Viz Thinking for Literature Students

I discovered that my very conscientious students were taking too many notes in classes. Word by word, page after page, they were reproducing the transcript of an entire Harkess discussion, rather than noting key ideas.

My goal was to teach them to ideate while note-taking, rather than replicate. So I asked a question:

And then I booked a session in the Makerspace.

TASK: transform annotations of Hamlet into visual notes. Mike Rohde’s concept of sketchnotes and samples from The Sketchnote Handbook  introduced students to new modes for taking notes, and a method for representing their ideas visually.

Process.  

1. Use Hamlet text + your class discussion  notes. Think about the characters, conflicts, driving themes, images, key words and passages from your studies of the play.
2. Cut a section of scroll paper. Using sharpies and markers, create a visual thinking map.
3. Plan. Design. Begin.

Written Analysis. Please compose on a sheet of paper:

1. Photo of scroll. Take a picture of your Hamlet scroll  and <insert image> at the top of page.
2. Reflection: 1 paragraph of analysis in which you identify your focusing idea (i.e. the centerpiece of your scroll), analyze the choices you made, and delineate your thinking process in creating your visual map. Please also refer to content.  
3. Upload to the shared class Hamlet folder on Google Drive.

Sunni Brown’s book The Doodle Revolution focuses on the idea of distilling narrative to its essentials, using  12 devices and 6 fundamentals.

 

Students enjoyed finding a style with which to express their unique ideas about themes, values, plot events, characterization, key words, images, passages in Hamlet.

Hacking the Essay: In the Makerspace with 12th grade Literature Students

Using the Makerspace to Re-imagine Literary Texts

The humanist Michel de Montaigne in 1580 conceived of the essay as an attempt to display discernment and thinking, a kind of theater of mind. More than 400 years later, students in literature classes still write essays incessantly: lower school essays, middle school essays, high school essays, college essays, application essays.

Essays. Essays. Essays.

As a long-term teacher of 10th and 12th grade English and world literature, I am always seeking innovative ways to inspire students to think abstractly about a literary text. Reading any text requires entry into the world presented by the writer; a text is a literary space that inspires multiple and layered interpretations. I am interested in encouraging students to examine texts as symbolic structures and systems that they enter and inhabit — meandering, sauntering and stopping, then exiting, and possibly returning again and again.

Following Mark Twain’s suggestion that students shouldn’t “let school get in the way of their education,” I invited AP English and World Literature Honors students to disrupt the cycle.

“Let’s hack the essay,” I suggested.

Influenced by the work of Matteo Pericoli at Columbia University’s Laboratory of Literary Architecture (http://www.lablitarch.com), and a project by an unknown but inspiring colleague’s work with 10th graders on Catcher in the Rye, my teaching and learning goals for the upcoming year involve conceptualizing ways for students to use the new Makerspace at our school to imagine literary texts as spaces in which readers immerse themselves.

During the past few weeks, talented literature students have been engaged in applying critical and creative thinking skills to their understanding of a complex, ambiguous work, Pulitzer prize winning author Annie Dillard‘s memoir, An American Childhood . After reading, annotating, and analyzing this text in Harkness discussions at the seminar table, classes entered the Makerspace.

Project: Constructing An American Childhood

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not are away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again. Dillard

Goal: To spatialize Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood; to model your understanding of the memoir through dimensional thinking. Focusing on Dillard’s key word in the opening paragraph of the memoir (“topology“), and her use of nature imagery throughout, aim to distill the narrative into driving themes,  and then come up with an abstract shape.

Final Product: a 3-D shape that captures your interpretation of the essence of the text.

Written piece: An artist’s statement that explains your choices. 2 pages.

In the first Makerspace class, students condensed the text into its driving themes by brainstorming and sketching ideas and images that reflected their interpretations of the key elements of the text. They used a scroll of brown kraft paper and sharpies. They began to map out and spatialize their ideas, adding relevant graphic and visual elements.

The next step: applying the maker model of designing, tinkering, prototyping, and fabricating through creative, visual, artistic, systematic analysis and interpretation — in ways other than writing an essay.

What might the un-essay look like?  Have a look at these creative interpretations.

  

I hope to inspire colleagues to use the maker model of tinkering, prototyping, and iteration in their high school literature and humanities classes. I am interested in the convergence of STEM and Design Thinking approaches to problem solving as applied to literary production and analysis: digital humanities, data visualization, info-graphics, i.e. alternative ways of interpreting the layers of meaning and structural architectonics of literary texts.

This was an interesting way to assess students’ capacity for abstract thinking and problem-solving. Of course, we began our studies of this layered text with close reading and analysis — and several short essays. The process of literary discovery ended with a single abstract shape.

This student’s design is a clock. The two clock faces are white to reflect the “times when Dillard is awake.” The gears are black to reflect moments of unawareness.  In the Artist Statement, this student eloquently wrote: “Ultimately, I think I learned a new way to envision texts. By going through my own process of constructing my own symbolism of Dillard’s awareness of time, I think that I also gained a new way to conceptualize the idea of time. On a plane coming back to New York from St. Louis I was finishing up the last two chapters of An American Childhood. As we flew over the city at night, and everything was lit up against the dark skyline, I remembered thinking and jotting down in the back of my book, ‘never forget the wonder of looking out the window of an airplane.’ It was in this moment that I realized that I had awakened through reading this book. More specifically, awakened to the passage of time. I think that previously I had been aware of other aspects of life, but never really to the limit of time or the opportunity to take advantage of it….I saw time flying by, and people’s lives going on without me even knowing them and just had an incredible sense of awe and wonder beyond my comprehension. Now, like Dillard,  I am poised to ‘break through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.’ (250)

Through conceptualizing imaginative ways to hack high school literature and humanities classes and assessments, I aspire to untether students and teachers from the iterative, way-too-predictable process of reading, sitting, discussing, sitting some more, and writing an essay.

The Future of the Humanities? Back to the Trivium.

Recent public discourse has focused on what is going right, and wrong, in the humanities. The decline in English majors is a fact; the rise of STEAM majors is important for an empire seeking to renovate, re-innovate, its economy and geo-political priorities.

I’ve been following this interesting thread from many angles, especially because I believe that the humanities are more important than ever. This summer I am designing a robust high school humanities curriculum for a NYC charter school network that will launch its first high school in 2014. And guess what they’ve asked me to construct…A “best-of-breed Rhetoric and Composition course” for 9th-10th graders.

So we’re back to the trivium: grammar,logic, rhetoric. Word study, etymology, linguistics, semiotics. By investigating cross-cultural language behavior and variation, students will learn how language shapes self-identity in human society. They will come to understand themselves as members of their own culture, and gain the capacity for empathizing with others, who are members of equally significant other cultures.

This is where my own education began, with the seven liberal arts, a foundation for developing an ethical and existential lens through which to view human experience.  Although we live today in a “utilitarian moment,” the humanities still offer enduring understandings and wisdom about how to live a good life.

Why do 1 in 8 students still pursue a major in the humanities?

The answer lies in the  resilience of the humanities canon. Students are inspired by the big questions and ideas — about character, values, power, love and ethics.

The humanities canon is a living record of the interior life of the human species. Alan Bennet’s short novel The Uncommon Reader presents literature as the ultimate democracy, a mode of humanizing. And Salman Rushdie poses this question in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? Stories and storytelling, fabulation and narrative, reveal the power and depth of reflection and  interior life, and inspire a social awareness that impels to action. The humanities canon is a catalyst for transformation.

If eyes are the windows of the soul, and language is the mirror of the mind, a movement back to the trivium will support critical reasoning, systematic thinking, the democratization of knowledge. And perhaps, a more compassionate world.

 

 

 

 

Out: Departments | In: Third Spaces | In: Fab Labs

 

In The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges constructs a library that is a replica of the universe, and a place of infinite possibilities.

 

As a humanities and classroom teacher, I tend to spend a fair amount of time in the library. It is a microcosm, a hub that thrums with vibrant learning. It is a place where I seek respite from the restrictions of an institutionalized schedule and the confines of four walls.

 

My school library is very beautiful. Its enormous windows allow for roaming imagination.  And the celadon green walls, the color of nature, inspire thoughtful reflection, quiet study, collaboration, conversation, and research.

 

I am a regular in our school library. My ideal school would have the library at its entrance, a symbolic portal.

 

For me, the library is a place for pause, for more spacious thinking. It is that “great good place” according to Ray Oldenburg, a neutral venue for gathering and connecting with others and with oneself.  

 

An important third place.  

 

This is why I’m so excited about the current fascination with the Fab Lab. Fabrication = fabulous.

 

A third place. A creative space. A hackerspace. A place for gathering, exploring, converging, imagining,  developing, playing, making, integrating, inventing, innovating.

 

A Fab Lab as a new metaphor for …. A school.

 

Last week I spent a few hours at  the MakerBot factory  and headquarters
in Brooklyn with colleagues from the math and science departments.
Bre Pettis made some time to present his thoughts about the evolution of hackerspaces.

 

Later on, I toured the new Marymount STEAM building with Don Buckley’s grad school class, generously hosted by Jaymes Dec.

 

I came away with lots of interesting questions to consider about the school as Fab Lab.

 

About what an exciting place school can be with a space and at least one creative teacher passionate about creating a mix-up of STEAM threads and pathways for kids and teachers to tinker and play and invent and make things. A 3-D model of a molecule or cell or hermit crab shell.

Problem-solving. Iteration. Mistakes. Messy learning. Authentic learning.

 

And I thought about myself, locked away in the silo of the English department. And how I’m longing to take courses in math and engineering, study data visualization and digital humanities. And add humanities texts like Borges and Calvino, or Andrew Plotkin’s interactive fiction, to pad out the STEAM curriculum, and create rich contexts for igniting students’ passions.

 

I thought about the issues surrounding the “department” and traditional ways of aggregating curriculum and measuring content and skills mastery.

 

This is a structural anachronism that needs some re-imagining, and healthy disruption.

 

 We need to silo-bust.

 

 At my former School at Columbia, a flat organizational infrastructure allows for flexible, multi-modal communication, integration, and curricular focal points or nodes. Avenues School, the new one with the 8 hydra-like former heads-of-school at the helm, made the determination to cast aside the  “department” infrastructure in favor of a flexible hybrid form — a convergence of both a lateral structure (with a grade level coordinator-integrator) and a vertical structure (a curriculum structure in each of the learning domains). This means that there are content experts commingling and playing with ideas and teaching skills across and up and down the Escher-like teaching and learning spiral. 

 

People pursuing passions, individually and collectively.

 

I am hopeful that departments will devolve into more flexible “third spaces,”‘ and that we will develop innovative ways to cluster content masters (of all ages, stages, grades, gradations), based on more fluid concepts of skills, knowledge, ways-of-knowing mastery — integrated thinking, lateral thinking, deep thinking.  

 

As Borges suggested in his 1941 parable that foreshadows the problem-solving capabilities of the MOOC , free open courseware, and online games devoted to world problems: “Within the total and endless reaches of the Library, [there is] no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution [does] not exist – somewhere…”

 

Just imagine the possibilties….

Upgrade. Re-search. What is the Taxonomy of Significant Learning? An idea worth spreading.

Happiness: vital forces aligned along lines of excellence in a life of scope.  Aristotle

Last week I spent the day in a corner room on the 40th floor of the New York Academy of Science at the 2nd annual TEDxNYED convocation, summit, gathering, choir.

Ironies abounded. Breathtaking 360 degree views of lower Manhattan. Inside, the NY educators sat in the dark, windows shuttered, tethered to chairs, looking at a wall, a lecturer, a screen.

Was it Plato’s cave? Was this an illusion, or enlightenment?

Or Foucault‘s vision of institutional life, realized. Where was Jeremy Bentham‘s Panopticon?

For me, it was merely day 6 in an airless classroom. My customary routine.

No matter. It was an uplifting day. It isn’t often that I am invited to be a member of a live audience for a TV show. There hasn’t been much glitter in my 30 years of professional life.

Aside: Although there were many references to education reform, public policy, access and opportunity, the room did not reflect the diversity that was so passionately invoked. 

Side reflection: In a historically gendered profession, it is always interesting to note the disproportionate number of males who hold the leadership positions in the field of education, schools, and schooling. Steve Bergen called them DWMs, “despicable white males.”

I first heard Alan November in 1996. He came to the independent school where I taught to speak to the faculty about technology. We’d just become a 1:1 laptop school. His prediction: within 10 years, everyone would have a web page. Guess he had foresight.

The following year Heidi Hayes Jacobs conducted a workshop for the faculty. She presented a PowerPoint on curriculum mapping to an awed faculty. From that day forward, we vowed that we all wanted to make presentations as sleek and efficient. She’s still making presentations to awed faculty with new, re-purposed words.

Side query: Why does the field of education ruminate and regurgitate and masticate at such a glacial pace. We’re all talk. How come no one has ever invoked radical change to topple such an intractable system?

“Upgrades,” says Hayes-Jacobs. Upgrade the old content, skills, assessment. Upgrade to new structures, too, for scheduling, student and personnel groupings, physical spaces.  

Re-assess the common core and improve it. Re-imagine assessments. What makes a quality tweet, blog post, wiki? Hayes-Jacobs encourages teachers to share subversive practices, and upgrade.

“Re-search,” she says. I thanked Hayes-Jacobs for re-introducing that word. As a literature and humanities teacher, I tend to value academic terms like “research” and “scholarship,” over “projects,” “activities,” and PBL.  Our librarian supports teachers and guides students through the research process, using  NoodleTools and online scholarly subscription databases.

Side reflection: Why | wherefore all the acronyms in education? PBL. PLN. PLC. AP. IEP. GT. LLD. STEM. STEAM.

Is this because teaching is such an undervalued vocation that we need to resort to bytes and branding to attract consumers? But our consumers are the next generation, and isn’t it our moral responsibility to “teach your children well?”

Gary Stager expressed passionate ideas about harnessing children’s intensity. Yes, we understand this.

Fourteen additional talks with slide decks continued at the front of the room. The TEDx format is edu-tainment. As teachers, we rarely have a wide audience. We’re pretty much in the shadows, performing every day, stars in tiny orbits. The TED brand reclaims a bit of sparkle.

It’s quite pleasant to be at a pep rally for education. So what if the TED talks are reductive and boiled down. I’m still working out the TAP. [Acronym: Task, Audience, Purpose.] Who is the audience for TEDxNYED? What is the purpose of these video talks?

And though “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” perhaps the friendly TED brand counteracts  a lot of ignorance, which is equally dangerous.

But none of this really matters to me.

Because what I do every day take place in an airless corner room, inside an institution, on a hill, removed from the world.

I have made the choice to root my social activism in the moment, and there is no need to look far afield. There is no need for mic or lights or camera to be a humanizing force, minute by minute, in an intractable system. 

My daily practice is infused with mindfulness, attention to all kinds of cues, inspired by high standards, and conveyed with love. It is about inwardness, cultivating deep thinking. Not about showmanship and the stage. There is laughter and joy.

I love going to work each morning.

TEDxNYED was a pleasant interlude. Hopefully the conversation about education will continue in the foreground while we daily engage in the work of educating the next generation. The back channel.

So here’s what’s really on my mind. There is a new taxonomy that extends Bloom’s framework of cognition. It’s an upgrade.

It is called the Taxonomy of Significant Learning. Dee Fink is the designer. And I believe this is an idea worth spreading.

I learned about L.Dee Fink from my PLC. Backwards design for a high school teacher necessitates having a long view, a look at successful college and university models, and beyond. Not on my watch will students be “academically adrift.”

What kinds of skills and expertise do students need in order to be successful in higher education, in real and online work spaces, as collaborators, global citizens, and caring human beings?

It was gratifying to read about the University of Virginia Med School’s exhilarating new prescription for teaching and learning. UVA’s Rx for Learning highlights student-centric round table learning in a flattened classroom infused with technology. This is the type of blended learning that colleagues are introducing in innovative primary and secondary school classrooms everywhere.

Fink’s system underscores the human dimension of learning, and focuses on integrated design principles. I plan to use this taxonomy as the foundation for next trimester and the close of a year. I am always fascinated by what students retain.

To think about:

How can I encourage student conversations about their learning styles, about what works and what doesn’t work?

What are the important, big concepts | categories | ideas | skills that I would like students to retain? Why?

What will students be able to do with the content or skills they’ve learned in my classes?

Where is the value? If “knowledge is in the group” (NYSAIS motto), how has this year with me as guide contributed to students’ academic and social-emotional development?  How have they learned to learn in more effective and deeper ways, so that they can connect with other people in the world?

 

Desperately Seeking Re-novation: Assessment

I’ve just spent some 40 hours writing end-of-term narrative assessments. Ugh.

By the time they’re home, the comments will be static, frozen in time, an artifact of questionable utility as an assessment or evaluation. Many of my students will have moved beyond the comments and grades reflected in the “report.”

Summative assessments. Report cards. Narratives. Comments. Whatever the name, it’s time we argue their usefulness in teaching and learning for understanding and competence.

I believe that my classes model a range of thinking dispositions, divergent thinking, convergent thinking. And skills such as pre-reading, active reading, annotation, the writing process, writing for varied audiences, informal and formal academic writing.  Soft skills, such as ways of knowing, listening, reflection, resilience, imagination, a growth mindset, collaboration….  

I’m trained in theories and workshops of Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Lucy Calkins, Nancie Atwell, Heidi Hayes-Jacobs, Jim Burke, John Trimble, Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, David Perkins, Kieran Egan, Howard Gardner. The list is longer.

Here’s what I know from daily practice, not theory.

Teaching and learning for understanding are complex processes. A summative report cannot capture the depth, scope, range of all that goes on in a classroom. Nor can it capture all that goes on in a student’s mind.

Here are the questions about assessment that I consider important. 

What is authentic assessment?  What does that hazy phrase look like in a classroom of rigor and engagement? One size does not fit all for the students who enter class each day.

What does learning look like in my classroom? What are the essential thinking dispositions, habits of mind, and problem-solving skills I hope my students will take away? Do the students know what these are? Have we discussed the ways they learn best? Have I modeled a range of new directions for thinking?

What are the teaching methods and strategies that allow for student progress? What moves a student from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? How do I de-condition students, raise their awareness of the assumptions and beliefs they hold about learning and school…and grades?

What makes an effective learning experience?

Here’s what works best for me and my students.

Formative assessment. Ongoing, consistent, regular, positive, dynamic, timely coaching, and feedback.

Reflective conversations about learning.

A portfolio, with content selected by the student. Students of all ages like to review their work to see how they have grown.

Frequent end-of-class 3-5 minute freewrites on a notecard or email or blog post that respond to this question: What did you learn in class today?

A weekly 10 minute conference, a check-in. How are you doing? What are you thinking about? What seems clear? What is exciting, hazy, confusing, troubling, tedious?

Let’s talk.  What are you working on?  How can I support you?  

Teaching writing. Teaching argument. A process.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say. E.M. Forster

Day 1: the first class of the school year.  I try something new. I ask students to become detectives. They work in small groups with handouts from a wonderful children’s book by Lawrence Treat Crime and Puzzlement. 

There are a number of crime scene line drawings, with titles like “Slip or Trip,” “Junior Prom,” and “Dead Aim.” A body lies on a bathroom floor. There is a shard of glass. A puddle. A footprint. Some of the scenes are hilarious. That first class establishes a collaborative sense of playful investigation and irony. 

Students examine the picture, look for clues, develop a theory, and a logically sequenced possible order of events. They share ideas and have conversations and solve “the crime.” They wrestle with a problem and seek a solution.

An article in the NCTE English Journal “Teaching Argument for Critical Thinking and Writing: An Introduction” by University of Chicago’s George Hillocks describes teaching students the basic elements of argument usingTreat’s picture books.

This exercise engages students in a process of inquiry and gives them a foundation for expository writing. Most students are skilled descriptive writers by 10th grade. But ask them to write an essay, and they freeze.

Beginning with crime scene visuals provides a framework for reading “text,” for finding evidence, and developing a theory. This is a useful schema for teaching expository writing and the conventions of the academic essay.

In tenth grade the critical thinking goals are close reading and analysis. Guiding students to move from reading for information to reading for meaning and to discover the author’s purpose. Reading for ideas, not just for plot and character. Determining  traits and values of major and minor characters. Mining the text for relevant data, for warrants to back up claims, and developing an interpretation. An argument.

Toulmin’s Model of Argument is a great resource for teaching students to write short Two Reasons papers. This format gives useful practice in cranking out a short essay, and it is an efficient model for the SAT.

Some helpful tools for collaborative talking to the text and about the text:

1.Google Docs to track key themes and develop inquiry questions, and to engender lots of lively, engaged, informal conversations that are accessible.

2. Wordle clouds for each character, of  language from the text that reveals traits and values associated with each character.

3. Informal reading journals and blog posts.

4. Forum discussions on the class Moodle.

5. Mindmapping, using Word or Mindmeister (or that old technology — colored pencils and paper) to map and cluster ideas. Students seem to love this. They enjoy the exchange of ideas and seeing the variety of their peers’  mapping styles.

6. The Ken Robinson RSA Animate shows them the flow of generating ideas and lateral thinking.

Then it’s time to go linear. I give them a format  for a Two Reasons paper. I counsel that this is merely a working scaffold upon which to build their argument.

• Intro paragraph ending with a proposition (a thesis). Thesis answers How…? Why…? And so…what…? 
• Paragraph 2 develops a single reason and a line of thinking that supports or explains the proposition/thesis
• Paragraph 3 develops a 2nd reason and line of thinking that supports/explains the proposition/thesis.
•   Paragraph 4 makes deep connections to other texts read this year.

Writing workshops and peer editing take up the next four hour-long classes. Students engage in focused exchanges about writing and thinking: sentence structure, evidence, word choice, sub-ideas. There is a great buzz in the room. They write and revise and check in with me.

Next step: some metacognitive reflection. They shoot me an email about the process. What worked? What were some of the challenges? What are some of the strengths? What are you going to continue to work on?

Final step: Assessment.  I use a grid based on the grading philosophy of  Peter Elbow that “writing comments is a dubious and difficult enterprise.” I have found that rubrics can be too complicated, and that most student writers prefer a grid that makes clear the components or elements of a strong piece of writing.

The grid guides students to become aware of the following:

Insights | Organization of ideas | Development of ideas | Introductory paragraph | Thesis | Paragraph Structure | Textual evidence | Connections | Sentence fluency, grammar, mechanics | Style | Vocabulary and language use | Voice | Concluding paragraph

Instruction in writing is a complex art.  I am always looking for new and fresh ways to teach writing. The organization of language into units of thought is a process infused with paradoxes — hunches and precision, flow and craft, clarity and coherence, energy and control, fluency and patience. For the students who are concrete thinkers, these paradoxes present challenges.

Teaching writing begins with noticing and observation at the level of language, at the level of diction, of a key word.  Students know all about key words, and they enjoy finding them. They also work at the level of a sentence, with style and voice, learning to notice different writing styles. Often they like to diagram sentences. This practice gives makes them aware of the shape and design of a sentence.They review sequencing by revisiting a process they learned in lower school.  How to eat an Oreo. How to make a peanut butter sandwich.

The oddest and most challenging part of teaching expository writing is that as literature teachers we ask students to de-construct a work of fiction by analyzing it in discursive, digressive, non-linear, messy, sprawling, and lively discussions. 

And then we ask them to re-construct their thoughts about a text in a logical and linear form of non-fiction.

Oh the irony. 

Education for thinking. Inquiry learning. Valuing knowing.

I met Deanna Kuhn in 2004.  I was on the founding leadership team of The School at Columbia, helping to shape a middle school culture and an innovative concept-based Cities and Civilizations curriculum, beginning in 5th grade with Varanasi and proceeding through all the great world civilizations to a Future City. The integrated curricular lenses in this unique 1:1 laptop school focused on a blend of project and inquiry-based learning.

A start-up school. Now that’s an exhilarating experience.  The brightest spot: the pre-opening weeks in August when the grade level teams met to design the academic and social-emotional curriculum, a flexible daily schedule, authentic assessments, showcases of student work, technology integration, trips, co-curricular activities — every aspect of a program for urban adolescents.  A time for divergent thinking, collaborative inquiry, heightened awareness, extensive conversations about what makes a meaningful, thoughtful, vibrant learning environment for all kinds of minds.

Deanna Kuhn was in the midst of  completing research on an inquiry and argument curriculum for a book Education for Thinking. She worked with sixth and seventh graders, observing their natural inquisitiveness and teaching them a process for inquiry learning.  Her Education for Thinking Project places the development of thinking skills at the core of education.

She would arrive in classes with a cohort of research assistants, divide the kids into small groups, and begin filming, recording, and taking notes. Of course I was fascinated by both the research process and the specifically designed technology. The kids gathered data and made predictions about earthquakes. They loved the idea of wrestling with a real problem. The room was a buzz of excited discussion.

I’d never officially taken an ed school course.  I had been a Teaching Fellow at Columbia GSAS; no one ever bothered to give any instruction in how to teach.  Instead, a series of hyper-critical professors lectured students in stylistics, semiotics, literary theory, and the systematic study of narrative structures in literary texts from the Middle Ages through the 20th century. Instruction, even in seminars, was of a primitive variety, more like call and response. Research was solitary, incessant, sobering, relieved by weekly lectures in Philosophy Hall, folllowed by cookies, tea, and perfunctory conversation.  We had the gaunt eyes of Chaucer’s Oxford Cleric (“and gladly would he learn, and gladly teach”), but we wanted to see something new.

Resistant to this model, we formed  a study group. A PLN.  An impassioned cohort, we met once a week to read and deconstruct the obscure texts.  At night we’d speak on the phone, that technology of yore.  We were the Educon of the moment, reading and sharing all the new ideas: Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Greimas, Lacan, Kristeva, Eco, Bataille, Said.  

We shifted the paradigm from content to making meaning. We passed around articles hot off the presses of small magazines and journals, then crossed the street to hang out at the West End, parsing their meaning. We envisioned a new world order. At night we went to the parties at The Paris Review.

What I learned then has stayed with me: a method of collaborative inquiry. Group reading, discussion, and sharing interpretations are gratifying and effective ways to process new material and ideas. I learned that deep understanding  is reached with practice and within a community of practitioners. Together we became competent thinkers, honing and shaping new ideas.

We learned to value knowing. We became astute in what Kuhn calls epistemological understanding. “What fosters the development of epistemological understanding? Direct teaching of the higher levels in abstract, encapsulated form is unlikely to be effective. Students must learn what knowing is by engaging in it over time and experiencing for themselves its dimensions. Exactly what kinds of educational and life experience best support this process remains a topic worthy of further research.”

Kuhn is interested in the development of intellectual values. Her education for thinking program targets middle school students. Her research underscores the benefits of beginning inquiry, argument, discussion, and debate with young learners.

Everything I have learned about the art of teaching I have learned from colleagues at workshops and conferences, and now via continuing, ongoing connections through social media, like Twitter and various Nings. A Professional Learning Network.

New name. Same old Margaret Mead.  “Never doubt the power of a small group of thoughtful citizens to change the world.” Small movements effect big changes. That’s what innovation is. Thinking small and beautful, rooting ideas in new soil.

As stewards of the next generation, we value deep intellectual engagement. Providing a broad spectrum of challenges, methods, tools, the space and the place for creative thinking gives all learners opportunities to make fresh connections in linear and non-linear ways.

 Including us.

Un-schooling students. Liminality. Intelligence in the wild.

Thoreau wrote in Walking , “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”  Delivered first as a lecture, then published in Atlantic in 1851, it is an impassioned plea for the pleasures of sauntering, a type of walking meditation that affords reflection, inquiry, and creative thinking.

“Wildness” is my metaphor for learning. For thinking outside the box, off the beaten path, two over-used cliches.

Isn’t Thoreau’s “wildness” more eloquent, and more evocative?

As an English teacher, I use the tools of rhetoric and those of the web to convey my own passion for inquiry, for the sense of wonder and loftiness, the sense of the sublime, that come with a great workout of critical reading and reflection. 

Each time I cross the threshold to Room 210, I do my utmost to ensure that everyone has a good time sauntering —  around and through the layers of a complex, ambiguous text.

I know after a few decades spent within the constricted walls of a classroom that real learning occurs in the liminal space between order and chaos.  At the edges. The margins. A space that is unrestricted, a sacred space where boundaries dissolve, when we stand at the threshold, prepared to move from where we once were to another place, where our awareness of self and others is deepened. 

I spend much of my time in classes guiding students as they learn to take that leap. To take risks with their thinking and learning. To free themselves of what Stanford ‘s Tina Seelig calls “constraint-ridden” thinking because initially they are very busy trying to figure out what the teacher wants.

I want them to be detectives, to find ways to read sub-texts for meaning and purpose.  I want them to make connections. I want them to rise above the text and dig into it by questioning, examining, teasing the meaning out of language. I want them to experience the joy that comes from playing with ideas, from making connections, from exchanging interpretations. I want them to learn to back up their claims with warrants and textual evidence.

I want them to have awakened minds, and the habits of mind to pose big, open-ended questions, medium questions for research, and small, directed ones.

• What kind of a scientist is Victor Frankenstein? 
• What are his traits and values?
• What themes are associated with him?
• How can you tell that this is a Romantic text?
• What are the Gothic elements?
• Why does Shelley focus on the theme of education?
• What does Victor learn? Who are his mentors?
• Where and how does the creature learn ? And you…?
• How is the plot of Frankenstein (1818) as it unfolds similar to that of Oedipus Rex (421 B.C.E.)
• What is the problem with Victor Frankenstein?
• What is the problem with Oedipus Rex?
• Who is the monster? Why?

I hope that by sauntering — by mining a complex literary text for data, examining it, making observations, sharing insights, developing interpretations  — that students arrive at a greater understanding of the issues that literature presents, as a living organic record of interiority, of inner life.

This kind of close reading and analysis is based in linguistics and philosophy, in the study of hermeneutics, and generates big questions. How do we read? How do we communicate? And why? And so what? And what now?

I hope that in reading students come to recognize something of themselves. That they can imagine lives, moral dimensions, ideologies, cultures they would otherwise know nothing about. 

I hope that they learn about self and others, sameness and difference, a world of complexity that is “large…and contains multitudes.” 

For David Perkins, intelligence in the wild involves a complicated and practical process of problem solving.  “The phrase may conjure up images of someone trekking through the jungle, but it actually refers to intelligence as it is used to get along in the world, to handle gritty situations in smart ways. For example, “the wild” might be a classroom or the street or even a used-car lot. It might involve running a corporation or managing a scout troop. Intelligence in the wild includes the ability to recognize problems hidden in messy situations and the motivation and good sense to choose which problems (because there are always too many!) are worth the time and energy it will take to solve them.”

Reading can be wild.

“Let the wild rumpus begin.”

 

Innovation. Leadership Activity. Thinking Dispositions. Rhizomatic Learning.

I’ve been thinking about innovation, and unpacking the meaning of this oft-used word.  

Is it a mindset, an activity, a work ethic? Or is it a thinking disposition? Perkins, Jay and Tishman suggest that a thinking disposition is composed of three elements: abilities, sensitivities, inclinations.

We can recognize that innovation has much to do with the ability, sensitivity, and inclination to tinker. It is a thinking disposition that plays with existing ideas, tweaks them, makes them new.

Innovation is also connected to the capacity for imagination, for creating mental images. This kind of insight or vision is the essence of discovery, and what Proust calls “seeing with new eyes.”

What does innovation look like in a dynamic, organic, living, breathing culture of learning that is a school? Is it top-down, a mandate to innovate? Or bottom-up, beginning with the tech team, who entreat us to try new applications, new ways?

Or is it the “long middle,” a wonderful phrase that gamer-high school English teacher-turned novelist Adam Ross uses in the brilliantly constructed (like a Mobius strip) Mr. Peanut, to describe the middle of a novel. Surely there is a long middle to every school year. 

Perhaps innovation is happening all the time, but goes unnoticed because innovation isn’t a discrete event, it is a way of seeing. And a way of being.

It is an activity, an ability, a sensitivity, an inclination to try something new.

Stanford’s Tina Seelig calls it “an extreme art.” Jonathan Martin captures the essentials of Seelig’s NAIS10 presentation on Innovation as an Extreme Sport.

Innovation: a way of being present, fully engaged, open to sharing.

A space where ideas and activities flow  in conversations that are immediate, spontaneous, continuous, ongoing. Just like a class, which ideally is a community of practitioners. An egalitarian model for creative, innovative, visionary, transformative activity.

Recently my 10th grade lit class finished close reading and analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988). Ben is the monstrous fifth child, oversized, different, prone to violence. The text describes Ben as a “genetic throwback,” a “monster,” a “troll”, a “goblin.” Students, however, saw him as misunderstood, isolated, and unloved. The novel ends as Ben leaves home to join his friends on the streets as a gang member.

I divided students into teams to probe the following questions.

How do we reclaim the “monstrous’? Can education do this?

PROBLEM: A 19th century novel would kill Ben off. A 20^th century novel sends him into the world, where he becomes a social problem. Perhaps a group of monks or a charity or a social service organization will pick him up; most likely he will end up on the streets, or in prison. But it’s the 21st century, and you are idealistic about education reform. About designing new schools and programs. Unlike the Lovatt family, you recognize that Ben is your responsibility.  

TASK:  Develop a program to support Ben and educate him to be a contributing member of society. Discuss, design, and create a program and curriculum for Ben.  What will you teach him? What does he need to learn and know?

Students had two weeks to work on the project and organize a presentation. There were a number of mini-lessons. On backwards design — to formulate goals for Ben. On action research — to become informed about existing programs. On effective presentation skills — to make a compelling case for Ben’s humanity, including Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen and Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 PowerPoint rules. On ways boys learn — Penn State’s Dr. Alli Carr-Chellman’s TedxTalk on Gaming to Re-engage Boys in Learning.  

The most interesting part for me was observing the students self-organize, delegate tasks, make lists, develop systems, engage in action research. They were discovering ways to solve what social scientists call a wicked problem. 

They were engaged in leadership activity.

John Diamond  of Harvard’s Grad School of Education uses the metaphor of a plane’s cockpit to convey that leadership, instead of a fixed position, involves the fluid activities of many people.The distributed leadership perspective is a conceptual frame, an integrated view of an activity system that is as collaborative as a cockpit, where a “constellation” of actions, behaviors, dispositions, situations, and contexts contribute to keep the plane on its trajectory. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to apply this metaphor, this model, everywhere in our schools?

It should be easy. Within a school, there are so many activity systems. Every class, club, team, meeting, conference, is a community of practice.  The NYSAIS motto underscores that “Knowledge is in the group.” Learning is a collective activity.

We need to shift the paradigm from individualized learning to collaborative networking. Students relish being given opportunities for problem-solving, divergent thinking, negotiating differences. This is the rhizomatic process of learning, a term coined to reflect a process of knowledge and knowing that is evolving and flexible, and exemplified in wikis.

This is how to un-school school.

By opening doors, making them portals, we can shift the concept of leadership from that old paradigm of the single charismatic person to the group. From that one person in the seat (the student, the teacher, the division head, the principal, the supervisor, the head of school)  —  to all of us, to every member of the community.

Walk-throughs for everyone. Check-ins. Informal conversations.  Innovation just in time, anywhere, everywhere. This is real professional development. It’s called everyday learning and sharing.

Because a school is a collective enterprise, a community of practice. Every day. Day by day.

And yes, knowledge is in the group.