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After reading a blog post on Cooperative Catalyst called “Irresistible Literacy,” I got to thinking. The post was about how to create an environment in the classroom that draws students to want to read. It included ideas of how to make the space fun and safe; it would have “touch-screen tables, one-to-one iPads, an entire wall that is a dry-erase board, tile floors that can be used as a canvas for brainstorming,” and more. The ideas were wonderful and creative, and they got me thinking. What can I do to make the work of my classroom and the learning that happens there be irresistible?

I discovered a my new love in the past month, while I was supposed to be resting and enjoying some summer quiet. I started preserving summer vegetables for winter. I found a new joy in canning, pickling and dehydrating, working with the abundance of summer farm stands and our own garden. I didn’t think that I was going to like this process, but we have a wonderful garden, and I didn’t want any of it to go to waste. I had never canned before, so to start, I decided that I needed to have at least one test run, making sauce, before our tomatoes fully ripened. If I was going to make a mistake, I wanted to do it on someone else’s fruit.

I bought a large basket of tomatoes, over 100, brought them home, skinned and cooked up the sauce. Then I canned them, using a water bath method, for dozens of jars – 5 jars at a time, 50 minutes per bath. It was the work of an entire summer day. Real work that lasted the course of a day! And much to my surprise, I loved it. In fact, I found the process “irresistible;” I simply wanted to do it again and again, because the work and the product satisfied me so much. I quickly moved onto pickling and then to dehydrating, experimenting with each one and figuring out what each has to offer. To the question, “How did you spend your summer vacation? ” I will be answering, “Working in the kitchen.”

It was real work, days and days of it, but I learned again and again the joy and peace that comes from doing work that is both hard and fulfilling. I kept making the choice to leave my novel and my lawn chair to instead stand in a hot kitchen for hours, chopping, pealing, stirring and bottling, because at the end of the day, I felt great, relaxed and yet with a deep sense of accomplishment.

I realized that I had found my vision for what I want for my students, “irresistible,” hard work that causes them to learn and grow each day! I tell my students every year that my class will be hard. I mean it. I explain that it won’t be in a traditional way of being hard with lots and lots of homework and mountains of rote learning to climb, but hard in that it will make them think. It will force them to accept that there are no easy answers, that they need to wrestle and challenge their own minds to find the answer.  It will be hard in that the goal is not pleasing me as the teacher; it is not about playing the game of school the best. It is about taking on challenges and learning the process of discovery and creation. I want to create lessons that accept the need for work, because the task itself and its goals are irresistible.

So, the beginning of another school year, “Irresistible Work and Learning” is my motto! Together, my students and I will work hard and learn together!

I read an article this morning by Daniel Pink about having a “Genius Hour,” as a way to encourage new and creative thinking at a company. It was building upon Google’s 20% idea of giving employees time to just dream and experiment, time where they are focused on their job, but not on the day-to-day “What needs to get done.” It is time to come up with new solutions to problems and to test original ideas. Because of the constraints of the job, it wasn’t possible to come up with a 20% solution at the credit union that Pink profiled, so instead they developed a Genius Hour.

It got me thinking. What would that look like in schools? My initial thought was about how it would apply to teachers. What could happen if teachers just had time to dream, to think outside of their standard curriculum and ways of presenting material? Time is always the factor for teachers. Where will we find the time to rewrite the classroom materials and reorganize our own thinking? If there were time each week, time that wasn’t already claimed by planning, grading and meetings, what could we come up with, what would we dream?

Part of what I like about the Google model is that at the end of the 20% time, there is a sharing time to talk about what you had been thinking and to hear from others about their ideas. This sharing time is as important as the time alone to think and dream. In today’s world, we need to be learning together. Change is happening too quickly for us to isolate ourselves. We will simply not be able to keep pace. If, however, we share our new and crazy ideas with each other, listening with open minds to each other, we may well be able to collectively “raise all of our boats.” The time for isolation has passed. We need to learn together, taking time to think and then to share.

Then I started thinking about the students. What would it look like to give them a Genius Hour, to let them sit and think, experiment and explore? I wrote in an earlier post about the “An Hour of Silence,” a one-time experiment of giving my students an hour to be still and think. It was a great success, far more than I expected it to be, but what would happen if I gave them time like that on a regular basis. What could that look like?

Imagine getting to the end of a unit and having Genius Hour time, giving the students a chance to think about what they had learned. It might lead to creating something to demonstrate what they were taking away from the unit, or it might lead to a new interest or area that they want to study. I would imagine that initially, because of how we have taught them so far, that they would create the standard posters or maybe a skit. What fascinates me is to think about what might happen after that.

At that point, if I have given them a safe place to experiment, where grades and affirmation are constructive and positive, what might happen? What might they develop to show how they have learned, what mattered to them and what they can do with it? There would be no limits for them at that point. They could begin to dream and develop in new ways that were not limited by my imagination and creativity in developing new assessments. They could take it wherever they wanted. The process would develop empowered and energized students, who would be able to explain what they knew and how they had built upon their initial understanding.

I need to work on this one! Thank Heavens for summer to dream and plan!

Let me just start by saying that if you have never been to one of Jeff Pulver‘s #140 Conferences, go! Go as soon as you can! Find the nearest one, and sign up now. It is an amazing experience, full of energy and hope. It is like experiencing the best of Twitter within a common, physical space. People come together to share what they are passionate about and it opens your eyes to the joy and power that people working together can have. On the one hand, it is about Twitter and how social media is changing the way people relate to each other; on the other hand, it is about the energy of human interaction, about how we can, in fact, make the world a better place when we share our dreams and build communities.

The conference is run almost like a Twitter stream, with ideas washing over you as you listen.  Each speaker is given 10 minutes, no time at all in comparison with other conferences. It is just enough seconds to present an new idea, challenge an old way of thinking or express a emerging dream. That the speakers used Twitter is almost, but not quite, incidental.  It is fast and furious, from the first speaker to the last, each one passionate about how and why the new connections that they have made are significant: artists, social workers; entrepreneurs; people with different illnesses; educators (that was the panel I was on). One after another person took to the stage to share, and the effect was almost overwhelming. So much change and so many possibilities.

And it was social media, and more specifically Twitter, that allowed isolated individuals to connect with others who shared a common dream or cause. The women who suffer from Lupus found others to walk their journey with them. The artist found a patron. The activist found other activists. By reaching out through social media, people could join into new communities that supported and encouraged them, and which then began to affect real and lasting change in the world.

Just a few ideas that I took away from the beginning of the conference:

We need to help each other to manage the flow of information that is all around us on Twitter. When we retweet something, it becomes our “digital clothing,” a sign of who we are.  That was from Steve Rosenbaum, @magnify. He calls it “curation.” I was struck by the fact that we do indeed carry our online presence with us, clothing us. It does not go away when we leave our laptops; it stays out there as a sign of who we are. I am known by what I share and by what I pass on. If what I share has value, then I have value within my network. If what I pass along is automatic and without substance, then that is the kind of person I am to the people who follow me. It connected with something that Gilad Lotan, @gilgul,  said that gaining your networks trust being critical. To build a network that supports and nourishes you and what you are passionate about, you need to be reliable and add value. It comes back to what I have said before, that being part of a community takes time: time to read, think and share.

Jeff Pulver said, “Humanity is on the rise!” Social media has the potential to connect people who share a common goal or passion and empower each with new energy. In education, that is all for the good of the students! When we, as educators, make those connections, when we learn from each other and grow together, new ideas are generated, and kids are better off for our efforts!

Thank you, Jeff, for all of the hard work that went into making #140 Conference work. After about a half a day, I couldn’t even tweet; I just needed to sit and absorb all the joy and energy that was in that space. People working together to make the world a better place!

As the year draws to a close, I started thinking about all of the students who have arrived day after day in my classroom, ready to learn and to grow. They are people about whom I care deeply. I study their expressions, looking for the moments of joy and discovery as well as of uncertainty, confusion and doubt. I just spent nine months thinking about them each day, so I thought I would put together a list of summer wishes and goals for them.

First is always that they would have lots of unstructured and peaceful time, enough of it that they would get bored. I am a great believer in the power of the mind and heart to fill the spaces that open up when we are bored. Today’s students run from activity to activity, most of them with the goal of enriching their lives. While ballet and soccer, piano and Little League are all wonderful, they often endlessly fill a child’s world. Never mind the intrusions of television and computers. Our students have no time where there is only silence.

A silent place can be a hard place to be, but it can also over time become a rich and creative place. Imaginations come alive in those spaces. So I would wish Boredom and Quiet for all of my students. What they fill it with could change their day or their life.

Next is more time surrounded by nature. Take a walk in the woods or by the river, which in Philadelphia is easy to do. Again, I would caution against filling the time with activities. Don’t just be outside to play a game or jump in the pool. Take time to listen to the birds; watch the wind in the grass. Be still for awhile in the midst of the natural world around you.

Remember to take time to read, at least 5-15 minutes every day. Read anything and everything: newspapers and magazines, blogs and books, fiction and nonfiction. Keep words around you in the summer to stimulate your thinking and your imagination.

And then, just have times of fun. Go to an amusement park; play miniature golf to be silly, rather than win; splash someone in the pool; eat water ice. Find anything that will create the freedom to laugh, the space to be away from all of the “Shoulds” in our lives. Rest and relax. The school year is long and demanding. Take time to breathe deeply and enjoy the moment. Ignore the cell phone; forget to check Facebook. Just find a space to have fun!

And for the teachers who will read this, let us remember to do the same for ourselves. May we each find spaces of quiet; moments in nature and time to read and times of simple fun! We deserve them, and our students will be all the better if we take them.

Happy Summer to all! It is time to lay down the dozens of balls that we juggle and refresh our hearts and minds!

Or at least catch our breathe between now and ISTE. Anyone who is going to be there, let me know. Send me a tweet @hadleyjf or leave a comment. It will be a great time.

I took my class to the library to work on “book research.” It is the first of my classes to start on the 1:1 program this year, and I realized that while we had done lots of research, it had all been online work. They had used the library’s online resources, but I had never taken them into work with books. I had the librarian introduce them to the areas of the library and show them how to use the online catalogue. They had each come to class with 3 people that they thought they might like to research. The time in the library was to narrow down their choices to a single one.

As I was working with some of the students, I realized that most of the times I told them to go to the encyclopedias and check for information, they were nodding and not moving in the direction of the bookshelves.  I realized that for them, encyclopedias were totally unknown. When they wanted to learn about anything, they did not need to look in the family’s World Book or go to the library and search in encyclopedias. They had it at their finger tips at all times, usually on their phones.

So I told them, “See those books over there. They are like wikipedia in book form,” and suddenly they got it. Big smiles, followed by “Really? Cool!”

It was another time when I realized that I think I understand the differences in the learning and thinking of my students, but that often their experience of school is fundamentally different than the way students in previous generations experienced it. And by previous generations, I really mean generations that are only a few years separated from them. We teach them how to learn from books, but when they need information, that is not where they go. They go to Google, to Wikipedia, to YouTube. They search and grab information, often moving rapidly on, having satisfied their initial interest. They do not have to make some deep commitment to learning in order to find a fact. Facts float all around them, easily acquired, a veritable waterfall of information.

To teach them effectively, we need to remember that they are splashing around under the waterfall of facts, images and videos. They speak a different language in many ways, and we need to learn it, just as they need to learn what an encyclopedia is, if only to know that they might not need one.

My 7th grade classes have been working on a project based around the early explorers to the New World, from Columbus to Magellan to de Soto. I divided them into pairs and presented them with the challenge of creating a ship’s log, complete with a daily log, a biography of the explorer, a map of the journey and a drawing of the ship. I adapted it from a project that I found here: “An Adventure to the New World Project.”  They also had to research one of the areas where the explorer landed, its flora and fauna, to see what might have returned to Europe as part of the Columbian Exchange. They had almost total freedom to decide how they would create their log. They could use Pages on their Macs, use Word docs or they could handwrite and draw the images. They had a total of 6-7 hours of class and homework time to work on the project.

I put together a list of initial research sites and showed them where to look in our libraries online databases. They also knew that they could use SweetSearch for any other research questions they developed and Creative Commons for images. Then I just let them go, and what followed was silence, hour after hour of focused silence. Occasionally, there was quiet whispering between the partners, or one of them would ask to go to the printer to pick something up or to take a walk to help her think. For the most part, however, they simply worked.

Sometimes they were drawing; sometimes they were typing. Then someone would come for help with research terms or to ask if a new idea would fit in. At every turn, I shifted the decision back to the student. “What do you want to learn about? What other words might you use to describe that?” “How will that add to your log?” My most common response was simply, “What do you want to use to tell the story?” With a smile, though often with a slight look of frustration that I wouldn’t simply tell them what was “right by the teacher,” she would go to figure out what she wanted without me.

It felt a bit like a miracle, students working independently, totally engaged with very little need of my interaction, hour after hour. I wandered around at times, but for this project, it almost seemed to distract them from what they were doing. It clearly made them think about what I, the teacher, might want, and they immediately started asking questions to verify that their work was alright by me. They lost their own assessing and creating momentum. Without me, they were investigating, doing, making. The project clearly had shifted from being my assignment to their independent task.

When I asked them to come up with a list of aspects that they would want to have evaluated for this project, they wrote: independence, creativity, collaboration, effort, commitment. So, I wrote up a self-reflection where they can discuss what they did and the learning itself. I don’t want to take the power of the project away in the grading process. I don’t want them turning over the importance of their work to me. I want them to articulate the steps that they followed and how well they did on each one, as well as to figure out what they would do differently the next time.

Last night, the designated last night of the project, my InBox was filled with emails requesting one more day. Over and over, the student said she was so close, but it wasn’t exactly what she wanted. She wanted to make it show how much she had learned and wasn’t quite there yet.

So I emailed the class to tell them that today’s class would be one more work day.

And it was another hour of silent, focused work!

What was my role in all of this? Was I, as the teacher, even necessary? Definitely! As teachers, we plan and create. We listen and learn. We create a safe environment within which each student can learn. We model learning, and we affirm it when we see it. Student independence only happens when we create and sustain it.

It is true. In the last few weeks, I have not been engaged with my digital community. I have been busy with family excitement and planning. One of our sons is getting married in June, and there are all sorts of details to be arranged: food and tents, transportation and flowers. While I shifted my extra energy in that direction, I wasn’t really aware of how connected I had become to those with whom I follow and who follow me. The energy I usually directed towards my online community simply hasn’t ben available for all of the conversations and connections in which I am normally involved. From spending time each day on Twitter to taking part in #edchat, I just did not had the mental space to learn and change. That others would notice reminded me yet again of that, while this is a new kind of relationship for decades before, it is nonetheless a real community that we are building.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that it would be noticed, but people who follow me and who read this blog felt the absence and commented on it. Rather than making me feel guilty for my lack of engagement, it made me recognize the depth of the connections that have been forming over the last few years all the more. It is a real “village” that we are building as we talk and share our ideas. We are getting to know each other and to care about other educators as full people, not just abstract resources on the end of a tweet. We laugh and share joy; we struggle and get upset. We triumph, and we fail…together.

As we grow and share together, as we become friends, we are building a community that trusts each other on many levels. We are becoming like an army that can bring about change. In some ways, the time that we spend sharing our ideas and learning from each other is like boot camp, where individuals from all around the country come together and are made into a team whose goal is always to guard and protect its members. We provide the forum for ideas to be tested, challenged and encouraged, and a place to come for support when the road in our individual schools is difficult.

We are scattered around the globe, but we are learning to be that team, working together to create the best learning for every student that enters our classrooms. While we may never sit in the same room, if we take the time to make the connections and share our stories, we can build the community that will support our own learning and provide the best for our students.

So thank you to those who noticed! I will try to be “around” as much as possible in the coming months. Just know that it is for happy reasons that I am more silent than usual.

I am trying to move away from a system where students are working for the grade that the teacher will give them, a system where their goal is to measure up to our bar. I want to stop being the person who knows what is the right way to do each and every task, and where it is their job is to do it my way. It is the model that I grew up with and that worked exceedingly well when the end goal was producing factory workers for whom there was a single task and one way to do it. I was a master at the art of “figuring out the teacher.” It had nothing to do with learning Math or Science or English. It was about how to get the grade.

The problem now, however, is that we are not teaching students who will end up with those kinds of jobs where memorization and rote learning will lead to success. It is our job to train students to think, to experiment and move beyond the old boundaries. We need to take down the fences that surrounded our own education and allow them to test new waters. There is no way that they should do this alone, without the guidance of experienced and wise teachers. It is just the goal that has changed. We must teach them to trust their own thinking and to develop the skills to be independent creators and innovators. Part of being able to do that means that they can evaluate their own learning.

As I was preparing to grade the assessments that I wrote about in the last post, a reading and a writing assessment, I realized that if I wanted to teach the students to be more independent thinkers and to understand their learning process, I needed to teach them how to assess their own work. I had to give them more control over evaluating what they did. So, instead of sitting with a red pen and marking their work, I spent time developing a way to teach them what I wanted them to get out of the lesson – which was how to be more effective readers, annotators and writers. I had to model for them what to looked like to do the task itself effectively. They needed to learn how to ask the kinds of questions that I ask of their work. Do they have control over the material? Can they organize what they know? Did they make progress?  How could they do it better next time?

For the reading and annotating part, where they had read the chapter and identified the significant facts and ideas, I simply did that task, creating a model of how it could be done. Instead of criticizing their efforts, by giving poor grades, I annotated the chapter. Then I made copies with my annotations and will use it as a way to show them what it might look like. Many of them want to underline the entire page, so part of the lesson is to show how a few annotations and words underlined can capture all that is necessary. It will not be for a grade, but for them to make a comparison. I also will talk about the fact that my annotations are not “right.” Each person’s can vary, as long as they capture what is most important and allow the reader to remember what is in the text.

With their writing, I wanted to start by looking at all of their topic sentences, so I created a document that I will project on the SmartBoard that has all of their topic sentences. I didn’t put their names on them, just the sentences. Tomorrow, we will go over each one and discuss which ones present a clear idea for their argument and which ones do not. Usually by the end of a conversation like this, they are beginning to get a better idea of what a topic sentence should look like. With the ones that clearly state an idea, we will talk about what facts could be used to support the idea.

I also copied the sentences from the other class,  and I will then have them, in pairs, identify which sentences work and which ones do not, and how they could make them better, and what facts they would use. Just more practice in reading strong and weak examples.

The final step will be to write a self-reflection on the process. It includes questions like: What skills are you the most comfortable with? What skills are the most challenging? If you had to do this activity again, what would you change about your work? What would you change about the activity itself?

Hopefully by the end of the process, they will know more about the skills that I want them to learn and also about their own learning. My goal is for each one of them to be able to write their End-of-Term comment, knowing their own learning as well as I am supposed to know them. What a powerful learning experience to feel, as a student, that you are trusted to speak about yourself and what you have done and what you find challenging!

Teaching students to read with strong comprehension and to write their ideas effectively is an ongoing challenge for teachers. In a world of sound bites and text-speak, we have to work to train our students to spend time with the written word and with their own writing. Reading and identifying what is important in a text takes concentration and attention. And then there is the hard work of identifying what they think about it and finding the words to put it down on the page. So often, the ideas are there, but when they try to write them out, they disappear or seem so much less important and disorganized on the page. I have been trying to find ways to help my students work through a reading and a writing process that allows them to show what they have learned with as much success as possible.

I needed to do an assessment in both reading and writing. I assigned them a chapter to read and annotate. They were to read it first to develop an overview of the material and then reread and annotate it, according to the strategies we had practiced. They were to identify significant facts to help them answer the question that I posed to them. In this case, it was “Why had the North won the Civil War?” When they finished that, I handed them a copy of the chapter and had them copy their annotations onto it, so that I could see their work, but they could have their textbooks. For homework, they reviewed the textbook and created a brainstorm to help them answer the question. They included the facts that they had identified as well as main ideas. Once they had recorded those, they organized them into categories and developed an initial idea for their argument.

I set up the hour long class in this way:

5 mins. – Review your brainstorm and the chapter

25 mins. – Write a rough draft of your paragraph. Make sure that the topic sentence contains your answer to the question and that you support your idea with 3-5 facts.

5 mins. – Read aloud and edit your work. (For some students, this is an important way for them to see if they have a clear argument. They often catch grammatical and spelling errors as well. For others, it isn’t all that helpful.)

5 mins. Peer edit another student’s work. (I collected the papers and randomly distributed them. They were supposed to make sure that there was a clear argument and supporting evidence, as well as check for any mistakes.)

15 mins. – Write the final draft (They did not need to take the advice that was offered. They could stick with their original writing, or they could develop it further.)

5 mins. – Read and make final edits.

I asked the students about the process at the end of the hour. When faced with an hour of writing, they usually get really nervous and concerned and are exhausted at the end of it. “I am just not a good writer,” being the usual refrain. And in truth, not many middle school students are great writers. They are still trying to put together their ideas and find words to express themselves. Finding strategies to help them practice these skills is important.

“I really liked it,” was the general response. They liked having time to plan outside of class, with less pressure. One student loved having the 5 minutes to look over her notes and the textbook before the writing time started, realizing that she had spent her homework time writing out facts and not thinking about them. One loved the reading aloud, saying that it really highlighted the mistakes; another thought it was a waste of time. They generally enjoyed the peer editing time, partly for the comments that they got and partly because it gave them a chance to see another person’s argument.

For me, I liked the variety of experiences, and I also liked the timing of each activity. Rather than giving them an hour to write with no structure, this supported a variety of different learning styles and allowed them to have intense times of concentration and times to talk and interact with each other. It took the strain out of the room that often comes with long periods of concentrated work. There was much more smiling and then focus. A good combination in a middle school classroom!

At a quick glance, the writing was also much smoother. More on that in the next post.

I tried an activity with my class this week that I used to do when I was homeschooling our children. We used to have “Quiet Time,” an hour or more after lunch when they had to be alone in their rooms – no TV, no computer. Just themselves, lots of paper and crayons, and books to read. One of our sons once said that “Quiet time + crayons = Creativity.” I decided that it would be interesting to try something like this with my students, many of whom are plugged in 24/7.

We had completed a week of research and investigation. Their task was to take a point of view and present it in any format that they wanted. They could create oral arguments; build models; sing songs; make movies; paint pictures. They needed to decide how they felt about the topic and show their argument in the most convincing way that they could. To start them going, I told them that they were going to take a piece of paper and something to write or draw with and find a place anywhere in the school where they could be quiet for an hour. I said that they could sit near their friends, but only if they could avoid being distracted by them. If they were going to laugh or make faces at each other, then they needed to find another location.

I told them that I wanted them to simply be quiet, to let their minds relax and think whatever thoughts that they had. The point of the time was not so much to develop a full-blown argument and strategy for presenting it, but that it was to give them space to think, with few to no distractions. They knew that if they wanted to take a walk, they just needed to let me know, but that if they thought that would help them focus, then they could do that. I said that I had a special topic that I was going to be thinking about as I walked quietly around the school.  Then I let them go.

Now I have to admit that I teach at a wonderful school where the halls are always filled with students collaborating or working independently, so it wasn’t startling for anyone for my students to “take to the halls.” They quickly found spaces, in the halls and empty classrooms, to sit or lay down, some doodling immediately and some just sitting in silence. There were 50 students spread throughout the middle school, and with practically no exceptions, they all settled down to try this experiment.

As the time went by, I was amazed at how few of them even tried to talk to me, much less their peers. They had found a space to let themselves think, to listen to what was going on in their minds. It was so exciting to watch. Some of their comments when they were done:

“I thought more thoughts than I knew I had.”

“I kept changing my mind about what I thought the more time I spent thinking. I was able to see it from different sides. It was really interesting.”

“I just got so much done. More than I ever thought I could. I know what I want to show and how I want to do it.”

It was a wonderful experiment, one that surprised them and me. In today’s world of constant interruptions, it is the breaks in concentration that are the norm. The distractions are accepted. We need to teach our students how to take time to listen only to themselves and the thoughts in their heads. There is a lot to be found in the silence.

We also have to remember to do it ourselves, to not give in to the Siren call of email, tweets, Facebook, RSS feeds and beyond. We need to take time to be still and listen to our thoughts. We will all learn and grow more if we do.