Monthly Archives: March 2014

Thank you #ACMI2

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This morning I went to an (almost) EdCamp style conference for administrators in Birmingham, MI. It was a fantastic experience. I met and caught up with many people I look up to and who push my thinking through my PLN on twitter. My biggest takeaway from every session was the same. Figure out who you are as a leader and lead from that place. Be honest about who you are to yourself and others and then reflect and grow from that place.

As I sat around numerous tables that I was lucky enough to be part of what I picked up on was everyone’s willingness to admit mistakes and grow together as learners. It’s hard to take risks like that in front of others but it was refreshing to see and hear people that I look up to genuinely reflecting about their practices. It made me feel like the work I’m doing is genuinely effecting the students I see day-to-day and will one day help the staff I will work with.

Favorite quote of the day goes to @HickeyGroup – Your title does not define how much power you have, it just defines how many people you serve.

Thanks to everyone at AdCampMI2 for continuing to push my thinking and help me become a better educator and leader.

Student Autonomy in the Classroom

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I am rereading Daniel Pink’s Drive for a book club at one of my schools.  The first time it was a complete revelation to me.  It helped me step aside in my classroom and help my students take the reins of their own learning.  This time it is allowing me to subtly rethink the things I’m doing.

We all know that students who exhibit intrinsically motivated behavior (pink calls this type i) have an easier time mastering things than students who exhibit extrinsically motivated behavior (type x).  Type I behavior leads to mastery where type x behavior leads to compliance.  What is difficult is helping students who normally exhibit type x behavior into type I learners.  I think that this transition happens when you give students as much autonomy as possible.  There will be setbacks for all students and, well honestly I think that’s a good thing if we deal with it in the right way.  We need to teach standards but we also need to grow healthy adults.

Pink says that there are four major things we can have autonomy over; time, technique, team, and task.  Some of these are very easy to give to our students, others are not.  Here is a look at them individually.

Time:

Schools are obviously not work environments where students can come and go as they please.  We can’t be here until 9 at night for kids who would rather come in at 1 in the afternoon.  I get that.

Much of the life in my room is spent in projects.  Those projects have defined start and end days, but much of the space in between lives in a world of flex.  For example, right now my fourth graders are writing a piece of music that uses B, A, G, and E on the recorder, creating a background track in GarageBand to play along with, answering some questions about the process, and then we’re presenting.  The way we talked about timeline was “You have two weeks and then we’re going to perform.  If I were you I’d spend a week on my recorder part, half a week on the GarageBand track, and half a week practicing the two together.”  Some took my advice; some flipped it and started with the GarageBand track; some spent nearly all of their time in GarageBand and had to cram in the recorder at the last 25 minutes or so.   After our performance week next week we will look at how we did (performances will be recorded) and reflect on the process.  Every group has a piece that is pretty awesome to share but this isn’t the first time they had autonomy over their time.  It takes a few times of honest reflection for them to make meaningful change in the way they spend their time.  It’s difficult but necessary.

Technique:

I think that schools are pretty good at this piece of the puzzle.  We are good at giving kids lots of different techniques and then letting them figure out what works best for them.  In my room I can be a little more flexible than most others.  Technique in my room usually evolves through the process of music making.  I may demonstrate how to play something but who’s watching exactly how I’m holding my hands? (Even when I draw attention to the way I’m holding something.)  When a student has a problem we talk about a different way to hold a drumstick, or a different way of holding your hands on the piano.  They need to see why it is necessary before the how matters enough to pay attention to.

Task:

This is where it gets really hard.  We’re starting to do a better job with this through the workshop model.  Students genuinely do have a huge influence over their task in those models.  There is no autonomy over task when worksheets are involved…

In my room at the end of a set of experiences that build understanding of a topic I used to create a project that allowed students to show their understanding of what we learned.  When I first get a set of students or sporadically when they’re ready for something new, I do design the project in a way they haven’t seen before.  Usually though I say, “Alright what have we learned over the last few weeks?  Your job is to create a piece of music to show your understanding of (all the things they just said).” I go around and discuss with all the students what they’ve come up with and push them as needed, but usually they’re spot on.  They know how to demonstrate what they’ve learned.

Team:

This one is easy for us but hard for the kids.  Talk about growing pains.  When kids first start choosing groups in my room, it’s not pretty.  There is a whole lot of “My group isn’t sharing well”, or “no one is listening to me”.  My answer is (almost) always “You’re really going to have to think about the group you choose next week.” I monitor closely for kids who are being left out and fix it before it becomes a problem.  Gradually students stop choosing groups based on their cliques and begin choosing “music groups”.  It takes a while and some students struggle longer than others.  I think it’s an important lesson to learn.  Worth the time that the missteps at the beginning take because the end process is fantastic.

In other words we have a ton of things that we control because it’s easier for us when we control it.  It’s messy when kids manage their lives at first.  Start small and grow.  It doesn’t stay messy for long.  It leads to type I behavior and to mastery instead of creating more type x behavior that the 21st century does not need.

What 3:1 has done my room

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First, I have to again thank Deborah Blair and Oakland University Music Theatre and Dance department for letting us borrow ten of their iPads for the year. They have provided my students with many experiences that they would not have been able to have otherwise.

 

I’m a tech guy.  I like to use tech in my personal and professional life, but I’m constantly reexamining the tech I’m using to make sure it’s really making my life and student outcomes better than analog alternatives. I expected to walk away from a year with ten iPads thinking “That was cool, but do we really need them?”  I was wrong… My students need them.  Our schools need them.

It’s their world; we’re just living in it

 I recently read that about 70% of the jobs that we are setting our kids up for are jobs that take creativity to do; jobs that do not have a prescribed process of steps, which end in the same outcome each time.  To me that gives me an obvious mandate as an educator.  Create learning experiences that take creativity to complete.  Assignments that are not prescribed steps, which end in the same outcome each time.  I’m lucky enough to work in two buildings that belong to a district that understands what I do in my classroom.  My students are lucky enough to have instruments to play.  They have a room big enough to work in.  We’re allowed to be LOUD.  My students have been composing music and learning this way for my entire career, until now there has been a huge but.  “My students have been composing and learning this way my entire career, BUT not the music that they were hearing in their head.”  My students don’t go home and listen to music composed on Orff xylophones.  They don’t go home and listen to music on a piano.  They go home and listen to pop music.  Music with synthesizers, and drum kits, and bass!  To purchase all of these things for our classroom would cost tens of thousands of dollars, or we can emulate most of them in the iPad for $5 through GarageBand. They can make music that sounds very similar to what they hear in their head while being helped along by instruments that do a little bit of the work for them.

Through these projects I have been able to set insanely high goals for my students. The examples I show them look and sound professional. In fact, I have had some of the music I created in GarageBand featured in commercials (for very small companies).  I say with no reservations, on a weekly basis my students come up with things that are WAY cooler than anything I’ve come up with.

With these high goals comes struggle.  The standard in my room is revision.  I heard a group walk over to another group and say “Our piece isn’t working, can you listen?”  Instead of saying “This is an epic fail” which is what I used to hear, they know that this failure is only their first step to success. Editing music recorded digitally is like editing an essay written in pencil.  You can erase just a piece of it.  Before this, everything we recorded was in pen.  One little mistake meant a crumpled composition in the garbage, or an ugly little scribble on the paper. I wish I understood grit the way my third graders do when I was in college. When I struggled with things my setbacks were huge and they didn’t need to be.

Before the iPads I was always stressed out about differentiating projects to meet the needs of every student.  I was worried about finding projects that all of my students could learn from but didn’t set limits that were easily attained for some. Now every student in my room tailors the project to fit their needs as learners.  They may need more or less support than the group next to them, but they know where to find the support they need in the iPad.  The less they let the iPad do the more they have control over their music so they are always striving to take the next step.  Sometimes they choose to use the iPad, and sometimes it doesn’t fit their needs so they use acoustic instruments.  They have learned that technology is a tool and you need to choose the right tool for the job.  I’d say that students choose to use iPads a little better than half of the time.  They understand that it’s not always the best tool for what they need and it’s not a “magic box” that does all the work for you.

We often use the desktop version of GarageBand as well.  This would be the equivalent of twenty-something students crowded around a board writing an essay together. It’s a great way to model how to do something.  Before the iPads that was often our last step.  Now students break in to groups and have much more autonomy over the things they create. In my dream world every student would have their own device but 1:1 is a dream for us right now.  3:1 works pretty well.

Thanks again to Deborah Blair for teaching me how important having this technology in the classroom every day is.  When iPads are in a cart they never lose the “cool new toy” feeling.  When that goes away and students learn that technology is a tool for the learning, that’s when the magic happens. It’s about time we catch up to the world around us.  After all it’s our student’s world; we’re just living in it.

What’s the other story?

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Yes, standards are important. We need to be teaching kids the knowledge that they need to be successful in life. They need to understand how and why things work. That’s important.

As I reflect on who I am as a professional and who I was as a student at no point do I think, “Learning how to find a derivative in calculus was important.” I do however often think that learning calculus taught me how to think step by step in small chunks to achieve big things. In my professional career it is not how well I memorized the standards that makes me successful, it’s all the other stuff I learned while building my understanding of the standards.

Recently I asked students to do a chalk talk about “What skills do composers need to write good music?” I was looking for answers like “an understanding of form”, “Harmony” etc. Here’s what they thought:

– Be humble
– Understand how to plan
– Have inspiration
– Reflect on their work
– Edit
– Persevere
– Revise
– Think about what other people want
– Be social
– Be passionate
– Be a good writer
– Be a good poet
– Have confidence
– Tech skills
– Research
– Teamwork
– Patience
– Humor
– Trial and error
– Use their resources

Oh, yeah…. And they need to have a good singing voice or play instruments

As the chalk talk was unfolding I was thinking about how these far better answers than what I was expecting. They’re right. Having a good singing voice and playing instruments does not make a good composer. What makes a good composer is their ability to grow as a composer. To not give up the first time they get a bad review. You can learn anything if you keep working at it for long enough.

I think that we need to be must more conscious about how we teach kids the standards. We need to help our students grow as thinkers and learners. Teach them all of these important life skills through the standards in whichever subject we teach. Help them learn that failure is the first step to success. Life is not a constant string of “the next, little bit harder thing that you can be perfect at.” Making school that for our students is doing them a disservice. Every once in a while, something really hard takes me a while to fix. We need to teach our students how to break down these huge tasks for themselves and show them the pride they feel when they’ve accomplished it, on their own.

As I was re-reading Making Thinking Visible, the authors say that one way to hear students thinking about deeper layers of a text is to ask “What is the other story?” I think our classrooms have another story. Yes, we’re teaching the standards but what is the other story?