Framing Innovation

It happens at nearly every conference I attend.

"Oh, I recognize you! It's the glasses."

The thick black cat's eyes have framed my perspective for the last seven years. Sometimes the opposite will happen. If I am not wearing my glasses, students and even friends have walked right by me without a spark of recognition. These frames have become my brand, if you will. It is how people come to recognize and remember me, at least initially. But a conversation at last night's TED Summit dinner has me looking at my lenses through a new perspective.

Amanda Palmer, who happens to be here in Banff for the TED Summit, writes in her book about how her perspective was changed by shaving her eyebrows, a look that has become part of her signature style:

"I found to my delight, that it had the unintended side effect of causing people to look me in the eye. When you have creatively painted eyebrows, people will assume you're approachable and affable, and talk to you."

This has also been true of my black cat's eye frames dotted with silver stars in the corners. I have been stopped on the street and questioned in the checkout line. They are a ready made conversation starter. And as I am not the best at small talk or even introducing myself to strangers, my glasses help me connect immediately. There was the barista who had to know where I got my frames because they reminded her of a picture of her mother, which was a reason I was drawn to them as well. My mother wore a similar pair in her high school graduation photo. The mother who stopped me to share her love of the singer Lisa Loeb (again, me too). My frames are a way to form immediate connections, to share stories, and move beyond simply getting to know someone by asking what they do for a living. These frames introduce me before I even open my mouth to speak.

And last night at dinner, TED fellow Tunji Lardner helped me think through my lenses from a new perspective.

Over our first course, Mr. Lardner asked about the role of the new TED Innovative Educators within the larger TED community. I described the innovation projects that each of us would spend the next year working on. He asked about how we, those of us sitting around him, framed the idea of innovation. What is innovation? The conversation evolved to discusseing how elements of design and innovation are dependent upon a particular cultural lense. Innovation, real innovation, must then both acknowledge that frame and move beyond it. Our culture frames design, frames innovation. What then is innovation at a global level?

Photo by TED Innovative Education YauJau Ku

So now I'm thinking about how my glasses might also serve as a reminder. The fat black frame is always present in my periphery, serving as a reminder for me to check my perspective. I am always aware of the frame through which I interact with the world. My glasses tangibly remind me that I have a particular perspective and perhaps if I want to think outside that frame, I might need to remove my glasses.

Not Just A Matter of Luck

It is our first full day at the TED Summit in Banff. Our group of 30 TED Innovative Educators (TIEs) from around the world is pitching our innovation plans. Mine has to do with mentoring passion. In preparing my pitch, I am reminded of a conversation a number of years back.

The year I first started teaching high school English, we piled into a friend's Honda and drove south to Williamsburg, Virginia, to spend Thanksgiving break with a group of friends from our college years. We spent all morning, afternoon, and into the wee hours of the morning cooking, eating, laughing, playing Boogle, and chatting. Sometime after three in the morning, one of my close friends turned to me and declared me lucky. "You've always known what you wanted to do with your life." And then she popped a question that many of my high school students have also grappled with:

"How do your figure out your passion?"

I didn't always know that I wanted to be a teacher. As a child, I remember declaring that I wanted to be an astronomer, namely because being an astronaut sounded scary and none of first grade peers seemed to know that an astronomer was. I thought it sounded cool. Secretly, I wanted to be a mermaid. But all the while, whether astronomer, mermaid, author, or teacher, I was writing. When I look back at what brought me joy as a child and what continues to bring me joy, it often involves writing. My passion for encouraging emerging writers to share their voice with real readers developed out of my own love for writing.

Luckily, I had teachers along the way that encouraged my writing. Tucked away somewhere in a trunk in my parent's basement is my very first book - The Amazing Talking Dog -  which I wrote as a fourth grader as part of the Young Author's initiative. In eighth grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Zeinstra, had us bring in notebooks which we wrote in every single day. We scribbled down lines from favorite poems which we found in her collection of anthologies lining the windowsills. We crafted stories that incorporated the hijinks of our peers as main plot points, taking joy in reading them aloud. We wrote every day. As a high school senior, my AP English teacher asked if he might submit a poem I wrote for an assignment to a regional writing competition. Before submitting it, we met after school to talk about the tone of one particular word I had used in the piece. Mr. Dik and I discussed how a single word can alter the feel of a text, but ultimately, he left the decision about whether I changed the work in my hands. Weeks later he took me into the city along with a couple of other classmates when the winners were announced. My name wasn't classed, but it didn't matter. I was lucky. It was this experience - playing with words, crafting lines, working with writers - where I was lucky to discover what I wanted to spend my life doing.

My good friend and so many of my students have not been as lucky, especially when what has brought them joy does not easily fit into one of the content-area silos of our current education system. What happens to the student who wants to design toys? What content-area does that fall under? Will that student be encouraged in our current system? What happens to the passion that does not easily fit into the curriculum of our algebra classes or biology or American literature?

We are educating students out of their stories. We are educating people out of passion.

That Thanksgiving conversation has haunted me, namely because I found my friend's question so difficult to answer:

"How do you figure out your passion?"

She wanted something more tangible, something she could do. Was there a class that I took in college that helped me discover a career path I am passionate about? Was there a book she could read? In my current classroom, I hear echoes of this same question. Is there a website I could look at? A test I might take to understand what my passion might be?

We have taught students how to look up the answers, but we have given them the questions. We have fed them questions that have right answers. My students, many of them, lack the confidence to struggle with the unknown, lack the practice of coming up with their own big questions.

I teach high school English in the third poorest county in my state. Our high school of about 900 students sits squarely in the middle of Michigan farm country. Over the course of this past year, I have had students struggle with food insecurity, homelessness, depression and suicide, broken homes, and broken hearts. Our teachers are fighting to raise our graduation rate and prepare our students for what lies outside the walls of our school. Unfortunately, our effectiveness is measured in how well our students pass the state tests. And so to prepare students for these tests and to take the college entrance exams, many of the writing experiences that my students have had in school have been in the form of timed essays written to a single prompt. As many of my students will be first generation college students, early exposure to the type of writing tasks that they will encounter on the SAT and ACT and AP test is helpful. To an extent. However, this cannot be the only type of writing we ask of students. Such high-stakes testing situations will not make up a majority of the writing experiences that my students will have over the course of their lifetimes. And yet, this is the type of writing they are most often asked to craft whilde in school. By the time I meet students as sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they are frustrated writers, frustrated by a lack of choice, lack of purpose, lack of writing that has relavence to their lived experiences.  They no longer see the purpose of writing yet another essay. Far too many papers have been returned with red circles and hash marks and a letter that looms large at the top of the page. Sure it is for a grade, but what does that mean? What has that taught someone about the purpose of writing?

I want my students to graduate high school as connectors, collaborators, and creators. If we don't facilitate more opportunities for students to do this inside the classroom, how can we expect them to be curious and critical learners outside of the classroom. As teachers, we need to facilitate possibility, potential, and passion. How can we help students not only discover their passion but pursue it as well? It shouldn't simply be a matter of luck.

A New Kind of Resume

Last summer I had the opportunity to participate in the ThingLink Summer Challenge for Educators.  As part of our initial challenge, we were asked to use the ThingLink platform to create a digital portfolio. I linked my many professional learning networks and digital platforms to a a static image.  But I've been thinking lately about the importance of video, of movement and photography. In our weekly video conversations with fellow TED-Ed Innovative Educators (TIEs), we've been reflecting on how video has changed the face of learning in the last few years.  How, where, and when students are learning has substantially changed in the last decade.

So, why shouldn't resumes change? For teachers interested in the intersections of blended learning, video opens up a number of opportunities to share what we, too, have learned.  In particular, platforms like ThingLink (or Touchcast, EdPuzzle, TED Lessons) offer opportunities to make videos interactive.

And so here it is: my interactive resume. I made this using Adobe Spark, WeVideo, and ThingLink.  I'd love to see what others are doing to create interactive teaching resumes. Share yours!

Why It's Important to Share Heartbreak

I don't even recall what the student said. It was an off-hand, joking comment about my weekend. And that's when I started to feel the tears well up. "It was a bit difficult, actually."

A few students noticed, crossed the room, and asked gently, "Are you okay?" I answered honestly.

"Not really."

About a year and a half ago, my father was diagnosed with cancer, but after a difficult surgery and six months of chemotherapy, he recovered. Unfortunately, this past weekend, we learned that he again had cancer. A different type of cancer. But cancer.

I shared this with my students. And what followed was heartbreaking. Cancer has touched the lives of nearly every one of my students.  I have a number of students who have lost uncles and aunts, grandparents and cousins to cancer.  The student who left my first period class in tears this morning revealed that her aunt was in surgery this morning to remove a tumor and that family had texted her during class to update her on the progress. A couple of my students have lost parents to cancer. A father lost to lung cancer five years ago. Another student learned this weekend that her mother's cancer has grown. Doctors discovered a tumor on her lung and two more growing on her brain.

It is a club that none of us want to belong to: the Those-Touched-By-Cancer club.

What I discovered today was just how large our club really is. As students in the room caught snippets of what began as a small group discussion, they drifted into our conversation circle, sharing with us their heartbreak. Before long, many in the room were sharing their stories.  At one point, we started to wonder how it was that so many of us, nearly all of us in fact, had so many personal connections to cancer.  "When I was younger, I don't think I understood what it was. Maybe it has always been like this, but we're just starting to realize what it means to have cancer," volunteered one of my tenth graders.

"My family just wouldn't talk about it. I don't think they thought I could handle it. They thought they were protecting me. But not knowing just made it worse."

"Maybe it's always been like this, but we've gotten better at identifying cancer. Maybe the tests have gotten better."

That's when a student made a connection to something we are working on in class. "I wish I did something about cancer for my IonPassion project. That's what breaks my heart. Cancer. That's what I want to fix."

And that's when I could respond, "You can."

This is how meaningful, purposeful, heartbreakingly important works comes from the classroom.  We have to share what touches us, what breaks our heart. Both teachers and students need spaces to share without fear. This is where innovation comes from.  We need classrooms where students have flexibility to share, to find the work that is meaningful both to them personally but also to our local and global communities.

So, now I have students who are rethinking their inquiry projects. I have students who want to do something about cancer. They are not sure what they will research, but you can bet that I'm going to share Jack Andraka's work. Before his 16th birthday, Jack developed a more cost-effective and accurate test for pancreatic cancer. And I know that even before they begin their inquiry work, my students are embarking on learning journey that will certainly bring our community closer. This is learning that touches lives in hopes of changing them. This is what can happen when we share.

Lasts and Firsts

This coming Friday will be my seniors last day submitting articles to our online school newspaper, last day of standing up to present speeches in our public speaking class. It will be the last time they spin that combination to change out one textbook for another, last time rushing from class to bathroom to class again all in under five minutes time. Some of these rituals they will miss. Other routines they will wonder how they managed once they have a few weeks or months perspective on their high school experience. But in addition to the list of lasts, this past year has also been filled with quite a few firsts, for both my students and for me.

This was my first year teaching in Michigan. When I started back in September, there were some challenges that I anticipated and some I never saw coming, much like my soon-to-be-graduating seniors. I knew that this year would be markedly different from my previous 13 years of teaching just outside the Philadelphia area. Up until this year, I taught on a four-by-four block schedule with a maximum of 30 students in my classroom. Yes, sometimes 31 or 32 would sneak in, but for the most part, I worked with between 75 - 85 students each semester, approximately 160 each year.

This year, I had 137 students first semester, and 131 in my second semester classes. Some of those 268 students I had throughout the entire year, but not all. This has certainly been the largest number of students I have been responsible for in my entire teaching career. And in addition to getting to know more students, I also learned new standards, new state testing procedures, and new curriculum. I taught classes this year that were all new to me. Although I taught a public speaking class about ten years ago, it was nothing like the class I had this past semester. And the tenth grade class I had taught my previous 13 years was focused on world literature. This was my first year teaching tenth grade students American literature. All new content, all new school. New routines, new systems, new faces. I felt like a first year teacher all over again. There were more times that I can count that I ended up crying in my classroom, crying in the car, crying on the shoulder of husband, feeling overwhelmed. How do I both plan and grade? How can I effectively individualize lessons for this many learners? How can I provide timely feedback on this much writing?

Then I would catch myself in conversations with students. In the past few months, I have had students miss significant school due to in-patient hospitalizations, homelessness, and parent illness. I have multiple students sitting in my rows who have lost parents and lost loved ones to cancer, to divorce, to accidents, to addictions. I have students who feel bullied and lost and alone. They, too, are overwhelmed. And here's what strikes me: I know these things.

I may have more students than I have ever had in my entire career this year, but I also know more students this year. Really know them. The district that I landed in is one that focuses on intervening not just on the academic level, but on the personal level. Each month we meet as an entire staff, the students have a half day of school, and the teachers talk about students. We look at specific students. Why is this student failing my class and not yours? What have you tried that is working? Which students are falling under the radar? Why? Why did this students miss seven days of class in the last month? What's going on at home? We do this each and every month. We connect around the individuals sitting in our classrooms. This is a first for me.

As Angela Maiers wrote not all that long ago, "If you don’t first secure students’ hearts, you don’t have a shot at their brains." The teachers I work with this year care about more than data. During my first year in this district, I have witnessed so many students meet the challenges they are facing head on, both academically and personally. I have witnessed resilience and kindness, empathy and grit. As a first year teacher in this district, students didn't know what to expect from me and neither did I. But I would put forth a challenge, ask them to try a new way of doing something, and students met those challenges and exceeded expectations. In the process, we got to know one another. We grew as a community of learners. And they were not the only ones growing. I had challenging days, challenging weeks. My students would push me. They provided support as well as constructive feedback.

About a month ago, I was offered a consulting position which would have taken me out of the classroom. The offer came at a time when I was feeling particularly frustrated, not with students, but with some of the requirements and politics that happen in a public school setting.  The consulting position would have paid a little more and put me in closer proximity to my family, but something about it didn't feel quite right. It took some soul searching to figure out exactly what it was. The company is wonderful. Their vision and mission align with my values and teaching philosophy. Their attention to team building, dedicated time for reflection, and commitment to personal and professional development are building blocks for a position made just for me. At the time of the offer, I happened to stumble upon Caitlin Tucker's blog post titled "Manifesting My Perfect Teaching Position" and Vicki Davis's post "When Is It Time To Quit Teaching?" After reading both posts, I realized that although I am frustrated by aspects of my current position, I am not ready for this to be my last year of working directly with students. I love coaching and working with teachers, one look at the list of presentations and conferences I've attended in the past couple years is evidence of that, but I am energized by working with young people. I love teaching emerging writers. I love getting young readers excited about new books. I love connecting practicing readers and writers with real audiences and purposes. I have more to give to the classroom.

So this will not be my last year in the classroom.  Unlike my senior students, I am not yet ready to graduate high school.

We've Got Our Eye on Passion with #IonPassion

We've been talking about passion in my high school English classes for the past two weeks.

No, not quite like that.

Much like the unit I introduced last year, we began our tenth grade inquiry projects about two weeks ago, which this year we've dubbed our #IonPassion Projects (get it? "Ion"...for Ionia), with an exploration of the roots of the word passion.  Students explored how our passions differ from our interests or even our hobbies.  In our discussion, we returned to our very first day of school, where following a failed attempt at folding origami cranes, we learned the importance of failing. Students remembered me saying that I wanted them to fail. I did say this. I want them to take risks, try new things, and fail in order to discover just how resilient they are. We don't learn by staying inside our comfort zones; we learn when we try out new ideas, new ways of thinking. During our discussion of what makes something a passion, students returned to this idea. A passion is something that we will continue to pursue despite setbacks and adversity.  Our passion, as Angela Maiers has pointed out, is what we are willing to suffer for.

And it turns out, I have a variety of passions sitting in my tenth grade English classes!

So now we're looking to connect our passions with experts in a variety of fields. My tenth grade English students have carefully crafted their inquiry questions, found mentor texts, written their initial inquiry proposals, and outlined their action plans for our #IonPassion research projects. But now we need some help. You'll find my students' research blogs linked below.

Roll over each picture to find a description and link to each student's blog. We'd love to hear your ideas and feedback.

1st Period 10th Grade Honors American Literature


2nd Period 10th Grade Honors American Literature


7th Period 10th Grade Honors American Literature


In addition to consulting mentor texts, we are looking for mentors to help us learn more about our inquiry topics. Do you have a passion for photography or mixing music? We are looking to interview, either in person or via email, experts. Please take a few moments to review our inquiry questions below, and if you wouldn't mind if one of my students contacting you, add your name and information to the columns on the right on our list below.

CLICK HERE FOR ACCESS TO THE FULL SHEET.

One of THOSE Days

It has been an incredible week so far. On Monday, environmental reporter from the Grand Rapids Press and MLive, Garret Ellison, joined my journalism class to discuss his writing and research process. We learned all about how he gathers information, interviews for a story, and about how state agencies and the general public interact with the pieces he has written.  Today, Darcy Meade from the Ionia Sentinel Standard shared with us her experiences in both television production as well as working as a newspaper education reporter.

It also happens to be our big poetry week.  Students brought in their favorite poems and lyrics which we posted in a hallway display. My public speaking students listened and responded to the American Academy of Poets "Dear Poet" program. Tomorrow we will chalk our favorite verses outside on the sidewalk of the school's main entrance and share our favorite poets for Poem in Your Pocket Day.

But today has also been one of those days.

Because despite how well I planned for these events, and how well some small pieces went, those things that went oh-so-wrong are overwhelming me.

It started small. Some of the students in my first period class didn't come prepared. I had asked students to bring in their favorite poem or lyrics to share. No big deal. This is to be expected.  I have Chromebooks in my room and a whole slew of poetry books, so students had the ability to look up their favorite verses if they forgot to bring them in.  "Ms. Ward, it can be a song, right?" Of course! Which lead to a short but great conversation about why song lyrics should be considered poetry. Students named off similar traits.  I asked students to list the title, author, and favorite stanza on an index card which we then taped to a hallway display for poetry month.

I teach 15 and 16 year old students. I know that they like to push boundaries. But we know each other. We've built a community of trust. I suppose I should have expected, but didn't, the couple of students who made the decision to write inappropriate lyrics. That question about whether they could use song lyrics wasn't about whether lyrics were poetry. The students were looking to push a boundary. And they did. Pulling up crude and profane lyrics, scrawling them quickly onto a note card, grabbing a piece of tape, and jumping to add their card high upon the hallway wall, far out of my reach.  I had pull a desk from my classroom and scramble on top of it to snatch the offensive verse from the display.

What irks me most is not that I didn't think students would try to push boundaries, they are tenth graders after all and that is what they do, but what irks me most is that the students didn't take into account our classroom community. I sought special permission from the principal to post this display in the hallway, to showcase our love of well-crafted lines, and a couple of students, students who have been in my class and built our learning community together since September, made the decision to disrespect our learning community.

If that was all that happened, I would be handling today better. I know that tomorrow we will have a class discussion about respect and community. And I know that it will be a good reminder for all of us about what we value and how we build our community. But this initial disruption was followed by a much larger one.

Part of my day is scheduled by the students and teachers. Students have 30 minutes each day to schedule time to work with a particular teacher, or a particular teacher can assign a student to "office hours" for more individualized help. It is a wonderful program. I had scheduled my struggling journalism students to my office hours today, hoping to get those who had fallen behind caught back up.  But one young woman wasn't having it. "Why do I have to be here?" she demanded. My room was filled with 30 students, many who needed extra help on specific assignments and others who were still signing into my office hours.  The room fell silent. When I explained, she threw her hands on her hips and stated that she didn't need my class to graduate so she was just planning to fail it. This breaks my heart.  To see someone so young, so angry, so checked out.  I responded something to the effect that I didn't want her to fail. She turned on heel and started to march out of the room.

"Making the choice to leave your assigned time will result in consequences," I called.

"F**k your consequences," she yelled back at me as she walked out the door.

She skipped our journalism class as well.

At the beginning of the year, I start my classes with an exercise. I ask students to fold an origami crane using these awful printed directions in two minutes time. They can't do it. I ask them why, and they tell me what they need to learn. We use this exercise to talk about failure. Failure gives us an opportunity to reassess and reflect, to figure out what went wrong and make adjustments. I tell students, if you aren't failing, then you aren't learning.

But what happens when the teacher fails.  I know this is my learning moment. This is the point where I need to reflect, to adjust what I did and how I respond. I know that there are reasons and personal stories that accompany both of these disruptions today. I know that in the scheme of things, they are not insurmountable issues. But I feel defeated today.

I love teaching poetry. It is sacred for me. It feels trampled.

I love working with students, and it is a point of pride that I do not respond to students with sarcasm or disrespect. I was so taken aback to be spoken to in such a way.

I just finished re-reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly, and in it she quotes Theodore Roosevelt,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” 

I know all of this. But there is a gap between knowing and feeling. I feel like I have failed. And while I may know that I have dared greatly, I still feel pretty lousy in this moment.