LET THE DIALOGUE BEGIN: ANOTHER TAKE ON OUR PUBLIC PURPOSE

Briefly: For a while it has been on my mind that independent schools here and there are up to some pretty exciting things and that for various reasons this information tends to remain within our sector of the education world. Earlier this summer I put pen to paper on this topic and submitted an essay to Education Week proposing, from my humble seat, that independent schools might consider sharing what we’ve been learning and that public school educators might be interested in what we have to share.

This might be just a modest and slightly romantic proposal, or perhaps it's an idea whose time has come; since our pathways began to diverge widely right around the start of the No Child Left Behind–standardized testing era, the things we have been free to do have been in some contrast with the constraints under which that public schools have been living. We have been free to experiment and try things out that even charter schools—subject to testing mandates—have not been able to attempt, and some of the work our more forward-thinking schools are doing is pretty exciting.

The piece went online today and will show up in print, with a slightly less strident title, in tomorrow’s edition of the paper. I’d like to think it will inspire some consideration, and that more of our schools will seek opportunities to share lessons of practice and program beyond our various usual channels of communication. I’d even like to think that folks in other areas of education will start asking us a few questions. 

I don’t think that we have all the answers or that our schools are “better” than others, but I do think we have both an opportunity and an obligation to express our public purpose by inserting ourselves more energetically into the national conversation about effective education—for all kids.

TAKING NOTES IN A DIGITAL AGE--SOMETHING FOR THE INTENTIONAL TEACHER TO THINK ABOUT

The other day I heard a teacher wonder whether it was okay to ask students in a digital classroom—that is, a classroom in which every kid is packing a laptop—to keep notes in a paper notebook.

That’s a heck of a good question, getting at the heart of how we learn, how we organize incoming information, how we process this, and how we keep track of content and ideas we need to keep track of.

In ninth grade I was taught a rigorous I.–A.–i.–a. outlining technique in history class. To some extent we seemed to be graded based on how closely our own notes adhered to the structure of the teacher’s own I.–A.–i.–a. lecture notes. This worked fine in that class, but when we found ourselves in front of a famously discursive teacher—more of a raconteur than a lecturer, really—for grades 10, 11, and 12, it was every student for himself.

Thus, I developed my own system for taking notes, using the same cartridge pens through college and graduate school. At some point I discovered Law Record notebooks, narrow-ruled with a margin about a third of the way from the left. I filled the left side with my observations, responses, and doodles and attempted the orderly recording of class or text content on the right. It worked for me.

I had classmates who worked a kind of stream of consciousness record of classroom proceedings and classmates who managed to distill even graduate school literature seminars into formal outlines. As life has proceeded, I now have colleagues who clack through every meeting—useful to have a record, useful to have someone whose keyboarding skills are up to the task of recording—and those who tend toward paper and pen. I note that quite a few adults don’t take much in the way of notes at all, relying on the keyboard notetakers, Twitter hashtag streams, or livebloggers to keep a readily accessible record; not a bad strategy, really, as long as others are willing to put in the sweat equity.

A deliberate typist rather than a facile one, I still tend toward paper, having traded in my Law Record notebooks for little notebooks from Levenger that have open space on the left that I use for rumination while trying to jot down salient discussion points in the lined area. I am afraid I still prefer fountain pens—clean, solid lines—although there are a few kinds of cheap rollerballs that I deem worthy in a pinch.

My informal survey of students reveals a similarly eclectic approach to taking notes. I know that teachers still try to teach outlining and other notetaking methods in lower grades, but technology now makes this harder, simply by offering more choices.

My holy grail of notetaking (and I suspect that of lots of other people, but the killer app remains elusive) would be a tablet computer with really nice stylus input on a page that would mimic my little pads. The stylus would look and feel and have a nib size like the Lamy pens I prefer, and it would somehow be impossible to misplace and cheap to replace. (The stylus I occasionally use on my iPad—and Steve Jobs was famously contemptuous of stylus input systems—leaves a line like an old crayon and would cost me ten buck or more to replace.) Good character recognition and write-to-text would be nice; my old Palm PDAs could do that, after all. I have just read of a partnership between Moleskine (I could be a convert) and Evernote that moves in the direction I crave, but their new products will be a bit pricey and still not deliver exactly what I’m looking for—I don’t really want to have to photograph each of my notebook pages.

So what do we tell a teacher in an age when every student may be approaching the whole notetaking enterprise in a way that is somehow idiosyncratic and where the possibilities change with the technology, regularly and a bit unpredictably?

We have an obligation to help students develop the skill of recording, distilling, and reflecting on what goes on in their classes or what they read. If teaching “old school” methods--I.–A.–i.–a. or “Cornell notetaking” (on which my Levenger pads are based) or “mind maps” or other systems with a history—helps to get kids started, that’s probably okay.

But like anything else we aim to teach, it’s worth laying out for ourselves what it is we want students to gain from the learning. In each of our classes and in the aggregated experience of “school,” why do we want students to take notes? I’m assuming there are a few universals in the answer to this, but we each have a slightly different take on the whole business, based on our own experiences and preferences.

The trick is to differentiate instruction—or at least the design of learning experiences—to help every student find his or her best method or at least best approach, as technology will bring about changes in available methods. This means that we have to be intentional about our purposes and attentive to students’ individual needs and preferences.

It also means that questions like, “Can I require kids to take notes in paper notebooks?” is no longer the simple yes/no classroom policy question that it might have been even in 1992. We can require students to “take notes,” but what we mean by “notes” and how we want them to do this is a question requiring a far more complex response than it did not so long ago.

Or perhaps, the matter of notetaking has always required a complex response but not always been given one.

NEW FACULTY ORIENTATION: ALWAYS TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH

We’re halfway through our week-long new teacher program at my school, and it’s going well. They have their laptops and have had a whole lot of training on the way we utilize the Google suite of applications, they’ve had a thorough, stop-and-meet-the-office-folks tour of the school, and they’ve had time to sit with their division directors and not-their-division directors (always seems nice to foster some cross-divisional interaction); they’ve had time to get into curriculum planning with their department heads, and yesterday they even had a panel of students who just shared their experiences of teachers here.

Every year we tweak the program based on some end-of-year feedback from the previous cohort, but by and large the program remains essentially the same from year to year. Now that we’ve been doing this for almost 15 years we have some principles and our goals pretty much down pat. Shifting to a very tech-intensive, laptop-enabled environment had us adding a big chunk of content, and we learned a few years ago that cutting a few workshops so that new folks could connect with department leaders and teachers sharing courses made the prospect of actually teaching a curriculum to actual kids a little less daunting.

The goals of the program are pretty basic:

• Become more familiar with the school as an environment.
• Meet some of the cast of characters, including some students (in the panel) and some parents (in a panel tomorrow after a session on the advisor program).
• Begin to understand the school’s culture in ways that the website and the comprehensive Teacher’s Guide to Life and Work that we create can’t fully do.
• Get some work done on curriculum and lesson plans that will ease the inevitable stresses and strains of the opening weeks of classes.
• Bring new folks up to speed on the technology-related aspects of work and school culture.
• Bring new folks into the ongoing conversations about the school’s strategic directions—design thinking happens to be on our plate this year.
• Build a little group spirit among the members of the cohort.
• Begin (because that’s all you can do, even in a week) to help new folks build their understanding and skills around school-specific aspects of the work—in our case, how our advising system works, what it means to be an diverse and inclusive community.

We’ll check in with the new folks individually and as a group as the year goes forward, and what we’ll collect is a list of “I wish I had known that…” topics that we can try to fold into next year’s program. We’ll also collect, especially at the beginning of the year, feedback that reminds us that this program, and some of the sessions in it, can feel like being asked to drink from a firehose, no matter how gently we try to pace the week.

All of this reminds us, in a human sort of way, that starting work at a new job in a new school is really hard. We try to acknowledge the anxieties that the new folks bring, often by referring to our own. “You’re never too experienced for pre-school sleeplessness,” we tell them, and this seems to help, at least a bit. I can recall being haunted by the names on class lists before starting my first job; it was like a nightmare version of the roll-call at the end of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. “It will get better,” we tell them, and our biggest single intended lesson is, “You are NEVER alone as a teacher here.” I think our school culture, once the year is under way, is consonant with that assertion.

But the big lesson, and there isn’t much we can learn from it except to accept it as part of the messiness of working in a place and a profession full of people—people whose needs, aspirations, and differences we are bound not only to accept and to celebrate but to accommodate as best we can within the framework of our own goals and aspirations as well as the school’s mission—is that the new teacher week will always feel like way too much when it is happening and will seem way too little in retrospect.

Sometimes the balance between such contrasts is the best we can hope for, and I think that’s okay. But it doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to seek feedback and to make changes where we can.

The main thing, though, is that our new folks will at least start the year with a pretty good sense of how the place works and what and where the resources are that can make their lives better. In my head there is a countdown to the first day of classes, but nowadays it’s largely a happy background noise. I remember, though, being at the stage in my career when that countdown felt like the voice of Dick Clark at New Year’s Eve of 2000, with the all excitement and nervousness around the Millennium—and the Millennium Bug.

And that all worked out just fine, now, didn’t it?

(BTW: Next up for our new faculty: advising, parent panel, quick overview of our philosophy around curriculum and assessment, quick intro to design thinking, and living and working in a multicultural community--plus more quality time to plan and talk specific academic policy stuff with department leaders.)

UNCLE WIGGLY IN CONNECTIVISM: THE MOOC MOOC ENDS

The scene from The Wizard of Oz my subconscious most often references is when Dorothy & Co. awake as snow falls to counteract the effects of the Wicked Witch’s poisonous poppies. Like the travelers, I hear little voices singing, “You’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night.”

The MOOC MOOC is coming to a close, and the earworm chorus of high-pitched, optimistic voices is firmly in place. The experience was interesting, stimulating, and even exciting, and I think I “learned” a great deal. But it was an intense experience that might have been even more so had I only the MOOC MOOC to think about.

As I emerge from the thickets of the MOOC MOOC, it’s pretty clear that my learning was not about “how to teach a Massive Open Online Course,” although I guess I could tease that content out of the experience and materials that were modeled for us. Nor was it, at least for me, about whether MOOCs are good or bad: Are MOOCs the future of education or merely an interesting experiment that captures the technology and anxieties of our moment in an interesting and probably fruitful way? Probably somewhere in between.

What I did learn, as I see things in this early stage of digesting the MOOC MOOC experience, is what MOOCs are and what the learner experience can be like. I think I also learned what MOOCs can be and what they can do. I learned that there are passionate believers in the cMOOC (Connectivist) approach and those who disdain the more common so-called (at least within the MOOC MOOC world) xMOOC (giant online academic course with familiar trappings) model. I learned that there are plenty of folks ready to jump on the “all of education as we know it is a crime against learners” bandwagon and a bunch of people with healthy skepticism about education that is too massive in scale and too online in nature—people who prefer face-to-face interaction and the yeastiness and warmth of real-time, viva voce communication. I learned that a Twitter feed rolling at the pace of the odometer of the Starship Enterprise is on the ragged edge between representing a helpful hashtag PLN and just making me want to close the laptop and go for a walk; just way TMI—and I don’t mean Three-Mile Island.

Where will I go with my learning? Well, I feel relatively confident about injecting myself into conversations about large-scale online learning, and I can speak with at least the knowledge of experience about yet another LMS (in this case Instructure Canvas, tidy and flexible from what I could see as a consumer) and a few more online tools. I believe that I could put a course together in either the “participant pedagogy”/Connectivist milieu or the more conventional mode; I am feeling vaguely empowered to contribute to one of the potential MOOC experiences presenting itself in the independent school world, Fred Bartels’s planning document for a MOOC on “IndependentSchools and Information Technology.” (Soon to be upgraded, I read; Fred has been a fellow participant in the MOOC MOOC and is generating a few more ideas on this evan as I write this.)

I think I will also incorporate the word “connectivist” into my vocabulary, although I may not prove to be as rigorous or doctrinaire a Connectivist as some of the MOOC MOOC organizers. I like the term in its insistence on the idea that knowledge and information exist by and for collaboration and that education is as much or more about connecting—people and ideas—as it is about, say, constructing understandings or the transmission of expert knowledge. I’m not sure yet that Connectivist learning leaves Constructivism entirely in the dust, nor am I convinced that there are not places where expert knowledge can be helpful to an enterprise, even a learning enterprise. You may not love Khan Academy, but if you need a quick tutorial in solving for x, it’s easy one-stop shopping.

What’s next? I still have to complete the Edutopia-IDEO-Riverdale Design Thinking MOOC, which I observe to be becoming a bit less M as time goes on: the first exercise on Week One generated 35 pages of content, while the Week Three exercises just winding down have yielded considerably fewer. The try it-post-respond model seems a bit too familiar, and I find myself a bit prickly over their insistence (it’s a “rule” of brainstorming there, for instance) that I “be visual.” I do my best, but somehow I’ve gotten out of the habit of drawing little pictures to illustrate my ideas. My spouse and kids would tell me I need play more Pictionary or Draw Something. Anyhow, I’ve got two more weeks to access my inner sketch artist.

Am I glad I participated in the MOOC MOOC? Yes, very. Will it have a lasting effect on my thinking? I suspect so. These are the questions that matter to me at the moment, and I am satisfied with my answers. If Hybrid Pedagogy rolls out a similar venture in the future, I would recommend it. (Speaking of which, I am enormously appreciative of the thought and energy that the organizers put into the MOOC MOOC—it was a tour de force in every way.)

And I’m signed up for a Coursera course that begins in fall. Time to experience the full force of a college-taught xMOOC.

PREPARING K-12 STUDENTS FOR CONNECTIVIST LEARNING: SOME INITIAL QUESTIONS

As part of today's "homework" I'm opening this up to fellow participants in Hybrid Pedagogy's stimulating MOOC MOOC, hoping to capture some thoughts on the today’s MOOC MOOC “Questions at Hand,” from Jesse Stommel:

• How does the rise of hybrid pedagogy, open education, and massive open online courses change the relationships between teachers, students and the technologies they share? 
• What would happen if we extracted the teacher entirely from the classroom? Should we?
• What is the role of collaboration among peers and between teachers and students? What forms might that collaboration take? What role do institutions play?

The goal of establishing connectivist cultures of learning—intertwined, non-spatially or time-delineated communities of individuals motivated by shared curiosities, needs, and/or passions—seems eminently aligned with what I suspect most forward-thnking educators (and parents) want for children, at least in the abstract. It is a giant leap, however, from most familiar “school” situations—even online courses—as experienced by students in the pre-university stages of their lives. Schools may be making halting steps toward altering the roles of teachers, expanding access to knowledge and the ways in which students can acquire or “construct” knowledge, skills, and understandings, but the notion of removing teachers from the “classroom” would give most K–12 educators—including myself, under many circumstances—an extreme case of vertigo.

But the advocates of the participant pedagogy—non-MOOC MOOCers should check out Howard Rheingold's idea of "peeragogy" or the student comments on a Jesse Stommel class, watch George Siemens's explication of the concept, or work their way through Stephen Downes's MOOC Guide wiki—offer up these ideas both as provocations and as a route to education's future—and they can be compelling.

So, if we are to prepare ourselves and our students to make this great leap, what questions do K–12 educators need to ask ourselves? Here are a few that come to mind:

• How do we start developing in ourselves, our schools, and most critically our students the habits of mind and the essential skills—and essential kinds of voices—that they will need to navigate their own pathways to learning? How do we even figure out what these are?

• How do we engage pre-adolescents, tweens, and secondary school students in the kinds of conversations about pedagogy that will help them understand their own wants and needs and how these relate to the work being done by the adults in whose schools and classrooms they find themselves?

• How do these conversations relate to established and conventional ideas about student learning styles and the power of metacognitive and reflective capacity?

• Are there markers of “readiness” that indicate points of entry to this process that fit the developmental capacities—cognitive, social/emotional, moral—of learners of various ages?

• Are there particular kinds of exercises that are especially well suited to helping students and teachers step away from their traditional roles and relationships?

• What role do schools as institutions and their leaders have in transforming the culture of learning in the direction of connectivist principles and participant pedagogy?

• How can we be certain that post-secondary education will welcome and truly be ready for students prepared for connectivist learning in which the traditional distinctions in the roles of learner and teacher are blurred and even flipped?

• In a more connectivist K–12 environment, how can we be certain that all students acquire the essential skills (reading, writing, numeracy, for starters, allowing that these can come in many flavors) they will need for making the most of future learning and citizenship opportunities and responsibilities?

I invite my fellow MOOC MOOCers and anyone else to engage with these questions—to add to them, rephrase them, argue against them (or even against the entire premise), perhaps even to ponder answers.

Please, have at it! And thanks.

Me, MOOCs, and MOOC MOOC: Aswim in Massive Open Online Courses

This week I’m in the middle of two MOOCs—massive open online courses. Considering the imminence of school and the manifold unexpected distractions of being alive (right now for me they're family, college bills, and the new roof being banged on above my head), this might not be the best situation into which I’ve ever gotten myself.

The first, now beginning Week 3 of five, is the Edutopia-IDEO-Riverdale Country School course in design thinking. It’s operated on a fairly familiar model for online courses, at least in my limited experience: weekly tasks, posted items related to the tasks, commentary on classmates’ posts, some reflection. It’s a solid and proven model, and if I were working harder I’d be learning even more, although the tasks themselves, developed for a broad audience of K12 educators as they must be, feel a bit contrived. I also suspect I know enough about the methodology to be finding some of the work slightly redundant, even uninspiring in spots. But it’s okay, and I will try to ramp up my level of activity. I will.

The second, and a far more interesting course in all kinds of ways, is the MOOC MOOC, organized by Hybrid Pedagogy and developed by experienced practitioners from Marylhurst University and Georgia Tech. If the Edutopia-IDEO-Riverdale course is familiarly constructivist in its essence, the MOOC MOOC is all about “connectivist” learning—a model that puts a considerable burden on the “learner” for figuring out what’s going on and for developing the skills and tools for using all the amorphousness of the cloud and a wealth of social media to bring a connected structure—it’s sort of pattern recognition, sort of gestalt—to the learning process; maybe the best advice I can offer is to read this article by George Siemens or at least look at this video by Dave Cormier.

The MOOC MOOC is a one-week course on the nature of MOOCs, with the authors evidencing a clear enthusiasm for the connectivist model. So far (after Day 1) we’ve posted profiles, met up by Twitter, linked our blogs, embarked on a zillion-author Google Doc with a narrow brief and tight constraints, checked out “readings” on blogs, PDFs, Slideshare, and YouTube. For anyone in need of a tour of the internet and its possibilities, this is the course.

What have I learned in all this? Well, that lurking only gets you so far—you really have to engage with the tasks and the people. The MOOC MOOC is largely aimed at higher education, so I’m finding myself pre-filtering my own thinking to reframe the learning for a K12 context as well as scouting out like-minded participants, of whom there are a few.

I’ve also learned that there are a lot of people who are pretty tentative in their embrace of the online learning concept, much less the MOOC idea. Insofar as the popular and even the ed press are in a constant swoon about the prospect of outfits like Udacity, Coursera (over one million served!, says the news today), and EdX pushing out for free (so far) the curricular substance of a $250K bachelor’s degree as well as all kinds of professional and vocational certifications, I guess we should all be nervous about online courses supplanting our brick-and-mortar institutions and our jobs. But we will adapt and find ways to keep teachers and professors at work even as entrepreneurial Stanford folks offer up courses to a hundred thousand students at a whack.

I’m learning as well that online courses are not to be taken lightly, especially if the bent is connectivist. As Hybrid Pedagogue (sorry; couldn’t resist) Jesse Stommel tweeted yesterday, “The course is just an organizing principle for learning—the course is not learning.” The learning is still something I have to do for myself—and this takes time and energy.

What do I need to be a good learner? Three things:

1. Genuine interest. I have to care enough about the course material to wrestle with the big ideas and small details—and the homework—all on my own. If I don’t actually care that much about what I am supposed to be learning, each task becomes drudgery. Without this, the rest is irrelevant.
2. A certain amount of online extrovertedness and confidence. I’ve got to be able to jump into conversations, offer critical analysis and even critique, in multiple online media. The inherent risks in online commentary—that my dry sense of humor won’t be understood and that we’ll all just say nice things to get our participation “checked off” with no troubling downside—are all present, and I’m working on this.
3. Comfort with the medium. This may mean downloading, installing, configuring, and learning how to use new software or new online tools. Fortunately I’m more or less okay here, although I’m not ready to code, which seems not to be even a possibility.
4. Dedicated time. This is not a pop-in, pop-out activity; I need to clear a bunch of time to get through each element of the work. This is more of a challenge than it should be, given the time of year, but it’s not insurmountable—where there’s a will there’s a way (see #1 above).

I think one last thing I’m seeing in action is that there is a tremendous amount of thought and effort that goes into designing a MOOC; my experience with an Online School for Girls Course in “How to Teach an Online Course” tells me that this is true for all online courses, just as it is true for classes in the physical world. Teaching, the part of it that involves curriculum and assessment design and choices in pedagogy, doesn’t get any easier in virtual space, even in the connectivist world where “the course is not the learning.”

Good design, however, makes the learning happen. As Sean Michael Morris, another MOOC MOOC organizer, tweeted yesterday, “I think all the teacher-work happens in design. The rest is facilitation.” It’s hard not to see the relatedness of my design thinking course in the context of this message.

Of course facilitation is no easy feat in meatspace or cyberspace, and I think I’m still waiting to observe or experience amazing facilitation in an online course. I suspect that in the MOOC MOOC I’m going to be discovering the possibilities of peer facilitation, or maybe even student facilitation. Of course, it’s also pretty interesting that I made special note of the tweets I have quoted from Stommel and Morris before I knew they were our facilitators. The people behind this course clearly bring a deep knowledge and understanding of the MOOC medium and culture—a sense of “the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

Right now I’m still at the stage of “simplicity on this side of complexity,” for which Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained he wouldn’t give a fig. At moments this is a frustrating place to be, but here’s hoping that perseverance will pay off. 

And now I’ve burned up half of MOOC MOOC Day 2 without starting my homework.

AN EDUCATION IN MESSINESS

When I was a kid at Southside Elementary School, my parents used to receive an extremely detailed report card—I’m guessing 20-plus categories in which I could be Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and a couple of other letters (I for Improving? Dunno). Southside was innovative(!) in a number of ways, as I look back on things: 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten, looped first and second grades, Spanish started in fourth grade, time for educational radio programming from the New York State School of the Air a couple of afternoons a week, and a pretty extensive art and music program with teachers I remember fondly. This, during the Eisenhower administration in a modest little burg starting its transition (still not quite completed, a half century later) from farm village to suburb.

Anyhow, those were the good old days, in their way, but what I remember most from those Southside School report cards was an emphasis on neatness. They might have cared that I had a smattering of Spanish at age 8, but they cared even more that I was neat—that my handwriting was neat and evenly spaced, that my personal habits of dress and hygiene were tidy and regular, that my desk space was orderly, and that my overall approach to work was, well, neat. My teachers must in their way have been neatniks—several had grown up on local dairy farms, a life that tends to instill a kind of orderly discipline—and certainly the “custodians,” as the buildings and grounds crew were called, were notably efficient.

Thus, “messy” was not a part of my early education; messiness was the very opposite of scholarliness as it was defined on those report cards. The good news, so to speak, is that I have never been a particular devotee of neatness; “tidy” might not make the list of Top Ten words anyone (especially my spouse) would use to describe me.

The last decade or so, then, has been liberating. It’s been the Age of Messiness in education, at least on the leading edge of education, and I like that.

What’s messy? The first time I heard the term in a post-Southside educational context it had to do with issues of historical interpretation, and for the first time I felt as though I could take a deep breath about my teaching of so many historical topics and literary interpretations where the single answer, the one cause, the received reading just seemed flat wrong—a lie that as a teacher I was supposed to be telling my students. (Good teachers, I know, have been avoiding these versions of the One Right Answer since Socrates, but we all know about the ways that “authoritative” textbooks and standardized tests pressure students and teachers alike toward clean, neat answers.)

Since then, it’s all been messy, and we are regularly reminded that messiness is good, a condition not to be avoided as Unsatisfactory but a state to be embraced. In messiness lies the possibility not only of truth but also the essence of the human condition, in particular the human condition as we understand it in schools; kids are messy, and fitting them into the cultures of the things we call schools is messy.

The obsessive neatniks of education, of course, are devoted to a single principle that they believe will allow us to leave no child behind. Systematization and standardization are really all about making school teacher-proof and learning, in some bizarre way, kid-proof. Make all of learning a set of templates and algorithms (dare I extend this metaphor to encompass Common Core Standards? Probably not, but I suspect there are those who would encourage this notion) and Kids Will Learn; their learning will be certified by Scantron. All neat and pretty, as they used to say on Mickey Mouse Club.

Messiness, of course, requires critical thinking, critical analysis. It requires seeing patterns, noticing within the complexities the principles or central facts that push an interpretation to one side or another; it also requires a certain openness to multiple perspectives and unexpected possibilities. Scantron doesn’t take such things into account. Scantron doesn’t do nuance.

Lately our political discourse has given nuance a bad name—as if critical analysis that doesn’t arrive at a binary yes/no answer is somehow suspect. But nuance lives within messiness, is part of the granularity of messiness, the fractal nature of what might be so or might not, given the subtleties of all that we might know or might surmise.

I’d also suggest here that Khan Academy, about which everyone has an opinion, is a great object lesson in messiness. For some, Salman Khan’s little demo lessons are perfect examples of binary, this-is-how-you-do-it, teacher-proof education. I think those who see Khan Academy in this way are probably missing the point. As I see it, Khan’s mini-lessons are also viewable as great examples of a messier approach—try this, stop the video, replay, try again, and again; there may be one approach, but there are a whole lot of ways of breaking it down. At least, that’s how it has worked for me, a kind of messiness that yields an algorithm, maybe, but also yields understanding based on multiple ways of looking at the problem. But as so often happens, I digress.

Last week I spent five working days immersed in studio learning, or design thinking, at NuVu. There it is all about messiness, in all of its dimensions: not just mucking around in the complexity of challenging problems and challenging ideas, but literally getting your hands dirty, playing with multiple approaches while using multiple tools and materials—some downright smelly and sticky. My teachers at Southside would have been appalled, I have been thinking, but then I remember the art room and Mrs. Jost. Hers was explicitly the “creativity” classroom, and, at least while we were in there working on whatever we were working on, it was messy. And it was good. I made a mess at NuVu, and I surely didn’t arrive at the One Right Answer—there wasn’t one—and I felt the joy I remembered from Southside.

I wish that Mrs. Jost and Mrs. Boldt and my other wonderful teachers at Southside could have seen us at NuVu. I like to think that they would have understood, that they would have known that the messiness we created and of which the NuVu leaders spoke so lovingly was exactly what they hoped for in the lives of their students. In 1959 they may have convinced themselves that neatness counted, but, like all great teachers who care deeply about the growth of their students, they knew—I’d bet on it—that there is a place for messiness.

SOME CONSIDERATIONS IN DESIGN THINKING—REFLECTIONS ON MY WEEK AT NuVu

(As noted below, this post has been edited to incorporate further reflections based on my final day at NuVu and including some insights gained from Media Lab professor and NuVu guru Edith Ackermann. I try not to have a single post be, like the work of the design studio, an iterative process, but somehow it seemed appropriate here--consider this v2.0. Apologies to anyone unsettled by the shifts in language and emphasis—PG)

I’ve spent the past five days immersed in the world of studio learning at NuVu, which is another way of approaching design thinking. I hesitate to try to explain the fine distinctions that the wizards at NuVu Studio make between their work and design thinking, but I would hazard a guess that NuVu, with its founders' backgrounds at M.I.T., pushes harder at having students create the amazing product, struggling through the design and prototyping process, with multiple iterations; the build—the actual studio work, a kind of loop between ideate and implement, in IDEO design thinking-speak—becomes the heart of the design process. Ongoing critique—desk crits, pin-ups, presentations—is the engine that drives the loop, inspiring continuous improvement of the model.

Anyhow, it’s been awesome, and inspiring, although my head is still reeling from having to go from a quick tutorial in Arduino to “Okay, folks, now build a robot” on Tuesday and from fast lessons in the operation of a Canon 7D and Final Cut Pro to “Time to make a film” on Wednesday—no down time in there. Yes, my partner and I built a robot (it waved its semaphore arms to spell our names), and, with a different partner, we got a short film done. We survived the crits, and if we had had time for further iterations, we knew what we would have done to make our projects better.

I’m also enrolled in the Edutopia-IDEO-Riverdale Country School online MOOC (massive open online course) in design thinking, which is just getting under way and offers up an alternative but very much complementary—though more superficial—approach to the kinds of things we’ve been thinking about at NuVu (where my heart is). It’s free, and I think registration is still open. The August NAIS Bulletin also contained a plug for this course.

As with so many essentially simple concepts, studio learning, or design thinking, requires a great deal of mindfulness to do well. In my observations and conversations with other practitioners and in my experience this week, I’ve tried to focus on the main considerations for teachers and schools in applying the approach effectively. For now, here’s my list; as befits my effort to be a good studio designer, this is a second iteration.

So, some considerations in studio learning/design thinking:

Considerations in planning:

• Teacher engagement. What are you as a teacher interested in and engaged by? What sensibility do you bring to the challenge of designing and executing a studio?
• Generative theme. How do you develop themes and topics that are truly engaging to students?
• Coverage. What are the opportunity costs of studio/project-based learning in terms of content and skills acquisition? Does the depth and experiential power of a la carte, need-to-know learning offset “missed” material?
• Project point of entry. Do you begin with a broad topic, or a more narrowly focused outcome-based “brief”?
• Resources. What are the human, material, technical, and practical (time and space, for example) resources that will be required for the project?
• The End. When will the project be “over”? How directed toward a specific goal will the project be? How open ended? How many iterations will be enough, taking into account real-world constraints?

Considerations related to students:

• Stage of learner development. What is the role of “development” in project-based learning? What constraints and opportunities are present in the diversity of students’ developmental “stages” (cognitive, social-emotional, moral)?
• “Learning style.” What role does student learning style, preference, difficulty, or disability have in project-based learning? What constraints and opportunities are present in the diversity of students’ areas of relative strength and weakness?
• Student experience and cultural perspectives. What is the role of culture, class, personal experience, and ways of being in project-based learning? What challenges and opportunities are present in the diversity of students’ cultural and personal perspectives?
• Group formation. To what degree, if any, should the composition of any collaborative groups that are likely to form in the course of the project be subject to  “social engineering”? What factors should be balanced?
• Transition to a new culture of learning. What bridge or strategy will help students make the often initially unsettling shift to the studio culture of open-ended, feed-back rich, and often self-directed rich learning? How do you help students cross this bridge swiftly and smoothly (and make the transition back again, as is so often necessary)?

Considerations in implementation:

• Structure. How do you calculate and maintain the balance between structure and looseness in the daily studio work environment?
• Documenting the learning process. How do you ask students to document their work processes in ways that contain their own seeds of engagement?
• Fundamental skills and the exigencies of the problem. How do kids learn what they need to know to develop solutions? Is just-in-time or a la carte instruction or self-teaching enough in the broader context of overall their school experience?
• Mid-course corrections. How and when do you make adjustments to the process and/or expectations and/or constraints as the project moves forward?

Considerations in assessment & evaluation

• Feedback. How do you learn to give the most effective feedback to students? How do you balance their need to learn and your need to “tell it like it is”? Where do you as a teacher learn or practice these skills?
• Formative assessment. How do you decide what you want students to be learning in a studio environment?  How do you know if they are learning it as you go?
• Summative assessment. How do you How do you know if students have learned what you wanted them to learn? How do you, or is it important to, assess other (incidental, accidental, serendipitous) learnings?
• Student evaluation. How do you evaluate student performance in a studio environment?
• Studio evaluation. How do you evaluate the success of your studio/project?

Other considerations:

• Good failure. How do you maximize/optimize the lessons of failure? How do you guarantee that an iterative process teaches the lessons inherent in a risk-heavy continuous-improvement environment?
• Inspiration. What the heck does inspiration look like?
• Quality of work. When does a process shift from and ethic of “getting ’er done” to an ethic of craftsmanship? At what point do expectations or goals shift from expediency to elegance?

Obviously there is plenty of material to expand on each of these, but the point here is to lay out the things that teachers need to ask themselves as they go about planning a project—or a course, for that matter. There’s nothing here that’s particularly new, and nothing that requires the services of NuVu’s in-house rocket scientist. (Yes, they have one, but he’s off doing something for NASA this week.)

Teaching, like design, like so many things, is all about making choices. What I’ve learned this week, or at least had reiterated for me in no uncertain terms, is that the choices we make in designing good design thinking/studio learning projects are critical—questions that demand a teacher’s most intentional planning. On some days some of these challenges will seem much bigger than others, and this will change from project to project and teacher to teacher. Some of these challenges are extremely context-dependent, others more general; again, this will change from project to project, classroom to classroom, day to day.

It’s context that matters, and goals that matter even more. But while it demands attention, it is not difficult. Five days with the masters at NuVu are great preparation, but for those who cannot be here, some reading, some creativity, and a belief that the process is worth the effort.