The Beauty of Story

In preparing  materials for our ongoing consideration of ‘appropriate challenge’, I came across this poem in Carol Tomlinson’s book, Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom. I think it paints a beautiful story of why we do what we do in education.

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
I bring a whisper.
Can you hear the poem in it?

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
Will you tell me what to think,
Or show me how?
Will you teach me answers,
Or the symmetry of a question well composed?

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
Will learning be only about doing things right,
Or about doing the right thing?
A thing of joy,
Or of duty?

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
Which will matter most to you,
My soul,
Or my grade?

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
Can you teach me to chart my journey,
Or must you use a standard measure
To place me always
In the shadow of others?

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
Will I go away from you ascending my strengths,
Or hobbled by my weaknesses?

I am a child.
I come to you, a teacher.
I bring you all I am,
All I can become.
Do you understand the trust?

I am in the process of recording our students telling this story; I shall add that when it is complete!

We frequently talk of the desire to help our students create rather than consume in the technological context. We could add to that, in the web 2.0 world, collaborate rather than isolate. Today I have a couple of simple tools that we can use to build stories, learning is story-telling, so build learning. And we can do this collaboratively, inviting comment within a public space.

We can start with Bookr, a tool that pulls pictures from Flickr – either yours or any public photos which you can find using a tag search – and puts them together in a book online. So, my Rome vacation snaps become a tale of a Roman holiday – juxtaposition of historical and gourmet delights!

Or you can go one step further with Showbeyond and add audio to your story.

These  tools seem like powerful ways for kids to tell stories and to learn from stories created by others. These tools also represent the style of adhoc learning opportunities that we can easily bring forward when students have 24/7 access to laptops. These may not be the tools one would choose when needing to book a lab or roll out a cart of laptops.

Thanks to Russell Stannard’s site of training videos  focusing on tools for helping teachers of language.

Last weekend I talked of  reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset ¹ and the value to learning of a growth mindset. As I continued with this journey, the distinct nexus between Dweck’s growth mindset and David Perkins’ working on the hard parts, became apparent. Dweck uses a number of sporting examples to illustrate the fixed v. growth mindset, and each of these comes back to the distinction between what is perceived as natural talent and what is derived from hard work and effort. The growth mindset sportsmen and women all worked on the hard stuff: perfecting a golf wing, soccer skills or boxing tactic all involved hours of practice and hard work.

Perkins ² reminds us that real improvement requires

deconstructing the game, singling out the hard parts for special attention, pratcicing them on the side, developing strategies to deal with them better and re-integrating them soon into the whole game.

So, rather than determining that student A has more natural ability in a discipline than student B, we need to bring forward the hard parts and develop a growth mindset ourselves to see that, with our support in working on those hard parts, it is possible for all our students to grow in understanding of our discipline.This may not be easy for all of us; we may not always see the hard parts in the way our students do. We may not always see the hard parts as hard. However, this is our responsibility: to see the learning from the standpoint of the learner, then to construct the teaching that will enable our learners’ growth.

And then we can work with our students on their own internal voices to ensure they do not languish in the fixed state of their own intellectual growth.

As part of a staff conference next week, I have been playing with a new, to me, presentation technology and am enthralled by the open canvas style of prezi! I will admit to having looked at this technology a couple of months ago, but without a need, I was lost. However, in preparing for the conference, I was taken back to the work of Ruben Puentedura, I have talked about his SAMR model before, and his weblog was my path back to prezi. Take a look at his May 12 post and you can engage in a fabulous online seminar where Ruben talks through the evolution of presentation technologies and demonstrates prezi.

So, I have created my own story in prezi, the story of thinking and visible thinking, as a way to engage my conference participants in a visually different story of thinking about thinking in our classrooms. It may prompt some interesting thinking in itself! Just click the arrow and it should start! Consider this a work in progress; a single digit temperature weekend will no doubt see many changes!

Reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset over the weekend has challenged me to think of myself in terms of being a learner or a non-learner and it is quite alarming! Dweck argues that a fixed mindset leads to nonlearning, while a growth mindset enables one to see opportunities for learning and change. It takes me back to a moment in German class three years ago, where I did not like not knowing what the tutor was asking, and liked even less that I could not respond appropriately!! Had I adopted the growth mindset and acknowledged that I was a novice German language learner and was supposed to make mistakes, I may well have been further along the path now with my language development. But, no I made all the excuses under the sun and shut down! My fixed mindset kicked in! I became a non-learner and justified it eloquently to myself and others!!

I am enjoying the challenge now, with Dweck’s help, of determining how to change my mindset voice!

Imagine how this works in a classroom?

“Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile,” said Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president. “The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected.”

Those words: digitally enabled and socially connected, paint a powerful picture of the context of education today. Now is not the time to deny the digitally enabled reality of our students’ lives or their desire for social connectedness. Now is the opportunity to leverage these realities and bring new meaning to school learning.

Is school digitally enabled and socially connected? What does this look like each day of a student’s  learning? What does this look like in your classroom? Michael Fullan (2001) reminds us that each one of us can change our own context.

And thanks to Ewan McIntosh for another great post that led me to the Gartner piece. Connected and digitally enabled.

Well, today’s story is a little off the usual track, but nonetheless is about story telling. As an iphone owner, I am taken by the ease with which one can take photos, rather surreptiously, by appearing to be texting. Capturing the ordinary things of life sometimes requires some subterfuge!

So, I was very impressed to receive this mail from Apple pointing me to some very cool photo apps for my iphone. Of course, I installed them all: being able to zoom with my iphone is a huge boost to my photo taking adventures. But, the really cool feature I am playing with is ColorSplash, a really cool little tool that converts your images first to black and white, then lets you colour back a portion of the image. The effect is pretty interesting.

My playing with this app began over lunch yesterday: a lovely sunny day in Munich, which may herald the end of opportunities to lunch outdoors. So, with my Lonely Planet Rome to read, I sat down to Zander fillet and a glass of Riesling; then started playing with ColorSplash. Here is the result of my first 5 minutes with this new toy:

This photo became this photo in 5 minutes on my phone! Cool, eh?

We all appreciate how powerful a metaphor can be in bringing understanding to complex processes: what more complex than teaching itself?

So, when I came across this fabulous article from ASCD ¹, the jazz metaphor resonated very clearly:

To create curriculum with the soul of jazz—curriculum that gets under the skin of young learners—we must hunt for big ideas embedded in the lists of content that often parade as curriculum (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). We must share these big ideas with our students and invite them to hunt for more or better ideas with us. We must then arrange what we teach to represent the concepts and principles around which experts organize the disciplines (Erickson, 2006). And we need to help students make connections by seeing how concepts and principles both change and stay the same within and across times, places, and disciplines—and how the same concepts that help students make sense of history or science can help them make sense of themselves (Tomlinson et al., 2001).(28)

What better way to explain why we must do the hard work of uncovering the big ideas within content topics, than to start with a vision of curriculum that will, like jazz, get under the skin?

We live in a time of information overload on leadership and change in schools, yet we continue to experience the frustrations of flawed models of leadership and inept attempts to make schools and schooling more effective. Doug Reeves brings much clarity to these realities, in talking about change in schools as culture change.¹

This is an important clarification, as it focuses our attention on better understanding schools in terms of the definiton of culture. Reeves argues

culture is reflected in the behavior, attitudes and beliefs of individuals and groups. (37)

and articlates four  imperatives of cultural change as:

1. leaders must define what will not change, must identify those values, traditions and practices that will be preserved;

2. leadership actions will bring about culture change, not just speeches and announcements;

3. leaders must use the right change tools for the particular system; there is no off the shelf set of tools that can be applied in all situations; and

4. leaders must be relentless in their personal attention to the work to be done to change culture; they must back up their words with personal actions. (38-39)

So, when leading change in schools, and when seeing that change as change in culture, what we need to work towards and look for are changes in behavior, attitudes and beliefs. Regardless of the addition of specific resources associated with the change strategy, unless we can identify change in behavior, attitudes or beliefs, we have no sustainable change.

How does this come about? One conversation at a time.

Reeves also published these thoughts in Educational Leadership, Dec 2006.

I never imagined writing here about a software application, but this morning on the BBC show Click, one of my favourites I might add, I saw a simple graphic editor for simple graphic editing tasks: Pixlr.

Over the past few years the added sophistication of the graphics tools available in my world, has become daunting to someone who just wants to crop a picture, maybe erase a line or two in a graphic or create a simple model to help explain a concept!

Which is exactly wanted I wanted to do this week: erase three unnecessary lines in a graphic from Wiggins and McTighe ¹ that explains in three circles the need to prioritise what we teach. You have probably seen it; I just wanted to modify it a little!

So, now I can add a simple and clear model to a communication to our parent community that explains why focusing staff release time on designing and documenting curriculum is so important to our capacity to be an effective school.

And, I have a new arrow in my quiver! A simple arrow at that!