Letting My Son Fall

Tonight when I got home from work my sons asked me if we could head down to our neighborhood park and ride bikes. Knowing it was one of the last free afternoons before school got started for them and me, I naturally said yes and we headed out. Now this particular park is a playground with a baseball field surrounded by a paved path. However, on one side the path take a sharp curve on an access road and it slightly downhill and gravel. As my boys were flying down the path and heading toward this particular spot I saw my older son take the turn too quickly and take a spill.  My younger son watched this and slowed down and stopped before hitting this curve.

My older son got up, showed me his scratches and continued on riding. The next time around he slowed down and took the curve in control and navigated the gravel with no troubles. However, my younger son apparently did not learn from the hard earned lesson of his older brother and instead took the turn fast and went down hard as well. He looked at me with tears in his eyes expecting me to somehow fix what had happened. I simply looked him (after I realized he was not seriously injured J) and asked him what he learned. He told me the “gravel is slippery” and proceeded to take the turn with caution for the remainder of the time we were at the park.

I was intrigued by this experience from a parenting and teaching perspective. After seeing his older brother fall, my younger son still decided to take the turn quickly and fall. For some reason he felt he could pull off what his brother had not. As a parent, my inclination was the yell out and tell him to slow down but then would he have learned that hard-earned lesson? Do we over protect our kids to the point they have no life experience beyond a parent’s warnings to dictate their actions? I often think we walk a fine line and really need to be mindful of safety but also of allowing natural consequence to serve as teaching tools.

In schools we talk a lot about protecting kids from adverse consequences and making sure they don’t fail. I just can’t help but think that if we let kids fall in the gravel more they just might learn more than if we simply tell them the gravel is slippery.  Obviously, gravel can be a metaphor for failing a test, being cut from a sports team or being dumped by a girl/boyfriend. As the new school year draws closer I plan on looking for more opportunity to stand near and allow kids to fall down and help them make sense of it rather than making sure they never fall.

Disclaimer – I don’t plan on allowing students to play with weapons grade plutonium, electric fences, or rabid raccoons in an effort to learn from failure/pain but simply those small failures we often try to protect kids from in school.

#SDE2013 Session Resources

This past week I was happy to share and present at the SDEConference in Chicago and had a great time with all four sessions I presented. As promised, here are all the resources or videos I shared in my sessions.

The first two sessions I did were PBL – Making Literacy Come Alive and Student Driven Learning with Technology. These first two sessions were more conversational and not any real resources were shared other than first hand experiences. I did share some of my students’ videos from my YouTube channel as well as some projects.

My third session was Innovation and Education and I shared some of my beliefs on what we are doing wrong in schools and some techniques on how to change that. One area that I spoke about was my experiences with Standards Based Grading and how it looks in my classroom. Another topic we discussed was the EdCamp movement for professional development as well as some teaching methodologies.

The final session I did was Interactive History, which was a resource sharing festival by both myself and the participants. Here is the listing of the resources shared and they are broken down by categories.

Debates

Today’s Meet – Use as backchannel for discussion

Lectures

Screencast-o-matic to record your lectures and share with students

Reports and Presentations

CrazyTalk talking heads

“March Madness Bracket” for historical figures

Music videos

Ujam song creator

Facebook page using fakebook

Horrible History Videos

Game or Simulations

BBC site for a handful of simulations

The ICivics site with tons of activities

Primary Source Documents:

New York Times time machine to access old documents

National Archives site for a ton of activities

Awesome Stories resources

Library of Congress resources

Beyond the Bubble resources

="MsoNormal"> Additional Resources

The Social Science Ning

Newspaper creator

Map manipulator and creator (fantastic)

A Livebinder of US and World history resources as well as primary documents

Lessons from Brazil: Impressions

In a continuing attempt to capture the experiences and reflections from my recent trip to Brazil as part of a Global Fellowship program, here is my latest reflection. The idea embedded in this post was a lesson that I learned by pure accident and on the final day of my trip abroad.

On our final day in Brazil, a handful of the male teachers from the fellowship decided to go out for lunch before catching our bus back to the airport and flying home. After an entertaining walk and meeting some of the more colorful locals, we found a quaint little place to eat. As we took our seats we were all fumbling through trying to communicate with the waitress who did not speak English. We were your typical Americans laughing about the experience and not really having much success distinguishing to the waitress between a Coke and a Coke Zero. We were doing our best to use our hand gestures, pointing and one teacher even had an app to convert Portuguese words to English.

As this train wreck of an ordering process continued, one of the teachers made a remark that stuck with me. Several of the teachers at the table were commenting on how our waitress was doing a phenomenal job. She was incredibly patient with our demands in spite of our futile attempts to communicate using both verbal and nonverbal means. As we were reflecting on her patience and polite demeanor, one of the teachers made the comment that struck me. He said that she might be somebody's first and only impression of the country of Brazil. What he meant was too often one single person can create the impression for an entire group of people. If we were to base our entire experience on that one moment or in that one individual, what would that say about the people of Brazil. What assumptions or conclusions or beliefs would we have about the people because of one interaction with one person from Brazil?

Of course the natural next step to that conversation was maybe we, the gentleman that were sitting at that table, were the only impression this woman was ever going to have of Americans. With that in mind, were we doing our best job to leave a good impression of what it meant to be an American? Was she going to go home and say all Americans are like (fill in the blank) because of the experience she had with us at lunch. Did we leave a good impression? Did we leave a bad impression?

Weeks after that experience I started thinking more about the interactions I had as I was down there in Brazil and what impression I may have left on those people about what it meant to be an American or even an American teacher. Did I do what was necessary to communicate to them what I believe in and was that necessarily reflective of the entire teacher population of our country? That may seem pretty heavy and maybe a little over the top but it was something I definitely thought about.

Like most good ideas, I don't think this notion of impression making is a teacher thing but rather a human thing. What sort of impression do you leave with people that you meet one time? When you meet somebody at a conference or stand in front of a room of strangers, what impression do you leave? Are you representing your school or in my case your country in a positive manner? In thinking about this, I wonder about the upcoming fall school year that will be here before we know it. What impression do I want to leave with my students on the very first day that they will walk home and share with their family? What about the entire school year and how I may impact a child or a family's belief or feelings about schooling or education in our school or state? We have all seen it in our time as educators. A teacher has completely ruined a child educational career or a family's perspective about a school or a school district. It only takes one teacher to ruin that faith in school for a family or a student. However, just like it only takes one to ruin, it can also take one to instill confidence and spark a love for learning.

I think there's a lesson to take to heart here when looking forward to the new school year or current school year for some. What impressions are you going to leave on your students or even your colleagues? Even those of you that have been teaching for many years, there's always a time, a place and an opportunity to change that impression of who you are, what you stand for and what you believe in.

Lessons from Brazil: False Assumptions

Recently I took a trip to Brazil as part of a Global Learners Fellowship. We visited a handful of schools in both Sao Paulo in Rio de Janeiro. In addition, we visited some other Non-Governmental Agencies, Volunteer Organizations as well as some typical tourist sites. I plan on writing a series of posts about the things that I saw and experienced and the reflections from all of it. It really was one of those experiences that will take several weeks, months, and even years to fully processed and unpack. Naturally, I took a ton of pictures and videos. Here is just a short video I put together as a one-minute highlight reel.

False Assumptions

When I left for Brazil I had a lot of preconceived notions about what I was going to experience and witness while in the country and in their schools. To be honest, I had a pretty stereotypical American attitude that there was going to be very little I was going to learn about how to do my job as a teacher better. I figured I would have fun, meet a ton of great people, but not really find anything great to bring back to my classroom. I knew the goal of our trip was to open our eyes to global competency and give us a unique perspective on just that. However, I was incredibly skeptical that I was truly going to be inspired to change my teaching based on anything I was going to see in a Brazilian school.

On the insanely long plane ride to Sao Paulo, another Fellow and I were talking about why we were even going to Brazil. Why were we not heading to Helsinki? Clearly we would learn more there. Then we began to think that maybe we were coming as the messiahs to preach the good word of American education to the people of Brazil. How colonial of us. J Frankly, we were more excited about seeing the cable car from Moonraker up on Sugar Loaf Mountain than visiting the sure to be uninspiring schools of Brazil.

Yet on our very first school visit to Humboldt High School in Sao Paulo my preconceived notions were shattered in just a matter of seconds. Where I thought I would see depressing and sad state of affairs, I encountered passion and enthusiasm unlike anything I had ever seen. The students at this school showed a level of passion for being in school that I have never witnessed in any school I have ever attended or taught in. I saw the kids that had a love for learning and literally craved it is we see Americans crave fast food. Now I must put a disclaimer here that the school we visited was sort of a pilot school that I will explain in a future post. Essentially it was a public school that did receive a level of financial support from a business partnership.

There was no sense of entitlement that we often face in American school. In fact it was quite the opposite. The kids we spoke with felt that they were genuinely lucky and truly blessed to be in school and to learn as a way to improve their lives. It was like nothing I have ever seen or witnessed or felt before. Here I was, this arrogant American teacher who thought that I had it all figured out. How wrong I was. What I wouldn’t give to have just one of those students come to my school and share their genuine love for learning with my students and teachers. Words can simply not express the experience.

One might ask why were they so enthusiastic and passion about learning? Obviously, they had Classroom Dojo to facilitate their behaviors and make sure they were getting stickers and badges to motivate them. Or maybe they were using the flipped classroom model and these kids were going home and being inspired by watching YouTube videos and coming in and having lively discussions. Some of you are thinking it's because their teachers were held to such a high level of accountability with test scores that they just naturally had this lively, loving, and supportive learning environment. You might assume that they had a one to one technology environment with every kid having a MacBook Air or an iPad or wearing a pair of Google Glass. You can probably picture the walls filled with student work and motivational posters with people climbing high rock walls in mountaintops.

To be honest none of that was there. It was just a bunch of kids that wanted to learn and a bunch of teachers that wanted to teach them. It’s just that simple. They had created such a community that it just worked. A great example of this community was when we ate lunch. I am a lunchroom supervisor and often spend my lunch periods eating while standing and roaming around redirecting and disciplining kids to pick up after themselves. Yet in this school there were no supervisors anywhere in the lunchroom area. It was just kids eating and in some cases teachers sitting with them as well. You could feel the community and respect the kids and staff had for each other and their school.

My initial takeaway from this visit was how they were able to do so much by way of motivating students and creating a community of learning with so little. You could see in every teacher and student we spoke with a genuine love for each other and passion for making theirs lives better. This was not about improving tests scores, which is a reality for them, but it was about improving lives. Their sense of community and passion was something I will never forget and will remember with jealousy.

I moved forward from that first school visit with a new outlook and tossed all of my false assumptions out the door. From that point on I embraced the idea that I had a lot to learn and planned on soaking it all up. 

History Hero

For the past several months I have been working on a new project that I am excited and super anxious about. I was approached by individuals at Mind Gamez to come on and consult on a new video game app they were developing. To start, all I knew was that I was going to visit museums, play a video game and do some work with Historical artifacts, which sounded great to me.

The idea behind the video game is to make kid’s experiences at museums and historical locations more interactive and engaging. The name of the game is History Hero and has recently hit the App Store in several markets. Essentially, the users are trying to save historical artifacts from being stolen by the villains who are the Erasers. For example, I have written missions at the Art Institute of Chicago. The mission will take kids through the museum where they will have to “save” some of the most important pieces of art in the museum. It is a great way to get kids and adults involved in the exhibits. Maybe the best part is it takes some of the guessing game of what should we see at the museum out of your visit. As of right now the App is ready in a few select markets and you can read the full press release here.

Personally, I am the Chicago area “guy” and am putting finishing touches on missions at the Field Museum and the Art Institute with more sites to follow. If you have kids or students that travel to any of these museums I would strongly encourage you to grab the app and have a blast.

Here is a great promotional video that was recently released!