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Yesterday I traveled up to New York City to go to edcampnyc, an unconference that sprang up following the model of the edcampphilly, that I helped to organize last spring. It is so exciting to see what can happen when groups of people make a commitment to education and to being part of a community of educators who want to make schools better. Many of the organizers of edcampnyc had come down to Philadelphia last spring to take part in the 1st edcamp. They were people who had connected on Twitter, who shared ideas and resources there and were excited to meet and talk in person. After experiencing the power of an unconference, they wanted to organize and hold one in NYC. To learn more about an unconference, check this post where I write about it.

The day started early, leaving home on a Saturday at 6:30am to drive to Trenton and catch the train to the city. As I was driving there, I couldn’t help but think about why I was doing this on a cold, blustery December morning. I could have been warm in bed, but instead I had made the choice to head north. What was it that was so important about these kinds of times? There was no doubt about the answer. They were times when I could get re-energized and excited about my job.

Don’t get me wrong! I love my job. I have always loved being in a classroom and facing the challenge of sparking interest and energy in my students. It is an exhausting job, and there are days when my energy is low. There are times of the year when there are too many days until the next break. At those times, I am not sure how to connect with each of the students in my classes; I am not convinced that I know the best strategy or activity. December can often be one of the times of the year. It is dark and cold with too much to do and very little stability.

To hold an unconference on the first weekend in December was brilliant. Three cheers for the organizers! It was the perfect antidote! I spent yesterday being nurtured and challenged. There was no room for lethargy or apathy when among the educators that were there. It was like a strong wind of wisdom and energy filled the School at Columbia, where edcampnyc was held. Each new session was filled with teachers and administrators who wanted to grow, who wanted to share their best practices and find solutions to their doldrums. These were teachers who willingly gave up their off-duty time to come together. They were often people who considered the others there part of their PLN, their Personal or Professional or Passionate Learning Network. Many of us had never met in person, but we regularly helped each other online. So being together in one space was even more special!

We live in a world that is changing every day. It can overwhelm us, or it can energize us. We can choose to ignore the changes, or we can become students again, eager to learn and grow. As teachers, we must become part of the solution. We must be willing to try new strategies and march bravely into this new world that global and digital connections is creating. When we do it together, we will be wiser and stronger. So take up the challenge! Find ways to share and learn with other educators!

To all of you who have read and shared your thoughts here, thank you! I hope you have a safe and refreshing Thanksgiving. I am grateful for all of you.

I decided to try a new strategy for helping my class learn to effectively develop an idea for writing in a paragraph. This is always an ongoing challenge when teaching history, identifying the main idea for the argument and then supporting it with evidence. When the students can come up with an idea, they often struggle with how to prove it, or when they find lots of facts,  it is a challenge to organize them effectively. I know that I often do some of my best thinking when I am talking with other people, so I developed a lesson to let the students see if talking and listening to themselves would help them organize and articulate their thoughts.

They first read a section of the textbook individually and then again in small groups, identifying together the most important facts. I regularly have them read a section twice: first to identify the main ideas and then a second time to annotate what is significant in the passage. To start the next part of this assignment, I posed a question to them and had them brainstorm from the facts that they knew. Some of them did it on paper and some of them used different programs on their laptops to make mind maps.

I gave them 10 minutes to look over what they had read and the work they had done the day before. Then I gave them this challenge. Using Garageband, they were to record their planning process, identifying which facts they wanted to include and what order they wanted to use them. Then they were to listen to the recording. They were then to repeat the process, only this time with the focus being on developing a topic sentence for the paragraph, one that clearly stated their argument. After they had tried a few sentences, they were to listen again. Then the goal was to record a paragraph that answered the question. After doing that, they were listening to see if they had a clear point of view and had proved their point with evidence.

At first, they were really worried, assuming that this was about creating a finished product that would be graded and, even worse, listened to by the class. When I told them that this was just for them, they became curious but still sort of doubtful. One girl was almost frozen due to her embarrassment at “talking to herself.”  When I explained that the goal was to use their laptops in a new way to develop their thinking, and most importantly that no one was going to hear their recordings but them, they began to loosen up and enjoy the process. As they started to experience it as a different means of identifying what they wanted to say, they got really excited. There was no “product,” except their deeper understanding of the material and of how to put together an effective answer to the question.

For some of them, it was a huge success. They felt like they had really been able to more their thinking forward over the course of the hour that they had to work in this way. They wanted to do it any time that they had to write. For others, they hated it and felt that it didn’t help at all. For both of those groups and the ones in between, it was a learning experience, which was exactly what I wanted.

I just got done with a whirlwind visit to Toronto to attend and present at ECOO – Educational Computing Organization of Ontario. It was a wonderfully run conference, with nary a hitch as far as this attendee could tell. The planning and communication ahead of time and the support team in place yesterday and today made it a great experience. If you can get a chance in the future, I would recommend attending.

One of the things that the time brought home to me is that while online tools are great for connecting educators from around the world, there is nothing like face-to-face time. There is a wonderful energy that comes from being across the table from a person, whether someone you follow on Twitter or not, and talking about topics about which we are all passionate. There is a deep kind of connection that comes when I meet someone that I had followed on Twitter for awhile. These are people whose ideas I know, but with whom I have never shared a cup of coffee. Having the time to share a meal is wonderful. Friendships are quickly born on the solid foundation of trust that has been built up over time on Twitter.

My one funny, and slightly embarrassing, Connecting with my PLN story came when I met someone that I had been following for over a year. I feel very connected to this person, know his ideas and definitely consider him part of my PLN. I pay attention to his tweets when I see them. I ended up sitting at a table with him and a few others. Shortly after the session started, he tweeted that he was sitting with the others but didn’t include me. I made a silly joke about being left out. What became immediately clear was that while I “knew him well,” in Twitter terms, he didn’t “know” me. He did not follow me and had no idea who I was. Truly, there was no reason for him to know me! Like many of the people who follow me, that I do not follow back so that my PLN doesn’t become unruly, he had not made a connection with me. I was outside those he followed.

It was one of those interesting, global connections/disconnections moments. Twitter creates a sense of community that sometimes needs to be tested. It is a great place to meet and begin the connections, but it is really just the starting place. If we want to have a rich, community life, we need to do those next steps – reading and commenting on each other’s blogs, attending online and face-to-face conferences, taking the time to move beyond the more superficial relationships and develop deeper ones.

That is why times like ECOO are so important. We need to make the time and save the money to attend them and to drag along as many colleagues as possible. In places like ECOO, it is possible to learn about global connections and digital tools in a familiar setting that seems to draw many more people into making deeper connections. We can also deepen all of the relationships that get started in other ways.

One of the ongoing challenges for teachers in the 21st century is to be willing to change and grow. The world of education is evolving every day. There are always new tools to help students learn and communicate their ideas. There are new avenues for collaboration and understanding. There are new discoveries about the brain and how to best support students. As teachers, we need to be learning and changing ourselves, as educators, so that we can facilite the learning that our students need to do.

Yesterday, Chris Lehman, the principal of Science Leadership Academy, came to lead our in-service today. (Follow Chris on Twitter, if you don’t already!) Chris spoke about how we can not expect our students to be transformed in our classes if we are not willing to be transformed ourselves. We have to be part of the transformation that we want to take place in our schools and in our students. We must be willing to grow and change if we want to create an environment where students feel safe enough to come along on the journey. When I live the challenges of being a learner, then I am able to create a creative and a safe environment within which students can learn. When I move beyond being the “expert” in the room and take on the role of inquirer, then transformation can happen for me and for my students.

I know that I am a better teacher when I am learning. In those times, I am out of my depth. There are issues that I do not understand or tools that I can not figure out. I am confused, and I have to struggle to understand. The experience of not knowing, of being lost, is critical for good educators. We place students in that situation all of the time. We need to remember what it is like, rather than simply enjoy the comfort of our previous learning and successes. When we learn and grow, we can support the learning and growth of our students.

I have learned so much from the teachers that I interact with online. They provide me with new ideas and new challenges. They support me when I am confused and offer advice to help me find my way through. When I allow myself to be too busy to learn and grow with them, then my students suffer. We are all busy, but there are choices that have to be made if we want to maintain in a place of transformation. We need to make the commitment to daily growth. When we do that, our students benefit. Our learning and inquiry leads to our being better teachers, ones who create transformational classrooms and schools.

So it is back to learning, back to the times of confusion and doubt and on to transformation!

When I got up this morning, I had a lot of work to do, most of it writing comments about my students. Three times a year I have to write a paragraph about each student that I teach. My goal is to make the parents smile and say, “She really knows my child.” It is one of those Love/Hate tasks. It really helps me to take the time to focus on each individual child and try to describe her as she is in my classroom. It is incredibly demanding though. While part of what I write is about her skills, most of it is about her as an individual. There is no Cutting and Pasting that works. Each comment is unique to each girl.

As I was getting myself set up, arranging all of the papers and pieces of evidence that I had collected during the trimester, I remembered my previous blog post about the importance on exercise when using the brain. Part of me wanted to shrug it off and get straight to the task at hand, but another part of me thought that it would be just as good an experiment with me as it was with my students. So I went outside and began to briskly rake leaves. The air was crisp and clear with a gentle wind blowing. The leaves were dry and easy to rake. It felt great to be outside and since I love to rake, it was a great start to the day. I had to discipline myself to stop after 20 minutes and head back inside to the real task of the day.

I sat down and the comments started coming. I felt awake and alert, definitely less in need of caffeine to create the energy. I worked with barely a pause for an hour and a half, at which point I started to feel distracted and lethargic. I had lost my sense of control over the material that I was using to understand each student and each comment was starting to sound similar, rather than unique. I realized that it was time to re-energize my brain. I got up and went back outside. There was no guilt or sense of avoidance. I was doing what would help my complete the task I needed to do, and exercise was part of doing the work of the day. Again, I spent about 20 minutes, raking and enjoying the fresh air. I wasn’t happy to leave it and head inside, but my brain was back on task when I got there. I stayed at it for another couple hours.

It was just fun to practice what I had been preaching last week to my students. Exercise and movement do indeed help the brain to work better!

I have used movement in my classroom a lot over the years, getting the students up to work in small groups or to participate in simulations and role-playing. Today was the first time that I incorporated an actual walk into the work of the class. It was an 80 minute period, first thing in the morning. The purpose of the class was to discuss study strategies and to allow the students time to practice them. I wanted for them to experiment with new ways of learning, so that they could begin to identify what works the best for them.

I started the class by going over the topics that were going to be covered on their upcoming test. It is first test of the year, as I tend to do many other kinds of assessment. I only give tests every now and then, mostly for the students to see how much material they have control over. I believe that mastering control over a body of information is an important skill, even in the Age of Google. It is far harder to think and write about a topic when you don’t have the facts in your mind. I work on helping them find the best ways to practice and learn facts and main ideas.

The students shared the ways that they like to learn information which ranged from making flashcards to recording it in Garageband to retyping their notes. We discussed some other strategies and tools that they could use, from paper and markers to Smart Ideas and Word. Because this isn’t the first time they have thought about this, they had a good idea of what tools they wanted to start with for their studying.

Then it was time for a brisk 5 minute walk. I suggested that they use the time to review in their minds what they knew and what they wanted to learn, but I didn’t enforce silence. The point was simply to get their blood circulating. We headed out of school and across the playing fields. They loved it. They chatted with each other and then broke out into a run when they got to the field. They laughed and joked with each other, spinning around and acting like the children that they are, rather than the students they must be in the building.

When we got back inside, I told them to find a comfortable space, in the room or in the hall, to do their work. They quickly spread out and got started with what they had planned on doing. There was none of the fidgeting and distraction that can so often accompany a Work Time. They had developed a plan and knew just what they wanted to learn and how they were going to do it. AND the blood was flowing to their brains. It was their task, and they owned it. There was a total focus on the task at hand. I wandered around among them, quietly recording what tool they were using to help them learn, fascinated by the variety of their choices.

After 25 minutes, I told them to stop and come together. They left everything where it was and gathered together. I told them that while they walked, I wanted them to share with a partner at least 2-3 facts or ideas that they had focused on while they were working. We set out on the same walk, with them moving in front to take the lead, talking and laughing over what they had learned. The whole exercise seemed like a lark to them.

What was amazing was that when we returned, they settled right back into the task at hand. They immediately picked up on where they had been and clearly shifted their focus from the walking time to a learning time. This is definitely a strategy to play around with. I had read about it but never tried it. I saw one of our PE teachers, and she responded, “That’s what it’s all about!” I have to agree!

It takes more than just telling students that my goal is to see how they think and not to simply have something to throw a grade on. They are so used to thinking that class and work is all about the grade, and not about the learning, that they truly doubt it when I tell them I just want to watch how they work with the material. For many, they have learned the Game of School really well, and they know how to play by its rules. They are masters of rote learning and simply want to be told where to find the answer, to write it in the blank and get their A. For them, being told that there is no Right Way to do an assignment can be terrifying. The rules have suddenly disappeared, and with them, their strategies for doing the work. For the others, the ones who are constantly being beaten down by the grades they receive, they completely expect eventually to be ambushed by a grade. They have lost their interest in learning, because school has taught them that they are no good at it. Their fear and distrust shuts down any fluidity that they might have with their thinking. For both kinds of students, it is a process to teach them how to enjoy the learning process and to move away from it being about simply about the teacher.

This is my most recent example: I had my students make a mind-map showing the connections between 20 vocabulary words that we had been studying. I wanted them to put the words into categories, whatever groupings that they found.  We did it first as a class, using the school as an example. We brainstormed a list of words to describe the school and then they identified groups of 2-4 words and explained why they had created that group. I had them make two different attempts at building groups, so that they could see that there were many ways to build categories out of a list of words. We connected each pair of words with a line to explain why they were close to each other. They loved the process of inventing and reinventing ways to discuss what they had identified as significant about our school.

I then turned them to the vocabulary of the unit and had them do the same activity: create one way to group the words, create another way to group them; examine the two ways and develop a final mind-map with words and connecting lines.

They could barely start their work because of the barrage of questions that focused mainly on “Is this going to be graded?,” How do you want this to look?” It was so hard for them to accept that watching them work and seeing how they put their thoughts on paper was what I was after. School has them so trained to not value their own work for the learning that is happening there, but to only look for how to get the grade. It is the grade that will show if the work has value, and by association, if they have worth.

Exploration, testing new ideas, trying to figure out the puzzle is scary work. To be in the process of learning takes all of us out of our comfort zones. In many ways, working for the grade is much easier than being in a classroom where the goal is active engagement and learning. I need to keep working on ways to make my classroom a safe place to try and an even safer place to fail. I need to affirm the experimentation that may lead to a dead end. I also want to work on developing ways of giving feedback that feel valid to them, that truly recognizes and affirms their work.

Perhaps it isn’t that I forget, but that it is impossible to actually remember just how exhausting it is to be teaching all day. sort of like being hit by a tidal wave of exhaustion that comes from being “on” all of the time. I love what I do, and that is probably part of it. I try to be totally present for every moment that there are students in my room – definitely one of my goals for myself. I want them each to feel seen and known, so checking out and relaxing simply can’t be part of the routine, even when they are working independently. It can be so tempting to simply sit behind my desk while they are at their tasks, rather than being up and walking around the room. When I am up and moving around, it is clear that they maintain a sense that I am with them as they take on the struggle of clearly writing out their thoughts or mastering whatever project they have to tackle. I want to have them stretch, to move out of their comfort zone, but I want them to know I am there to catch them, to keep them from completely falling. I can’t do that from behind my desk with my thoughts on my next job.

If I retreat and use the time when they are at independent work to do my own work, the students notice it immediately. They are so sensitive to the energy flow in the room. Their behavior changes almost as soon as I shift my attention and withdraw from them. They quickly become less focused on their task and are much more easily distracted. For older students, it may be that they need to learn more independence and that that separation might be called for, but for middle school, it is different. Middle school students still need that attention, that gentle hand of guidance to keep them on track, simply staying visible and being mentally present. When we offer them that, it provides them with the space to test new ideas and to grow. Most importantly, when we stay connected, they know we care.

But, Boy! is it exhausting! Between planning, teaching, grading, recording, thinking and starting it all over again, there is very little time for that wonderful contemplation of summer, where thoughts can be played with and new strategies considered. Now is the time to draw on those calmer moments and create, build and produce as fast as we can. Each new day should teach us something new about the students in front of us and challenge us to rethink what we did last year to make sure it presents this year’s group with the appropriate challenges and supports. Each new day should reawaken our commitment to the students who trust us to lead them well.

And once we have done all that, then it is time for bed! Time to refresh and start again!

I am the most effective in the classroom when I remember to always be alert, to be ready to adapt and shift on a moment’s notice. Sometimes the plans work and the goals are smoothly met. The students tackle each task and grasp the new concepts and skills. Then there are those other days, the ones where it should be working, it worked before, but it just isn’t now. Those are the times when we have to punt, to simply throw the old plan out the window and modify the lesson to meet the kids.

Yesterday I gave a pop quiz on maps and globes. It was material that we had worked on for three days. I had showed a variety of maps and compared them to globes. We acted out the globe and different map projections. For being a globe, the students stood and with their arms over their heads, curved forward.

For the Mercator map, they stood straight with their arms spread wide, to show the lines of longitude that run straight from top to bottom of the map. Their mouths were wide open to indicate how large Greenland is on the map, in comparison to its size on the globe.

Their favorite was to come up with a way to show an interrupted projection, which had them standing like storks or Egyptian Pyramid-style dancers.

They had then copied notes from the board, while we had a conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Their homework had been to type up the notes on their new laptops, to help them see if that helped them learn the information. The next day in class, they all said that the combination of handwriting and then typing made them feel like they knew the information. Their homework had been to study their notes. It felt like a varied approach, and the class had been engaged and interested in how cartographers impact the maps that they make.

The next day, I wanted to see how much they had retained of the information, so I started class with a quick quiz. I expected that it would be an experience of success for them. For the first section, early in the morning, the students reacted with confidence, reading over the worksheet and quickly filling in the worksheet, especially the one where a penguin looks at an upside-down globe and smiles.

My second section came in after lunch. They took one look at the worksheet and became deflated. Some began writing, but many of them picked up their pens and simply stared into space after writing their names. Some began to become visibly disturbed. After a few minutes, I realized that this was not accomplishing anything that I wanted. I had no desire to make them feel like they didn’t understand the material.

I stopped the quiz and quickly changed the homework. It became to study the quiz that they had in their hands and to be ready to take it again the next day. I told them that I would collect both quizzes, so that those who had been doing really well could be able to show me that, but that those who were finding it too difficult would have time to review the material. The next morning, when they came in, it was a totally different feel. They were ready and eager to show what they knew.

Sometimes how a lesson goes isn’t about teaching strategies or planning. Sometimes it is simply about the kids. Where are they at that moment? What has happened in their day? They are each unique individuals who form unique and ever-mutating groups. No two classes are ever alike. It may be my job to cover certain skills, but to be effective, I have to stay attuned to how each group tackles the work and adapt on an almost moment-to-moment basis. And the final lesson, after lunch should never be the time to give a quiz. The brain has a hard time thinking when the stomach has top priority.

Photos all found on search.creativecommons.org