Dream Learning…according to our 10th graders

We had an interesting discussion with our 10th grade Humanities II class yesterday.

We started the year off with a discussion about learning. We presented them with Edwin Romond’s “Dream Teaching” poem and asked them to write a version of their own that expressed their vision of Dream Learning. I pulled together some excerpts from their poems here. They represent some of the more common points that actually focused on learning.

Yesterday we revisited this discussion by having students respond to the New York Times Learning page post on the Manhattan Free School. The Student Opinion Post asked:

At the Manhattan Free School, students “do not receive grades, take tests or have to do anything, really, that they do not feel like doing.” Teachers there believe that students learn best when they direct their own education, so though there are classes, students can play video games all day if they like. Would you want to attend a school like this? If not, why not? If so, what do you think you would do with your time? Do you agree that you learn best when you direct your own education? Why or why not?

The kids left comments on the post and then we discussed what they thought. A lot of this relates to our move to more formative assessments which is an adjustment for many of them. Here are the comments they left. The following excerpts provide a glimpse into how the discussion went:

Schools today make you conform to their standards and that will affect the student’s personality and the way they think. If the student is allowed to choose the way they learn instead of being told how to learn it would significantly help the student in life.

This is a great idea and I think that student driven learning should be established in schools nationwide.

If you don’t plan on going far in life, than this is a school for you.

In a free learning school students do not have to worry about grades, they can just learn.

I think it might be a good idea for the younger kids who just started school because they would learn to love to learn new things by themselves, but when your older it is a bad idea.

By having this choice I think that students can find their own passion and then will voluntarily engage themselves.

I’d love to go to a school like this because I wouldn’t have to worry so much about high school credits so I can either take the classes I want to take, or I can’t.

If you give the responsibility to students to learn for themselves or the choice to learn or not they will probably choose not to. I know that if I went to this school I would definitely choose playing Fifa 11 over learning and reading.

Even though this school is based on trust, do you really think teenagers in our generation will actually learn anything if you gave them the option? I feel like I would get no where in life if I went down that route. I would rather have teachers give tests and teach material rather than let us do whatever we want.

The quote “the flip side of freedom is responsibility” is definitely true because now that the kids have the freedom to be able to do what they want they have to be able to accept the responsibility of deciding what they want to do with their lives and to become self-motivated to actually do classes.

It would diminish our country’s next generation, being full of people that wont know how to work because they had everything FREE to them before, since they have never been pushed to strive for what they want.

The idea of students voting on issues the school faces or things in the curriculum is great.  It would make school be more in line with the students perspective.

If students work at their own leisurely pace, employers will not be happy with the slow outcome of their work. They will be accustomed to working at their own pace and will not be able to keep up with the bustling lifestyle of real life.

I think that depending on the learning values of a child, structure or non-structure is important.

I think I’d do well because I can learn what I want to learn and what I need to learn, but I won’t have to learn about things I feel are not necessary.

Without tests the students would have no idea if he is even learning well. When they go to college, they will most likely find that students from a normal school will be much farther ahead than them. But how would the person even get into college without a GPA due to the absence of tests?

I need structure and grades and a reason to learn to actually make myself do work.

The concept of a free school where children are encouraged to want to learn is ridiculous for one main reason:  Children in high school do not want to learn.

Without the pressure of grades and doing well the students may have an open mind for learning and it will be easier to store all their knowledge.

As a follow up, I just posted this high school valedictorian’s speech to our class diigo group. In it she challenges the system of schooling in some of the same ways this Free School does. It should be interesting to see if anyone responds.

Vision for Education

This post by Marc Waxman got me thinking about what my vision for education is. With all the talk about reform and 21st Century Skills,  sometimes this vision can get lost in all the buzz words. For me this has relevance on both a personal and professional level. My son is going into 10th grade, one of the grades I teach, so getting to work with this age group as a teacher and a parent can be an eye opener. It makes me think about what the purpose of school is, what an educated person is, and what I hope for my son and my students.

I hope that he will be able to question ideas put before him whether it is from a friend, the media, or an authority figure. That he will be  able to find the answers to the questions he develops. That he will be able to consider multiple viewpoints and that he actively seeks them out. That he finds effective ways to express his ideas and communicate them with others. That he is able to creatively solve problems using a variety of methods and tools. That through the arts he will be able to better understand American and other cultures and our common humanity. That he understands who he is, where he came from, and the values that are important to him. That he participates as an informed citizen in our democracy.

These to me are the mark of an educated person. It’s not where he is at now. It’s not necessarily where he wants to be. I don’t think he connects any of these things to school. He concerns himself with getting good grades, so he can get into a good school and reach his dreams.

But to me, it’s what school should help students become.  Unfortunately, too often schools focus on grades and test scores rather than educating, producing students who are not ready to question, to be critical thinkers, or to understand themselves and the rapidly changing world around them.

Summer 2010

Obviously, I didn’t keep up with this blog I started last year, but I think I really need to start getting my thoughts down in some kind of consistent basis. It doesn’t really matter if anyone is reading, there is just so much change going on in my school, classroom and life that I realize the need to document my experiences and thinking.

For what feels like the first time in my 12 years of teaching, much of what I’m reading, trying and learning about seems to be heading in the same direction. The courses and conferences I have attended (Ubd, formative assessment, writing as thinking, Inquiry and Project Based Assessment) all seem to coalesce around a central idea: Refocusing teaching around essential skills and knowledge rather than content.

Teaching kids to research, write, and question is more important than making sure we cover certain texts. I’ll explore these topics and related ones in subsequent posts.

Summer 2009

This will be a busy summer for me.  I’m involved in my school’s 21st st Century Skills Pilot.  In the fall I will have a section of Journalism 1 in which every student will have his or her own mini-notebook computer. Facilitating this will require a change in the way I teach by incorporating more inquiry and project based learning.  I’ve taught the course in a computer lab and through the use of weblogs for years (the course was designed by Will Richarsdson), so in some ways the transition will be a little easier for me.

So far, we have met with the principal and teachers from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, become immersed in social networking technology and begun to plan a unit using UbD templates. I’ve created this blog to reflect on the process, create a discussion, and reach out for collaborative opportunities for my journalism and humanities classrooms.  I’ve kept a blog in the past that I’ve imported here. I’ve also made this blog a part of Jon Pennington’s Language Connects Blog to reach out to a global audience. If you have any feedback or ideas, please leave a comment. 

You can also visit our school’s 21st Century Skills Facebook fan page.

Transitioning from blogs to?

After using blogs with my classes for almost four years now, it is a little disturbing to think that soon the format I use will be gone. My school has made it clear that they are not committed to maintaining the Manila system we use, but has also reassured me that they won’t leave teachers in the lurch even though they have had some security issues recently.

So after coming to this realization, I spent part of an in-service day learning about Moodle. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to the hopes I had for it, but it did get me thinking about what I would want in an ideal online class site.
Here’s the list I came up with:
The ease of use, and hyperlinking capabilities of a blog.
Testing, polling and quiz applications.
Chat room capability.
Discussion capability like a blog that can be open to the public.
The flexibility to determine what is public.
Social networking for teachers like Facebook (with groups that bring together content areas).
The ability to turn on focused social networking for students.
Ability to upload content (including video) for both students and teachers.
The capability for a group to create a document and track changes like a Wiki.
Ability to import quizzes from textbook companies.

A system like this would empower both teachers and students to interact and share their knowledge far beyond the classroom walls in a much more effective way. Is any of this currently out there?

Citizen Journalism – Massaro Update

I must admit that spending two days in Bloomsbury talking to residents and writing about Monica Massaro’s murder made me obsessed with this unsolved murder. I spent a lot of time searching the Internet and even set up Google Alerts on the topic.

And although there has yet to be anything released officially from the State Police, it looks like they have a suspect – a truck driver from North Carolina who was caught during a home invasion in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

The mayor of Bloomsbury is announcing it on the town’s website (although some of the details originally posted have been removed), and it has been reported in the news in both The Chelmsford Independent. and in the Star Ledger. The Democrat is planning a major update this week as well. I’ve passed along some of the information I received through this blog from an anonymous commenter. He or she was obsessed with the case as well and found an amazing amount of information through the Internet and a friend who lives in the town.

So I guess in a sense we are both citizen journalists. We are interested and informed about a specific topic, and through posting on this blog and e-mailing the paper, we are adding to the articles (and type of articles) that will appear in the paper. Of course, I could take this a step further and go to Bloomsbury, talk to people and post an original article here or on another online space, this would be closer to what generally considered citizen (or grassroots) journalism, but I’ve begun my transition to the classroom, so I’ll let the professionals handle this.

I do think this situation illustrates the variety of roles citizens can play in the gathering of news, and it will be another lesson from my internship that I will bring to my students.

Apparently the lessons just keep on coming!

Internship – Last: My Reflection Column

This summer I’ve had the opportunity to practice what I teach.
During my four week internship, I traded in my identity as Mr. McHale, English teacher and newspaper adviser at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, for Tom McHale, reporter at the Hunterdon County Democrat. I was able to make this transformation through the New Jersey Press Foundation’s Teachers at Newspapers Program.
As a reporter, I’ve written news and feature stories, worked on obituaries and re-written press releases. I’ve also had the opportunity to cover a land use meeting, interview interesting people, and even cover a murder. In addition to all of this, I’ve worked with Shirley Sasor to try and develop a stronger connection between the county’s five high schools and the newspaper.
My work with Newspapers in Education and the development of a teen section for the Democrat is something I hope to continue into the future.
After all that, what can I take back to my students and newspaper staff?
A new appreciation for the role of the news media in society. In covering the murder of Monica Massaro in Bloomsbury, I got the chance to see a close-knit small town yearning for information. The day after her body was discovered, officials wouldn’t confirm her name, address, or even how she was killed. We worked hard to publish what we could find out through a variety of sources and illustrate how residents were reacting to the lack of information. I participated in discussions with editors on what we could say and what we should or shouldn’t say. Contrary to prevalent public perception, I have been part of a newsroom that cares deeply about the accuracy and ethics of what they print. I’ve even witnessed heated discussions over the choice of a single word.
The importance of knowing and serving your readers. As I’ve worked with editors, I’ve learned the importance of not just telling a good, concise story, but also making the local connection. I’ve come to understand that the Democrat is in the business of telling the story of Hunterdon. In that context all of the decisions that are made make sense: From the collection of stories that make it on the front page, to the printing of almost every letter to the editor, to the history photos and columns, to the use of Mr. and Mrs. in front of names. All of it revolves around a projection of Hunterdon county’s identity and a respect for the reader. The Democrat takes its role as a community newspaper into account with every decision it makes. I hope the staff of The Lamp works to serve the Hunterdon Central community in the same way.
A new knowledge of the community in which I teach. For nine years I’ve known little about Hunterdon county beyond the highways I travel to commute from my home in Pa. Yes, as one of the editors likes to tell me, I’m a carpetbagger who lines my pockets with local tax revenues. In reporting on local meetings, attending the Farmers and Businessmen’s Picnic, talking to local officials and citizens alike, and just being a part of the gathering of news, I’ve come to know the county’s people and places much better.
Everybody has a story to tell. In my few weeks here I’ve had the opportunity to learn the stories of a variety of current and former Hunterdon residents. I’ve talked to the Red Cross National Volunteer of the Year, a former resident who is certified to fly the world’s largest passenger aircraft, a world-class master rower, a former resident who is an online business whiz kid, and a master auto technician who will compete for a world championship. I’ve come to discover that in telling their stories, I’m telling the story of this community. And that being a good reporter involves being curious and taking a general interest in those around you. My students would do well to reach out to some of the more than 3,000 people who walk through the doors of Central each day.
So as I begin the transition back to “Mr. McHale,” I’d like to thank everyone in the Democrat’s newsroom for sharing their knowledge, craft, and friendship; all the people who shared their thoughts and stories; Tom Engleman and the NJPF which provided this opportunity; and all those who read my stories as well.
I return to Central a better writer, teacher, and adviser.