Tea and Conversation

There's a memorable scene in Three Cups of Tea where Greg Mortenson tucks his 6-foot, 4-inch frame into a tiny cable car and pulls himself across a river gorge in northern Pakistan. Reflecting later on the creaky cable that he entrusted to hold him aloft, he said, "If it broke, you'd fall. And if you fell, you were dead."
Overcoming one obstacle after another, Mortenson has helped to build 131 schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. His is a remarkable story of courage, persistence, and cross-cultural understanding. It's also an ideal tale for launching students on their own quest to make a difference in the world through a service-learning program called Pennies for Peace.
I'm delighted to be hosting a webinar for Edutopia on April 15, when Mortenson will talk about his own journey and the examples of youth leadership that he encounters wherever he goes. (This new article from Edutopia introduces one such student from San Diego.)
Are there questions you or your students would like to ask Mortenson? Post them here in the comments, and I'll do my best to pass them along in person. Hope you can join us!
Photo by David Oliver Relin

Teach Like a Champion

I just read the March 2 NYT Magazine article Building a Better Teacher that looks at the "hidden game" of accomplished teaching. Doug Lemov, teacher, principal, charter-school founder and consultant, decided to study the methods of champion teachers who, working under the most challenging circumstances, are able to reach and teach kids and ultimately, significantly, increase their achievement. His findings, referred to as Lemov's Taxonomy, isolate 49 instructional strategies that make a difference. From "cold call" questioning where every kid gets ready to answer to the "strong voice" technique that ensures a teacher's words are heard, Lemov digs into seemingly small but significant communication and management methods that increase a teacher's effectiveness. The "Taxonomy" is presented in a new book due in April:
Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. (Amazon offers a discount if you preorder!)
I look forward to reading about the strategies and imagining how they apply to the PBL classroom. I wonder, if we were to drill down into the methods of exemplary PBL teachers, would we identify techniques that are unique to the PBL-constructivist setting? I look forward to reading with my PBL lenses on.

PBL Goes Global

Excited to learn from our friends at ISTE that Reinventing Project-Based Learning will soon be published in German. And here's more evidence that PBL is generating interest around the world: Eduteka, a Spanish language website for educators, has just translated "Appendix A: Essential Learning with Digital Tools, the Internet, and Web 2.0," from our book. Spanish-speaking colleagues can find the full text here.
And for our English-speaking colleagues, we have just updated Appendix A to include a few new Web 2.0 tools. See link at top right of this page to download a copy.

Keeping Your Project on the Rails

Next up in our PBL~Better with Practice webinar series is a March 4 discussion about project management. Or, as we're calling it, "Keeping Your Project on the Rails." We'll meet in our Learn Central Elluminate Room at 2:00 and 5:00 pst. Please join us!
Experienced teachers will be sharing their advice, tips, and resources for keeping projects on track. For instance, Sue Boudreau will explain how she has adapted project management processes from industry to work with middle-schoolers. Neil Stephenson will dig deeper into questioning, explaining how inquiry evolves during a complex project. Lisa Parisi will offer well-honed advice for managing PBL with elementary students. Nichole Kotasek will get into the nitty-gritty of managing teams and the other issues that arise during the implementation phase of projects. Nichole's school uses Project Foundry, and we'll hear more about how that PBL platform works, too.
Thanks in advance to these practitioners, who are generously sharing their time and strategies. Can't wait to hear where the discussion goes!
Meanwhile, please join the PBL~Better with Practice group in Classroom 2.0, where more than 70 folks are shaping this conversation and expanding their professional network.
Photo by Rachel Cowan, Creative Commons

Better with Practice - A Webinar Discussion Series

Once a project launches there's a lot to attend to. Let's look beyond project design to the implementation phase of projects and share our challenges and best ideas.

Join us for our webinar series
Better with Practice: PBL Implementation Tips from the Field

1. How to Create a Culture of Inquiry - February 18 event login
   
2. Keeping Your Project on the Rails - March 4
3. It’s Not Over When It’s Over: The Project Spiral - March 11

To accommodate time zone differences, sessions are offered twice at 2:00 and at 5:00 pacific. Each session lasts an hour. Series sponsor is Project Foundry.

Help shape the series in an unconference-y way. Join the Classroom 2.0 group Better with Practice and help us decide what we should be attending to.

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.