No Room for Failure?

I have been rereading Joy Kirr's book Shift This!  As is typical when rereading a book, different passages that may have gone unnoticed previously stand out.  This is one that resonated with me this time around:

There is no room for failure.
"In order to prepare our students for the future, we need to give them opportunities to create -- and risk failure. Sir Ken Robinson also reminds us that kids will take a chance. "If they don't know, they'll have a go." They're frightened to be wrong. Once a grade is attached, the fear of failure is so strong that many students will only take the safe route and not try something new. They won't push themselves. They'll only do what we ask of them, and nothing more! Future careers require creativity and entrepreneurship. When do we give students work that is free from risks? If we are not giving that time to students, they will not be ready for those careers (we can't even imagine) that are coming down the pike." (Joy Kirr, Shift This! p. 144)

Our district, like many others, is in the process of moving to standards-based grading. This is a change that is making many of our teachers nervous, as they fear that if there are no grades, students won't do the work. I am looking forward to the time when students and teachers in our district will spend less talking about grades and points and more time focusing on learning.

DIY PD

Our district has been experimenting with different kinds of professional development for staff.  Something we tried this year was a Do-It-Yourself Professional Development Bingo board. 

We distributed the board to our middle school staff at the beginning of the school year, with the expectation that each teacher would have at least one "Bingo" at the end of the school year by completing the PD in the squares.  Over-achieving teachers who cover the whole board will get a special prize.  Several times throughout the school year, teachers shared their PD experiences with their peers at faculty meetings.  Our hope is that teachers start thinking outside the PD box.  We will gauge the success of this experiment when teachers do their final share out at the end of the school year.

OK Go

I recently attended a conference presentation given by Janet Moore, a professor at Illinois State University. In her presentation, Moore shared strategies of how the OK Go videos can be used to teach math and science. I have always been a fan of the OK Go videos -- such creativity! -- so this was an especially exciting presentation for me. I left her presentation with many ideas to share with our math and science teachers.

Here are some of the handouts that she shared:

• Skyscrapers: Modeling Patterns And Predictions Connections
• The One Moment: Rate Ratio Proportion Connections
• This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg And Failure Connections
• Upside Down And Inside Out: Parabola Connections
• Writings On The Wall: Domain And Range Connections
• Writings On The Wall: Perspective And Eclipses

She also shared what she called "OK Go Kids Fan Videos".

• "The One Moment"
• Introduction
• Video
• "Turn Up the Radio
• Introduction
• Video
• "Another Set of Issues
• Introduction
• Video

Recently, OK Go partnered with the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to create the OK Go Sandbox. The purpose of the Sandbox is to provide teachers with tools to connect the OK Go videos with what students are learning in the classrooms.  I haven't had a chance to fully check out the Sandbox yet (that will most likely be a summer project), but from what I've seen I can't help but wish this was around when I was learning science.

Word Clouds

Word Clouds are not a new technology, but I think they have great potential for supporting student learning.  Word clouds provide a quick and easy way to summarize and are visually appealing.

In our building, word clouds are used as an about-me student project.  Teachers also have students enter their essays into a word cloud generator to help them find overused words.

Here are a few more ways that word clouds can be used in the classroom:

• Put text related to the day's lesson into a Word Cloud and have students answer the following questions:

What do you think the lesson is about?

What do you think is the main idea?

What are five questions that you have?

What do you think the title of the article might be?

• Create a word cloud of a current event.  Have students write a paragraph about what the event might be and why they think that.
• Create two word clouds from two different sources on the same topic.  Display them side to side. Have students write a compare/contrast paragraph explaining why they think things are the same and different.  Can be used with political parties, campaigns, speeches, primary documents, etc.
• Have students keep a journal of the foods they eat in a week. Then have them enter their list of foods into a food cloud generator.
• Before starting a new unit, a word cloud can be displayed as students identify and discuss both familiar and unfamiliar words related to a particular concept.  Students can also create their own word cloud during the unit as a review for previously taught content. After a the unit, students can create a word cloud as a class by brainstorming words that describe what was learned.
• Create a word cloud from parts of a novel chapter. (You can find PDFs of many novels online.) Ask students to:

Find three words that relate to: character traits, setting, theme, mood..

Predict what the book is going to be about.

Write a story using 10 or more words from the word cloud

Write a paragraph about their life using 10 words from the word cloud.

Have students write Haikus or other short poems using at least five words from the word cloud.

• Have students collaboratively create word clouds (using Answer Garden, Poll Everywhere, or Google Docs)

Define characteristics: What does it mean to be an American? An atom? A planet? An earthquake? A mammal? An ecosystem? A prime number? A noun?

Vocabulary: When introducing a topic or for review, ask students for all the vocabulary they can think of associated with the work they are studying.  Repeat the activity at the end of the unit and compare.

Summarizing: Have students enter key ideas from a reading from an assigned (homework) text or video.

Choose a topic. Have students enter words related to the topic. Can be used with description of character in a story, adjectives to describe a painting, poem, song...

After group discussions, have each group enter key points/words from their discussion.

As an Exit Ticket, students enter key ideas from the day’s lesson. Use as next day’s Bell Ringer.  Have students write a summary of the lesson using at least 10 words from the Word Cloud.

I would love to hear how other teachers are using word clouds in the classroom.

Falling Out

I follow many good blogs, but I don't keep current with reading all of them.  (There are only so many hours in the day.)  There is one blog, however, that I read faithfully every day:  Seth Godin's Blog.  When asked what his occupation is, Mr. Godin replies, "Teacher."  However, his posts aren't specifically written for teachers, and are often more business related.  That being said, I have found that many of his ideas are pertinent to education.

A couple of months ago, he wrote a post called "Falling Out". Here is the entire post:

"The hard part isn't coming up with a new idea.

The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea.

That's why editing work is so difficult.  In order to make the new thing, to make the old thing better, you need to destroy it first.

Situation switching, acting as if, loving the idea enough to sketch it out and then caring enough to stop loving it... that's where the tension often lies."

This post helped me to pause and reflect on my work with coaching teachers.  How often do I see teachers doing the same activities year after year?  Even when I share some newer, maybe even better ideas with them, I often hear "The old ways just work." The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea.  So maybe the reason that teachers are hesitant to try new ways of teaching is not that they think that the new ideas are bad, but that they're not quite ready to let the old ones go.