Kaizen in the Classroom

One concept that I has been more frequently used of late is the term "Kaizen."  It is a Japanese word which means many small changes over time will yield big results.  With the beginning of the new school year creeping (or galloping depending on your point of view) closer, I am thinking of specifically incorporating the practice of kaizen into my classes.  I think it fits remarkably well with education and with the idea of students, the class and the school will improve with the collective efforts of all participants.

In our PBL program, it would be a natural progression to include students being able to use their knowledge of the expected learning, along with experiences and community contacts to suggest changes or additions to the lesson or unit.  They can use the strategy of Kaizen to create a more personalized assignment or assessment. In the past, we have encouraged students to take control of their learning, but having the term as a touchpoint makes it easier to communicate what exactly we expect.

As teachers, it seems our role in creating an atmosphere in our classroom where Kaizen can flourish is to be more transparent about our plans, activities and the structure of each unit. The challenge for us will be to make it organic and to truly embrace the changes which will make it a better, more effective learning environment.

Summer Skiing: Overcoming Lizard Brain

For years I have tried to use what I call "circular thinking" to examine decisions from as many different perspectives as possible to make sure I have considered all aspects of it.  One of the key components is to try to see it from the perspective of my future self. Because of the myriad of factors in every decision, it is almost impossible get it perfectly right.  Will my future self wish I had asked more questions?  have done the thing anyways? consulted with someone more knowledgeable about the topic? done more research?  Often what it comes down to is "what will make the better story?"

Maybe I am wrong in thinking this because is can lead to paralysis by analysis, which I believe can be caused by the lizard brain or "the resistance." One example I use with my class in describing how I overcame lizard brain, at least in this instance, was skiing on Mt. Hood outside of Portland, Oregon.

While we were visiting my brother in the Portland area in late July, he asked my son if he wanted to snowboard Mt. Hood. He also asked me if I wanted to go.  My son eagerly said he wanted to go. My thinking was much different than his. I thought "I'm not that good at skiing. I know it will be difficult, probably too tough fo

r a person who skis the green runs, even in Wisconsin." and "I don't have equipment; how can I ski?"  After much hemming and hawing, I thought of Seth Godin's writings and talks about the lizard brain and I decided that my future self would not be happy if I missed the opportunity to ski a big mountain in the summer. I decided to rent equipment and go skiing.

For what seems like my whole life I have seen pictures and videos of people skiing in shorts and T shirts and wondered how they could do it since my experience skiing was mostly in temperatures below 20 degrees.   On this day I found out.  It was 70 degrees and many of the good skiers did not wear cold weather gear. I was finally going to live the warm weather skiing experience!

It took two lifts to get to the top, which really freaked me out. When we got to the top, it was like nothing I had seen before!  Blue sky, peaks of other volcanoes in the Cascades--then I saw the black diamond signaling this would be a difficult, if not impossible, outing.  I had never skied a black diamond anywhere before and now I was going to ski one from 9000 feet!

I took it easy and made a hundred turns and wiped out on purpose when I got going too fast, but a half hour later I made it to the bottom to find my brother and son waiting for me. I don't know how many times we did the run that day, but because I conquored my lizard brain, I had an experience I had always dreamed of and will never forget.

If I had chosen not to ski, my daughter and sister-in-law spent their day picking blueberries.

A Video Game About Playing Outside?

Kids control the family--at least in many families.

That is one of the driving forces behind the summer school class I created 9 years ago. I came up the idea for my outdoor summer school class, set in a public school, when my niece was about three years old. Upon getting in the car, if anyone failed to put on their seatbelt, she would begin the shrill repetition of  "Put on your seatbelt or you are going to die." Everyone obeyed her.

My thinking behind creating an outdoor class was that if a kid can get such immediate action from adults through such minimal means, then I could harness that ability for the health and enjoyment of their family.  I decided that kids should be the leaders in their families in getting outside to hike, bike and camp.

The other event which swirled around in my head occurred in the winter of 2008, way before Pokemon Go.  In Wisconsin it was a beautiful winter day, sunny and in the upper 20's Fahrenheit. I was teaching at a middle school that had an attached elementary school and was going outside to do lunch duty on the playground when I encountered a dawdling elementary schooler.  I said, "Wow, what a beautiful day!" To which he responded, "I would rather have a video game about playing outside."

I was shocked that any little kid wouldn't love making a snowman, making and throwing illicit snowballs or any other activity that kids do during recess.

Knowing that no such class existed in my district, I was unsure if the district would accept a course of that nature for summer school.  But, as Seth Godin always encourages, I did not wait to be picked. I did not hope that someone would magically find out about my idea.  I proposed and sold my idea of the Survivor class to an audience that didn't know they needed what I was offering.

I am not sure how many other ideas I have made excuses which cause them not to be put into action, but this one stands out for me because, but pursuing it I have taught hundreds of kids outdoor and leadership skills which have caused families to go to state parks, ride bikes, camp and go outdoors.

I Matter and I Pledge to Choose Myself

In Tom Rath's excellent book Are You Fully Charged, he made a point about self confidence based on the work of Timothy Judge and Charlice Hurst about the life long health and monetary benefits of self confidence. One way I try to instill self confidence is for students to take control of their lives. Instead of telling kids don't do this or that, I created this document I call, "I Matter and I Pledge to Choose Myself" which is based on psychological, educational and leadership readings. My thinking behind this document is to give kids mental ammunition to push forward when encountering something they may find to be difficult.

To choose myself, I will make the time to finish anything that needs to be finished before class starts.  Meaning, I will come to class, on time,  ready to learn.

People like me do things...we are ready, we work,  we finish and we encourage others do the same. One way to ensure this is by appropriate uses of my electronic devices.

One thing I will do to finish is to change “should have” to “did.” I will no longer say “should have” to talk about my list of things to accomplish. Done. Next point.

I will get rid of excuses. Every time I think or say, “but,” it will become “and” in my thoughts, words and actions.  Embrace the power of “and.”

Time out for a quote from Seth Godin:

“People don’t believe what you tell them.  They rarely believe what you show them.  They often believe what their friends tell them.  They always believe what they tell themselves.”  

The last sentence in the quote is why I will fire my old boss (the pre 2016 me).  My old boss used language which cut me down.  I am the boss of what I do and I do not want to work for or with someone who uses language which cuts me down.  If I worked for anyone else who talked to me like that I would hate it.  I will not talk to or think of myself using belittling terms.  Instead of thinking or saying: “stupid,” “idiot,” or “moron,”  I will think something such as:  “How smart am I to figure it out?” or  “I bet there are a lot of people who wouldn’t have solved that!” Come to think of it, I will not use language tearing down others either. No meanness.

When I have a problem I will ask myself,  “Can I do it?  Yes I can, because I have solved a problem like this already.“  I will answer the question...everyday.

My signature below is evidence of my promise to myself, my family, my classmates and my teachers that I will choose myself everyday and that I agree with the points above.  

____________________________________    ____________________________________

student parent/guardian

"When Will I Use This in the Real World?"

In regards to school, if every kid has not asked this question out loud, then they have thought it. How can schools answer the question before students ask it?  By making education something students do because it has meaning to them. The best way is to allow them to take their learning beyond the four walls of the classroom to help real people in a real way. 

Authentic learning involves giving students a way to see what their learning has to do with real life and how their learning can have a direct impact on other people.  They are learning for a reason and will share their learning with others to make their lives better.  Adam Grant, Management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, discusses how, through prosocial motivation, people benefit both themselves and others with powerful results. 

Prosocial motivation, as described by Grant has shown that people who know their work has a meaningful impact on others are happier and more productive than those who don't see or specifically think about the influence their work can have on others. Grant may not approve of my leap from his prosocial motivational studies in the workplace to authentic learning in schools, but here it goes:  

According to Grant's chapter in the ProSocial Handbook, Prosocial Motivation at Work: When, Why, and How Making a Difference Makes a Difference, "when jobs are designed to connect employees to the impact they have on the beneficiaries of their work (such as clients, customers, and patients), they experience higher levels of prosocial motivation, which encourages them to invest more time and energy in their assigned tasks and in helping these beneficiaries."  In the case of students, I take "jobs" to mean "learning," because they both involve daily tasks.  and "employees" to be "students" because of the human element. 

When students learn about how their learning will affect others, they will stop at nothing to make sure they do the best job possible.  One example  was in the 2016 spring semester when students in the Arete Academy at Neenah High School held a Heroes of Neenah Celebration.  Students interviewed, researched, wrote articles which were published on various websites in the Fox Valley, and created permanent artwork installed on a prominent wall of the school where heroes will be enshrined each year.  The amount of time that students spent at night and on weekends working on the project far exceeded what they ever would have done if they were assigned those tasks without any connection to real life, or to actual people they knew.  Because of the prosocial motivation to do something great for others, while also doing something great for themselves, students pushed beyond the requirements of the assignment  and contacted people from the historical society, other family members of the heroes, television stations, along with current and former local and state political figures who lent their knowledge of the heroes and also attended the ceremony. Students also felt there should be a reception following the event for everyone to interact on a personal level, so they took it upon themselves to decorate, provide food and drinks, made a booth for nominations for the 2017 heroes and host the event.  

Had we just told them that they had to write an informative essay about a hero, they would have written it, and we could have checked off the box that indicates, yes, this student can proficiently write an informative essay.  There is no way they would have worked as hard as they did.  Authentic learning gives students prosocial motivation to follow their passions and take their learning and final product to a level that would likely never be equalled in a teacher led, artificial learning environment. 

Rock On

Last weekend I was at a neighborhood party which the police broke up at 11:00 pm.  I think they expected to find 18-20 year olds rather than the 40-60 year olds in the backyard when they came around the corner of the house. All of which made me think of how some people continue their energetic pursuit of life and others resign themselves to wistfully thinking of what once was or what could have been.

In terms of the education world, the energetic pursuit of excellence has revitalized many veteran teachers (see any of the writings of Mark Barnes, Dave Burgess or AJ Juliani among others) and caused them to embrace a new way of thinking and to give students educational autonomy rather than the age old system of lecture, quiz and test.

For those who cling to the legacy educational methods along with many students, it seems like teachers who encourage student control of their learning are taking a lazy way out by making kids do most of the work.  In fact, even the students in our Arete PBL Academy when surveyed expressed the belief that teachers who lecture work harder than those who require students to pursue their interests, and solve authentic problems.  John Koker, Dean of Letters and Science at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh captured traditional school perfectly when he said, "School: the place where kids go to watch adults work."

Even though providing student voice in their education invariably takes more energy, creativity, research, interactions, feedback, the results are invigorating.  Seeing student excitement and engagement with their learning is thrilling for any teacher.  Knowing that students are staying up all night in July talking about project ideas for next year is mind blowing!!

Romeo and Juliet PBL style

Seth Godin says when assessing an audience or creating a culture, the main question is, "Who are we and what do people like us do?" All 9th grade classes at my school read Romeo and Juliet. Our 9th grade PBL students decided that as Problem Based Learners, they needed to go about their Shakespeare experience in a different way.  Students decided they wanted to perform the play but in a different setting than what Shakespeare ever would have chosen.  After much discussion, the groups decided they would do the play in pantomime format.

While it sounds like it may be easier, every student had to know not only what their lines were, but also how to interact with others based on facial expressions and body language. The miming of the play led to greater knowledge of the intracacies of the play than my standard English 9 classes normally do.

Building a PBL Program Going Into Year 3

As we neared the close of the 2015-16 school year, for whatever reason, the Arete PBL program had 66 kids committed for next year and many of our 9th graders were beside themselves that there wouldn't be 4 sections of each core area.  Many accepted the fate that we would have to cut two classes worth of students to fit the prospective class sizes. A few students took it upon themselves to make sure there would be enough students to continue the program as it was this year.  They examined the 9th grade class list, identified students they had gone to school with for the last 10 years and then organized the list of possible students by friend group and specifically talked with each student about joining.

The position of the PBL students is that anyone who is not doing PBL is missing out on a great experience..  Our current students organized meetings with their classmates to inform them about the benefits of PBL and how it will change their lives.

Many people, whether they are students or not, have difficulty presenting to their peers, not to mention asking them tough questions about their goals in their academic career and what they hope to get out of school.  As impressive as our students were in assembling the groups to meet with and composing their sales pitch, some of their target group members were equally as impressive asking great questions. Another interesting aspect of the whole arrangement is that they kids who asked the best questions were the ones who decided to join us.

Thanks to the hard work of a few students, the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School will have four sections of each core content area for next year!

I'll Just Do it in Summer School

"I'll just do it in summer school,"  usually said with a shrug, those are words I have heard from high school students who are failing classes.  For some of them, a few minutes of work is the only thing keeping them from having to go to summer school.  After talking with the student, parents, special education teachers (if appropriate), and the guidance department to help the kid pass, but sometimes they still won't do the work necessary to pass.

Recently I may have figured it out.  Growing up in a house with a mother who was there anytime we needed her and  never having to worry about anything bad happening, I could not understand kids who would genuinely say they didn't want break to come. They not only dreaded the big breaks like Christmas, Spring Break and Summer, but also even having one day off. As a kid, from my perspective, those were the greatest days of the year.

They generally don't love school that much. A lot of them say they hate it, but the fact is that many kids need school for the routine, safety, security, meals and the good excuse not to be at home. It is great they have a place to go to feel safe and that they have had a positive enough experience in school to want to go for an extra month or two during the summer.

I am sure that there are more schools and students around the country who are playing his game.  The question is, what can be done to give students the same qualities as school, but also makes them better than kids who don't go to summer school.  Is it internships, sports, volunteering, a mentor, something else?  Instead of those kids feeling like they want to do summer school for a completely non-academic reason, can districts use their community connections to create a program or programs with the goal to propel kids forward rather than giving them more of the same they got during the school year.

Maybe if they knew they had a positive experience awaiting them in the summer, they would choose to pass their classes and also gain important life experiences during the same times that summer school runs.

Art, Books and Connections

The last few years I have been reading business, entrepreneur, psychology, leadership and education books almost exclusively.  Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Robert Cialdini, Sir Kenneth Robinson, Malcolm Gladwell are among the many different authors whose books I have explored.

With each book I read, I start by putting a 4 x 6 inch post it note inside the front cover to keep track of interesting words, concepts, people, websites and books as I read.  I also take notes in the books and use colored coded post-its to mark the pages.  For whatever reason, I use orange to mark ordinary notes. I feel they are the ones I want to be able to refer to later, but are not mind blowing.  I use yellow for the mind blowing ideas.  Pink are specific quotes I want to be able to use in the future and blue indicates connections between ideas. 

Before I started to use different colors, I noticed that many authors refer to each other's books or at least to the same books during their discussion of ideas.  In fact, it happened often enough for me to specifically mark those incidents.   

One of the things I have long thought is, with all of the connections between books I have read, is there a theme that winds through all of them that ties them together?  

Today as I was doing my Austin Kleon Steal Like an Artist Journal, I chose one which is an unlabeled web. with the instructions "Start in the Middle."  For lack of a better term at the time, I chose "Art" as my central word. I am using the definition of art I derived from reading Steven Pressfield's book The War of Art. To me Pressfield is saying that art is beauty created through someone pursuing their passion.

After I chose my word, I started placing names of authors and books I have read in the last few years in the circles in the web.  Unfortunately, the names I put in the list do not always come from the circle which precedes it. I think my best bet is to take my books and go into an empty room and examine the blue post its to attempt to determine which books inspired the others and how they fit together. Possibly then I will finally be able to create  a singular idea that each book explored to some level.  

The Perfect Summer Activity: Steal Like an Artist

This summer in my house we are all working on creativity.  After reading Austin Kleon's book Steal Like an Artist, I bought three copies of his Steal Like an Artist Journal for us to fill out. Each day we choose one entry to do then we may or may not share what we have written or drawn.

The tasks Kleon includes in the journal ask the reader to take mundane objects and look at them in a new way. He encourages the reader to draw, listen, see, speak and feel using items or ideas such as: find an old receipt and try to recall as much as possible from that day. Ask someone to coffee and afterwards write everything that was discussed. Write your favorite quote and then say it in 5 different ways. I also love "Stare at this dot until you get an idea." One of my favorites is "Climb Up Your Own Creative Family Tree"  where you identify who inspires you and then who influenced them, followed by who inspired the people who inspired the person who inspired you and so on. This exercise could take the entire summer, or an entire lifetime.

My first entry was from the page "10 Things I Want to Learn"

They are:

1.  Fishing
2.  3D printing programs
3. Steps showing how people learn
4. juggling
5. Guitar
6. principles of drawing
7. design process
8. investing
9. Spanish
10. video editing

It is not all that often where adults encounter a list like this. In a way it may be a "bucket list" for me since many of these topics are those that even experts may continue to learn their whole lives.  Maybe that means it is a good list.  It would be interesting to fill out this list every few years and compare with previous lists to check on progress and/or changes.

As I peruse the book, especially at the entries I have already made, it seems that each entry has unstated steps which must be done to fully make it a creative endeavor, rather than something to do to check boxes to indicate completeness. One example is "10 Things Lying Around that No One is Using." The follow up is where the creativity comes into play.  Should they be put together in a poem, picture,  or story, taken somewhere and donated followed with a description of the next phase in their lives?   When looked at in terms of being creative, there is no end to the book. 

Think Big! Do Something Important! Change the World!

We started doing Genius Hour 7th hour on Thursdays in the first semester of the Arete PBL Academy. It was a learning experience for everyone.  When one is passionate about something they will read, watch, ask questions and practice and in general find every means to learn about the topic.

Some kids knew what they wanted to do in the first thirty seconds. Others had a tough time finding a passion and joined with another person who was their friend, they thought would do all the work, or topic seemed interesting.  Needless to say, those who pursued a passion enjoyed the time they were given and used it well.  Those who weren't passionate about their topic usually were working in a group, generally with people they liked, but not necessarily with a topic they loved. That situation led to the one who was passionate about the topic feeling like the other person wasn't doing anything and the other person who wasn't really into it feeling like the passionate one was always bossing them around.

It took some of them awhile to figure out that each of them had skills they could leverage to push the project to success. For others, the main learning was that they didn't want to work on a project with a person who was not as passionate as they are, or that they didn't want to work on a project where they got to choose how to spend their time both in and outside of school, but didn't love.

At the beginning of the hour for each Genius Hour, we took the first three minutes and did a quick research tip, discussed a point where they should be in their project and waved the green flag by saying, "Think big, Do something important, Change the world." I used it was a touch point for everyone no matter which stage they were in with their project.  Another frequent saying was Oliver Schinkten's expression, "If you didn't fail, then you fail."  The expression fits into the Think Big portion of the project. By that I mean if you didn't think big enough for something not to work out, then you didn't think big enough.

Genius Hour--Getting the Go Ahead

In considering steps necessary to begin Genius Hour, I felt I had to let my administration know about the projects as well as the parents. I used these ideas below in my letter to parents and my discussion with administrators:

We are excited to inform you that we are introducing the Genius Hour (GH) project in English 9 classes this semester.  We recognize that all students come to school with interests and talents which school typically may not acknowledge. This project is our way of applying those skills in a format which validates students' interests and is in tune with Angela Maiers’ saying,  “You are a genius and the world needs your contribution.”

The idea and logic behind Genius Hour is very simple:  allow people to work on something they are passionate about, and productivity will go up.  Engineers at corporate giant 3M have worked in this way for over 60 years, famously producing Post-It Notes among other products. Google is the most celebrated company to incorporate 20% time into the work week. Google is not alone. Across the globe, increasingly, companies are using 20% time to increase employee satisfaction and production. Research based data confirms this policy works so well that 50% of Google’s projects have been created and implemented during this creative period.  Ever heard of Gmail or Google News?  These projects were creations by passionate developers during their 20% time projects.  Our Genius Hour project is based on this Google philosophy.

Just like Google engineers, and countless students in schools across the country, our students will have one day a week in English class to devote to their passions. The benefits of Genius Hour within our curriculum are in line with Common Core State Standards and the findings of internationally renowned researcher and author Daniel Pink, who revealed that people worldwide are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose.  

Here is how we will promote those qualities:

Autonomy--Allow students an opportunity to discover and investigate one of their passions

Mastery--Help to promote, support, and model creative, innovative thinking, communication skills and inventiveness to make our students experts in their area of passion

Purpose--Provide an avenue for students to reflect on and share their learning with others on how they will each make the world a better place and at the same time provide a forum for parents, community and school to partner and to support students’ learning.

Ultimately, the goal of Genius Hour will be realized when students improve their community through real world application of their research and share their knowledge in the form of a culminating project, with you (the parent), and the community, at our open house.

For the next 7-weeks, your student will have assignments that will be due in conjunction with Genius Hour.  They will complete a brainstorming activity, submit a proposal of their topic, apply the elements of nonfiction writing to their research, contact an expert,  correctly cite their sources, and create a final presentation of their topic.  We strongly encourage you to mentor your student and check on their progress often.

Why Not Genius Hour?

I have read and thought about the concept of 20% time since reading Daniel Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us in 2010 (see Pink's motivation TED Talk here).  In it, he talks about 3M and their practice of giving their engineers 15 percent of their week to work on a project of their choosing, out of which post-it notes among other products came.  Then Google followed with their 20% time.  And Atlasssian continued the idea, only allowing their people to work on any project they were passionate about, whether it was work related or not.  

In preparing for the first attempt at using one class period per week to pursue something students loved, I had to have a name for it.  Some of the names I had read online in Joy Kirr's Genius Hour Live Binder and elsewhere were: Googley Time, Innovation Time, Collaboratorium, Passion Time, 20% Time, and Genius Hour. 

I felt that when one hears "Genius," they think about Albert Einstein. When one hears "Passion," they think about Telenovelas and 20% time had no feel (like Tuesday according to Seinfeld).  I decided to go with the Einstein version. Finally, I considered the psychological priming effect of what they name would be and did some other research and discovered one of the most powerful means which create people’s beliefs is reading. As far back as the 1670’s, philosopher Benedict Baruch Spinoza  opined that people believe whatever they encounter. More recently, in 1993, Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues tested Spinoza’s idea in a series of experiments and found that people believe concepts seconds after reading them. 

I felt that Genius Hour is not just another name for the same old way of doing things. It is a time for people to connect their partially or fully formed ideas with others in a Google-type Innovation Time  for something education related.  Individuals’ ideas can be connected to make the whole better than the sum of the parts. These connections may come from people in the same school or from elsewhere in the district.  The goal is to combine ideas to create an innovative education version of revolutionary designs like the engineers at Google do.  Through the ability to follow their passions during Genius Hour, students will be driven to make themselves into the greatest people they can be. Some outcomes of a Genius Hour type of collaboration are:  students may have stronger relationships with adults and with each other;  they may become more inspired learners; they may become more skilled at asking questions and researching their answers; or an untold number of other outcomes depending on the groups and projects created through Genius Hour.

Think of the terms Evolution, Wall Street and Climate Change .  People can easily create a mental image of these short, power packed monikers.Ok, I was set on Genius Hour as the name

Creating Arete PBL Academy Project 2

Our learning from the beginning of the first project to the second project was exponential.  Our entry event for the second project was to show the film Night at the Museum, where the historical figures come alive. Each student in the program was to "become" an influential historical person from one of ten countries or areas, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Australia, China, Japan, Egypt,  and Greece. Students were to know everything about their influential person and be able to answer any question about them. The public exhibition for the second project was to present to 6th graders at the middle school.

To prepare for the presentations, in math they made scale models of a famous structure in that country, in physical science they studied the materials used to build the structures, in English they wrote a story which took place in their country. In social studies they learned the history and stories of their person and country, including why their person was so influential.

The event that truly captured their interest was the Thursday 30 Second Throwdown based on Brad Gustafson's 30 Second Take. We set up a March Madness style bracket featuring all influential people and each week we had them face off for 30 seconds on a topic.  Some topics included, who was more historically significant, who would make a better principal of our school, who is more like Santa Claus, with whom you rather be stuck with for a day in the airport.  For the finals we did a rap battle. As the weeks progressed, and characters were defeated, the vanquished joined the team of their conqueror.  The job of the vanquished was to research both their conqueror and their opponent for the next week.  That requirement worked on multiple levels.  1. It kept everyone involved with a stake in the result, 2.  As the tournament progressed, everyone got to know all the historical figures 3. It established a team atmosphere in the class.

After each match up we did a poll everywhere vote for the round.  Kids loved to see the vote totals as they came in. I'm sure the teachers in the classrooms around ours hated those Thursdays because I don't think it could have been louder as students stated their claims and then threw some dirt on their opponent. I highly recommend doing the 30 Second Throwdown. It was a blast and the kids learned more during that time than they may have in some entire years.

In addition to actually building their famous structures, they had to create a backdrop which served as a billboard showing a map of the country, the flag and something famous about the country. Most backdrops were 4 feet by 6 feet or so. They also had to find or create a costume which represented what the character would have worn or how they had been depicted and have an interactive component for 6th graders to do when they came to learn about the country.

Two weeks before our final exhibition,  the we held a "cocktail" type party to practice being characters around other people and answer questions students didn't know were coming. We invited parents and adults from the school to come and talk with the famous people. The highlight was a spontaneous debate between Marie Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI of France. The kids had fun showing off how much they knew and having snacks and soda.

When we got to presentation day, we had to transport 50 structures, ten backdrops, our artifacts and interactive components and transform the lunch room at the 6th grade middle school into a museum.  The day was amazing!! Our students informed, entertained and delighted the 6th grade students and loved having former teachers there to show off how much they knew and how they had grown. It was a huge success! Some teachers even told us the kids got more out of our Living Museum than they had from the culture fair in Milwaukee. They said our kids were more engaging, entertaining and there was more of an interactive element to our "museum."  To that point it was one of the greatest days of my teaching career.  We left there excited, and exhausted.

Creating Arete PBL Academy Year 1 The First Project

Our first project in year one was an individual water project.  For Global Studies, students researched a water crisis somewhere in the world. For physical science, students looked at molecular bonding and did water testing. For algebra they had to find statistics about water issues in the country they were researching and make a visual display of their learning.  For English they wrote an argumentative research paper on the water crisis in their country.

We expected that kids would choose a country with water issues that interested them or made them angry. For our entry event we showed the documentary, Tapped, which garnered their interest.  As we began to work on the various parts of the project, we did some traditional skills based teaching so that students could begin to put their project ideas together.  We wanted students to choose a topic they were passionate about, but, for some reason, most kids chose the drought in California as their topic. The drought is a great topic, but when students had the opportunity to choose any water issue in the world that we had talked about and what seemed like 1/3 of them chose the same topic, we knew that we had to set up future projects in a better way.

One of the most painful aspects of the first project was that to many the "no tests" message students heard in the spring was meeting up with the reality that they actually had to produce something. The first few weeks were really rough. We had to overcome the misconception of what "no tests" actually meant. To students, projects were what happened after the test took place, like dessert after a meal.  Our idea was that in creating the presentations for high school juniors and seniors, they were doing the learning and their final project was a series of pieces on the water crisis of their choice.

We emphasized that failure was expected, meaning that not everything one tries works out.  We were no exception to that rule.  We had spent the first two weeks of the school year trying to get kids to unlearn their 9 years of school. In retrospect, we should have taken more time to work through more collaboration, teamwork and leadership activities so when we started the project, they would have the tools to shut down disruptive activity before it interfered with their project work. In overestimating how prepared our kids were to be self directed, we also made a major miscalculation.

After they created their visual data piece for math, did the chemistry of water for science, researched a country and its water issues for Global studies and wrote their research paper for English, students presented their projects to juniors and seniors who were not that impressed with the initial offering.

We thought we had all parts of the Gold Standard project, entry event, driving question, learning in class contributes to final project, final products presented in front of an audience other than their class or their teacher, but we missed the mark. Part of the miss was us expecting too much of the students off the bat.  Even if they were really excited to do the project, we could have given them smaller more frequent checkpoints.  I think the project was so big that they didn't know where to start or where to go next if they had already started.

Creating Arete PBL Academy Year 1 Part 1

During the first year of PBL at Neenah High School, we each had two sections of PBL and 3 other classes. We quickly found that the PBL classes were how we had always thought school should be taught, which made teaching our standard classes less satisfying than they had been in previous years.

Maybe it was good we didn't spend too much time with "experts" who told us what we were trying to do was impossible.  It was clear early on that the most important part was to put a team of people passionate about changing education. We all found the content from other subject areas interesting and it afforded us a new way of looking at our own class to make it fit together with the other subject areas.  It was our idea that most adults functioned very well in their own lives without currently knowing who the 8th Emperor of China was, or what are the parts of the ear.  We decided to make our standards the skeleton of our program, on which we layered the truly important part of education, the 4 C's or 21st Century Skills.

From the very beginning we emphasized collaboration, communication, creative and critical thinking to a group of students only signed up for the program because they thought it would be easier because they weren't going to have tests.

It turns out they were wrong about how hard it was. After being used to being told which problems to do, how long the essay had to be, how many slides the presentation should be, we changed all the rules on them.  They became frustrated at the responses when they asked how long, how much or how many  questions because they were usually answered with something like, "How long will it need to be for you to clearly communicate your ideas?"

The difficulty came in having to self organize and be self directed. Depending on the project, group roles, project tasks, and final products were all varied based on what the group was trying to accomplish.

The first project was rough for both the students and the teachers.  As teachers, we expected to have students who were curious, excited to learn and hardworking.  That was not always the case.  We also found that the amount of choice we gave students who were used to choosing from a list of 3 or 5 topics, was paralyzing at first.

While students were unsure of what to do, the teachers were emboldened by our new found panoply of options for the school year.

AP Seminar: Creating Students Most Likely to Succeed

After spending the afternoon re-reading the final two chapters of Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith's book Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era, followed by reading through the materials for the AP Seminar course (part of AP Capstone) for Fall 2016, I am encouraged by the dovetailing of recommendations by Wagner and Dintersmith and the requirements of the Seminar course we will offer to juniors this year.

The Junior Seminar course, as created by the College Board, is built upon the QUEST protocol which asks students to: Question, explore, challenge and expand their boundaries of current knowledge, Understand and analyze arguments and comprehend author's claims, Evaluate multiple perspectives and the larger conversation of the varied points of view encountered, Synthesize ideas of others and combine their own perspective into an argument and Team, transform and transmit their argument in a method suited to their audience.

Along with QUEST, other guidelines put the direction of the course in the hands of students. topics, and arguments will be based on student interests and passions and built on their own scholarly sources for both individual and team research projects and presentations without teacher involvement in choice of sources, research questions or revisions. That is a tall order for students who will have to be self sufficient and for teachers who have become accostumed to being a font of ideas and resources for their students.

We are in the application phase this year so we are not offering it as an AP class this year, but we will follow as closely as possible, the guidelines in the documentation on the AP Seminar website.

Following our first two years of teaching PBL, it is an exciting step in the process of re-creating public education.

Creating the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School: The Beginnings

Two years ago, there had been no PBL program at Neenah High School. The plan was to start with a 9th grade cohort, and they would have the opportunity to progress through high school being the first group of PBL students at that grade level.  Our initial team of teachers for the 9th grade included Lynn Heyn in physical science, Tara Meinke in Algebra, Suzy Weisgerber in Global Studies and me in English.

At our original meeting in the spring of 2014, we tried to put together our ideas and standards into groups we thought would make sense for each unit.  In our initial meeting, we planned projects for the entire year based each unit on a big idea from the 9th grade Global studies curriculum.  We decided that using Global Studies would be easiest as the center point because the rest of us could incorporate our standards into some aspect of Global Studies.

From the onset, we made tons of mistakes. Possibly the biggest was our phrasing of what the program was about.  We emphasized that the program was for people who were smart, curious and despite possessing knowledge, did not do well on tests, thinking we would have students who were as excited about the opportunity to learn in a more meaningful way as we were to teach it.  The middle school teachers and counselors looked at our description of the type of students who we thought would be successful in the program and selected about 80.  We met with the students and we excitedly talked about projects which combined all the subjects and that the learning would be shown through projects.  Somehow the only message many of them heard was there were "no tests" and they listened no further.

Our next step was choosing a name for the program. We chose the name Arete  Academy because we felt the Greek definition of the word (striving for excellence) fit our overall goals for our us and for the students.

Shortly thereafter,  we went to the Innovative Schools Network PBL conference in June, hoping to learn about effective implementation of a PBL  program, creating and assessing projects and any other tips or tricks we could pick up.  We did learn some of that and did make some connections with other PBL schools throughout Wisconsin, but we were discouraged when we heard from many people that constructing a PBL program that included all core content areas in a public high school was impossible. We were determined to prove the experts wrong.

Summer Reading: Be Inspired

Inspirational and useful books to consider reading this summer:

1. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink is my favorite book ever. His assessment of bonuses, rewards and their counterintuitive effects is shocking. He breaks motivation into easy to understand explanations using vignettes.

2. Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin (pdf) This book is incendiary.  Godin examines what is needed for success in the 21st Century and how schools, as currently structured, are irrelevant.

3. Poke the Box by Seth Godin  Have you ever had a personal cheerleader encouraging you to pursue the idea that has always captivated you?  Now you have one.

4. Writing the Standard for Project Based Learning by John Larmer, John Mergendoller & Suzie Boss discusses Gold Standard PBL practices with examples of how they are used.

5. Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess  Use creative and consistently great ideas to generate enough interest that you have to sell tickets to your class.

6. Learn Like a Pirate by Paul Solarz Restructure your classroom environment to put the kids in charge of their learning and daily operations of the class.

7. Most Likely to Succeed by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith A companion to the documentary of the same name, Succeed builds the case for examining the guiding principles of education and gives necessities, suggestions, and examples of how a forward minded education must operate to give students a school career which truly prepares them for the future.The final two chapters provide teachers, principals and superintendents with specific ideas and actions which will transform their classrooms, schools and districts immediately.

8. Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner This book should be read by every parent and teacher.  Wagner uses examples of Millennials who used their passion to create something extraordinary and how their parents planted the seed to pursue their passion.

9. Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon Funny, creative look at how being creative is not limited to coming up with ideas no one has ever thought of before. In effect he says, “Steal them,” meaning apply and combine ideas from varied sources in a new way.

10. Creative Thinkering  by Mike Michalko From one of the leaders on creativity, Creative Thinkering contains many exercises to boost creativity.

11. Creative Schools by Sir Kenneth Robinson This is my favorite of Robinson’s books.  A departure from some of his other books, he gives some specifics as to how schools should be run.

12. Role Reversal by Mark Barnes  Ditch grades and encourage students to learn for learning’s sake and the rest will work itself out. Barnes teaches English Language Arts in the middle school and gives many of the tips and tricks as to how he pulls off not giving grades, but giving grades (at least on report cards)

Inquire by Rob King Do you love the 4 C’s?  King breaks down Collaboration, Communication, Creative and Critical Thinking and so much more into this handbook for students.