In real time

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Abner Oakes

The other day, my wife made a comment about the time that orientation starts at my son’s new middle school. The kids are to report at 7:50 in the morning, and she wondered aloud about this time’s oddness, its disconnect from reality. Why did orientation not start, say, at 8:00? In the real world people make appointments on the hour or half hour, maybe even at quarter past or quarter of. What’s with ten of?

I then looked at the school’s bell schedule. Here’s a regular day:

The kids had to be at orientation at 7:50 since the normal school day starts at that time. But the time oddities continued. A class that starts at 8:46 and ends at 9:31? And none of the four lunch periods begin on a multiple of five.

Now, full disclosure: I’ve developed bell schedules for schools, and I remember wanting to minimize hallway passing time to maximize teaching time. So what’s driving the above schedule, that slices and dices time to the nth degree? The four minutes that kids get for passing from one period to the next. If it were five minutes, we’d see a schedule that aligned more acutely with the real world. The first class of the day would start at 7:55, not 7:54. But with four minutes of passing time and 45 minute class blocks, classes and lunch periods will not start or end on a five.

Back to that big rule about schedule building: Minimize passing time – within reason – to maximize classroom time. I will assume that my school district’s done careful study about four minutes of passing time vs. five minutes and has determined that middle schoolers can get what they need from their lockers and get to class in 240 seconds. With four minutes of passing time – as compared to five – that gives teachers eight extra minutes of instruction a day, 40 each week (or about one class period), and about 25 hours each school year (or about 33 class periods or four full days of school).

So there’s a trade off: The ludicrousness of class periods that begin at odd times, unconnected to reality, vs. more instructional time. I’m all for increased instructional time as long as (1) middle schoolers can get their act together in four minutes and (2) that teachers teach like mad for those additional 40 weekly minutes. It will be interesting to see how those two qualities play out over the course of this school year.

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Schools designed for learning

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Abner Oakes

The Comprehensive School in Joensuu

This article in Ed Week, called Form Meets Function in Finland’s New Schools, reminded me of a couple of high schools I visited when in North Carolina last year: Monstrosities. Huge. Impersonal. Architecturally and design bereft. Just boxes built next to and on top of other boxes. Sure, I get why this needs to happen. There are budgets to hew to; there are pre-approved designs, from other schools in the district; there are thousands of kids to house; there are construction schedules that need to need to be stuck to. Their design has not changed for a hundred years.

Now, contrast the ugly American schools I saw with the schools in this exhibit, developed by the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki, that described seven Finnish schools that had opened from 2001 to 2007. As the Ed Week article writes, these schools “exemplify [Finland’s] move from factory-style schools, with all classrooms and desks in rows, to contemporary campuses built to meet the pedagogical and social needs of their students and teachers.”

The Kirkkojärvi school in Espoo

So it’s not just a move away from ugly; it’s a move to design that exemplifies and aids the learning that should happen in a school. In these schools there is a focus on collaborative spaces, for both teachers and students, and there is easy access to the outside, for recess and for outdoor learning. Floor-to-ceiling windows fill classrooms and other spaces with light, building on what this 1999 report from the School Design and Planning Laboratory at the University of Georgia stated: That student performance on standardized tests is affected positively by daylight.

Sure, schools need to look like these right now, not like the soulless buildings that I visited. But the school of the future demands even more of a shift from our current design. We hear about this future school – one that’s wired, one that has students moving at different paces, one that values collaboration, one where the teacher might be more of a facilitator, less of a sage on the stage – but there’s not much movement in the States to design schools that foster this sort of approach.

The Strömberg school in Helsinki

Or at least I thought so ’til I heard from Sue Reed, a college classmate and architect at Smith and Vansant in Norwich, Vermont.

“It may be that the average school has tended to the plain, horizontal and blocky, since maybe 1950,” she wrote, but “I used to work for a firm that was involved in school work in New Hampshire and Vermont, where there is a lot of citizen involvement in boards and public meetings, schools are largely paid from from property taxes, and we were always very conscious of that we were spending money out of the pocketbooks of the local folks.  That said, schools were really interesting to  design – to organize them to the individual school’s philosophy, to make the budget stretch, to be colorful and playful, to use daylighting, to be more free to design than in custom houses.”

East Fairhaven ES in Fairhaven, MA

To illustrate her point, Sue sent me a link from Boston’s HMFH Architects that showed a slew of thoughtfully designed schools – click through to see for yourself – and she finished by saying, “This isn’t to say that the Finnish schools might not be great. But designing and building schools is complex, and judging what is ultimately success from what criteria is difficult. Just seeing some well-done professional photos, whether of the Finnish schools or Mario Torroella’s work, doesn’t really allow one to judge the whole picture.”

Thanks, Sue. I’m less grumpy now. She’s right: School design is a complex, community-centered process, and more important than nice pictures is the inclusive process that is integral to the design of any school building. And it’s good to see that there are folks in the US designing and building schools that are not so old school, the kinds of schools that kids and the adults at them deserve. Thoughtful school design shows a respect for those inside that building and a respect for and partnership with the teaching and learning happening there.

Dr. Maya Angelou Community High School in Los Angeles

The first image came from here. The Kirkkojärvi school image came from this Fast Company article. The Stromberg school image was from here. The East Fairhaven school image can be found here. Lastly, the Maya Angelou school image is from this blog.

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State Education Agencies Focusing on Technical Assistance

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Abner Oakes

My second article on the Common Core for ASCD. You can also see it here and sign up at that site to get ASCD’s Common Core-focused newsletter. Here goes:

School districts and state education agencies are developing close working relationships as they create new tools and processes for implementing the Common Core State Standards. They are discovering that they have much to learn from one another, as states watch and learn from districts working with school leaders and teachers on effective implementation and as district personnel support those at the state office as they create new training and systems for statewide rollouts of the standards.

In Missouri, just such a relationship has developed between Willard R-2 School District and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in Jefferson City, over two hours northeast of Willard.

Willard School District, about 11 miles northwest of Springfield, has 4,200 students and nine schools: five K–4 buildings, of which three are full Title I; a grades 5–6 school; a 7–8 building; one high school; and one alternative school. Danielle Sellenriek, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, has been leading the district’s work with the Common Core State Standards.

Now starting her second year at Willard, Sellenriek has previously worked with the state department of education as a regional instructional facilitator, doing professional development for districts out of one of the state’s regional centers. “When I worked with DESE,” Sellenriek says, “I was a part of the assessment division and worked with about 90 school districts on the state assessment and its oversight. In that role is when I first met the people at Willard.”

Sellenriek moved from the professional development center to Willard as an assessment specialist. She built on the work that she had started at Willard with districtwide common formative and summative assessments, deconstructing with the district the state’s grade level expectations standards and creating a process that would soon be ideal for work with the Common Core State Standards.

Using the state’s grade-level expectations, Sellenriek and her Willard colleagues created formative and summative assessments around units of studies and clustered standards, with pacing charts, essential questions, learner objectives, and other parts of thoughtful, actionable units. When the state adopted the Common Core State Standards, Sellenriek and the team leaders from Willard transitioned into the new standards, shifting their work from the grade-level expectations to the Common Core. “It made sense to incorporate the two lines of work,” says Sellenriek.

As other small districts have done, Willard ensured that people from several school buildings were involved in this work. Master teachers represented the different content areas of each school. Instructional coaches and administrators from Willard schools and the district office were also involved. Once trainers were prepared, they went to the individual schools and trained their colleagues. Kent Medlin, Willard’s superintendent, was also very engaged and supportive.

But unlike at other small districts, Willard also had another partner in this process: personnel from the state education office. Not only did the state office assist with the development and delivery of this work, but it also used what they discovered as a pilot for work with other districts across the state of Missouri. Diane Audsley, a Communication Arts Consultant at DESE, a former colleague of Sellenriek’s, and the lead contact between Willard and DESE, says that the state office was “looking for a district to work with, for piloting ways to help teachers understand new things coming down the road with the Common Core.”

“We wanted to know: What kinds of information and materials would be most helpful to teachers so that they really understand the shifts happening with the new English language arts [ELA] standards?” says Audsley. “And what is going to help those teachers make those shifts?”

“The state department has always been very collaborative,” said Sellenriek about her work with Audsley and DESE. “People at the state office function in the real world and used our work as action research, to create a structure that they can use around the rest of the state.”

Sellenriek, Audsley, and Willard School District colleagues developed a professional development series around the Common Core State Standards, with the focus on ELA at the elementary level and math and ELA at the high school level, and then Sellenriek and Audsley cotrained. This process allowed Sellenriek to access resources from the state office and Audsley to see closely what was happening on the ground in a district, as she and her DESE colleagues planned for a statewide Common Core rollout.

“With this training, we provided a really strong overview of the shifts that were taking place with the Common Core,” says Audsley. “When we began this work, we were very much on the same page, and teachers came to a much deeper understating of the instructional shifts that would need to happen.”

Audsley continues, “Interestingly, what Danielle and I did not anticipate was just how thirsty teachers would be for knowledge, so much so that they got out ahead of us.”

As for the statewide rollout this summer, DESE is taking what was done with Willard, modifying the materials as needed for a statewide audience, and delivering a series of train-the-trainer events to curriculum directors from larger districts and professional development trainers from the state’s professional development centers. Both groups then will go out and train their own cohorts of people.

Sellenriek could not be more positive about her work with people from the state office. “For us here at Willard, it is about being collaborative and proactive and moving forward,” she says. “We are working for our students and their future.”

Audsley feels the same way and sees her work with Willard as a metaphor for what is happening across the country, given each state’s common goal of implementing the Common Core State Standards. She sums up: “We developed and are now sharing that work, all over our state, and other states are doing the same, given that we all have the same goal, effective implementation of the Common Core State Standards.”

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Teaching cursive and handwriting

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Abner Oakes

My handwriting is awful. Just awful. I signed some forms at the doctor’s office last week, and the nurse looked at my signature and commented that I “should’ve been a doctor.” I guess the cursive writing instruction I got back in elementary school just did not stick, as I often, when not writing on the computer, write in block letters or my own odd mix of bad cursive and block. Blursive, I guess. Which sounds sort of how it looks.

A friend and father of one of my son’s classmates asked me the other day, “Just why do schools continue to teach cursive writing, given that writing on computers is what people will do in the real world?” It’s a fair question, even more so with the advent of the Common Core State Standards and the pushing of keyboarding and other tech-based literacy skills. This blog at Hanover Research did a nice job summarizing the pros and cons to the teaching of cursive: On the con side, (1) it’s not a 21st century skill, per the Common Core, (2) it wastes valuable class time, and (3) kids can get by without cursive. On the pro side, (1) it helps develop motor skills, (2) it’s a useful back up skill, and (3) it connects writing to reading, such as assisting with word-order comprehension.

But what does the research say about the teaching of handwriting and its impact on students and learning? I found this piece in Ed Week, called Summit to Make a Case for Teaching Handwriting, which chronicled a Washington, DC summit that took place on January 23, 2012, National Handwriting Day, and was sponsored by the American Association of School Administrators and Zaner-Bloser, a company that produces a handwriting curriculum.

The white paper from the summit did a really nice job of convincing me that the teaching of handwriting is pretty important at the early grade levels, on a variety of levels. Here are a few statements from the paper:

  • “Research findings suggest that self-generated action, in the form of handwriting, is a crucial component in setting up brain systems for reading acquisition…handwriting appears to contribute to reading fluency by activating visual perception of letters and improving children’s accuracy and speed for recognizing letters.”
  • “Handwriting influences a student’s ability to write words, thereby improving the ability to transform ideas into written language by constructing multi-word sentences…teaching [writing] resulted in improved fluency and an increase in the quantity of students’ writing.”
  • “In addition to an evolving body of research that demonstrates a link between handwriting and brain functioning, experts suggest that handwriting lightens a student’s cognitive load. With consistent handwriting practice, the processes involved become less demanding and more automatic, enabling students to devote a higher amount of neurological resources to critical thinking and thought
    organization.”

But I also wondered: Did the above also apply to keyboarding? That is: Can the literacy connections attributed to the teaching of handwriting also emerge from the teaching of keyboarding?

In short, some. Kids learn to read, kids learn to write, and keyboarding can be a great tool for accelerating that writing. Studies have found a positive correlation between word processing and the quality, quantity, and positive attitude toward writing. The researcher James Kulik reports a positive correlation, for example, between writing skill and use of word processing prompts. (See his paper, Effects of Using Instructional Technology in Elementary and Secondary Schools: What Controlled Evaluation Studies Say.) And while she was writing about keyboarding for students with “non-verbal and visual-spatial learning strengths,” Elspeth Sladden stated that, “Becoming confident and competent at using…computer skills builds self-esteem. It also aids organization and work study skills, as the computer permits verbal and linear information to be displayed in graphic mode,” qualities that can benefit all learners.

But it seems that starting keyboarding at the right time is critical. John McIlvain and Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain write that keyboarding “is not to be confused with writing. The word processor is a tool to aid in the writing process by making it faster, more accurate (with spell and grammar check), more editable, and more easily distributed (perhaps its biggest asset)…In moving from the concrete to the associative in 9-11 year old spurt of intellectual growth, students are beginning to make associative connections…At this stage, keyboarding has a place in their development. One of its foci should be increasingly upon creating meaning at the keyboard,” with the creation of authentic texts.

So, yes: Teach kids to write, obviously, and even teach them cursive. There’s a lot of important development stuff that happens when they pick up a pencil and put it to paper. And when they’re developmentally ready, teach them keyboarding, to aid fluency, efficiency, confidence, self-esteem – and to prepare students for a world that demands that they use a keyboard.

I got the above image here.

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Oklahoma!

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Abner Oakes

Last week, my son’s fifth grade class put on the show Oklahoma. This show and those that had come before are part of an annual year-end ritual at our little elementary school, the fifth grade musical. The show was double cast, and each cast had a day that they did the show twice, one performance during the day for students and another in the evening for parents and guests. Students not only acted but also did make up, ran the lights, pulled the curtains, and took care of other technical issues. Several adults were instrumental, particularly the school’s hard-working music teacher and two fifth grade teachers.

As a parent at this school for the last six years, I was aware of the musical but just did not get the hullabaloo that surrounded it. I remember saying to myself: OK, so there’s a year-end musical – yeah, yeah, yeah. Just what is the big deal? Well, now I get it. Boy, do I get it. And as wonderful as the performances themselves were, all that bubbled beneath those performances – the ritual of the year-end musical, the work that preceded the performances, the show Oklahoma and its messages – were just as wonderful and even more powerful.

High steppin' cowboys and farmers. Copyright of David Baratz.

I’ve written about year-end rituals before, and the fifth grade musical is just one more at this school that closes an important chapter for the students. They work intensely over several months on the show, collaborating with peers, teachers, and parents on the year’s biggest project, a project that has a real-world exhibition at the end, the four performances. While this school project is not about biomes or acute and obtuse angles, it does encompass many skills that students need to succeed in school and in life: speaking and listening, for example, and the ability to work cooperatively with a team. There are also the personal qualities that can develop through this kind of extended project: responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity and honesty.

Just as the kids (and their families) need this closing ritual, so does the school. This tradition of the year-end musical helps to define the school and the qualities that set it apart from other places, that make it special. I think about the importance of community at this school and how the musical epitomizes that quality, with all fifth graders and innumerable parents and staff members taking part. Even past participants can not escape that quality, as middle schoolers were in the audience the other night, reliving their experiences with the musical. And the younger students in the audience, siblings of those on stage, were learning this ritual and preparing to undertake it in a few years and transmit it to another set of students.

End-of-show hat toss. Copyright of David Baratz.

Lastly: Perhaps unbeknownst to her when the music teacher selected Oklahoma back in the fall is just what the show says about the American ethos and how that can be applied to these young people as they emerge from this cocoon of a school and head off to middle school. For me the musical is about a lot of things: That darn and eternal American quality of optimism, epitomized by Curley’s very first song, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. The tension between the ranchers and farmers, between the dark inside of Jud’s smokehouse and the open expanse of the Oklahoma territory, its fields and meadows and wide open skies. And then there are the dreams and imagination and hopes of these characters, as they conjure up fancy surreys and their futures in the United States.

How can that not apply to our kids as they load up their wagons and begin the trek from cozy elementary school to the far-ranging plains of middle and then high school? As they put into action their hopes and dreams, as they stake their own territory. Oklahoma served as an exclamatory end to their time in elementary school, the curtain closing on that final song, but it was also preparatory, reinforcing skills that they’d been taught during the year, during their tenure at the school, skills to use far into the future.

So, what’s your school’s culminating performance, its year-end ritual? Sure, the one I witnessed was a ton of work for teachers, staff, students, and parents, but not only was the final product spectacular, but the process to get to it was instructive, difficult, fun, and full of risks – all that school should be.

OK, enough highfalutin talk, as Aunt Eller might say. Let’s just sing – and be sure that you do so with “Plenty of heart and plenty of hope!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrDVzbeDzRk

Photographs courtesy of my friend and great photographer David Baratz.

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Young Adult Literature or The Hunger Games Explained

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Abner Oakes

The Knife of Never Letting Go

My college classmate Ann Jacobus writes and writes about Young Adult literature, and I got the OK to re-purpose the below piece that she’d written for my college class’s newsletter. You can find Ann at www.annjacobus.com and www.readerkidz.com. Here goes – and thanks, Ann!

The world is made of stories, not atoms, poet Muriel Rukeyser once noted. If you like stories, especially strong and fast-paced fiction, often dark and only less graphically x-rated than adult offerings, then according to many in the publishing industry, current Young Adult (YA) literature is where the action and innovation is.

Not a genre, YA is a category encompassing gritty realism, romance, sci fi, biography, fantasy, historical fiction, etc. YA (or kidlit in general) is defined as literature with a young protagonist, and according to Wikipedia “theme and style are often subordinated to the more tangible elements of plot, setting, and character.” While I disagree about theme, it’s truer about style. Younger readers tend to be more impatient. They want the story, not fancy footwork.

Feed

YA has changed since we were YAs (the bad news is that a story set in even the early 90s is considered “historical”). YA was ground-broken by J. D. Salinger and then firmly established by Robert Cormier, S.E. Hinton, and Judy Blume. No doubt many of us read these authors back in the day.

In the last decade and a half, the category has gone ballistic. Many adult authors now “cross-under” – Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, and Isabelle Allende, to name a few. They make a much better go of it than the celebrity authors who by and large (there are exceptions) produce awful stuff and give kidlit a bad name.

As you know, jillions of copies have been sold of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which if you haven’t, is a great read. Then came Twilight. Some authors sniff at the writing, but Meyers brilliantly rendered lust, for young female readers, metaphorically into the much safer blood-sucking.

And now Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. I recommend the first book highly. It showcases a strong and sympathetic protagonist, high stakes, nonstop action, fast pacing, great secondary characters, romance, excellent world-building, and tight writing. It’s a good book.

The House of the Scorpion

Some adults have despairingly noted the preponderance lately of dark dystopian YA fiction. It’s true. And teen readers gravitate to it like to the house of a sophomore with out-of-town parents. But is it a sign of the collapse of modern civilization? Nope. Really. Dystopian worlds mirror many young peoples’ morphing internal view of the world. Don’t you remember? As we emerged from childhood, it dawned on us that adult society is cold, corrupt, and cynical, not to mention war-like. We often reacted with adamant idealism. Main characters in dystopian stories are usually strong and full of hope – they have to be – to fight and change a world gone wrong. Teens love it. And it’s the stuff of great stories.

Some recommended dystopian titles:

  • Feed by M.T. Anderson
  • Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go
  • Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion
  • Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
  • The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak  (not dystopian, but excellent)
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