by Andrew K. Miller | Nov 12, 2011 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
“Not multicultural education, just excellent education.” — William Ayers
I had the privilege of attending (and presenting) at the National Association for Multicultural Education International Conference last week in Chicago. Moreover, I got to sit down many of the influential and founders of the organization including activist and multicultural education advocate William Ayers and “founder supreme” of NAME, Dr. Cherry Ross Goodin. My goal was not only to learn the overall trends and themes for Multicultural Education, but also practical tools that teachers can use in their classroom. In my opinion, you need to have a crucial understanding of the underlying pedagogical and historical frameworks of multicultural education to be able to institute culturally responsive strategies and lessons in your classroom.
Increased Interest
Attendance approached 1000 people, a continued increase, signaling a revitalization in the conversation and interest. Leadership programs have been formalized with a mentor/ mentee format with specific objectives to help new members get involved. Personally, I was able to meet with almost every single person involved in the leadership of NAME, from the founders and president to keynote speakers and committee chairs. It was a rare conference where you can meet the leadership up close and personal and engage in authentic and courageous conversations. Institutes and workshop topics targeted all audiences and needs from a session on the challenges of implementing GLBTQ children’s literature in the elementary classroom to a session on an innovative teacher evaluation matrix that included quality indicators for culturally responsive teaching.
Below are some tips and ideas from the two aforementioned leaders on real strategies you can become a culturally responsive education and utilize practices of multicultural education.
1. Know your students.
Of course this is a given, but Dr. Goodin expressed that knowing about the background and culture of your students is crucial to building the relationship you want so that students can achieve. Ask them questions about their culture. Find moments to have students share. In order to build achievement, you have to build respect for who your students are.
2. Analyze Jacob Lawrence’s paintings.
Ayers notes that Lawrence’s famous paintings can provide fruitful discussion about African American culture, depiction and historical representations. Art is a great tool to engage in critical conversations about race.
3. Have students create a slang dictionary.
Ayers also suggested that slang is a great window culture. I have actually done this with my students. It can provide an opportunity for students not only to share their culture with each, but create their own. It honors their knowledge about their own cultures and empowers them by letting them know, your ideas matter. Example: Scrapper (n): a low riding Buick or Cadillac, that has an amazing sound system.
4. Use the standards as your framework and then find opportunities to embed multicultural ideas, literature, and materials.
Embedded multicultural education should be the focus, noted Dr. Goodin. Start with you learning targets and see what possibilities there are to engaging in multicultural themes, literature and more. That’s the best part of standards in my opinion, they are just the start. Let’s go beyond standards to create great multicultural classroom discourse.
5. Get them going with teen poetry competitions.
Ayers mentioned the documentary Louder than a Bomb, which chronicles the journey of a high school team through competitions. At the conference, we were even privilege by students from a local high school demonstrating their own. Inspiring. It is a great opportunity to build literacy skills and honor student voice. Students have amazing stories to tell, let them tell them.
6. Controversy is coming to you. Teachers often spend time closing it off.
I think that Ayers, like Dr. Goodin, was trying to express that becoming a multicultural educator is not as hard as it seems. Subjects, issues and controversy are all around us. Allow it into the classroom. Students are already talking or thinking about them. Use it to engage students in conversations on culture.
7. Don’t ask permission.
I appreciate Dr. Goodin’s authenticity with her statement. When you do what is right, you don’t ask permission. At the same time, if you are going to engage in controversy or potential courageous conversations, find and recruit allies in administration. In fact, there may be policies in place at the district level that protect you.
All in all, I left inspired to continue my work as a multicultural educator and scholar. Just remember, it is not as hard as you think. Culture encompasses so much of who we are, and can easily be leveraged in the classroom learning. If we seek to know our students and truly value them, our classrooms in turn will reflect it in practice.
by Andrew K. Miller | Nov 12, 2011 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
We’ve heard this story before. The first thing to go in budget cuts is the visual art program or another related art. Proponents of arts education counter with the usual rhetoric on the importance of self-expression and creativity. I, myself, am a product of arts education.
From the early age of kindergarten I was in musical theater. I eventually transitioned in music as a focus, and was a choir nerd in middle school and into college. In fact, my participation in Jazz Choir kept me in school, as I struggled with depression as a young adult. I kept singing into college, where I led the jazz and a cappella ensemble, and participated in a semiprofessional jazz ensemble the Seattle Jazz Singers. Although my schedule no longer allows me to sing on a regular basis, karaoke continually calls my name. I’m sure many of you had have had a similar experience, where art remains a crucial part of your being. These stories alone say “Yes!” to arts education.
Well, I have another argument to advocate for arts education. Visual arts (as well as other arts) are an excellent discipline to build and utilize critical thinking skills. I don’t think we often give credit to the deep conceptual and interpretational thinking that goes into the creation of a piece of art, and this is often because art is treated as something separate from the core content areas. School does not need to be this way. In fact, I have recently seen two excellent ways that art can be used to wrestle with rigorous content from the core while allowing for creativity and expression.
I had the privilege of visiting High Tech High and Middle in San Diego, California. The first thing I noticed that art was vital to the culture of the school. Whether using physics content to create kinetic art with pulleys or to create 21st century resumes (see photo above), teachers embraced art as part of the culture of study.
Chris Uyeda was nice enough to sit down with me to talk about a recent chemistry project by his students. They were told that the common image of the atom was WRONG, and that they needed to create a pitch for a better representation of it. Chemistry and the study of the atom require deep conceptual thinking, some of which is hard to grasp. Chris saw art as an opportunity to have students critically think around the content to create a beautiful art piece. The student example below shows just one student’s take on a more appropriate representation of the atom through the motif of bees and beehive. Art was a great way to familiarize students with critical content they would need later in the course.
A colleague of mine, Dayna Laur, a social studies teacher at Central High School in York, Pennsylvania, worked with her art teacher colleague Katlyn Wolfgang to ingrate the study of art and politics. Edutopia featured their story and advice, and you can use some of their resources. The driving question for the project was, “How can art reflect and inform the public about policy-making agendas?” In it, the students had to collaborate across classrooms to create an art piece that had a message.
More than just making connections, the art students had to use their critical thinking skills not only to understand all the information and nuances of their public policy issue, but also to synthesize it into an art piece that conveyed a message. Students researched legislation, background information and other pertinent content. Instead of simply creating artwork with a message (which is a natural function of art), they had to wrestle first with critical content of politics and social studies before creating the art piece. Student examples are pictured above and below.
Teachers, your mission is finding ways to integrate art into the core subjects. Use your students’ creative impulses to bring a new purpose to interpreting, conceptualizing and critically thinking around content. This type of integration can work for ANY discipline. It will help to value art as not just a separate entity, but rather integral to the school culture. Art is important as a single subject, but also should be valued as core through rigorous integration. In addition to being a fulfilling part of your students’ lives, it can engage them in the core content.
by Andrew K. Miller | Nov 3, 2011 | Blog
This post originally appeared on Abeo School Change’s blog, an education design and implementation group that partners with schools and systems to make powerful learning a reality for every student. View Original >
At the iNACOL conference this last fall, I encountered many professionals asking the same question. “What does Professional Development for online teachers look like?” Many sessions addressed the topic, but most of it was around processes that were in place to train and evaluate teachers. These were great sessions and highlighted many ways to create effective systems, but many participants were disappointed. They wanted to see content. What were teachers being trained in? What do online teachers do when they participate in professional development? Great questions all. They were looking for modules to take back to their schools and districts. iNACOL recently put out a report around professional development and it too gives great indications of what online teachers need. Since we lack a plethora of content to distribute, we need to think about ways to create an effective professional development program for online teachers. As a teacher and teacher trainer in the online education world, here are some important steps I believe one must take in order to create an effective professional development.
1) Identify what good online teachers do – Take time with teachers to identify and discuss with them what online teachers do. You will hear comments like “They are in constant contact with their teachers,” or “They give useful feedback in a timely matter.” You will end up with many topics to cover.
2) Identify critical components of the school framework – Schools have a vision, and this vision is articulated in its framework which includes, of course, structures and curriculum. Perhaps your school has an iRTI structure. Perhaps you focus on PBL. Perhaps you focus on competency –based pathways. Regardless, teachers will need coaching in these areas of the school framework.
3) Analyze what teachers need – Through both feedback from teachers and things noticed while “walking the halls,” identify what teachers need to know. There is no use in covering everything, and frankly, there is not enough time. You may find that only some teachers need a certain topic, while other content will need to be pushed out to all teachers.
4) Create modules or trainings based on each of these needs – Use a competency-based pathway model to create modules based on needs the teachers. Some of these modules will call for synchronous and asynchronous learning. On a side note, ensure that if a PD session is synchronous, keep it sacred. Don’t crowd it with logistics, announcements or other pieces that might distract from focused, deep learning.
5) Show teachers what it “looks like.” – Teachers, like students, need specific models and examples. If they need help with effective communication with students, play them a recording of a model phone call. Have teachers look at a model welcome email. Show them paragraphs of ideal feedback for student work. Again, examples and models speak volumes.
6) Continue to monitor and set goals with teachers – Be authentic and transparent with teachers with the quality indicators for evaluation. Don’t do “drive by” evaluations, but instead, create a culture of continuous feedback and improvement. Partner with teachers to set goals and improve.
While all of these pieces may seem obvious to many, I see many professionals skip to step 4. Professional development should come from authentic needs and quality characteristics of online teachers. This is just a starting point in the conversation around professional development for online teachers. A major next step in this world of professional for online teacher is to create open source training resources. Although there will specific components unique to individual schools that teachers must be trained and coached in, there are some common pieces all teachers will need in the future.
by Andrew K. Miller | Oct 18, 2011 | Abeo School Change, Blog
This post originally appeared on Abeo School Change’s blog, an education design and implementation group that partners with schools and systems to make powerful learning a reality for every student. View Original >
Inquiry is a “buzz” word education, and thrown around often, but this it not because of bad intent. We really do want our students to engage in inquiry, but what does it look like? More importantly, how do we get educators to internalize the process. One of the best tools that teachers can use to not only internalize inquiry, but also DO inquiry on topics of their choice is the Inquiry Circle.
The Inquiry Circle replaces the “book club” or “book study” model with a more authentic and inquiry modeled process so there is voice and choice for teachers in terms of learning targets, but also a better understanding of inquiry. It is modeled after the PBL process as well. Here are the steps for an inquiry circle:
1) Craft a Driving Question: This question can either be created by administrators, or co-created with faculty and staff. Perhaps it is something like: “How do we make culturally responsive curriculum?” or “How do we create tasks in the classroom that truly make students college and career ready?” You can even have groups create their own questions and jigsaw the faculty and staff appropriately.
2) Entry Event: Engage participants in a intriguing video, provocative reading or similar. It can help to frame the future exploration and get participants excited about next steps.
3) Research Questions: Have teachers or groups of teachers generate questions they want to know about the topics. After generating, have them share out with other groups to help build transparency and interest.
4) Expert Groups: The DQ question is the big umbrella question of the Inquiry Circle model, but from the research questions, sub topics are formed. Have teachers choose into a subtopic group.
5) Product: How will each group share what they have learned by the end of the process. Give them a list of possible products and allow they the flexibility to choose how they are assessed and to pick a product that will be authentic and useful.
6) Facilitate Inquiry: After these initial steps, teachers must choose literature, books, and other resources to explore. Teachers will meet periodically over an extended period to share learning, engage in reading selections, and generate further questions to explore. Participants will need to find more resources and continually draft and revise their final product.
7) Present Products: After an appropriate amount of time, teachers should present their product to the entire faculty and staff. These presentations should be done by the whole expert group. Encourage creativity! Have the entire faculty, after seeing presentations, generate ideas for next steps and implementation.
In order to rethink how we use professional development time, we must have the tools to do it. The Inquiry Circle is one way to allow for collaboration, voice and choice, and focus in professional development that teachers need.
by Andrew K. Miller | Oct 17, 2011 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
In the last post I wrote, I explained many of the important in game-based learning unit. GBL continues to get national press. Game design company Valve is working on digital learning in partnership with the White House. Mashable just touted in a post that “Education needs to get its game on.” I couldn’t agree more!
I promised to give some tips on how to make one of the units in your teacher bag of tricks into a game-based unit. Before I move forward with that, I need to clarify a couple terms: game-based learning and “gamification.” Gamification is the process of applying game design principles into another field. Game-based learning is the process of using games to teach content, critical thinking, and other important outcomes. When you make a game-based learning unit, you are doing both. The entire unit, as well as the individual missions and boss levels, are gamified. They contain important principles of game design. In addition, the individual mission, quests or boss levels can be games themselves. So to summarize, what you are doing when you are creating a game-based learning unit you are not only apply overall principles of game design, but you are also using individual games.
In order to help you create your own unit, I’m going to be using an already proven effective unit by Quest to Learn from their website. So how do you start?
Begin with the End In Mind
No surprises here. You must use the Understanding By Design principles to effectively plan the GBL unit. Think about the enduring understands, learning targets, standards etc, that you want students to target and achieve by the end of the unit. GBL Units are often interdisciplinary, and target standards from a variety of subjects. For this unit the standards targeted and content knowledge are:
Social Studies
Interpret, analyze and evaluate different forms of evidence and determine which pieces are most convincing.
Apply evidence to support a theory of action (war, neutrality, or diplomacy), and understand how the choice of action affects systems.
ELA
Write and deliver a persuasive oral report in the format of a policy brief.
Use the writing process to develop and revise their writing.
Read, respond to, critique and discuss a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts.
Digital Media
Select an appropriate tool for research and presentation.
Content
Specific historic events that help us understand why Athens and Sparta developed uniquely different cultures within the same area during the same time period (e.g., Messenian Wars, Peisistratos grants rights to the poor, Thermopylae, Salamis, etc.).
The advantages and disadvantages of all the 3 resolution strategies (War, Diplomacy, Neutrality).
How to synthesize key information about the daily life, social and political organization, culture, religious beliefs, economic systems, use of land and resources, development of science and technology of Ancient Greece.
In addition, making sure to create a driving question that summarizes the game and its purpose or include essential questions. They list essential questions such as “How do the actions of one society impact other societies?” and “How can a system function within a larger system?” For a DQ I would suggest “How can we convince the Spartan Council of Elders the best course of action to take?” or something related to the objective and purpose. This leads to the next step.
Brainstorm a Rigorous Scenario
This could be your “boss level.” Your boss level needs to require students to synthesize the content they will learn from the other quests without the unit. In this case, the students will be presenting to a council of elders about war strategies that will be beneficial to Sparta. They will work in teams to critically think and collaborate as they gather evidence, consider different points of view, and ultimately come up with the best possible answer in a fictitious scenario. You will see major similarities here to PBL, but the difference here is that there is a focus on a scenario rather than an authentic current situation. This scenario is the major summative assessment, and as you can see will show that the standards and content have been learned. As you come up with this scenario, you may add or remove standards to meet the needs of the “boss level.” This scenario is also the whole frame of the unit, where all quests fit within the structure and theme.
Design Quests
Consider these quests your individual lessons and learning activities, some that you already have, some that you may need to create, some that you may need to steal! (Remember, it’s ok to steal.) Look at the skills, content and standards to craft quests to arm students with what they will need to be successful for the boss level. In these quests, you may have some modeling, direct instruction and other teacher driven activities, but make sure think outside the box in terms of what the goal of the quest could be. Yes, the major objective is to accomplish learning, but what is the more game-based learning goal? In one of their core documents about their work with Quest to Learn, the Institute of Play articulates the plethora of quests you could create as a teacher. These include:
Collect Quest Goal is to collect/harvest x resources.
Puzzle Quest Goal is to solve a problem (might also be called a Code Cracker Quest).
Share Quest Goal is to share x resources.
Drama Quest Goal is to enact a system or behavior.
Conquest Goal is to capture a territory or resource.
Spy or Scout Quest Goal is to observe and gather information and report back.
Research Quest Research a question and return with the answer. This research might take any number of forms, from questioning friends and teachers for viewpoints to reading and more.
From this you can see how easy these quests can align to the activities and learning tasks you probably already have as a teacher. Now you just need to modify them to fit within the overall challenge and scenario of the GBL unit.
Don’t Forget!
The quests, boss levels and content explained in this blog here must also include the core tenants of Game Based Learning from my last blog. Students need to be able to tinker and fail, and then get back up again. Students should be given incentives like badges and rewards for their avatar. Students should role play as characters in the scenario of the unit. When you create an engaging and fun game, it will create a “need to know” the content and allow for the inquiry process. Now get your game on and gamify the learning for your students!
by Andrew K. Miller | Oct 5, 2011 | ASCD, Blog, InService
This post originally appeared on InService, the ASCD community blog. ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization with 160,000 members in 148 countries, including professional educators from all levels and subject areas––superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.
View Original >
Why might teachers be pessimistic about setting aside valuable time for professional development?
One major reason is that teachers often have little to no role in designing their own PD. But an often even more pervasive reason is that PD time is misused or wasted on nonessential items. Here are three quick tips for maximizing the time devoted to PD:
Parking Lot: If something comes up during PD that is unrelated to the focus and can be addressed via e-mail later, put it in the parking lot.This can be a digital or physical space or a piece of paper where those requests are honored, but also put to the side, so that the time is sacred to the task at hand.
Use Digital Tools: Instead of spending 20 minutes of valuable PD time to go over logistics or schedules, capitalize on digital platforms to push out general info and announcements. Perhaps you post important information on Edmodo or a Google Doc, have your teachers read and ask questions by a certain date and time, and then come to the meeting with those answers ready. Make sure that the information being pushed out is manageable and also held in one space. This helps to make sure there isn’t password and destination overload for teachers, and ensures documentation for future return and reflection.
Set Next Steps: At the end of a PD session, set next steps with teachers that include dates and times, deliverables, and locations—perhaps a digital collaboration space to get more information or continue work. When next steps and goals are set in a concrete way and teachers can see a product connected to their PD, then the time spent working toward goals will be sacred.
How do you make sure PD time is time well spent?
Recent Comments