texting as a learning tool

I am charged with teaching the ancient Indian Manusmriti, the Laws of Manu handed down sometime around 200 bce. These laws helped solidify patriarchy and the caste system of Hindu society. I can always provoke a bit of outrage in my students as they read the laws from primary source, but it's, well.... let's say it can be dry. 

To spice up this lesson, I wanted my students to engage more actively with the laws. It is easy for them to express enlightened disgust at the servile status of women that these laws imposed. I wanted them to try to see what the writer of these laws was attempting to accomplish as he set these laws in place. I wanted them to be able to criticize and defend. To contextualize. To understand the concept of dharma and its place in samsara.

I think the activity moved the depth of thinking from DOK-1 to DOK-2 and -3 as it forced kids to take a different perspective. "How could you?" "And what is the reason?" are practically embedded into the lesson. It forces students to do a bit of research and to contextualize the lesson. They also had fun doing it- and engaging kids is always half the battle. Several kids asked, "Can we do this again?" A victory! This is dry stuff for many 15 year olds.  

After reading the laws and having a preliminary discussion about them, I asked the students to use this SMS composer tool to create a text exchange between themselves and Manu- the ruler to whom these laws are, by custom, attributed. They composed text exchanges and then shared these exchanges on this Padlet wall. 

Students worked in pairs on this activity. 

World Religions

I'm teaching a months long world religions unit. It is difficult. I want to do justice to these important belief systems yet also have students think about them critically. I can't proselytize, nor should I. Yet, as we break religions down into just their practices and beliefs, we do little to capture what adherents get out of their practice.  Okay, okay, many people dutifully attend religious services only out of a sense of duty to family or heritage. But many others find deep meaning. And that's what is so hard to teach.

Religion is multi-sensory. I happen to be Catholic- a disaffected and deeply upset Catholic, but Catholic nonetheless. On reason I remain one is because Catholics at their best worship with all five senses. There's sublime (and sometimes ridiculously awful) music. There's art, incense, bread and wine and kneeling, standing, sitting and processing. Jews also worship with all 5 senses. So do the adherents of many other faiths. We mainly teach and learn with two senses. Perhaps this is one reason why it's so hard to teach about religion. There's a lived experience aspect to religion that mere words can't capture.

Yet, what's really tricky in teaching about religion is that religion itself, as Ken Wilber points out, has always performed two important but very different functions. For millennia, religion has allowed humans- through  stories and rituals- to make sense of the world, our role upon it, to understand suffering and to explain death.  This is the religion we attempt to teach in our world religion units- the religion that bolsters the self and society. But there's another aspect of religion that we don't even begin to explain. The great insight/ triumph achieved by mystics across faith traditions is religion that transcends the self instead of reinforcing the self. It's the genius of Gandhi and Francis of Assisi and Buddha and Hildegard. Something happened to these people. Yet, today, we're just as likely to call them crazy.

I teach in a school born of a religious tradition. William James called George Fox, the founder of this tradition, a spiritual genius. William James suggested that we study religion through those individuals who "have a genius for religion."  We don't talk much Fox's genius nor of anyone else's, really. Perhaps I should take William James up on his suggestion. But I know I can't. Because it isn't "history". And that's crux of the pickle in which I find myself.

Big History

Not every lesson is a homerun and that's okay.  I hit a solid line drive up the middle with this lesson that I share below. Kids learned content, tech tools, and had fun doing it. I share this with my readers because I reference three tech tools.

1. Canva
2. BigHistory
3. Google Slides

I am using the Big History Project to supplement my World History course this fall. Big History has been valuable in letting me "set the stage".  (To see a broad overview of Big History, click here.) My course kicks off with a study of ancient religions, but it was the agrarian revolution that created the milieu in which religions would be born and I used Big History materials to teach a lesson on how agriculture started in the fertile crescent and both spread and developed independently across the globe.

After a short lecture, I had students read and watch videos about the discovery and development of agriculture across the world. To demonstrate learning, I had the students create menus as if they were opening a restaurant specializing in "first foods". Students used Canva to create their menus. It took all of about 20 minutes for most students to complete the task. I like to think that this activity allowed for a "stickier" lesson.  I'm the first to admit that the assignment challenged students and DOK level 2- not the deepest level of thinking. But they liked the task, they learned about Canva and had to show their learning in a creative way. I think the lesson is a keeper.

(BTW, I used the ever flexible Google Slides to make the presentation below- the first page of this is courtesy of the amazing Template Palooza created by Ryan O'Donnell - which is chock full of fantastic templates for student and teacher use.)

Student Led Conferences

 Student led conferences aren't new, but they seem to be gaining steam. I've taken some tentative steps in this direction as I invite students to parent conferences. But this is a baby-step and I likely can't go further without institutional support.

I'm interested in what the research says about student led conferences. Are they effective? Why should schools adopt them? 

Some research suggests that parents don't particularly find traditional parent-teacher conferences all that useful and instead find them to be stressful and time-consuming. But I digress. 

The most thorough review I could find of student led conferences was this Dutch study of 130 10th grade students. (There was a separate control group of students who did not lead conferences, but only attended teacher led conferences.)  The students who led conferences prepared for these conferences by creating learning portfolios to present at the conferences. In contrast, students who attended teacher led conferences did nothing in preparation.

There were some intriguing results. Before diving into them, I want to note that these results don't measure "soft skills" nor do they examine any of the other alleged but seemingly obvious benefits of slcs such as student agency, ownership, and having students parents and teachers all on the same page (literally and figuratively). Instead, these results look at student achievement the subjects of math, Dutch and English. Interestingly, it seems that math scores improved more than the language subject scores for students who led conferences. Boys received a greater benefit than girls. And low achieving students, boys in particular, saw the greatest improvement when contrasted with the control group. 

I don't think the study fully accounts for the variable that is the portfolio. Indeed, how important a role does the preparation for the conference- the building of a personal learning portfolio-  play in the success? The metacognitive process of portfolio building would seem to have benefits whether or not it was created for a conference. 

I'm not surprised that the low-achieving students saw the most improvement. One reason of course is that high-achieving students have less room to improve.  There is a cap to highest scores. Yet, I can't help but thinking that student led conferences encourage (okay force) disaffected and disengaged students to participate in their schooling.

finding meaning

This ain't my first go around. It's my 28th. The arc of this teacher's career has had distinct phases. I put them this way.
1) Survival- first year
2) Settling In- years 2-4
3) Hitting a Stride- mastering of craft -5-15
4) Unease- Is this all there is? 16-22
5) Reinventing oneself- Finding meaning and new challenges in the work. 22- 'til now.
6) A second stride.
7) The final lap.

Okay, I guessed about the final two steps because I've not really experienced them yet. Maybe there are more than what I list here. Still, this has been my journey thus far. I was clueless at the start of my career and did things that were just stupid; I survived and had good mentors. Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou, Doug Ross. As I learned my craft - praxis- and about my craft- theory, I became a fine teacher. That third stage lasted a good 10 years for me. By my late thirties I wondered about my career path. Teaching is hard in that it doesn't offer much in the way for advancement outside of administrative work. And so, my groove became a rut and I felt stuck, truly stuck.

In some ways, I'll never be the teacher I was at age 33 again. Nor do I really want to be. I was dynamic in ways I am no longer dynamic. I can still "bring it" sometimes- but I did WAY too much talking- and really couldn't do it now even if I tried- I don't have the energy. It was an "Alex show". I performed and was perceived by many as being superb at what I did. My ego and sense of self were much too wrapped up in being the "best" teacher; I intentionally cultivated a following.

That time in my career ended years ago. I was good. I was dynamic, creative, I knew my pedagogy and was popular with kids. I was zealous in pursuit of changing my school in more progressive ways. But this teaching was also so narcissistic- I was much too wrapped up in self- and I think it damaged me.

Today, I still want to bring and share my gifts with my students. Influenced by Parker Palmer, Richard Rohr and others, I've come to know joy and contentment. I want a healthy connectedness with my students. I want to share knowledge and push them to learn and experience on their own. Of course I want kids to like me and my class. They're not going to learn without feeling some level of appreciation and connection towards me. Ego still has a healthy place in all of this. But I've made ego deflation a central part of my meditative practice these past 7 years.  I no longer desire to be "the best" at anything. I want meaning and joy.

While this meditation admittedly rambles about-  I'm quite sure I'm not alone in experiencing an arc such as the one I describe above. A teaching career can be difficult to navigate- those heady days in which I hit my stride were such a rush! But where do you go with it?  It's a dead end, but it is such a seductive dead end. I see some colleagues- young, dynamic, smart and popular- headed perhaps on my path. I hope they come out the other side feeling at ease and okay. Burn-out is an equally likely outcome.

I'm close to being an empty nester. 4 of my 5 kids are now off to college. I'll always be dad, but the job of dad is close to being done for me. I'm almost 50 and figure I have about a third of my career left. A little euphoria akin to what I felt in my salad days of teaching will be always be nice, but I will want it to be tempered with wisdom and detachment. I look forward to that second stride.

I'll let you know how it goes.

There's No Going Back

Can you really put the genie back in the bottle? The French National Assembly voted recently to ban cell phones and tablets in schools for all students 15 and under. This Guardian article points out that approximately 90% of students age 12-17 have a device in France. Yet Macron's government celebrates the idea that:

 "banning phones in schools means all children now have a legal “right to disconnect” from digital pressures during their school day."

Oh please.  What about the legal right to connect? This is just stupid. It's stupid because it doesn't help kids learn to manage devices in appropriate ways. It's stupid because we are in the midst of what some call the 4th Industrial Revolution and we are cutting kids off from the very tools that are driving this revolution.

Will it really be possible to ban technology that is even more integrated with the person? Who knows what we'll have in 2030. The tech may far outpace what we see in the video below. How long will we insist that students use only 19th century tech- the pen, paper and blackboard?

I'm reminded that it's a hard time to be a teacher. For my teachers back in the 80's, information was scarce and they were the repositories of information. Finding information required some thinking. Navigating a library's card catalog, microfiche, and stacks took some skill. Now we can just ask Google. And finding answers is easy. I know schools that kept antiquated laptops solely because they were incapable of connecting to the internet and kids couldn't cheat when typing their exams. I know it's pithy and easy to say that we should give Google-proof exams. But I'll say it anyway. Our tests should be open note and open internet. Let kids make their own meaning and play the role of expert. It's now easy to find facts. Let's stop pretending it isn't.

Look,  I know that students are distracted by tech. I know that they don't engage with each other in the the ways they used to. My classroom used to be abuzz in the morning before homeroom started with chattering kids. Now they are all on their phones. Something important and good has been lost. I do have kids put devices away upon entering homeroom, but when I do that they don't know what to do with themselves.

I know that students (and adults) who spend a lot of time on social media are more likely to be depressed. I know that technology is indeed a disruptor that threatens long established patterns.

Yet, banning phones, tablets, and connected devices teaches French students very little about how to manage technology and to use it effectively in their lives. British Luddites of the early 19th century thought that smashing machines would stop the Industrial Revolution. That's so silly in hindsight. We look back at these Luddites as noble, naive and yes, silly. This decision in France will look much the same.

Public vs. Private

My mother, my brother and my wife are public school teachers. I teach in a private/ independent school. It's little surprise to me that this study found no difference in performance by students in independent schools compared with students from public schools once parent income levels were taken into account.

So what can an independent school offer? In many cases, independent schools can offer more diverse learning environments. Again in many cases, independent schools can be more proactive and explicit in instilling moral codes. Private schools can also "catch out" kids who could disappear in larger public schools. Completely anecdotally, I've taught kids - usually misfits in public schools- who have thrived in my independent school. I've also known students who have left my school for public schools who have reported positive experiences.

For independent schools to thrive despite an increasingly difficult and likely unsustainable business model, we're going to have to do better in distinguishing ourselves.