Educators from all over the country sat in silence for two minutes trying to fold a crane based on a worksheet of directions. Not one was able to complete the task. And as we talked afterward about what they would need in order to be successful - flexibility with time, the ability to collaborate and to connect with others completing the same task, access to a model, availability to look at a visual tutorial - the inherent lesson of this activity became apparent.

When I first started teaching high school English, this is what my classroom looked like. I was even one of those teachers that during the first week of class would hand out that ubiquitous “Directions Test.” You know, the one that had a list of 30 to 50 questions, but in the directions it states that students should do nothing, and then you sit and wait for students to yell out, “shark!” or go sharpen their pencil 12 times, and the class has a good chuckle at the students who didn't read the directions. My class was organized around directions and instructions and not centered on learning. And for my first couple of years, as I taught primarily honors students, this worked. My honors students were good at following directions. They were good at playing school. However a couple years in, I was given both mixed ability courses and a group of struggling ninth graders, students who did not chuckle when we played the directions test. And it was in that moment that I was called to reassess what I was really teaching and why?

In May 2013, I attended my first EdCamp conference, EdCamp Philly, and it was here that I met Angela Maiers and learned of her Choose2Matter initiative, a project largely based on the work of teachers using Genius Hour and 20% Time projects in their classrooms. Learning more about these passion-based learning experiences in the context of the EdCamp unconference format helped me rethink how I was teaching writing. I had heard of Google’s 20% time in the past and had been using a writing workshop approach in my 10th grade classroom as a way to teach research skills, but when I heard other area teachers talking about their experiences with Project-Based Learning (PBL) and 20% Time Projects, it clicked how crucial choice, voice, and purpose was to the composing process.

Following EdCamp Philly, I started to learn more about passion-based learning experiences so that in the Fall of 2013 I could engage in 20% time research writing with my 10th grade English students. So what’s the 20% Project all about? The basic premise of the 20% Time Project is that it is student-driven, passion-based learning. Student writers are empowered when choice goes hand-in-hand with autonomy over their learning, opportunities to connect and learn from mentors, and safe spaces to reflect on the failures and successes that come as part of their research process. What my students and I learned as we engaged in our 20% research projects was our most memorable learning experiences came when we were sharing our reflections. This is a component that is often times missing from the more ubiquitous research writing assignments that students complete in school. And as a writing teacher, I wanted to know more about this? What impact does choice, autonomy, purpose, and reflection have on the writing skills that students develop as they engage in research? So, following the completion of their 20% projects, I spent some time researching what other writing teachers have had to say about these elements but have also surveyed and interviewed my 10th grade English students.

Over the last few months I have been both surveying and interviewing former students about their experiences with our research endeavors. I asked students to review our Pennsylvania Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for expository writing and reflect on what skills we addressed as we engaged in our research and writing processes. Additionally, I asked students to think about how they decided on their research topics, how they found their mentor texts and experts, and their thoughts what worked and didn't as we engaged in both our traditional research writing and our more inquiry driven 20% research writing project. In reviewing my students’ responses, what I discovered was that the strengths they reflected on most were those that fell into seven themes. EMPOWER is an acronym for the seven elements of our research writing that students identified as being crucial elements in their success.

And these elements are not only key for developing student writing skills but connect with learning in all content areas.  Empowering students through choice, voice, authentic purposes is not something that is unique to teaching writers. We know this. Yet even though we know that in combination these elements grow creative, collaborative, and critical thinkers in all content areas, we don't always see these sorts of learning opportunities in our secondary schools.  Passion-based learning sounds too "fluffy" or too messy or too risky. However, what my research has shown me is that this "messy" learning does more to grow both academic skills as well as those intangible skills of grit, resiliency, and perseverance. 

As I reviewed my student survey results, as I spoke with my students about what they had learned and how they had learned it, so many of their responses echoed the research done by other educators and psychologists interested in passion-based learning. Students learned more from the process of being able to not just decide on a topic to research, but on the multitude of choices they needed to make in order to find a mentor, craft both traditional writing and digital writing pieces for real audiences outside of the classroom, and decide upon how, when, and where to present their work to a larger audience.  My students discussed the tone of their writing as they crafted emails to contact potential people to interview. They had to analyze their intended audience as they prepare their pitch videos and final TED-style talks. Students reflected not just on the steps of their process but on their pitfalls, revisions, and how they learned in their weekly blog posts. And these are the higher order thinking skills that we want our students working toward.  Their writing was audience and context-driven.  It was purposeful. It was meaningful. It was empowering. 

I shared some of this research in my recent EdTech Teacher Summit presentation.  Feel free to take a peek at my slides and notes below. I would love to hear from you! Are you completing passion-based learning projects with your students? What questions or suggestions do you have?