iSchool iThink

Ms. Shah so beautifully summed up many of the ideas that were sparked from our visit to the iSchool yesterday. I would like to reiterate that at this point in my career visiting other schools and getting a sense for the possibilities and of the excitement out there is invigorating. It is amazing to me each time I visit another school how much tunnel vision I have accumulated in my home school. The PERSPECTIVE that opens up is refreshing. I am "up on the balcony" for sure. I won't repeat the same take-aways as Ms. Shah even though we took them away together... Instead I offer three more iThoughts:

1. Market Our Classes - This is an idea that has been tossed around before at UNMS, but I was happy to see it in action at iSchool. The idea is simple: create course names and more specific goals for each course. This was most evident in the iSchool's "modules", which are investigative, interdisciplinary inquiry courses around a contained theme or issue, which Ms. Shah discussed in her post. Imagine if at UNMS instead of students just having a class called "Science" for three years, each year, or better yet, each semester or quarter was named a specific course, such as "The Human Body" or even something catchier like, "How do humans survive?" Essentially, for a course like science or math, instead of having units inside the class that get stretched out, blended, and diluted, these classes can be named after catchy and memorable essential questions or inquiries. I believe this would help both teachers AND students gain clarity about goals and be more excited about content.

This idea also has unique implications for the humanities department, which I have been thinking about and playing around with for the past week. One challenge the humanities team has faced since implementing the program five years ago is how to manage the immense amount of content and skills that lie within ELA and Social Studies. Inevitably each year a pendulum swings back and forth between competing areas of content (e.g., history vs. geography; economics; writing notebooks?; nonfiction writing?; GRAMMAR?; vocabulary study; independent reading; open-research and inquiry projects, etc...) In short, something gets shortchanged each year. Splitting the course back "to normal" between ELA and Social Studies is not the answer to this dilemma. Instead, I think the creation of smaller more targeted "mini-courses" within humanities could offer a solution to make sure we target the skills and content we value most at UNMS. Which leads me to my next point...

2. Consider Implementing Concrete Quarter Semesters This is another idea that floated around the UNMS cloud a few years ago. There are two good reasons why this is something worth considering. The first is that it unifies the school in a number of ways. Imagine that the entire school is involved in a 9- or 10-week quarter course and all teachers and students are working on the same pacing throughout these weeks. This means that students would be getting repeated practice with certain "learning skills", such as how to build background knowledge, how to conduct inquiry, and how to demonstrate knowledge and reflect upon it, at the same times. Professional discussions would be enriched by having common ground on which to speak, and students would feel a surging sense of learning and accomplishment as each quarter ended in a variety of meaningful project-based learning demonstrations. This would also help us get on the road toward a long-term goal of UNMS, to create more interdisciplinary projects and learning opportunities.

The second benefit of such an idea is a tightening of school culture and practices. For example, as is often the case, units could not bleed over intended ends and drag on to a slow death; teachers would have to "stay honest" and keep learning targeted and small.  In addition, marking periods would actually measure specific chunks of learning instead of landing more arbitrarily in-between this or that unit in different classes; the school could create celebrations and benchmarks in each quarter as every student and teacher travels along the same quarter-long path. For example, maybe each quarter ends with a day of portfolio roundtables and a field day or a spirit week, or some such event.

Here is an example of what a modified humanities course MIGHT look like. (Obviously this is really just a draft of possibilities not an actual proposal.)

3. Be Deliberate About Standards I'll keep this part short since this is something that we already know we want to do, but seeing a school doing it (and a school that is not completely deluded by the sometimes arbitrariness or hard-to-measure-ness of the standards movement), gave me hope that we can do it too. In the humanities team, with the help of the more streamlined National Core Standards, we can identify all of the skills and content we want students to master at UNMS and create a master spreadsheet to track learning. Simple as pie, right?

A Visit to the NYCiSchool (sorry, this is a very long post)

I've realized that I love visiting schools and that, next to structured team meetings where I can learn from my colleagues, school visits are the best way for me to grow as an educator. These visits give me much needed perspective on the immense task of educating students and help me see "the big picture" more clearly. Today I had the opportunity to visit the NYCiSchool, a small public high school in its second year of existence. The experience was illuminating and energizing in many respects, and, as always, I was thinking about innovations that might work in our school.

Before I outline my thoughts, I should point out that the NYCiSchool and UNMS are extremely different in two important ways. The iSchool is a high school, currently 9th and 10th graders, and it is screened. UNMS is a middle school and as completely unscreened. As Alisa Berger, the principal, introduced the school, its vision, its successes, and its challenges, I kept both these points in mind. However, at the same time, much of what I saw and heard can apply to UNMS to make learning more engaging and meaningful to our students. Below are a few ideas and thoughts about implications.

1. An emphasis on "authentic" learning and problem-solving. I use quotes for "authentic" because this word gets thrown around a lot in education. However, one feature that I really liked about the iSchool is that is that it pushes for authenticity through module courses. In addition to regular English, math, history, and science classes (many of which are online) that help students pass the regents, students select interdisciplinary module courses that follow a nine week cycle. These courses teach through "challenges" that push students to solve a problem, create a tool, or analyze a debate. Some examples of module courses are "Design a Green Roof", "New York City: A Case Study in American History", and "A Call to Action: The Crisis in Zimbawe." Though we did not get to see one of these courses in action, based on the syllabus and the principal's discussion, they are engaging, rigorous, and meaningful to students. The school creates a very flexible and complicated schedule that allows for both the modules and the very test-prep driven "skills" classes that all students have to take.

For UNMS, I wonder whether an idea like this could work on some level, especially in 7th and 8th grades. Right now in humanities for example, while we push project-based learning, we often get mired in teaching the numerous basic skills and background knowledge that many students still struggle with. Often, this leaves little time for the actual inquiry and forces us to rush. But what if we designed the humanities block so that students had to pass certain "prerequisite" courses in order to take a "humanities elective" based on their interests? These prerequisite courses would fill the first half of the year, making room for electives in the second. Students who do not "pass" the prerequisites have to continue with skill-based work before they can move on to an elective. Also, book club would have clearly outlined standards-based skills (the National Core Standards have a clear set of skills that would be perfect for book club) as well to make sure students are taught all the skills they need. This system would certainly require some flexible grouping and would change the way classes are configured. Also, the prerequisite courses would have to be much more engaging that what we saw at the iSchool to meet the developmental needs of middle schoolers and our particular population. However, if students understood and bought into the purpose of the program, then perhaps something like this could increase excitement for learning at our school.

2. Articulating skills that students need to have and finding out where students are at when they enter our school. While this is an area that the iSchool is still working on, I liked the way Alisa described their method/plan for doing this. Basically, the idea is that all students come to us with different abilities, and the school's job at the beginning of 9th grade is to figure out what these are and to focus on skills that need to be learned. That means students who have more "skill-boxes" shaded in from the get-go don't need a lot of the basic instruction that other students might require.

For UNMS, this means defining skills that we think are important based on our vision and our values, and then tracking students' growth from the moment they enter our school. This is something we realized during the quality review as well, but it was interesting to see how another school is thinking about this challenge. The questions foremost to my mind with regards to skills are how do we decide? How granular do we get? How do we keep the whole tracking system manageable? While these are daunting questions, I think our school is ready to engage in them. However, the entire staff has to be on board and has to be part of the process. And whatever we create has to be student and parent friendly.

3. Building developmental milestones. This is an idea carried over from our Mott Hall II visit that continues to resonate with me. At the iSchool, students are pushed toward independence as they move through high school to prepare them for college and beyond. First, all students have internships on Wednesdays. In 9th and 10th grades, these internships are assigned by the school with participating organizations. In 11th and 12th grade, students are required to find their own internships. Also, in 11th grade students define an area of focus for an independent study with an adviser for the next two years. While this plan is still in the development stage, it sounds like it will work much like an action-research or thesis project to help make the transition to college.

In a middle school model, this might mean that 6th graders have a more restricted schedule with fewer teachers and more prerequisite courses and life-skills classes. As students move to 7th grade, they might have more teachers, more course electives open to them, and perhaps a community service requirement. By 8th grade, students have all of this and also a group inquiry project that serves as an elective course. This structure would push students toward increased independence incrementally as they make the often painful transition from elementary to high school.

Of course all of the ideas above are somewhat idealistic and present a whole new set of challenges and problems for our school. However, that's the benefit of zooming out from your school and classroom every once in a while and getting another perspective: you can remember your ideals, visualize possibilities, and feel excited about zooming back in.

"The Hurt Locker": Best Film of the Year?

 The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow won Best Picture this year at the Academy Awards. It has received rave reviews from some movie critics who believe that not only is it the best movie made so far about the Iraq War, but it might be one of the best war movies ever made. For example, a New York Times review states that the film "is the best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq" . And another movie critic, Roger Ebert, says, "The Hurt Locker is a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they're doing and why."

However, for every positive, gushing review, there have been deep criticisms of the film. After watching the movie in class, we read another piece from The New York Times, a blog post by Michael Kamber who is currently a war correspondent in Iraq. In his essay, "How Not to Depict War" he insists that The Hurt Locker "glamorizes war" by creating an action hero out of the main character, Sergeant Will James. Kamber also feels that the film is not realistic and does not show the true dangers of what soldiers face in Iraq, and he is worried that too many people think the film is accurate.

So what do you think? Is The Hurt Locker a great war film that shows us what it was like to be a soldier in Iraq in 2004, or does is present a "fake" portrait that misleads the viewer about what it's really like in Iraq? How does it compare to another controversial film that we viewed, Fahrenheit 9/11, which focuses on the Bush Administration's reasons for going to war? Is that film fair? Is it misleading? And whose responsibility is it to "tell the truth"? Should films be more "truthful" or is it our job to find out?