Today, I posted a project on DonorsChoose.org to get an iPad for my students so they can create content digitally.  The amount of technology on campus has severely limited what I have been able to do with my students.  I'm constantly running into roadblocks - I can't use Chrome. At all. The computer lab is always in use 1st period, so I have to ask the computer teacher to give up her prep so I can use her lab if I ever want them to have lab time. There is a cart of laptops that are seven years old and barely function.  There was no wifi network until today, and even then, you can't access YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Chrome.  Oh, and the number of internet leases is far lower than students using the network.  And the log-in process is 5 steps.  And different on every device.

So yeah.  It's been a frustrating year, technologically.

Getting to the point: DonorsChoose.  I posted this project about six hours ago.  Already, many of my #flipclass friends have helped out - in fact, Karl Lindgren-Streicher, John Stevens, Stacey Roshan, and Eric Pitt got me all the way to 1/3 of my funding total.  It also helps that there is a donation matching code - INSPIRE - that doubled their total.

I'm not posting this here asking for money.  I'm posting it here as a way that you can give tangibly to students who can't possibly afford something this nice.  I'm opening the door of opportunity and inviting you to share in the gift of a device that will help every freshman at East Bay Arts be creative, innovate, critical thinkers, collaborative communicators.  You get to own a piece of that.

Plus, there is research that says that giving gifts to other people will make you more happy.  It's really a win-win.

That being said, if you can't afford to donate or just don't want to, please don't feel obliged.  I like opportunities to help my friends and members of my PLN do their job a little bit better.  So I'm giving you all the chance to do the same.  And NO BIG DEAL if you can't. 

This device won't change any lives.  But it will improve the lives of over 100 students, just this year.  That's not something most people get to experience every day.

UPDATE!  In only six days, the entire project got funded.  I got the shipping confirmation yesterday, and I hope to have students making videos within the month.  Thank you to those who helped out, and thanks to the Yellow Chair Foundation for matching all donations, and thanks to everyone who retweeted and read this post.  Seriously, I'm very blessed.

Me: "Okay class, take a few minutes to add to your reading journal for Looking for Alaska."
Ethan walks up to me hesitantly.
Ethan: "There's no way out of the labyrinth, is there."
Me: "That is a fantastic question."
Ethan: "Yeah."

**

That probably doesn't mean much to you if you haven't read LfA (and if you haven't, you need to go read it.  Like now).  But the question he asked (or rather, stated) is the most central to the book.  It comes from the last words of Simon Bolivar: "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"  That question is central to the characters in the novel, and it's one with which we all wrestle at some point.

How do I live through suffering?  Is there a meaning in suffering?  How do I make it stop?  What did I do to deserve it?  Is there any way to get out of this labyrinth of suffering?

In the end of the book, John Green writes that he was born into Bolivar's labyrinth, as are we all.  It's not something we can just not experience.  So the question becomes, how do we get through the labyrinth of suffering?

That's what my 9th graders (and Andrew's 11th graders) are wrestling through right now.  Andrew and I joke that our curriculum ends up becoming a mirror for our lives all the time.  Teaching this book has become a way to understand our place in the labyrinth, and how we can best survive it.

Teaching this book also reminds me that when I was the age my students are now, I desperately needed an answer to this question.  I needed to understand why being a human sucked so much sometimes.  

Sometimes we condescend to teenagers and believe that because they are young, they can't possibly engage with the deep and meaningful questions of life.  But that's false.  In fact, whether we believe it's possible, they ARE on their own journey towards those answers.  And many of them react like the characters in the book.

Like the Colonel, they try numbing the pain.  That doesn't work.  Like Miles, they try ignoring the pain.  That also doesn't work.  Like Alaska, they try feeling the pain.  That doesn't work and leads to being paralysed with fear or anger or sadness much of the time.

One thing I've learned over the past year and a half that I've been team-teaching with Andrew is that the only to truly survive the labyrinth is in community.  In trying to articulate why it is that we collaborate, and why I believe all teachers should collaborate, I came back to this point: working closely with people who are sharing the suffering the labyrinth imposes on all of us is the only way to find meaning - and even joy! - through the pain.

Many people are driven to teaching because it's something that seems like you can get good at it.  We've all had good teachers, and most of the time, they make it look effortless.  So many people enter the teaching profession who are perfectionists by nature, or people who feel keenly their own lack of being "good enough," or who fake arrogance in order to mask just how far they fall short of their own standard, so it's no wonder that we expect teaching to be something one can perfect.  It's alluring to think that if you can just do this right, your entire world, your labyrinth, will make sense, will be meaningful, will stop hurting so damn much.

And that's a lie.  And it's why 50% of teachers leave the profession in five years.  Teaching, just like real life, is messy and difficult, and painful.  It's isolating...if you never feel like you measure up, you end up shutting your door, shutting your mouth, and putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, hoping that through your persistence you will finally end up being good enough.  That never happens.

I don't collaborate because it's easy.  I collaborate because it's how I survive the labyrinth.  I NEED people to help me take myself less seriously, to expose when my own ridiculously high standard is hurting me and my students, to take my brain crack ideas and make them real so I don't get paralysed and never do any of it.  I need someone to pull me out of the darkness of the labyrinth and remind me that there's light ahead, and if I can't make it, then they will help me.  That there's no way to be magically free of the labyrinth, but that it is built for people to face together, in community.

So I don't know how else to answer Ethan's question.  I know that there's no way out of the labyrinth except through, and I know that going through it with people who love me no matter what is the only way to not give up and let the labyrinth overwhelm me.

I also know that him asking that question is worth the entire unit.  Just for that one question.  

I can't wait to see what comes next.

Here is a presentation I gave on Saturday 10/26/13 at Fall CUE in Napa Valley.

The time my classes spent in the computer lab yesterday felt like I was Sisyphus and my students were the boulders.

Instead of pushing a boulder up a hill, I was trying to get students to transfer their Photo Journal pictures from their own devices to a Google Document.


That proved to be far more problematic than I expected it to be.  The reasons for that were many - student excuses, technology failures, network insufficiency - and not very interesting.

Today, my final class went into the lab to complete the same task.  The LAST thing I wanted was a repeat of feeling like Sisyphus.  So this is what we did.

Before we went to the lab, I presented them with the following instructions, and they took a picture or copied it down:

1. Create a document through the tmiclass.com first period page called "Photo Journal."  Upload all the pictures to that document.
2. Create a blog through your google account and send me a link to your first post (about anything).
   

Then the twist:

• If you ask me zero questions, I will give you 5 extra points.  
• If you ask me one question only, I will give you 2 extra points. 
• If your team all finishes (i.e. each person has created a document and prepared it for the photos and I have an email with a link to your blog post) before the end of class, your entire team gets 10 additional points.

We had no idea how (or if) that would work.  I expected most students to cave and ask questions.  After all, I gave them barely enough information to do each task.  We also have had almost zero lab time this year.

I did not expect that today would be the best day I've had in a computer lab ever.  Like in my entire decade of teaching. 

A few times, a student raised their hand to ask a question.  I would walk over and say, "Do you want to use a question?" and most of the time, their team would tell them to put their hand down, and then would answer any question that came up.  

I did make an exemption for a few odd technical issues, but even those were mostly solved with creative thinking and teamwork.  In the end, only two students used a question.  Out of 30.

Another of my shattered expectations was that teams would decide to hoard all the knowledge and not help other groups.  I didn't present it as a competition, but you could easily view it that way.  

I underestimated the strength of the school and class community. Hugely underestimated.

At the end of class, I asked how many students were helped by a member of their group.  Nearly every hand went up.  Then I asked how many were helped by a member of another group.  Nearly as many hands went up.  In fact, three students seemed to help someone in every single group.  These weren't the kids I would have selected as being the most likely to help others, but again - I greatly underestimated them.

After an hour, only three groups out of six were completely finished.  But the really beautiful part was that no one was left behind.  A few students had photo problems (far fewer than in the other two classes though), and a few weren't able to create a blog on the school computer (yay Windows 7 with very little memory and Chrome not allowed!).  But everyone knew how to do both tasks.

I wish I could say that Andrew and I intended this to be an object lesson pulled directly from the curriculum we've been teaching.  We didn't, but it's pretty awesome that it worked out that way.

On Monday, we finished Dan Ariely's TED talk called "What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work?"  Ariely says that when tasks are meaningful, we care about the product more.  When we are forced to face challenges and overcome obstacles, the result is far more meaningful than if we had been walked through or taken the easy way.

What we did today, wholly on accident, was create meaning.  They had to create the instructions, follow them, and then help each other do the same.  Because of that, they found the process far more enjoyable and the product far more worthwhile.  It was pretty cool to see the level of engagement and excitement in the room.  I didn't hear a negative comment about ANYTHING the entire hour.

And it was pretty freaking sweet to not feel like I spent the whole period shoving a massive boulder up a hill.  Or explaining how to upload a photo to a document for the 15309324896 time.

For the first few years of my career, I operated under the mindset best described by the following pictures:

I (mostly half-heartedly) kept a binder of work for people who missed class.  However, I would regularly tell students that if they missed class, they missed something important and rarely could it actually be made up.  Plus, I only gave ONE copy of the handouts, so if they lost one or it was destroyed by the rain on their walk home, or their little sister ripped it for her collage, they had to find a classmate and a copy machine to replace it.

The trash can sign is based on an actual sign used by a colleague of mine, and the philosophy that I embraced under her guidance (though I never used the sign).  I told students that part of my job was to help them learn to be responsible and so if I allowed work to be turned in late, I was encouraging them to be irresponsible.

Now, I look back and think that those two policies were really bad ideas.  In fact, I believe that they caused me MORE work, and harmed my students and the relationship I had with them.  The difference is that now I approach planning class through the lens of ways in which I can get students to be responsible for their own learning, and how I can help them gain the skills and knowledge they need to be critical readers, writers, and thinkers.  Through that lens, I can't justify either practice.

I still do keep a version of the "Absent Binder" but it's pretty different now.  Everything we do in class is available for students, whether through a screencast, a link to a secondary resource, pictures of my notes and what was written on the board, instructions for assignments, etc.  When I've done explanations to a small group in class, I've even recorded it using ShowMe or on my laptop with Camtasia and then posted it for the entire class.  When I read aloud in class, I record myself and post it to YouTube, or to Evernote through my LiveScribe pen.

All of that is curated into a MentorMob playlist, and posted on my class website.  If you want to see what that looks like, here is the weekly blog where I post all of this.  What that means is that my students have access to our coursework any time, and anywhere they have an internet connection.  That's not quite the same as being in class where I can give individual differentiated instruction, but it means that I leave the door of opportunity open instead of slamming it shut in their face.

I also accept any work until the end of the grading term.  And if they aren't happy with the level of mastery they demonstrated, I also accept revised work until the end of the grading term.  The only exceptions are assignments not entirely linked to a useful skill or standard - those I often will just excuse.  And frankly, those are pretty rare anyway.  

The point is this: if I assign it, then the skills are important.  If the skills are important, then why am I attaching an arbitrary time limit?  

The answer to that question is "because it's a lot more work to grade work when it comes in, rather than when it's due."  As an English teacher with California class sizes, I totally get teachers who push back and say they won't accept late work because of how much work it can be.  Last year, I had six preps and 310 students.  I know it's difficult.  But I also know it's possible.

Part of what makes it more doable for me is that I have a system for checking work.  When students are turning in an assignment after I originally collected it, I ask them to do the following:

1. If it is on paper, they need to attach it to their most recent progress report with the assignment highlighted.
2. If it is digital, they add it to their MentorMob playlist and send me an email with the link to that step.

For the paper assignments, I have a special coloured box to put them in until they are processed.  For digital assignments, I just add a label in gmail to designate it as late work and it gets filed in a folder until it's processed.  Both systems require little maintenance and a significant amount of effort on the student's part.  As it should be.

It means that I never have to explain to a parent why a student has to make something up, or how to complete it.  It means that no student can ever say "I didn't understand how to do it" or get out of it because they lost the assignment instructions.  It means that the focus is now on what they learned and produced, rather than just what we did or turned in.  Any assignment questions start with this:

1. Did you read the instructions?
2. Did you see the [resource/example/instructions] posted on my website?

I can't tell you how much time that has saved me.  And it reinforces the idea that students are the ones that need to be responsible for their learning.  

Frankly, this system does more to build community, student knowledge and skills, and make my students responsible for their own learning than a binder and trashcan ever could.

As a teacher in the flipped learning movement, I sometimes struggle with sharing what I do in class.  Especially when I am running what looks more like a teacher-centred classroom than what I would like.  

However, I've had to come to the realisation that being student-centred is about doing what the students need for where they are in their education and with the content knowledge and academic habits they bring with them.  So sometimes that looks like me being at the "front" (there is no front in my classroom) and everyone engaged in a synchronous activity.  In fact, that's what it looks like most of the time right now.

For both years Andrew and I have team-taught, we started running several minutes before even hitting the ground.  We planned to throw our students into the deep end, and then hope that they could swim as well as we wanted them to.  And yeah, that failed.  Shocking, I know.

After only a few days (it took six weeks last time), we saw that we needed to take a few steps back and build their skills before expecting them to take ownership over their learning in any meaningful way.  Since that's the ultimate goal of any class we teach, it was important enough to change enough that we could get it right.

We were already planning the first unit (for me, the entire first trimester) to be about the brain, how teenagers think, feel, and learn, and to centre around the novel Looking for Alaska, by John Green.  So we started thinking about the skills and knowledge they would need in order to start taking responsibility for their learning.  The short (and nowhere near comprehensive) list came down to:

1. Taking notes, both as annotations while reading and while taking in information from a video or in class
2. Collaborating and having academic conversations with peers
3. Establishing a procedure for writing fluency - writing without stopping or talking for 3-10 mins
4. The basics of patterning - finding patterns in a text, categorising those patterns, and starting to find meaning
5. Using information from sources accurately and effectively
6. How to work productively and independently for a short amount of time without disrupting others
7. Using technology essential to the course - Google Drive, MentorMob, YouTube, Gmail, Blogger
8. What it means to work to mastery, rather than just for completion

We gave ourselves the first trimester or so to teach and assess those skills.

As we started to plan out the unit, we thought about what content we should use for this unit.  Other than Looking for Alaska, we didn't want to use fiction, either short or long-form, or poetry (or at least not predominantly).  So we decided to focus on two things:

1. How the teenage brain operates, and how it learns
2. What the purpose of school is, and how our understanding and decision-making is (or should be) influenced by brain development

So we began to build a unit that would teach our students those concepts; however, the real focus is on the skills.  So we will watch a TED Talk on the adolescent brain, but the actual assessed skill is note-taking.  The question on the open-notes assessment is just a way of checking to make sure students see the utility of good note-taking.  We may do a piece of visual art about one of the videos we watched, but the real skill is in finding patterns and showing the main idea clearly through their art (even if it's stick figures).  All of these skills are things that are required in the Common Core standards, or lead to students becoming more critical readers, writers, and thinkers.  We also believe that regardless of whether these things are in the standards verbatim, they are the skills that literate human beings need for whatever they do after leaving high school.

Everything is leading toward the project students are undertaking that centres around this question:
What is the purpose of a high school, and what can we do to implement one change at our school to make it fit that purpose better?

That question will guide all of our study.  If you want to see what this looks like, here is the MentorMob playlist that has all the videos we're using (we do a video every day at the start of class to get students in their seats on time and focused, and also to give them something to write about if they need a topic for their daily writing warm-up.  We also have used lots of TED Talks about education and the teen brain) and many of the assignments we've created to lead them towards thinking about education and their place in their school community.  I've also started getting in the habit of taking a picture of anything I write, whether it's on the board or my own personal notes about something.  I post these for my students, and many of the steps on the playlist are the notes/instructions that I've modelled and made available for all students.

As with all our curriculum, please take what works for you and use it.  We do ask that you credit us if you take something exactly as-is.  We also acknowledge that NONE of this would be possible without having TED Talks available for free online, and without the work of many of our colleagues, particularly Karl Lindgren-Streicher, who did a version of the "What would you do to make a positive change at our school" project.  We are blessed to have such amazing people share so freely with us, and we'd like to extend the same offer to all of you.

What does that look like to you?

Probably a bad picture of a red Honda Civic parked in a cinderblock parking stall.

You know what I see?  

Community.

Let me show you two more.

See it yet?

There are two stories here, and they are more connected than they seem.

The first starts with my car.  The front tires got misaligned at some point between the Gorge in central Washington and the Bay Area when I went up at the beginning of September.  I had to wait until my first paycheck before I could do anything about it.  So I found a place that would do it if I could leave my car for a few days.

Leave my car for a few days? When I drive 70 miles round-trip to and from work? That seemed crazy.

But a solution appeared in the form of a 1996 red Honda Civic.  In my church we are in small groups called Missional Communities, and we try and live life together in a transparent and real way.  So I mentioned that I was worried about my car, and as it turns out, someone had a third car that was gathering dust that they offered to me for as long as I needed it.

So I'm driving a red Honda Civic that is 10 years older than MY red Honda Civic because community.

Continuing the car story requires adding some people.  I got a call during first period saying that instead of the $75 they quoted me, the service they recommended would be $1250.  As I was on the phone with them (with 30 freshmen listening in), I missed a call from my power company saying that the last few payments on my automatic debit hadn't gone through and they were going to shut off my power at 5 PM today.

On top of all of that, I have had two migraine days in a row.  Today's migraine was brutal.

So I made it through three periods and lunch, and decided that I needed to leave after Leadership.  I found a colleague who would cover for me (because community) and started getting stuff ready so I could walk out the door after 4th period. 

Then I got a call over the loudspeaker to come to the cafeteria.

I walked in to find my entire leadership class with balloons, streamers, and the sign and presents pictured above.  After a group hug, we all went back to class to make puppets.  Quietly.  With no lights.  And sunglasses.

They didn't know what a crappy day I had been having.  They knew that it was National Day of the Teacher, and decided that they wanted to do something special for me.  So they made gluten free desserts, some crocheted magnets, and a two minute video with all the things they liked about me...that I don't treat them like kids, that I give them responsibility, that I have a sense of humour, that I'm flexible, etc.

They also told me that they had gotten copies of Final Cut Pro so they could help me edit the weekly Ninja News videos (I'm generally up until 10:30 on Tuesday nights doing that. So this is a HUGE FREAKING DEAL and is probably the best of all the presents).

They planned that without me knowing anything about it.  And they did it because community.

**

The story I told here doesn't even include some of the people who made today less sucky - my parents helped with some of the phone calls and financial stuff and my PLN and CoLab partner were on hand for emotional support.

Speaking of CoLab Partners, Andrew is part of our class MessageMe group for Leadership.  After I sent him a picture of what they had done, he sent them this message.

Is there any way they knew what a huge freaking deal it was on a day like today? 

No.

But I do, and Andrew does, and that's enough.

And it reminds me how thankful I am for ALL of my communities - my PLN, my missional community, my family, my CoLab partner, and my students.

They are the reason I could drive to school this morning.  They are the reason that a crushing migraine feels less crushing.  They are the reason that my power is still on.

Community, especially authentic community is tough.  But it's so, so worth it.

It has become a running joke with my friend and fellow #flipclass teacher Lisa Highfill that no matter what my session at a conference is called, I end up pimping MentorMob at some point.

And it's funny because it's true.

Andrew and I have been using MentorMob to organise all of our classroom content for the last two years.  We use it when we want students to share a text with their peers.  We use it when we want to hand back essays but allow whole groups to access them easily.  We use them for maintaining an archive of posts on blogs we like.

And we use them for student portfolios.  That's where they really shine, honestly.  In a very simple format, students are able to upload files, link anything that has a web address, or even create a post that has the basic text editing features.  This allows us to grade students' work really easily.  Instead of looking for digital work in 10 different places (did you email it to me? did you remember to share it? which email address did you send it to? did you spell it right? what's the title...etc.) we made the students responsible for maintaining their work.  If it isn't there, it isn't graded.  If it isn't shared correctly, it isn't graded.  

Simple.  And the students love it.

There are just so many uses for MentorMob that I'm sure there are lots we haven't even thought of.  

I'm posting this now without links to playlists. But I will link to all the examples I have in the next day or two.  Apologies if you read this before that happens. :-)

This morning, the power went out.

The outage affected almost 25.000 people, and left us with no electricity for nearly two hours.  The kids were confused at first ("Can I still charge my phone?" "Can we watch a movie?" and my personal favourite: "I can't look that up on my phone. There's no electricity right now!"). And it did minority disrupt my plan for class - we were going to do a patterning exercise with "Hero at 30,000 Feet," and then watch particular scenes back to determine what visuals helped to create the overall effect.

So that was out.  While my laptop doesn't need electricity to run, to show it we need speakers, an LCD projector, and of course….power.  

Thankfully, Andrew and I, in co-planning our classes, had dozens of things waiting to drop into its place.  We are currently teaching exactly the same curriculum - something that wasn't really possible last year because of the vast differences between our students.  But this year, our students are pretty close in ability and need, so we are not exactly in lockstep, but we do follow a roughly similar plan most days.

Now, I work at an arts school.  Most students don't choose EBA because they are visual artists, but many do.  We also are an arts school without any visual arts classes.  We have digital media, yearbook, journalism, leadership, puppet-making (i.e. "English Support"), drama, digital music production, choir, and a wide range of student-run workshops on the monthly choice days (more on that in another post).  For a school with about 250 students, that's a pretty staggering elective offering.  

As a staff, to compensate for the fact that we don't have visual arts classes, we try to integrate the visual arts into our core classes.  So an activity Andrew and I crafted was around assessing student understanding of the TED Talks we've shown - The Mysterious Working of the Adolescent Brain, How to Learn Anything in 20 Hours, The Power of Belief - Mindset and Success, and School Kills Creativity - by depicting the most important content into a poster.  The guidelines are:

1. Must depict the important content of the video visually
2. Use words only where necessary
3. Someone looking at your poster should be able to A) tell what video it is, and B) learn all the relevant content from looking at it.
   

That's pretty challenging for densely-packed TED Talks like these.  We thought it would be good for students to practice once before the one on which they would be assessed.

Another of our daily routines is to watch a short YouTube video.  Generally, these are educational (such as many of the vlogbrothers' videos) but sometimes, they are just fun.  We asked students to choose from the list of videos we'd watched (from a library of about 30 videos) and do a visual depiction of that video.  

When the power went out, the choice became really easy.

I took these pictures while they were working on the drawings.  I call it, "No Power, Fully Engaged."