More on innovative practices outside of New York City: Just came across this report on the Fund for Teachers website.



Fund for Teachers is an agency which, among many things, provides $5,000 travel grants to teachers looking do professionally enriching research. Many of the grant proposals are total boondoggles -- visiting the islands (and beaches and cafés) of Greece to get of better sense of the locations depicted in the Odyssey, say. As I was told in a recent information session, the Fund believes that anything that rejuvenates and inspires a teacher's classroom practice is justifiable just so as long as teacher can supply a good story and the receipts to account for the monies spent.

This proposal, however, appears to come from a teacher in a similar predicament as the ones writing for the CCC Blog. Eager get away from mere mathematical test prep curriculum to one focusing cognitively demanding tasks, the teacher, from the Bushwick School of Social Justice, secured the travel funds to visit various conferences dedicated to novel teaching methods and several west coast community college districts purporting to be on the cutting edge of instructional innovation where mathematics is concerned.

As the teacher notes in the after-action report, however, the community college world has its own grant-biased language problem. What started out as an effort to observe "innovative instructional practices" at work to turned into a due diligence exercise in B.S.-detection.

"I went into this journey expecting to be wowed by innovative mathematics teaching practices happening in different community college settings. Instead, I was stunned by the realities of what is not happening," writes the report's author. "A math class at North Seattle Community College purportedly addressed students’ anxieties about math in addition to working on skills. But, when I sat in on that class and talked to the professors who taught it, I saw nothing but traditional, rote teaching. Yet, in Portland, where they were not claiming to do anything that radical, I encountered a network of educators truly empowering their students and promoting authentic growth."

As the report goes on to state, the teacher, who describes herself as "ignorant and idealistic" at the time of the proposal's writing, hasn't lost her initial idealism. What has happened, however, is that she has come way with a more realistic awareness of how difficult it is to seek change in system which in which the easiest thing to do is do things the way they've always been done and simply slap a new name on the effort.

"I leave this fellowship committed to prioritizing the types and frequency of the questions I use, the worthiness of the tasks I ask students to tackle, and a curriculum rich with real world thinking," she writes.

One of the union reps at our school just shared via is Facebook feed this story about an Oklahoma high school switching over to a "personalized education" format.

Basically, the incoming freshman class at Chickasha H.S. will monitor their own progress in school. They still have to meet the state-mandated 6 hour, 30 minute daily attendance requirement is fair game but once inside the building, it appears, the choice of topics and study strategy is up to them. No report cards, just monthly updates. The primary role of the teacher is not so much to teach lessons as to act as a concierge/tutor/research librarian -- helping the kid move through assignments and assessments in the shortest amount of time possible. The building will be kept open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. to account for variability in student (and teacher) schedules.

The actual details are, I'm sure, a little more restrictive than I'm making it out to be. This is, after all, a taxpayer funded institution with a boatload of rules and regulations limiting just how much "freedom" this personalized educational model can accommodate. At the same time, however, you get the sense that the brains behind this shift are doing the same sort of hard thinking that a lot of us teachers are doing when we look at classroom management practices designed to meet the needs of a 1950s or 1960s-era economy? In other words, in an era of declining technology costs and near ubiquitous Internet connectivity, shouldn't students be better served learning how to control their educational identify? Shouldn't they have the freedom (within strict guidelines) of what to study, how to study it and how to communicate their level of understanding to the adult world?

A co-teacher and I are clawing our way to the semblance of this type of model in a team taught Geometry class. The plan (at least on my end) is to post the list of Common Core Geometry standards, linking a lesson, worksheet and set of challenge problems to each, and then have students check off the box and move on to the next item once they feel they've attained mastery.

From the perspective of teacher working inside a system that doesn't offer a personalized anything, the primary challenge is the mind shift. Basically, you're asking a student who has been trained to sit quietly, take notes and follow the teacher's model in 6 other classes to self-direct in your class. More than a few students are happy to sit and wait 10, 20, 30 minutes even until being told what to do.

From the perspective of a student unexpectedlyencountering such a system, there is reason to be hesitant. For one thing, the teacher is being paid to teach and, until you walked into this particular room, teaching involved standing up in front of the class, putting things on a chalkboard or SmartBoard and directing activity. Secondly, there's the challenge of not knowing where to start, how to self-monitor or at what point to say, OK, I get this.

Finally, there is also the plain fact that, when it comes to math, many roads lead to Rome. Many teachers in my school are quite effective teaching in the traditional rows and columns classroom format, especially when it comes to preparing students for the New York State Regents exams, and one thing I've lamented is that, the more personalized the tasks become, the less group training you can provide on how to take decent notes, how to use the calculator as a reasoning tool -- all the "in between" instruction that aids math class longevity as much as content mastery.

This is a conundrum I've been pondering heavily over the last month and one I hope to post about in the spring.

Creating a Warm and Intellectually Challenging Classroom

A great article for the summer written by Suzy Boss, an education reporter I've been following of late.

This article distills advice from Dorothy M. Steele and Becki Cohn-Vargas, two researchers who've been looking at ways to boost student empowerment in the classroom. The article ends with a checklist that I think I might want to post at the door in my classroom.

"Empowerment" seems like a buzzword, I know, but a few years back, Joe Sicilian did a great 3 session PD on student empowerment that had my mind buzzing for weeks afterward. I borrowed a ton of ideas from that session. Some worked, some didn't, but the students were generally enthusiastic because I was trying something different.

That experience reminds me that this whole "chaotic" classroom thing is something I've been gravitating towards at least half my career here at Curtis. The last two years, for me at least, have been about keeping my eye on the ball, namely the year-end standardized test results that confirm, at least to an outside viewer that whatever changes you've made within the classroom aren't detracting from the educational bottom line. Giving students greater control of lesson content and pacing is all well and good, but the Algebra 2 Regents has a broad range of topics a class needs to work through in a given year.

Boss' article doesn't focus on any particular discipline or subject. It keeps the advice open-ended, so that Geometry teachers and U.S. History teachers find it equally applicable. Again, it's more of a philosophical refresher as you find yourself thinking about the classroom environment you hope to create in the first weeks of school.

PBL @ Tech ISTE 2015

An open, crowd-sourced document created during the latest EdTech conference is pretty much a roll call of technologies and tactics teachers are using to restructure classroom time. Throwing a link up here just so I don't have to go scrambling to find it again on Sept. 10.

Genius Hour

I just read a discussion thread in a teacher forum where a second grade teacher mentioned using a "Genius Hour" model in her classroom.

A quick search of the term "Genius Hour" led me to the slick teacher-to-teacher site geniushour.com, which features a short, front page video in which the narrating teacher explains how he employed the concept in his own classroom.

The concept draws primary inspiration from Google which, in an effort to attract and retain top talent, lets employees devote 20 percent of their workplace time to unsupervised pet projects.

Projects have to be consistent with the company mission, but beyond that simple dictate, the worker is free to carry out the project in whatever manner they choose.

More than a few high level Google products, gmail most notably, started their life as sideline projects of this type.

In education terms, 20 percent free time allotment translates to one class period per week. Hence the term Genius Hour. In the video, the teacher lays out the guidelines he uses to keep the work productive. He also discusses some interesting projects that have come about as a result of this classroom management policy.

Suffice it to say, the Genius Hour concept seems tailor made for the Chaotic Classroom approach. I can see it being really popular with the students, especially in math class where the daily lesson grind can take a toll on student and teacher alike.

I owe a follow up post on my experiences and experiments with Geometry Regents Review this summer. The experience has me rethinking class routines, focusing more on building a predictable, weekly cycle of lessons and tasks as opposed to a daily cycle. I'm not sure whether I have the planning chops to pull it off just yet, but I see a way to use a free period incentive of this type to encourage better practice and a more accountable use of classroom time in the days leading up to that free period.

Embracing Messy Learning [Article Review]

I'll admit it: Block, a humanities teacher at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, had me at the title. Still, it's the middle of the essay Embracing Messy Learning [links to Edutopia website]  that packs the real punch.

Block discusses the power of choice and how important it is to plan and execute class projects in a way that takes that power away from the teacher puts that it squarely in the hands of the students trying to learn.

While I think most of us would agree that giving students the ability to choose topics, research methods, presentation styles, etc. is a powerful motivator, we approached the choice issue only indirectly in our two spring PD sessions, I think.

Again, I think there's that fear component -- that students, much like teachers, can easily fall pray to option paralysis and spend major chunks of class time spinning their wheels -- that makes us hesitant to throw the "choice" term around too casually. As a math teacher, however, I've seen students respond well whenever I've presented students with a menu-style lesson plan. Why not go even further and recruit students into writing that daily "menu?"

For every teacher who worries about students responding negatively to lack of "structure" in the classroom, Block presents a countervailing viewpoint, one that sees this wheel-spinning stage as vital to the creative process. More importantly, Block shows how giving students time to flail makes the classroom a better modeling environment for adult-level decisionmaking.

A powerful article by an author who appears to be traveling down a parallel professional road.

August 3 Geometry Regents Review

About two weeks ago, one of the supervisors at Curtis called me up asking if I'd be available to teach a five day Regents Review course for the upcoming Geometry and Common Core Geometry exams.

It was a weird request if only because I hadn't taught Geometry since 2012 and wasn't too current on the changes imposed by Common Core.

Then again, the money was good. That and the fact I tend to enjoy Regents Review classes, where you can be a little more relaxed than in a regular classroom setting, led me to say yes.

Going in, I figured it was a good chance to push forward on some of the classroom management strategies discussed in our spring 2015 meetings and on this blog.

For me, that meant switching away from the usual chalk-and-talk or SmartBoard presentation format and running everything through a growing collection of laptops I've started bringing to every classroom I visit. I also saw it as a good chance

Technology being a double-edged sword, I immediately found myself up against two obstacles: 1) Google Classroom wouldn't register any kid with an email address outside the curtishs.org domain -- i.e. just about every kid who showed up that day. And 2) the laptop I'd borrowed to run the SmartNotebook software was having a troubled relationship with the classroom's built in SmartBoard system. It was at this point that I thanked myself for bringing four additional laptops (my own personal MacBooks, plus a Chromebooks and two Notebooks. Stealing a trick from my last two substitute coverage experiences, I handed each machine to a kid the moment he walked through the door, asking him to fill out a start of class survey I'd whipped up that morning on Google Forms.

With nary a shrug, each got down to work, supplying the necessary info while I took the moment to think ahead.

Shifting away from Google Classroom, I decided to have each kid register into Trello, a management system I'd been running throughout the spring.

If you don't know anything about Trello, it's basically a digital bulletin board. What you do as a project (or class) manager is create a series of lists representing the workflow of whatever project you're trying to execute.  List headings for my review session, for example, included Research, Waiting for Teacher Feedback, Reflection. Basically, each list is a stage I wanted students to go through before moving on to the next task.

Within each list, you can basically create a card "icon" out of thin air. This new icon can represent anything you want it to represent and can be dragged from list to list, giving the manager a quick visual indicator of progress (or lack thereof)

Again with the double-edged sword thing: I hadn't really put much thought that morning into what each card represented in the case of a review session, and the blank slate nature of the Trello "card" format is that can orient your project workflow to just about any cardinal point on the compass. For example, did I want each card to be representing an individual student or group of students or maybe something a little more abstract, like a topic or question of interest?

As the kids went through the hurdles imposed by Trello's registration process, I realized that it probably made the most sense if the card represented a sample problem from the test we were going to go through. I wanted to start with the first Common Core Geometry exam (administered in June) and my objective hope was that I could get each kid to take ownership of at least one problem and present its solution to the group.

Trello's wonky registration process was yet another bug/feature Rorschach test. From across the hall, I could hear another teacher already launching into a lecture review for the U.S. History regents, while my first three students were still waiting to get confirmation. I debated whether to scrap the exercise altogether, until the first kid's computer screen showed the main Trello page with "Geometry Regents Review" as an accessible "board. " I suddenly realized that I now had a chance to give each kid a staggered one-on-one tutorial on how the system worked and how I expected them to carry out the review process.

Things went pretty swimmingly from there. My first registered kid worked his way through the first problem on the test. It wasn't the toughest problem, but in our back-and-forth -- logged via text messages on the "Problem 1" card, I emphasized that the point of a review session isn't to master the problems on a previous test so much as to anticipate how the same topic or skills might show up on the next test. The problem in question (Problem 2 on the June 2015 New York test) asked which transformation, of the four listed, might result in a shape not congruent to the pre-image.

As other kids launched their own Trello sessions, the first kid and I were able to play the role of a fictional test writer and come up with away to rewrite problem's language -- which of the following is not evidence of an isometric transformation -- recylcing the same four answer choices.

Things weren't perfect. I had one kid in the sparsely attended morning session who could work his way successfully through only one problem in the time allotted. Still, I'd gotten the interface up and running and the other two students, once instructed, seemed to take flight, cranking through four problems a piece and completing a brief reflection survey I'd attached to the end stage.

Most importantly, I hadn't panicked, abandoning ship out of fear that the students were going to start getting restless.

The experience was helpful, because the first session, which had started at 9, ended 10:30. Each kid took his leave and over the next 10 minutes, the second shift rolled in. I was soon walking another three students through the registration process. Then another three. Then another eight.

Again, with only four laptops to share, I felt the acute urge to cut bait and go with a standard review. By about the 11 a.m. mark, though, I had a critical mass of motivated students working their way through the research/feedback/reflection process, giving me enough time to register each kid both to the class and to Trello. Rather than run the laptops around the room, I eventually selected a "superuser" from each geographical corner of the room, had them invite in their neighbors or, failing that, manage the card/ticket writing process for them.

It wasn't pretty, but it was a pretty good facsimile of what to expect in a regular math classroom. Were some kids bored? Yes. Did more than a few sit idle for the whole 90 minute period? Also, yes. Did a few leave the room in frustration? Maybe.

The ones who got working, however, appeared to be filling out legitimate cards and by 11:30, less than 45 minutes before the end of the session, I found myself in a position where, all I had to do was look at the list of cards in the "waiting for teacher feedback" pile to get an instant sense of who needed help on what? Even better, the students had a visual sense of who was first in line to get the teacher's attention.

Like a lot of educational experiments, this one hovered somewhere in the gray area between out-and-out success and utter disaster. A couple times I was able to deliver a quick review on circle equations, a huge topic on the test, without calling for complete silence or worrying that I was distracting students focused on other topics. As I told the students at least three times, in between thanking them for their patience, this was the ultimate goal: To give each student help on the exact problems that most concerned them. If students chose to take that as a signal to sit and do nothing, that was their choice, I allowed, but a wiser use of the available time would be to look past the problems you knew you could answer and focus on the few problems where you still needed a little help from the teacher.

Perhaps the best indicator of success, however, was the momentum of the second day's session. As soon as I arrived on the floor, I tested the lock on the neighboring computer room and found it
accessible. Writing up quick sign for the classroom, I directed my students to the computer room, where we could each line up behind a monitor and deal with the Trello system individually.

This time around, I had roughly eight students. And while it still took about 30 to 45 minutes to get everybody through the Trello gateway, things were in full productive swing by 10 a.m.. Like an air traffic controller, I was checking off feedback requests almost as soon as they came in. Even better: I reached the point where I could respond to those feedback requests in writing, raising the lexical bar of the conversation, if you will.

Once again, the second sessiondrew almost double the number attendees, including two who never quite managed to get through the Trello signup problems. Both students attributed the impasse to not remembering their gmail passwords (Trello, like a lot of online education apps, appears distinctly biased against accounts bearing a non gmail address, so I had students attempt to re-register through gmail). Part of me felt guilty for letting these students twist in the wind. Then again, another part of me realized that losing track of your email password was the 21st century equivalent to not showing up to class with a pen or pencil.