I just read an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about education and technology. I often don’t find the mainstream press getting the story straight when they write about efforts to shift our schools to Learning 2.0 techniques and the value of using technology. Take a look at the following paragraph from the article to entice you to read the full article.

Ms. Herdman envisions such a transformation in North Kansas City. “It’s no longer going to be ‘Turn to page 10 and look at this,’ ” she says. “It’s more collaborative work, the learning style is inquiry-based, and the teacher is guiding, facilitating learning rather than lecturing. It’s about teaching the curriculum using technology as your vehicle.” (WSJ July 22, 2009)

Ms. Galland’s Advanced Placement Language and Composition class read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, analyzing how a moneylender named Shylock demands repayment from a debtor named Antonio. Shylock asks that Antonio repay him his 3000 ducats with a “pound of flesh” as promised in the verbal contract they agreed on.

The AP students held a mock trial in class before George Galland, who is an attorney in Chicago. Mr. Galland played the role of judge over Skype. The plaintiffs used legal opinions, evidence from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and other web sites and articles documenting the climate and laws in Elizabethan England to present and defend their cases. Mr. Galland decided in favor of the defendant, but was very impressed with the preparation, presentations, textual citation and courtroom performances of all the AP students.

Acknowledgment: Hilary Galland helped author this post.

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to follow through in making the value even more a part of our culture at HIS.

• How do you build IM when students are not passionate about the subject?
• What does it really feel like to KNOW something?
• How do we build connections to expand lateral thinking?
• How do we enrich students’ lives to give them more interests to get excited about? (Field trips real & virtual, telecollaboration, reading content in classes, current events, blogging)
• Where are most of our students on the “dependent” to “independent” learning continuum?
• How to move them along the continuum?
• How many students are motivated by learning knowledge as opposed to ideas/skills?
• How to develop risk taking?
• Is project-based instruction the only (main) way to develop IM?
• How to develop the skills to be learners today and in future?
• How do 1:1 computers help or hinder IM?

Margaret’s comment:

Thanks for the podcast on this important topic.

I’ve been thinking about what nurtures a passion for learning and I agree that creating a culture for exploration and expression is key in the lively elementary school years, as the podcasters expressed. Furthermore, being involved in curriculum writing is where the rubber hits the road and where tech use will become part of the program students engage in to show their learning. It helps to build technology use into the common assessments used at ends of units. It helps when the integrators volunteer to shoulder the load of co-writing the actual documents for instructing and assessing those projects (rubrics). That shifts schools.

I have a couple ideas that tap into children’s natural EXPRESSIVENESS and social nature to fuel passion:

-Building CHOICE into student assignments;
-providing instruction to nurture skills for expressing themselves in a variety of (high tech and –don’t forget–low tech) ways;
- connecting students with other students on their wave length and with their unique interests so they can go farther and deeper instead of just skimming the surface of someone else’s bag (Dungeons and Dragons anyone?);
-helping them to identify their learning style and the technologies that honor learning styles and that showcase their special talents;
- creating a culture that encourages asking questions and taking responsible risks;
- training children on asking relevant, meaningful, open-ended, higher level questions… and giving them the subject-specific vocabulary to analyze concepts in depth “like professionals”;
- connecting students to mentors;
- keeping expectations high (and safety nets strong and nurturing);
- letting students formulate their own questions for research or literature discussion (rather than find the answers to the teacher’s questions);
- helping kids and teachers tolerate “ambiguity” when a clear black and white answer may not exist (success is “an enjoyable, stimulating and question-generating exploration” rather than “getting the answer right and the A”) This can be a cultural hurdle in certain parts of the world…;
- rewarding with the good grade the demonstration of “HABITS OF MIND” (see Art Costa) instead of “correct answers”;
- training students to provide constructive, specific, meaningful and skillfully expressed feedback.

Students need to know there is a “real” audience for their efforts, and so many technologies and the Internet provide them such when traditional showcasing is so limited. (It’s hard for a child to get excited when the paper is only going to be read by the teacher.)

When I worked as a coordinator of programming for gifted and talented students at Hong Kong International School, a great deal of my time was spent setting up “platforms” for students to share their work with authentic audiences (web pages, podcasts, videos, literary magazine, etc.) It was spent making sure strong students had enough complexity, challenge, and choice in the assignments given them, and a peer group that would connect on the same level or theme as them where they could enjoy the sense of “flow” that comes from being on the outer, exciting edge of what they know and can do.

It’s always great to hear what other educators are doing, so thanks for a podcast that connects us to one another on this work that we all care so much about.

One of the goals of the Shift Our Schools: SOS podcast is to highlight and celebrate those “shifted” teachers using learning 2.0 thinking to adapt their instruction and assessments to meet the learning needs of their students. I will be sharing a great many of these stories about the secondary teachers of Hsinchu International School (HIS) in the coming weeks and will offer a few tidbits of creative teaching in this post. My previous school, the Upper Primary of Hong Kong International School (HKIS), also has some shifted types coming up with very creative ways to use technology and information literacy skills in their classrooms.

Sheryl Gruber and Patrick Truchon of HIS use the Geometry Sketchpad software as the mechanism for students to ask questions and use problem-solving skills as they journey to discover math concepts through their self-guided work. The students in Sheryl and Patrick’s classes received differentiated instruction by the groups they work in. They move through the discovery process at a comfortable speed that fits their skill level and understanding. The teams work together to use Geometry Sketchpad to design and create products which demonstrate their understanding of the concepts shared by the teacher. The teachers work on the sidelines to step in and ask guiding questions and to help students in their problem-solving efforts. As the students progress through their math courses, they add their completed projects to their electronic portfolios for assessment.

For more information on this discovery approach to mathematics education, check out the information on Brent Loken’s Web site. Brent and Sheryl shared their instructional methods at the recent NCTM national conference. To see examples of student exhibition work, visit the HIS media Web site.

Thomas Perkins like all of the HIS teachers follows the school’s instructional strategy of working with students to design “learning expeditions”. These student-design efforts are drawn from the essential questions of the curriculum units. Students in Thomas’ class recently completed a poetry unit where the used visual literacy and research skills to find images on the Web that connected to the poetry they were writing. Thomas’ students then presented their images with music and their reading of their work in short videos presented in “Exhibition” time during the twice weekly all school morning gatherings. As a school focused on project-based learning, it is routine at HIS for portions of these sharing times to be used for students presenting their learning to the community.  Grant Ruskovich, the school principal, leads the school’s learning 2.0 efforts through his classroom teaching and directing efforts of whole school activities like the school musical. A foundation belief for the school is to build and support community. To support this outcome, Wednesday afternoons are designated as an activity period for all students and faculty to pursue interests outside of classroom academics.

The teachers of the Upper Primary school of HKIS follow a more traditional approach to student learning with several teachers working within their classrooms to expand upon the technology and information literacy skills that are integrated into the social studies, science and language arts curriculum units. Using Audacity to create podcasts for end-of-unit assessments led Ben Hart, a grade 3-4 teacher, to have his students start recording their writing conferences. Ben now prompts his students to record their thoughts on how they are improving their use of the writing process, what they are working on as writers and what next steps they plan to take. Ben shares “it is quicker than their responding through writing” while providing him instant feedback as he listens to the sound files from the writing conferences.

Many of Hart’s students use PhotoStory for common assessments using images and voiceovers to share their learning. Viewers are wowed by the students’ videos but teachers appreciate the underlying language arts and information literacy skills that go into the research and writing of the scripts for the voiceovers. Ben is now creating a PhotoStory video to introduce the upcoming “Human Body” unit. He is drawing his own digital images and diagrams as well as using images from the Web to grab his students’ interest and introduce key themes for the unit.

David Navis, a 5th grade teacher, has expanded upon how Inspiration mind maps are integrated into the social studies and science units. Students are provided a mind map template with the essential questions for the various units. They start the units with a pre-assessment, responding to the essential questions by adding new symbols with their ideas to their diagrams.  As the school emphasizes “inquiry” (Jamie McKenzie has visited HKIS), the students also add any questions that come to mind in the “parking lot” section of the mind maps. As the units progress, students continue their reflection to further develop their responses to the questions. Navis intentionalizes the use of this process for deeper student reflection and learning by having them use set colors for their new symbols at each stage of reflection (e.g., blue symbols for start of the unit, grey for the middle, green for end of the unit). David reports “Once the diagram is complete, I switch to outline form on the class projector using an example from one of my students with his/her permission. It becomes very evident how their thinking and knowledge has expanded. The next stop is to have them write an essay from the outline.”

With all of the students doing research for a Civil War Unit common assessment project, Gene Cheh, a 5th grade teacher, did his own exploration and multimedia creation expanding upon the initial information literacy research skills integrated into the unit. Gene used Flash to construct a slideshow of primary source posters for the students to interpret using visual and information literacy skills.  Gene used clickable “hot spots” on the poster images that provided probing questions for his students’reflection.

Many other shifted instructional strategies can be found at the best practices section of the HKIS Teacher Toolkit.