Category: School System Reform

The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same

Post author By North Navigation
Post date May 20, 2016

The phrase was coined by French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Aside from writing a number of novels and serving as the editor of Le Figaro, he was a former teacher, known for his keenly satirical tone and bitter wit, and loved educational reform and going fishing. Go figure.

I was recently sent a folder of instructional documents that I had collected in 1997 by a former colleague. He found them for me on an old computer. Looking through materials I had created or assembled then as a young teacher was an experience similar to stumbling upon an old yearbook, or maybe reminiscing over a series of letters between friends from long ago.

Along with instructional materials, there were items that I don’t recall having or reviewing; A link to a teacher community on GeoCities, a Lord of the Flies “cyber-guide” from a teacher in San Diego, various articles. I also found instructions that lead my students in creating their own Hot Mail accounts (they, nor I, had email accounts provided through the school back then). In those instructions, there was even a note to myself warning me to write out www.hotmail.com on the board next time so they didn’t accidentally put in www.hotmale.com instead. Lesson learned.

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There was also photocopied chapters from the recently published book Learn & Live that I had ordered from the glef.org site (now Edutopia). It looks like I had made handouts to give to my colleagues, I’m sure, at an upcoming staff meeting. And on one particular photocopy, I had highlighted an excerpt that read,

“With the growing number of computer networks, teachers are able to connect with others from around the world and access information globally…work together to research and develop curriculum…These teachers report that they no longer feel isolated in their classrooms and enjoy their jobs more.”

I had notated in the margins, connect with other teachers online and share our best lessons.

At that time, I was the only full-time English teacher at our little high school of 235 students. My “English Department” was just me and two other teachers who both split duties between English and History classes to round out their positions. And in looking for more curricular models for my own classroom, I had marveled at how teachers in other parts of the United States were starting to develop lessons and projects online, not as html-published word documents or pdf-based lessons written to other teachers like those I had used in college from the ERIC database…but as full websites for their own students to engage and use to guide their classroom activities. You could actually get a more comprehensive sense of their instructional thinking, their tone, where they stepped up support, slowed down the instructional pacing, went deep, moved fast, etc…So I gave it a try with my own unit on Animal Farm.

Of the activities and projects for each chapter I had designed, and the vocabulary lists I had tied to merriam-webster.com, (Check it out but beware of potentially seizure inducing animated gifs) I will never forget getting an email from an 8th grade teacher in New Jersey who sent me a grainy realPlayer video of her students signing their made-up Animal Farm National Anthem based on one of my activities and thanked me for posting the project.

So thanks for taking that walk with me down memory lane, but in the “bitter wit” spirit of Alphonse Karr, and his famous adage, I will share the real reason I’ve included this montage.

A kid, that might or might not live in my home, came home last week and said, “Animal Farm is so ridiculously stupid.” Those are fighting words to a former English teacher. But upon a bit of calm inquiry, I started to see the reason.

“Ok, how did your teacher introduce the story?”
“Did you get any background on George Orwell or the political environment of Europe at the time this was published?”
“Are you clear on why this is considered an allegory and how it relates to the Russian Revolution?”

He responded, that they were given 4 worksheets and were told to watch a short video on the Russian Revolution and to take notes on these “study-guides” and then review at home before starting the novel. “Then the next day, we started reading the book in class…and it has talking animals.” In looking at the “worksheets / study-guides” I found 3 typed (as in type-writer…pre-word processor) photocopied lists of historical characters and a correlation sheet (shown) photocopied from a 1991 workbook.

And that is why I made some inquiries to see if someone could dig up my old materials on an old off-line server for Animal Farm. A few days later, I sat a young man down at the dining table and said, “Give me 10 minutes, and I will make the remaining 7 chapters of your book somewhat comprehensible if not maybe even palatable.” We discussed Orwell’s tumultuous life, idealistic view of Communism, his time in Spain embedded with communist rebel forces during their civil war, his growing concern with fascism and how communism was potentially being used to forge even more totalitarian regimes across Europe…we went over the 3 pyramids of political transition that framed Russia’s move from Czar Nicholas II to Stalin that an incredible History teacher helped create for me to use. How Orwell’s novella was originally rejected by publishers who feared it would upset the delicate alliance between the UK, US, and the newly formed Soviet Union. As my 10 minutes wrapped up he said, “So Squealer IS the newspaper Pravda…and Snowball IS Trotsky, because he was part of the animal movement, but now he’s gone and its easy for the pigs to blame him for everything going wrong, and is probably actually dead, but they aren’t going to say that, because then they can’t blame him for everything and….ok, ok, this makes more sense now.”

[irp]

Looking back at another item in that old folder of materials, there was also an article by Linda Darling-Hammond from 1999, which holds the following concern regarding the need for teachers to network and share strong instructional practice and the growing promise of technology to serve as a vehicle to enable that process:

“After entry, teachers are typically expected to know everything they will need for a career, or to learn through occasional workshops mostly on their own, with few structured opportunities to observe and analyze teaching with others. As one high school teacher who had spent twenty-five years in the classroom once told me: “I have taught 20,000 classes; I have been ‘evaluated’ thirty times; but I have never seen another teacher teach.”

The article frame out the hope that the new millennium and ensuing decade (the 2000’s) would enable vast sharing of exemplary curriculum. I was ignited with this notion, and had no way of knowing that I would be invited within the next year to join a statewide team doing precisely this work. I have since worked in many capacities on the very notation I scribbled 19 years ago on an article about, “connecting with other teachers online….and sharing our best lessons.” That was a long time ago. Yet here, today, among the files in this old folder, I saw at the top of one of my “political pyramid” handouts for students the heading question of The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same?

[irp]

And given the perspective of almost 20 years now, and all the change that has occurred in that time with technology and with education…I reflect on the fact that teaching a classic novel such as Animal Farm, that has to have been done by so many teachers in so many ways, with such creativity and flair still eludes many. How many times have skilled educators in classrooms all across the United States honed versions of activities related to this story that help kids unlock the meaning and the application of the themes, that can then be extended into other disciplines, and used to stimulate thinking about propaganda and power and representation and information, and can be applied to any number of contemporary events, in ways that have even the most marginalized youth attentive and engaged? Yet here we are in 2016, and a student is given a stack of 25 year old photocopied handouts as part of an Honors English Class, in a shiny nice suburban high school, with far more instructional options and resources than most…and I think the answer to Mr. Alphonse Karr’s satirical assertion, The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same, is quite clear, at least in the field of education.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Communities of Practice Company News Digital Learning Design Education Educational Leadership School System Reform

We Snuck A Teacher Into SXSW.Edu This Year

Post author By North Navigation
Post date March 11, 2016

We were only two hours in, yet Sarah and I had already hustled through the exhibitor floor, meandered in the Playground, created LED-light up clouds in a Makers Space session, and caught half a panel discussion on Competency-Based assessment. Now on the hunt for coffee, my 4th grade teacher companion, sporting a Canvas LMS tattoo sleeve, and Kahoot stickers proclaimed, “Wow, this is so different than any other conference.”

That caught my attention. “How so?” I asked. “We haven’t even really been here that long.” Without hesitation she exclaimed, “Everyone here seems so incredibly happy and optimistic about all of this stuff.” …then put a lid on small to-go cup.

“Hmmm, ok.” I responded. As we headed off to our next thing she abruptly stopped and turned to me. “Are there any teachers here, I mean really? ”

I assured her, “Well, it seems like there are more here than I’ve seen in the past. Do you think there should be more?” She pondered, “I’m not sure.” as we showed up late to a session on Mindfulness. “Actually, Yes. Although a bunch of teachers might bring a bit more reality to the scene than many here are looking for.”

The best way to predict the future is to make it.

The next day we sat and listened to futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal during her keynote, make a case for shaping the future. Five years from its inception, I wondered if SXSW.edu had taken steps to make a future where a teacher felt as if this was an education conference largely not attended by educators, or if in not planning, it had inadvertently become that. However, the “Signals of Change” that Ms. McGonigal alluded to during her address felt present this year. And in a message about understanding trends and projecting where they might potentially take us, there was a sense of collective I hadn’t felt in the past here, where potential solutions to problems should be the work of many, not just a few.

In years past, it seemed that key persons and groups used SXSW.edu as a platform to boldly propose a future where technology (specifically, their technology) would inevitably solve all of education’s problems: Give us enough funding and enough data, and we will match it with enough venture capital bravado and programmers and young MBA’s in a newly opened, hip office in a dilapidated urban neighborhood and create the software to solve education’s problems for you.

In subtle, but real ways…the message seemed to shift this year to: Give us enough understanding of your work, a sense of how you reach kids on a day to day basis through specific strategies and interactions, and we will come to your classrooms, listen to you, pay attention to how and why kids engage and use that to create supportive software to help amplify those approaches to solve problems with you.

In a session titled, What Do We Mean When We Ask if EdTech “Works”?, Chief of Learning Innovation at LEAP Innovations, Chris Liang-Vergara, summarized his team’s research report Finding What Works with this (as interpreted on a half cup of mediocre coffee after a very late night – all apologies Chris):

When people ask, “What are the qualities of a good digital learning tool?” we want to resist the urge to place the promise of measurable learning gains on the tools alone. The tool is such a small percent of the formula in relation to the skill of the instructor. Instead, we tend to look for tools that support innovative pedagogical practice, provide a learner focused approach, and enable the type of learner agency that the teachers are already looking for and fostering in their classrooms….where teachers don’t have these core expectations nor are implementing strategies that support student inquiry and access to diverse resources and differentiated demonstration of knowledge, the tools provide little help to change the outcomes of those classrooms.

Having spent the better part of the last 7 years watching educational software development largely focus on processes that take place at the perimeter of the teaching and learning cycle, it was refreshing to hear and see groups begin to circle back to the important instructional authoring and delivery pieces that truly inform best practice and inevitably have the most promise in supporting learning gains.

So as part of a team that showed up to illuminate our recent work with our colleagues from the Smithsonian on their new Learning Lab, we definitely felt like we were a part of that message and were thrilled with the numbers that turned out for our presentation and later for our social mixer in downtown Austin. It felt right sharing how much time we spent in classrooms, and how much of our system could be cited back to a specific teacher’s needs or a given group of 6th graders trying to accomplish a complex learning activity with one of our many prototypes. I was happy to see two of the teachers in the crowd who had been part of our testing team across 3 years of research and development and to know that our lead researcher, programmer, educator-specialist, and project director knew them personally.

The questions we received during our presentation and the conversations at our follow-up event were pointed, vibrant, and clear. Afterwards, we invited an eclectic group to come meet the Smithsonian team that included this small band of teachers interspersed with industry leads from t’es, Nova, SETDA , U.S. OET, National Film Board of Canada, the Annenberg Learner Foundation and NYLearns, amongst many others. (Thank you all for your attendance and support.) There was a general desire to see the ways in which teachers had played an active role in the organizing of open educational resources while applying of their own instructional cohesion as part of the process. The Smithsonian Learning Lab was received well, and many wanted to know what kinds of inputs, efforts, and culture supported its development and ongoing implementation. Good people intermingled with good drinks and food in a music filled environment where ideas could take form over handshakes, laughing, and genuine collegiality.

At one point I stumbled into a conversation amongst educators about what makes for a great teacher, and because we had asked people to remove their SXSW badges (and thus titles and affiliations) at the door in order to have people meet merely as people, I was surprised to to find out later that the conversation actually involved a software CEO, a lead actor/educator from the Royal Shakespeare Company, a middle school History teacher from Utah, and an Ed Tech Incubator from Tokyo. That evening was the culmination of one of the better experiences I’ve had at a conference in the last few years, and not one I would have suspected could have occurred at the SXSW.edu events of the past.

Perhaps this conference really is growing into an educator affair? Perhaps we bring more teachers next time? I thought to just ask Sarah since she was sitting next to me on our long flight back home.

Under the beam of the small personal overhead spotlight she had turned
on, I saw that she was scrolling through 3 days of emails from her teaching partner, scores of parents, administrative site announcements, fund-raiser events, etc. “Over 120 in all.” she tells me. She was working to select those that need immediate answers and those that can wait a day or two. So instead, I offered to start developing the slide show she’s required by her administrator to present to her faculty from my laptop while she openly cites from 3 days of notes. “That would be really helpful.” she replied with a sigh that I assume comes with connecting back to the reality of a teaching life waiting at home…”at least I got my grades in before I left.”

“So what do you want to share with your colleagues?” I asked, opening my laptop. She fished out her notes while I started a new Google Slide presentation, and typed What Sarah Learned @ SXSW.Edu.

Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

The American High School Is Still Far From Operating as a 21st Century Institution

Post author By North Navigation
Post date September 20, 2015

I loved my time teaching high school. I watched my own kids’ largely enjoy their time in high school. I always look forward to working with high school teachers and being inspired by their passion. But I bristle whenever I have to contend with some general, grandiose statement applied to a high school wether it comes during a principal’s well-intentioned Back to School Night welcome to families, or as the moniker emblazoned across the school marquee daily. Regardless of these loosely assigned assertions, the American high school can not be a 21st Century Learning environment, nor can it be any other single thing given the fractured culture and dysfunctional design by which it is operated. Where good occurs at a high school, it almost unfailingly occurs despite the system, not because of it. And where mediocrity happens, because of the system, it goes largely unnoticed, unchecked, and unexamined in almost all instances.

So here we are again at the beginning of a school year. We have two teenagers currently participating at our local high schools. One is my son who is a Junior, the other is my step-son who is a Freshman. For the record, these are respectively kids # 4 & 5 that I am personally getting to usher through their last stop in the public education system. They both have Spanish I this year, but with two different teachers. In our Junior’s Spanish class, he came home the first week and said, “I have to create an account on Quizlet.com to get to my teacher’s digital flash card sets for numbers 1-100 and days and months in Spanish.” As educational technology enthusiasts, my wife and I said, “That’s cool.” And off he went. His teacher (20+ year veteran) had all her digital sets of vocabulary, verbs, and phrases loaded in their class account for the entire year broken out by month. I noticed she had not made all of them herself, but had copied some existing sets from other educators that made theirs available to the community for sharing purposes. Smart. I know her professionally, and as a teacher of my kids; she’s good at what she does.

A week later, our Freshman came home and said, “I need to make flashcards for days of the week, months of the year, and numbers 1-100.” My wife and I said, “Makes sense, this is what Zach was doing last week in his class.” So he went on to ask us if we had index cards in the house. We both looked amused at his request since he had been using Quizlet with his middle school teachers for over two years.”Of course we don’t.” we replied. “How about you just have Zach share a copy of his set in Quizlet and use the time to study the terms instead of making your own?” Now is the point in the story that I will disclose the fact that these two kids couldn’t be more different in how they approach school. Our Junior has always required some extra “motivation” to stay on top of stuff. Our Freshman however, only requires our intervention when we have to finally pull him away from over-studying and over-preparing for every assignment and test, for every class, all of the time. He’s been this way since 3rd grade. So, it was no surprise to us when he hesitated and wondered whether we thought it would be acceptable to do his notecards on Quizlet instead of on index cards. So I asked these questions:

Did she specifically ask for paper index flash cards or show you an example? – No
Have you done flash cards in this class yet? – No
Isn’t this one of the teachers that lets you use your phones in class to look up information online? -Yes

We also reminded him that at the recent back to school night, she referred to her love of technology in the classroom so long as it helped the kids be more efficient and aid in their learning and was not being used as entertainment. We couldn’t have agreed more. Given all this discussion on the topic, true to his nature, he deiced to use Quizlet BUT insisted on making his own set from scratch so he wouldn’t get dinged for short-cutting that process. I told him, “That’s reasonable.”

And off he went on an hour of making his own set and then studying. The next morning we reminded him to share the link for his set to his teacher so she had a copy…he already had, of course. The next day, we received this text from him at lunch. “Guess what, my teacher didn’t accept my flashcards and I received 0 points for the assignment since they weren’t on paper index cards.”

He went on to share that his teacher told him that she understood he did the actual work, but because they were not standard flash cards, he wouldn’t be able to partner with another student and go through the drilling activity she had planned, thus the 0 credit. He shared with her that he could share his stack to another student with a phone, and because they were allowed to use phones, they could go through the activity just like the rest of the students and also could have the words pronounced by the app on their phones, and play other similar games as well with the selected vocabulary. She told him that it was not acceptable, and that he had one day to make all of the flash cards and turn into her if he wanted to gain back at least half of the credit for the assignment. He was crushed, and I felt compelled to email his teacher. It went something like,

“I’m partially to blame for his decision to use Quizlet. The other teachers are using it for the same assignment. Please note that he did all the work. It seems that he should get credit in this instance and we will make sure to have plenty of index cards the remainder of the year if that is how you prefer to have the students create their study aids. etc…” She did state that she appreciated my “respectful tone”, and was concerned with kids cheating on the use of Quizlet, but that he could print up his cards as sheets of paper, and then cut and tape them to index cards in order to receive credit this one time. So he did. I told him, “Don’t be discouraged. In life, in most instances your boss, your colleagues, your team, will welcome you using tools, resources, technology to try to get your part done more effectively or more efficiently…in this instance, your boss wanted something else, so that’s what you do and you move on.” He understood, but he finished with this observation: “Over my last three years in middle school, we were asked to use technology and help figure out ways to do things without paper…my first three weeks of high school, the one time one teacher had Chromebooks checked out for our class, at least 2/3 of the students didn’t even know what they were or how to use them. One teacher had us using Snapchat, which was fun but I’m not sure what it had to do with English. And now I lost points for using Quizlet.” His mom said, “Ya, I know…that sucks.” And given the nature of the middle school he attended where the 4 core teachers worked diligently to coordinate their instructional approaches, curriculum, and student expectations, his response wasn’t surprising, “So why do all my high school teachers have completely different rules for how we are supposed to do things and learn when the principal said at orientation that our school leads in innovative instruction, access to technology, and high expectations of both students and staff?”

Good question, but tough to answer on a Wednesday night at 10:15pm when a bunch of flashcards still needed to be made.

For the last 20 years, I have come to observe the American high school from 4 distinct perspectives; classroom teacher/department chair, professional development coordinator in every type of high school imaginable throughout the state, educational researcher and analyst focusing on curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and technology, and finally as a parent. Through these perspectives, I have come to one conclusion about the American high school…It is broke. And despite that, I do know that students can still find meaningful experiences with one another during high school. And thankfully they can also find given teachers in given moments that can help them grow and connect their learning to their lives. And if they choose to take advantage of extra-curricular programs, they can extend their experiences beyond the classroom in ways that can create lifelong lessons and memories. But as an institution, there is currently little to no way to recognize how the system helps to regularly enable these engagements and ensure their value as the norm, not the exception. Beyond creating mission statements and various slogans accompanied by some sheepish accountability plan that regresses within a month to a check-box exercise, the real work of ensuring a quality, unified learning environment at the high school level requires a persistence and structure that does not exist. The heavy lifting required to identify different and effective instructional strategies occurring on and beyond a campus, the communication and leadership required to support genuine, constructive collaboration amongst staff, and the creativity and willingness to let go of existing practice and protocol in order to examine cross-curricular, authentic assessment constructs that draw students into engaging, imaginative real world application of skills is rarely the outcome of these pseudo-reform campaigns.

As a teacher, I spent my fair share of time with colleagues and leadership laboring over the formation of these endeavors for my school. As a county office of education and regional coordinator, I have been asked to design and shape similar efforts for other schools and districts. As a researcher and analyst, I have been asked to help both state and federal education agencies understand the overall impact and outcomes of these initiatives. On all levels, I’ve been complicit in this process. And finally as a parent, I have now seen with 4 of my own children, what I knew all along as a teacher. No matter what anyone claims about a given high school, at the end of the day, the school is, for better or worse, a composite of the individual decisions that each teacher makes in his or her own classroom with little to no real operational connection to the school’s mission, vision, SMART goals, ESLRs (expected school-wide learning results), site-based master plan, school-wide program, single plan for student achievement, or now the LCAP (local control accountability plan).

There is only one member of the high school community that participates in all elements of what the school is, what it offers, and how its collective culture is translated into exchanges and expectations each and every day…and that is the student. And for students, and their families, it is clear that each and every class and program they rotate into an out of daily throughout the year operates primarily according to the inclinations of the teacher running that class. I believe strongly in teacher efficacy and academic freedom to make good decisions based on the needs of learners. However I also strongly yearn to see environments where professionals work together to regularly and transparently examine, define, and promote effective instruction and ensure common practices that foster learning. I have seen the transformative nature of environments where the courage to question and challenge antiquated processes and approaches is welcomed not seen as a threat. And I have been able to participate on the rare occasion with teams of teachers who hold critical both what they teach and how they teach and use that exploration to seek out other educator’s methods and share their own. But across hundreds and hundreds of experiences spanning 15 years, I can count on one hand the number of times a high school team collectively engaged any one of these types of deep assessments of their own craft and culture. I have only seen a few sites that have realistically moved their school into a position to make any kind of unified claims about the nature of their coursework and their instructional approaches.

Somewhere under the steadily waving banner of “school improvement”, you can typically find a process that merely takes one-dimensional snapshots of learning and then creates a set of “rigorous” yet vague expectations. From there, improvement ends up being a checklist of content to be covered, a timeline for administering common assessments, followed by loosely structured meetings where largely mis-informed assertions are made about the resulting data. The hard work required to build collegial expertise and move staff collectively towards defining mastery and then supporting their individual journey towards improved instruction, increased access to diverse content, and the creation of a comprehensive assessment approach that combines standard exams and project-based learning is not the outcome. And in the end, it was easier for me to write this post than to explain to a freshman why moving forward from middle school to high school has in fact seemed to move backwards in terms of a cohesive, thoughtful educational environment and experience.

Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

Can We Please Put the Digital in Digital OER Finally?

Post author By North Navigation
Post date January 6, 2015

Testing Digital Resources with 6th Graders - Fall 2014 (Brian Ausland)

A call for more advanced thinking in the development of digital curricular formats designed to capture the way open learning objects and resources are organized and framed by educators to create quality instructional experiences for students.

More regularly now, we are asked to look at and provide feedback to various agencies and projects that are forging the tricky waters of developing digital curriculum tools and resources for public education. From small start-ups to the U.S. Department of Education, we are asked to draw from over a decade of work in this field, and our ongoing proximity to classrooms, teachers, and students to give feedback, assistance, and guidance. We love looking at new approaches to increasing teachers’ access to rich, digital content. Ultimately we tend to get our hopes up in anticipation of reviewing a given team’s digitally-enhanced curricula that’s being promoted by a statewide curriculum sharing project, or being marketed via an agency’s big roll-out of their awesome, new curriculum authoring platform.

So whether the curricular item is referred to as a web-based project, an online lesson plan, or a digital learning resource, our imagination makes anticipatory leaps envisioning the promised innovation. However, I am always burdened by my own history in this space. In 1995 I started teaching. Because of some of my “home-grown” online curriculum at the time, I was invited to be part of a statewide project in California that brought 100 teachers together to learn FrontPage and Composer to make online versions of our best units to publish on the World Wide Web. Sharing ideas and coming up with imaginative projects and activities with other teachers was awesome, but taking those ideas and making them then conform to the old Bernie Dodge Web Quest model was not fun. They referred to our units as CyberGuides in true late ’90s web-parlance and one of mine was on the Arthurian Legends. The S.C.O.R.E project-site has long since been abandoned (I had to use the Way Back Machine to find the horrible image of my actual CyberGuide), but copies of it still persist on various teacher’s pages even today like Ms. Davis’ in Wichita Falls…http://www.wfisd.net/Page/8242. Not pretty to look at today, but hey, it was the 90’s, and I was just an English teacher with a GeoCities account and some savvy 10th graders willing to teach me some basic html and help me download CoffeeCup FTP. So I was off and running and posting up my projects for students to access online. This was all of little interest to my immediate colleagues on campus at the time. Strangely enough though, across the country, emails started appearing in my inbox from more and more teachers saying thanks for sharing, or how they had modified pieces of my own instruction for their own classes, or even asking for samples of student-work to show their own kids. Again, this was 18 years ago.

So today, when I’m asked to look at any number of new digitally-enhanced curricular authoring tools or lesson creating and sharing environments like the AFT’s Share My Lesson site, or meet with the University of California to see how they’ve convened 450 educators to produce model online integrated curriculum, I am always hopeful. I consider all the time that has occurred since the late ’90s, and how data, collaboration tools, and app-based innovation have transformed the ways in which we can access, manipulate, annotate, combine, and distribute objects, information, and ideas. Its exciting to consider the possibilities all of this presents to re-inform our old print-based, copy-righted, rigid, curricular models. I prepare to review things like:

interactive, in-line resource aggregation,
feedback mechanisms for coaching and collaborative annotations between the authoring educator and project leads, coaches, and subject area experts
design elements that frame curricular activities for independent access or in-class presentation both
metadata directing me to similar instructional items, common assessments, and models of effective use through an intentionally and intelligently integrated learning object repository,
standards alignments that not only show the specific skills being supported, but their context within other related skills found in the same domain,
options for collaborative authoring across a team of educators and visual connectors showing me the linked nature of their learning activities, materials, objects, and resources,
options allowing a user to make a full digital copy of a curriculum item for personal modification, differentiation, and specific use-cases as pertains to other instructional settings,
formative and summative framing with resulting student work samples, etc, etc, etc…

However, more times than not, I am directed to a list of PDF’s or videos. Instead of being mesmerized and drawn in by rich resources, thoughtfully organized by skilled educators, I find myself looking at none of those items listed out above, let alone a combination of many of them. And the real tragedy is in the amount of time and effort that goes into bringing together teachers, having them consider and articulate their practice and instructional approaches full of dynamic and fluid ideas and strategies, we end up modeling up very traditional, unimaginative, one dimensional frameworks. Rather than work to innovative the use of the very digital environment in which these derivative, digital learning objects are stored, the resulting content is most often published in simple digital document formats or single-perspective, lecture-based videos. The platforms themselves are often elaborate, the communication tools are robust, the group utilities are feature-rich, the overall design is thoughtful and responsive, but when you get to the OER objects, we end up browsing through tired collections of PDFs, embedded Crocodoc files, passive html pages, or simple play-lists of materials where teachers might have not even developed much of the material, but instead were merely asked to assess it’s instructional value, subject-focus, and standards alignment. The curriculum or key learning assets make little to no use of the rich, digital, database supported environments in which they are hosted. So while it seems that programs often afford their web site and auxiliary functions and marketing content far more UI and UX considerations, the actual instructional artifacts the program is designed to solicit, build, develop and deploy get stuck with antiquated design models. After all the work that goes into these types of programs, and we know the work well, this should be the easiest part to get right…right?

We endeavored to work on this issue over the past year as part of supporting a number of programs that assemble teachers together and ask them to combine their curricular thinking and instructional approaches and integrate those with rich learning objects to create curriculum that can serve as a point of collaboration and sharing.

I like to think that what we’ve been working towards harkens back to that small community of early adopters from back in the mid 90’s. The tools were so much more limited, but the audience was clear and tangible, and those of us having to figure out how to FTP our simple pages and directories were the very teachers who had an intimate understanding of how learning occurs. What we lacked was the technology to adequately capture and replicate our innate sense of instructional scaffolding. Now much of that technology exists, but a rift has developed between those that develop the tools and those that know how learning happens. We are trying to bridge that divide with various programs we are supporting. The work represents a decade of designing and implementing online curriculum authoring and professional development programs. Creating the platforms, the tools, designing the outreach, conducting the trainings, but most importantly, wading deep into classrooms regularly to implement with teachers and students in all types of situations and settings is the real work. The resulting models don’t look like traditional lessons and projects, nor should they in many instances. They are however designed to help educators make best use of online learning objects, capture and coordinate their instruction singularly or in teams, and ultimately focus on how real learning sequences and exchanges occur for students when being guided by quality teachers and field-based research taken directly from the classroom.

Title: Epic Epidemiological Examination (Project-Based STEM Unit)
Team: Biomedical Teacher, History Teacher –
Summary: Dive deep into a journey that examines basic characteristics of viruses, introduces the concept of index cases and patient zero and elicits the importance of ELISA testing in case identification. It illuminates human tragedy and the impact of an array of public health epidemics that transformed approaches in disease prevention and intervention commonly used in the 21st Century.

Title: Exploring the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Lesson Plan with Integrated Coaching Annotation)
Team: Susan Carle is an English teacher in Long Beach Unified School District, Sheri Coburn is a curriculum and instruction coach with San Joaquin County Office of Education.
Summary: Using the controversial and captivating, historical medical biography of Henrietta Lacks, students will learn how to closely read, paraphrase,interpret and evaluate science essays. This lesson focuses on non-literary reading as emphasized in the California Common Core State Standards.

Title: The Presidential Experience Project (Online Blended History Activity)
Team: Smithsonian Educator Specialists, Navigation North Digital Curriculum Specialists
Summary: In this blended History activity, students research various aspects of a selected U.S. President and work to search and use the historical objects and artifacts associated with the man and his tenure in office as compared to the top issues of the era in which he led to create a Presidential Exhibit. (Prototype)

Title: Introduction to Circles (Blended Learning Activity – Gr. 4-6)
Team: 6th Grade Math Teacher & District Library Media Specialist
Summary: In this math exercise on parts of a circles, students learn the basic terminology of circles, formulas for determining how to calculate area and circumference and practical applications of this knowledge.

(These samples are pulled from projects ranging from a statewide CTE/STEM model curriculum initiative where teams of teachers work online to create integrated Academic and STEM-based, career pathways projects, a statewide CCSS lesson share program, and a series of curricular tools that provide teachers the ability to craft authentic, differentiated instruction.)

While some of these tools have already been implemented with success across various online educator communities, we are even more excited about those that are being designed and tested for direct student use in asynchronous and synchronous implementations (ie. blended learning). Running comparative analyses between identical online student learning content framed out in similar structures as above and then implemented against a cohort of existing resources such as Blendspace, Pathbrite, Gooru, and Versal, we have found repeatedly that the student response data has shown increased ability to use, navigate, research, and demonstrate learning gains. We believe some of this is attributable to implementing tools that better provide a given teacher a clear method to replicate and communicate their instructional decisions and scaffolding in a unified way along with the sequenced learning objects/resources they’ve selected. In and of themselves, playlists of objects, videos, and quizzes aren’t structured to perform in this way and don’t provide enough spacing for subtle, but key cognitive reflection points nor room for learner differentiation based on those “formative forks” that occur when a good teacher is guiding students. More testing is occurring now, and the data is supporting our inclinations. We are excited to be moving the conversation and the focus of back to the learning process itself, and ultimately welcome more projects, programs, agencies, and firms to do the same. We are not trying to abandon paying homage to traditional curricular formatting which is designed to document and record static instructional models. We are merely more interested in creating new models that are designed to capture and publish fluid, organic, strong learning exchanges crafted by practitioners each and every day in classrooms across the nation. Platforms that are making resulting student data more readily accessible and usable for teachers, that are presenting diverse ways for colleagues to coordinate and communicate, and are enabling up-stream agencies to track and monitor assessment data across large systems for strategic long-term decision making are all good things, but only when they are also paying attention to the heart of the matter.

For us, the heart of the matter is found in that place where student curiosity and interest intersects with a given teacher’s ingenuity and creativity. We welcome others to join in making sure we are ultimately making decisions, building tools, and channeling technology to support the efficacy of that exchange, and helping to enhance, capture, illuminate, and share it wherever possible.

Digital Learning Design Education Open Educational Resources School System Reform

Back to School the Designers Go

Post author By North Navigation
Post date October 19, 2014

Its time to go back to school for the Navigation North team. So we packed up a few researcher friends from the Smithsonian, a videography team, and our own personnel and we went and knocked on some classroom doors to see if the kids could play.

Here were the questions,

If kids could access anything that the Smithsonian has in its vast collections, what would they want to see?
What would they want to do?
How would they want to play with and learn from these items?
How would they want to modify, adapt, organize and show what they found?
What were the crazy, outlandish ideas they concocted that we couldn’t anticipate?

So we waded into the deep end of 3 different 6th grade classrooms and with the help of some incredibly talented teachers, engaged the energetic and boisterous hordes. While a

video/audio team maneuvered through the sea of students, we explored Lincoln’s life and death masks and wondered aloud if we could find evidence that he actually was a secret vampire hunter as portrayed in a contemporary film.

We surfed through decades of lunch boxes trying to understand how the pop-culture and media of a given decade surfaced on the food containers of youth across the nation. From Howdy-Doody, The Lone Ranger, Yogi Bear, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Disco a’la Saturday Night Fever, to the Transformers, Star Wars, and Snoopy. It was all there. We then watched the kids hunt for items of their own interest. From Cute Cats, Creapy (sic) Spiders, Beast Swords, to UFO’s, Football Heroes, Joe DiMaggio,Mary Todd, and Triceratops.

We then asked them what they would want to find, what they would want to do with stuff they found, and what more they would want to know and see and understand. This information will assist us in a project we will begin next month with the Smithsonian. Kids are wide-open with their criticism and directives when using digital tools, they want things to work, they want to modify, customize, share, mark up, and adapt. We have our work cut-out for us to be certain. Stay tuned…