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?

Where’s the flow?

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Recently I’ve been thinking about how I can better meet the individual needs of my students.  I teach music to about 600, k-5 students.  I would imagine that designing individual work for 30 students would be difficult, but designing it for 600 I’ve found exceedingly difficult.  In the past I’ve thought about what the majority of the class can do, how I can help the struggling students, and how I can push the more advanced students.  Essentially coming up with three slightly tweaked lessons for every class I taught.  It was exhausting and I was not meeting the needs of every student in my classroom.

Recently I have been reading a book called Boy Writers by Ralph Fletcher.  I’m not a writing teacher but I love reading and learning about the readers/writers workshop model.  He does a great job at honestly discussing the difficulties of teaching this specific subset of writing students and lays out helpful ways to meet them where they are, instead of trying to force them into a mold they do not fit.  Helping students construct their knowledge through the process of creation is a passion of mine.  In Boy Writers Ralph also talks briefly about flow. I’ve read about flow before and have felt it happen sporadically in my classroom.  Flow according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is when the difficulty of a task meets a person’s ability to complete it.  The result is extremely high engagement.  It is because of the engagement learning happens fast, and it happens deep.  The kids get it.  This graph is from Ralph’s Book, p. 31

photo

The diagram does a fantastic job at showing what happens when the task is too difficult, or too easy.  I’ve seen both happen in my classroom during the same project.  2/3 of my class might be in flow 1/6th might be drowning and the last 1/6th is bored.

That has been my problem up to this point.  I was meeting the needs of most of my students and tweaking it for the rest of them.  The tweaking seemed inauthentic to them.  “Why do I have to do more?” one might say or even worse the kids who need to concentrate on a smaller piece of the broad concept may feel like they’re behind, like they’ll never get to the full understanding that they are supposed to have.  Something I’ve wrestled with for a few years now.

I started to think more deeply at a professional development session led by Ron Ritchhart, co-author of Making Thinking Visible.  He said that we need to create projects that have a low threshold and a high ceiling.  In other words projects that are easy enough for all of your kids to do, but don’t put limits on them.

No more, “Your diorama must have three dinosaurs and three plants that lived in the Triassic period”.  With those directions you won’t have a single student who takes what you’re learning about food chains and maps out how the food chain worked (or may have worked) in the Triassic period.  They’re going to have three dinosaurs and three plants and it’s probably going to look bad because they were bored.  It was not meeting their needs as learners.  They already understood that things that no longer exist today existed together back then.  Students need more autonomy over their learning.  They need to understand that they are the arbiters of their own knowledge.  “What did the world look like in the Triassic period?” would be a much more open ended prompt.  Could a student design a diorama with three dinosaurs and three plants? Yes.  Could they make a complete food chain? Yes.  Could they make a model in Minecraft? Yes.  They can design their own learning process with our help.  They can create their own zone of flow.

My students have always had tons of autonomy in my classroom.  They made decisions about what music we learned.  They help with the day to day processes of class.  We genuinely work together.  Before this year I had never tried giving them autonomy over the design of the learning.

Now instead of designing a project for the entire class that meets the needs of most, at the end of a unit, we have a conversation.  How can you show your understanding of what we just learned?  Ok, go!  Every student designs a plan that shows their understanding of the concept.  Sometimes they choose to write a song as a class.  Sometimes they choose to work individually with acoustic instruments.  Sometimes they work in small groups on iPads.  The end result is they own the learning space.  They care about what happens in my room.  They are in flow.

When possessing a growth mindset turns into a handicap

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I love the students in my class.  I also understand that I have a relatively narrow perspective of the education system.  My k-12 education came from a suburban district with high achievement, I went to college within 10 miles of my hometown, and I now teach in a district within 10 miles of my hometown and college.  I feel comfortable with the knowledge I possess and I believe that I’m working hard at becoming an excellent educator – however I also realize that with my narrow experience I must be missing something.  My solution?  Reading, twitter, and anything else I can get my hands on to increase my student’s growth and love for school.  Everything that fits within my schema gets incorporated into my daily teaching.

I had a particularly powerful experience at MACUL when Kevin Honeycutt was talking about creating students who are producers rather than consumers.  To me this means that as a teacher I need to be a producer and role model for my students.  As a musician I immediately went back to composing my own songs (like students do in my classes) and sharing them with my students.  I was really proud until I realized this wasn’t really me creating in my field.  My field is education.  I’m a consumer.  My dilemma comes from my insatiable appetite for new information – transformative information.  It seems like almost every book I read, video I watch, or blog I follow I pick things up that I think “how did I live without this” or more importantly “how was I teaching without this”.  How can I produce when I know next month I’m going to read something that is going to make my next iteration of thinking so much better than my current thinking?

I’m creating this blog to begin my journey into becoming a producer.  I’ve been a consumer and I want to begin to add to the conversation in a meaningful way.  I need to in order to become the role model my students deserve.