#SOL15: Writing, Agency, and Colonization

Blue Ridge Mountains III (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I.

This morning I withdrew an article that required some revision before being published.  Originally the article was 12,000 words and I whittle it down to about 8,000 at the insistence of the editors who have been patient and the peer reviewers who have been somewhat helpful.  And although I have never not returned a manuscript that was accepted or accepted with revisions prior to this morning, I did so today.

With Rob's care and my responsibilities, priorities shift and time feels far more constrained.  I do plan to revise the essay again as I want to see it finished and see what it is I must learn. I realize though that presently such work will need to wait as I just do not have the clarity of thought to write academically and I know that this work is far from done.

I don't know what I most want to say and so I have said a lot of things not worth reading. As John Cage might say, "I have nothing to say" and unfortunately I am saying it (over and over). I do realize that there is something there that is important and I am missing it, for now.

II.

I think about this authorial freedom to wade into a work or set it aside and think about my son in high school where such options are rarely afforded, if ever.  Yes, I am confident his teachers would make exceptions for him especially now as he struggles with all that is happening at home--but the agency would reside with his teachers to a larger extent and that is highly problematic--especially for writers, thinkers, doers.

Good writing requires thought.
Better writing requires agency.

III.

Agency is more important than the myriad of lessons taught via mini lessons, focus lessons, workshop lessons and the like. The right to determine the trajectory of a work is a large part of the writing.  I wonder where that happens at school in these days of Common Core, non-organic workshops, and those units of study that come pre-made, written for teachers to enact as if teachers and students were interchangeable cogs.  This is the very definition of being colonized.

Hopefully there is some young writer in some US classroom testing his or her agency, helping the teacher to understand that the more important lesson is one we do not teach directly.

Leaning on My Reading Life When I Write: Let's Make Mentor Texts Kid-Determined

Walter Dean Myers (M.A. Reilly, July 3, 2014)

I. What We talk About When We Talk About Reading

A lot of what I write about begins while I'm reading/listening to text. Imagine that's true for you too. I read daily, often, a significant amount.

It's difficult to think about wanting to write, let alone doing it, without being a reader.  Let me say here that I use the term, reader,  in its broadest definition and I do so on purpose. I'm not talking about the close reading that is the mandate being acted out in schools as if that single method represented all of reading. So not true. There are so many ways to read and little reason to be stingy.  We ought to broaden our ways, not shrink them to a single method. It's actually kind of foolish to read in only one manner. No one I know does this.  Different texts, different purposes, different moods shape how we might want (or need) to read. Why keep this a secret from the kids? Let's teach children that power, not keep it from them.

I'm not limiting reading to putting eyes to a page, either. It's 2015 and the ways we can read continue to grow. So before we go further, think of reading as interacting with a text be it with your eyes, fingers, or ears. Think of reading as a full body act. Think of it more as co-authoring the work, rather than just consuming it. 


II. Learning in Grade 4

There's this boy in one of the fourth grades where I am working who I understand has had some struggles with reading and writing. 

He intrigues me. 

He appears to be at a critical turning point, putting together what he knows as a reader to help him with his writing and leaning on his writing knowledge to help him read better. 

Smart kid.

A couple of critical noticings:  

He has a teacher who doesn't shy away from the challenging-to-teach child. I have observed at other schools, in other classrooms children who are instructionally ignored.  They sit doing some form of busy work. This boy's teacher is not like that.  He's all about best ensuring that this youngster learns to read in credible ways and privileging the work most needed to help the child gain the skills, strategies, dispositions and muscle to read and write well.  The teacher's insistence and attention are paying off, as is the child's work. He is gathering his literacy confidence and skills around him like the cape of a superpower.

So one Tuesday morning, I was leaning over the boy's shoulder at his invitation and reading a passage he had recorded in his notebook. You couldn't miss the pride in this young boy's face.

"Really good piece. Its got such voice. You know who that writing reminds me of?" I asked.
"Who?"
"It sounds like something Water Dean Myers might write. Do you know who he was?"
The boy smiled, lifted his notebook and uncovered a Walter Dean Myers' book. "He's my favorite author."
"Not surprised you are reading him given the voice I hear in your work."

I'm reminded watching this child how important our reading lives are to the work we do as writers.

III. Mentor Texts

I read a lot about mentor texts and much of the time the domain of mentor texts belongs to teachers. There are countless books and blogs dedicated to explicating mentor texts that teachers can use with students. 

I love reading about these books and at the same time I think limiting mentor texts to teacher tools is largely a mistake. Yes I can and do share texts (print, digital, audio) I love. I share ones that have helped me to write and/or inspired me to write or forced me to write. But I don't share these as texts for my students.  I want them to simply know I lean on what I read to write.  More important: I want them to understand the habit of how text leads on to text--be it as reader or writer.  I want them to feel and know that power. I don't want them to experience that through me.  That feels too much like a form of servitude.

So I'm thinking about asking this child to co-present when I introduce his class to the idea of leaning on reading as writers. I am hoping he'll join me and perhaps talk a bit about the way he leans on Walter Dean Myers' works when he writes. I know I plan to bring a ton of books, comics, audio and visual texts with me that I hope the children might enjoy and find inspiring, perhaps--necessary. I'll leave these for the year so that they can take their time with these works. I'm hoping we have time to learn some of the ways children lean on their reading lives when composing.

In the interim, I ordered a copy of the print I made that tops this post that I'll be leaving in the classroom for this child and his peers. It was a collage I made last July when Myers died. I'll let you know how the lesson goes and the many things I learn from these kids and their teacher in Newark. 

Why Teacher and Learner Agency Matter: We Are Harming Kids

I. An EL Lesson

Last week I was observing an Expeditionary Learning lesson being taught to third graders and what I saw gave me pause.  I suspect it might have you pausing too.

There's a fair amount of rhetoric being voiced and revoiced by some state and district administrators, ed pundits and reformers, and some teachers too that says something to the effect that we do not need to worry about children reading texts too difficult for them.  These worries have been for naught.  All we need to do is give them "complex texts" and for those who struggle we should "chunk" the text and then all of the children will be able to read and comprehend.

So I was thinking about this line of talk as I interacted with a group of third graders who had been assigned to read a section from My Librarian is a Camel (Lexile Level 980). The children I interacted with were given two pages that discussed how children in Thailand receive library books.

Below is the two-page spread.

from here.

Second page, from here

I watched as the children attempted to complete their "first close read" in which their teacher had told them to circle unknown words. (In fairness to EL, this was not part of their lesson plan.) As the three children I was sitting near worked it became obvious that the text was significantly difficult for them. One child was trying to read the text softly to herself.  Another had her lips moving as she read.  I interrupted and asked how she was doing with the text and she told me she didn't know what she was reading cause she doesn't know a lot of the words. Nor did she know about Thailand (that it was a country) or where it was located.  She was unable to make meaning from most sentences, such as: "A number of these villages can only be reached by foot."  We worked together and I scaffolded her reading, apparently a faux pas on my part, as the struggle is supposed to be good for her.

She was the best reader of this text in the group.

Seated to her right was a boy who was copying letters from the text in his attempt to locate words he did not know.  For the entire time I had worked with the other two children, he was painstakingly copying. He did not copy whole words. Rather he was reduced to copying letter by letter. When I asked him how he was managing the text, he told me quietly that he could not read any of the words.

"I can't read anything. I have to pick some words and write them," he said, showing me a post it note where he had recorded two words: Onkoi (Omkoi), regon (region).

"How about I help you understand the text you've been assigned to read?"

He nods okay.

When I ask him to try the opening, he tells me the words he can read:  In, a, on for of, the and then stops.  I tell him a little bit about the text explaining that he will be learning how children in the mountainous region or area of northern Thailand and one of its cities, Bangkok get library books to read.  We talk about how he lives in the northern region of his city.  We make our way through the text, with me reading it aloud and the two of us discussing what I have read at the close of each paragraph. We make use of the photographs at key times and it becomes evident that although he had great difficulty reading, he thinks well.  He was surprised there were homeless kids in Bangkok. He had thought homelessness was something limited to his city.

This is a child who can learn to read.

Below is an example of a text he can mostly read, although words like, where and said, might still stop him. He might need some support (decode by analogy for example) to help him problem solve words such as nest and lost.  

Text level 7/8 from here.

Again, this is a boy I know can learn to read.

Unfortunately, this child attends school in a district where the teachers have been banned from conducting guided reading by the district leadership (not school administrators). This is the new edict making its way among the uninformed. There's that belief again that if the teachers would only teach well using the scripts they've been given, and adhering to the pacing guide the district created, then the children will all learn.

II. Guiding Learning

Guiding learning, in this case, comprehension is critical.  Walter Kintsch describes the importance of guided practice well when he writes:

Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) have shown that practice requires proper guidance. To become an expert skier it is not sufficient just to ski a lot; you need someone to guide your practice, make you work on just the right things that will make possible long-term progress. We recently observed that just having 6th grade students write a lot of summaries of texts they had read does not make them better summary writers. Indeed, it may just ingrain bad habits. They need someone or something that tells them what about their writing was good and what was not good—only with such feedback to guide them does practice make perfect.  (From here)

Guided instruction is guided practice.  This child, like many of his peers, are placed in jeopardy unless that leadership reassesses its edicts that are not informed by any juried research. Dismiss guided practice and the children are banned from consistent high quality, reading instruction that is necessary on a daily basis. Rather, this boy and many of his peers spend their days, circling unknown words and copying letters onto post-its that they lose as quickly as it took you to finish this sentence.

After the children leave, the teacher and I discuss the children in the class who are severely struggling to read.  She confesses that if she deviates from the script and someone from "downtown" shows up (which has happened) she can be marked unsatisfactory for not being in the correct place on the pacing guide. She works in an atmosphere of fear given the tenuousness of tenure and the widespread closing of schools. Years ago, I had been invited by the Philadelphia school system to review their ELA program for K-5.  They too had a created a pacing chart for ELA that they were intending to mandate for all of the schools. Every minute of every school week for the entire school year was accounted.

Have you ever taught anywhere where unexpected interruptions did not occur?

My feedback was perhaps less diplomatic than it might have been.  Pacing charts given to 200 schools for teachers to enact without deviation will harm learners. Agency must matter for teachers and learners.

III. Scripts and Outcomes

Teaching scripts are shorthand for:

We do not trust teachers to teach yet we pay them to enact scripts that other people at other times who may or may not have ever taught, who may or may not have any actual experience or content knowledge, who do not and cannot know the actual children, but who did receive a ton of money which must mean that the work they produced has to be great, has to be the answer we've been seeking, our bit of manna straight from Heaven. 

This is insanity and it's our tax dollars footing the bill. (Did I mention that the finest teachers I've known are running for the exits?  They are seeking not other schools where they might work, but rather other careers, early retirement.)

There are no short cuts to high quality public education.
Repeat that.

There are no programs, no scripts, no technologies, no secret formulas, no better tomorrows on the horizon that can be used to educate your child or mine in the absence of the teacher.

Teachers are often the product of their workplace. The culture in which they work shapes them.

High quality public education requires that we privilege teachers--that their agency, like that of the learners, is ensured.

Anything less ensures servitude.

CCSS, Educational Aims & The Agency to Act or Why Being a Mere Onlooker Is Always Problematic

Towards the Light (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the obstructions in the way,—or, if it is really a mind to do the thing and not a vague aspiration—it is to have a plan which takes account of resources and difficulties. 

Dewey, John (2009-10-04). Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (Kindle Locations 1775-1778). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition. 

I. Wading In

Years ago when I first read Jerome Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds--I was a fairly young high school English teacher, alone for a week at Bard College.  I had gone there to learn about teaching writing as a process and one of the key texts we studied was Bruner's. I can recall the challenge of that text as I sat in the local motel room each night and read/reread. It was heady, wise and still remains a central text I return to.

Towards the end of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds Bruner concludes by stating that a new developmental theory informed by the question of how to "prevent the world from dissolving into chaos and destroying itself" will arise. Central to that theory will                    

be how to create in the young an appreciation for the fact that many worlds are possible, that meaning and reality are created and not discovered, that negotiation is the art of constructing new meanings by which individuals can regulate their relations with each other. . . - Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, 1986, p. 149.

Bruner posits a world that is being composed, not given, and as such the aim (create that appreciation) aligns with an ideology that privileges agency. For Bruner it is critical that education helps the learner to "render a world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to recreation" (Kindle Locations 2024-2025).

Educational aims represent what we want to achieve--outcomes that are designed. For example, In the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, the writers state:

The aim of social studies is the promotion of civic competence—the knowledge, intellectual processes, and democratic dispositions required of students to be active and engaged participants in public life. 

The social studies standards "provide a framework for professional deliberation and planning about what should occur in a social studies program in grades pre-K through 12." The relationship between educational aims and standards are pretty clear when it comes to social studies. There is an implicit linkage between the outcome of civic competence and the belief that a framework for 'deliberation and planning' represent a means to that bigger end. 

In contrast, there's no explicit talk of educational aims within the CCSS.  The word, aims, does not appear, nor is there an explicit linkage between pubic educational aims and standards that have been developed by the public. I wonder if the challenges with the adoption of the CCSS that David Brooks in today's NYT and others outline isn't a felt response to the absence of agreed upon educational aims. 

What is it we want for our children? What is it that public education ought to provide and occasion?

II.  Having a Mind to Think About Aims

Today much of the discourse about pubic education focuses on standards and testing and these discussions seem to be neither heady nor wise. Missing from this public discourse is the articulation of the educational aims we desire, need.  The conversations necessary to determine what we as a country need and want to produce are largely absent.  We have substituted method for philosophy. Yes, there is discussion about being college and career ready, but this is a phrase that has been given alongside the CCSS--not one that has been developed from and by the people.

Why do we have public education?  What is its function in a republic that protects certain inalienable rights that government cannot take away?  What might we want public education to produce? To occasion?

In chapter 8 of Democracy and Education, John Dewey defined aims as endings that have been "designed or consciously intended" imbued with work that has "intrinsic continuity." Educational aims are not merely effects or a "serial aggregate of acts."  Imbued in Dewey's discussion of educational aims is the primacy of agency at the pupil level.  He says it is nonsense to even discuss aims "when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another" (Kindle Location 1741). One must have the will and permission to act.

In thinking about aims, Dewey is clear to connect temporal with action. He writes

Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process.  (Kindle Locations 1745-1748).  

Dewey cited three interrelated functions of foresight--a factor of aims. He writes that the third function is that foresight "makes choice of alternatives possible"(Kindle Location 1760). The presence of alternatives is deeply connected to agents at work in the ever emerging present--it is what Bruner in 1986 is writing about at the conclusion of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds--the "negotiation is the art of constructing new meanings."   Dewey concludes:

Since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring about this result or that.

For Dewey and Bruner, mere onlooker status is not to be confused with actors.  We have much to learn from each for it is this commitment to individual agency that is most missing today as standards and their requisite high stakes tests get enacted.  It is this absence of voice and presence that leads to the collapse of educational reforms.  In the absence of ongoing national discourse about what a Republic's public educational system must be mostly about may begin to feel that "Someone, somewhere else has determined what our children should know and be able to do without bothering to build consensus about what we want that public education to occasion."

Standards are always epic constructs, regardless of how well we believe them to have been crafted. Beneath whatever polish they might have, they cannot be responsive to emerging conditions as they are someone else's acts.  They are an already made. They are not aims and we are foolish to confuse them as such.

Dewey contends:

to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent. (Kindle Locations 1788-1789). 

III. Acting

We would be better served discussing aims and the means to achieve those aims at our local, state and national levels than fighting about standards and tests. These discussions about aims are apt to be thorny ones given our differences and inexperience with ongoing discourse. And so this practice is all the more essential.

We live in dark times, still. And I suspect will remain so until we learn how to see other and respect other.  Oddly, there is some hope that Bruner tosses us as he concludes:

"...if we have learned anything from the dark passage in history through which we are now moving it is that man, surely, is not 'an island, entire of itself' but a part of the culture that he inherits and then recreates" (Kindle Locations 1908-1909). 

It is this active stance of (re)creation that shifts us from being mere onlookers to agents acting.  It is a shift we must make and ensure it is one that our children and all whom we consider to be other are able to make and remake.

Have We Lost Our Minds? The Omission of Guiding Students' Reading

2 second grader's initial thinking while reading

I was conducting an in-service for NYC elementary school administrators this past week when a person in attendance asked me to weigh in on the question of guided reading in primary classrooms. Underneath the query was the question of whether or not guided reading was an appropriate instructional practice given the emphasis on 'close reading' via the Common Core.

Many in attendance, it seemed, have been struggling with the absence of guided reading instruction for primary grade children. It seems an odd thing to me that guided literacy might be stricken from the primary grade classrooms, along with children actually practicing reading--but that does seem to be the situation many educators and their students are facing as time has been allotted for newer, (better?) basals that do not incorporate guided reading. In the mad dash to have all children 'PARCC-ready,' we are harming these same children by denying them the space to read with a more knowledgeable reader alongside them. Guided literacy learning offers the possibility of assistance during problem solving--be it as a writer or reader.

Linda Dorn and Tammy Jones (2012) explain:

An apprenticeship classroom should be structured so that children can work in their assisted and unassisted learning zones, including whole group, small group, one-on-one, and independently.' 

I like Dorn and Jones's reliance on Vygotsky and Bruner as they craft an approach to teaching that includes scaffolding (always with an eye to deconstructing the scaffold when it is no longer necessary). They explain the complex process of scaffolding:

Assisting a child in the zone of proximal development is called scaffolding (Bruner 1986; Wood 2002). During guided instruction, teachers provide children with varying degrees of support that enable them to accomplish specific tasks. As children become more competent, the scaffolding is removed and the children take over more of the responsibility. Scaffolding is not simply a case of breaking learning segments down into scope and sequence. Instead, it is a complex interactive process whereby the teacher regulates levels of support according to how well the children understand the task at hand. An essential quality of a scaffold is that it be self-destructing.

There's such clarity in the way Dorn and Jones situate the concept of guiding learning, while not succumbing to foolish (mis)understandings of text being inherently complex or not. Rather it is through interactions among child, teacher, task, and text that complexity and degrees of scaffolding occur. To me this is what the phrase, guided reading, has always meant.  It's not the technical aspects of group size, location, time, or a particular book or task that define this type of practice. Rather, it is the intentionality of the learners (teacher and child) who work alongside one another to problem solve. It is a relationship of shifting power as the child gains control over the processes of meaning making.

Over at EngageNY, there is a 5-minute video that has the title, "Guided Reading and the Common Core State Standards," that I watched twice as it did not make a lot of sense to me. I recognize this could be a shortcoming on my part.  It felt like the two speakers were trying to fit their ideology into a practice that was not actually a close fit and as such there was a lot of talk and not a lot said. Curious if you watch it what you might have to say. Truly it baffles me.

Guiding children's reading is essential for some learners at particular times.  It is practice that can help bridge the distance between I can't read it and watch me read it on my own.  As such the question of whether guided reading ought to be in primary grade classrooms is more a question of power and agency and less a question of method. To impose an absolute decision about such matters from positions beyond actual classrooms, is to deny agency and power to learners.



Cited
Dorn, Linda J.; Jones, Tammy (2012-09-28). Apprenticeship in Literacy (Second Edition) (Kindle Locations 3845-3846). Stenhouse Publishers. Kindle Edition.

What Rest in Our Hands

From here.

The Chatter

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and how teacher, administrator, board member, professor, consultant and publisher interpret the CCSS is particularly important.  I am already hearing statements and directives like these:

1. The way for our kids to be CCSS-ready is to fill the classroom with informational text. That's our priority: Buy books.
2. I told my teachers, 'No pre-reading. It's a waste of time. No one cares how you feel.'
3. Let's based our curriculum on products. The Board has determined that there will be no curriculum writing until after we've purchased CCSS-aligned materials. Teachers are to teach these materials.
4. Our students need to practice writing arguments. I don't want to see any narrative writing hanging up.
5. Argumentative writing is the same thing as persuasive writing. I don't see what the big deal is.
6. The only way for our students to be CCSS-ready is for us to make sure we have them read only grade-appropriate books. Nothing easy.
7. We're not sure what text complexity means, so we're only using the text exemplars for what we teach.
8. No feeling questions. Just text-dependent questions. 
9. We're getting a jump on the CCSS by making sure we are emphasizing information books. No story books.
10. Teachers are not allowed to read aloud to students. We need to stop doing their work.
11. The 5 W's are text dependent questions: Who, What, Where, When and Why.
12. Our kids must read like detectives and write like investigative reporters. That's our curriculum and our approach.
13. All lesson plans will be reviewed to see that only close reading is being done. 
14. We need to get kids ready for the test so they will take a CCSS exam every x weeks (insert: 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10).
15. Stop asking students what they think.  It's not about their thinking. It's about the evidence in the text.
16. I teach only academic vocabulary. That's what is most important.
17. It's what the text says that is important.  We need to focus on that. What does the text say? Can you point to it?
18. This CCSS is a fad.  I try not to get too worked up when something 'new' comes along. I just close my door and teach.
19. Why are we following the ideas of someone who has never taught?
20. We allow students to only read challenging books.
21. These kids can't pass the old state test.  This new test will just put them further behind.
22. Close reading will hurt children. We need to stop this.
23. Kids need to have better vocabularies.  We need to buy vocabulary workbooks.  That's how I learned.
24. I didn't read the CCSS, but I did skim it and I think...
25. CCSS is just a way for publishers to make money. Nothing in it is any good.
26. Where's the evidence? If I have to do CCSS-based teaching I want to know where is the evidence that supports these approaches?

As I listened to these statements and directives being uttered, I wondered if the focus on reading method and writing products which have garnered so much attention doesn't oddly limit learner potential--not because CCSS is 'good or bad", but more so because such talk signals an absence of agency and will.  Across the 30 years I've taught--matters of method and product have occupied large portions of debate--often obfuscating personal and professional responsibilities by substituting choosing sides for exercising one's agency and responsibility.

We are what we do.

We can't forget that as discussions about CCSS occur.  What is it that we do each day in our respective work?  How does what we repeatedly do matter?  To whom?


Getting Beneath Method

From here.

In the CCSS, close reading is a method referred to when reading narrative and informational texts. Garnering evidence from the text is clearly privileged in the CCSS and most likely in the testing that will accompany the CCSS (PARCC and  Smarter Balance). Close reading is a term most associated with New Criticism--an Anglo-American literary theory from the last century that emphasized the belief that meaning exists on the page. For such a stance, it is the reading of the text that must be privileged, with less emphasis on the author and the reader's experience. Close reading locates the text as self-sufficient and meaning is made through careful attention to language and text structure. Garnering evidence by reading and rereading a text so as to notice textual details, language, patterns, and structure represents important ways of coming to understand.

To make meaning, attention to a text is important, and so too is attention to author and reader.  The biographical, historical, ideological, and sociocultural contexts in which a work was penned and is read inform the meaning that is made. It is the reader who makes sense of a text's language and structure and it is his/her experiences, schema, knowledge of textual strategies and the context in which the reading occurs that will each inform the meaning that is made. It is not one of these: text, author, and reader which is most important, but rather complex readings occur when reader intention is purposeful and knowledgeable. There is no escaping one's prior knowledge, regardless of ideology.  Our prior knowledge informs the understandings we construct for simple and complex texts.  Reading and rereading the text is not sufficient for making rich understandings when the requisite prior knowledge is poor. No matter how many times one rereads, the absence of relevant prior knowledge will limit meaning and/or help the reader produce misreadings.

What Do We Need to Ask Regardless of Method & Product?

Out Walking (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Learning how to read well and with authority is not simply a matter of knowing reading methods and processes, just as writing arguments is not simply a matter of knowing form. For many learners, sensitive and responsive teaching is necessary.  We may need to see/hear/sense how.  We may need to be coached.  We may need to find our own methods. We may need to try and refine our attempts.  We may need to cooperate with others.  Alongside these actions an attentive teacher can be essential.

How attentive are we?  To what are we attentive? In what ways are we knowledgeable?  No amount of described learner outcomes can substitute for what we attend to and how we understand. That rests in our hands.

Some questions to consider (generated in a random manner and hardly complete):

1. How do we actively theorize based on what we perceive learners know, misunderstand and fail to know when engaged in making meaning and when we observe and evaluate learners' expressions of that meaning? 
2. How often are learners' opinions sought when designing lessons, programs and policies?
3. In the places where we work, who are producers? Curators? Receivers? Are we inclusive?
4. What do we do when we are confronted with not understanding how, what or why learners' are progressing and/or failing to progress? 
5. Is saying we don't know allowable where we work?
6. How do we understand the complexity inherent in the acquisition of reading/writing processes and problem framing/solving strategies?
7. Are we published and/or is our work exhibited?  Do we make anything? Do we apply this knowledge to our work?
8. Do we participate in active learning beyond our workplace?
9. Which of our assumptions about knowing, teaching, learning and doing do we question?  What does that look like and lead to?
10. What is our commitment to learning? 
11. What is our commitment to learning with developed and emerging technologies? 
12. When we don't understand a teaching/learning procedure or practice, do we seek to understand what or why rather than acceding to just getting x done?
13. Do our decisions and practices telegraph that getting done is more important than understanding?
14. Are learners' achievement a shared responsibility?
15. How often do we write?  
16. How often do we read/reread?
17. How often do we fail?
18. How do we understand the complexity inherent in the critical application and evaluation of literacy processes and strategies?  
19. When a learner's close reading of a text is misinformed, how do we fashion a response that will forward not only the meaning(s) that learner is making from that text, but also that learner's independence? 
20. How do we create occasions where learners make literal, interpretive and critical understandings of text? How do we scaffold learners engaged in such work?
21. What foundational skills are necessary for literal, interpretive, and critical understandings of text and how do we measure the presence and absence of such skills? How do we provide learners with methods to develop these skills, especially those who struggle to make meaning of simple and/or complex texts?
22. What practices and policies do we adhere to when teaching learners who are experiencing difficulty learning?
23. What role does vocabulary knowledge play in making meaning of text(s) and how do we provide explicit and implicit ways to grow such knowledge?
24. What is curriculum? How is it determined?
25. What is our personal responsibility to deepen and complicate our pedagogical and content knowledge? How are we supported?
26. How do our budgets, practices, and policies support and/or limit learning? 
27. Whose voice is mostly missing from the education conversations you participate in? Why?
28. Whose voices is overly privileged in education conversations you participate in? Why?

These are a sampling of questions and ones that cannot be soothed by only attending to method.  If the CCSS represent a road map (potential or otherwise), we must also remember that we make that road by how and where we walk.

Your thoughts? Responses?

An Experiment: Thinking about School Environment

from here.

In 1915, John Dewey wrote the following about 'old education':

from here.

Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed suitable from all points of view--artistic, hygienic, and educational--to the needs of the children. We had a great deal of difficulty in finding what we needed,and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: 'I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which children work; these are all for listening'... It's all made 'for listening'--because simply studying lessons out of a book is another kind of listening;it marks the dependency of one mind upon another...If everything is on a 'listening' basis, you can have uniformity of material and method. The ear, and the book which reflects the ear, constitute the medium which is alike for all  (pp. 21-23).


So a challenge: Take a look at the classroom, school, or district where you work.  Is it designed for listening? For working?

#AskObama What If We Have it All Wrong?

I tried writing a question to President Obama and realized that what I needed to ask required more context than 140 characters might offer.  I was wondering if President Obama has the will & the courage to not emphasize standards and testing that his administration has either established or continued from the Bush years? In other words (to borrow from Reagan [clearly a first for me]} -- Can our President JUST SAY NO to standards & testing?

The USDOE and state governments have an unshakable belief in the efficacy and wisdom of national and state standards that outline "the big ideas" and list objectives organized by discrete subjects for teachers to follow. We are told that standards represent the important information to be transferred and that tests designed by companies are the best way to know if the designated information has been learned.  It's all very neat--very logical. But what if the initial assumption is inaccurate?  What if the emphasis on information-based knowledge coupled with a manic desire to test public school students every few weeks in mathematics and English Language Arts (via the PARCC Plan,60 million children ages 8 to 17, would be tested nine times a year) reduces learning, children's desire to learn, and teachers' agency to teach?

In Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown's (2011) A New Culture of Learning they explain that this new culture consists of two elements:

The first is a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything. The second is a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within these boundaries (Location 63 of 2399).

In contrast to this new culture of learning, we have the mechanistic view of education that President Obama's education policies and practices are maintaining. Thomas and Brown describe the mechanistic approach:

Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can (Location 327 of 2399).

In the Obama plan for education, schools are places where students must demonstrate they have received the Common Core Standards and can replicate them on tests given frequently across each school year.  Failure to demonstrate that the standards have been received can lead to retention, failure, cheating, dismissal, and cash bonuses depending on your role and the outcome.  This schema is based on the belief that what we know remains stable.

In contrast in the new culture of learning it is understood that "Making knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game"(Thomas & Brown, Location 503 of 2399). Instead of valuing only explicit knowledge, we must value tacit knowledge ("We know more than we can tell" (Polanyi as quoted in Thomas & Brown, 957 of 2399).

Like many others, Thomas & Brown conclude that "Students learn best when they are able to follow their passions and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment"(1038 of 2399).  It is challenging, if not impossible, to follow one's passions when federal and state standards outline what matters and in doing so exclude opportunities for the complicated process of a young person coming to know his/her passion(s) to happen.  The very absence of choice is problematic.

Applying the New Culture of Learning: Posing Questions About Things That Matter


As I have indicated in former posts, I have been interested in watching my 12 year old learn.  He is deeply involved in Minecraft and recently learned how to turn the family computer into a Minecraft server.  When I asked him how he had learned this he said that he watched a "ton of YouTube videos" and taught himself about the computer's operating system.

He told me: "It was a lot of trial and error. A lot of experimenting." 

I also wondered what motivated him to create his own server. Why did he do it?

He said he wanted a place where he and his friends and people he hasn't yet met but who also like to play Minecraft could play together and chat. The multi-player aspect of gaming matters to him and motivates him to learn and want to play.  When he first began playing Minecraft he played it as a single player.  He did this for about two months and then decided that he wanted the interaction with others in the world he was designing and building. I'm encouraged that he sees people he has yet to meet as potential friends.  We have discussed safety precautions as well as the more probable scenario that he will meet people who share his interests and who help him to widen and deepen those interests through play and chat. (See Will Richardson's 8 Shifts for Every Classroom: Shift 1: Do Talk to Strangers).

In the world he and others are building, my son made a replica of the Parthenon.  When I asked him how he built it he explained that he had downloaded different images of the Parthenon taken from different angles and then used the images to think about the exterior and interior of the structure as he built his replica. When he had a question, he did an image search.  He also said that he was disappointed as he could not figure out how to build a replica of the statue of Athena.

My son's interest in the Parthenon was tweaked when I told him that two high school students where I work had created a replica of the Palace of Fishbourne in Minecraft.  He figured out how to contact them via their server and was soon interacting with them.  He wanted to do what they had done: build a server and infuse a sense of history into the play.

Again Thomas and Brown discuss the importance and centrality of play, referencing Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens): "...play is not merely central to the human experience, it is part o f all that is meaningful in human culture. Culture...does not create play; play creates culture" (Location 1359 of 2399).

Central to my son's play in Minecraft, as well as his friends who are often at our home playing or on line playing-- is the sense of agency they possess.  What I find interesting is none of the boys would be considered honor roll students. Some self describe themselves as having reading problems and disliking reading.  Some describe themselves as being "bad in math."  Many have comments on report cards that say: Easily distracted. Not working to potential.  Some have been classified hyperactive. Yet all can design and build intricate worlds with harbors full of ships and various types of homes with rooms serving different purposes, and farms, and self-repairing bridges, and portals to name but a few things. They can do this for hours.

Thomas & Brown discussing agency explain that "unlike traditional notions of learning which position the learner as a passive agent of reception, the aporia/epiphany structure of play makes the player's agency central to the learning process, How one arrives at the epiphany is always a matter of the tacit. The ability to organize, connect, and make sense of things is a skill characteristic of a deep engagement with the tacit and the process of indwelling" (Location 1381 of 2399).

My son built a server as he is in search of a guild: a group of dedicated players who actively participate in the making of the game, framing and posing questions, using answers to generate more questions, and attending to design challenges and other problems as they arise.

So Where To?

The learning world we need to engender looks little like the structure of school we know today. It is not informed by a list of standards, regardless of how clever those standards may or may not seem to be. Learning is not satisfied by having patients receive knowledge and replicate that information on national tests.  Such passivity dulls interest.

Instead, a shift needs to happen. Instead of schools being the locus of learning, we need to be open to seeing learning opportunities beyond the classroom and valuing such experiences instead of situating them as marginal.  This means that we need to be learners as well.  There are educators I have worked with or met via social networking that I would love to have looking in as my son and his friends play.  I imagine teachers like Harry Sugar or David Wees whose keen knowledge of mathematics might shape (bound) occasions based on the game playing that might help the boys to name the mathematics they are using as well as the naive understandings they may well have.

When I think about learning that is needed, I imagine a guild as well: a collection of people who are committed to learning and connected through interests and mediated online and in person. I like the idea of a bounded environment where experimentation happens and agency is privileged. I appreciate the understanding that knowledge is changing at a rate that defies us naming it, teaching it, and regurgitating it on tests. I imagine experiential learning and tacit knowledge coupled with some explicit knowledge mattering. Instead of sitting and watching, learners (students, teachers, mentors, community based experts) would be knowing, making, and playing.

How and what should be locally determined and informed by learners' interests.

Curious as to what you think & I will continue this...

On Learning Limitations of Self

History (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

So today I was interviewed for a film that is being made about a learning initiative at the high school in the district where I work. As a photographer I was fascinated by the set up Ben and Oscar (the film makers) brought in order to tape the session. I asked a few questions about the technical end of filming and said that I knew that as a photographer, moving image, has become more and more a reality of the work. I kidded them that I really needed to learn how to shoot film and hoped when I got around to it, I could call on them for pointers.

I didn't think much more about this conversation until I was on my way home.  Commuting seems to be a good time for thinking. It occurred to me that shooting a film is risky for me and I recognized the "excuse making" I have offered instead of getting on with the new learning.  I write a lot about uncertainty, risk taking and so it smarts a bit when I have the opportunity to see myself, as tentative and resistant.

When I write about change I rarely (if ever) discuss the associated loss that accompanies change.  Years in analysis certainly showed this to be the case, and had me asking, What occupies the space between knowing x well and doing something related that is new?  I realized as I thought about learning how to film that it wasn't the new learning that was problematic, but more so all of the foibles and errors I now make as a photographer that would come into focus.  Learning something new might reveal the limitations I have as a photographer.

To learn something related to what I love to do now, I would need to reveal the imperfections and challenges I mask to some degree with photographic technique. For example, in many of my images the horizon line can be off, not parallel and I have learned how to fix this so as to not have it mar the composition. Another issue is sight. I wear reading glasses but don't shoot with them and often I will soft focus an image to compensate.  This soft focusing has become a signature of my work.  But how do you straighten a horizon line in a moving image?  How does soft focus work in film?

Learning something new will likely reveal the unresolved problems I have with the art making I love to do.

I wondered how parallel the story I am telling might be for educators who are moving from work they now do (with all the imperfections mostly hidden or covered by technique) to new ways of working which may reveal those imperfections, those hesitancies?  I thought about how I still retain agency in my story as no one is forcing me to make films.  It will be a choice.  What happens when educators are forced to learn something? When some other, more powerful, determines what the learning will be?

Some big questions for me to ponder. Wonder what you think about it, as well.

Want (M.A. Reilly, 2010)