Let's Talk About You for a Change

Try this exercise, please! It's easy and fun and will only take you a minute (OK three). Send your response by email (don't comment here) to jkrauss(at)mahonia(dot)us. Subject line: exercise.

Let's Talk about You for a Change

Directions: Forget about kids and teaching for a moment and recall a project you did recently away from school. Maybe it was planning a wedding, tracking your family genealogy, building a shed, organizing a community campaign or learning to knit. Choose one big or small that taxed you to a degree or took you into unfamiliar territory.

Now, open an email and put "exercise" in the subject line. In the body write a descriptive title for the project, then jot notes -single words or short phrases- that describe the personal capabilities the project called for or caused you to develop. An example statement might be persistence or budgeting time. Think through every phase of the project as you go. Write as many capabilities as you can in three minutes. Send them by email to jkrauss(at)mahonia(dot)com. I'll post a wordle with the combined results soon. I'll also share the facilitation that goes with this group exercise and we can discuss the AHA moment that results.

The Dirt on School Gardens

In the current Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan takes a good, hard look at the shortcomings of public education and comes up with a surprising fall guy. The blame for the academic woes of our current generation, she concludes, rests squarely on the shoulders of...Alice Waters. Waters, the California chef who introduced millions of foodies to the joys of eating locally, is also the godmother of school gardens (starting with The Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley). To listen to Flanagan, those campus garden beds spell nothin' but Trouble.

In "Cultivating Failure," Flanagan reveals the dirty trick perpetrated by "an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math."

Flanagan's basic beef is that school gardens are glorified time-wasters, depriving kids of a chance to learn serious stuff. Apparently, she's never seen the rigorous projects that use gardens as a place to grow scientific inquiry skills along with vegetables, or to give budding naturalists a place to hone their powers of observation. (For just a few examples, check out this issue of Northwest Teacher. It's a little dated but still relevant.)

Flanagan really goes off the rails when she tries to blame the burgeoning school gardening movement for the achievement gap. Children of Hispanic immigrants deserve better, she suggests, than becoming "our state's new child farm laborers."

Sounds like a load of organic steer manure to me.

Photo by Michael LoRusso, Creative Commons.

The Cigar Box Project - And More Immersive Learning Experiences

This week I'm compiling a set of projects I can have teacher teams examine and "unpack" against the ISTE NETS for Students and Teachers. I thought I'd share some of these rich, rigorous exemplars of PBL with you.

I've gone on project searches before and in the Web 2.0 era the hunt is more rewarding than ever. Before the emergence of social tools I'd typically find an instructional plan of some sort and possibly some samples of student work, but *wow* what a difference a few years make. Videos, blogs, wikis, digital artifacts, recorded Skype calls, podcasts-- there's no limit to the creative ways teachers and students are sharing what goes on in their project-focused classrooms. Enjoy!

In a Duck with a Blog K-2 grade students in California chronicle their science studies when a mallard family nests on campus. Read chronologically from the bottom and ignore advertising banners. (Edublogs what were you thinking?)

In the Machinto Project Alberta and Ontario primary students join students in Hiroshima, Japan and from around the world to study war through children's eyes. This project is hosted by iEARN. View a 7-minute Flash video of the Canada Machinto Project and then dig into artifacts of learning.

In the Write On! project ten classes of third, fourth, and fifth grade students around the U.S. contribute to a collaborative story.

Eighth graders in Calgary, Canada mash up all sorts of technologies to reinterpret events from Canadian History. And they stump historians in the process. See the Cigar Box Project.

After three terms studying African American history 9th graders in Philadelphia launch inquiries and create 30-second commercials. Read the teacher's summary of the project, view the student wiki and examine commercials.

Texas teacher Christian Long developed the Alice Project, where 9-10 grade literature students analyze Alice in Wonderland and present their blogs for scrutiny by "jurors" from around the world. Please see "The Big Picture" section.

High school "citizen scientists" in Los Angeles investigate air quality -indoors and outdoors- and propose remedial action in The Black Cloud project.

ISTE 2010

I look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones at ISTE 2010 in Denver. I have two sessions I hope you'll consider participating in: Tinkering Under the Hood: Strategies to enhance critical thinking and Computational Thinking for Everyone where we explore how computing develops logic, systems thinking and other capabilities. What are you looking forward to at ISTE 2010?

Critical Thinking: Not Just an Exercise

Los Angeles Times writer Sandy Banks recently wrote about a turnaround at Manual Arts High, the oldest high school in the sprawling—and struggling—L.A. Unified District. According to Banks, the school is starting to rebound with help from MLA Partner Schools, a nonprofit that works to “improve schools and empower neighborhoods.” MLA’s approach is to partner with schools serving disenfranchised neighborhoods rather than going the more heavy-handed route of taking them over.

This wasn’t the first I’d heard of Manual Arts. Last year, I got acquainted with an English teacher there named Antero Garcia. He had gotten his students to participate in something called the Black Cloud Project, an interactive, innovative game that prompted them to ask hard questions about the health of their local environment. In the process, many students got energized about what they could do to change their school and their neighborhood. Garcia shared some highlights of that experience, via Skype, during our session at EduCon last year. (He also shared some of the frustrations of trying to teach from behind a firewall in this story for Edutopia.)

So when I saw Manual Art High in the news, I went straight to Garcia’s blog for a reaction. I wasn’t disappointed. In this post on The American Crawl, he shares his students’ responses to the L.A. Times story. Their comments are not quite so glowing as the story Banks tells. Even Garcia admits he was “surprised by the vitriol.”

But they’re well worth a read. This is the kind of real-world writing assignment that encourages students to be critical consumers of media. Did the reporter get to the essence of what's happening at Manual Arts High, or miss the main point? Responding to that prompt invites students to think critically—about the media, as well as about their own lives.

What seems to have infuriated many students wasn’t the way that Banks described them and their South Central neighborhood (“Forty percent of its students are still learning English, and 20% live in foster homes. Even its name and mascot -- the Manual Arts Toilers -- suggest that ceaseless struggle is its legacy.”) It’s the lack of student voice in school improvement efforts.

I hope the partners at MLA are listening.

Growing Your School Garden

As school gardens gain popularity nationwide, it's a good time to consider how to make the most of these outdoor learning spaces. Lewis Elementary in Portland, Ore., has been expanding its garden gradually for the past several years. The Lewis Outdoor Education Center now includes raised garden beds, greenhouses, an outdoor classroom, composting bins, and more, as this Spiral Notebook post explains.
When I visited recently, natural builder James Thompson was helping kids construct a cob bench. Every student in the school participated in this wonderfully messy activity, and the finished project will no doubt be the launching pad for even more engaged learning in the months ahead.
Successful campus greenspaces require ongoing care. To exchange ideas with like-minded educators, check out the new group at Edutopia devoted to Green Schools. See you there!

Ready for Prime TIme

One of my favorite nonprofits made it to prime time last week. KaBOOM! rallies communities to build playgrounds. "Parks and Recreation," the NBC sitcom starring Amy Poheler of Saturday Night Live fame, wove the nonprofit with the funny name into last week's episode. If you like the idea of rallying your community to build a new playground, check out the wealth of real-life planning resources at KaBOOM!