common core radio (School|Life 14)

the common core state standards are a really big thing in education, now. it’s a collection of standards that help define common state goals for student learning. one really big emphasis in the CCSS is literary nonfiction.  and it’s true that too often we ground our units in traditional literature.  fiction and poetry are amazing! for real. still, it’s essential that students learn to read and write non-fiction genres well.

i feel like our radio project could be a really cool match, too. our teachers have been searching for several years for how to engage students in a genuinely dynamic, interesting, and challenging nonfiction project. we’ve tried profile, feature article, and investigative journalism.  we’ve used an i-search project, a journalism project, and even a multi-genre project. they were all nice and alright – they didn’t quite get there, though.  i feel like, maybe, it could be amazing to use radio to help students uncover their own lives.  their own interests.   their own families and voices and ideas.

we might be able to do some really nice crossover stuff with multimedia, too.  i’d love if somehow we could merge profile and oral history with a multi-genre multimedia thing.

how could we bring audio into the game? can we get audio recorder to all of the students? what would that look like? can we edit the sound in the lab? what would the goal be? maybe we could ask students to tape one day, their entire day. then, they could splice together their day into a non-fiction multimedia project. it might include all of the things that we’re thinking about for our website:

1)  radio story

2)  photography slide show

3)  blog entries

4)  interview transcripts

5)  other ideas. . .

 

two things we’d have to think about are:

1) logistics.  what would that even look like?  100 digital audio tape recorders?  100 omnidirectional microphones?  1 day?  split classes into different days, so 35 recorders and microphones?  split a class into two, so 20 recorders and microphones?

and 2)  does this still connect to our research goals?  are there areas for students to investigate and research?  can they cite information?  can they learn background information?  to make a clear argument and make specific claims?

i’ve got to work through it a bit more, but it might be pretty interesting.

the sweet spot (School|Life 13)

when we talk about education, we generally imagine categories or types of students and schools. we rarely remember that every class, every teacher, and every student is very different.   we often come from very different experiences and perspectives, and every situation has a different context and different meaning for every person.  principals, teachers, parents, and students all have individual personalities, interests, and ideas.  how we work together and talk together makes a major difference in how initiatives, programs, and reforms are designed, revised, and implemented.

for example, one thing you may not know about teachers is that our first lesson every day is likely our worst lesson of the day.  it can matter more than you imagine when a a class is scheduled in the day.  not because a teacher or student wants it too, but because every lesson and every class is a little bit like a venn diagram.  everybody in school is a mix of different abilities, interests, and skills.  in one circle, there is the lesson the teacher offers, and in another circle, there is student readiness.  instruction is not just theory: it has to match real students in a real classroom. that’s the major difference between “content coverage” and “deep understanding”.  how do we help students really learn?

the first two circles already offer real challenge, but there’s a the third circle, too.  what skills and techniques can a teacher use to affect student readiness?  how can a teacher engage, scaffold, and support students to promote real learning?  it’s not easy.  learning, then, is essentially the overlap of the teacher’s lesson, the teacher’s abilities, and student readiness.  and honestly, there are a lot of things that can affect how different circles overlap in different ways on different days.

classes too early in the morning or too late in the day limit can student readiness, and teachers are often far more frustrated and impatient at the end of a full day.  there’s a sweet spot in the day for lessons, but it’s not pure science.  after a student has adjusted to the day, and after a teacher has taught a lesson once, students are more likely to really learn.

you know what the crazy part is: there’s also a sweet spot for learning among the students in the classroom.  i’ll get to that in a new post . . . i think it’s probably one of the most important (and controversial) things i’ll have to say.

numbers game (School|Life 9)

when my wife, samantha, was pregnant with my first daughter, she started having intense pain in her jaw. her dentist removed two teeth, but the pain didn’t go away. and when he threatened to pull more teeth, i said to samantha that we needed to find a new doctor.

we visited an ent recommended by her general practitioner, and the ent discovered a large tumor in her neck. he explained that the tumor was so large it placed  significant pressure on to her jawbone and into her teeth.

he discovered the tumor, he explained, because people of chinese descent are sometimes more susceptible to a specific kind of tumor in that area. salty and preserved foods, he said, can cause a malignant tumor near the vegas nerve. in fact, one of samantha’s folk dance teachers had recently died because of a similar illness.

the doctor was amazing.  he really was.  still, he didn’t diagnose samantha’s tumor because he’s “amazing”.  he was able to help samantha because he knew more information.  it’s a numbers game, and he had knowledge that helped him narrow the likelihood of certain possible problems.

we often speak about teachers and students in the same way.  we say that they’re terrible or awful or amazing or brilliant.  we reduce an incredibly complicated idea (we need good teachers: what does a really good teacher look like?) to our best position.  it’s important to know that even really very good teachers are really only very good for a certain amount of students at a particular time.  how can we be good to the greatest amount of students?  how can we better for all of our students?

too often, we speak about teachers and students without essential information.   we speak in generalizations that simplify truly interesting people and truly difficult situations.  i hope that school|life can help bring more knowledge and more understanding on education.  i hope it can help us see beyond traditional divides and boilerplate arguments that limit and coarsen education policy.  and i hope it can help reveal real people in real life.

the truth is: it’s really quite complicated.  we need to broaden our conversation.  we need to understand that different programs and different reforms can work in very different ways.  we need to remember that different people come to the same classroom from very different places.  we want to promote a genuine, thoughtful, and honest conversation about our students, our teachers, and our schools. we deserve that.