Grading

I could sum up my grading practices in five words: I have to submit them.

Once I wrote on a syllabus:

Grades come with assumptions that can undermine the creation of a community learners. These include the beliefs that 

• teachers decide the value of student work, 

• grades are objective assessments of student performance, 

• grades are indicators of student potential. 

There are practices around grading that foster negativity, such as when grades are used as a way to control behavior, show who’s boss, punish a student or class.  

There are negative effects of grading: a student can work for a grade and  never engage emotionally or cognitively with the subject, never learn to work persistently at understanding and/or creating knowledge for him/herself, never learn how to be genuinely curious or how to seek to know.   
Ultimately, there are subtle beliefs that can evolve and become deeply rooted. I get Cs so I must not be as good as a person who gets Bs.  

In short, I think grades can be impediments to student ownership of the process and products of their own learning. That’s on a good day. All too often, though, grades & grading seem to have the same effect as the Dementors of Azkiban.  

In the literacies and technologies class that just ended, grading is absolutely counterproductive to the atmosphere of experimentation I want students to experience.

Several years ago, students in my classes began to indicate that they had no memory of schooling without high-stakes testing. I know because I asked; I ask every semester. By now, every hand is raised.

I began asking after I noticed something different in the feel of classes. Students were increasingly cautious. They needed to know exactly what they were supposed to do to the point of not attempting to independently interpret the assignments. Anxiety about grades was sometimes almost palpable. Increasingly I find that students are quite skilled at masking their feelings about classes. How successful the American public schools have become at churning out obedient young automatons adults!

In the literacies class, I ask students to set goals for learning at the start of each week and to assess their progress toward those goals at week's end. This takes place on a Google Doc shared by the student and myself. I believe-- I hope-- that this might spark or affirm a subtle shift in attitudes about who is responsible for learning in the class. At the end of the semester, the students evaluate their work and assign it a grade. Nine times out of ten, the student and I are in complete agreement.

What matters to me is that students begin to work, learn, and think for themselves.

I think that happened in the course that just ended. Which is probably why I forgot to do grades yesterday. But I remembered today.

I submitted grades because I had to.


Image:"Bill Gates Talks 'Free Education'" by Libby Levy/opensource, used via Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0

Make the Road by Walking: Six Weeks Closer to the New Unknown

I give my students, pre- and in-service teachers, a lot of credit. After about five weeks of intensive reading (i.e., new literacies, participatory culture, youth and digital life, etc. ), venturing into the wilds of the Web to play with a wide range of tools (e.g., Google Docs, Google Reader, Animoto, Flickr, podcasting, blogging, TitanPad, TodaysMeet, Adobe Connect, Skype, Twitter), they've gone off in teams of two and three to create a product that will feed our class Commons (hat tip to Howard Rheingold and Lawrence Lessig for that concept), and address a question or idea that matters to them related to teaching, learning, and/or "English." Their overarching mission is to see what happens when they try to use principles of new learning as the context for their teaching.

The idea that educators work with a trio of knowledges-- pedagogic, content, and technological-- within a social & cultural context comes from the TPACK model. According to the TPACK Website

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). 

All I do is insist that my students swap an Industrial Age context for a context comprised of new definitions of literacy, new mindsets about communication, knowledge, economies, and participation in society, and new technologies.

There are lots of lists of the elements that make up the new contexts for learning. To keep it simple, we use five. Drawn from the work of Howard Rheingold and others, they are: Connection, Collaboration, Creation, Crap Detection, and Commons-Sense. These five terms capture the spirit of the complex and varied ideas about the new literacies needed for our evolving social contexts.

What students need to know how to do, ways they need to be able to think and work-- all of these things are radically different in a world described above than the Industrial world in which so many of us grew up.

Being Connected means being conscious of living in a world larger than one's immediate life and seeking connections to that larger world, usually by means of technologies, i.e., the World Wide Web. Collaboration speaks to new ways of working made possible by the dissolution of rigid social lines. Creation is the act of making new knowledge for the benefit of the larger community.

Crap Detection: the skills to 'read' messages being conveyed about people, places, ways of being.  Postman's (1969) "Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection", for example, and Rheingold's 2009 "Crap Detection 101" encompasses media and information literacies, as well as skills described as essential for a participatory culture (Jenkins et. al., 2008), and even broad ideas of critical literacy (Luke).

Commons-Sense refers to the belief that, in this new society, information must be freely accessible in order for people to continue to build knowledge that can benefit everyone-- i.e., the Commons. Ideas that information can be "owned," i.e., via copyright, are counterproductive to knowledge creation, and Creative Commons Licensing is a new way to protect rights of content creators while making information accessible to others.

I imagine that this is not what many of my students expected from this course. It would be so much simpler to write a list of Web-based tools on the board, ask them to dream up cool ways to use the tools in the classroom, and then to require that these be written up as lesson plans. But that's not what's needed for the transformation of education. It's barely even change. It is the substitution of new technologies for old, in order to do the same old thing, only more efficiently-- "old wine in new bottles" (Lankshear and Knobel. 2006. p. 55).

I keep telling my students that this is really hard. That we don't know what the answers are. That, together, we will create them.

Some students are keen to try their hands at seamless integration of tools into lessons. Others are trying to see how/if traditional concepts of humanities could be brought to a new place within the new context. Still others are trying to see if sustained silent reading could transformed. I can't wait to see what they've created.

Jenkins, H., Purushotoma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. (2008, March). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2006). New literacies: Everyday practices & classroom learning (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.

Tech in Schools: It's Not Just the Tools, Stupid

At Educon a couple of years ago, I heard someone-- maybe Will Richardson?-- say that he was thinking that the best kind of PD session would be to take a bunch of teachers, throw 'em in a room with computers, and say "Figure it out." I think that was true several years ago but I'm starting to believe that learning to weave a seamless flow of tech, curriculum, and practice is becoming much, much more complex.

One problem-- challenge-- is the multiplicity of competing, sometimes conflicting realities: the stakes for testing will get even higher as test results become linked to teacher evaluations. We thought NCLB drove learning toward teacher-centered practice, drill and kill test prep, and increasingly narrowed curricula? I predict we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Let's look at one conflict. As districts scramble to understand and implement the Common Core standards, I'm hearing about PD that is not only boring, it's increasingly dictatorial, moving toward telling teachers what to teach and how to teach it. This despite the oft-repeated CCSS assurance (in the Myths section) that this is exactly what should not happen.  

At the same time, the push to move beyond tech-for-tech's-sake-- AKA "engaging" the connected learning environments and real-world contexts is calling teachers to transform the way they think about teaching, learning, and the structures of schooling.  At least, it would if teachers could get access to social networks in their schools.

This push-pull starts to look like "use technology to get kids to do low-level thinking while we trick them into practicing filling in bubbles on Scantron pages." Of course, no one not many intend(s) for this to be the goal, it's just that there's no time allotted for authentic, teacher-driven brainstorming about how to create and work toward a different vision.

So. Enough bemoaning the difficulties. What can we do?

• Teachers, especially those with tenure who know the bureaucratic ropes of their districts, can come together across academic subjects and meet with IT folks, Superintendents, etc. to get specific social networks unblocked: Google Docs, VoiceThread, Glogster, Skype are the ones I see teachers talk about most often. I would add Storify to that list, especially for Humanities teachers.

Strategies need to include

• Concrete examples of how the tech will be used and for what purposes. For example, an argument about developing interdisciplinary work that would build cross-discipline  inquiry-based learning environments across the entire school would be a great way to start using the Common Core to inspire a...well, a common theme for the whole school, perhaps even a grade-level concrete problem to solve or goal to accomplish that every academic subject could connect to 

• Concrete examples of what other schools have done and the results (of course, the positive results). Schools that are similar demographically and/or in closer proximity to your own will carry more weight. There are a couple of YouTube videos you could share-- URL only, because YouTube will undoubtedly be blocked in your school. Here's one: Teachers and Principals Talk about Google Docs

• The Connected Principal, a blog by a group of connected principals, would make great reading for your school leaders. 

• Teachers, even one or two, can commit to spending 1 block of time --and yes, it will probably be after school, and yes, it will undoubtedly be uncompensated-- playing with new tools, and, more important, to talking about ways to use them to build new dimensions in curricula. Teachers can pick a book to read together. I make some recommendations here.

• Parents who are connected will be invaluable resources. Draw on their expertise and ask them to bring other parents on board. 

It's not all about the technology. It's always about power-- what is the tech that matters? That doesn't? The rationale for any decision? Who decides? 

I want to hear teachers' voices loud & strong in the push for change. 

It's time. 

Image: Speak Up: Make your voice heard by Howard Lake used via CC   Some rights reserved by HowardLake

This is for Arne Duncan

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a Facebook update of a former student. The update read,

"Have you ever had a moment, three years after Graduate School, when you FINALLY understand what your genius professor was talking about in class? 'Without active reflection, every Educator teaches like his/her worst teacher.' I GET IT NOW! Thank you Karen LaBonte!" 

I'm no genius, and reading this makes me feel like a million bucks. The point I want to make here, though, is about teacher ed programs. In a blog post, Wes Fryer quotes Arne Duncan:

. . .  ”Districts currently pay about $8 billion each year to teachers because they have masters’ degrees, even though there is little evidence teachers with masters degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers — with the possible exception of teachers who earn masters in math and science.” 

First off, I don't give a crap about Duncan's version of "student achievement;" standardized tests measure only how skilled students are at taking standardized tests.

Second, Duncan's focus on math & science reveals his underlying assumption that content trumps all. This assumption never fails to amuse me: the discussion of what English is and what its content should be has been a brutal battle since 1898, when the professors who comprised The Committee of Ten determined which academic subjects should be part of an American high school curriculum, how much time should be devoted to each course, and what each course should cover.

The battle rages today. Should kids read only the canon of classic texts? (Whose classics?) Are young adult books OK? What about writing? Shouldn't literary analysis be the focus, with five-paragraph essay as the foundation? What about other forms? How much say should students have in what they write? Thank goodness the Common Core Standards have arrived to clarify these questions for us. Nonfiction texts, writing that focuses on analysis and argument-- that's what kids need to be "successful in college and career."

Me, I also want teachers to be able to think. That way, when the pendulum of public opinion swings from one set of "best" ideas to another, usually opposing, set of ideas, teachers will be able to peer through the rhetoric to study the "reformed" objectives and think about why these matter-- or, in many cases, why they don't.

I've noticed that education students who expect to graduate with a secret manual of tricks and catchy lessons have a different level of professional stamina than those who are willing to ponder as they write lesson plans, go to student teaching sites, meet with supervisors. The students who learn strategies for classroom management and content sequencing while they seek to understand and apply educational theories generally turn into classroom rock stars.


That doesn't happen overnight. My student learned something from graduate school three years after she graduated.

I hope she's in a setting where she's getting mentored, where she has opportunities to keep growing professionally. If she's not, I believe she still has something to draw from.

Because she went to graduate school, Arne. She learned not only to teach, she learned to think.

Which seems, to me, to be the point of education.


Images
Exam Time by Cocoen used under Creative Commons license  Some rights reserved

Target Practice, or, What Many of My Students Feel Like at this Point in the Term

You've seen the cartoons, the unlikely ones, where the duck or the rabbit is in the batting cage or on the tennis court with the machine that spits the balls. Suddenly, the machine starts spewing balls so fast that the athlete crumples under the assault.

It's not fashionable to blog about the icky moments in teaching, the ones where you're suddenly aware that you are not only working without a net, you're not even on the tightrope, and the class time, the semester, is running out.  Think of what happened with Michael Wesch. A colleague comes up to him and says that Wesch's tech-filled lessons have been a dismal failure for him. Wesch writes about it. Suddenly, the headlines blare that Wesch is renouncing technology in his teaching.

You can read a situation in many ways. I read Wesch's situation not as a cautionary tale about using technology in one's teaching, but as recognition of something we've always known: teachers have individual styles and, the more experienced they are, the more established their comfort zones. It is tough to leave the comfort zone, whatever that may be. But teaching through this new time is tough, and this seems like a valuable conversation to have.

So I'm teaching this course, Literacies & Technologies in the Secondary English Classroom, in one of those summer sessions where you do 15 weeks of work in 6. Not optimal for grappling with complex subjects, but you do what you have to do. Some may think that what I'm trying to do is ridiculous. I run the risk of some of those people being my students. I run the risk of creating a situation where the reading and activities come so fast, from so many directions, that it feels like an assault. A big, frustrating blur of ideas, whizzing by. Or, even worse, projectiles screaming through the air, some smacking against into the body before they bounce off, roll away.

True, deep learning is usually uncomfortable. It should rock your ideas to the core, make you roll back on your heels and say, WHOA, I never thought of it like that. Cognitive dissonance, I tell my students. Learn to love it sit through it.

But there are so many layers. Let me try to sketch these out.

It's hard to talk about the profound changes that are rocking our teaching and learning lives as a result of the exponential changes in information & communication technologies, particularly the Web, if the Web isn't woven through people's daily lives. I'm not talking just individual tools here. I'm talking about a different way of seeing, of being, that comes as a result of mindful playing with whatever Web-ness one can grab. So I ask them to go out on the Web and see what's there. To tinker. And I design assignments that push against some of the traditionally basic tenets of our subject area, English, as well as some of the practices that are traditionally considered "best."

Over the semesters I've taught this course, I've seen that even this one layer is challenging in so many ways:
The computers. How do you turn them on? How do you sign in to the College's system? The wiki, the blog, the shared folder of documents-- the passwords. So many passwords. So many pages on the wiki. Which page are we on? How will I get back to it? How do I find something? Tags? What's that? Wait, how will I know my blogging partners have written? Oh, the new blog title is bolded in my Google Reader. Oh, that means I need to check it regularly.

I count at least a dozen balls alone in the paragraph above.

Then we add a new layer. We read. It's not easy reading, either, and the ideas? They are so unsettling. Since when did literacy go plural? What's the difference between Discourse and discourse? (and why should I care?) And what about books, and literature, and.... (So many ideas, so many projectiles, help, I'm dying here.)

Then we start talking about the so what. If we can have class in a virtual space and see each other and talk to each other, what's the purpose of place-- a classroom, a building. If anybody can add a wiki page, write something that challenges what the teacher says, suggest that deadlines or projects or readings be changed, then what's the purpose of a set-in-stone syllabus (curriculum)? What counts as learning? Who decides?

Then there's reality. How can any of this make sense when every site is blocked in my school? When we don't have computers? When we spend the entire year preparing for tests because we're a turn-around school? Why aren't you telling us the answers?

Because we haven't created them yet.

In my head, of course,  loom the fears. The awareness that everything students might be thinking about me as a teacher could be true: I'm disorganized, indecisive, ignorant. That I sound like a nut case. That the course, already on the outer reaches of the department's priorities for teacher preparation, is going to fizzle and die.

Today I'm going in to do the thing I usually do at this point in the semester. More risk. More projectiles.

More opportunities to learn.





Image: boles grounge by Miquel Bohigas Costabella via Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND 2.0

Racing Toward Literacy(ies)

We're a few weeks into the summer course I'm teaching, Literacies and Technologies in the Secondary English Classroom. Typically, at around this time of semester, I rewrite a course syllabus around the interests and needs of the class I have begun to get to know.  This time is no exception. 

But something is different. Since I last taught the course-- two summers ago-- I have experienced for the first time the sense of being flooded by information, tools, people, to the point of being overwhelmed. It is not possible to track, do, read, try, it all. It's barely possible to maintain a finger on the pulse. At the same time, cutting off the flow of information doesn't provide the same respite it once did. 

So what does that mean, for me and for my teaching, especially this particular course? I think a couple of things. 

First, it is really important to s t o p and synthesize. Writing is an essential tool for this. Like many folks, I'm an information pack rat. I make links to interesting Web pages just in case; I keep every last byte. But my collections of information are like bureau drawers crammed full to overflowing. When I'm clicking through links, grazing on data, I don't form the same extended connections I make when I am wrestling to get an idea into prose. 

Second, I think that there's a new dimension to the world of the Web. The volume of information, the number of new tools and resources, all of this continues to expand exponentially. The new dimension is in the connections that form around the information, tools, and resources. I don't refer here to Siemen's theory of connectivism or Castells' idea of the network society. I am simply watching Twitter buddies coming together, usually around an idea, and working on a project: P2PU and EdCamp are two that come immediately to mind. 

A new Big Truth I am thinking about is, "It's the relationships, stupid."  People connect digitally, they share information, and then take it one step further. Together they are using the information to do: act, create, build. So as a Web traveler, one still has to deal with a tsunami of information. Then, on top of that, one has to decide with whom and in what venue to engage with the information. You can't experience everything, everyone, everywhere. How do you pick? 

This is not something I see on anyone's list of Essential Skills for the 21st Century, yet in an adolescent's world where 500 friends on Facebook is not an anomaly, setting boundaries in virtual peer groups begins to look like a survival skill. How will our young people learn to do this? Especially if the adults whom they see every day secretly think Facebook is a little silly, something the children will probably outgrow in time. 

Does boundary-setting qualify as a new literacy? 

And here we are at my third point. What characterizes a new literacy? Last week, someone I know reported reading about ‘existential literacy’ and I almost fell over giggling. 

Technology is no silver bullet; despite all kinds of new technologies, we still grapple with the issues that we've been grappling with forever. What does it mean, to know? For whom? What’s important to know? Who decides? The information and digital era just provides the new arena/setting for opening these old packages.

My question to myself is, how does the tool or practice disrupt, call us to new relationships with ideas, students, ourselves. How does the tool or practice help me emphasize to the learner that this is her journey; how does it help me invite the learner to take up the responsibility and joy of inquiry; how does it help, make, force the learner to question, seek information and another like-minded person with whom to create some new idea, product, solution?

But here's the irony. How do I open these ideas in a structure where the syllabus sets the course. By course,  I don't mean the entity that's shaped and marketed through an institution of learning. I mean course as in the course a runner takes. No, not a runner. A racehorse. Because at heart, in the purest form,  that's what I think learners are.  Beautiful, streamlined racehorses -- no, not race horses either. Wild horses.  Wild horses, running, not a circular track with a starting gate and a finish line and  a stopwatch, but on a beautiful open prairie, toward a point they can only imagine.  

That’s new literacy, baby. 

Image: 

Do Note by Paul Watson is used via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Feral horses in Eastern Nevada near a Greater sage-grouse lek by Tatiana Gettleman used via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Tinkering: Screencast-o-matic

I recently heard a recommendation for a screencasting tool called Screencast-O-Matic. Basically, it's a tool that let's you make a recording of whatever you are working on on your desktop accompanied by any commentary you'd care to make. I learned about this tool when a Twitter pal of mine tweeted:

I favorited her tweet and went to check out the tool & her blog post. I love how she uses her webcam so we can *see* her talking to us. I also love that she includes sound and icons of different tools that are part of her early digital life. Her discussion of the way she uses different digital writing tools in her teaching and learning is also valuable.

I've used Jing as a screencasting tool and really liked it, but it has two limitations, in my mind. One, each screencast is limited to five minutes. While that kind of time limit may encourage focusing only on the central ideas, it's often just not enough. Screencast-O-Matic has a 15 minute limit.

In addition, Jing's output options seem a little convoluted to me, whereas Screencast-O-Matic offers three straight-forward options: post to YouTube, save it to your computer, file it on their site (which I think requires a pro account? I didn't pay attention to that because I wasn't planning to use that option).

Another plus: If you want the additional benefits of a pro account, Screencast-O-Matic is only $15 a year!

I've learned it takes a bit of planning to get images lined up to use on my desktop, etc. I also probably say "Umm" too much. But it's an interesting addition to a publishing portfolio. I think I'll keep it.


Photo: lens 2 by hunnnterrr used via CC BY 2.0