Choices, Choices

Have you ever been to a restaurant where they let you build your own meal? After weeks of agonizing about how to end our digital citizenship unit, a trip to Friendly's inspired an idea. On the table was a pad with options for build your own burger. Although, I didn't want a burger, I really wanted to fill out the burger order form. When you love your curriculum and the technology, sometimes it’s hard to make a decision about what to cut. I knew I wanted to do a project but I kept vacillating between topics, audience, and mediums for the project.  A few days prior, our Superintendent had mentioned incorporating student choice into our curriculum. On Sunday morning while contemplating an end-of- unit-project, I was thinking Aaaahhhhh! I can’t decide what should be the focus of this project; I should just let the kids decide. A perfect storm of recent experiences and necessity, and the Build-Your-Own-Project was born.  

Like me wanting to complete the build-your-own-burger order form, my students were drawn to the idea of building their own project. I have never seen students get so excited about a project.

Is it Rigorous?

One of my district's goals is to increase the rigor and relevance of our curriculum. Last year our superintendent began educational rounds (like doctors do in hospitals) with a focus on rigor and relevance. At first it was just administrators making rounds, but not long after teachers were invited along. The group would visit various classes for approximately one period observing what students were doing, then meet for another period to complete a chart based what again we saw students doing. We were told, it didn’t matter what the teachers were doing, focus on the student’s activity and we were allowed to ask the students to explain what they were doing. For each class, we had to place a post-it in the quadrant that we believed the students were working.

   

 So, this rigor and relevance conversation has been ongoing for over a year. As we begin using the new teacher evaluation tool this year, many teachers are making it a goal to increase the rigor in their classes and the discussion about what is rigorous continues.

People always think rigor means hard. Calculus and physics by most people's standards are challenging subjects, but if you enter a classroom and the teacher is giving direct instruction what are the students doing, they are listening, watching, and maybe taking notes. Listening and watching is not very rigorous. A teacher can't say my subject is hard therefore my class is rigorous. So if rigor is not a challenging subject, what is rigor?

Rigor is about designing tasks that force learners to think about a strategy, to test that idea, to reassess the strategy, and to try again with a new strategy in a rinse and repeat fashion until they are successful.   I like a Hansel-and-Gretel-follow-the-bread-crumbs metaphor for rigor rather than the Wizard-of-Oz- yellow-brick-road metaphor. On the yellow brick road, one can enjoy a stroll through the country side while making their way to their destination, the answer. If the route to the answer is following breadcrumbs of information, this is much more challenging. Sometimes the crumbs of information are smaller than other crumbs, sometimes there are large gaps, maybe even a river, between bread crumbs, and sometimes what you think is a breadcrumb is a small pebble. A task like this requires strategizing, analysis, planning, applying prior knowledge, determining what's missing, experimenting, perseverance, and maybe even creating a river-traversing-system.

                                         photo source: http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/03/50_very_awesome.shtml

Often people also think rigor is assigning a lot of work, which is rigorous as a time management activity because the learner must plan and strategize how they will get all the work done in a limited amount of time, but a heavy workload is not content related rigor. In fact, the learner may think less deeply about the content activity because completion in a specified time frame is the goal, not learning. Creating a rigorous learning activity, requires the teacher to plan backwards and maybe share the the expected end-result, then start dropping the breadcrumbs that will get the learners to strategize a route to the answer. 

Recently, after a lesson about digital reputation, specifically who owns one's image once online, I challenged students to get themselves untagged from a class photo that I placed on a wiki (I had not introduced wiki’s yet). I gave them a bread crumb in the form of a blog post about how to get oneself untagged from an unflattering photo online. The blog post, however, was more a treasure map than a road map. Only one student was able to untagged themselves, and two others were close. It appeared all students waited until the minute, not giving themselves enough “trial and error” time, and many didn't bother to read, or they misread the “breadcrumb” blog.  What I learned was that I needed to add a few more breadcrumbs and closer together. Next time, I will prep the students with the Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs analogy to start. I think informing students that this is a challenging activity will encourage a more serious attitude.  I would also set a “questions for the teacher” deadline about half way through the time frame to force strategizing earlier in the process.

Parent Engagement

Recently, during the roll-out of the new evaluation tool, our superintendent mentioned that eventually we would be pulling into our teacher evaluations, student and parent feedback. He used the phrase “parent engagement.” Engagement is a big buzz word in education of late and it has me contemplating how to “engage parents.”  Engagement is more than connecting, involving, or getting feedback.  To engage is to engross, secure, charm, absorb, and attract parents. I began thinking about how I can attract and engross parents.

                                          Photo Source: Freefoto  http://www.freefoto.com/preview/04-08-5/On-the-Phone

An opportunity soon arose when planning for our (I am co-teach a class this year) Digital Citizenship unit, it dawned on me that this is an area that nearly every parent in the country has concerns about. I enlisted the help of the administrative assistants to get me the parent’s phone numbers for each of our students. I set a goal to use the time between 2:30 and 3:00 each day of that week to call all our parents. This short after school period was the quietest of the whole day in the library, and I knew there would be fewer interruptions. My plan was to introduce myself as their child’s Digital Technology teacher and then say this,

“We are beginning our Digital Citizenship unit which covers topics like online safety, digital reputation, privacy, and cyber-bullying. I know these topics are concerns for parents in general, and I was wondering if there was something you specifically wanted us to cover?”

This is my twentieth year teaching, and this exercise was by far the most wonderful parent-teacher experience of my career. The parent’s first reaction was stunned silence. I don’t think any of them had ever been asked by a teacher to guide curriculum. All but one parent had concerns. Each shared a story about an “online” issue and thanked me for addressing these topics in class. If I couldn’t speak to a parent in person, I left the same message on their voicemail. I ended all calls with “if you have any concerns at all, please do not hesitate to call or email me at school.” 

This was literally an experiment for which I was very nervous. I had a horrific parent(s)-teacher interaction in 2005 during open house when a group of hostile parents literally ganged up on me about a difficult reading I had assign their honor’s students. I left school that night in tears and the next day enrolled in a graduate program and within two years, I was out of the classroom. It was so bad that a parent who was a bystander to the scene called me the next morning herself crying to apologize for even being in the room.  

                                          photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gccommunication/3965583947/

I know I am not alone, when I attend my son’s open houses or parent-teacher conferences, his teachers are nervous wrecks, and when I try to engage my son’s teachers in a non-parent but a collegial, teacher-to–teacher manner their walls are so high I can’t breech them. It’s clear with every interaction that they have been burned and those wounds are still fresh. So, with my son’s school and teachers, I don’t interfere, but try hard to be supportive. However, as a parent, I would cherish a teacher who would call and ask “what would you like me to focus on this year?”

Teaching is risk-taking, and not for the faint of heart. We must acknowledge and overcome our fears for the benefit for our students.