Statement of Purpose

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Sam: The official title of this professional development session was “The Journalism-Type Classroom,” an awkward last-minute phrase I came up with when I heard the school was still looking for teacher-led PD sessions.

The morning before the first session, I retitled it “The Journalism-Inspired Classroom.” I teach math, not journalism, but I figured journalism, at least at Curtis, had the more established “brand” when it came to decentralized, tech-driven classroom management.

I wrote up a brief essay, Why journalism as a classroom model?, to explain the choice of title and my own professional link to journalism. During the first meeting, Cadence, the co-facilitator who does teach journalism, lamented that I switched away from “The Post-Modern Classroom,” a title I’d used when suggesting our initial collaboration.

Eventually, we gravitated to “The Chaotic Classroom,” sort of a joking reference to a comment I made after doing a prep period in Cadence’s room while one of her freshman groups was working on a podcast project.

“So what do you think?” asked Cadence afterward.

“A little chaotic,” I said. “At least to a math teacher’s eyes.”

“Good chaos, though,” added Cadence.

This became the theme of our first meeting: How does a teacher trying to take advantage of all the new technology available in the classroom distinguish between the “good chaos” -- i.e. 30+ students working at different speeds and in different styles but generally towards a common objective -- and “bad chaos” -- 30+ students interpreting the lack of an immediate grade and a dominating “teacher voice” as a sudden signal to go full on apeshit? 

Having encountered the latter outcome more than a few times in our teaching careers, all teachers sitting in on the first meeting agreed that it was this fear of “bad chaos” that was stifling our attempt to court “good chaos.”

"Learning to let go is a big part of it," said Cadence.

Admittedly, not every teacher is in a career stage or work situation where courting chaos, even on the smallest of scales is the best idea. Some might even argue that the typical public school classroom needs *less* chaos, not more.

I think almost all teachers, however, will acknowledge that the forces of time and technology are working against those trying to maintain tight control of the classroom environment. I also think that many would acknowledge that chaos has its beneficial uses, especially in situations where creativity of thought is the ultimate end goal. Indeed, in mathematics, we have an entire field of study, “chaos theory,” which puts forward the notion that just as predictable patterns can lead to unpredictable outcomes, so too can unpredictable patterns lead to predictable outcomes.

So, it was in this spirit of “chaos” that we decided to investigate our own best practices as veteran teachers and look for ways to make the “chaotic classroom” model a little more “viral” within the Curtis H.S. instructional culture.

A Student Initiated Classroom

Just thought you might find this interesting: The Classroom in the Cloud proposal:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud?language=en

Experiment results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtUl2CP8ak

The Evaluation Conundrum

THE CHALLENGE OF "LETTING GO." THE EVALUATION CONUNDRUM.

In our April 1 session, we discussed the challenge of adopting a student-led instructional model. All three teachers attending the PD session are in the business/mathematics department and have the same administrator conducting our observations. Each teacher has experience breaking a classroom into small groups, with each group working at a different pace and possibly pursuing different goals. One common concern in listening to our colleagues who teach the journalism classes, however, is that many of the things that look promising to a journalism teacher look "chaotic" to first time visitor from the math department, especially a math department administrator charged with giving that a teacher a "lesson" grade.
The following is a rough transcript of what we talked about:

Deb: My evaluations have called for an exit ticket or some form of assessment to make sure every student is or was on task during the observed class time. What Cadence is talking about, having different students working at different phases of the project, doesn’t seem to fit with this in my mind. Also, the observer wants to see continuity. When he walks around the classroom, he expects to see everybody doing the same task. Pretty much.

Sam: As Cadence noted last week, the traditional idea that an effective teacher must keep every last kid in the classroom engaged and on task doesn’t necessarily sync up with what the Danielson rubric looks for in “highly effective” practice. This came up in her post-evaluation: The observers admitted that the lesson didn't look like what they were used to giving a high score to, but when they went down the rubric checklist, they almost had no choice but to score it highly effective. 

The Danielson "highly effective" criteria put a heavy, heavy stress on student initiative. Part of the price of getting students to show more initiative is letting unmotivated students flail or even blow off the assignment altogether. To quote Cadence, “The bottom line is there’s a percentage of kids who are going to be disengaged whatever you do,” so the teacher's main job is to encourage the students who do show initiative in the expectation that the freedom to do creative, more meaningful work will eventually serve as a recruiting tool for unmotivated students. 
This is where the phrase "letting go" becomes more than just a joke-y catch phrase.

What I hear in my evaluations is that many students appear disengaged. I can keep them on task, for the most part, but I’m like a sergeant barking out instructions all the time, trying to maintain a tight formation. This is wearing on the students, and it’s wearing on me. Groupwork has been successful at times, but the technology component has been lacking. I see a chance to do so much of the math instruction through Desmos, where a student is more free to experiment and can share the work to me via a link as a formative assessment and proof of accountability. Unfortunately, Desmos is a little too cumbersome on the smartphones. I see the opportunity, however, to do more interesting small-team projects with a handful of Chromebooks.

Christine: I’m a new teacher, so every lesson plan is an experiment, pretty much. My classes are project-oriented. Their project is using the technology. To increase ownership, I might solicit students on the next topic of the project. Room 331 is designed to facilitate clusters. I’m going to make the top-performing student the “general” and ask them to create document that all five team-members can work on. The general is responsible for the other four people at the table. For right now, I’m just getting awesome ideas.