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.

Kids, the Resistance and Genius Hour

Every kid, and probably every person no matter what their age, wants to be known for something. For all people, including school age kids, the choices to eat, wear, play and/or listen to something so often it becomes their own individual trademark goes a long way to inform us as to what school should offer--individualized choices for each person.

At school there is the kid who wears socks up to his knees and shorts everyday, the jersey kid, the hair kid, the shorts and sandals kid (living in Wisconsin, it gets to be a challenge in the winter), the no jacket kid, the kid with funny sayings on his shirt, the branded kid eg. (Nike, Under Armor). The list is so long and diverse that kids take their identity and notoriety from what happens at other times of the day--before school, on the bus, at lunch or after school.

Think of the power that choice of what to be known for, has for people. To be an individual, to choose their own path and to celebrate what makes them different from everyone else, kids will even go so far as to eat something like a frozen pizza everyday. Pizza is great, but eating one everyday? Yuck! Think of what must go through someone's head everyday when they know they face 40+ minutes at lunch standing on the playground in shorts and sandals with a foot of snow on the ground  just to keep their streak going!

Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (see a summary here), gives this willingness to do the same thing over and over a specific name--consistency. It is one of the things which causes people to do many things they would not ordinarily do just to make it seem to others like we haven't changed.

Dan Ariely discusses the fact that people continually make choices not in their own best interest in his book, Predictably Irrational.

According to Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art, the bad choices we make are a result of the Resistance trying to distract us from what is truly important to us.

I think everyoneDon't we owe it to them to give them a chance to defeat the Resistance by giving students dedicated time in class to work on something they are passionate about so they will be able to focus on something they really want to do like: growing tomatoes, welding, trapping animals, writing computer code or any other topic?  Through Genius Hour, every student has the chance to be known for how well they can do something. If you haven't ever heard of or have had your students do a Genius Hour project, check out Joy Kirr's LiveBinder for a plethora of information from many veterans in Genius Hour. Most of us have about 2-3 weeks of summer without professional development, committees, or grad classes. Consider doing Genius Hour next year. Better yet, have your class do one, and have your district allow teachers to do one.

I'm not saying kids still won't make sure they have a Hello Kitty item visible at all times, but when they are known for the passion they have about a topic and how they have used that topic to help others, maybe that will take over for Hello Kitty.

Learning and the Lizard Brain

It is daunting for adults to learn to do something new.  It may be our Lizard Brains making excuses like: we don't have time, money, friends already doing the activity or that we are not the type of person who does that sort of thing. It is hard to overcome a lifetime of consistency to do anything new.  It is too easy to find reasons not to pursue the topic.  We are too busy, and therefore, too distracted to take time to learn it or do it now, but later on we will totally be able to do it. These are the kind of lies the Lizard Brain lures us into telling ourselves.

This summer, as part of the Arete Academy acceptance letter, we have challenged our students to learn something new.  We will recognize what the Lizard Brain is trying to do and head it off at the pass. Sometimes it is easier to do something because someone said to do it. For some people the challenge in the letter is the person telling them what to do.

I cannot ask my students to learn something new, and not do it myself, which means I must conquer the Lizard Brain too. My new learning is going to be fishing.  Every year I say that I want to learn to fish and every year November rolls around and I say, "Man, I was going to learn to fish this year. I was just too busy. I guess next year is the year I learn it."

I don't have any delusions about being good at it, but learning something and giving myself an opportunity to enjoy being outdoors is worth it.

Ahhhh Summer!!

Contrary to what many people think, teachers do not take June, July and August off.

Here is my list of school related activities for the summer in the order I thought of them:

1. write weekly mindset lessons
2. Readers'/writers' workshop
3. Read Teaching Argument Writing
4. Blog daily
5. Plan week 1 Summer School
6. Plan for year 1 of Capstone seminar
7. English 9 Research
8. PBL Future plans
9. Compile quotes
10. Finish 1 Udemy Class per month
11. Redo Genius Hour project design using Shipit journal, Stanford d.School design ideas
12. Develop Socratic Seminar norms and prompts
13. Genius Hour blog subjects for each week?
14. Contact Kevin Ralofsky and George Brunell about partnerships for next year. 
15. altMBA

One Week of Work

As the school year wound down this year, the same scenario unfolded as happens every year, students start to panic during the last week.  They chase points trying to get the grade they, or their parents, wanted them to get.  They look for extra credit, dig into the depths of their backpacks and pull out crumpled papers and ask, "Is this something I am missing?"

What is interesting to me is that those kids work with purpose for one week each semester, except it is for the wrong reasons.  At no point does the goal of that week have anything to do with learning. Maybe it is just my perception, but thinking back on the school year, many of the kids who are the one-week-of-work-per-semester kids are the same ones who answer, "To torture kids," or "To boss kids around," when asked about the purpose of school.

Would removing grades from the picture lead to more learning throughout the semester for those kids?  Would students be freed from the pressure to perform and seek knowledge?  Would they do even less than they do now because there would be no letter on the report card to be scared of?

Does removing grades and increasing desire to learn only work when coupled with more student autonomy? If so, how much autonomy? I suppose it varies with the student, but for those who only give their all during the waning days of the semester, something must change.

On a similar vein, Goldman Sachs is no longer taking their employees entire year of work and defining it with one number. They are restructuring their employee evaluation system to provide regular feedback and coaching.   It seems like work performance being a conversation between bosses and employees would provide more possibility for fine tuning throughout the year, ultimately more success for both the employee and the company.  I am sure they won't be the last company to switch over.

How long will it take for education to make the switch to feedback instead of a single letter to represent performance?

PBL and The Matrix

"Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?" While speaking to Neo, Morpheus obliquely describes the feeling Neo has had through the first quarter of the 1999 film, The Matrix, and the one I had for years as a teacher.  

For the longest time I was unsatisfied with the way school was being run.  Something wasn't right, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was or how to fix it. It would wake up at night only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the idea disappearing the more awake I became.  In 2010 or so, I read Daniel Pink's (@DanielPink) book Drive (which I highly recommend) and followed its ideas to see where they went. As I combined Drive with Seth Godin's (@thisissethsblog)  Stop Stealing Dreams, suddenly it all became so clear. It was as if Daniel Pink and Seth Godin had spoken collectively to me with the sentiment expressed by Morpheus. It was too late for me to turn back, I had taken the red pill.

And I began my journey down the rabbit hole of Project Based Learning. I then knew it is the true path for education. Everything else in education I had seen is a fake world created by an oppressive force which has been in place for over a century. The whole time the solution was so close, but I was not able to see it.  I am far from being "The One," but it sure felt like I was when I first recognized the truth of what education and learning should be.

Education was so contrived.  "Mary has a red dress. If she is walking 2 miles per hour and Agent Smith starts .5 miles behind her and walks 3 miles per hour, when will he catch her?" It is obvious that the teacher has come up with the problem of the lady in the red dress and can easily find the answer, which doesn't matter anyway. 

Whether it was math, science, social studies or any other subject, concepts did not transfer between them. Even though a student may have learned about reading a line graph in Math class and then immediately walked 40 feet down the hall to the next class classroom and used line graphs in Social Studies, students either replied, "This isn't math class," or "How am I supposed to do this?" Obviously students weren't learning.  To me, once one "learns" something, it means they know it and can call upon it when necessary. That wasn't happening. 

Fortunately, the rabbit hole has led Lynn Heyn, Tara Meinke, Suzy Weisgerber, Emily Bennett and I to found the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School (@nhsarete).   Our  two years of experiences have shown that real learning is happening now.  By combining English, Math, Science and Social Studies in a regular public high school, Arete PBL  allows students to participate in a meaningful, authentic experience which drives their learning everyday and not solely in our four classes. One of the most surprising revelations from our students is that they take the interconnected way of thinking we teach everyday in our classes and even connect their learning to their non-PBL classes.  Our students are now so passionate about their learning, they are looking to rescue as many students as possible from the Matrix of regular education. They figuratively hold the two pills, and say, "This is your last chance (at our school). After this, there is no going back. Youtake the blue pill and the storyends. You wake in your bed andyou believe whatever you want tobelieve. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you howdeep the rabbit-hole goes."