Keep or Toss?

What can reality shows on television and the "real food" movement teach us about the future of education? It may seem like a stretch, but in reading some of the most recent writing out there about radical new teaching techniques, there may be some parallels worth considering.

You've probably seen those reality shows on TV in which a team of energetic people, usually in matching shirts, sweep into someone's house and clean it out. They sort through all of the clutter and then introduce a system of plastic bins and printed labels to reorganize a person's life. In at least a few iterations of these shows, there is always a series of tarps out on the front lawn for sorting objects labeled "keep" and "toss."

It seems to me that the world is immersed in a massive paradigm shift into a data- and computer-driven age and we are constantly re-evaluating how we interact with each other. Similarly, education, parenting and child development seems to be going through a similar shift -- a metaphorical "keep or toss" of traditional techniques. While it is impossible to ignore the differences in the way that today's young people interact with their world and each other, I sometimes wonder if too much of what we know as "good teaching" is going into the "toss" pile in favor of more free-form, inquiry-driven and high-tech practices.

The rapid pace of change in today's youth is particularly evident to me as a relatively young teacher. Sure, it has been commonplace for decades for adults to see huge differences in the way that young people use technology and behave socially, but to see such a dramatic change in less than one generation is a new phenomenon. It seems like the changes between generations are increasing at an exponential pace.

To acknowledge that this is happening is one thing, but should we fully embrace the way that young people are evolving as 100% inevitable and valuable? What is the perfect balance of what to "keep" and what to "toss?" What happens when too much is "tossed?"

There is no question that students are more successful and more likely to understand and retain information that is presented in a connected and creative way and that is relevant and based in student inquiry. This has been the primary push in educational research and teacher instruction for decades. In just my own career, however, of studying and practicing the art of teaching, this concept has broadened to the extent that much of education writing suggests throwing the entire school paradigm out the window in favor of technology-based student-guided projects and research into topics of exclusively their own choosing. An exemplary article describing this type of movement is this one from Wired.

So this leads me back to the keep piles and toss piles. When our culture largely moved past lecture-based teaching with massive class sizes, I was on board. When we tossed out student shaming as a means of discipline, it was for the better. Several aspects of traditional teaching have been put in the "toss" pile over the years and this was a necessary shift, if a slow one at times.

Even in my relatively young perspective, we seem to be standing at the precipice of putting an awful lot of stuff into the "toss" pile. I am worried that we may not value enough the parts of today's teaching that maybe should remain in the "keep."

The adults in my life have exposed me to subjects and ideas that I may never have discovered without them. They have provided insight into life experiences. They have shared their histories with me. I have also learned arts and skills that may be obsolete, but incredibly enjoyable. As I tell my students all the time, even if a skill or a tidbit of knowledge doesn't affect their lives directly, it puts a little wrinkle into their grey matter and makes them a more well-rounded person and a better thinker.

That said, I don't know if I am ready to give all of this adult input up to embrace a completely student-driven paradigm. And there are plenty of educational think tanks and writers out there would have me feel pretty guilty and entitled about making that statement. I may sound like I am overstating the recent push toward student inquiry, but

Lately, I have been reading through Michael Pollan's body of work about food. I have read Cooked and The Omnivore's Dilemma, but his book that really struck a chord with me recently was In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. The primary thread of the argument is that we as a society need to return to the "real food" of our grandparents' generation. Most of society embraced an industrial food model as the way of the future, as modern and empowering. Women were no longer required to spend countless hours in the home preparing foods by traditional means and other technologies, most notably television, became part of meal time experience.

Initially, this was perceived as the wave of the future, the inevitable march toward progress. Now, however, many deeply regret this transition. The American population is heavier than ever and while our expected lifespan is longer, we are suffering and dying from diet-related health conditions more than ever. Pollan quite convincingly argues that the processed versions of food are never as nutritious as the "real food," and we are paying the price in our mental and physical health. In addition, research has shown that the simple act of eating meals together makes for happier families, healthier diets and even lower rates of drug use and suicide in young people. In this case, the tech-driven wave of the future seems to have provided some progress -- like movement toward gender equality and wider food options -- but also has led us astray.

Why bring up this example of food? Today, the biggest movement in the world of culinaria is one that looks backward to an earlier time instead of toward the future. Locally-sourced and seasonal foods, organic agriculture, and "slow food" are the buzzwords of a culture that has found something wrong and downright dangerous in the quick and unquestioning embrace of how new technology changes ancient and essential human activities. As it turns out, cooking food and sharing it with our families at meal time was pretty darn important. Further, the legacy of our prior generations had something to teach us and it turned out to be really valuable.

I am worried that too quick of a jump into the "future of teaching" and fully embracing technology and the "connectedness" of today's socially-networked society might just be a repeat of the TV dinners and fast food of the last generation. Simply put, the needs and operations of the human mind may not evolve as quickly as our technologies do.

In no way am I arguing that technology should not be part of classroom instruction. As a matter of fact, ours is a very high-tech school and we are finding that assistive technologies like text-to-speech software, teacher websites and visual graphic generators are an important part of our instruction and I have blogged about several of them here, here, here and here, among many other posts. Instead, I hope to merely raise the question of how much is too much to "toss."

Students are exposed to new skills, topics and ideas through the expertise and experiences of the adults in their lives. Learning from adults in order to grow into adults is the quintessential part of youth and adolescence throughout all of human history. While it has been valuable to consider student inquiry, embrace young ingenuity and nourish the experience of childhood, it may be taking it too far when we flip the system on its head and only value the insight and motivation of young people. You can call it self-preservation or an inflated sense of purpose, but I do believe that I have something valuable to offer my students in my life of knowledge and experience, and I think most of them would be inclined to agree.

Artifacts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Once again, our textbook zips through another historical event that I felt deserved more attention, so we supplemented the text with a film and a project. I wanted my students to understand just how unknown and expansive the western frontier was during the earliest years of the United States. To say that the country was growing at an unparalleled rate is an understatement. During the Jefferson Administration, the country doubled in size with the Louisiana Purchase and the population nearly tripled. In order to explore and document this new territory, Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to traverse the terrain.

The fact that Jefferson still sought to find a Northwest Passage shows how little was known of the new territory. To explore the journey further, we watched National Geographic's production of Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West in class. In the film, we know that there were several goals of the expedition, but among them were to build friendly relations with Native Americans while also formally annexing their lands, but also documenting and mapping what they see and collecting artifacts of the people, animals and natural environment. According to this historical blog, many of these artifacts were dispersed and lost over time.

For our project, students used information from the text, the video and their own research to create their own "artifacts" that may have been lost. For example, it is known that Lewis and Clark spent a significant amount of time with the Mandan people of the Plains and brought back a buffalo hide depicting a battle scene. Several groups created buffalo hides depicting other scenes from the expedition using paper grocery bags. Others created journals with tales from the expedition and included leaves and bone fragments of species previously unknown.

I like this project for a few reasons:

1. The students really enjoy any opportunity to use art and creativity. There are countless benefits to using technology in the classroom, but they really appreciate times when we power down the laptops and create something with just our hands and some art supplies.
2. Creating these artifacts made students step back and think about how historical narratives like the textbook are created based on artifacts and other primary sources.
3. Looking at the artifacts also forced students to reflect on the ways that our knowledge of our world was built. Only recently have we been able to map and observe our world with satellites, sonar and similar technologies. For most of human history, our collective knowledge of the world came from on-the-ground human exploration and experience.

For the project, students were allowed to create journals, samples, maps and other types of artifact evidence from the trip. They looked at online catalogs of real artifacts and watched a film that reenacted the journey to collect information, then began creating. 

They made Mandan buffalo hides depicting famous battles and encounters, journals with leaf samples of real species from the west, as well as recreations of antique maps that showed the journey.

I found this project to be relatively flexible as far as timing and ability levels. Some students got really creative and researched more information about what Lewis and Clark actually collected. Others stayed very concrete and created maps or wrote journal entries. It was also fairly simple to adapt the requirements in order to accommodate shorter time periods as needed.

Electoral College Simulation

Our next topic after exploring the Articles of Confederation and Constitutional Convention was Washington's presidency. Our textbook briefly describes how Washington was chosen by the Electoral College, but goes into little detail about what this was. I decided that we needed to dig deeper into this question and not only explore how the Electoral College functions today, but how it was originally designed. In the first few elections in American history, the president was not determined by a popular vote, but exclusively by the Electoral College.

First, we discussed the role of the electors as they were originally described. Because the American population at the time was often rural and far-flung and long distance communication was slow to say the least, campaigning was exceedingly difficult. Many Framers also didn't have much faith in the ability of the general populace to chose a worthy candidate for various reasons. To gather information about this particular era of the Electoral College, we watched videos and read from various sources, including The United States Constitution: A Round Table Comic by Nadja Baer. The graphic novel offers a clear, concise and visually-supported version of the events of the Constitutional Convention. 

Later, we discussed the election of 1800 and how several key flaws were discovered in the electoral system. Finally, we compared the way the college functions today to the original design on a Venn diagram after watching the following video showing the official process. 

To model the electoral process as it is conducted today, we created a mock election in which the entire middle school would participate. We created two mock candidates who represented Federalist and Democratic-Republican agendas. We chose these two political parties because of their significance during the period of history we were studying, but the lesson could easily be adapted to any two or more political parties. 

Several of the classes in the middle school were not studying this subject, so our ballots clearly explained the platforms of each candidate. Each homeroom was allowed to vote for a candidate and in our simulation, each homeroom would count as a state with a different number of electoral votes based on population. Before handing out the ballots to each homeroom, we created a fact sheet (shown below) with the electoral votes for each homeroom and a map to color in red and blue as the votes are tallied. The map is intended to look like our middle school hallway and resemble the United States maps that are color-coded during election coverage

After the election, I showed a video of typical news coverage from YouTube of the 2008 election of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I showed and explained how the media outlets use a complex algorithm of votes counted, exit polls, historical context and other data to project a winner for each state. Sometimes the winners are called in short order while others may continue to be counted late into the evening or even the following weeks.

Similar to the news reporting on the election, teams of students were allowed to count the votes for each "state," then "call" a state for a particular candidate when the votes were tallied. As the states were called, we kept a school map, like the one shown above, of the hallway and shaded in the homerooms either red or blue depending on the victorious candidate. Finally, when the "magic number" of electoral votes had been assigned to a candidate, we called the election. Later on, each student acted as an elector for a particular state and signed off on a certificate like the ones shown in the electoral college video above.

After our rallies complete with "state" paddles and signing the certificates, I felt that students had a much deeper understanding of how the modern Electoral College system operates and how it has changed over time.

The Weakest Link

In discussing the forming of this new nation, the United States, I wanted students to understand why the Articles of Confederation failed, but also why the features that made it weak were built in. I wanted them to see the fears of the Framers about their experiences with British government replaced with new laws, limitations and procedures in the Articles. Finally, I wanted them to analyze what they felt was the weakest part of the plan, or the weakest link.

In order to accomplish the bold, challenging concept, we created a chain of weaknesses in the Articles that led to everything from excessively high state taxes to massive inflation. Chains are easy to create both by hand and on the computer. I wrote about using chains to demonstrate metaphors in a novel here.

In Microsoft Word, you can simply insert a one-column table with as many rows as links. By choosing a larger font or inserting spaces, the rows can be larger and allow for typing or handwriting. These rows can later be cut into strips, then curled and taped into the chains. My students used a template like the one below then typed in the weaknesses.

Students were required to choose five weaknesses based on our in-class discussion. Once the template was complete, we printed them and created chains. Students then had to choose one of the weaknesses that they felt was the most damaging or was the greatest influence on the eventual demise of the Articles. They wrote paragraphs about the so-called "weakest link."

One student had the idea of posting the paragraphs onto images of locks. One of our sources described how some of the features of the Articles "gridlocked" the government, rendering it powerless to levy taxes, regulate trade, or create a standard currency. Using the lock template, we attached the cut-out lock image to the link representing the student's selected "weakest link."

Understanding why an entire system of government failed can be daunting, but I found that this helped to break down the Articles into manageable chunks, then allowed students to analyze those weaknesses.

Photo Graphic Novels

There's a whole bunch of research out there suggesting how effective graphic novels can be effective at increasing comprehension, especially for struggling readers and those with dyslexia. But what if a suitable graphic novel doesn't exist for your particular subject matter? Or what if you have a particularly active group of learners who would benefit from a more kinesthetic lesson?

We have had a lot of fun this year with photo re-enactments and transforming those re-enactments into graphic novel-style frames with quotes and captions only enhances student understanding.

Earlier this year, my 8th grade classes analyzed Emmanuel Leutze's iconic painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. We looked at the historical inaccuracies in the painting, as well as the symbolism that the artist sought to depict. Finally, we created a stand-up "boat" and ice chunks with some painted poster board, oars cut from cardboard and some costume hats and accessories. Students posed "in" the boat in front of a piece of large blue bulletin board paper painted with clouds and light similar to the original. The students really enjoyed this activity and seemed to really connect with the material. So, next time with another class, I took it a step further.

Later on, a different group of 8th graders used a storyboard template worksheet to plan five different scenes of the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga. For each scene, students sketched the poses, planned the props they needed and assigned character roles to each member of the group. I required that the scenes be planned in detail so that on shooting day, each group was only allotted 10 minutes for each scene.

To conclude the activity, I imported the photos into a Word document and framed each picture with a black border. As a class, we added captions, thought bubbles and quote bubbles to each of the scenes using the pre-formatted shapes in the "Insert" ribbon of Word.

(In the image above, the students' faces have been omitted. In the final product, they are visible.)

By acting out the scenes, then coming back and adding captions, I have found that the students have a more complete and retrievable memory of the events. The activity also made for a fun day outside and a very real opportunity to students to take responsibility for making choices about the most important scenes and planning the scenes themselves. We had a great time participating in this activity and as the students get more comfortable with the procedure, it can be easily applied to reading, science and other content areas.

Snapshots of Life, or Teaching with Photojournalism

When I was still a young student myself, I remember how much I was struck by the images in Peter Menzel's Materials Worlds photojournalism project. It's a cliche to say that "pictures are worth a thousand words," but in this case, a single image did more to describe everyday life for average families around the world than prose ever could.

I have taught lessons based on these photographs a few times to teach a huge idea that I simply call "worldly thinking." A few years ago, I heard about a similar project by another photographer, James Mollison. His gallery of images shows Where Children Sleep and again, a single image shows the radical disparity between the way different people live from country to country, even from town to town. I was so struck by these complimentary projects, that I blogged about it here on SpenceSpace back in 2011.

Well, I'm back again with another similar project and this time, the uses for the images can be used for "worldly thinking" instruction, but also to discuss nutrition and health. Peter Menzel has started another project, featured here on Nutrition News, showing a week's worth of groceries from various countries around the world.

Some viewers will be affected by the sheer quantities of food in the industrial world versus the simple sacks of grain in the developing countries featured. Others, however, will be struck by the amount of fresh produce in so many homes compared to the piles of processed and prepared foods in Europe and North America. Either way, the images can be used for a host of lessons about culture, food, nutrition, globalism, or just that big notion of "worldly thinking."

As the world continues to become more global, there are still massive disparities between lifestyles around the world. There are few ways to show this better to students than with a series of photographs that do more for their understanding than words or explanation ever could.

What if the Patriots had Facebook?

In preparing for our upcoming lesson on colonial upheaval before the American Revolution, I was reading through our textbook and their discussion of the Committee of Correspondence. Just like so many revolutions in recent history, the political activism of the colonial period was spread through social networking.

We discussed how grassroots protest and activism almost always spreads this way during the lesson and many students were aware of the role of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites in the fostering of political action today. The Patriots, however, communicated between colonies with a network of letters and express riders up and down the east coast. This discussion got my brain juices flowing...

Any of us who spend a decent amount of time on the web have probably seen fake Facebook walls about everything from TV shows to historical events. One that my family and I recently enjoyed was a spoof of an episode of PBS's Downton Abbey. I thought about how the Patriots would have communicated had they access to Facebook, and I also wondered how this could incorporate their fluency with the medium of social networking and their senses of humor and creativity.

I got to my laptop, opened up my Facebook wall and created a Word template with editable text boxes that looked just like a real Facebook page. I have included an image of the template below, but you can also download the document with the link provided.

View and download the template as a Google doc here.

For our purposes, we created these Facebook farces on 11" x 17" and printed them in color to hang in the hallway. The kids showed off their knowledge of the colonial activists by joining them into groups like the Sons of Liberty and inviting them to events like the Stamp Act Congress. They also added some humor in their interactions between figures and "liking" various slogans, pictures and events.

The potential for these types of projects is endless. This template and the idea could be used for characters in literature, any historical figures, or even more abstract concepts, like personifying geometric shapes or elements from the periodic table. Please feel free to share how you have used Facebooking in your lessons!