The topic that has been eating away at me since the day I committed to becoming a math teacher is "why isn't there more project based learning (PBL) in math?". I had seen a handful of awesome schools, but most of them did PBL everywhere except in math, that unfortunate subject that just seemed to get in the way.
Over the past couple of years, I had been moving away from my belief that it wasn't done because nobody knew how, shifting towards a different view that math was in fact something different that needed a different form of instruction. To be clear, this different form does not resemble what we do in most math classrooms now, but it isn't PBL either. My visits to High Tech High and Summit, along with my discussion with Amir at DPEA, solidified this view. I will do my best to explain what I think math instruction should be striving for. <!--Begin opinion-->
At its core, math is the study of patterns. You can look at patterns of growth and decay in a function when you discover an underlying mechanism between steps such as add 1 each time (counting, leading to a y=x equation), add 3 each time (skip counting / adding, leading to a linear equation with a slope y=3x), or double each time (multiply by 2, leading to an exponential equation y=2^x). Inverses of these core functions include logarithmic, radical, and inverse functions. Other functions include absolute value, step functions, sine waves, and many other patterns to describe how one thing changes in relation to another.
Patterns are also prevalent in Geometry. Intersections of lines create congruent angles in the same places every time. Parallel lines produce a number of identical intersections in a predictable way. Closed shapes grow the sum of their angles in a predictable, drawable way. Similarity, which is calculated through proportions, really just comes back to linear functions and the patterns discussed above.
Patterns also show up in the way you evaluate expressions. For example, 1x + 2x is similar to 1√(2) + 2√(2) and 1x² + 2x². A key rule that we rarely discuss when teaching these skills (that you must first factor the common component out, then evaluate the numberic addition) would take longer to do, but would clarify why expressions like 1√(2) + 2√(5) or 1x + 2y cannot be further simplified.
Some of the best math teaching ideas, such as 3-act lessons (http://wmh3acts.weebly.com/3-act-math.html) started by Dan Meyer and visual patterns (http://www.visualpatterns.org/) started by Fawn Nguyen, start by giving students a chance to understand a concrete situation. However, they do not stop there, instead pushing students to figure out what happens next. This may start with wild guesses, but with practice, becomes a process of figuring out the underlying mechanism of change. From here, students can test their mechanism by building out the next few steps to see if it produces what they expect. Finally, students use the growth mechanism to write an equation (such as turning "it doubles each time" into "y=2^x"). This is where observations becomes what we traditionally recognize as math, and students are armed with a powerful tool to predict far beyond what they can model in front of them (how many pennies are needed to cover the earth? or how many boxes are in step 43?). Mathematicians and people in many fields use modeling to make similarly complex predictions that they cannot easily imagine or model.
One step from this towards PBL is teachers who ask students to estimate crazy-huge numbers such as "how long of a thread would be needed to roll up into a ball of yarn the size of the earth". In these kinds of problems, students figure out some base measure, such as taking known lengths of yarn and making a ball, and taking measurements. They also look at the growth rate, so in this example, the volume grows at a rate proportional to the cube of the length. Using the starting points and growth function, along with known reference numbers such as they radius of the earth (after using dimensional analysis to convert all units to be the same), they can make their prediction in a way that they could justify and explain to others.
Another branch in the high school math picture is logic. This shows up most clearly when working with proofs in Geometry, as it is one of the few places we ask students to use generalized rules in an explicit way to make a new generalized rule. Boolean logic, the use of AND, OR, and NOT, is another place where we ask students to apply general rules to determine an outcome. When connected with probability, we can calculate the chances of one or more events occurring. Even more mathemagic happens when you introduce randomness, study the patterns present in random events, and then apply it to data collection through statistical inference.
One piece of mathematics instruction is teaching the process used to do difficult mathematics, something embodied in the idea of "productive struggle". Students need enough background to get a start in the problem and enough confidence to play with a few ideas. This is also where groupwork is highly effective, as students can bounce ideas off of each other as they try new methods of moving forward. This is different than simply plowing into a new problem and discussing when they get stuck -- it is instead a collaborative planning and experimentation process.
In my visit to Summit, I saw that one group's presentation for math class focused on this kind of group scenario. The teacher asked the group to explain the problem to the class, explain how they approached it, and walk the class through the solution (the last part looking more like a demonstration speech). After that, the group had to present on why the problem was interesting and challenging, where they struggled and how they overcame it, and what they got out of working on that problem. The problem was heavily tied to the math content they were studying, but was an application problem that reached into physics.
More generally, if you want to see how math aught to be, just go to the expert: Jo Boaler. I liked her stuff since I first came across it, but I appreciate and understand it more every day. https://www.youcubed.org/
Projects come into play when math is being applied in a more open-ended way. Ideally, this happens outside of the math classroom (science, computer science, and engineering are great places). Why? Most of the math teachers I talked to, including me, find that their students are not getting enough practice and fluency in core math skills when they spend a disproportionate amount of time on projects, causing more harm than good.
Many of the better math projects that I remember from college and witnessed this week are rooted in science or social science contexts. For example, you could study a simulation of an owl population and try to find patterns to predict the next steps. You could model a billiards ball on a computer and program in the equations that govern the system. You could calculate torque requirements for a robot. There are a host of cool things you could do, but most of the interesting ones are either covered in the "pattern recognition / estimation" above (generally a small amount of class time to complete a problem) or belong embedded in content from another subject.
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And then there is what I do now. It is a small percentage of what is above. Our curriculum is organized topically, such as by quadratics and radicals, since that seems like an appropriate way to lay out one class of problems at a time. Given the procedural instruction method (Madeline Hunter's I do, we do, you do), it makes sense. Video-based instruction is a nice improvement: the "I do" phase is now delivered at the time and pace the student needs. Mastery-based quizzing is a fantastic improvement for this system as well: the "you do" phase is checked and repeated until the student can actually do it, rather than moving on aimlessly when the teacher decides it is time. Students working on practice in groups or collaboratively on the whiteboard makes the "we do" phase something that a teacher can monitor but students can struggle with more effectively.
I'm not sure what the place is for efficient algorithms that can obscure deep understanding. For example, I can multiply any two digit number by 11 in my head by adding the digits and making in the middle number, so 72 * 11 = 7_(7+2)_2, or 792. There are reasons why this works, but when I use this trick, I don't think about them, I just execute the algorithm. We do this more commonly with students when we use the quadratic equation, factoring tricks, "combining" like terms, and strict rules (such as "never cross out terms through addition in a fraction"). All of this helps me do math faster, and when I take an ACT, I can burn through thanks to all the algorithms I was taught over the years. (For helpful examples, see Tina Cardone's Nix the Tricks).
The balance we play as math teachers is when to ask students to generalize and derive, and when to hand out the shortcut. If you go to my YouTube channel, you will find over 500 examples of me ruining a good learning opportunity for students as I provide them with a recipe on exactly what to do next. That said, I learned with examples and procedural instruction through all of my math career. I made lots of connections along the way on my own and have a very rich understanding of mathematics as a result. Without some procedural fluency from the drill-and-kill I received, I may have never been "good enough" at math to advance to interesting new challenges or become a math teacher.
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Given all of this reflection, this is what I am imagining for 9th grade math:
The baseline is rooted in patterns. It would give all students a chance to play in the physical world, look for growth mechanisms (and distinguish the many different underlying functions), and then predict much larger numbers in a way they can explain. Tasks for students need to have context (as in nearly all word problems), and answers should be right with justification, not just black and white. 3-acts, Visualpatterns, estimation problems, and Desmos lessons would all fit very natually in this framework.
Building on patterns is language around functions. We describe graphs with terms like "intercept", "zeros", "concave down", "region of increase", "increases as x goes to infinity", "axis of symmetry", "vertex", and others. These terms can be introduced as relevant questions are asked ("find the peak height of the projectile, which is called a 'vertex'") and further generalized with more questions that use the term differently. They could also be taught through more traditional video lectures and students could memorize them as baseline knowledge.
Algebraic manipulation through explicit form change and student's justification would form the second pillar. Students need to be able to distribute and factor linearly with extreme comfort, as it forms the basis of all that we do in algebra. x^2 + 4x^2 + 3x can be rewritten as (1 + 4)x^2 + (3)x, making the grouping rules clear. We can do the same with fractions: 1/4 + 2/4 can be factored out as (1 + 2)(1/4), making the answer of 3/4 painfully obvious rather than something potentially tricky (trying to remember the "rule" of whether or not to add the denominators). Equation-based thinking about equivalence needs to be practiced in many different forms as well, and notation needs to adapt with it. When you "add to both sides", the new term should be on the far right of each side, not lined up with the "like term", or it can lead to the appearance of new rules. Subtraction and division should be banned, instead simplifying to make all operations negative addition or fractional multiplication. Practicing this with one variable, multiple variables, multiple powers of a variable, and radicals in the same unit enable connections to be formed and skills strengthened.
Some skills, such as trinomial factoring, offer little return on investment at a young age. As students work toward Algebra 2 and advanced math, more in-depth time can be spent playing with the relationship between factoring and binomial distribution to analyze how form change can lead to new insights about an expression. We don't inspire this kind of mathematical curiosity right now since most students have no interest. I think this is not worth fighting for a while. Quadratics can be solved graphically or with a computer with a focus on purpose rather than calculation.
Throughout the course, students would have smaller numbers of problems to work on with higher levels of rigor. Communication of understanding could come through group presentations, conferences with the teacher, or written justification of work. The course would need to also assess students individually in the applied use of vocab and math notation.
I would love to see clarifying questions and push-back with everything I am saying here. The path forward is still muddled in my mind, and though it keeps getting clearer, I need a lot of help from anyone who took the time to read all of this. Please keep poking holes so I can continue to grow. Thank you!
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy
After a long late-night drive from San Diego to an hour north of Los Angeles, I jumped off my AirBnB air mattress, showered, shoved down a granola bar in the car, and just made it to my 9am meeting with Amir Shaeer, the guy who started Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy (DPEA). His program is an add-on to a traditional high school: students are only with him for one period each day from 9th-11th grade, and then spend 3 hours/day in the program as seniors. Structurally, the 9th-11th grade components are comparable to Project Lead the Way (PLTW) courses, but I think their curriculum is much more engaging and rigorous. The senior year component has the complexity of FIRST Robotics, but with a full-year time scale and complete mechatronic projects for every group.
I found DPEA from a the book "The New Cool" which shares the story of Amir's FIRST Robotics team (the same league I coach with), his seniors, his mentor team, and their robot. The book positions FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) as the next varsity football, something that fully engages and challenges students at a high level. DPEA's FRC team, #1717, has been competing for many years at a high level.
As a FRC coach and a teacher, I wanted to see how Amir and team put school and FRC together. At first, I was a little surprised to find out that last season was their last year of FRC -- team 1717 no longer exists! However, with everything Amir explained to me about their program and all that I observed, I think it makes perfect sense for them to stop doing FIRST programs as part of the classroom experience. More about that and the new senior experience later.
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DPEA gives up creativity for technical complexity, but then goes back to add in as much creativity as possible. For example, students build a glass-rod light sculpture. Every student uses an Arduino microcontroller, a set of LED lights, glass rods, and a block of plastic as a base. They use similar wiring and controls across all projects. This greatly simplifies the teacher time required to build the project resources and teach the entire class. It also allows students to more effectively help each other. This is necessary because the skills required to do this project are high: learning and using CAD software, milling out a block of plastic with precision, cutting and mounting the rods, learning the Arduino sketch language, learning how to wire LEDs, soldering and electronics layout, and creating the logic for the controls.
However, every sculpture has a different layout pattern of rods, different colors, and different timing patterns with the lights. Even for a single sculpture, students can create multiple different programs to run different patterns as you turn the knob on the side of the sculpture. Giving students this kind of freedom doesn't distract from the technical objectives above. However, this kind of infusion of art makes the project much more engaging and appealing than some of the PLTW projects.
One thing that is particularly impressive is the gender equity of the program, both in numbers and in practice. When I pushed more on this, he said that he used to teach "Physics" and it was 50% male / 50% female. Then, he created a new title for his course, "Engineering Physics", to better reflect what he was already doing. Only two girls were in the class. To fight this, he started inviting girls one at a time from his classes to join FRC, and from this core group, continued to advertise the program to more girls. As he developed the 9-12 program, he continued to lean on the girls he already had in the program to help tell the story so more young girls would sign up. He also made sure that projects deeply integrated the arts, something that is relevant to both boys and girls, but that tends to attract far more girls toward technical work. At this point, the program is self-sustaining. In a district with 1500 kids per year, there are 300 applications for the DPEA program with 100 accepted. The qualified applicant pool has a gender profile that matches the school. More than numbers, I see girls doing every task that boys do, and doing it at the same or high levels than boys. Though some groups are clumped by gender, girls and boys are not separated in their work as they tend to do on my robotics team. It is true, complete integration.
I enjoyed reflecting with Amir on some of the differences I saw between what he does and what other PBL programs seem to do. When he told me about the FRC robots, he talked about the precision of the parts they built and why it mattered. When he talks to students, he speaks in thousandths (of an inch), even to the point where he doesn't even say thousandths (instead just saying "650" or "give me 5 more") and students know exactly what he means. Yes, this is standard for machinists to use this as a unit of measurement, but he expects precise work from everyone around him. When things don't sound right, he slows kids down to debug and find the problem, looping back to the same group many times per hour to touch base. He moves fast, but he is always precise and exact, and his students and other teachers work the same way.
This culture extends into the way the program is designed: teacher and student minutes are better utilized here than any place I have ever seen people learning. While I was here, I saw no downtime -- classes rotate between the classroom spaces so that machines and computers are always fully utilized. Teams are further split down to pairs or individuals because there is too much work to be done to do it any other way. Students are always busy. They are not always speedy, as Amir and the others slow them down to make sure they do it right the first time, but they are efficient and they are constantly learning. The learning productivity here makes my classes look like a joke.
Back to the structure: the first three years have well-planned curriculum that all students work through. By the end of junior year, students are excellent at programming a microcontroller, wiring and soldering electronics, designing a part in CAD, and manufacturing nearly anything in metal or plastic. The kinetic art project below is an amazing example of the complexity of mechanical engineering they do, something comparable to my FRC students' dream to build "swerve drive" (module pictured as well -- both use similar mechanical principles). This provides the basis for the senior project.
For many years, Amir used FRC as the senior project. It gave students in-depth experience with many of the skills above in an exciting, high energy program. However, there were only ~10 students getting the most exciting, interesting part of the design process. In a cohort of 100 seniors, many were left machining spacers and lightening parts while most of their skills sat dormant. Last year, Amir moved to a senior project called the "Physics Carosel". The was much more effective at engaging all students by getting them to work in small teams with a very complex outcome. The final integration of the components at the end took more time than expected and left some students disengaged, but this year's new version of the project hopes to solve that. Having seen this thing run right in front of me today, you would be blown away by what an incredible piece of engineering and manufacturing this is.
One of the initially discouraging parts of DPEA is the money they seem to burn through. They have a $100,000 CNC monster router, a lab with 15 lathes and 15 mills (I would kill to take just one of each), a lab with a huge CNC mill and lathe, a laser cutter, 4 huge milling machines, two labs with 30 really intense CAD computers, a bunch of 3D printers, and other toys that make a nerd really jealous. Check out this facility:
I found DPEA from a the book "The New Cool" which shares the story of Amir's FIRST Robotics team (the same league I coach with), his seniors, his mentor team, and their robot. The book positions FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) as the next varsity football, something that fully engages and challenges students at a high level. DPEA's FRC team, #1717, has been competing for many years at a high level.
As a FRC coach and a teacher, I wanted to see how Amir and team put school and FRC together. At first, I was a little surprised to find out that last season was their last year of FRC -- team 1717 no longer exists! However, with everything Amir explained to me about their program and all that I observed, I think it makes perfect sense for them to stop doing FIRST programs as part of the classroom experience. More about that and the new senior experience later.
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DPEA gives up creativity for technical complexity, but then goes back to add in as much creativity as possible. For example, students build a glass-rod light sculpture. Every student uses an Arduino microcontroller, a set of LED lights, glass rods, and a block of plastic as a base. They use similar wiring and controls across all projects. This greatly simplifies the teacher time required to build the project resources and teach the entire class. It also allows students to more effectively help each other. This is necessary because the skills required to do this project are high: learning and using CAD software, milling out a block of plastic with precision, cutting and mounting the rods, learning the Arduino sketch language, learning how to wire LEDs, soldering and electronics layout, and creating the logic for the controls.
However, every sculpture has a different layout pattern of rods, different colors, and different timing patterns with the lights. Even for a single sculpture, students can create multiple different programs to run different patterns as you turn the knob on the side of the sculpture. Giving students this kind of freedom doesn't distract from the technical objectives above. However, this kind of infusion of art makes the project much more engaging and appealing than some of the PLTW projects.
One thing that is particularly impressive is the gender equity of the program, both in numbers and in practice. When I pushed more on this, he said that he used to teach "Physics" and it was 50% male / 50% female. Then, he created a new title for his course, "Engineering Physics", to better reflect what he was already doing. Only two girls were in the class. To fight this, he started inviting girls one at a time from his classes to join FRC, and from this core group, continued to advertise the program to more girls. As he developed the 9-12 program, he continued to lean on the girls he already had in the program to help tell the story so more young girls would sign up. He also made sure that projects deeply integrated the arts, something that is relevant to both boys and girls, but that tends to attract far more girls toward technical work. At this point, the program is self-sustaining. In a district with 1500 kids per year, there are 300 applications for the DPEA program with 100 accepted. The qualified applicant pool has a gender profile that matches the school. More than numbers, I see girls doing every task that boys do, and doing it at the same or high levels than boys. Though some groups are clumped by gender, girls and boys are not separated in their work as they tend to do on my robotics team. It is true, complete integration.
I enjoyed reflecting with Amir on some of the differences I saw between what he does and what other PBL programs seem to do. When he told me about the FRC robots, he talked about the precision of the parts they built and why it mattered. When he talks to students, he speaks in thousandths (of an inch), even to the point where he doesn't even say thousandths (instead just saying "650" or "give me 5 more") and students know exactly what he means. Yes, this is standard for machinists to use this as a unit of measurement, but he expects precise work from everyone around him. When things don't sound right, he slows kids down to debug and find the problem, looping back to the same group many times per hour to touch base. He moves fast, but he is always precise and exact, and his students and other teachers work the same way.
This culture extends into the way the program is designed: teacher and student minutes are better utilized here than any place I have ever seen people learning. While I was here, I saw no downtime -- classes rotate between the classroom spaces so that machines and computers are always fully utilized. Teams are further split down to pairs or individuals because there is too much work to be done to do it any other way. Students are always busy. They are not always speedy, as Amir and the others slow them down to make sure they do it right the first time, but they are efficient and they are constantly learning. The learning productivity here makes my classes look like a joke.
Back to the structure: the first three years have well-planned curriculum that all students work through. By the end of junior year, students are excellent at programming a microcontroller, wiring and soldering electronics, designing a part in CAD, and manufacturing nearly anything in metal or plastic. The kinetic art project below is an amazing example of the complexity of mechanical engineering they do, something comparable to my FRC students' dream to build "swerve drive" (module pictured as well -- both use similar mechanical principles). This provides the basis for the senior project.
For many years, Amir used FRC as the senior project. It gave students in-depth experience with many of the skills above in an exciting, high energy program. However, there were only ~10 students getting the most exciting, interesting part of the design process. In a cohort of 100 seniors, many were left machining spacers and lightening parts while most of their skills sat dormant. Last year, Amir moved to a senior project called the "Physics Carosel". The was much more effective at engaging all students by getting them to work in small teams with a very complex outcome. The final integration of the components at the end took more time than expected and left some students disengaged, but this year's new version of the project hopes to solve that. Having seen this thing run right in front of me today, you would be blown away by what an incredible piece of engineering and manufacturing this is.
One of the initially discouraging parts of DPEA is the money they seem to burn through. They have a $100,000 CNC monster router, a lab with 15 lathes and 15 mills (I would kill to take just one of each), a lab with a huge CNC mill and lathe, a laser cutter, 4 huge milling machines, two labs with 30 really intense CAD computers, a bunch of 3D printers, and other toys that make a nerd really jealous. Check out this facility:
The positive story is that it is not as expensive as it looks. The cheaper lathe is a little over $1000 plus hardware. The cheaper mill and digital readout are under $2500 (see Travers Tool). A lot of the other components would need major grants, but could come with time as a program develops and the need is more obvious.
Crunching the numbers further, Amir estimates the need for $1 million of operating expenses for his 400 kids beyond the districts' $8500 per-pupil-unit funding. This averages to an additional $2500 per student to cover all consumables and the extra staffing needed to make the program go. In total, with similar teacher salaries to Byron, this adds up to $11,000 per student per year to provide them with this experience, the same funding we already receive in Byron. However, like in most places, this money is pre-allocated to district administration, staff development, and teacher salaries, leaving little margin for program expansion. I would have to spend many more hours than I already have reading through all of our district finances and getting schooled by our business manager Jenn before I could pretend to understand it. The short of it is that this is very possible to pull off, and if it was achieved by pulling in some students from out-of-district via open enrollment (additional revenue with minimal new overhead), there might be cash freed up to make something like this work.
Final take-aways: DPEA is not a full school day program (yet), but they use the few hours they have with students at an incredibly high level, blowing away any school I have ever seen. The culture is focused on excellence, high performance, and precision. The students are incredibly engaged and act like professional engineers at an exciting job (so much so, that when discussing with Amir about internships that other schools do during the school year, I told him to just stick with summer internships because it would be a let-down for students to be away from here and at a job site). From a cost perspective, what they do is expensive, but not out of control. They spend about $1000 per student per class hour in the program for the school year, something that can be raised with grants + district support + private donors. With the money saved by abandoning FRC, this becomes slightly more feasible.
I think their next steps should be the construction of an "export" institute -- a team of two people who are grant-funded to take everything they are doing now and get it out into other schools. Amir wants to disrupt college since what they are doing is better than most colleges, but by making the resources available and getting training out there, high schools could also start adopting the model. It would take teams of very dedicated people at any given district to do this, but the vision of having so many students able to design incredibly complex machines at this age is amazing.
High Tech High
Day one began at High Tech High in San Diego. A student tour guide spend 2 hours with me at the relatively new High Tech High International, allowing me to chat with a number of teachers and students, before I gave myself another 3 hour self-guided tour of the original school. The short of it: they are doing a lot of really cool stuff in class, but culture change is the even greater accomplishment. I will talk about culture and curriculum in general here, but write a separate post to discuss just math and its role in PBL schools based on the synthesis of my first two days on the road.
International is a new, separate school about 100 feet away from the main building, part of an effort to replicate the school, slightly diversify the approach, and keep buildings small. More than anything, the infusion of the arts blew me away. There was not a wall in this place that wasn't covered in paint or projects, giving everything a home-y feeling. There was a handful of music practice rooms and small music classrooms equipped with all kinds of instruments, digital and acoustic. The painting room was awesome.
As I walked through, I couldn't help but feel like things were not tremendously different from our best classes in Byron. My guide told me about one of his favorite teachers that happened to be a start-to-end intense lecturer with hard tests, but you stayed riveted the whole time. Another teacher did lots of role plays and debates. There were whole class and individual projects all happening. Though the physical spaces were different, the differences were more at the school level than classroom level.
Students are grouped in advisories with about 5 students per grade together. They do not just get together once/week as a rallying point before dispersing off to do homework -- they chat about life together, do college visits as a group, go camping together, take out of state trips together, and just become a very cohesive unit. They rely on each other and their adviser for advice and support for non-academic things as well.
More than anything, there is a huge attitude set that everyone is going to a 4-year college. They do not force this, but they connect student's dreams and goals to the education required as young as possible and talk about college a ton. There isn't a guidance counselor, but the college adviser's office is in the middle of the building with a ton of exposure. Don't get me wrong: I think it would be bad for our nation if all high school students wanted 4-year degrees. However, if a student has the drive and skills for a certain career, it is not our place as a school to stop them, just to present the facts about true costs and benefits of higher education.
There is also much less focus on the nit-picky rules, like snacks in class, that get teachers into battles. Everyone is 100x more chill than at most schools. I never saw anyone appear tense or ready to burst all day.
One unique structural component is the one month internship all students have during January of their junior year and the externship that all seniors have for two months before graduation. This is very powerful, even if it is a bad experience at the time, since it gives students a sense of whether or not they might want to work in a given field. It is a great reality check.
Another unique piece, something that reminds me of Olin and many other awesome schools, is the limiting of course choice. PBL schools maximize choice in the classroom, but you get no say in which classroom you go to. This greatly simplifies team teaching, student scheduling (also saving counseling time for college support), and planning, though it makes in-course differentiation and personalized approaches to teaching become completely essential rather than good ideas.
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Over in the original building, I was greeted with more of what I expected from High Tech High: clear paired teaching at all levels, projects everywhere, chop saws in half of the classrooms, tons of windows, and students building all kinds of things. Like most PBL work, there was some inefficiency in student time, with a handful of kids blocked or waiting on things out of their control at the moment, but most had something to be working on.
Many of the teachers heavily leaned on their course websites. Students created pages on the teacher's site that tracked all of the project components and deadlines. Most projects were large, 2-4 month projects, and many were spread across two traditional periods of the day (the two subject teachers working together on the project). Teachers reused as many projects as they could year-to-year, but would also switch things up just to try new ideas or improve upon past challenges in the project flow or students learning and engagement.
Teachers and students all seemed to float across the building pretty easily. Given the San Diego weather, most rooms had external doors so students could work with more space outside, but students wandered to other rooms to get what they needed without hesitation. No passes or traditional nonsense. Teachers also roamed a bit to check in with students in different areas or touch base with their team teacher. It was clear that student teams and teacher teams communicated effectively and often. It was also clear that everyone was treated with respect and trust and they wandered around.
The biggest required subject where PBL was full force was always physics / physical science. Beyond that, other sciences, social studies, then English, and finally math. Electives were often paired with required courses to maximize project flexibility.
One thing I wondered about was Special Education services. The school still has paras and SpEd teachers working with students as most schools do. More than anything, they seemed to focus their efforts on helping students manage the social and management complexities of project based learning. As an example, one student I observed was frustrated about problems he had with his teammates and with an unexpected teacher deadline. The SpEd teacher coached him through the conversation he needed to have and then went with him to see it through since the boy's story didn't really make sense. My impromtu afternoon tour guide, a SpEd student himself, told me how they helped him transform from a "bad freshman" (he didn't do homework or care about school) to the senior he now was (he appeared to be more on-task than peers when I first ran into him and was very articulate about what he was doing and learning).
The specific projects I witnessed were pretty cool, but more than anything, I think that the way students viewed their own high school education and beyond was the key benchmark that made High Tech High so cool. Students were grounded in the reality of what they could do now, but believed they could learn and do anything with effort and practice. This is the same attitude that fueled me my entire life, and to see that in other young people cut across gender and racial lines is really awesome. The school uses PBL as an important tool, but it is NOT their "why". Instead, they focus on students' growth and future opportunities and provide all students equal access to an excellent education.
Sunday, March 6, 2016
The Journey Begins
This week, I'm coming off of an intense FIRST Robotics build season and Duluth Regional and making a tight transition to a trip that I had been dreaming about for the past 7 years -- visiting a number of the schools that I consider to be the most amazing in the country.
As I was designing and officially proposing a new 2 credit course, Grand Challenge Design, that I plan to teach next year, I found myself left with too many questions. The course is designed to give students immersive experiences working in a design team, partnered with a non-profit organization or individual who has a challenge to be solved. From there, teams will define the underlying problem they observe from their field work, invent new solutions, and iteratively test them with their clients until they successfully solve the problem.
I have a lot of experience to draw upon from my experiences with Olin College, Future Problem Solving, the Grand Challenge Scholars Program, and FIRST Robotics, but I also knew that there were passionate teachers all around the nation who already successfully adapted many of the ideas I was pursuing for the high school level. Sometimes I can be an inventor, but if it helps me make school awesome as quickly as possible, I would rather just be a thief. Thus, my dream to go see a number of awesome schools I had been collecting in my mind for years was rekindled.
After making my dream list, most of the schools I wanted to see were clustered in Southern California and the Northeast, leading my initial plan to consist of a two week trip that spanned both coasts. Knowing that our professional development budget was tight, I never considered asking for travel reimbursement, choosing instead to self-fund and just keep costs low. Despite this, the plan was shot down on the grounds that missing two weeks of block classes in the middle of the school year would be very harmful to students' learning. Though I didn't like this answer, it was fairly true. I scaled back the plan to the highest concentration area, a stretch from San Diego to the Bay Area, and received approval for a 5 day journey.
Once the plan was cleared, I started reaching out to my list to solidify visit dates. Rejection after rejection, I was not only annoyed but terrified that with all the approvals in place, I would have no where interesting to go. On a whim, I reached out on Facebook where my Olin College and other friends offered support in droves. Suddenly, I had an "in" everywhere with direct invites from close friends of teachers and school directors. Who knew that engineers could be so connected in education?
THE PLAN:
Monday 3/7: High Tech High (HTH) in San Diego.
HTH is a powerhouse in the project-based-learning (PBL) world, known widely for its highly interdiscinplinary approach to teaching and ability to get students working in teams beyond the classroom. I look to draw on my PBL experience at Olin and PBL training from the Buck Institute as I see how it all comes together and works at a public high school.
Tuesday 3/8: Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy (DPEA) in Goletta.
Monday night, I will rent a car and drive 5 hours north to Goletta, just past Los Angeles. Here, I will meet Amir Shaeer and his students at DPEA. The academy started as a few add-on classes for high school students that formed a hands-on sequence to spark a passion for engineering and provide students with the prerequisite skills to succeed in the field. The capstone project for seniors was designing a robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition, the same league I compete in with students in Byron. I am excited to see how Amir and team weave FIRST into an immersive and engaging curriculum for students during the school day.
Wednesday 3/9: (probably) Summit Public Schools, Facebook, and Alt School (Bay Area).
Tuesday night, I will get up near San Jose where I will begin to crash with a number of my Olin friends. Due to the very high concentration of amazing places between San Jose and San Francisco, I plan to double and even triple-up my meetings to squeeze all I can out of my time there. Unless I flip days with Nueva, I will start the morning visiting one of the Summit schools, a public high school that invests deeply in personalized learning. They partnered with Facebook to build out new software tools to manage this process of personalization. I hope to meet over lunch with some of these engineers to better understand the philosophy behind this tool. Finally, I'm planning to head up to Alt School, a private school founded on the idea of personalizing learning for all students in an open-ended, hands-on way. Operating more like a tech start-up than a school, they have a dedicated team of engineers whose full-time job is to build the systems that makes all of this work seamlessly. Finally, I plan to end the night visiting some Olin friends working on an early stage business incubator for education-focused start-ups. This will easily be my most exhausting day.
Thursday, 3/10: (probably) Nueva School and Singularity University (Bay Area)
One of the most amazing schools with a very strong reputation for excellence is the Nueva School. I am thankful that an Olin alum is managing their makerspace on campus. I am hoping to see how they mix traditional high-intensity academics with open-ended learning experiences in a well funded private-school setting. I know many things won't easily transfer to the Byron Public Schools budget, but the approaches and ideas surely will. In the afternoon, I am visiting an old friend who co-planned a sister cities youth conference with me back in high school. He is now working with an organization that tries to bring together some of the most talented minds to work on very challenging problems together. I am excited to see how advanced students are pushed and stretched in this new school.
Friday, 3/11: Design Tech (d.tech) and Stanford's d.School
On the last day of the trip, I am 100% focused on design. This will likely be my favorite day, as everything I know about d.tech makes me think that it is Olin College for the high school level, the goal I have been working on since deciding to become a teacher. I will round out the day with a visit to the real flagship of design education, the d.school at Stanford. Between the two, I hope to figure out a solid model to work from with my Grand Challenge Design course next year.
This week is going to be awesome. Though I have a grueling schedule and will still have fires to put out at home, I plan to stay disciplined by taking a crazy number of photos and blogging every day, maybe more, as I process and reflect in real time. I'm excited to also mix in reflection from an awesome robotics season, something I have had no chance to mentally process and reflect upon quite yet. Perhaps my long drives early in the week will give my brain a chance to put some of this to words as well.
There are a lot of details of the plan yet to be worked out, so it will be a true adventure with plenty of audibles along the way. I'm hoping and planning for wonderful conversations, crazy new ideas, and lots of excitement. Here it goes!
As I was designing and officially proposing a new 2 credit course, Grand Challenge Design, that I plan to teach next year, I found myself left with too many questions. The course is designed to give students immersive experiences working in a design team, partnered with a non-profit organization or individual who has a challenge to be solved. From there, teams will define the underlying problem they observe from their field work, invent new solutions, and iteratively test them with their clients until they successfully solve the problem.
I have a lot of experience to draw upon from my experiences with Olin College, Future Problem Solving, the Grand Challenge Scholars Program, and FIRST Robotics, but I also knew that there were passionate teachers all around the nation who already successfully adapted many of the ideas I was pursuing for the high school level. Sometimes I can be an inventor, but if it helps me make school awesome as quickly as possible, I would rather just be a thief. Thus, my dream to go see a number of awesome schools I had been collecting in my mind for years was rekindled.
After making my dream list, most of the schools I wanted to see were clustered in Southern California and the Northeast, leading my initial plan to consist of a two week trip that spanned both coasts. Knowing that our professional development budget was tight, I never considered asking for travel reimbursement, choosing instead to self-fund and just keep costs low. Despite this, the plan was shot down on the grounds that missing two weeks of block classes in the middle of the school year would be very harmful to students' learning. Though I didn't like this answer, it was fairly true. I scaled back the plan to the highest concentration area, a stretch from San Diego to the Bay Area, and received approval for a 5 day journey.
Once the plan was cleared, I started reaching out to my list to solidify visit dates. Rejection after rejection, I was not only annoyed but terrified that with all the approvals in place, I would have no where interesting to go. On a whim, I reached out on Facebook where my Olin College and other friends offered support in droves. Suddenly, I had an "in" everywhere with direct invites from close friends of teachers and school directors. Who knew that engineers could be so connected in education?
THE PLAN:
Monday 3/7: High Tech High (HTH) in San Diego.
HTH is a powerhouse in the project-based-learning (PBL) world, known widely for its highly interdiscinplinary approach to teaching and ability to get students working in teams beyond the classroom. I look to draw on my PBL experience at Olin and PBL training from the Buck Institute as I see how it all comes together and works at a public high school.
Tuesday 3/8: Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy (DPEA) in Goletta.
Monday night, I will rent a car and drive 5 hours north to Goletta, just past Los Angeles. Here, I will meet Amir Shaeer and his students at DPEA. The academy started as a few add-on classes for high school students that formed a hands-on sequence to spark a passion for engineering and provide students with the prerequisite skills to succeed in the field. The capstone project for seniors was designing a robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition, the same league I compete in with students in Byron. I am excited to see how Amir and team weave FIRST into an immersive and engaging curriculum for students during the school day.
Wednesday 3/9: (probably) Summit Public Schools, Facebook, and Alt School (Bay Area).
Tuesday night, I will get up near San Jose where I will begin to crash with a number of my Olin friends. Due to the very high concentration of amazing places between San Jose and San Francisco, I plan to double and even triple-up my meetings to squeeze all I can out of my time there. Unless I flip days with Nueva, I will start the morning visiting one of the Summit schools, a public high school that invests deeply in personalized learning. They partnered with Facebook to build out new software tools to manage this process of personalization. I hope to meet over lunch with some of these engineers to better understand the philosophy behind this tool. Finally, I'm planning to head up to Alt School, a private school founded on the idea of personalizing learning for all students in an open-ended, hands-on way. Operating more like a tech start-up than a school, they have a dedicated team of engineers whose full-time job is to build the systems that makes all of this work seamlessly. Finally, I plan to end the night visiting some Olin friends working on an early stage business incubator for education-focused start-ups. This will easily be my most exhausting day.
Thursday, 3/10: (probably) Nueva School and Singularity University (Bay Area)
One of the most amazing schools with a very strong reputation for excellence is the Nueva School. I am thankful that an Olin alum is managing their makerspace on campus. I am hoping to see how they mix traditional high-intensity academics with open-ended learning experiences in a well funded private-school setting. I know many things won't easily transfer to the Byron Public Schools budget, but the approaches and ideas surely will. In the afternoon, I am visiting an old friend who co-planned a sister cities youth conference with me back in high school. He is now working with an organization that tries to bring together some of the most talented minds to work on very challenging problems together. I am excited to see how advanced students are pushed and stretched in this new school.
Friday, 3/11: Design Tech (d.tech) and Stanford's d.School
On the last day of the trip, I am 100% focused on design. This will likely be my favorite day, as everything I know about d.tech makes me think that it is Olin College for the high school level, the goal I have been working on since deciding to become a teacher. I will round out the day with a visit to the real flagship of design education, the d.school at Stanford. Between the two, I hope to figure out a solid model to work from with my Grand Challenge Design course next year.
This week is going to be awesome. Though I have a grueling schedule and will still have fires to put out at home, I plan to stay disciplined by taking a crazy number of photos and blogging every day, maybe more, as I process and reflect in real time. I'm excited to also mix in reflection from an awesome robotics season, something I have had no chance to mentally process and reflect upon quite yet. Perhaps my long drives early in the week will give my brain a chance to put some of this to words as well.
There are a lot of details of the plan yet to be worked out, so it will be a true adventure with plenty of audibles along the way. I'm hoping and planning for wonderful conversations, crazy new ideas, and lots of excitement. Here it goes!
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Pitch Yourself
My Art of Game Design class is a 9 week course block focused on doing exactly what it sounds like: designing games. For the first three weeks of the course, each student is required to individually design a new game and share it in a 3 minute presentation to the class on Friday. For the last 5-6 weeks, students work in teams on a single game that they polish to a high level (digital games are fully programmed and have custom digital art, strategy games are balanced through excessive play-testing, physical games have 3D-printed pieces and clear, printed rules, etc.).
Sitting between the two parts of the quarter is Pitch Day. That was today.
On Pitch Day, each student gets up to 3 minutes to share a game idea, a sales pitch for why they would make a great teammate for someone else's game, or a combination of the two. About 1/3 of the students focused heavily on the game idea itself, trying to draw others to their team. The other 2/3 focused more on their own value-add with a team. It was fascinating to see students pitch their programming skills (or desire to learn), promise to dedicate an hour or more every single night to work on the team project, or desperately offer to supply a team with creative ideas and donuts during late night game design parties if they could join a team. I was worried students wouldn't take the process seriously, but it honestly felt like I sat through a 1-hour interview with 24 candidates today. Almost everyone wanted a "job".
Part of the motivation behind an effective pitch is how teaming works, something I explained in detail last week to students:
Sitting between the two parts of the quarter is Pitch Day. That was today.
On Pitch Day, each student gets up to 3 minutes to share a game idea, a sales pitch for why they would make a great teammate for someone else's game, or a combination of the two. About 1/3 of the students focused heavily on the game idea itself, trying to draw others to their team. The other 2/3 focused more on their own value-add with a team. It was fascinating to see students pitch their programming skills (or desire to learn), promise to dedicate an hour or more every single night to work on the team project, or desperately offer to supply a team with creative ideas and donuts during late night game design parties if they could join a team. I was worried students wouldn't take the process seriously, but it honestly felt like I sat through a 1-hour interview with 24 candidates today. Almost everyone wanted a "job".
Part of the motivation behind an effective pitch is how teaming works, something I explained in detail last week to students:
- Nobody is required to work on a team. It does not hurt your chance to get a good grade if you work solo. Last year, both the highest and lowest grades in the class came from students with solo games. It is not dishonorable to go it alone, though I do my best to encourage students to look for a team since it makes the class more fun and generally makes the games higher quality.
- Each team has an owner. This person makes all hiring decisions. He or she does not have to hire anybody. He or she can fire anyone on the team, but like any business, there is a long process involved in firing.
- A full time hire means that the other person is permanently on the team unless fired. To fire someone, the owner must approach me and sit through a few rounds of mediation. After several sessions, if this does not address the underlying issue, I will allow the owner to fire someone. This never had to be used last year.
- If an owner wants to hire someone but has doubts about their willingness to fully commit, they can offer an internship. This gives the other person a week and a half to meet specified criteria in order to be upgraded to a full hire. If they do not meet the criteria, they will be off the team.
- The owner cannot be fired. However, teammates can abandon an owner at any time to work on a competing game. The game rights in the class (and legally) belong fully to the game owner, so teammates will need to create a different game if they take this route.
Last year, most students worked on physical games and heavily utilized the 3D printer for game pieces. This year, 75% of students want to build something digital, most using the Unity 3D game engine. I wonder if it bothers anyone that I have never used Unity in my life, but I am supposedly the teacher of this class? So far, nobody even mentioned it. Given the high interest this year, I do plan to learn alongside the students so I can be a more helpful resource. I will also encourage students to build a new online network of game designers who can assist them as they run into challenges.
As teams start to form and ideas start to gain traction, I am excited to see where this all goes. I plan to start sharing more student work as it gets developed over the next month. Stay tuned!
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Connected Community
My grad school cohort, #WSUCohort1, recently discussed the need for connectedness and community for both teachers and students. Given one particular frame of breaking it down, I see two core reasons why someone would want to connect with other teachers:
Notice that I didn't say digitally connect, just connect. I think that connection is a human need that everyone seeks at varying levels. The digital medium offers the ability to choose any plugged-in person in the world, not just those who happen to live near you. The physical medium offers a much richer experience of connection (high fives, hugs, voice inflection, shared experiences).
When I think of other teachers interacting with each other in my Twitter timeline, I see both professional and personal connection at work at varying levels. A common thread I perceive amongst many of the most active users is teachers who cannot find the kind of connection they are seeking in their physical school, leading them to not only participate, but immerse themselves in a wider world of people who share their passion and care about them.
Getting back to our weekly #WSUCohort1 chat, my co-facilitator for the topic, Jen @JG0005, started Question #4 by asking about obstacles to creating a connected school. A lot of our discussion focused on teacher discomfort and unfamiliarity with digital tools like Twitter as a major barrier to a digitally connected school.
I asked the question:
However, my tweet above set-off a long discussion with a number of interesting points. Jen G @JG0005 looked at the angle of medium:
I think of it in a similar way to exercise: we all need it, but it meets more needs for some people than others. My wife loves to run, ski, or do anything that involves moving. It clears her mind, makes her stronger, and helps her sleep better. She is a much happier person when she is able to exercise. On the other hand, I only feel this need after not moving for 8 hours straight, and even then, it needs to either be short or part of a game to engage me. I exercise just enough to avoid early death.
For some, Twitter will fill an unmet need for professional and/or personal connection, making it more likely that the teachers will stick with it on their own. For others, this tug does not exist. This doesn't change the importance of modeling professional connection for students, giving students the opportunity to engage with others around the world, or opening yourself to a much wider set of ideas than you could ever see in just your physical network. It just means that it has to become a routine, a chore, a part of the work day, or more creatively a game. If we want to convince other teachers to engage in a social, digital community, we need to consider that many will lack the tug that so many Tweeting teachers have pushing their sails.
- Create a professional network that challenges my existing practice, brings in new ideas, and offers support in implementing my vision for my classroom.
- Create a social network of people who can really understand what I do at work and why I do it. These are people who I can care for and who can care for me beyond just classroom practice.
Notice that I didn't say digitally connect, just connect. I think that connection is a human need that everyone seeks at varying levels. The digital medium offers the ability to choose any plugged-in person in the world, not just those who happen to live near you. The physical medium offers a much richer experience of connection (high fives, hugs, voice inflection, shared experiences).
When I think of other teachers interacting with each other in my Twitter timeline, I see both professional and personal connection at work at varying levels. A common thread I perceive amongst many of the most active users is teachers who cannot find the kind of connection they are seeking in their physical school, leading them to not only participate, but immerse themselves in a wider world of people who share their passion and care about them.
Getting back to our weekly #WSUCohort1 chat, my co-facilitator for the topic, Jen @JG0005, started Question #4 by asking about obstacles to creating a connected school. A lot of our discussion focused on teacher discomfort and unfamiliarity with digital tools like Twitter as a major barrier to a digitally connected school.
I asked the question:
Most of the time, I personally do not feel the unmet need for connection at either a professional or personal level. Part of this is due to some degree of introversion and a desire for quiet thinking time, but most of it is due to having my needs met with my face-to-face personal learning network. I spent the past 4.5 years working very closely on every single course with my high school math PLC, I work daily with an all-in co-teacher, I feel very comfortable discussing ideas and concerns with my principal and school counselors, and share a building and district with many other hard-working, passionate adults seeking the best long-term outcomes for our students. More than just pushing my work, these are people who care about me, my family, and other things I am passionate about. Having a classroom right at the busiest intersection of hallways means that my greatest challenge is hiding from all of these awesome people so I can finish my work once in a while. I am overloaded with meaningful, professionally-rooted connections.Probing Q4 more - what about the "satisficing" principle: I am thrilled with my offline PLN so I don't seek it externally. #wsucohort1— Andy Pethan (@rockychat3) February 11, 2016
However, my tweet above set-off a long discussion with a number of interesting points. Jen G @JG0005 looked at the angle of medium:
Kory @korytellers brought up the importance of modeling professional, digital connection with the intention of students using it in their future:@rockychat3 @korytellers and does it have to be Twitter? could there be a couple options? Ts like choice also...#wsucohort1— Jennifer Green (@JG0005) February 11, 2016
Jen @jenhegna, our course professor and fearless tech/innovation leader in Byron, pushed back with some of the unique aspects of the digital PLN that a face to face network cannot replicate:@korytellers @rockychat3 +be their world, whether we like it or not. They need to know how to connect online. #WSUCohort1— Kory Graham (@korytellers) February 11, 2016
@korytellers @JG0005 @rockychat3 My PLN challenges, supports, & encourages me and connects me to awesome ppl not possible thru tradit means.— Jen Hegna (@jenhegna) February 12, 2016
Four days after our Twitter chat, there are still new posts being made on this thread. The topic is a hot button, as it pushes against the entire point of our class -- digital connection between teachers and classrooms. From my own reflection and the torrent of tweets coming at me since Wednesday evening, I do believe that all teachers should be part of a digital community of other teachers.@korytellers @rockychat3 @JG0005 relationships I have made and experiences I have had and brought back to the district are invaluable.— Jen Hegna (@jenhegna) February 12, 2016
I think of it in a similar way to exercise: we all need it, but it meets more needs for some people than others. My wife loves to run, ski, or do anything that involves moving. It clears her mind, makes her stronger, and helps her sleep better. She is a much happier person when she is able to exercise. On the other hand, I only feel this need after not moving for 8 hours straight, and even then, it needs to either be short or part of a game to engage me. I exercise just enough to avoid early death.
For some, Twitter will fill an unmet need for professional and/or personal connection, making it more likely that the teachers will stick with it on their own. For others, this tug does not exist. This doesn't change the importance of modeling professional connection for students, giving students the opportunity to engage with others around the world, or opening yourself to a much wider set of ideas than you could ever see in just your physical network. It just means that it has to become a routine, a chore, a part of the work day, or more creatively a game. If we want to convince other teachers to engage in a social, digital community, we need to consider that many will lack the tug that so many Tweeting teachers have pushing their sails.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Innovative Instructional Leadership
During the past semester, I started a new graduate program: the Innovative Instructional Leadership Certificate. The program was first imagined by Byron's Tech Director, Jen Hegna (@jenhegna), last fall. Through some incredible will and a lot of supporters, she managed to convince Winona State University, and by extension the entire Minnesota State College and University system, to approve a new program that prepares innovative educators. Eight months later, Jen had her first cohort. With the lack of time for Winona to advertise the program, and the awesome tuition support of our school district, our nine-student group is all from Byron.
The first course focused on Blended Learning. We explored multiple models of blended while creating our own materials. Thanks to my math department and earlier experience with Jen in Byron, I came in with some prior experience in blended. As my primary course project, I focused on rebuilding my worst Statistics unit of the year. Our final project was an open-ended Pecha Kucha-style presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each). I talked about feedback loops in learning and my vision for the future of remixed content playlists in an open-ended school environment.
The second course, Connected Educator Connected Classroom, began last week. This blog post is intended as an introduction to the blitz of posts that will appear over the next three months related to the class. The course is very flexible by design, setup in a way that will expect all of us to push forward in journey to be effectively connected professionals and to bring our students with us. I know the tools of social media and have a sizable network of awesome educators, but I still lack the buy-in that would send me in head first. I enter this class as a fairly knowledgeable skeptic, but I look forward to expanding my own perspective as I learn from an incredible professor (@jenhegna) who practices what she preaches and a cohort of other Byron educators who blow me away with their interactions in their own networks.
The first course focused on Blended Learning. We explored multiple models of blended while creating our own materials. Thanks to my math department and earlier experience with Jen in Byron, I came in with some prior experience in blended. As my primary course project, I focused on rebuilding my worst Statistics unit of the year. Our final project was an open-ended Pecha Kucha-style presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each). I talked about feedback loops in learning and my vision for the future of remixed content playlists in an open-ended school environment.
The second course, Connected Educator Connected Classroom, began last week. This blog post is intended as an introduction to the blitz of posts that will appear over the next three months related to the class. The course is very flexible by design, setup in a way that will expect all of us to push forward in journey to be effectively connected professionals and to bring our students with us. I know the tools of social media and have a sizable network of awesome educators, but I still lack the buy-in that would send me in head first. I enter this class as a fairly knowledgeable skeptic, but I look forward to expanding my own perspective as I learn from an incredible professor (@jenhegna) who practices what she preaches and a cohort of other Byron educators who blow me away with their interactions in their own networks.
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