Creating Something of Which to Be Proud is a Key to Engagement

A former student emailed me recently to find out if I had a copy of a video project they did during their junior year as a part of a project based lesson I had students do. They were talking about the project with some friends from high school and wondered if by chance I still had a copy as they had lost theirs in a move to college. They were proud of the work that they had done from nearly nine years ago and hoped they could take a look again.Sadly, I did not have the requested copy, but it definitely got my wheels turning.

This morning I put my mind to creating a wooden piece for my boat. By NO MEANS would I call myself a wood worker, but I used all of the patience and know-how I could muster and turned out a pretty nice replica of a broken plastic piece that I can no longer buy. I sent pictures to my wife and dad immediately, and I was just sitting here thinking about some other wood working projects I could do around the house. Needless to say, I'm pretty proud of that work.

It's a long lead in, but hopefully both examples remind us all of that feeling we get when we do something we are TRULY proud of. Often that feeling comes from doing our best on something that we found challenging, maybe even overwhelming at times; something that proved we could do a task we weren't completely confident we could handle.

Thinking back to high school, there are only a few academic experiences that I'm truly proud of. That seems a shame to me. Plenty of extra-curriculars come to mind, but few academic encounters hold that same weight in my memory. Now that I work with teachers, I hope I can inspire some of my colleagues to change that for our students today. The beauty is, it probably isn't a difficult as we might make it out to be.

Content is the Kindling

Teachers who love their content are infectious if they can sell that passion to kids. Even kids who don't love the same content (or any content) are amused by teachers who do. By their very nature, teachers are constantly delving into new topics, ideas, and subjects that can be used as a springboard for a project. As long as the content provides an opportunity to explore, to break out of a mold of everybody doing the same thing, and as long as it (and the teacher) allows students dig into elements of the topic that others may not venture into, the content will suffice. This gives a wide variety of students the space they need to expand and find a niche in topic that others haven't already filled. This matters when you are a teenager and making this consideration for kids will be enough to get the fire started.

Set Forth a Challenge They Can Engage In

Inspiration can come at any time, but the greatest inspirations seem to come as we attempt to resolve an issue we face. When we find a problem or issue that we deem challenging, most people set about the work of solving it both consciously and sub-consciously. We become engaged in the task of resolving that issue. If engagement is what our students lack, perhaps it stems from the idea that they do not see school as a worthy or meaningful challenge. Yes, content can be challenging. So can playing bridge, painting, or learning to dance. It doesn't mean that we all find those endeavors engaging or motivating. Here is where teachers have to use a little bit of their teaching sense!

What are your kids talking about? What do they crave? What might motivate them to stand up and get involved? Is there a local issue they can take on? Is there a way they can have their voices heard? Is there a local group that will rock your students world if they can engage with them (even if the kids aren't aware this group could do so)? The hard part about project based teaching is that teachers have to be flexible and aware of how to engage their students in the project. This means the set up from year to year, or the project, or the audience all has to be flexible. However, the end result has to be the same -- the students have to feel authentically challenged so that they can engage in the problem solving process.

Create Conditions You Can Live With and They Can Overlook

Great teachers understand that they don't necessarily help students to learn; great teachers create the perfect conditions for their students to learn in! This definitely becomes the role of a teacher in a project based unit or classroom. The reality is that teachers have content to cover and need to ensure that students are learning the identified targets. For that reason, teachers have to lay ground rules, create assessments, and determine checkpoints that allow them to do their job. However, teachers also have the responsibility of getting those things out of the way as much as possible. Rubrics and checkpoints wreak of "school" and "grades" and "assignments." They detract from the authenticity of a project and they serve to kill student motivation. Although it is a delicate balance, create conditions in which you get what you need, students get what they need, and the project is still engaging and authentic for students!

Have Students Make Something of Which They Can Be Proud

As I mentioned in the intro, to have students talking about a high school project six or seven years after college suggests that they were truly proud of that work. That depth of pride is powerful, and it tends to spur on even more engagement and passion in future projects.

For many teachers the trouble is the time these products take to complete. Often the end product is itself outside of the focus of the course or content. That trade-off, though, is likely worthwhile if students can commit more deeply to the work they're doing. I struggle to recall a single worksheet, test, or even paper that I wasn't deeply tied to. That is not true of the few projects I was able to complete during my schooling. I remember them well and I remember the content they were tied to. While that is just one perspective, the ongoing adult conversation I have with my friends about school reveals a similar truth for them. Often these projects were self-selected, determined by choices we made as students or a group of students, and had to fit within certain parameters. The investment of time and energy, along with the feeling of pride when being finished, is largely what makes them so memorable.

The more opportunities we can give the students to create something, to get hands on and see a project from start to finish, the more likely they are to be invested in this project, in future projects, and in the whole concept of learning.  That's an important trade-off when you consider what data suggests about our students nationally related to school engagement.

Find an Audience Students Care About

Think back to being a kid, specifically a teenager. What were the things that most motivated you? What were the things that drove you crazy? These are hooks that we can use to encourage kids to engage more meaningfully in school related projects.

One driving force that most teens can relate to is the issue of voice. They want to have a say and how things go and they want to be heard. They want an audience that they care about (unfortunately, this USUALLY does not include teachers)

This should be an essential part of the work we doing a project-based classroom. It is a natural way for students to meet a raised expectation (they are presenting to an audience after all), and it needs a central need that most students have of wishing to be heard.

The challenge for teacher in a project-based classroom is finding that audience. That is the beauty of technology used appropriately in our classrooms. It breaks those walls down and makes anybody in the world a potential audience member. Start dreaming about potential audience members.  Chances are likely if you can dream it, you can probably find it!

This may seem like a tall order, but remember, the work for teachers is generally done in the planning stages.  Then the students take center stage and do the heavy lifting (as they should -- the workers should always be doing the majority of the work).  The dividends this project based approach to learning will pay far outweigh the time and "risk" put into trying something new in your classroom.  Trust me from experience on this one -- nothing feels as good as knowing your students were so deeply engaged in learning that they are still talking about it years later.  That's the experience every child should be able to have while at school!

Moving Beyond Substitution: Innovative Use of Book Creator Climbs SAMR Ladder

If somebody promises gains in student achievement as a result of the purchase of 1:1 computing devices or of introducing an app in your district/classroom, it's fair to say they may be feeding you a line.  However, when a teacher shares an educationally relevant, SAMR climbing use of that same tool or app, pay attention. Student achievement is likely to follow!

Recently a teacher in my district, Emily Hernandez, shared one way she uses the Book Creator app for iOS that pointed to an educationally relevant, instructionally appropriate use of the app.  If you are not familiar with Book Creator, it is a way to develop interactive, multimedia-incorporating ebooks/iBooks on the iPad.  It is a simple, easy-to-use app that could very easily be overestimated due to its apparent simplicity.

Ms. Hernandez, though, saw the potential in the tool because she dared to think differently about how her students would utilize the app to demonstate knowledge in her foreign language classroom.

Foreign language students need to demonstrate a wide variety of language acquisition skills, measured primarily through their ability to write and speak the language.  This is traditionally assessed via written works and through the use of conversation and oral presentation with classmates and instructors.  

In Ms. Hernandez's application of the Book Creator app, she was able to utilize these two assessment techniques to demonstrate the students' knowledge to date.  Through the use of written text in the eBooks students created, as well as through the ability to record audio and place audio files into the eBook (a feature built into Book Creator), Ms. Hernandez achieved Substitution by having students do something they had always done, only now using technology to do it.

She climbed the SAMR ladder another rung, though, through the meaningful incorporation of audio, images, and written text into a singular demonstration of learning.  Using the medium of a "published" eBook as their palette, students were being asked to provide written text, were asked to record and supplement that written text with an audio version of that text, and were able to incorporate meaningful images that supported the key themes and messages of their eBook.  Here the teacher was taking advantage of the benefits of the technology built into the Book Creator app, as well as the student's pre-conceived notion of a more professional level of communication in a published book, to gain efficiency and to add authenticity to the demonstration of learning.  This is clear evidence that Ms. Hernandez had now achieved Augmentation on the SAMR ladder in her use of Book Creator.

As we move into Modification, it is important to understand that the key focus must be on how the teacher changes the lesson design or demonstration of learning to take advantage of the functionality and efficiency the technology provides.  Ms. Hernandez decided to make student reflection a key component of this project, allowing students to continually reflect on their "performance" based upon teacher feedback to inform their future learning.  In her lesson design, she allowed students to return to the eBook to make changes prior to final publication. 

The stroke of genius that Ms. Hernandez conjured was in using AirDrop and/or Google Drive (both export functions are natively available in the Book Creator app), functions that allowed the student to share the "draft" of their eBook with the teacher, as well as the audio recording function of the Book Creator app, to provide that feedback.  As students shared the draft of their eBook with the teacher, the teacher reviewed it on her iPad in the Book Creator app, added a page for audio feedback in which she spoke her feedback to students, shared it back with students using the same AirDrop/Google Drive method the student selected, and then allowed them to continue working. While that feedback could have just as easily been spoken to the students in class, the ability to use Google Drive and audio record provided four key advantages.  

• The students could work on the rough draft of the eBook at any time and "turn in" that draft as soon as they were finished.  Ms. Hernandez could do the same with the feedback.  This creates an ability to provide just-in-time feedback to students as they meet natural finish points, not just on a once-size-fits-all, pre-determined collection date.
• The feedback was recorded, meaning that both the students and Ms. Hernandez had a record of the feedback provided.  This becomes valuable to the students as they make suggested changes and alter their final product, and it becomes valuable to the teacher as a way of measuring growth from previous iterations of a similar work product.
• Through the drafting process, Ms. Hernandez reinforces the concept that language acquisition is about a process of learning and growing, not a unit of study that is explored and then completed or forgotten.
• Students create a lasting product that demonstrates their understanding at a given point in time.  This can be posted to an electronic portfolio, shared at conferences, or later revisited and revised as the students grow in their language acquisition.

Ms. Hernandez's work should be applauded, as it is an incredible reminder that the simplest of tools, used in meaningful, thoughtful, and creative ways, can really transform the way that our students perceive and experience the journey of learning.

Risk Taking is the Way Forward: What is your #edurisk ?

Educators are being asked to take on a lot today when it comes to improving instructional practice and educational outcomes.  Whether it be increasing student engagement, embracing new tools and concepts for instructing students (or having students create and demonstrate knowledge), re-thinking educational spaces, or a long list of other topics that impact our work with students, the reality is that it can feel overwhelming.

However, in synthesizing the larger message of these changes in practice, there is one clear theme that surfaces.  Change is evident and inescapable.  A hyper-connected world is a world that is dynamically changing.  If an educator's primary responsibility is readying students for the life that they will one day face, we must prepare them to ready for a life of ongoing change.

While it's an understandable feeling to just want to throw up your hands in surrender to the overwhelming overflow of change (especially in education).  For the good of our students we can't give up that easily.  There is hope, and it comes neatly packaged in a simple idea - "risk taking."

Why is risk taking so important?

The act of willingly taking risks is the life line that makes dealing with change palatable, manageable, and survivable.  Risk taking, by its very nature, provides a platform on which we can identify our challenges, develop a plan for tackling those challenges, and then safely implement our plan without feeling the pressure to be immediately successful.

In taking a risk, we agree to try something new without fear of failure -- risks, by their very definition, embody some chance at failure.  The universal understanding of what a risk is (implying that failure may happen) provides us with a safety net to try something new.  

It is the act of trying something new, though, that is the key element. When change happens, it often requires a different response than previously offered/attempted.  The feeling of being overwhelmed by change is usually in direct response to our inability to attempt a new response; we are committed to the way we've always done things and struggle to see a different way to respond. When we take a risk, we commit to trying something new.  We accept that it may or may not be a successful attempt, but we are willing to forego the way we once did things to attempt a new way of doing things.  In doing so, we begin on our journey forward to both address and deal with change.

Taking a risk

Put simply, a risk is any change you elect to make (and actively engage in) that stretches you beyond your comfort zone.  Risks are not determined by the overall magnitude of the change or the size of the impact it has. Personal changes that impact one person are valuable risks, just as are risks that change an entire organization impacting thousands of people.  In the end, a risk's magnitude and sphere of influence is not the determining factor if it is a risk or not -- it is if the risk taken stretches the person, organization, or society  beyond an existing level of comfort.

Steps in the Risk Taking Process

1. The first step to taking a risk is acknowledging personal/organizational anxiety over a change that has happened which requires a different response.  
2. The second step is developing an actionable plan that provides an adequate response to that change.  
3. The third step is determining what success and failure might look like and accepting the consequences for both.  
4. Finally, the fourth step is taking action -- going for it by taking the risk.

Remember that every person has his/her own aversion to risk.  Some individuals are comfortable with risks that may seem monumental to others.  Others may feel that even slight changes are a big risk.  However, both are valuable and noteworthy, as both are progressive steps forward to address and deal with the realities of change. Your personal aversion to risk is a personal matter that you must grapple with and understand as a part of the risk taking process.

Sharing your risk

Witnessing risk taking is both humbling and inspiring.  Knowing that an individual has literally taken a chance, put a part of themselves out there -- this is exactly the kind of action that can encourage others to take their own risk.  In a hyper-connected world we can easily share our risks with others in ways that were never before possible.  The use of social media is one avenue for this.

Understandably, for many of us the risk we take might simply be putting ideas out there for others see.  We encourage you to think about the act of publicly sharing your risk with others as a way of building a network with others -- a network that just might be able to offer support, insight, or perspective based upon their experiences.

We are encouraging more educators to take risks and to share them out with the world!  Through the use of a common code that is easily searchable, also called a hashtag, regardless of what social media network you choose to share in your risk can be identified.  For this campaign we are going to use the following hashtag:

#edurisk

Whether you use Google + or Twitter, we would love for you to share your #edurisk with our community, both to mark and celebrate your personal risks in addressing the challenges of constant change, and also to inspire others to take those first steps forward -- steps that mark the cultural shift our profession is making to embrace and respond to a world of constant change.