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First and foremost, after a weekend of thinking and learning, it is the people! It is always the people who make the time at Educon so important. Educon isn’t set up like any other conference. The challenge for those who are presenting is to create “conversations.” It is not to stand at the front of the room and pontificate. The presenters’ job is to get people to talk, to share and learn together. Sometimes it is difficult to get the conversations going, and some questions or initial presentations of ideas are more captivating than others, but overall the connections with other educators are made.

Educon is not for the faint of heart or the passive. Teachers and administrators don’t come to Educon unless they want to grow and develop their practice. It isn’t a place for anyone who simply wants to sit on the sidelines; it is for those who are willing to try new ways of meeting the needs of their students. Most of the people there found Educon through Twitter and came to meet face-to-face with the people they had connected with through dozens or hundreds of tweets.

I led a session, with Wendy Eiteljorg and Philip Cummings on “Being a Risk-Taking Teacher.” The session was filled with teachers who are trying to change the world, one small project and one individual child at a time. They willingly shared their challenges and their successes with each other.We built the session around the ideas in Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchart, Mark Church and Karin Morrison, so everyone who came had to be up and moving around throughout the session. We set up activities that allowed them to think about taking risks while learning new ways to present material in the classroom. The session was before lunch, and the movement helped to stimulate their bodies and minds as well as create a sense of community among the teachers. I will be writing more on these strategies as I use them in the classroom.

Another thought, as I leave SLA exhausted and in many ways, overwhelmed, is that this sort of learning, intense, hour after hour, is what we do to our students every day. We ask them to go from one class to another and give it their all. We want them to care about every subject, deeply and with commitment, 50 minutes at a time. After 2 days of it, I am exhausted. I can’t imagine how they can do it with any level of passion and enthusiasm. As always I believe that change is going to have to happen to schedules first of all. Students need time to design and build,  to reflect and integrate new ways of thinking. If we don’t give them that time, the best plans in the world will fall on disheartened and tired minds and hearts.

Time for me to rest now before the start of another week! Thank you to Science Leadership Academy and Chris Lehmann for a wonderful weekend!

Today is the first day of Educon, one of the most amazing conferences for educators that I know of. Educon is held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, a charter school that was founded in connection with the Franklin Institute. The conference is based around the idea of having conversations. It is a model that demands that the people who present avoid becoming the dreaded “sage on the stage” and instead develop strategies that allow the teachers and administrators who attend to become part of the sharing and learning. The sessions are organized to create dialogue.

This is my third year attending. My first year, Educon was where I met face to face the people who were populating my PLN. I wrote about that experience here. Educon pushed me even further out of my past comfort zone, building connections with educators who were refusing to look at learning in the same ways that they always had. They were people who were and are deeply committed to their students and to creating enriching and meaningful learning experiences for them.

Educon starts with an Open House at SLA, where teachers can visit, talk to students and see how the SLA model of education works. It is also a time to connect with friends made in past years and learn what their experiences over the past year have been before the whirlwind of the weekend begins. Saturday and Sunday are filled with conversations, hours of thinking, sharing, and learning. My brain and in many ways, my heart will be filled to bursting by Sunday afternoon.

As I get ready to leave, I am excited and nervous. It takes a lot of energy to learn, to be honest about the mistakes of the past year and to look for new challenges for the coming one. It is something that I have to do, however, to stay fresh and determined. These times of conversation and sharing energize me with new ideas and force me to not become complacent. They help me to know that I am part of a community of educators, that there is a Moveable Pasture for me if I will take part in it.  When I come away from Educon, I always have a clearer sense of what I want to try next.

My Survival Guide to Educon:

• Lots of sleep – I am a morning person, so it is definitely Early to Bed this weekend
• Sneaker – there is lots of walking around SLA and around the neighborhood
• Charged laptop
• Energy snacks for when I just want to keep talking and sharing and don’t feel like finding food
• Water bottle
• List of people coming, to jog my memory

Just saw this tweet from Maureen Devlin, @lookforsun and had to add it as the conclusion to this:

#educon Best Effect: Happy, engaged, curious, spirited, creative, empathetic, playful children w/skills, concepts & knowledge to succeed.

That says it all!

I am regularly struck by just how persistent Change has become in our lives. For me, 2011 was a year of tremendous change, both personally and professionally. There were so few “normal” or “standard” days. Every week brought different challenges, ones that I had never encountered before. I recently read this quotation by Sir Ken Robinson, the “rate of change is going to accelerate; it’s not going to decrease. We are not heading towards some calm pasture where all of the change will be behind us.” While I have believed this intellectually for some time, it is only recently that I have begun to wrestle with what that means for each of us as educators. If there is no “calm pasture,” if we must adapt and flourish in the midst of constant upheavals and confusion, how do we survive? How do we keep our creative energies flowing when there are so few calm spaces?

Teaching in an ever-changing world is stressful, that is all there is to it. If Sir Ken Robinson is correct, and I believe that he is, change is now the new constant, and there will be no respite for us as educators. There will not be a simple Finish Line to cross. We will not learn how to teach with technology and be done or to master Project-Based Learning and be able to relax. The list of skills and novel ideas will continually grow. As soon as we adapt, the landscape will have changed.

What is a pasture and why is it so appealing? First, it is a place where each member of the herd is recognized and known. The group bears the same brand, no matter what the shape or size. It is a place where each member is accepted. It is also a place of healthy nourishment. The herd stops and rests there. The grass is green and the water is pure. Finally, it is a place of safety. The wolves and dangers of the outside world are held at bay, while the herd is refreshed and strengthened.

I want a place like that in my life. If I have to live with constant changes and shifting, I want a place to be safe and nourished. I want a place where I am known and accepted. A primary goal of 2012 is going to be to create that sort of space in my life, a Moveable Pasture that will allow me to maintain the necessary energy and creativity to survive all of the challenges. I want to create or build relationships where I can relax and be honest, where there is healthy learning and growth. Basically, I want to be part of a self-shepherded flock of educators who are in a Moveable Pasture that will support and nourish us as we travel this crazy road.

I believe that we need to connect with other teachers who are honest about the stress of this work and yet still are passionate about providing the best for our students every day.

We had a meeting after school to talk to parents about the use of portfolios as a means of assessment, instead of grades, in 7th grade. We wanted to share with them how the process empowered the students, building a new sense of energy and connection for them to their learning.  It was the beginning of a process of shifting the center of control from the teacher and training each student to take it on herself. In many ways it was very hard for the parents to imagine an effective learning system, the work of a School, where there were no grades.

“How will i know if my child is learning anything?”

“How will my child know if she is learning?”

“What will motivate them if there are no grades? We have raised them to perform in response to a graded system, almost like trained seals, so how will you get them to work without them?”

It was at that moment, in the midst of the parents’ questions, all of which were legitimate and important, that one student spoke up to share the  effect that not being graded and using a portfolio had had on her.

“At the end of the trimester, I am more interested in learning. Before all I wanted was to do better, just get a better grade.”

I wanted to jump up and down! She got it and on top of that, had the confidence in the midst of what was an Adult Conversation, to share it. She had found that she cared about learning. I don’t know if the parents, who had all grown up like I did in a very different system, were able to understand the power of what the student shared, but I did. I knew that we were headed in the right direction at that moment.

The process that we had put in place to make class be about her and her growth as a student and a learner was bearing fruit. When the student’s work was towards learning, it was, plain and simple, different from learning that is done so that someone in authority will tell them that they did a good job. It has only been a few months, but it didn’t take long. The students wanted to learn about how their brains worked and how to make them work better. They wanted to assess themselves in ways that took away the fear. When saying, “I don’t do this well,” does not lead to be bad grade, there is no need to avoid it. When the student can name the challenge, then she can grow from right where they are. Without the discouragement of a bad grade or the tension of only working for a good grade, learning can be set free. It took them no time to want to take ownership of their learning.

I had two significant conversations with parents after the program was over: one parent of a student with learning challenges and one with a student who easily gets “A’s” and rarely has to work hard. For both of them, the work of the portfolio had energized their daughters. For the student who normally did not have easy success, she lost her her regular sense of being slower than other girls and was beginning to focus on the process of learning, naming a skill and working towards mastery. She was starting to take pride in the areas where she had success and identify what she found challenging outside of an arena of that was tinted with previous failure.

For the student who always succeeded, when asked to challenge herself, to identify her areas of difficulty and seek to master them, she suddenly engaged with the learning process. There was no longer an easy Finish Line to cross that let her stop working and growing. When she had to set the goal, it became about her own effort and work: good, healthy, hard work that led to new levels of thinking. There was no easy A to slow her down or allow her to disengage.

It is a lot of work for the students and for the teacher to use portfolios, but if just one student begins to care about learning, rather than simply the grade, it is worth it!

For those of you who have been following this, my sections of 7th grade shared their assessment portfolios with their parents this week. The class has been ungraded, the first of its kind at school. After lots of self-reflection and class discussions, they created portfolios to show what they had learned. To find out more about that process, check the previous post.

The students shared their work with their parents right before Thanksgiving weekend. I have to confess that I sort of held my breathe for that weekend. I wasn’t sure what the reaction was going to be. I knew that the portfolios demonstrated an incredible amount of work and thought on the students’ part. They had managed to communicate how hard they had worked in history and where they had grown, but it still wasn’t a grade. It wasn’t a standard form of assessment, one that came from one authority, the teacher, to the other authorities, parents and administration. Each portfolio was the student speaking for herself, explaining her learning and her challenges.

What followed was silence! No phone calls, no emails, nothing! I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or to wait for some other shoe to fall.

When the week started, I investigated, asking the students how their parents had responded to their portfolios. The responses varied, but it was clear that the silence over the weekend had two sources. The first was that the parents had simply not had enough time to sit down and read all that their children had written. Rather than having to digest a grade with a 5-7 sentence comment, there was an entire website: pictures, documents and commentary. It was far more than they usually received. They were interested, but it was more than they could take it at the time. One student said that her father had wanted a grade; her response, “Don’t worry! I explained it all to him.”

The second reason for the silence was that they were truly impressed with how much their child understood her own work. She could talk about it and answer their questions. There was no need for me to do it. The conversation no longer needed to be with the teacher; their child was more than capable to speaking for and about herself. She knew her strengths and her challenges. She had set goals for herself moving forward and had organized a plan to attain them.

A lesson that has come through loud and clear in this new week of the Winter trimester is that it is far more powerful for a student to write as a goal, “I want to participate more in class” than it is for me to write it in her comment. When she identifies it and claims it, change happens. The student drives the growth! A very exciting new stage!

My classes are starting a research project this week. We have been studying the Roman Empire, and they are creating a museum exhibit around a topic of their choice. We have spent the last month learning about the rise and the height of the empire, looking at the different characteristics of empires that can be found in Rome. We will use this model to then look at the Islamic Empires.

The students chose topics of interest to them, ranging from Roman baths to arches to how various gods were worshipped. I worked with them to expand or contract the topics that they had chosen, as they only have 3 days to do their research. Then, before moving into the research itself, I wanted them to pause and think about what it was about their topic that interested them. What questions did they hope to answer? What did they already know, and what did they want to find out?

I decided to give them a 10 minute “Thinking Time” to reflect on their topic. I didn’t give them any specific questions to answer; I just told them to consider what they were interested in. Each of them took a sheet of unlined paper and went to find places around the Middle School where they could sit and not be disturbed. I cautioned them to no sit too closely to their best friends, as they might be distracted. I encouraged them to draw or write if they wanted to, but that I mostly wanted them to focus on thinking about the topic.

I sent them out and then began to slowly walk around the halls. It quickly became apparent that many of them felt like they had to fill up the sheet of paper, that just having it represented a “task to be done” and they were madly scribbling away. Others were clearly watching other students walk by or paying attention to conversations down the hall. Others were simply sitting, looking around them or focusing on the wall in front of them, no outward sign of mental activity at all.

When I called them back after the 10 minutes, I asked them if they had learned anything. The main response was that they loved the quiet. Simply sitting still felt like a treat to them, an almost unknown kind of time that they really enjoyed. They clearly were surprised at how much they liked it. I think they thought that they were getting away with “no work” by having time to be still. That part made me smile, because part of what I want to train them to recognize is their brains at work, without a lot of outside stimulation. To teach them that, I have to give them quiet time to listen to their own thoughts. I am willing to give up some “teaching” time to have them learn to hear their own ideas rattling around inside their brains.

When I asked about using the paper, many of them acknowledged that it had been more of a distraction than a help. They had felt the need to “show” that they were working and focused on recording more than on thinking.  Note for next time: no paper.

While I am not sure how much they accomplished in terms of thinking about their topic, they clearly loved the time to pause and think. Time to be in control of their own minds. They recognized that too often, they just give in to each new distraction, and without anyone or any task to intrude, they enjoyed the work of their mind. As they started researching today, many of them seemed to have a sense of purpose and attention to the facts they found. They demonstrated a connection to their topic and to what they wanted to learn that appeared deeper than I have seen in the past.

We shall see! If nothing else, it showed me that it is a good thing to pause and let my students’ brains relax and then build. It is a good skill to for them to know their own thinking. And there is so much that comes at them all day long. Some peace and quiet can not hurt.

It has been a wild couple of weeks as my two classes of 7th graders have created and published their portfolios. We are on a trimester system, so this is the end of the first trimester. For the first time, I am teaching an ungraded, portfolio assessed class. As I have written earlier, the students have grown more and more adept at identifying the skills that they are learning as well as their strengths and challenges. They have moved away, not completely but to a large extent, from expecting that I will tell them, through a grade, how they are doing, and they have begun to develop an independence around their learning, which is very exciting.

History 7 is the only class in the school with this form of assessment, so it is new for the parents and for the students. I wanted to make sure that I guided the students carefully through the process of building a portfolio that showed what they had learned. I gave back to them examples of their earliest work of the year that I had saved just for this purpose.

Together we created a Google Doc in their History collection that was titled “Portfolio Planning.” We talked about the skills that they had been working on and the kinds of activities that they had done to learn and practice their skills. We generated a great list, everything from new memorization strategies to taking walks to get the blood circulating, from how to annotate a history text to writing an effective paragraph. They did a great job of remembering the trimester.

I then organized the skills that they had generated into four categories: Studentship (which included preparation for class, class participation and collaboration), Thinking and Learning (memorization, organization, learning styles: strengths and challenges), Reading and Writing. For each of these categories, the student wrote about what she felt comfortable with and where she felt challenged. For each page, she needed to chose at least one photograph, scan or screen shot to add to the page, very some visual interest. They had an album of photographs that I had created with images of them working at various tasks. Then we had an amusing “reenactment” of hand-raising to answer a question. They took screen shots of the lists of documents in their Google History collection. They scanned examples of their first attempts at annotating and their last. They took screen shots of mind maps that they had created. When they had generated all of their ideas and images, I went through their documents and left comments: How will you do this? What steps will you take to make this happen? Explain your thinking more. It definitely took more time than slapping a grade onto a piece of paper, but I wanted to push their thinking beyond their initial ideas.

With that feedback, they wrote paragraphs. They took those and put them into their Haiku ePortfolio, along with the images they had chosen. They also created a movie, 20-30 seconds, in Photo Booth to use as an introduction for their parents, explaining how to navigate their way around the portfolio and what its goal was. At that point, I again reviewed all of them – very time consuming, but also very exciting. They were demonstrating a control over their growth as students that was very exciting!

I decided that I was not going to do the actual editing of their work. While I knew that that would mean that there might well be uncorrected errors, I wanted what was there to fully be their own, awesome writing as well as spelling errors. I made a Word document for each student. When I saw a mistake, spelling or grammar, I cut and pasted it onto the document for them to find and correct. Also, if there were places where the language was confusing or the student needed to explain further, I did the same thing and added a question to help her understand what was missing. I emailed each girl her corrections and gave them time in class the next day to make the changes.

I then wrote a blurb that was posted in the report cards, directing the parents to the online portfolio:

“In history this trimester, your daughter has grown in her understanding of herself as a student. She has learned to identify the skills that she is practicing and to monitor the level of her mastery. With my guidance, she has reflected on her learning at each stage, and has then set new goals for herself.

 Each girl built a portfolio to share how she sees herself as a student of history at the end of the first trimester. Without worrying about grades, each girl focused on the process of her learning, becoming increasingly empowered to develop, articulate and understand her strengths and challenges.

 All of this work was closely monitored throughout the trimester. While I edited every website and gave each girl notes for revisions, some errors have been allowed to remain. One goal is for the girls to improve their proofreading over the course of the year, and when they look back on these, see their growth.

It was a lengthy process, one that was not specifically devoted to learning more history, but nonetheless it was one that clearly led the students closer to owning their work and being able to set and achieve new goals for themselves.”

I did have one student turn to me and say, “Now that we are done the portfolios, will you give us our grades?” It was unbelievable to her that I had actually meant it when I said it was ungraded, not un-assessed, that there had been no gradebook hidden away somewhere.

Wow! I tried the Visible Thinking activity that I wrote about yesterday in my class this morning. We only made it through the “I know” and the first 4 steps of the “I wonder.” It was amazing – a real challenge, but one that will be a great model for the future. I can see using it again and again, because it really provided a way for the students to think about and connect with their research topics, though it is not for the faint-hearted! Lots of noise, questions, energy and interactions! It is not a lesson for a day when you want to sit behind your desk. But on Halloween, it just added some focus to their energy and excitement.

The students were fine with the initial activity of finding facts in their notes that connected to their topic. They had done work like that before. While they wanted to know, “How many facts should we have?” and found it frustrating when I responded that it depended on the topic that they had chosen. For some, there were lots of facts and for others, not as many. Accepting their own ability to find and record the facts was the first step of pushing them away from Teacher-driven to Student-driven research. I want them to build on what they know and then think about what they want to investigate. It is a strategy that will become familiar, but for today, they struggled with what they saw as a the lack of clarity. None of us likes to wander in the dark, so I had sympathy for them, but still continued to push it back to them. Identifying what they know and what they want to learn about was simply one of their jobs.

The next challenge began when they had to develop questions about what they were interested in learning. They wanted to be told what they should research, rather than consider for themselves what interested them. After they had written their 5 questions, they had to get them checked before writing them on Post-Its. This was where it got especially intense and wonderful at the same time. They wanted a quick OK from me, and my job was to push them to explain what was behind the questions they had, what was of interest to them.

“Did Rome have slaves?” had to shift into something like, “Where did the Romans get their slaves?” or “What jobs did slaves do in Rome?” I wanted for them to move away from the “Yes” and “No” questions towards the aspects of the topic about which they were curious. For some, it might be where slaves came from; for others, it might be gender roles. Sometimes getting a student to make the necessary choices, to think through what they wanted to know, was like pulling teeth.

I didn’t want to give them their questions, because I wanted them to grow from their interest, but at the same time, I had to model a good question so that they could understand the direction in which to move. Lots of thinking on my feet while making them laugh, rather than feel pressured and confused. It had to feel safe enough for them to experiment with their thinking.

Once they had their questions approved, they wrote them on Post-Its and decided where they should place each questions. They had to identify one of the categories for each note. It was great, watching them wrestle with their questions, talking to each other, making decisions, changing their minds and finally deciding. It was truly Visible Thinking going on.

As I wandered around after class, I realized that some of the notes were in very strange categories, for example “Were slaves allowed to marry?” was in the Geography category. Now, granted, in the mind of a 7th grader,there may be an explanation for that choice, but it was a bit unclear to me, but getting it “right” was not the point of the activity. It was about experimenting with new ideas, trying out new questions and perspectives, and working together as one messy whole.

The first task for the next class will be to divide the students up and put each group with one category. They can then make sure that all of the questions connect to that topic. Then I will rotate the groups through all of the categories, having them look for questions that they find interesting and recording them. At that point, they may decide to change the focus of their research, which will be fine, or they may like what they have and stay with it.

What an adventure! It was a great activity to kick off a research project with lots of student engagement and questioning!

I am introducing a new research project to my 7th grade tomorrow, and I am trying a new strategy that I learned from Phillip Cummings’ blog about Visible Thinking. I want to combine the ideas of Visible Thinking, making the process of developing new ideas more apparent to my students, while sparking their imaginations about the project they are about to start. They have been studying the Roman Empire. I sent them a Google Form with 25 topics that they could choose from to begin their thinking. It had everything from slavery to gender to architecture to trade. Here is what they will be doing tomorrow, as they put some of the Visible Thinking strategies into practice.

I had my students write a reflection today on how they had learned over the course of the last unit. It had started with the activity where they were running around the back field, collecting characteristics of an empire and putting them into categories. After that, they had engaged in lots of different ways of learning and mastering the material. They drew pictures; they worked in groups; they wrote paragraphs; they made mind maps.

They took a quiz about half way through the unit to see what they had memorized and how well they knew it. At that point, even with warning that they needed to know the 7 major categories and the facts connected with each, about half of the students simply did not know the material. They were intimidated by having to memorize and seemed totally terrified by the memorization process. I was surprised and concerned by the degree of their nervousness and fear. While we live in a day and age of “information overload” and “information in my pocket,” there is still a place for learning and knowing information. I wanted to empower them to learn new material.

They were struggling with how to remember the categories, so I created a device, using the first letters of each category. All of a sudden, they could do it. What was interesting was that I had suggested a number of ways to memorize before I set them to the task, including doing just what I did, but it was only when I endorsed one, told them that this was a means to do it, that they bought into it and used it to learn the material.

Teachers are powerful people in every classroom, even when we are trying to empower the students.

What was interesting was that while the majority did it “my” way, there was a collection of girls who had already figured out a way to learn the material, and I assured them that they should definitely stick to what they had chosen. I wanted them to know that there was nothing about mine that was “right,” in comparison to theirs. Mine was simply out of the teacher’s head, but that one from them would definitely help them more.

On their second quiz, after another collection of activities, they all improved significantly, but what was interesting was the activity that they chose, when writing a reflection on their learning, as the one where they learned the most, was when I gave them a set of notes. I wrote them on the whiteboard and had them copy them by hand. I have found in the past that writing notes by hand somehow gets the information into their minds better than when they type them. I was still surprised that with all of the other experiences, from running around to drawing, most of them liked the teacher-directed, “Here is what is important.”

It makes me think that I need to intersperse the activities where I want them to explore and discover information with times when I simply present what is important. That way the students could be more secure in what they need to know, which might lead to more experimentation and testing on their part. I need to provide a solid foundation for their experimentation, so that they will feel safe enough to move beyond what is the norm and develop their new ways of thinking.

Good lesson! As always, I am grateful to students who guide me on my journey!